Chapter 4: Whistleblower Part 2

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Gallipoli

“Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe this war would end all wars?”
– Eric Bogle, Green Fields of France

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LDS youth are filled with the imagery of joining God’s army and fighting it out against the forces of darkness from a very young age. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what makes the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and other fantasy sagas so popular among Mormons: they’re considered to be hypothetical representations of an absolutely real war that was waged before the formation of the earth and will continue to rage well after we’ve left. While I’m sure there are some Mormons who expect a peaceful transition to whatever the next life holds in store, there is a compelling scriptural basis for a competing belief that when we unplug from this matrix, we’ll find ourselves in the middle of an all-out clash between good and evil.

LDS manuals are full of quotes claiming that if we could open our spiritual eyes, we’d see billions and billions of tortured spirits doing everything in their power to possess our bodies and turn our allegiance to their sinister master. According to these visions, every day when we leave our homes – or even when we take our first step out of bed – we are effectively marching off to the front lines of this very real but unseen war.

Primary-age children in the LDS Church get to focus on popcorn, snowmen, rainbows and little streams, interspersed with fun little war stories from the scriptures that stir up equally positive images. When kids sing, “We are as the army of Helaman,” the battle is as harmless as the apricot trees, and a G-rated victory is assured.

In primary lessons, Joseph Smith’s vision is entirely made of light, and he is ever the noble hero; but teenagers soon learn in seminary that Brother Joseph had to fight the demons of hell just to get to that first conversation. Now that story certainly made me wonder whether blissful ignorance might be preferable to having my eyes opened to the nefarious netherworld he described. As far as I was concerned, if a battle with Satan himself was going to be the first answer to that sort of supplication, I think I’ll take a pass. “If any of you lack wisdom…” you might want to keep your mouth shut!

On my first day of seminary, the teacher opened the class by saying, “Hi, I’m Brother Krieg. That means WAR in German!” He turned out to be as benign as they come, but in our seminary lessons, we learned about war after war in which the victorious armies of the Old Testament and Book of Mormon credited angelic support and their own righteousness for their enemies’ defeat.

According to the lesson material, if you didn’t wear your “breastplate of righteousness,” you’d be prone to get a bad guy’s spear right through the heart. So who are the bad guys we were supposed to be fighting in this symbolic battle of life? And if angels of light are helping the good guys, I’d wonder, who was helping the bad guys? And what if a soldier who wanted to fight for the good guys wasn’t quite righteous enough to deserve the company of angels? Well, what I took from the lessons was that you’d then end up having to fight those devils all by yourself without heavenly hosts on your flanks – or worse yet, if your testimony wasn’t quite strong enough, they might even sway you to their side and get you to lose your testimony altogether! Next thing you know, you’d be joining forces with Orcs or Sith Lords in a fight against your former friends.

This bellicose imagery wasn’t restricted to an ancient setting; we also heard about the early elders of the modern church who saw the armies of the devil surrounding the cities they travelled to – fiercely opposing the introduction of the gospel message. Now I would think those stories would be just as likely to scare as many kids out of serving missions as they would scare into serving missions, but in any case, when teachers encourage LDS youth to serve a mission, it is often referred to as joining the Army of the Lord. Well, no army runs around without an enemy to fight, so if there must needs be opposition in all things, prospective missionaries had better gird up those loins to get ready for what’s about to come at them from the depths of hell!

Maybe it’s a guy thing, but as a teenager I picked up on some measure of this sort of martial imagery almost every week in church. I even chose to draw Friberg’s Captain Moroni for a school art assignment and hung it up in my room:

The tone in LDS youth meetings may have softened up a bit since that time, but when I was finishing up high school I knew that every generation of twentieth century Americans before me had faced a military draft. Surely my own generation would be no different, I assumed, with the next war in all likelihood being fought against the Russians. I thought I’d get a head start on the inevitable conflict by joining the Air Force; that way I could start climbing the ladder early, and by the time the next war came around, maybe I could view the battlefield from the air as an officer while the infantry from the common ranks had to face the fallout on the ground.

My father and his father before him had both been dismissed from the U.S. Air Force Academy due to medical issues. I planned to finally fulfil their dreams by graduating from the Academy myself…that is, until I realized my poor eyesight would put me on a ground crew instead of being Maverick or Goose. So I ended up opting for BYU as a consolation and waited for Uncle Sam to want a near-sighted engineer badly enough to point his conscriptive finger at me.

