The Lets Read Podcast - 223: TALES FROM THE MILITARY | 21 True Scary Stories | EP 211

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about the Military, Date Nights, & Law Enforcement... HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsRead ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: INEKT https://www.instagram.com/_inekt/

Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz. Make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Ben MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Back in 2013, an independent horror movie called VHS2 came out. The first one in the series was a monster hit, and personally I loved it, so it was inevitable that a sequel would be on the horizon. I don't think the movie got a wide release in theaters or maybe it didn't get any release nationwide but luckily for me, my hometown was getting a special screening of the film. When I found out, I was pumped. I asked my girlfriend at the time if we could go and she agreed. I bought tickets ahead of time and couldn't wait until that night came to go see

the movie. My girlfriend was happy to get a date night out of the event. I made my girlfriend arrive early for the 10pm movie because I wanted to get the seats that I liked. When we arrived, it was an empty theater and as the minutes closed in, nobody showed up. I was honestly shocked. I knew it wasn't a super mainstream movie, but I thought that it would be popular enough to get an audience, and this was a special screening of the movie after all. About five minutes until showtime, somebody finally came into the theater. It wasn't a massive theater, but I would guess that there were probably about a hundred seats. My girlfriend and I were sitting dead center in the middle of the theater, so this

person that came in by themselves sat right behind us. It was strange, since it was an empty theater and they could have just sat wherever they wanted, but this person chose to sit basically on top of us. I try not to let it bother me, since it was the best seat in the house. It's just some people have very little self-awareness. Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't sit in the seat directly behind someone in an empty theater, I would at least sit in a row or two behind. After the first few minutes of the initial awkwardness, I just got over it and was ready to watch this movie. The movie started and I was hooked right away. This type of found footage horror movie, though done a million times, I still love it.

Just a couple of minutes into the movie, the person behind us got up and just stood there. I didn't turn around, but I could feel them standing over me. My girlfriend was squeezing my hand because she was very uncomfortable. Finally, he moved and walked to the aisle. I looked over to see if I could get a glimpse of the guy. It was dark in the theater but I could definitely make out a few features. It was an older man. I could see a white beard and he was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt. When I turned to look at him he just stood at the end of the aisle that we were sitting in. Now I was pretty freaked out and more annoyed than scared because this was just starting to distract me from the actual movie.

My girlfriend whispered to me to say something and I could tell that she was completely freaked out. I got the courage to just shout at the guy, hey man, could you sit down or something? You're really distracting us from the movie. The guy held up his hand to wave to us and then turned around and walked out of the theater And I think I could hear him laughing It was so creepy that we just sat on eggshells for a few minutes, but the guy never came back Once the movie was around 20 minutes in, I forgot about the guy and just began to enjoy the rest of the movie The movie was around an hour and a half and once the credits rolled and the lights came on in the theater, I started to talk about the movie right away with my girlfriend

and share all the parts I loved. However, my girlfriend couldn't focus on the movie. She said that she was terrified that the man was going to come back. Every sound she heard in the theater made her jump. I felt horrible and a little selfish that I didn't even think about the guy. As we left the theater, we both decided to use the restroom before the car ride home. She was petrified to leave my side, but I was able to break away for a minute so I could, you know, do my business. When I got into the bathroom, all the urinals had signs on them that said out of order. Weird, I thought, but it was no big deal. So I went into the stall and it's important to know that at this point, the entire building was basically empty besides a few employees

and my wife and me. It was just about midnight and we were the last theater to empty out, so I didn't expect to hear anyone in the bathroom. Now while I was doing my business, I almost had an accident because someone slammed on the stall wall on the other side of the stall I was in. Hey buddy, I shouted. Hey take it easy next time, you made me make a mess in here. Now instead of a response, I just got a series of grunts. I just assumed it was some clown of an employee going to the bathroom. I flushed and as I washed my hands, I noticed in the mirror reflection that that person's stall door was opening slowly. I stopped washing abruptly because I just had a bad feeling and as I walked away from the sink, I swear that I could see that hooded man from the theater start to walk out of the stall.

I couldn't be 100% sure but I was almost certain it was the same guy. My girlfriend was already waiting for me and they didn't want to freak her out anymore so I didn't let on that anything was weird or wrong. I briskly walked over to her and promptly said to her, hey let's get out of here. I should have said something to one of the employees but all I saw was two younger guys who really didn't look like they cared about their jobs too much and honestly, I just wanted to get to my car and drive away. Besides, in that moment of thought, I didn't really think anything could be done, since this person really didn't do anything wrong besides kind of freak us out. It was just about midnight and we were walking to the car. It was an early summer night, but that night was on the chillier side.

My windows were fogged up so we sat for a minute in the car and I tried to lighten her mood with some jokes and silliness. This was also an attempt to lighten my spirits as well. When the fog windows defrosted, in the distance, probably ten yards or so, it was him. We saw the hooded man. Now it could have been anybody, but we knew it was the guy from the theater. My girlfriend immediately begins to freak out. She started to scream and panic and just kept shouting for me to drive, drive, drive. As I was putting the car into drive, the man sprinted at my car and dove on my hood as I started to pull through my parking spot.

Her and I both screamed unconsciously and I made a sudden turn because the guy was hanging on my hood, like something you would actually see in a legitimate movie. And I'll never forget the eyes. We stared at each other for probably about two seconds, but those two seconds felt like hours in that moment. The man's eyes were wide and creepy. I know that's not a great description but it's the only way that I can describe them. After that turn he let go and fell to the ground. I sped out of the parking lot and when I looked in my rear view mirror I saw the man just standing there waiting like I would turn around and come back to him or something.

As we turned out of the parking lot onto the main road, we looked back one last time, and the man was walking the lot in the opposite direction, towards the theater, and that was the moment that I finally felt some relief. Now, as a man in my thirties now, I would have absolutely called the authorities or even the movie complex to tell them to check the cameras, but for some reason, younger me just wanted to move on and forget about that event. I went back to that theater again only one other time nearly five years after that event, and like my girlfriend that night, every sound made me jump out of my skin. I was anxious the entire movie, and I told myself I'd never go back to that theater. I have so many unanswered questions

about that night. Mainly who that guy was and what did he want from us? What would have happened if I didn't move quickly in the bathroom that night? What would have happened if we didn't drive away right when we did? I think I'm lucky to be sitting here writing this story and this is one date I'll always remember and not for the right reasons. With that look in that guy's eyes, I really do wonder if he was just on something and was losing his mind. The story I'm about to share isn't insanely scary, but more along the lines of toxic scary. I want to attempt to raise the awareness of creeps on dating sites like Tinder. I met a seemingly great guy whose name was Ryan, but I soon found out just how deceiving someone can be behind the curtain that is the internet. Shortly after ending a long-term relationship, I finally decided to get back out there into the dating world.

I did what everyone else I knew was doing and that was meeting people on Tinder. I didn't have a ton of success from the start because a lot of guys were looking for something that I just wasn't looking for. A few matches here or there, but they didn't amount to anything more than a few texts back and forth of just small talk. It wasn't until I met Ryan that things started to turn around for me. Ryan was sweet and charming, and he was kind of cute, which was just a bonus for me, really. I have several Disney tattoos, which I featured on my Tinder profile pictures, and he commented on them in a very nice and tasteful way. We bonded over a love of Disney and he had a small Mickey Mouse logo tattooed on his inner bicep and we messaged for a few days on Tinder and then we exchanged

Snapchat information instead of just our phone numbers. For a couple of days we snapped a ton, harmless pictures of just us and our everyday life and at night we would message for hours on the Snapchat app. Finally, after about a week we exchanged phone numbers. He started calling me beautiful and it started to feel like more than just a conversation with a guy. We finally set up an actual date and I was thrilled. We went to dinner downtown in the city where I live and then stepped out afterwards for drinks. I won't lie, this was probably the best date I'd ever been on. Ryan was charming and sweet. He held the door open for me, which I know seems small,

but you would be surprised how many guys don't do those little things that require almost no effort. That night we danced, and I never dance. Around 1am he took me home, walked me to the door, and even kissed me goodnight. He could not have been more of a perfect gentleman. Now the next day we started messaging again. By this point I was head over heels for Ryan.

I couldn't wait to see him again. We made plans for that evening to have dinner in a much less fancy setting. We went to one of the local sports bars which is actually more of a family restaurant with a small bar inside. The night was just like the night before. I was having a great night and I couldn't believe I got this lucky with the first person I met on Tinder. After we ate we sat there for a while and then decided to move over to the bar and continue hanging out for a while. Once we claimed our bar spot I told him that I needed to use the restroom and that I would be right back, and that is when everything seemed to just start going wrong. I came back, and the charming man I had just become so accustomed to barely acknowledged my presence. Ordinarily, I wouldn't

care, but I only point this out because it was just so out of character for this guy Ryan that I felt that I knew now. He sat stone-faced at the bar, drinking his beer and watching the TV. I started to talk and playfully flirt with him like we had been doing for a while now and he just sort of ignored me. He barely even gave me eye contact. I couldn't imagine something that bad could have happened in the two minutes I was gone in the restroom. Only about five minutes after coming back from the bathroom, Brian stood up and told me that he had to take me home.

He apologized, but something from work came up and he needed to get home right away. He dropped me off and didn't walk me to the door or kiss me, and this was not the same Ryan as the night before. That night I couldn't stop thinking about how horrible that date turned out. I finally broke down and just texted him and said, hey Ryan, I noticed you didn't seem like yourself when I got back from the bathroom. I hope everything is okay. I'm thinking about you. And I added a couple of hearts and kiss face emojis and all that kind of stuff. It took about an hour but I finally got a response that said, it's fine, I'm fine, good night, I will text you tomorrow.

For a guy I just met, that text really hurt me. If I could show you all the texts prior to this one and how loving and affectionate he was, you'd also be concerned that something's wrong. I started to wonder if it was me. Did I say something that could have made him upset? He was fine literally two minutes before. The next day he asked me to go grab some coffee with him and he apologized for his strange behavior at the restaurant. He told me that he was going to explain everything at the coffee shop and not to worry. It made me feel a little bit better but I still had that pit in my stomach. I figured maybe he ran into an ex or something like that when I was in the bathroom and that

he wanted to tell me about her. Trust me, that would be something I would have zero interest in knowing. I met him at the coffee shop because he came right from work. He was already sitting there with two coffees when I walked up and he greeted me with a huge hug. He told me to sit down and just let him explain. He said in the most calm and collective voice, I just want you to know, I'm not a jealous person. I gave him a crook smile and said in a confused voice, Uh, okay, it's good to know I'm not either.

He didn't react to my statement at all. He continued to stare down at his coffee and he spoke up again. I saw you texting a guy named Sean. You're with me now. I just can't stand for that. And any guy here would agree with me. Not even processing the invasion of privacy that he knew who I was texting, I was more concerned with his phrase, you're with me now. Before I could formulate a response, he spoke up again, now much more aggressively.

So you don't deny it then? You were texting a Sean? You know I told you I'm not a jealous man, but this is not okay. When you're someone's woman, you don't text other men. Ever. Well, I'm no fool. As soon as this unbelievably twisted sentence came out of his mouth, I got up and started to leave. As I pushed my chair in, he stood up and now shouting at this point, Who's Sean? Hey, I'm not jealous. You can tell me. You owe me that.

I owe him that. I started to walk away, embarrassed now because the entire coffee shop was now staring at us. He started to shout, I saw your phone when you went into the bathroom. You said I love you to Sean. You're just like every other girl

and I want everyone here to know. Finally, to the point of being enraged, I turned around and yelled, Sean's my sister. Sean is a female. You're insane. Ryan did not like this response. He started to follow me out of the restaurant, and he was continuing to scream. I'm not a jealous man. I swear I'm not. You know this is your fault. Thankfully, this outrageous coffee date allowed me to move right past the grieving process and right into being thankful that I never got more serious with this freak. He ended up spamming

my phone with calls and texts for two days and that's when I finally got a restraining order on him and blocked his number. At least once a week I get a call from some random number but I have no way to prove it's him. Sometimes the calls are restricted and the person on the other line is just breathing heavily. That was the worst date I'd ever been on and the worst man I'd ever dated by a landslide. I'm not sure how I could have avoided this situation. Perhaps I could have moved a little slower and got to know him a little more before getting as cozy with him as I did. I know some people have had many more horrific stories on Tinder and other sites, and

all things considered, I'm lucky. But the events of that day in the coffee shop still haunt me. The look in his eyes was horrible, and if I didn't walk away when I did, I don't know what would have happened. Ladies and gentlemen who use those sites, please be careful and really get to know your date before you start getting serious, because a seemingly great individual could end up being an insanely jealous monster. I don't think dating is something I really want to focus on right now in my life. I never was big into the whole dating scene, mainly because I was always ultra-focused on progressing my own career, and even though you can absolutely focus on your career and date, my specific career path forced me to move and travel a lot. So as a result, dating was the last thing on my mind. I'm writing this account of events just days removed from the incident. Also, one last sidebar before I break it all down.

