Goliath

At the top of the food chain are the gangs, classified by law-enforcement personnel as Security Risk Groups. Latin Kings, Muslims, Crypts, Bloods, Aryan Brotherhood, La Cuestra Nuestra Familia (the Mexican Maha)—all well-organized groups, motivated by the desire to survive and the spoils of illegal prison activities.

Then there are the “wanna-bes,” individuals in the protracted process of seeking formal gang membership. Those convicts are often linked to the most violent prison yard episodes as they attempt to impress their recruiters.

Drifting through the jungle like solitary rabid animals are the sociopaths and psychos. You never knew when one of these lifers might slip out of his twilight zone and attack. Look at one of them the wrong way during breakfast, and you could find a shiv in your belly before lunch.

Like the jungle, prison has an unwritten code for survival. Leave your cell in the morning and you enter a world where it is take or be taken, kill or be killed, never knowing for sure if you will return to the relative safety of each night’s lockdown.

Every movement watched. Every weakness probed. Society’s worst predators, always evaluating, instinctively separating the strong from the weak, the focused from the distracted.

Though an elite physical specimen and highly trained fighter with a hundred different killing reflexes, Gunnar entered Leavenworth Prison an emotional wreck, his self-identity gone, the injustice of his situation, combined with years of guilt from his actions in the field robbing him of his will to survive. Severely depressed, he drifted through his first hours of hell like a zombie.

He might as well have been a bleeding fish tossed into a swimming pool full of sharks.

Gunnar’s first “mud check” happened during his second day. Inmates at Leavenworth are permitted to roam the yard relatively unchecked. Anthony Barnes was a lifer, a “J-Cat” (needing mental treatment) doing 104 years for kidnapping and murder. He had just been transferred to Leavenworth after spending eighteen years at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut, where he had killed three inmates; two because they were black, one because the man had made the mistake of refusing him sexually. Barnes was being actively recruited by the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the most savage of the white prison gangs. Before gaining his lifetime membership to the AB, he was required to “make his bones”—killing another person targeted for death by the “Commission.”

The Commission had targeted Gunnar.

It is unusual for the Aryan Brotherhood to go after Whites, but tensions between the AB and the Muslims had been rising of late, and the outnumbered Aryan Brotherhood were not looking for a war, they just wanted to end “soldier boy’s” misery before their Black and Hispanic rivals could get to him—

—killing him out of “kindness.”

The eyes of the jungle watched as Gunnar walked the yard, his mind doing “hard time,” his psyche unable to come to grips with the sudden reality of a prison sentence too unfair to accept, too long to imagine. As Barnes approached, the other road dogs instinctively backed off, leaving the new inmate on his own.

The shank in Barnes’s hand was an eight-inch piece of metal, ingeniously taken with great patience from the back of a radio. One end, ground against cement, was as sharp as a razor. The other end was wrapped in cloth for a firm grip by hands that had crushed many a throat.

His mind preoccupied, Gunnar never saw the man coming. Only when the blade penetrated his lower back—millimeters from a classic kidney stab, did Gunnar’s commando instincts finally take over.

Ignoring pain that would paralyze a normal man, Gunnar pivoted to face his assailant. Looping his left arm over and around both of Barnes’s arms, he pinned them in a viselike grip while the heel of his free hand exploded into the convict’s face, shattering his occipital bone. Passing on the temptation to crush the larynx, Gunnar opted to slam his shoe sideways against the medial section of his attacker’s right knee, tearing the collateral and cruciate ligaments from the bone, crippling his would-be assassin.

From that day forward, the former Ranger was regarded as a convict, a prisoner who was to be respected. A week’s stay in the hospital was followed by the mandatory twenty days in the hole.

Naked and in the seclusion of darkness, he reflected on the hypocrisy of his life.

Who am I?

I am a son, scorned by his father. I am a man loathed by the woman I love. I am a fool, betrayed by his best friend. I’m an American, imprisoned by his country. I am a soldier, forced to kill children.