Left for Dead Read online

  Japanese exterminators visited us regularly, with no greater impact on the vermin population than the cowardly cat. I knew them as the “latmen,” because of their trouble with r’s.

  I liked the Japanese gardeners, especially one old guy who didn’t have the vaguest hint about English. Of course, I spoke no Japanese, but that didn’t stop us from becoming buddies. I’d squat down next to him while he worked, chattering away.

  I found one gardener’s lunch one day, fish heads and rice, and swallowed the works. My mother had me wormed.

  One compensation for our down-market billet was abundant and cheap domestic help. Three Japanese women, Magai (“Margo”), Shizeko and Miyoko worked for us from eight in the morning until ten at night. The first two cleaned and cooked in return for their meals, and Shizeko received $8 a month—Margo was free, part of war reparations, believe it or not. Miyoko, whom Dad paid $12 a month, was a wizard at the sewing machine. All my mother had to do was point to a little boy’s outfit she liked in a magazine, and Miyoko would whip up three exact copies to size for Kit and Dan and me, all in the same color (usually bright) to make it easier for my mother to keep track of us in crowds.

  I have two other lasting recollections of Japan. One is of the four months Dan spent at Tokyo General Hospital in a steam tent, being treated for bronchial asthma. His recovery was complicated when a nurse knocked the steam kettle over his foot, causing a painful burn. The doctors nearly were forced to amputate.

  The other is of air raid drills at Shiroi. It seemed like every other night we’d give the rats the run of the house while we went outside and hunkered down in the dark. I’m not sure who they expected to attack us—rogue elements of the Imperial Air Force, flying kites?

  We sailed back to the United States in 1951 via the S.S. Gen. E. D. Patrick, a somewhat homier sister ship to the Mickey Mouse. This transport featured enclosed decks and a nursery, where Mother could park us boys from time to time. The single somber note to an otherwise pleasant, ten-day voyage was the Korean War casualties we carried home with us, stacked in caskets aboard the Patrick.

  My father’s next assignment was Dobbins Air Force Base in Atlanta. We rented an apartment across the street from an elementary school, where I entered the first grade as a five-year-old.

  I probably should have gone into kindergarten, but I wouldn’t have any part of that. I wanted to go to real school. My eyes were underdeveloped, however, and the weak muscles made it difficult for me to track the page during reading. As a result, I was placed among the remedial readers, which actually thrilled me; I loved to read and this gave me more opportunity to try it.

  The return to Georgia afforded me my first real opportunity to get to know my grandparents. My father’s father, for whom I was named, was extremely reserved. As my own dear old dad grows older, he has come to resemble his father more and more, both in appearance and demeanor.

  Dad met his grandfather on only one occasion, when he was placed on a train to ride across Georgia to a meeting of Confederate Civil War veterans. My great-grandfather (I’m told) was resplendent in his Confederate uniform that day. I’m reminded that in the South Memorial Day was once celebrated as Confederate Veterans Day and the Civil War was known as the War of Northern Aggression.

  The personality in that generation was my maternal grandmother, Ethel Beck, who was always upbeat and chatty. My grandmother also enjoyed some local renown for having begun one of the first Girl Scout troops in Georgia. Girl Scout founder Juliette Low even sent her a letter of appreciation.

  The Weathers side of the family put great store in decorum. Coarseness we take for granted today did not exist in that household. The word gosh, for example, would have given my paternal grandmother, Nancy, a heart attack. Even I had the sense not to use gosh or darn in front of her. Of course, I also didn’t know any words stronger than that.

  My favorite was Ethel’s husband, my grandfather Lewis Beck, whom we all knew as Pappy. He was educated as a textile engineer at Georgia Tech, and oversaw the operations of several mills in Griffin before retiring to raise flowers, a decision forced in part by Pappy’s weakness for strong waters. He was in any case a demon gardener—Jackson and Perkins, the rose people, often asked him to try out their new hybrids—and also maintained an enormous library with books on every subject imaginable. Pappy was a Renaissance man.