To protect my privacy and quite frankly my job, I'm not going to give any specific names as it could have serious implications for myself or my career. Right from high school, I went to film school as my lifelong goal is to make movies. I love everything about film and I love all genres for the most part. What I really love is horror and I would love the chance to make horror movies one day. Anybody reading this who is familiar with the film industry will know it's not easy to make it in that industry without paying your dues. After graduating from film school I secured some easy jobs on films. Nothing exciting or substantial but my foot was in the

door. My work mainly consisted of freelance work, any kind of job that I could get to pay the bills. I was living out west at the time and California rent is not cheap, even with consistent work. After a few years of working on films in a very small capacity, I got a really good job that I'm still working on today. I'm not going to disclose the name of the show, but it is a fairly popular ghost hunting show. I really enjoyed working on the show. The people are great and I love all this stuff, even though I am aware that it's pretty much all fake. Oh yeah, sorry to burst your bubble if you're reading this and you believe what you see in those shows, but like all reality TV, all ghost hunting shows are completely fake. We find allegedly haunted locations from

myths or local lore and set up some fun shenanigans and produce a fun and engaging story which gives the viewer just enough evidence that something sinister could be happening. I was what you probably could call a writer, I suppose. I would set up many of the locations and the scares and write the scripts for the talent. It wasn't the horror movies I wanted to create, but at least I was telling a scary story in some way. While working on this show, I was able to travel to a lot of fantastic places all over the world. Of all the wild and exotic places I got to visit for this show, it was in the New England area where I met Abby. She checked every box on my list of what I like in a woman and most shockingly she seemed into me. We hit it off immediately and luckily we were

going to be in the area for a few weeks filming a few different stories. Abby was infatuated with my work and loved horror as well. Specifically she loved anything that pertained to the paranormal. Abby and I went out on a couple of dates and I was surprised how well they went. It all seemed too good to be true. It wasn't until we started talking in depth about my work that she started to unravel, and I mean she became truly unglued. This specific date was a little different than the others. Up to this point, we had been out to eat and gone out for drinks, but on this night, we decided to go on a scenic walk after dark. We were completely alone and sitting on a bench watching the water flow down the stream. In a sincere and soft voice, she asked,

What was the scariest thing you'd ever filmed for the show? I just sort of chuckled and said in a playful tone, Well, when I'm filming, it's all scary, really. She giggled, but looked confused. I didn't think she was serious. I thought she was just kidding around. She then said in a more fishing tone, well, have you always believed in this stuff,

or did you just start when you started working there? I leaned back a little and responded in the politest way I could and said, Abby, I don't believe in ghosts or paranormal. This show and all the shows like it are fake. I create all the tension and scares you see on TV. I mean, maybe there's ghosts out there, but we sure as hell aren't recording them for television. Abby looked enraged, as if though I just told her that I stole her life savings. Abby, are you okay? I'm just saying, she cut me off mid-sentence by screaming and holding up her hand to my face. I was in awe of this reaction. It's something I would see

my three-year-old niece do and not a twenty-something-year-old woman. As I sat there in disbelief at the antics of Abby, she finally responded in words after her yelp and said, So, you lie to people? There are no ghosts? I shrugged off her attitude and said, Lie is a strong word. I prefer the word entertain. I allow people to use their imagination and wonderment.

I kid you not, this woman started to weep uncontrollably. I have to admit, I was very confused, and I didn't know how to handle the situation at all. Before I could say anything else, she stood up and said, You know, there are spirits and evil in this world, and people like you are the ones that upset them. You're as good as dead. After this haunting little monologue she had, she turned and ran away. And I sat there alone on the bench, and just shook my head in disbelief, and kind of just laughed it off. A short time later, I had to back to my hotel for the evening. I called my buddy back in California and told

him the whole story and he just laughed it off as well. He made an excellent point and said, you know, even if you don't believe in ghosts, you fake their existence for a living. It's not like you're an authority on the matter. They could still exist, you personally just happen to fake their existence is all. I thought that was so well put, and later that night at around 3am I was woken up by a bang on my door. It scared me. I looked out the peephole of the door and there was nothing or anybody there. I went over to the sink, washed my face, and sat in the chair in the room. After another minute or two, bang, I jumped again to the loud noise at the door. When I approached the peephole, I again saw nothing. After a moment of contemplation,

I decided that I was going to open the door and see if I could see anybody or anything in the hallway. When I opened the door, I was immediately struck in the head with a small bat or something. I fell to my knees and became groggy for a second but I was able to get back up. Right on the side of the door which would have been out of sight of the peephole was a figure dressed in all black holding this bat or object. They went to swing it again, but I was able to catch this blow from striking me in the head. Luckily for me, some of my production crew was staying right there on the floor with me and they heard the struggle. Two of the producers of the show ran into the hallway and grabbed my assailant and pinned them down while another producer called the authorities.

Once they fell to the ground, I noticed the person was wearing some type of red devil mask, and the masked person wasn't very strong, as the two skinny producers were able to hold this person down, who wasn't saying anything. They were just struggling to get free every minute or so. Finally, the cops were able to show up and they removed the mask, Scooby-Doo style really, and if you haven't figured it out yet, it was lovely Abby who attacked me. Jesus Christ, she was arrested right away and honestly, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Obviously, I should be pressing charges but this woman is clearly, clearly insane. I guess she told the police that the demons told her to attack me because I mock them or something insane like that. Just ridiculous stuff. And I'm sorry, I just don't believe that stuff. I'm only in the area for a few

more weeks and honestly I may even head back to California now and just try and put this nightmare behind me. I've been in constant communication with my lawyer from the show and we're trying to figure out what exactly to do about the entire situation. I love horror and I've always wanted to make a horror movie but I never intended on starring in a real one. I have always found dating hard. It's not from lack of trying, it's just something I wasn't very good at. There were several boys in high school that I liked, but they never liked me. I tried again in college but same story. It really took a major hit on my self esteem. I don't think I'm ugly, I'm just a little weird and guys back then just didn't like that. I'm older now and married but there was a time when I was desperate

and that desperation also became a matter of life and death. In my senior year of college the whole virtual meeting thing was getting big on the internet. Websites like Omegle and Chatroulette were huge. This was way before the Tinder craze or any of those other meetups or dating websites. One night, I finally decided that I was going to try one of those websites and see if I could connect with a boy. I don't even know if those websites exist anymore, and if they do, I hope they don't exist in the same way as before. Without going into explicit details, there were many unsavory things on those websites, and I'll leave it at that. If you're unfamiliar with those sites, basically the idea is great in theory. You get

matched with a random video chat with a stranger to talk about anything you want. You can see how that may lead to things you don't care to see. Anyway, I sat on this Omegle website for hours just being constantly skipped. I would meet someone, talk for a minute or two, and then I would get skipped. Finally, at some godforsaken time in the middle of the night, I matched up with a boy named Greg. He didn't skip me, and he found me fascinating. We shared just harmless stories about school and life and general interests, but nothing personal. Rule number one on the internet is never give away your personal information. I knew that, at least for a little while. We talked for nearly two hours

in that Omegle chat window, and I was terrified of losing connections, so I finally asked for his number or his Facebook. He said he didn't have Facebook, and this was really before Snapchat or Instagram. They may have been around, but nobody I knew really had them yet. But he did give me his number, and we decided to text instead. I was so excited and happy. I met someone who seemed genuinely interested in me and constantly complimented me which I realized now was probably a red flag. But when you live your entire life never hearing those compliments, when they come, you kind of forget about the consequences. One of the biggest red flags that I failed to mention earlier was that

he didn't want to show his face because he felt embarrassed, but I was so scared of losing connection with him I never pushed it. His chat window was a video of his chest down to his waist so I could only see his arms and a Nike t-shirt. When we finally started to text I asked if he could send me some pictures of his face now that we were texting and he obliged me. He was gorgeous and not at all what I was expecting. He said the picture was a little older and that's why he appeared to be skinnier in the picture than he was on the camera. I didn't notice until he said it but once he did mention it I did notice a bit of a difference. In fact the skin color even seemed different but those old computer cameras were terrible and he started flattering me again,

so my brief moment of concern instantly puffed away. We texted all night and the entire next week. It affected my studies a little bit because I was more concerned with talking to Greg and not doing my homework. After a week of texting non-stop and with my constant begging, I was finally able to get Greg to go on a virtual date night with me, meaning we would video chat on Skype and watch a movie together or something. I just wanted to hear his voice again and not text. He begrudgingly agreed, claiming that he just had bad anxiety, but he would do it for me, his babe, which is what he started calling me. The entire next week leading up to our big date was blissful. He sent me dozens of pictures of that beautiful face and six-pack abs, which I didn't really care about to be honest. During this week, we also had divulged a lot of personal information. I told him where I lived, like

exactly where I lived. Obviously, in hindsight, I would never do that again, but we considered ourselves dating, so I didn't really think anything bad about giving him that information. Especially because we constantly talked about meeting up one day. Finally our date night came and we were supposed to meet on Skype at 8pm and I didn't hear from Greg until about 9.30 which was not like him but I was just happy he made it. We never got to the movie part of the date because I spent the first hour of the conversation begging Greg to get on camera and microphone instead of just typing in the text box. He finally agreed and it was the same angle as the night on Omegle when we met, just his torso and his arms. As I really studied his background, he looked somewhere public, almost like a cafe or something, which was weird because it was kind of late at

night. I called him out on it and he said something along the lines of his internet got shut off so he had to use the wifi at his local grocery store, which was a big supermarket that was open 24 hours and had a little cafe section inside of the market. It's easy to pick these details out in hindsight, but in the moment I was blind. I didn't realize that the 24-hour market that he was in looked just like a 24-hour market in my hometown, which also contains a cafe inside. Instead of inquiring about that more, I started to really look at him and then at the pictures on my phone. Things were finally starting to seem a bit weird to me. The boy in the pictures had dirty blonde hair, was skinny, and had very tan, almost sun-soaked me. The boy in the pictures had dirty blonde hair, was skinny,

and had very tan, almost sun-soaked skin. The boy I was chatting with on Skype was a lot bigger. His arm hair looked dark, and his skin was very pale, like porcelain doll white. I was not happy about our date night, and now I was uneasy about the entire Greg situation. It only took this long. I told him to show me his face or that I was hanging up for good and he agreed. And as he started to lift the camera on his computer, the video feed faded. He started to type in the text box that something happened to his camera and he apologized over and over. I was over it though. We kept talking for a few minutes via the Skype text but I eventually said that I needed to go. I laid there that night, honestly far more upset than I should

have been. This was the first real intimate attention I had ever received, so it stung a little bit, as foolish as that may have seemed to some who read this. As a senior in my college, I lived off campus and alone in a small one-bedroom loft in the attic of a two-family house. At some point in the middle of the night, I was of course awake doing nothing and I heard a funny noise coming from the bottom of the stairs. My loft had a staircase that went directly to the front door and bypassed the other two floors where other tenants lived. There was another front door right next to the front door that led to the other two apartments so there would be no reason for anybody to be jostling my door.

I made my way to the top of the landing and stared down to the door and watched as someone was actively trying to open the door. I stood there and held my breath in panic trying to process these events. It was a college town so I thought it was possibly that maybe the tenants downstairs had too much to drink and were trying to unlock the wrong door. After a few seconds, the activity stopped. Right at that moment my phone dinged and it was Greg asking if I was awake and if I was home.

I didn't answer right away because honestly Greg was the least of my worries. I continued to stare at the door which had been quiet now for a couple of minutes. My phone dinged again and surprise, it was Greg. He said something weird which I now know was his attempt at fishing for information. He said, I just want to make sure you're safe. I heard in your town that there was a string of break-ins. If you have a spare key outside or something, I would definitely go grab it and bring it inside. You don't want an intruder to find it. Instead of responding to that text, I decided I was going to call him. And to my absolute horror, as soon as I pushed send,

I heard a ringtone right outside my door. My call was ignored immediately by Greg and at the same time the ringtone outside my door stopped. I texted back, Greg, are you outside my house? No response. I called and the phone went right to voicemail. My heart was beating out of my chest. I slowly made my way down the stairs. There was a small landing with a closet for storage. On that landing was a small window that I could look out

of and see the front door. It was Greg, and he was standing outside my door. I only know it was him because I stared at that stupid Nike shirt for a few hours during our date. And this was not the boy from the pictures. It was a middle-aged man, completely bald. As I stared out the window, I could see him trying to open the door every couple of seconds. I was sitting there holding my breath in tears. I wanted to call the police, but I left my phone upstairs and I was too scared to move. What happened next, I swear to you, is nothing shy of a miracle. Thank God I lived in a college town. The tenant who lived below me was

just getting home with her boyfriend. She knew I would never have company like that at that hour of the night. As I stated before, we had two separate doors but the doors were right next to each other so she witnessed this guy trying to open my door. A brief verbal altercation transpired and Greg, or whatever his real name was, pushed her boyfriend and sprinted into the darkness of night. And that is when I finally ran down the stairs, opened the door and gave this girl who I've had maybe two conversations with a huge hug and thanked her. She invited me into her place and we called the authorities right away. I hate to type this next part but unfortunately they never found Greg.

Who he was, where he was from, nothing about him. His phone, Skype and everything had been faked and nothing was real about this Greg. There was an investigation and so many red flags when I told the cops all the information. And this was before Catfish the show and before this type of thing even really happened to a lot of other people. I've always refrained from sharing this story for several reasons. First, it was traumatic and I hate to relive it. And secondly, it's hard to believe sometimes and I just hate to put myself out there to be called a liar. So many years have passed now and I have mostly moved on. My husband told me to write this story and maybe it'll reach one person,

scare them into not giving away any personal information. I apologize for the long story, but I'm happy I finally shared my horrifying experiences. If it wasn't for that Skype date and the off chance that my other tenant coming home when she did, I may not be sitting here writing this story. Be safe, friends. The internet is a scary place. A few years ago, I went on probably the weirdest and most disturbing date of my entire life. At the time, I kind of just thought that she was crazy and I moved on with my life afterwards. It wasn't until I told this story over the last few months that I realized just how uneasy and potentially dangerous this story is. Whenever I tell friends or family about my date with Amanda,

they scald me for not taking legal action or pursuing the law in any way. At the time, I was living in a city that was close to two hours away from my hometown, which is where I reside now. I was on the fence about moving home, but thought if I found a nice girl to date that maybe I would stick around in the city for a little while longer. On a cold Saturday night, I met a lively woman named Amanda outside of the casino in my hometown. At first, I'll admit she wasn't my type. She was loud and in your face, but for some reason I was into it on this night. I asked if I could buy her a drink and she accepted. She was a wild girl and honestly, I loved it at the moment. We spent the entire night at the casino partying and having a good time and we

ended up grabbing a room at the casino that night. The next day we went our separate ways but exchanged numbers so we could set up another date. I decided to put my plans to move home on hold since last night went so well. We set up a date for a couple of days later. I was excited and ready to go on a real date with Amanda and get to know the real person behind the wild girl I met the other night. The date I got was something I'll never forget and made me wish that I had the girl from the casino back. We sat down and made a little bit of small talk before she started with her antics. We haven't even ordered our food yet and she said, do you want to see what our children will look

like? I laughed nervously because I thought she was kidding. I asked in a nervous but stern voice, did you say our children? What does that mean? Without hesitation, she pulled out her bag. The bag was one of those giant purses that I felt like you could fit a child in if you wanted to. And from the bag, she pulled out notebooks, pictures, and all sorts of other books and things. She started to present the pictures on the table like I was looking at colors to paint a room or something. She had all these digital photos printed on beautiful cardstock of what a digital AI rendering of our children would look like. I was freaked out, but still half thought that this was some kind of sick joke, I guess. While showing me these photos, she then opened

up all the notebooks containing all of her wedding ideas and planning and photos of the dresses she likes. She started saying things like, when we get married, and at our wedding. And that's when I cut her off. I felt horrible, but this got way out of hand fast. I thought I handled it nicely and gently, but she apparently thought otherwise. I said in a calm, rational voice, Amanda, I think you're great, but this is way too much for me. I don't even know you yet. I mean, you have to admit, it is a little creepy, isn't it? Amanda froze in place and stared at me with rage bellowing out of her eyes. I could see her turning red and even starting to shake. She screamed a certain cuss word that I'm

going to refrain from writing here and threw her water at me. She screamed a certain cuss word that I'm going to refrain from writing here and threw her water at me. She packed her bag and left. It was embarrassing but I was happy that it ended quickly and I didn't have to drag it out any longer. That night when I got home I told my parents that I would be moving home soon. My date with Amanda was the last straw and then I was going to be done with the city for the stage of my life. I dozed off early on the couch watching some football game and when I woke up, I had over 20 missed calls from Amanda. By the time I processed just how extreme that was, I had been alerted to a loud banging coming from my bedroom. I made my way slowly down the hall only to reveal Amanda was there

in my bedroom. She was bending over in my closet as if though she was looking for something. I barged into the room and screamed, hey, what do you think you're doing? She jumped because I startled her and she ran over and gave me a hug. And in a voice almost of desperation she said, thank god you're okay, I was so worried about you. I threw my hands up and squirmed my way out of her hug. Instead of losing my mind or calling the police which I should have done, I just screamed to get out of my apartment. I did say if she ever came back I would call the police, even though I never did. She put her hands up, started to cry and ran out of the apartment.