Well, the call to battle never came, though I did find myself in a reservist recruiting office a few times over the years debating my patriotic duty. Now I’ve finally reached an age where I would be more of a liability than an asset to any military operation, so I guess I’ve dodged that bullet for myself. I do consider myself very lucky in that I never had to fight in a war, but I’ve just recently had to register my two oldest boys for selective service in the U.S. military. Will one of them want to finally break the cycle of being unfit for the Air Force Academy and decide to apply voluntarily? Will they be as lucky as I was in avoiding a draft? I sure hope that call never comes, but when I hear Trump and Kim Jong-un comparing the size of their buttons, I wonder what the future will hold.

Of course nobody wants to send their kids to war, but when Mormons send their kids out on missions, that analogy is applied proudly: when you’re a missionary, you’re told that you are engaged in a war in which the overarching prize is the eternal fate of every soul on earth. The stakes are much higher than any worldly battle, and the consequence of failing in that higher cause overshadows all earthly dominions. Even if you were to lose your life in this earthly battle, it would be far better than losing your faith in the eternal battle for your soul.

If that perspective holds any validity, modern missionaries are the paramount freedom fighters on the planet, motivated by the same call to arms as the Army of Heleman:

“We’ll Bring the World His Truth”

It is frightening to think that this is how some Mormon missionaries see themselves, but that self-perception certainly isn’t limited to the Latter-Day Saint movement. The imagery of sword-wielding zealots abounds across other Christian and non-Christian sects alike.

When a Mormon congregation opens its hymnal to #246 and starts singing the opening lines of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the dual nature of the lyrics may not be apparent within the safe walls of a chapel. Outside of that context, however, the symbolic warfare can become as literal as the crusades; after all, it was the marching anthem of the Ku Klux Klan, and a few transposed words would readily turn it into a jihadi nasheed. If a Muslim congregation sang the same song with their prophet’s name inserted, and a crescent substituted for the cross, Christian listeners might take offense; yet the artists formerly known as MoTab proudly shout those lyrics to the world, pronouncing the glorious spoils of victory.

Any glorification of warfare itself – like the above cartoon – ought to reflect the real costs. In my weekly assignments to nursing homes as a young missionary, I met veterans of both world wars. Some were losing their minds due to old age, while others had lost their minds long ago as young soldiers and never recovered. In many cases, they provided uninhibited, unfiltered accounts of war that portrayed the stark difference between the recruitment posters and the reality on the ground. War is hell, that’s for sure! They spoke of death and destruction raining from the sky in the form of shellfire and chemical clouds. Those who fought in the trenches told me about hand to hand combat with bayonets that ultimately yielded a gruesome scene with grown men screaming in fear and horror while trudging through rivers of blood, excrement, maggots, and rotting limbs.