  One of my greatest joys was for him to read Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories to me. He did all the characters, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and the rest, in perfect dialect, as Chandler wrote them, no mean feat. I’d later give baby-sitters the same books to read to me. They’d quickly become tongue-tied, so I’d read the stories to them.

  Pappy was a staunch Methodist. I recall one Christmas he and I took a walk that brought us past the First Baptist Church of Griffin, where Peach and I later would be married. Glancing up at the imposing and quite beautiful structure, I asked my grandfather if this was where God lived.

  “No,” Pappy replied, “but the Baptists think he does.”

  In 1954, the Weathers family packed up again, this time for Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio. My mother was horrified at the idea of moving to what she presumed was the nether edge of the civilized world. I, who was then in the second semester of my second-grade year, was delighted by the expectation of finally owning my own pony, which I’d ride to school each day and hitch to a rail, the way I’d seen in the movies.

  We both were mistaken, yet San Antonio turned out to suit us fine. I didn’t get a pony, but there were millions of horned toads around, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything more than chasing after them. There was also a huge field of sunflowers behind our house. Daily, I would take a stick out there to do combat with the sunflower people. Hopelessly outnumbered though I was, I could have soldiered on indefinitely. The sunflowers probably would have persevered eternally, too, had they not eventually been plowed under.

  I sailed effortlessly through the San Antonio schools during our five-year stay there, less a testament to my brilliance than to the quality of public education in Texas. In my seventh-grade class there were at least a couple of guys who went home to the wife and kids each night.

  Dan:

  I’ve always admired Beck. He just seemed to carve his own path. I sensed that even as a small child, and was grateful for a big brother to follow and to emulate, which I did. And I’ve liked him most of the time. He’s real headstrong and not always easy to get along with. My mom always says we fought like cats and dogs when we were young.

  I remember the competition was fierce. Beck was determined to always win—and he did. It didn’t matter what it was. He was better.

  Beck’s gears are always grinding. He has a need to be in the limelight. He’s always talking and intellectualizing and telling stories. There’s a lot of bravado there. I like the Beck who’s quieter, who asks me, “How are you feeling?”

  Next stop on the military-brat circuit was Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which the reader likely will recall is the U.S. Air Force base where nineteen American airmen were killed in a June 1996 terrorist truck-bomb attack.

  Back in the 1950s, Dhahran was an isolated airstrip, a few low buildings and a collection of about forty concrete-block duplexes set about with oleander trees. Nearby was an ARAMCO oil installation.

  My father was transferred to Dhahran in November of 1958. Mother followed with us boys on Easter weekend, 1959. We flew out of Charleston, South Carolina, on Good Friday on a Lockheed Constellation, making stops in Bermuda, the Azores and Tripoli before landing in Saudi Arabia on Easter Sunday. The plane was filled with Iranian pilots on their way home from training in the States. My mother was the only female aboard.

  We discovered Saudi Arabia was hot and flat and nearly featureless under an unremitting sun, sort of like North Texas in the summer. My grandmother Beck sent us an audiotape of rain falling just to remind us of the sound. But Dhahran also was a great place to be a kid. There were free movies every night at the officer
s’ club, and the community swimming pool was directly across from our house. There weren’t many schoolmates my age in the three-room Quonset-hut school I attended (thirteen kids total in grades seven and eight), but enough for plenty of volleyball and softball games. There was Little League, too, with five or six teams made up mostly of the ARAMCO oil workers’ sons. I was catcher for the air force contingent, the Dhahran Flyers, and was league home-run king one year.

  The Persian Gulf was just a few miles away. We’d go fishing in the gulf, where I also learned to water-ski. I can’t imagine a more magical setting for night water-skiing than the Persian Gulf. Phosphorescent plankton glow bright under the moonlight in the prop wash and in your skis’ wake, causing a huge light show to funnel up as you crisscross behind the boat. Even swimming stirs up the little buggers.