I was really freaked out that she had gotten to my apartment in the first place somehow. Feeling uneasy, I called my parents and told them that I was coming back that night. I was done with the city and that apartment. I figured that I would just go back and get my stuff another time. Once I got home after the long drive, I couldn't stop thinking about how Amanda got into the place and what she was doing in the closet. Those questions bothered me for weeks. And in the few weeks that I was home before going back to the city to get my things, I had received dozens of calls from Amanda that I ignored, and they eventually stopped. When we got back to my place to pack my stuff up and leave, the door was unlocked. It was shut tight, but unlocked, and I always locked my door. Upon walking inside, nothing seemed to be stolen, at least nothing I noticed right away.

The first place I went to look when I got inside was the closet. On the floor in the closet was a knife and some duct tape, two items that did not belong to me. I turned as white as a ghost, but of course I didn't report it. We packed my stuff and we left the city for the last time. I never heard from Amanda again, and I had no idea what she intended to do that evening. If I didn't scare her that night into dropping those items, who knows what could have happened. I've always told this story at parties when people start talking about bad dates or things like that, and for a while now, people have been telling me to write this,

stating that I'm potentially lucky to be alive. To anybody reading this story about my horrible date with Amanda, I hope your with my girlfriend for good. We had been on and off again for years. It just wasn't a compatible match. We had tried everything we could think of to make the relationship work, but when your heart just isn't in it, it's impossible to make it work. Instead of listening to my gut and just moving on, we agreed to go on one more date. A date to serve as a last ditch effort to see if all the spark is truly gone.

We agreed on a time and I picked her up. We had dinner at our favorite spot and everything was just fine. There never really was bad blood between us. Towards the end of our dinner, she suggested something that was extremely out of character for her. She suggested that we explore an abandoned church behind her new apartment. When we broke up last time, she moved out and moved into this small little spot in a small town roughly 15 minutes from where we used to live. Behind her small apartment was an extremely old church that was not in any kind of service anymore. She told me that she'd been looking at the building for a few days and nobody ever goes in or out and the building's empty. Her logic was that by doing something exciting and illegal, it would ignite some sort of spark in our relationship. I smiled and said,

why not? It's the worst that could happen. When I was younger, I had done much worse stuff than this, so I wasn't nervous at all. We finished our dinner and drinks and I drove her back to her apartment. We went upstairs and had another drink and she claimed that she needed another drink to work up the courage to break into the church. I just kept laughing at her because I thought it was funny how nervous and jittery she was being. One drink turned into a couple of hours, a few glasses of wine and some laughs. Finally, close to midnight, she finally asked the question in a shaky and nervous voice. Are you ready to go to the church?

I jumped on my feet from the couch and said in a commanding voice, Yes ma'am. And she giggled, but I knew that she was not doing well. As she was putting on her shoes, I could see her hands shaking as she tried to tie the laces. I said to her, we don't have to do this, you know, I mean, I'm totally okay just hanging out here. After the short struggle of tying her shoes, she perked up and said, No, no way, no, we're doing this, and then barged out of the apartment. We slowly walked and made our way to the run-down church, which was way bigger than I thought it would be. I was picturing some small, like, colonial church or something, but this was one of those big, fancy-looking churches.

The door opened with minimal effort. Obviously it was completely pitch black inside so we used our phone flashlights to look around. Objectively speaking it was admittedly spooky in there. Churches in general can just be creepy by themselves but anywhere abandoned after dark is just objectively even more so. To lighten the tension a little bit, I kept jumping and making boo noises to scare her. I laughed and she would scream, but it was all playful. She was holding to my arm and it was honestly kind of nice. I couldn't believe it, but I was starting to feel a little bit of an ignite there, you know what I mean? And she may have been right about this.

We explored some of the back rooms, and the building was mostly just trashed and abandoned. Nothing of value or anything of that sort was left inside. The main room of the church was filled with church pews, and there was a small altar with a small broken table. There was a big wooden cross on the wall, but it looked like cheap plywood and nothing that would be worth any money. In some of the back rooms there were some robes, old books, a bunch of papers and that's pretty much it. Even the candles were gone. I'm sure this church was still owned by the Catholic religion, it was just very abandoned and not operational at all. When we arrived back in the main room after a little adventure I mentally prepared to make my move on her.

I was going to kiss her and see if she would reciprocate the gesture. I grabbed her hand and right before the kiss we heard a loud smash. We rapidly shot our phone lights in the direction. We saw nothing. Whatever that noise was, it scared us half to death. I looked at her and whispered, Maybe we should head back to your place. She didn't answer me though. Instead, she was frozen in fear.

What is it? I said, still whispering. She didn't point, but with her eyes, that I could barely see in the low cell phone light, she gestured to the far side of the room and whispered, There's something over there. I promise you, I wish it was an evil spirit in the corner, because what was in that corner was infinitely scarier. A man, a real man made his way out of the shadows and said in a stern voice,

Get down right now and empty your pockets. She wasted no time, but I stupidly moved slow as I was trying to size this guy up to see if I had an advantage. While I was slowly moving to the ground, two more guys came from behind me and forced me to the ground very hard. She started crying and I was pretty close to tears myself. Again the man said, I'm not going to ask you again. Empty your pockets now. Neither of us had a wallet or money on us. I said to the guy in a frantic voice, hey man, I don't have a wallet and she doesn't have her purse man. I was at a loss for words. I tried to think of a way to diffuse the situation, but my mind was just completely blank. All three of these men had some sort of weapon, but it was too dark

to make any of them out. I'm not a religious man, but laying in this church, I was praying to get out of this alive. The men huddled around me and had some conversation that I couldn't hear. They were wearing face masks, so I couldn't make out the details. And one guy had a massive beard that stuck out from his mask and another guy had a tattoo of a flower on his hand. And those were the only two features I could make out. While the men were deliberating about whatever they were talking about, my ex-girlfriend did something that still has me shook to this day. She got up and ran. The men were shocked by this action and had a delayed reaction to it, and two of the men chased her, leaving me alone with just one guy. I could see that his attention

was focused on them running, so I jumped up and tackled the guy to the ground. I got up as fast as I could and sprinted as well. When I ran through the front doors I saw that she was way, way in the distance and nearly out of sight and the two robbers were walking toward the front door as if they had just given up, breathing. When they saw me running they tried to jump back into fight mode but luckily I was too fast and I still had energy so I was able to sprint by them. My adrenaline was pumping like insane. I caught up to her in just a few minutes and we caught our breath together at a gas station down the road.

We called the police right away. Well, we had the gas station employee call the police since we had dropped our phones in the church and made a statement and told them everything. They were surprisingly cool about the whole breaking in thing and didn't write that detail down in the report. When they went back to the church, obviously those robbers were gone and they didn't take our phones for some reason. They were still sitting on the floor of the church with the flashlights on when the cops arrived. Maybe they thought that they could be tracked if they stole it, but I'm not entirely sure. The most haunting detail about this entire story is what the cops told us a few days after our initial report. The lot that separated her apartment and the church had several cameras,

and the video footage from that night, as soon as we walked out the back door from her apartment building, the men came from three different directions and began following us. Maybe it was the drinks that we had that night that made us oblivious, but we had no idea people were behind us. When we made our way into the church, they entered almost right away behind us. The fact that they waited that long to make their move on us still gives me chills. And the fact that they were hiding basically in plain sight, I'll never forget. They never did catch those creeps, at least at the time of me writing this, and ever since that night, I'm always looking intently at hand tattoos to see if I can recognize the flower tattoo. And this goes to show you, you never know who could be hiding right in front of you. I love my wife very much.

We've been happily married for almost 10 years now, and we also have two beautiful children. We were high school sweethearts and attended college together. We planned on going our separate ways after high school, but we just kept finding our way back to each other. We even tried to see other people in college, but life just kept putting us together and I couldn't be happier. But enough of the sappy stuff, because unfortunately the story I'm going to tell you today is the opposite of sappy, and honestly the scariest thing that's ever happened to me or my family. One of the things that has kept my wife and I going strong all these years is just an overall very healthy relationship. Once a week we have a date night where we have done everything from dinner and a movie to midnight sledding and everything in between. It was one of these

date nights that we encountered Caitlin. Now let me first say, I respect all people's beliefs, whether it's religion, science, paranormal, or whatever it may be, but that doesn't mean that I believe it as well. You see, my wife and I are very skeptical people. It's one of the things that's brought us close together all these years ago in school, and because of this, we usually keep these opinions to ourselves so we don't offend anyone. On this date night, however, perhaps we had a tad too much to drink. But our true feelings on certain subject matter happened to slip out, and it very much offended our server for the evening, Caitlin. The night started great.

We had an amazing meal, great drinks, and great service. She was good at her job. When she brought me back my card after paying the bill, she sat at the table, which was kind of strange, but I've seen that happen a bunch of times before, and looked at my wife and I and said, what are your signs, guys? You guys look so compatible. Again, no disrespect, but astrological signs and all that stuff mean literally nothing to me. In a situation like this, I would usually just smile and kind of go along with the person, but astrological signs and all that stuff mean literally nothing to me. In a situation like this, I would usually just smile and kind of go along with the person, but for some

reason, instead of acting like a decent human being, I just chuckled and said, it's all crap. Our signs don't mean anything. My wife looked shocked that I said that out loud and just grabbed my hands as if to tell me to watch what I'm saying. Caitlin looked not only surprised, but angry. She turned her head and looked at me and said, Oh really? It's crap? Well, I think I know what sign you are then. I continued to laugh for some reason. As I write this, I'm cringing at how I handled it. I was a jerk to this poor girl just because I didn't believe in a religion or whatever they want to call it. I stood up and grabbed my coat and in a very dismissive voice I said,

You don't know my sign because you don't know my birthday. And even if you did, my birthday doesn't make me a good or bad person. So thank you for everything tonight and good night. When we started to push our chairs in and walk out, Caitlin slammed the table so hard that she knocked over the water glass on the table and said, you know, I hate people like you. You're toxic to society. I just looked at her, smiled like the antagonizing jerk I was being and said, well, this toxic person just left you a massive tip. Just want you to have some respect and have a good night. I didn't like at all how that night ended. I hated being confronted with something I didn't believe,

and I hated even more how I handled the situation and how I acted. Not one of our better date nights. That night, my wife and I stayed at a hotel that was connected to the restaurant. We weren't far from home, maybe 20 minutes or so, but we tried once a month on date night to stay somewhere without the kids, the benefits of having retired parents. We joked about Caitlin that evening and had a pretty good laugh about it. When we woke up in the morning, I had several missed calls from my mom and a text message that said, don't worry, everyone is fine, but call me right away. Definitely not a great text to wake up to. When I called my mom back, she said that she was with the kids and she couldn't talk, but she would send me a picture and then talk to me when I

got home later that morning. The picture message was a broken window in my son's room. It was a brick with a piece of paper taped to the brick and all the paper said was, what sign are you? I was enraged and told my parents to call the authorities right away. I went right into the restaurant and demanded to speak to Caitlin's manager who was incredibly dismissive of the entire situation. Caitlin wasn't there and the manager was some young guy who could care less about this potentially dangerous person who threw a brick through my window and not only just my window but one of my kids windows. The manager just kept shrugging it off and saying I don't know what you want me to do dude.

Caitlin's not here today and even if she was you have no proof that she did it so just call the police and kindly leave my restaurant. My poor wife, she was already a nervous wreck and she had to listen to me scream and cuss the entire 20 minute drive home. The cops were there when we arrived already talking to my parents and I explained to them the story of the night before and they almost didn't believe it. But they did and said that they would investigate. I was not thrilled with that response as now I believe my family was actually in danger. The cops unfortunately said the same thing that

the manager said about not having any real evidence and at this point it was just he said she said. I was livid and not okay with this. My wife and the kids went to my parents house and I stayed alone in our house which I realized was a terrible idea, but I wanted the evidence that everybody kept talking about. I didn't sleep at all that night. I sat in my living room playing Call of Duty, and at around 2am is when I heard a truck shut off outside. I turned my TV off and crept to the door and put my ear to it. I could hear movement outside, and it wasn't just one person. With all the lights off in my house, I could see outside the window and I saw two shadowy figures creep by. One smaller one leading the way, and another taller skinny one in the back. I followed their silhouettes all the way around the house to the backyard.

Once in the backyard, I heard footsteps on the back porch and then all the way to the door. It took me this entire time to use my head and actually call the police but I finally did it and was able to whisper the situation without giving away my presence to the potential intruders. As I waited anxiously for the next move, it finally happened. They started to turn the doorknob and then shake it once they realized it was locked. I was crippled in fear as to what I could do if they got in. I heard a lot of whispering, but I couldn't make out any words or if the whispers were actually male or female. Thankfully, the cops were close and before I knew it, the lights from the cop car illuminated the entire front of the house which flooded to the back.

I heard a female voice scream something about being toxic and then the footprint sprinted away. I ran out of the front door and told the police that the intruders fled out the back and were running that way and apparently they had a car patrolling but they weren't able to catch them. The cops investigated but there was literally nothing they could do as they said. At least that's what I was told and it felt like they were completely useless. I believe those two nights I was terrorized was by Caitlin and the manager from the restaurant. I of course can't prove it 100% but all the clues added up.