That’s the real, gangrenous truth that never quite makes it into Christian hymnals, Uncle Sam’s I Want You posters, or Friberg’s paintings!

~~~~~~~~~~

The Great War

The two world wars of the twentieth century are prioritized a bit differently around the globe, depending on your country of origin. Americans tend to focus on scenes like Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the mushroom cloud as the most iconic images of warfare – all pointing attention to the Second World War. The trench warfare of World War 1, on the other hand, seems to get dismissed as a fruitless stalemate.

In many of the British Commonwealth countries, however, World War 1 tends to get more of a focus. In Australia, in particular, almost every shire and suburb has a memorial to the “Great War.” Even the smallest Australian communities lost a substantial number of their young men in that war – at over ten times the U.S. casualty rate. ANZAC Day – which is equivalent to Memorial Day in the U.S. – is filled with dawn memorial services across Australia that tend to focus on the losses sustained during the First World War.

The galvanizing campaign for Australians is the Battle of Gallipoli. I don’t remember ever having heard the word Gallipoli before moving to Australia in my late thirties, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find an Australian child – even a pre-schooler – who is not familiar with the term.

The battle appears frequently in Australian media, including feature movies – many of which include scenes depicting young soldiers in the trenches being sent “over the top” to their deaths in no-mans-land. I remember a scene in one of these movies that really struck me: a single-file line of soldiers was shown in a narrow trench, each soldier waiting his turn to climb a single ladder. Their commander stood next to the ladder with a whistle in his mouth. Each wave of soldiers stood briefly at the bottom of the ladder, waiting to hear the whistle blow. At the sound of the whistle, each soldier in the queue climbed the ladder and fell onto a growing pile of bodies thanks to an Ottoman machine gun position mounted directly opposite their trench.

Every one of these soldiers knew in that moment that his choices were very limited: he could either die on the battlefield or live as a court-martialed deserter. With just a second or two to make the last decision of their lives, these soldiers would have been torn between honor and betrayal, bravery and cowardice, obedience and survival. At some point in this particular movie, the commander faced his own son in the next wave of the line-up, and despite the emotional struggle that ripped him apart when he looked his son in the eye, he felt compelled to blow the whistle just the same – from his perspective making the only decision that could preserve dignity for both of them. Needless to say, his son didn’t fare any better than the rest of the doomed lot.

The loss of a young soldier is equally tragic on both sides of a conflict, regardless of the ultimate victor, but what made this father’s loss even more disheartening was that the Gallipoli campaign was a military disaster for the Allies – in hindsight, a retreat might have actually been a more effective strategy.

A few months into the Gallipoli conflict, some of the troops suspected that they were engaged in an unwinnable struggle, but of course neither a foot soldier nor his immediate commander would have been given any choice in the matter. The thoughts and emotions that would have been swirling around in every soul at the sound of the whistle would have been especially agonizing for those who realized they were fighting a losing battle.

Westerners who watch movies about the First World War may assume that the Allied characters are fighting on the right side of the conflict; the presumption is that they are the good guys and not the bad guys. In that particular campaign, however, the lines between good guys and bad guys are much blurrier than in the later fights against fascism. There are no public celebrations of the sweeping Blitzkrieg victories across Poland, for example, but the battle of Gallipoli is currently memorialized in Turkey just the same as it is among the Allied nations who were their bitter enemies at the time. If the movie about Gallipoli played in an Istanbul cinema today, each of the Allied soldiers heading over the top, including the Commander’s son, would be viewed as one of the evil invaders. And the Ottoman victory in this campaign – with the accompanying defeat of the Allies – remains a prime source of Turkish pride over a century later.

As a civil engineer, I’ve been fascinated by attempts to span the Dardanelles Strait that connects the Gallipoli Peninsula to neighboring Canakalle in what is now Turkey. Historical crossings of the strait represent some of the greatest engineering achievements on record, but the last successful bridge – built under Xerxes thousands of years ago – was subsequently destroyed in a storm. A record-breaking replacement bridge is now finally being completed. Western banks headquartered in the countries that suffered defeat in the Gallipoli campaign are funding the bridge, which has been named the “1915 Canakalle Bridge” to commemorate the Ottoman victory over the ANZACS and their allies.

In this case, Western powers are seeing their own loss commemorated in the bridge’s name without expressing any objection to the reference. The other campaign launched by the Ottoman government at the same time, however, was more sinister in nature, and any attempt to celebrate the success of that operation would surely be met with international resistance today. The term genocide was actually coined with the expulsion and massacre of the Armenians in mind, an atrocity that began with a precursor of Krystallnacht, shattering lives across Constantinople on the same night as the Allied troop landing in Gallipoli. Should a celebration of that “victory” be allowed?