  I joined the Boy Scouts, too. Practicing our forest skills, of course, was difficult. Mostly, we’d go and squat in the desert. Out of that experience also grew one of my life’s lingering annoyances. Every Sunday for a year I worked to earn a God and Country Award, a sort of super merit badge in the form of a little shield—white with a blue cross on it, as I remember. I worked for it, and I wanted it, but they never sent it to me. That probably explains my later drift into secular humanism.

  Dharhan, like Shiroi, offered my mother the welcome amenity of cheap domestic help, a Somali houseboy named Mohammed, whom we shared with the Skinner family on the other side of our duplex. Otherwise, the Arabian desert was no garden of delight for adults, especially if you took your religion seriously, or enjoyed a restorative zizz at sundown. King Saud was reasonably tolerant of us infidels, but he would not brook any external Christian symbols or insignia (church services were held in the unmarked community center, behind closed doors), nor was a drop of booze permitted on the base, a real hardship for some of my teachers.

  It was not uncommon for the air force to send personnel to Dharhan for precisely that reason, to confront and defeat their inner devils.

  Over at ARAMCO, however, amateur stills flourished; I think every family had one installed under their house. The joke was that if your plumbing stopped up, forget about it. You could wait a month for a maintenance guy to show. But if you called to report problems with your still, help arrived at once. This was only prudent; a maladjusted or balky still could, and occasionally did, erupt explosively.

  The Dhahran base school ran only to the eighth grade. My brother Kit, who was a sophomore when we arrived, tried a year of correspondence school with some other kids, but that didn’t work out. So he, and then I, shipped out of Saudi Arabia to attend high school. Kit went first to a boarding school in Wiesbaden, then to an air force dependents’ school in Dreux, France, southwest of Paris, where I followed him two years later.

  The school at Dreux was excellent, with very high academic standards. But besides a little wine-drinking adventure I got into there with some of my buddies, the most memorable moments of my one year at Dreux took place on vacations.

  At Christmas break, we all flew to Ethiopia to go on safari. Protected from the numerous local bandits by heavily armed escorts, we hunted gazelle, guinea hens and wild boar, as I recall. I shot a gazelle, which was a thrill, even though I felt a little guilty about it, looking into his big brown eyes.

  We also visited the Holy Land as a family. The most vivid recollection I have of that trip is an incident at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. As I was photographing the star on the church’s floor, I stepped back into a rack of candles and lit myself afire. “Holy smokes!” yelled brother Kit, indulging a weakness for puns and word play we all get from our father. Even I, the semiscorched object of Kit’s humor, had to laugh.

  After approximately two and a half years in Dhahran, now Lieutenant Colonel Weathers was transferred again, this time to Sheppard Air Force Base near dusty Wichita Falls, Texas, my father’s final posting before retirement in 1964. Kit by this time had decided his life’s work would be rock and roll. My mother naturally differed, and coerced him into accepting her idea of destiny—dentistry.

  It was a “you can be a rock star after you finish dental school” sort of thing. So my older brother enrolled at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, and then transferred to Dad’s alma mater, Emory, to learn to drill, yank and polish, according to mother’s wishes.

  Kit:

  We were a fairly normal family—for the military. Our parents didn’t put up with any BS. We had to stand up straight and observe all the standard military stuff. At home we toed the line, observed all the rules. We didn’t dare not do what was supposed to be done.

  Our parents always encouraged us, though, told us we could be anything we wanted to be, anything we set our minds to. My family has always been very goal oriented. I remember we were given IQ tests. My mother took me aside and told me I had a special responsibility to succeed because I had the highest IQ. I’ve never discussed this with Beck or Dan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she said the same thing to each of them.

  Dan and Beck and I are all risk takers, which I think we got from that encouragement, and from my father. We all tend to drive too fast, for example. My youngest brother, Dan, got his airplane pilot’s license. Beck climbed mountains. For twenty-five years, I had a hot-air balloon with fifteen-foot-tall teeth painted on its sides. Just got a new one. I also recently took up paracycling, which is a sort of motorized parachuting.