Thankfully this was the last interaction I had with that psychopath or anybody else trying to break into my home But unfortunately nothing ever happened legally I know the ending isn't satisfying but sometimes life just isn't that way I've since moved and I've never gone back to that restaurant and trust me when I say that I never will My wife and I still have date night but nothing will ever be as nightmarish or toxic as that weekend. I grew up during the 1960s in a fairly large North English town. It was a nice place to grow up and I liked it very much, but when I turned 16, my mom and dad told me I needed to start paying rent. Luckily for me, my mom had already gone and sorted me out with a job. The only problem was, it was down at the local hairdressers.

It wasn't a bad job. All I did was sweep up hair and I could have as many biscuits and cups of tea as I wanted. But unfortunately for me, being a boy and working in a lady's hairdressers meant that the other kids my age began to spread rumors about me. I'm almost certain you'll be able to guess what those rumors were and for the most part, I didn't give a monkey's bottom what anyone thought about me. Only, I did care about one person who thought about me and her name was Maureen. Maureen was the prettiest girl on my street, and when I realized Maureen might think

that I was batting for the other team, I just couldn't have that. So one day, as I was walking home from the hairdressers, I bumped into Maureen who was on her way to the corner shop. She asked if I really did work in a lady's hairdressers, emphasizing the word ladies for maximum humiliation. And when I answered yes, she followed up by asking if I liked working there, and this forced me to think on my feet. I told her no, I didn't like working in the hairdressers, and I was actually on my way to join the army the very next morning. Maureen seemed awfully impressed by this, which was fantastic in the short term, but I was also faced with the long-term problem of having to actually apply to keep my word. So that's how I joined the army, to impress a girl, assuming I could just

leave if I didn't take to it. Only, I did take to it. Soldiering was bloody hard work, but I loved it. And I don't think I can really explain why outside of reeling off the usual cliches, but they're true. You make the best friends you ever have in your life, and you blow things up with them. As a teenage boy, what's not to love? I kept in touch with Maureen for a while after I was sent to live on base, but after a while, her life moved on and mine moved on too. Maureen moved on to some fancy university down in London, whereas I moved on to North Ireland. In the late summer of 1970, myself and the rest of Lancashire Regiment's 2nd Battalion were sent to Belfast, North Ireland's heavily divided capital city. For those that don't know, the mostly Catholic IRA were at the throats of rival

Protestant paramilitaries, and the mistrust among civilians in both communities led to a very volatile kind of segregation. They didn't want to live together, but they also couldn't stop fighting. Our mission was to keep the two warring parties separate, but as time went on, we increasingly sided with Protestant paramilitaries since their loyalties lay with the UK. The whole thing was a bloody great mess, never should have happened in the first place, but we got sent there so we all just tried to make the best of it. Don't get shot, come home in one piece, and really nothing else mattered. We were billeted in a place called Gurwood Barracks, which was right next to Crumlin

Road Prison. We used to joke about not being able to tell the difference between the two and how the food in Crumlin was probably better than the stuff we were getting. There was also very little for us to do at the barracks. It was great if you liked table football, pool, or reading, but anyone with a pulse was itching to get into Belfast city center whenever weekend passes were handed out, mainly so we could go down to the local pubs to relieve the stress of living and working in a bloody war zone. Only this war zone was unlike any other British forces have ever operated in. The older blokes in our company had served in places like Aden or Malaya, big open deserts or thick jungle, places you could use all your core

soldiering skills. But there we were, operating in an actual city full of innocent people, and even more jarring was the fact that it was a city within our own national borders. Before I left, my mom and dad were telling me, look after yourself and all this other stuff, like I was headed halfway around the world. I remember telling them something like, I'll be fine, we're not even leaving the bloody country. Now looking back on it, I can't believe I was so bloody naive. Because although we were only across the Irish Sea and still technically in British territory, serving in Northern Ireland felt like we were a very long way from home. That kind of stress had younger lads like me longing for the comfort of the familiar, and to an Englishman, nothing is more

familiar or more comforting than a good pub. I'm sure this is news to no one, but the Irish quite enjoy a little tipple, so the corn market area of the city center had one on almost every corner, really. And they were magnificent places too, some of them almost a hundred years old with intricate stained glass panels behind the bar. There were some good pubs back home, don't get me wrong, but the Irish took things up a gear when it came to proper community pubs. All you had to do was find one with a soldiers welcome or we serve soldiers sign and you were in for a ruddy good evening. I used to visit this one place quite regularly during my first tour and I got to know

the landlady and the regulars quite well. But the real reason I used to frequent this particular pub so much when there were definitely places to get a better pint of beer was the pretty ginger girl who used to come in and talk to the soldiers sometimes. I heard her name was Roisin, but I was far too shy to try and talk to her. Instead, I just kept on darkening the pub doors, even if I had to go alone, until she finally came over to chat with me. She was a few years older than I was, in her early 20s when I was still 18, but she was really easy to talk to. After a few hours of chatting, she gave her phone number and

told me to give her a call whenever I intended to visit the pub. I ended up doing just that at one point and I invited her to join myself and a few of the lads in my section for a few drinks. And that's when she told me that, as much as she appreciated the invite, she'd rather see me alone. It was subtle, but I got the hint, and I just about skipped back to my billets after arranging to meet her another time. I had to wait a whole two weeks just to be issued another weekend pass, but the moment I did, I telephoned Roisin. It was really nerve-wracking having her dad answer the phone, but when he realized I was the soldier she mentioned,

cue the butterflies in my stomach, he grew very friendly then handed the call over to her. We chatted for a few minutes then I told her that I was finally free to meet alone. She sounded very excited and her enthusiasm was very infectious but after we arranged a date and time and I hung up the phone, something just didn't sit right with me. Roisin had mentioned living alone in a flat above a shop, so why did her dad answer the phone? She later told me that he'd been visiting at the time I called and had answered the phone because Roisin was busy making their tea. It was a reasonable explanation, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I was so excited to

see her for a date, as my kids would call it, that I didn't stop to consider that something might have been off. I didn't tell a soul about the meeting either. I didn't want anything to ruin my chances with Roisin, and as silly as that seems looking back on it, you might have noticed my habit of making silly decisions in the pursuit of romance. So, on the evening in question, I met up with her, and we had a lovely time, and when it came to about nine o'clock, I offered to walk her back to her flat. It was only around the corner, so it wasn't like it was far, but when we got outside, she asked if I wanted to come inside to have another drink or two.

It was like all my birthdays had come at once, and I'd never felt so high in all my young life and I remember trying to keep cool as I said yes but I know I betrayed how thrilled I actually was. We went upstairs, had a few drinks then when the right moment came I moved in for my first ever kiss. I won't repulse you with all the gory details but we ended up taking things to our bedroom where more and more of our clothes came off until there was very little else to strip. Then, right before I thought the fireworks were about to commence, Roisin told me that she had to pop to the loo, then disappeared from the room to do god only knows what. I waited there for a few minutes, then the door opened just a crack and I heard Roisin tell me to close my eyes.

I must have had the biggest grin on my face as I did so, assuming that I was going to be opening them to the sight of her standing in front of me, maybe even wearing some kind of racy lingerie or something. But as the seconds ticked by, I didn't hear a thing. No opening of the door, no footsteps on the carpet, no cheeky Belfast brogue telling me to open my eyes. Nothing but silence. Finally I heard the door open, but instead of the gentle padding of bare female feet, the footsteps were much, much heavier. I remember this flash of fear going through me at the sound of those footsteps, and when I opened my eyes, that fear grew tenfold. I caught a glimpse of two men, both in balaclavas and dark green jackets, before the man in front of me punched me so hard that I fell off the bed.

The next thing I know, they were forcing some kind of bag over my head, and before I had a chance to get that off, one of the blokes pinned me down while the other just started stamping on my head. I assumed that they were stamping on my head anyway. Whatever they were hitting me with was bloody hard, and the next thing I'd remember, I wasn't being pinned down anymore, and one guy was saying to the other, that's enough, he's out cold. Now I wasn't out cold, but I definitely wasn't in a position to defend myself, and my one overriding thought was, this is it, I'm gonna die. They were obviously IRA men, or at least someone who had ill intentions for me, and they'd caught me half naked and very drunk with no means of defending myself. But then when the one bloke said enough, I realized that they weren't going to kill me, not right away anyway. I have no idea what kind

of hell they intended to put me through, but they still needed to get me from A to B first and that gave me a chance to escape. At first I stayed lying on the carpet on the side of the bed because I was physically and mentally in shock, but as the IRA men started talking back and forth with each other, I listened in and played dead, so to speak. Instead of keeping me prisoner in the flat, the men planned to move me to some other location. One was going to get the car ready, with the other telling him to bring it right up to the door of the house, while the other intended to tie my wrists and ankles before dragging me downstairs. That was their second big mistake.

If they both focused on keeping control of me and tying me up, I might not have made it home. But working on the assumption that I was out for the count, they split up and gave me my opening. I waited until I heard the one bloke head downstairs and stayed still until the other bloke leaned down to start grabbing for my wrist to bind them. I stayed nice and floppy until just the right moment. Then I whipped the bag off and started to fight back. Now it might seem like a bit of a cliche, but my training really did just kick in and take over.

All that hand-to-hand training we'd done back home paid off big time, and I managed to get enough leverage to inflict some pretty nasty damage on the man's face by gouging his cheek and eye, just like our sergeant major had taught us to do back in training. The rest is a bit of a blur, but I do remember opening the bedroom window and shimmying out onto the lower roof just as the second IRA man came back upstairs to check on the first. I somehow managed to get down to ground level without breaking or spraining anything. Then when I realized I could still run, that's all I did until I reached a main road. Then it was only a matter of time until I reached

a British checkpoint. Some military policemen, or Red Caps as we called them, the nicest name at that, drove me back to the barracks, assuming that I'd just had one heck of a wild night. When we arrived, I was then told to clean myself up, get some sleep, and to expect a disciplinary hearing in the morning. I was so glad to be back on safe ground that I just nodded, went to the shower block, then drifted off to sleep after the adrenaline crash. The next morning, I was told to report to my company sergeant major's office where the man himself was waiting for me, along with the MP who'd driven me back to the base. Again, I think they just expected me to shrug my shoulders and make some excuse as to why I ended up drunk and half naked in the corn market.

But as I told them what actually happened, both of them had to pick their jaws up off the floor when I'd finished. I had some nasty bruising on my face to back up my story and I gave up so many intricate little details that they knew I couldn't have been making it up. The MP still double checked everything, just in case I made up some elaborate lie, but one phone call to the pub me and Roisin had been at, and at least one major chunk of my story was confirmed. They basically let slip at my next hearing that they believed the rest of my story too, and although they were well within their rights to send me to the glass house or army prison, I was going to be let off with a slap on the wrist on account of what I'd already suffered. I was confined to barracks for a while and the whole company got hit with a three week drinking ban which made everyone hate me for a while but I was

alive. We started getting briefings telling us to be careful who we associated with, how the IRA had spies and hitmen out there just waiting to ambush us in our civvies. They hoped it would stop it happening again, but young men remain young men, no matter where they're from or what year it is. And a few years later, someone else fell for the same trick that I did and it actually cost them their lives. Not a single drop of alcohol passed my lips for the entire rest of my tour and whenever I got leave, I spent it in the gym or in the naffy. After we got back, I spent another few more years in the services but I got out before they could send me back to North Ireland

again. After that, I didn't tell anyone that story for 15 years, not until I met my wife, and even then I waited until we were married. Mine isn't the kind of war story you tell in pubs so you can drink for free. Mine was something I was ashamed of. I was young and stupid, and had been easily tricked. But when all was said and done, and the thing that really hurt the most was that a pretty girl had made me feel handsome, interesting and funny. And it all was just some big lie. To be continued... Recently, I undertook a kind of personal project, one that involved recording some conversations with my 75-year-old father. He's been battling quite a serious illness recently, and I know he doesn't have much time left, so I decided to sit down with him to ask him all the questions I'd never had the courage to ask in years gone by.

We talked about a lot of different things, but I think the subject I wanted to explore the most was his time in the Australian Army. I knew that he'd served in some capacity during his life as my parents had mentioned it in passing when I was an ankle biter, but he never talked about it in any depth. He didn't display any medals or pictures, meaning I had no clue as to where or when he'd served. So it was only when we sat down to talk that I found out, after almost five decades of near ignorance, that my father was a Vietnam veteran. That's also how I found out

that the scars on both sides of his knee weren't from an old rugby injury. They were war wounds. He'd kept it such a closely guarded secret that even Mom didn't know that he'd fought in Vietnam. They met after his discharge and he never once mentioned the war, so she reckoned that he'd managed to stay home by working as a clerk or something like that. Neither of us knew a single thing about what he'd done over there,

how long he'd spent deployed, nothing like that. So when he agreed to talk to me about it, I made sure to not press him and just waited until the actual recording session to ask my questions. It took me a while to get it done, but I used a combination of speech-to-text programs and manual editing to make a full transcript of our conversations, and this is an abridged section of our Vietnam conversation that includes the story I think you'll be interested in. So, without me waffling on any further, here's the story of my dad's time in Vietnam. I chose a very poor time to join the army.

The plan was, join the army as an engineer, serve for a few years, then use the money and skills I'd built up to open up an auto repair shop over in Rockhampton. I signed on for a six-year minimum contract, but then two years in, Australia got involved in Vietnam. We'd had advisors in before that, working to train up the South Vietnamese, but no one expected it to escalate in such a way. I certainly didn't anyway. And if it did, I thought being an engineer would keep me out of harm's way,

for the most part at least. But oh how wrong I was. In late 1968, I was summoned to the office of my company commander and when I arrived in his office, he had a sheet of paper in front of him. He gave me a look over then asked me if I was indeed just 5 foot 5 inches tall and 70 kilos and I told him yes, that I'd always been short and skinny but that I'd passed all the relevant army tests as well as meeting all the minimum height and weight requirements. And that's what I thought it was about you see. I'd gotten it into my head that they were trying to kick me out because of my smaller stature. It turns out that quite the opposite was true. The army wanted men of my size very badly indeed,

and that's because of a very special kind of job that only we could perform. A job that would earn us the name Tunnel Rats. Along with about a hundred other guys, I was sent back to the army school of military engineering near Sydney, where we underwent a three-month crash course in what was called tunnel clearance. To counter the threat of air power, the Vietnamese communists had taken to living underground as means of avoiding detection. It was such an effective technique that our ground forces were forced to come up with a means of flushing them out.