Part of my reason for writing analogies like the story of Corporal Crowe is to force myself to take a step back before making any assumptions on who the good guys and bad guys are. The Ottoman soldiers who fought and died in the campaign against the ANZACs were engaged in a defensive battle trying to save their capital of Constantinople from foreign invasion; it is thus no surprise that the city’s defenders are considered to be martyrs and local heroes in their own right. One might argue about who struck the first blow, but protecting one’s homeland is generally seen as a perfectly justifiable reason to take up arms no matter where you reside. So if you look at an Ottoman gunner in a World War I movie, do you see a good guy or a bad guy? To me it is very easy to justify the individual cause of an infantry soldier on either side of this conflict – and to understand any internal doubts that might arise as to whether they’re fighting for a just cause.

So what about the Ottoman soldiers who made the first Armenian arrests in Constantinople? Good guys or bad guys? Those soldiers had been told that the Armenians were collaborating with the Allied invaders and likely believed that their incarceration was just as necessary to save Constantinople from foreign occupation as the coastal artillery. Did the arresting officers know at the time that this initial wave of arrests was just the beginning of a horrible war crime that would culminate in mass executions and widespread slaughter? I doubt it, but the justification for their initial actions was certainly packaged up under the same fear and paranoia that allowed the holocaust, lynchings in the American South, the Bosnian War, and so many other ethnic conflicts to explode throughout history. When a propaganda machine paints a group of people as dangerous bad guys, good guys can become bad guys themselves when what starts out of as self-preservation culminates in self-righteous domination. So how is the average foot soldier supposed to know the difference between the real bad guys and the wrongfully accused bad guys? And what do you do when you find out you’ve been misinformed?

In the music video for the song “Some Nights,” soldiers on both sides of a conflict are fighting for the things they love – only to find that they’re taking away the same thing from their counterparts. Nate Ruess sings these lines in uniform:

Oh, Lord, I’m still not sure what I stand for
Most nights I don’t know…
So this is it? I sold my soul for this?
Washed my hands of that for this?

For me, what started out as merely examining the accuracy of my map has now expanded into questioning the entire cause of the supposed “good-guy” movement I have spent my life fighting for; those Fun lyrics now hit home as I debate whether or not to return to my former position after having been reprimanded by High Command.

I am that man. If I can now insert myself back onto that allegorical battlefield, I am Corporal Crowe. I answered the call of duty. I stormed the beach. I served my time in the trenches. I’ve been up the ladder myself, and I helped to advance the front line. I went back to the trenches as a decorated officer, and they put me in charge of a few good men. It all seemed to be going according to plan until they gave me a whistle of my own…but no periscope. I had been fine following the directive to go over the top myself without first having had a good look around, trusting that those in command had done their homework. But I wasn’t about to blow my new whistle and send others over without taking a glimpse at the battlefield myself. So I cobbled together some trench shovels and shaving mirrors into my own makeshift periscope; when I finally had a look for myself, I was alarmed to find that the maps we were following were just plain made up, having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the real conditions on the ground.

I felt like my periscope observations would have benefitted the entire army battalion, but my view was dismissed as irrelevant by those in command; nobody needed my input, I was told, because my superiors already knew the whole situation perfectly. The hierarchy of command was set up to disseminate orders down from the top and not the other way around. Junior officers like me were expected to just do as we were told; and the enlisted men who served under me were expected to do the same.

I was surprised at the wholesale dismissal of my findings, but as I thought back through my military career, I realized that I had never actually provided any feedback on any situation at all, because no commander had ever asked me for my input. The more I thought about it, an official policy that prevented any ground-based intelligence from ever being passed up the chain of command seemed awfully dangerous. Given the disparity I had observed between the maps and the battlefield, it certainly didn’t feel like a safe or even a remotely sane manner in which to wage a war.

Of course, nobody gets to call time-out in the trenches, but I decided to take one anyway, knowingly risking further casualties as a result of my indecision while I dug a little deeper and tried to make up my mind about what to do next.

I started my investigation by dumping out my Doughboy Duffel Bag and taking a hard look at the orders I had been following. All along I had been told that these orders came directly from high command, issued personally to me by those who had the perspective, the experience, and the authority to make life’s most crucial decisions on my behalf. As I dug out my orders and examined them more closely, however, I realized that they were actually carbon copies of orders that had been recycled from previous conflicts. I couldn’t believe I had never looked at these form letters closely enough to notice the little snippets with my name that had been meticulously cut out and pasted over the opening lines. I had also overlooked a heap of anachronisms showing that the orders came from completely unrelated battles – some referencing campaigns in which my predecessors had suffered defeat at a tremendous loss; yet similar orders were being issued and followed all around me without question. The orders I followed had been enforced with constant repetition, but as far as I could tell from my new vantage point, they bore no current relevance to the actual war that was raging – or even to my made-up maps!