  One of my other hobbies is rock and roll. I still play regularly in a group we call the Party Time Band.

  Mother was the disciplinarian in our family. She, more than our father, tended to shape our lives. For instance, she knew she wanted us all in professions where we’d do well financially. When I showed an interest in building model airplanes, she said, “Well, you’re so good with your hands, you should be a dentist.” I was pretty young at the time. I think all along she had our lives mapped out for us.

  The family unit was always important to her. Mother was very close to her brother and sister, and tried to maintain that closeness in our family as well. Family holidays matter a lot, as does keeping in touch. On the Mother’s Day prior to Beck’s incident on Everest, she sent each of her sons a Mother’s Day gift, telling us, “Thanks for being such great sons.”

  Like all kids in military families, we couldn’t afford to make close friends while we were growing up, because we moved around so much. I, for example, attended high school in four different countries. Also, my brothers and I weren’t real close, but that was probably because I was the oldest by more than three years.

  Of the three of us, I think I’m the most outgoing. I think of myself as very self-assured. Beck is much more introspective. He always seemed to have something on his mind. He looked more inside himself, not because he was afraid to have contact with people, I think; it just didn’t seem to matter that much to him. Of the three of us, he was the deepest thinker.

  I entered Burkburnett High School near Wichita Falls as a sophomore in the autumn of 1961. Education was an afterthought at Burkburnett—the kind of place where they held an annual junior-senior fight. They actually had organized fist-fights, which held little appeal for a five-eight, 127-pound bruiser such as myself. I stayed home on junior-senior fight day.

  Despite my size, however, I didn’t get picked on too much as a kid. I was clever enough to realize when Tharg should be left alone. Besides, I am a bleeder. I didn’t see any merit in getting the bejabbers beat out of me by going toe to toe with someone seventy-five pounds heavier than I.

  The classroom was quite a switch from Dreux. I remember one history teacher who couldn’t correctly pronounce place names. Lacking any challenge there, I spent the ensuing three years making straight A’s, more or less, as I honed the art of playing hooky. It became a point of pride with me that I did not put in one full five-day school week my entire senior year.

  My size pretty much prevented me from continuing in sports at Burkburnett, as did my flat feet and poor vision. I had discovered on a camping trip i
n Europe that when you see a tree, you should also be able to see its leaves, not just a green blur. Since I had seen well enough to play baseball and other sports in Dhahran, I can only assume that the onset of my extreme near-sightedness (I’m also night blind) was age related.

  For a while I would pull back the sides of my eyes to foreshorten them, and thus improve my vision. I also borrowed my mother’s glasses, until I finally admitted I needed my own at about age thirteen. I hated wearing them, but I never could tolerate contact lenses of any sort. All I ever got were infections, exacerbated by multiple allergies.

  But I did discover at Burkburnett the joys of acting, poetry interpretation and debate. I won a districtwide best-actor competition for my role in the school’s production of The Glass Menagerie, and third place in a statewide poetry-reading contest.

  Debate was another matter. I remember getting thoroughly waxed by the debate team from St. Mark’s School in Dallas, which my son, Beck, would later attend. The subject had something to do with communism in Latin America. I can’t remember if I was for or against it, but I do know that I put forth a less-than-compelling series of arguments.

  My very first motorized vehicle was a Vespa GS motor scooter. It had tires slightly larger than the wheels on a roller skate. I’d flatten myself out on the seat, open the throttle and then hang on, catching June bugs in the face as the speedometer inched toward the Vespa’s absolute upper limit, seventy miles per hour.

  Then I graduated to use of the family Karmann Ghia. Kit already had slammed the little import into a bridge. Now it was my turn. My friends and I would drive like maniacs around the dirt farm roads near Sheppard. One time after a rain, I mistook a two-foot-deep wallow in the road for a wide puddle and plowed the Ghia right into it. When I opened the door, mud oozed over the sill into the car.