We tried everything. Grenades, dogs, tear gas. The Yanks even tried flooding them with water at one point, but the only thing we sent down those holes that was really effective were people. And to fit down there, you needed to be short and skinny, just like I was. We crawled through a few replica tunnels the instructors had built, but the meat and potatoes came down to the kind of combat we were told to expect. Most of the fighting in Vietnam was in really dense jungle, and from a lot of the stories I heard, you rarely got a look at the Viet Cong during a firefight. But in the case of us tunnel rats, we would be getting up close and personal with the enemy,

so close you could touch them. In fact, more often than not, you had no choice but to lay hands on them, because the fighting down in those tunnels was quite literally hand-to-hand. You went down into the tunnels with a handgun, a flashlight, and a knife. Sometimes a rope to tug on if you needed help, but that's about it. You could use the handgun if you really needed to, but shooting in such a dark and enclosed space could really mess up your eyes and ears so it was always a last resort kind of thing. The enemy tended to just flee if they knew we were in the tunnels and we'd pose blocking forces to try and cut off their escape, but every so often you had to get your hands dirty. Ideally, you wanted to sneak up on a bloke, clamp your hand over his mouth and stab the Jesus out of him before he knew what was happening. That way, you could either keep going or go back to warn the rest of your mates without the enemy knowing you were there.

But after a while, the enemy got wise to what we were doing and they really wanted to take us out of the game. They started building booby traps into the walls of tunnels, mostly things like tripwire grenades, but some tunnels had false walls or floors where Viet could hide before plunging a bamboo spear into our bellies. There was even one instance where an American tunnel rat claimed to have found a booby trap consisting entirely of live snakes. The VC had dug out a little hole in the bottom of one tunnel, then tossed some highly venomous pit vipers. There was even a mouse or rat droppings dotting the little enclosure where the VC had clearly been feeding them rodents to keep them alive. They started doing a lot of that sort of thing after the tunnel clearance program really

got going, just baiting us sometimes so they could kill our blokes. We heard that a Viet Cong got a big time reward for killing a tunnel rat and rightly so. It wasn't like you could train any soldier to do the job. The army only had a finite supply of smaller, skinnier blokes and the more we lost, the more strain the job put on you. We were also faced with a massive problem when it came to taking casualties. 90% of the time, if the Viet got the better of a tunnel rat, he was a goner. But we couldn't just leave the bodies down there, we had to recover them. Same thing if a bloke was wounded, we had to send another man down there to drag them out. This was obviously very dangerous as the Viet's were experts at setting traps and

ambushes so try to rescue one guy and you might lose two or three other tunnel rats killed or wounded in the process. And that's how I ended up buying my ticket home. In June of 1969, me and another tunnel rat we called Sharky were flown from our base at Nui Dat to a place called Kauu Chai. We'd be joining the 5th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment for what they were calling Operation Esso, which amounted to a month's worth of mine disposal and tunnel clearance in the area of Kauu Chai. We worked staggered shifts in teams of two, and that day was our day, so off we went. The moment we landed, some infantry sergeant runs up to the helicopter and tells us we're needed at a tunnel system about two kilometers

from the landing zone. They'd been mapping out the tunnel system for weeks, making a note of all the entrances they could find. They weren't easy to locate either, being these small holes with wood panel covers that were very easily concealed. Anyway, they mapped out the tunnels, put a few blocking forces in place, and all we needed to do was flush out the Viet Cong so the other platoons could pick them off. When we arrived at the entrance the sergeant wanted us to start with, Sharky told me that he wanted to be the first one in so he could at least get a feel for the place before we both went down together, if it even came to that. He goes down, rope tied around the hand he's holding his pistol with and says that he'll be back in a few minutes. But then a few minutes goes by and there's no sign of Sharky. As you can probably imagine, the rope that he held kept

extending and extending as he moved forward. that way we knew everything was a-okay every so often the rope would stop for a few seconds where sharky was just waiting and listening or checking out his surroundings i assume but it had always start up moving again in a moment or two but then it stopped and didn't start moving again. Then after I gave the line a few tugs and Sharky didn't tug back, I really started to worry. I tried my best to wait a few minutes before heading down, I mean I hadn't heard any gunshots or anything that might indicate he was in trouble, but him being so still for so long, it wasn't a good sign. So after a minute or so ticked by and there was still no movement, I got down into the tunnel myself to check on Sharky.

Generally speaking, there were two kinds of tunnels here. The larger tunnels connected all the various underground facilities the Viet Cong had down there. They had field hospitals, armories, even bloody classrooms so their leaders could indoctrinate them with all that bloody Marxism stuff. But then there were the smaller tunnels, the kind closer to the surface where you literally had to crawl along on the belly to get anywhere. And it was this kind that I found myself in that morning. It was pitch black and I didn't need to use my flashlight. All I had to do to find Sharky was follow the rope he was holding. So that's what I

did. Move as quiet as a mouse, just hoping I wasn't about to crawl into a trap. Eventually, after a couple of minutes of crawling, I felt my hand touch the bottom of Sharky's boot. I stayed quiet as I gave it a nudge, but Sharky didn't move. He was dead, probably killed by some Viet who then ran off to warn his mates. And if that was the case, then job done. The blocking forces could do their thing. It just seemed unfair that the result came at the cost of my mate's life. To make sure that there was nothing restricting Sharky's body before I tried to pull it out, I switched on my flashlight to take a look around. The smaller tunnels were tiny, but there was just about enough room to lift your head up a little bit. That way I could use my flashlight to look ever so slightly over Sharky's body.

But when I did, it resulted in the single most heart-stopping moment of terror I had ever experienced. I didn't get a good look at the bloke, I didn't have time really, but when I switched on my flashlight, there was this Viet on the other side of Sharky's body, and he had a pistol aimed right at my flashlight. I ducked back down straight away, trying to get as low as possible. The guy must have shot at where the light was, and I know I must have blinded him a bit so his first few shots went over me. I know this because I felt the earth hitting the back of my neck from where the Viet's bullets were smashing into the tunnel ceiling. The noise was deafening, well and truly, and as much as I saw the flashes from where he kept on shooting at me,

I didn't really hear the shots, not properly anyway. The only thing that kept his bullets from killing me was Sharky's body and if he wasn't dead when I found him, he certainly was by the time it came to dragging him out. The guy shooting at me quickly extended his pistol clip and he had to back out of the tunnel to rearm when I carried on dragging Sharky's body the opposite way. I could hear the Beluk shouting for his friends in Vietnamese and I knew it was only a matter of time before more bullets came flying in my direction. All I could do was focus on dragging Sharky, telling myself I still might be able to save his life if I just get him out of

that bloody tunnel in time. I could hear the rest of my mates shouting on the surface. They'd heard the gunfire and were willing me to drag myself out of the tunnel in one piece. I almost made it out without a scratch too. But as I reached the tunnel entrance and raised myself up to climb out, I heard another round of muffled gunfire before a bullet smashed into my left knee. I'd known blokes to get themselves shot and because of all the adrenaline they didn't feel a bloody thing unless it broke a bone or something. But Jesus Christ, the pain I felt when my kneecap shattered into a dozen little pieces, it was like nothing I'd ever felt before or since. If it wasn't for the guys who grabbed me under the armpits and dragged me out of that hole, I might have lost one or both legs to a spray of Chinese-supplied bullets. Like I might have lost one or both legs to a spray of Chinese supplied bullets.

Like I might have already said, that bullet wound was my ticket home. I was flown back, stitched up, put into a rehab program, then I was back on duty. Thankfully I didn't have to go back overseas, but I did serve about 18 more months teaching tunnel rats how to do that job. And after that, I was out, met your mother, and brought your ugly mug into the world. Snakes and ladders, eh son? Now that's about as condensed as I can get it, and I hope it doesn't come across as a big wall of text, but I honestly feel like my dad has stories that many other people should hear, not just me. I know he probably won't be too happy

about me sharing it with you, but I want people to know what an incredible man he is. Not because he served and fought, and horrifying conditions too, I might add, but because he came home, didn't grumble, and just got on with life. He worked hard, raised a family, and gave me and my sister every opportunity in life, and to me, that makes him a hero, even if it's only me who thinks so. I served as an officer in the Marine Corps from 2008 to 2017. During my second tour of Afghanistan, me and my unit was based in the south of the country, in a place called Helmand Province. A lot of what we were doing were mounted patrols, which involved our whole platoon piling into what we called MRAPs. MRAP stands for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected, and they're basically these big armored trucks that are supposed to be able

to withstand explosions and whatnot. They worked pretty good for a while, but the Taliban had an easy workaround. To counter our bigger vehicles, they just started making bigger IEDs. For those of you that haven't seen The Hurt Locker or any movie like that, IED stands for Improvised Explosive Devices, and such weapons were the cornerstone of our enemy's arsenal in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The only thing was, it wasn't as simple as just making bigger IEDs, as the Taliban bomb makers only had a finite number of resources. Sure, they could put all their high explosive eggs into one basket, so to speak, but it meant they had less to spread out along our patrol routes. This was a big problem for the Taliban because if we uncovered their one or two big IEDs,

we could guarantee ourselves at least a few days without having to worry about another one. The Taliban's secret weapon was their ability to place bombs in places we least expected it. They spent enough time fighting the Brits and the Danes to know what kind of clues we looked for, and they tried their darndest to subvert our expectations at every turn. But as a matter of fact, we had our own secret weapon, one that the bulk of my platoon simply called The Kid. In reality, The Kid was probably older than most privates, he just had this very unusual look to him. He wasn't very tall, so from a distance you could easily mistake him for a boy in his mid-teens. But then as you got closer, you realized from the patchy facial hair

and crow's feet around his eyes that he had to be way, way older than his teens. That or he had the hardest paper route of any kid in history. In the end, we set his age anywhere between 18 and 34, and after a lot of arguing back and forth we actually started placing casual bets on how old he was. Then get this, when we finally asked him, he told us that he didn't know when he was born. He only knew that he had been born sometime during Ramadan and that he thought it was after the Soviets had pulled out but couldn't be sure. Some of the junior guys in our platoon thought that was about the Soviets had pulled out but couldn't be sure. Some of the junior guys in our platoon thought that was about the craziest thing they'd ever heard and I get it, but not

knowing your own birthday is a depressingly common thing in Afghanistan. They don't seem to mind much and they go hard on the two Eids too, so Afghans aren't exactly stuck for things to celebrate. But anyway, first time we met him about a week into the tour. He was working the fields near the compound he and his extended family lived in, and when we turned onto the dirt track that snaked through the fields, he came walking over to stare us down as we slowly and carefully approached him. I ordered our convoy to stop, as I wanted to respectfully introduce myself and my platoon. Not so much a tactical decision as a strategic one, as we were still very much back into the winning hearts and minds routine,

and it never hurts to try and win a few friends among the locals you'd be seeing on the regular. Now bearing in mind that I'm extremely anxious about dismounting from a stationary convoy like that because it made us a juicy target for an ambush. But I also figured that since the kid was so comfortable approaching us, that there was probably no Taliban in the area. So I walk up to him and gave him my friendliest salam alaykum before our platoon's translator took over. Through him I very briefly explained who we were, what we planned on doing, and how long we'd be planning on doing it. I also told him, again through the translator, that if he and his family needed anything from us,

that he shouldn't hesitate to approach our combat outpost, but only in the daytime, with nothing we might misconstrue as a weapon. The whole time, he just stared me down, looking at me like he wouldn't pee on me if I was on fire. And when I stepped forward to shake his hand, he offered me his left. This is a grave insult in a lot of eastern cultures, and it all stems from their rather old-school bathroom habits. You see, with no toilet paper, you need a system. You eat with one hand and wipe with the other. And guess which hand you wipe with based on which one the kid offered me. That's right, the left, and by offering me it, he literally was implying that I was a piece of crap. No, I was wise to this, and I'm not the kind to take stuff like that personally,

so I just laughed it off and told him I was good for a handshake, because I knew what he was insinuating. After hearing my reply through the translator, the kid's face changed and he seemed stuck between being impressed and scared that I'd take his insult to heart. I told him he was fine, then offered him some powdered Gatorade as a kind of olive branch. He seemed to know exactly what it was and taking it was the closest he came to cracking a smile. After that, we mounted up and carried on with our patrol. The next time we saw the kid was when one of our sentries spotted him walking towards our cop with what looked like a toddler in his arms. Through the translator, we worked out that the kid had some kind of stomach ache, but after our corpsman fixed up a cocktail of Gatorade and ground up

Motrin, the little girl started to feel better and they went on their way. This little incident marked a turning point in our relationship with the kid and his family, and within a week or so, he had become our very own secret weapon. Every time we passed his compound, the kid would be waiting, having heard our engines from like half a mile away. He'd then run up to the convoy, said his salams, then would say something in Pashto along the lines of, the area of Wazir Kaleh is very busy today, do not go there. And we quickly realized what he meant by busy, and although he'd never come out and say it,

we knew he was referring to the locations of enemy IEDs. We went 36 days straight without a single IED strike, and it drove the Taliban crazy. We used to listen in on their ICOM chatter, and they'd be going nuts wondering if drones were constantly watching them. Their frustration meant they began leaning on small arms and RPG ambushes, but we were more than equipped to deal with straight-up firefights like that, and we inflicted some serious casualties over the 36 day period. And then the day came when we turned on the track that snaked through the kids' fields and spotted something in the dirt ahead of us. Obviously in a kind of foreign object in or at the side of a patrol route and will dismount to check the area for explosives.

I was never in the point vehicle on any of these patrols, obviously due to the threat of IED strikes, so I asked our forward most MRAP to glass the object ahead of us, just to give me an idea of what it was. I still remember what the Lance Corporal's voice sounded like when he gave me the reply. I remember how cramped and hot it got in those MRAPs, how I could taste the salty sweat on my top lip from how much fluid I was losing. The whole thing is like a full body memory. And all he said in reply was, It's the kid.

I thought I'd been clear on the fact that whatever was on the track ahead of us was an object, not a person. So I asked the forward vehicle's commander to clarify. It's the kid, he said again. It's his head. The Taliban had somehow caught on to the fact that the kid was the source of our intel. I guess it was only a matter of time before they figured it out, given how many eyes and ears they have among the local populace. The only thing I can't work out is how they figured it was him. Combat operations permitting, we tried to stop and talk with as many locals as we could, and we were relatively cozy with most of the surrounding village elders by the end of our tour.