When I faced the men in the command bunker and challenged them regarding the discrepancies, they had no explanations to offer…other than to tell me that General Mapmaker knew best and couldn’t possibly mislead me. There couldn’t be a mistake, I was told, because the General couldn’t make mistakes; even admitted mistakes that showed that the General actually could make mistakes weren’t really mistakes after all. If the maps were made up, they were made up on purpose. If the orders were outdated, it was all a part of the overall strategy for ensuring victory. If previous losses looked like defeats, they were actually victories in the grand scheme of things because the losses were necessary diversions at the time – meant to test the loyalty of the troops.

Under threat of a tribunal, those who received orders were obliged to follow them, regardless of their accuracy, because the whole system would fall apart without that overall order. The battle was ongoing, I was told, and we would see the wisdom in that order once the overall war was all over. In the meantime, the message was clear: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Whatever the case, I was expected to profess the accuracy of the orders, the maps, and the battle plan to my little platoon; but as I looked more closely at the history of previous conflicts, I realized that some of them had ended in defeat precisely because the troops had been following outdated orders and erroneous maps. Some of these battles had been entirely winnable if we had only adjusted the battle plan to fit the changing topography. In other cases where the battle had been won in the end, I found that we had secret alliances with the enemy or had shifted sides in the middle of the conflict.

I also found plenty of cases where the commanders realized and even admitted that they shouldn’t have issued the outdated orders in the first place; yet they continued to re-issue them to new recruits. Some standing generals had ultimately acknowledged that those who received certain orders probably would have been better off ignoring them, and that lives would have been saved if someone had stood up with the courage to question their orders at the time; but the morale of the troops demanded that we continue on the path of absolute, unquestioning obedience.

I was absolutely confused: instead of learning a lesson from the real context of historical losses, the concealment of the whole picture was leading to dire mistakes that kept getting repeated again and again.

“You don’t have the full picture,” the commanders countered, “Only we do!”

I slowly but compliantly wandered back to the trenches, but when I looked back out across the battlefield, I realized that I couldn’t even distinguish the good guys from the bad guys anymore. My patrol gathered around me, awaiting further instructions, and I knew the time-out was over; it was time to call the next play.

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Now this is the point where the back story is brought into the present tense:

My kids are staring me in the face as I’m about to send them out into the unknown, no-man’s-land of the world. I’ve got a whistle in my hand and my boys are climbing the ladder, waiting to charge. All around them, their brothers-in-arms are singing the Saturday’s Warrior fight song:

Strangers from a realm of light who’ve forgotten the memory of their former life,
The purpose of their call.
And so they must learn why they’re here and who they really are,
Like silver trees against the storm who will not bend with the wind or the change,
But stand to fight the world alone!
Rising in the might to win the battle raging in the hearts of men.

A brave and noble fiery youth,
Who’s not afraid to die for truth.

These are the few, the warriors saved for Saturday,
The last day of the world.

If, like me, you have been “promoted” to parenthood, and you are now holding a whistle of your own, do you blow it anyway when your own, enlisted son looks you in the eye on his way up the ladder, ready to bring the world his truth? What if you thought you had a map that would prepare him for the fight ahead, but you now realize that map is erroneous? Do you doubt your doubts, questioning your own view of the battlefield and trusting that someone with a wider perspective has flown above you? Do you tell your son to charge ahead because you absolutely believe your cause to be absolutely true? Or because you believe that your own sacrifice – and the Abrahamic offering of your own children – will somehow promote that cause despite the erroneous intelligence? Do you blow that whistle just because you’ve been told to or just because that’s how things have always been done before? Do you encourage those under your command to follow their own conscience if they decide to desert? Or do you entice, bribe, coerce, or otherwise push your kids over the top – whatever it takes – because you believe that strongly in the legitimacy of your end cause?

I now find myself at that critical turning point. I could go one way or another, and I’m unsure which ending to choose here; I legitimately do not know whether blowing the whistle is the right thing to do. I have received a direct order to do so. Do I comply or defy?