It could have been anyone feeding us that intel, so how in God's name did they figure out that it was the kid? It's something I've never been able to figure out, and ruminating on it just makes the guilt eat away at me even harder. But, and this next part is going to make me sound like a total jerk, it's not the kid's death that makes me feel guilty. I feel guilty because I know without his intel that dozens of my soldiers would have died on that tour, and in some twisted,

messed up way, that makes him acceptable collateral damage. I hate that I think like that, but I do. Call it a coping mechanism, call it a product of some latent PTSD, it just is what it is. The soldier in me says he died a good death. I just wish whatever's left of my humanity would believe it On September 2nd of 1944, as dawn broke over the Pacific Ocean, a group of U.S. Navy airmen serving aboard the USS San Jacinto climbed into their planes and took to the skies. They were based on one of the many American aircraft carriers which now dotted the eastern Pacific, and their destination was the tiny island of Chichijima. Located around 500 miles from the Japanese mainland, Imperial forces had established a small naval base on Chichijima

way back in 1914, but by September of 1944, the island had become their primary communications hub for the entire Pacific theater. This meant the Japanese high command saw fit to place a sizable garrison on Chichijima, and by the time of Pearl Harbor, around 4,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors called the island home. In addition, Chichijima's military garrison boasted a small seaplane base, a large communications array, and various gunboat, subchaser, and minesweeping units. The garrison also included a heavy artillery regiment, a formidable defense against American warships. So naturally, the U.S. Navy was only too keen to eliminate it. By June of 1944, the U.S. Navy had surrounded

Chichijima, and a ferocious aerial bombardment commenced. U.S. warplanes of all shapes and sizes strafed and pummeled the island's beleaguered occupants on an almost daily basis. But the Japanese gave as good as they got. A sophisticated network of anti-aircraft batteries meant their attackers rarely departed unscathed, and the pilots that took off on the morning of September 2nd were acutely aware of the danger that faced them. Their target was Chichijima's radio tower, perhaps the most crucial of the entire Japanese war effort, but the defenders would not give it up easily. Approximately an hour into the mission, with heavy flak exploding in the air around them, a Navy pilot nicknamed Skin realized his plane had been hit.

It was burning, Skin later recalled. The cockpit was beginning to fill up with smoke. I thought the plane was going to explode. Knowing that his death would be in vain if he didn't carry out his orders, Skin pushed his aircraft on towards the radio tower, striking it with two of his bombs before turning sharply away from the island. Skin wanted to get as far away from Chichijima as he could before ordering his crew to bail out. The longer he waited, the less likely they were to be captured.

Finally, when it seemed as if though the aircraft might break apart at any moment, each man grabbed a parachute before leaping from the burning plane into the ocean below. Once Skin's parachute opened, he expected to see his comrades floating alongside him. Instead, he watched in horror as they flailed helplessly in the water below, all while Japanese interception boats raced towards their position. He knew they were doomed to be captured, yet he had no inkling of the horrific fate that would befall them. As skin hit the water, the Japanese speedboats roared after him,

and he had swam like hell to put some distance between them. I was crying, throwing up, and swimming like a maniac, Skin later recalled. I could have made the Olympics that day because we had to get out of there. Skin realized it was only a matter of time before the Japanese boats reached his position. Yet to his relief, a small flight of American fighter planes appeared and swarmed his potential captors, driving them off with a torrent of machine gun fire. The next moment, Skin was suddenly faced with the sight of a surfacing submarine. I saw this thing coming out of the water and I said to myself, geez, I hope it's one of ours, Skin later recalled. But his lucky streak had

continued. The submarine was the USS Finback, and after he was pulled from the ocean, the exhausted pilot uttered just four words, happy to be aboard. Following his miraculous feat of survival, Skin would go on to become the 41st President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Yet despite reaching the highest office in the land, Bush never forgot about the airmen who didn't make it home that day. Not only for their sacrifice, but also due to the horrors they endured. Unlike the man himself, Bush's comrades were unable to evade capture. They were pulled out of the ocean by Japanese sailors, restrained, then taken back to Chichijima to evade capture. They were pulled out of the ocean by Japanese sailors, restrained, then taken back to Chichijima to face their doom. These same airmen had been

bombarding Chichijima for months by that point, so as you can imagine, not an ounce of mercy was shown to them. The Japanese were already infamous for their diabolical treatment of enemy prisoners, but even by their usual standards, the fate of Bush Sr.'s former comrades was beyond atrocious. To satisfy the bloodlust of the besieged Japanese servicemen, two of the airmen were beheaded with a samurai sword just moments after stepping onto the dock. The remainder were taken to the garrison's detention center, where they were each subjected to horrifically painful methods of torture. Post-war records indicated that the Japanese were entirely uninterested in extracting any useful information from their captives, and merely used their torture as a means of avenging comrades slain by American bombs.

One by one, the captured airmen were blindfolded, led from the island's jail, then executed by a variety of grisly methods. The plane's radio operator was reportedly forced to dig his own grave before he was blindfolded and beheaded. A mechanic was stabbed to death over the course of hours, with his executioners using nothing but sharpened bamboo sticks as spears. Another was beaten to death with a wooden club, with his executioner careful to start with the man's legs so he'd feel every bone in his body breaking before the killer blow was finally delivered. What occurred that day is almost too terrifying to conceive, but the truth was, the horror had only just begun. By September of 1944, Chichijima had been under siege for months on end. A deadly combination of US submarines and airborne torpedo bombers resulted in less and less food making it to the island, meaning the Japanese garrison was on the verge of starvation.

Once all the American prisoners had been executed, an aide to the island's commanding officer approached him with a suggestion. He explained that there was a way of conserving the energy required to bury the prisoners' corpses while also recycling them to extend the garrison's food supply. The situation was by no means ideal, but it was also an extremely desperate one. So in a decision that was proved as methodical as it was called, General Yoshio Tachibana ordered his men to commit cannibalism. The men of Chichijima's garrison were hardened veterans, each willing to obey any order given to them in service of their divine emperor. But when ordered to butcher, cook, and consume the corpses of their American prisoners, even the most fanatical of Japanese soldiers found themselves hesitating to comply. To persuade them, General Tachibana was forced to give a speech in which he urged them to show a fighting spirit, and once it became clear that no other supplies would be reaching the island, the garrison surgeons began the grisly task of dissecting the prisoners.

Over the course of the following few hours, Japanese combat surgeons removed the liver and thigh muscles of the soldiers, which were then cooked and presented to the garrison's officers with a side of vegetables and soy sauce. At his trial for war crimes, Admiral Kinozomori later testified that a chef had the liver pierced with bamboo sticks before cooking it, and was completely unapologetic as he explained that liver was a delicacy with powerful nutritional properties. Major Suiyo Motoba, another of the officers who engaged in cannibalism, also defended his actions during his trial, claiming that these incidents occurred when Japan was meeting defeat after defeat. The personnel became excited, agitated, and seething with

uncontrollable rage. We were hungry. I hardly know what happened after that. We really were not cannibals. Following the cessation of hostilities, the Japanese officers responsible for the Chichijima incident admitted to their heinous actions at war crime trials in Guam. At the time, the airmen that had been killed and consumed were officially listed as missing in action, and their families still prayed for their safe return. So when it was confirmed that the missing had fallen victim to cannibalism, U.S. High Command was faced with a difficult choice. Tell the families the truth and further traumatize them after a long and heart-wrenching absence, or conceal it and deny them closure. In the end, the relevant authorities opted to label the accounts of the

men's final hours as top secret. The full story of what became known as the Chichijima incident remained a closely guarded secret until 2003, when author James Bradley published his book Flyboys, A True Story of Courage. George Bush Sr. himself was unaware of his comrades' fate, and was said to have been visibly shaken when he learned of the manner in which they died, even if the news did come more than half a century after the fact. In an interview with news network CNN, conducted shortly after the news was made public, the former president shared his thoughts on the incident. Quote, I wonder if I could have done something different, he said before asking, why me? Why am I blessed? Why am I still alive? It's a question asked by many survivors

of similarly horrific events who wonder why they got to walk away from a tragedy when so many others did not. I was nearing the end of my first tour of Iraq, November 2006 to August 2007. It was July in an unfamiliar part of Diyala province, northwest of Muktadia. We were RVing with Iraqi police, with the majority of our platoon sitting idle in the surrounding area on our M1151s. In the distance we heard a few shots of small arms fire which our second lieutenant wanted to investigate. I was the driver to the second squad leader and Spartan II generally took the lead with us. Our platoon, which was undermanned, two squads instead of three or four, rolled out with two additional Iraqi army trucks and two Iraqi police trucks towards the suspicious gunfire.

Outside the main village, there was an outcropping of buildings as if it was a mini-village with one dirt and gravel road about a half mile long, with a drainage ditch on the left and canal on the right. This is where leadership failed on a few counts. First, air drone recon was called and responding, yet we did not wait for recon to proceed. Second, dirt gravel roads are avoided as much as possible because of the ease at which IEDs can be emplaced and hidden. Third, a secondary road was located but had clearly been intentionally blocked, making the main road in suspicious and even more dangerous. Lastly, upon proceeding down the road, the Iraqi police escort claimed that we were going into an al-Qaeda stronghold

and promptly abandoned the convoy, which was ultimately ignored by the 2LT. An Iraq Army Humvee took point, next my truck, then another Iraqi truck, with the remaining seven US trucks proceeding down this road. Roughly halfway down, the lead truck stopped for some reason. Without radio contact, we had no idea why until I moved to the side a bit and saw a ditch across the road, bearing safe passage forward. My squad leader got out to get some word with the Iraqis ahead and immediately jumped back in his seat. At that same moment, we came under small arms fire.

He jumped back in yelling about being shot at. Outside my driver's window, I saw three men pop up from tall grass about 50 meters directly beside my truck firing AKs. My gunner called out a bongo truck to the front near the village with a mounted dushka, which is like a huge Russian version of a.50 cal. This was a typical L ambush and I was front and center, no way forward, left, right, nor hasty retreat, taking small arms and now heavy machine gun fire. My gunner engaged the bongo truck and I could see the M240 turret kick up dust around the three engaged on my left. I just sat there, unable to defend myself. Then came a bang, a flash of fire and smoke. I thought it was an IED. I felt a pinch on my left cheek and touched it,

drawing back a heavily bloodied glove. I slapped it back on and applied pressure, training kicking in immediately. I called out to the squad leader, I'm bleeding, while I wondered if I was dying since I felt no pain. And unbeknownst to me at the time, the fire suppression system had activated which the heavy gas made her voices super low, like the opposite of helium. It was like a movie portrayal of slow motion and my senses were all messed up. I had enough of sitting there in the kill zone and started to reverse. The Iraqi truck behind me didn't get the hint until I rammed him about two or three times. Finally, we began to back slowly away which isn't easy on a narrow road with one hand on the wheel with only a single side mirror, no backup mirror and the passenger's side

mirror was blocked from view. At some point the medic had run up to my truck from about three back to jump in mine under fire. We managed to move the convoy far back enough that my squad leader could drive and the medic could tend to me. We eventually moved off the road and headed back to base while I sent up my own nine line media on the blue force tracker. After being seen by medics and being flown by Blackhawk to Ballad Medical, I learned that I wasn't hit by an IED. The dushka had penetrated the armor of my truck above the windshield, ricocheting at the roll bar beside my head, finally breaking apart and spraying shrapnel across my face.

A few inches and I could have had a stump where my head was. The PTSD is an SOB still to this day, and the VA says, from Easter of 2001 to Halloween of 2008. Most of the time when some civilian asks an ex-cop what it's like to be police, you get some diplomatic answer about how it was challenging yet rewarding, or how they'll still be doing it if it wasn't for whatever injury or incident took them out of the service. I know because I'm guilty of that myself because, honestly, it's just easier to say that than tell the truth. Because the truth is, being a cop sucked. I hated almost every second of it, and if it wasn't for the fine men and women that I worked with, I'd have gotten out a long time before I did. This might sound like the understatement of the century to some of you, but police officers are not well liked in the city of Los Angeles.

We had our supporters, don't get me wrong, but they're not nearly as vocal as our detractors. And then the people that really, really love cops tend not to be the most well-adjusted of folks, I guess. Ed Kemper loved cops, and look how he turned out. My point being, you were working in an incessantly hostile environment where sometimes your own superiors pose more of a threat to your career than the people trying to shoot you, stab you, or run you over. You also see a lot of crazy stuff, way more than your brain can safely handle and you see it on a daily freaking basis to be honest with you. It raises the entire bar for what you consider to be stressful or scary so there's only been a handful of instances during my law enforcement career that actually really frightened me. And as much as this might sound like a cop out when I definitely have some weirder more outlandish stories, the scariest for me personally was the time I got shot. It seems like an obvious one,

but some guys take a bullet without even really knowing what happened. Gunfights can start so quickly that some cops are never faced with that, oh god, I'm about to get shot moment, whereas me, I wasn't so fortunate. The day it happened, me and my partner were cruising through some Viennese territory in East LA, headed over to a call for trespassing on some teenagers from a parking lot. The owner said that they were causing trouble and wanted them gone, and I honestly thought the call would make for an easy start to our shift. But as soon as he rolled into the parking lot, I recognized a few faces that immediately put me on alert.

Most of the kids that we would say were trespassing were just that, kids around the ages of 10 to 13, but then among them were a few kids in their mid to late teens who I recognized as being V&E or little homies. Now, quick primer, V&E stands for Vario Nuevo Estrada, a Hispanic street gang which came from Boyle Heights way back in the 40s and 50s. And since then, they've become one of the biggest gangs in all of LA. And they have had a hand in most of the violent street crime that takes place in East LA, Montebello, and Lancaster.

To say that they're a royal pain in the butt for anyone who works Eastside would be an understatement, so any chance we got to take a few of them off the street was one we grabbed with both hands. The way I saw it at the time, it was like an ongoing war of attrition. Even if we nabbed a few of their little homies on some stupid charge, it still cost the sets and bail money, because, more often than not, they were needed to do things that the big homies couldn't do because of parole restrictions. If these guys had so much as baggies on them or didn't immediately move on after we commanded them to, we could take them in, file some paperwork for the day, then get a pat on the back from the death sergeant before noon. And back then,

it was all about keeping the death sergeant happy. Anyway, we got out of our car and started walking over to the kids who immediately started walking away in different directions. I just kept my eyes on the older kids, calling out for them to come back and talk to us while at the same time preparing myself for a foot chase. If they all walked off like that, they were definitely in possession of something they shouldn't have been in which case it was going to be an easy collar. If they all walked off like that, they were definitely in possession of something they shouldn't have been, in which case, it was going to be an easy collar. I called out to the kid one more time before he rounded a corner, and I just instinctively knew to run.

Lo and behold, he'd started sprinting as soon as he'd broken line of sight, but I was way, way faster than him and I gained a lot of ground very quickly. Now, I've obviously got my eyes on the kid, but what I'm looking for is any signs of him throwing or reaching for anything. Most likely, he's going to try and toss his stash somewhere he might be able to find it later, but there's also the chance that he might have some kind of weapon on him. I didn't think this kid had a gun on him and even if he did, I doubted that he was brave enough to use it, or rather, I hope he wasn't stupid enough to try. I keep chasing this kid down a few side streets, then he breaks across an intersection into a residential neighborhood with what looked like a row of boarded up houses. I followed him up to one and he pulls the boards

off the back door before running inside. He did this way too easily, and the boards all came off as one, meaning this was some kind of pre-designed means of concealing an entrance. My first thought is, boom, stash house, because I honestly figured the kid had been dumb enough to lead me back to the local stash house. It turns out, he'd done just that, but he didn't mind letting a cop inside that day, because if his plan worked, I'd never be getting out. Like I said, I chased him into the buildings, only to discover that someone had knocked a bunch of holes into the walls to create a kind of rat run through the three buildings. Kind of smart for a bunch of aerial boys, but I still didn't figure this kid's end

game, so I just continued to follow wherever I heard his footsteps. I follow him into one building, then the other, then I realize I can't see him, and that there's nowhere else to run. I have him trapped basically, which could be very volatile if it was anyone else, but I really thought that I could talk this kid down and get him to give himself up. So I tell him just that. He's surrounded, and that no one wants to get shot today, so just take the charge, get bailed out, and play the whole game all over again tomorrow. Not in those exact words, but you get the idea. If a guy is defiant, he'll usually make that clear with a loud F you puerco,

or something along the 21st century equivalent of, you'll never take me alive, coppers. But this kid was silent, which encouraged me. Silent means scared, and scared means there's a good chance that he'll just give himself up. There was just one problem. The kid wasn't in the section of the building that I was in, but I only realized that when I heard him moving behind me through the hole in the wall that I just scrambled through. I turned, just in time to see him pointing his gun at me, and if he hadn't have insisted on shouting Southside Sangra or something, I honestly think that I've been a dead man. I had just enough time to sidestep,

hoping it didn't affect my accuracy too much, but as we both started shooting, I got hit right away, and most terrifying for me was the fact that I got shot in the face. I knew one of the kid's bullets had struck me in the face because it spun my head before I hit the ground. As soon as I landed I could feel all this blood and smashed up bone in my mouth and I knew it was bad. But right there in the moment my only concern was to make sure that he couldn't get any more shots off on me to finish the job. I tried to get up but I had problems keeping my balance so I just kept my gun trained in the hole in the wall where I figured that he was going to shoot from again

then got on my radio and tried my best to call for help. I say tried my best but I couldn't get any real words out. I was trying to talk around all this blood and smashed up god knows what and none of it was making any sense. If it wasn't for my partner having seen where I had ran after the kid no one would have known where I was and I know I would have been in way, way more trouble. I didn't know this, but the kid had taken one of my bullets, ran into the street and collapsed right there. Without knowing that, I'm just basically sitting there, waiting for this kid to appear to finish me off and I'm hoping I can get him first before he gets me. It made for the scariest moments of my whole life, let alone my law enforcement career.

I was holding my face together with one hand, thinking that I was about to pass out any second from blood loss. I mean, I really did think that I was going to die. Hearing my partner's voice getting louder as he got closer is probably the closest thing to a religious experience I'll ever have. The word savior comes to mind and it's no wonder we assign that word to Christ so much because when someone really does save your life, they're like mom, dad, God, and Jesus all rolled into one. Thinking about that moment gets me to the closest point possible to break down because I know I'll never pay my partner back, even if I live to be a hundred. I'm sure by now a lot of people are going to be wondering how in God's name I survived getting shot in the head. Well, that's because the bullet struck about half

an inch from the left corner of my mouth. It broke all my teeth, then shattered my jaw, before exiting harmlessly through the fleshy part of my upper neck. It was one of the most miraculous gunshot wounds that somehow avoids everything vital while still being extremely debilitating in terms of path to recovery. After the doctors finished putting my face back together, I had to have a ton of dental work done after having extensive reconstruction work on my jaw, and all in all, I was in and out of the hospital for 18 months and out of the job until I was signed off as mentally and physically fit. It took almost two years to get back into uniform, and almost everyone

down at the department wanted to help make that happen, but if I'm being honest, they shouldn't have let me go back out there. They knew I wasn't ready but I needed to work and they needed good cops. Or cops that had at least once been good police. I lasted a few weeks in a patrol car before I had my first panic attack and even that seemed an impressive feat to some of the PTSD experts I talked to later. But once I had a breakdown in the job, I knew I had to just give up the ghost as they say. I couldn't be police anymore, and as painful as it was, I just had to be a cop here in Australia, New South Wales to be specific.

I joined after getting kicked out of the army on a medical discharge. There was no chance of me getting back in. Back when I found out that I could try for the police after rehabbing my knee, I reckoned policing might be the next best thing to being in the army. I still wanted the adrenaline. I still wanted to chase bad guys. But the only thing I didn't figure was that the kind of action I'd see as a police officer was way more frightening than any I had in the army. I think the scariest confrontations were

early on in my career when I was still feeling the job out. I'm not a small bloke. I'm just over six foot, about a hundred and a bit kilograms. Not exactly a pushover, but every so often I came across someone even bigger than I was where the intimidation factor just didn't apply. Most of the time the bloke was a good'un and there was nothing dramatic about my encounters with these gentle giants, but every so often you caught one in a bad mood and it rarely ended well. So, with this incident in question, we had arrived at the scene of a suspected domestic violence incident and since no one was coming to the front door, we decided to go around the back to have a gander through the rear windows. I'm being really bloody cautious as I'm moving because the bloke whose house it is, is actually known to the cops and we'd already heard his description over the radio heading in there. And the bloke was huge, just shy of 7 foot and 180 kilos.

An absolute monster. So ideally, we wanted to get the situation sorted without any sort of confrontation with them, obviously. I'm keeping in mind that this is at two in the morning as well, so it's all dark as I'm walking down the side of this bloke's house. Whatever argument occurred seemed to have ceased, and the whole place is dead silent apart from a few ambient nocturnal noises. I hear something moving behind me on the concrete slab path, and I turn thinking it's my partner coming to back me up. Instead, I see our Samoan bloke, shovel in hand, raising it above his head. I didn't find out until later that his missus had broken his jaw with some kind of gardening tool, so in the low

light, his face just looked all wrong. One side of his mouth was hanging a little lower, giving him this weird, unnatural looking grimace as he lunged forward and took a swipe at me with his shovel. The positioning meant that there was no chance of me being able to discharge my weapon as it would put the occupants of the surrounding houses at risk. So, and I appreciate how this makes me sound, but I just ran. I almost fell over in the process of dodging his second swing, but I put a little distance between us and then just ran around the house and jumped over the side gate. There was no way he was climbing over that gate, so I bought us a little time, but then

seconds later, he comes barreling out of the side that I originally walked down and started swinging at my partner with a shovel. She was this 5 foot nothing girl in her 20s, a great cop just not in the position to take this guy on. But luckily, having heard all of the commotion, she had her OC or pepper spray ready to rock as the blow came around the corner and after a couple of more wild swings, he dropped the shovel and started rubbing his eyes. He pretty much put himself on the ground at that point, and after we told him that we'd get him some water for his eyes, he actually let us put the cuffs on him. The guy's wife told us that the argument had started because this big Samoan guy had tried to force his 12-year-old son to down a shot of Bundaberg rum because, quote, it would make him a man.

She tried to stop him, he attacked her, and she just hit him with some gardening tool or something and broke his jaw, then actually managed to get him locked out of the house, the one crucial piece of information we were neglected to be told before he actually rocked up on the place. It still gives me the creeps to think how he just watched us from the darkness. That I'd somehow walked past this guy, that large, just crouched in the nook or behind his wheelie bins or something. We just had no idea why he was acting so violent. His wife even said that it was totally out of the ordinary. He was a bit of a crim, but not a wife beater or a child abuser, so why the sudden switch?

And we didn't find out until we got out of the hospital. He only went in to get his jaw fixed, but during the x-ray, the doctors noticed something else. Some bloody great brain tumor they suspected had been affecting his behavior. It turned out he basically needed emergency surgery to remove it or he was going to die. So, as crazy as it sounds, this guy's arrest ended up saving his life in a way. They had to wait until he was out of the hospital and all recoup before they actually took him to court and because of the mitigating circumstances, i.e. the big growth that had been in his head, he got off with little more than a

warning. It helped that he turned up to court with a surgical scar still showing and at that stage, I'm almost certain that there was no need for it to be on show but I suppose his lawyer was just on the ball when it came to making an impression on the jury. After that little encounter, everything else I had to deal with seemed easier and that feeling stayed like that for months, until my next run in with a not-so-gentle giant. But that's a story that'll have to wait for another time. I grew up in Baltimore, but I spent most of my adult life as a police officer out in the country. This means I'd sometimes operate in some very rural areas, and this brings a whole other level of criminality than the city. It also means a whole other level of weird, too, and possibly one of the weirdest and creepiest calls came about a man trespassing out near the county line.

The complaint was that someone was wandering around private land, yelling and screaming, and the owner wanted them gone. But then when we arrived at the property, I knew this one was going to be different. The house still had their Christmas lights up, still switched on and burning electricity on a mid-July afternoon. Soon as we got out of the car, a haggard looking lady in her fifties emerged with a little kid in tow. It was a sad looking scene. The woman looked tired, really really tired, and the kid was dragging a little oxygen tank behind him. The lady explains that she's not related to him,

but that she was taking care of them because their dad is off on some meth binge. At the point she called, he was right in the middle of his binge, had realized his kids had been put into the care of a woman we were talking to, and long story short, he wanted them back. Since the kid's father wasn't there at the time, there wasn't much we could do about the trespassing situation, so after giving her my personal cell phone number so she could get a direct line if he came back, I had no choice but to leave her. The whole thing happened again a few days later, and I suggested getting one of those doorbell cams or some kind of surveillance system so we at least had evidence of him breaking the law. But with a woman's dire financial situation,

there was no chance of her being able to purchase anything of the sort, so again, I just had to walk away and hope things didn't get any worse. Much like the first time, I left feeling troubled, but it wasn't the impending threat of a binging meth head that had me concerned, it was the behavior and appearance of the potential female victim. The woman seemed to be more exhausted than when I'd first seen her, and although I initially put this down to the stress of her situation, the more I thought about how she looked and how she acted, the more I began to think something else was going on. I didn't figure that she was tweaking, it wasn't that kind of weird, but again, I just put it down to stress and moved on. We got a couple more calls like that, with different officers heading over to

talk to her, and from what I heard, each time this woman is getting progressively worse. I mean, even to the point where we figured that she was just chronically ill or something. Finally, we get another call from that same house, only this time it's the kid with the oxygen tank calling. The dispatcher said the poor little guy was in tears, saying his auntie was acting scared and that he was scared that she was going to hurt him. Me and another officer just broke the sound barrier trying to get out there in time and I felt sick with guilt that I hadn't got the kid into temporary care while I had the chance. Thankfully, the woman hadn't hurt the kid at all by the time we got there, but she was acting completely manic, refused to calm down and in the end, we had to call it a 5150 which is when someone is having a mental health crisis and needs urgent care.

Once the woman was on her way to the hospital, and the kid was on the way to temporary foster care, we decided to search the house, just to make sure that there was no narcotics on the premises. The place looked fine, a little messy with some eccentric decor, but there was nothing that led us to believe that the home was unsafe for a child. There was no sign of any narcotics use, there was plenty of food in the fridge, and there was even a bunch of medications and spare oxygen tanks for the kids, so she was obviously taking care of him. So what happened to make her just snap like that? The answer came to us very personally and very unexpectedly when as we were exploring the house, the other officer I

was with started to complain of feeling woozy. I've been feeling kind of the same way, but I tried to ignore the sensation as best I could so I could get on with the job. We both head out into the porch to get a breath of fresh air, and what do you know, after a few minutes, the wooziness clears right up. On a hunch, the officer I was with asked me if I'd searched the basement yet. I told him no because it was a real mess down there and I was going to wait until he was free so we could get in there, clear some of the debris, and take a proper look around. We're down there for no more than a few minutes when my fellow officers identified what the issue

was. The moment he laid eyes on an old gas-powered water heater, he made a beeline for it, putting his ear right up against the outer casing while telling me to keep quiet for a second. He stayed there for a moment or two, then made a rush back for the stairs saying, we need to get out of here. With a suspected carbon monoxide leak on our hands, we called hazmat and poison control to advise on carbon monoxide poisoning. They told us to just keep everyone out of the house, including the kid, who had avoided the same gradual poisoning the woman had because of the little oxygen tube that he had running up to his nose. I was confused as to how being poisoned like that hadn't just killed her, as I heard about other carbon monoxide leaks being outright fatal. But according to the hazmat guys who tested the concentrations in the house, it was just enough to increasingly poison the woman over time, while having little to no effect

on the young kid with the oxygen tank. The other thing I heard was that the woman wasn't getting out of the hospital anytime soon, and this is the part that really scares me about this whole incident. Although the levels of carbon monoxide in her system had gone down, the effects of the poisoning on her brain would last a lot longer, and from what I heard, she pretty much went straight from the hospital to a robust psychiatric clinic in the city. And from what I heard, the sick kid's mother wasn't around, so he ended up in foster care. Another one lost the system, with only the small consolation of knowing that he'd get the care he needed. I drove past that lady's place the other night, and I saw that all the Christmas lights were off, and I found myself thinking about her and praying that one day, those lights might flicker

back on. For most of the 1990s, I worked for Riverside Police Department here in Southern California. One night I was working alone on an unusually chilly October evening when a call came in about a drunken disorderly incident at a local bowling alley. I figured that it'd be your average drunken argument over a bowling game or something and you'd be surprised at how heated amateur bowling leagues can get. But when I arrived on scene, I discovered that there was nothing regular about what I was about to face. Running around the parking lot of the bowling alley was a half-dressed man who appeared to be attacking cars I feel I should remind you that it was almost 40 degrees at the time of my arrival But even in the low light of the parking lot I could see my suspect was heavily perspiring