With the image of the whistle, I realize that I dove back into an analogy here in the reality section, but the battles I’m referring to are not just symbolic: they were and are absolutely real! In a very literal sense, those faithful Mormons who received orders from their priesthood leaders during the time of Mountain Meadows, Nazi Germany, the civil rights movement, Proposition 8, and other critical turning points had to decide whether to challenge those orders or obey them – and whether to propagate the directives within their own jurisdiction, be it among their family, their quorum, or their ward constituency.

I’ve never fought in a war myself, and I really have no business pretending that I can relate to the horrors that real soldiers have faced in combat. Seasoned war veterans would likely laugh at the comparisons I am drawing here, along with the insinuation that my life of comfort bears any relevance whatsoever to a real battlefield. But my Mormon upbringing tells me that my current battle matters many times more than any trench warfare ever could. This isn’t just about the green fields of France: entire planets, endless posterity, and eternal kingdoms are at stake here!

As for myself, I have tangible, written orders sitting in my file cabinet in the form of a mission call, a patriarchal blessing, church callings and other milestone moments. Some of the orders are merely invitations, but they lay out the unacceptable consequences of non-compliance, which essentially makes them direct orders in my book.

The latest order that I have received is the most consequential of all. With this order, I now find myself in the quagmire of an unwinnable stalemate with just two choices ahead: Conformonism or Mormonschism?

If I truly believed a cause to be just, I would hope that I would willingly give my life for it and put my shoulder to that wheel. But when my commanding officer puts fake maps in my hands, I can no longer accept his authority nor his determination that the cause is just. I understand that he may have no capacity to question the orders that have come down to him. But I do believe that if he and others in authority took an objective look at the available intelligence, they would understand my reluctance to blow the whistle. And they would understand that we would all be around to fight a more relevant battle if the entire battalion were to retreat from the unsustainable positions that we have dug ourselves into.

I have been asked to accept a calling. And I have turned that down. I have been beseeched to come back to the fold, and I have now decided to defy that command. I am violating a direct order by refusing to pick up my weapon and by throwing my whistle into the mud. Perhaps some will view that as treason or cowardice. Perhaps I will be accused of acting out of pure self-interest. But I’ve come to realize that the hill we’re fighting for isn’t something I even want in the end.

Is it really any different for my fellow brethren-in-arms who faithfully follow orders today? What if they decide to accept the commander’s authority, climb the ladder when the whistle blows, and storm the big hill ahead? What if they successfully reach the high ground and raise the flag? Will they be reveling in their success, declaring the severe casualties along the way to be heroic? If so, what if they then look around and realize it’s not a position anyone wanted in the first place?

One drastic realization that is guiding my decision is the fact that the end goal of the final Mormon battle plan isn’t something I’m even remotely interested in. A glorious future is promised to those who obey…but it is one that most everyday Mormons don’t even want. If you doubt that hypothesis, go ahead and take a poll outside a Mormon chapel next Sunday and ask the question, “Are you looking forward to polygamy?” What would the results show? Here’s my educated guess based on the comments I’ve heard in Sunday school classes that cover the topic:

Men: “Uh, no…”

Women: “Hell no!”

Are the men lying and secretly want lots of wives? Do the women hate the idea but believe that God will someday bless them with enough humility to accept the principle? If not, why fight for an end result that you reject wholesale now? Of course, it all gets blamed on a limited, mortal perspective, but it seems a bit ironic that Mormons continually state their opposition to a doctrine they claim to adhere to as an eternal principle. Essentially, Mormon scriptures paint a picture of what victory will bring to those who wage a successful war, and the soldiers all cringe at the image.

No thanks!

In the meantime, I plan to sketch out my own map and plot my own course, rejecting exclusivity and manipulative measures along the way. I’ll rip that whistle from the chain around my neck and leave it far behind.

~~~~~~~~~~

The following observation from an account of Australians in Gallipoli summarises my feeling about not just trench warfare, but so many other realms of politics, religion, history, and humanity:

“However, for all the gallantry and selfless sacrifice offered by Australians in this war, it must also be remembered that throughout World War 1 there was constant, unnecessary waste of human life. Bryce Courtenay writes about the sacrifice of the Light Horsemen in his introduction to “An Anzac’s Story” by Roy Kyle A.I.F (p. 152),

“Their gallantry will never be forgotten, and the stupidity of the commanding generals must never be forgiven. This was a war where too many of the beautiful young of every nation were sacrificed willy-nilly by old men smelling of whisky, with the brass buttons on their tunics stretched to breaking point over their paunches. Dyspeptic colonels and generals, spluttering and mumbling through their tobacco-stained moustaches, watched men die through the rubber eyepieces of their field glasses and pronounced the battle glorious.”

Throwing it back to Nathan’s question: “Am I that man?”

I sure hope not.

But even if I’m not, I still have to ask myself a second question: “Have I been taking my orders from that man?”

I’m afraid so.

Well, not anymore!

| Next: Chapter 5: Lockdown|