Right away I knew this wasn't a regular drunk call This guy was on something else I got out of my car, walked over to him and unsuccessfully attempted to engage him in conversation. All he wanted was violence. Dilated pupils, blank stare, couldn't keep still. Even when I pulled out my collapsible baton to show him that I was ready for it, he still didn't back down and that's when his symptoms started to look very familiar to me. I hadn't dealt with the perp myself but we booked a guy not long before who was acting in a very similar way and blood tests came back positive for PCP, something I've heard of but I'd never

actually seen anyone under the influence of until that day. It took four or five officers just to get him booked and into his cell, and then there was me, all alone, facing a suspect that had to be a hundred pounds heavier than our first perp, and at least a foot tall or two. Officers who've dealt with suspects under the influence of PCP will understand what an incredibly dangerous situation I found myself in, but for those that don't know anything about PCP, time for a swift and much needed science lesson. The drug prevents a neurotransmitter called glutamate from attaching to its receptor in the brain. The user then experiences out-of-body style sensations caused by the drug's dissociative effects. Some describe feeling like they're

floating or being under the impression that the world around them isn't real. Others experience an intense sense of euphoria and invulnerability, and all that from a drug that was first intended as an anesthetic. It all depends on how much a person takes, but those hallucinogenic dissociative effects can last anywhere from three to six hours, and during that time, the user is in a very vulnerable and volatile state. The comedown is even worse. Depression, anxiety, mood swings. It's a bad scene for everyone involved. As soon as I realized the suspect was on PCP, I started to put away my baton. Not just because

I was hoping to peacefully de-escalate things, but I could beat the brakes off this guy all night long and he wouldn't even feel a thing, so the baton was absolutely pointless. To trace and placate a suspect in that condition, our department taught us to always tell a distressed, frantic, or manic person that we were going to get them help. I found those words can have an incredibly placating effect on people suffering through manic episodes and the like. They don't see you as the enemy anymore. You're a friend, there to help, even if helping them means tasering and cuffing them before they hurt themselves or others. In this case, help meant calling in as

much backup as possible and the suspect showed absolutely zero positive reaction to my get-you-helpline, so I knew that backup would be sorely needed. I was told that I'd have to wait a good five or ten minutes for any backup, and I prayed that in that time, that things weren't going to get any worse. But not only did it get worse in just a few short minutes, it went completely sideways. The second I tried to re-engage the guy just on the off chance that he was ready to calm down, I immediately paid for it. The suspect lunged at it and made it scarily obvious that he was trying to grab my sidearm. I knew I had to keep him from getting my pistol at all cost, even if it meant getting the crap beaten out of me. A bloody nose or broken jaw would pale in comparison to what would happen if he were to somehow get a hold of my sidearm. Fortunately,

there were two things going in my favor. The first was that our department had only recently issued retention holsters as standard equipment, and retention holsters serve the same purpose as regular holsters, but with one exception. Instead of simply lifting the gun out of the holster like you'd normally do, you gotta kind of twist and pull at the same time to be able to unholster the weapon. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure that he didn't know anything about our newfangled retention holders but it was still a miracle that he didn't just destroy the mechanism with pure brute strength. My suspect had to at least been 300 pounds soaking wet and either he did some serious

lifting or PCP really does give people super strength because I was convinced that he was about to disarm me on two very frightening occasions. However, a second thing was going in my favor also. Even though the fight was a complete weight mismatch, and I was never going to win it without some kind of weapon, the guy was so fixated on my gun that he didn't physically attack me too much. If he had, I'd have been completely screwed, and there's a chance that I wouldn't be here to tell you all this story, but luckily, his fixation meant that I was able to get him in a kind of

top-down bear hug before I threw myself sideways onto the ground. The ad hoc suplex worked just enough to knock the wind out of the suspect, but then remember what I said about PCP's effects on the human body's nervous system? Well, I finally got to see this side effect first hand and it was absolutely terrifying. No amount of punching and bar holds or pressure point manipulation even slowed this freak of nature down and it took all I had just to get a grip on this guy so I could hold on for dear life and keep him from getting up again. The whole time, he remained determined to get his hands on my weapon, and he was literally telling me how he was going to kill me with it when he finally got a hold of it. I'm not sure how long it took the cover unit to finally

show up, but it was probably a case of five minutes feeling like an hour. Fortunately, the officers in the other unit immediately recognized the situation upon their arrival and helped me hold the drug-crazed nutjob down while security guards from the bowling alley, who emerged from hiding once several cop cars were on the scene, contacted the paramedic unit under our orders. Upon the paramedic's arrival, it took no less than five of us to apply restraints to the suspect. We were actually forced to hogtie him in order to safely place him in the back of a squad car, and only then we were able to transport him to a medical facility for treatment and evaluation.

A subsequent search revealed that he was also armed with a four-inch blade, and once again I had to count my blessings as I wondered why he didn't use it. Once it was all said and done, my watch commander ordered me back to the station to take a rest and start my report. And good thing too, because that was probably the longest 10-15 minutes of my life at that point, and I was worn out. For the first time in my life, someone had actually tried to kill me, and I don't think I'm skilled enough as a writer to properly communicate what that feels like. I feel like I could spend all day trying and failing to properly sum it up, but I think the easiest way to explain it is that one day, you wake up, and the world doesn't seem quite as bright anymore, and you see it for the dangerous

and unpredictable place that it truly is. Back when I was a newly minted police officer, I was on patrol near a strip mall when I got a call regarding an ongoing assault near the mall's front parking lot. I was on the scene in seconds and as I pulled up, I saw that one of the two men involved in the fight had a long iron pole in his hands. As I got out of the car, he raised up as if though he was ready to strike another man to the ground with it. The other was looking up at him, hands raised in terror as he begged the armed man to reconsider. Now this was before tasers became standard issue for departments across the country and arguably I had every right to use my weapons since such a large sturdy pole definitely constituted a lethal weapon. However I was brand new on the job and there was a whole

mob of people watching from the mall's front entrance and I figured that I'd try defusing it through force of will before I'd sent anyone to the hospital. I ran up to what I figured was minimal safe distance, drew my pistol, and then screamed at the armed man to put the pole down. At first, he stopped, lowering the pole as he looked over to me, and I was just about knocked out of my boots when he actually started to smile at me. I might have been very much a rookie at that stage, but I'd still been involved in my fair share of pursuits and arrests. Generally speaking, criminals aren't happy when the cops show up, so having this guy seem happy to see me was jarring to say the least.

Still pointing my weapon at him, I repeated my order to drop the pole, but instead of complying, he just breathlessly panted, thank god you're here, before pointing down at the terrified looking victim who was still just laying there, visibly shaken from how scared they were. The guy with the pole then started telling me how I needed to arrest his potential victim, and to just keep him from striking out, I decided to humor him and ask him what the guy had done. This is when Pole Guy, who is clearly suffering from some kind of manic episode, launches into a grand paranoid speech about how they had been stalking him and how the guy he was about to attack was one of them. On more than one occasion, I asked who they were, but he seemed incapable of giving me any kind of coherent answer that didn't just descend into conspiratorial psychobabble.

I knew that I was in over my head, but I also knew that dispatch had routed another unit to the scene right around the same time I'd gotten the call. Backup would be arriving at any minute, and all I had to do was hold onto the ball long enough so the big dogs could bring her over the line. It was the first big test in terms of preventing life-threatening injury to an apparently innocent party, and up until that point, I thought I'd done pretty good. But things took a sudden turn for the worse when, out of nowhere, the pole guy's expression went from friendly to hostile. Silently, he started to study my face intently for a few seconds, and considering I couldn't get the guy to shut up just a few seconds ago, I found his silence to be very disconcerting.

As he turned away from the grounded man altogether and turned to face me with the pole still in his grip, I tried to ask if he was okay, but he cut me off with some comments about silent words. I only half heard what he said, so I asked him to repeat himself. I swear to God he looks me dead serious before he repeats with emphasis, don't you talk to me with no silent words. It was only then I realized how dangerous that man really was. He was a violent schizophrenic, and although I wish God's mercy on each and every sufferer of that god-awful disease, they are very dangerous to be around whenever they're in an anxious or manic state. It's clear that this man could hear something that I couldn't,

and it meant that he went from happy to see me to downright hostile in just a few seconds. I quickly went from feeling quietly confident about myself to downright terrified that I was going to have to use my weapon in anger for the first time. Don't get me wrong, I knew I was going to have to use it eventually, but if I was going to shoot someone, I wanted it to be some heavily armed human trafficker or something, not someone in dire need of mental health assistance. I kept trying to talk louder than the voices in his head, which I know sounds stupid in retrospect, but all I wanted in the world was to see this guy on the ground in cuffs, without any extra holes in him.

I kept trying to work into his mindset by telling him that I was there to help, and I'd even arrest the guy he was referring to if he'd only put the pole down and step away from the situation. The guy on the ground didn't freak out or anything. I think he knew it was just a bluff. Instead, he tried to seize the chance to escape. But the pole guy noticed, and it made him incredibly angry. Keep in mind that it takes a few seconds for the guy on the ground to actually find his feet, but in that time, pole guy noticed the movement and swung around with the pole as hard as he could. Almost the very end of the pole smashed into the side of the grounded guy's head, right where his ear was, and it knocked him sideways onto the ground again.

The guy then raised the pole above his head, so high that it was clearly going to be an execution strike. I had no choice but to shoot, and I put one right to the lower left side of his back, hoping I wouldn't hit anything vital while still putting him out of action. One shot just staggered him. Two shots put him down and by that point, the victim on the ground was just screaming and praying, scrambling to back away from the pole guy's fallen body.

Pole guy groaned and writhed for a while, too wracked with pain to say anything else. The backup unit assured me that he'd survive. Said gut shots were painful and took a while to recover from, but were generally non-fatal. So you can only imagine how shocked I was when I heard back that the guy had died. Doctors said I'd severed the guy's hepatic artery with my second shot. After that, he only had about minutes in him, tops. The other guy survived, but he needed surgery to reattach part of his ear. You wouldn't think blunt force could cause such horrific injuries, just internal damage, but they do, especially around the head and face. I've been retired for a few years now, and every so often,

I hear how more and more departments are putting their officers through dedicated training on how to deal with mental health crises. And if you ask me, this is a severely underfunded and underexplored area of policing, which is incredible considering how common mental health crisis can be here. My only hope is that, with the right training and the right equipment, no one will have to take a life like I was forced to. No one should have to die because they're suffering through the worst day of their life, and no one should be forced to be their executioner. I'm a homicide detective for an unlucky 13 years, and out of all the crime scenes I've seen,

this is the one that stuck with me the most. One night, at about one in the morning, some 19-year-old kid was attempting to climb up to the second floor apartment window of his then-girlfriend. We later found out that she thought the idea was very romantic, and so the boyfriend had tried to surprise her one night. Yet unbeknownst to Romeo, his girlfriend's father was still awake, and upon seeing him climb onto their first floor balcony, had assumed that he was some kind of home invader headed for his little girl's room. Romeo was shot point blank, causing him to fall twenty feet to the ground. Then, once he was lying there in a twisted heap of bones, his potential future father-in-law stood on his balcony and unloaded his revolver into the poor kid's body. Up to that point, everything that

occurred was just some stupid tragedy. But everything that happened after that, that's where the horror really comes into it. Instead of then calling 911 to report what he'd done, the girl's dad reloaded his weapon, then unloaded all six bullets into the kid's body again, all while his daughter was watching from the balcony above. We talked to the neighbors above and below afterwards, and they said the screams could have woken the dad. I've seen bodies in much worse condition than Romeo's, but seeing him on the ground, face up, with literally half his face blown off and chest cavity blown wide open, I think this was one of the most hideous, if was assigned to the Accident accident investigation unit on the afternoon shift

when I was dispatched to a car-slash-pedestrian accident in a residential area. And when I arrived, I found a female subject in her early thirties lying on the sidewalk wearing only her underwear, covered in blood, and deceased. A short examination revealed two hole wounds on her back, and while I was with her, a neighbor who was standing on his porch pointed to an open door on a two-story townhouse, yelling to me, She ran out there! It was then obvious that this was not a car accident, but some type of assault that had become a murder.

As I got to the front door of the townhouse, I could see blood on the front stoop, blood inside on the floor, and bloody handprints coming down the stairway from the second floor. My backup arrived, looked at the victim with the holes and said he thought she looked like she'd been shot. I yelled into the townhouse, got no response, so we determined that we had to see if the suspect was still inside. The neighbor told us that the victim and her husband lived there. While my partner went to search the ground floor, I started up the stairs. From the bloody handprints, it was obvious that the lady had run down the stairs after being injured and out onto the sidewalk where she died. All I could think of was this lady was shot and the husband was still on the second floor. I was in the narrow hallway, slowly making my way up

the stairs feeling the suspect would step around the top step and start shooting or something. I remember my heart was pounding so hard that I thought I could hear it. Dead silence though. I had my gun drawn and pointed up the steps but knew that if the suspect popped out and started shooting that I would be in trouble. Anyway, I made it to the top, found blood in the hallway and in the bedroom while my partner yelled that he had him. The husband had stabbed his wife twice in her upper back while she was standing in front of the open closet. She turned and he stabbed her once more in the chest, which gave her just enough adrenaline to run down the stairs, out the door, and bleed out on the sidewalk.

When my partner found the husband, he was lying on the kitchen floor, having made a feeble attempt at cutting his own wrist. Our investigation revealed that months before that afternoon, the couple lost their only daughter in a car-slash-pedestrian accident in front of their home. Their marriage deteriorated, and they'd been fighting, and the husband snapped out of grief. It was the longest stairway climb that I've ever had to make in my life. My dad used to be a state police detective and he once told me this story after I asked him what the most messed up thing he'd heard or seen on the job was. He said it happened when he was still fairly new on the force and he got a call to an apartment building because a man in a Halloween mask was trying to get into someone's apartment.

He then finds out that a call had been placed around the same time from the same apartment building, with the caller claiming they'd heard a gunshot coming from the apartment above. The original caller had described someone pounding on their door, then when they opened it, a man in what they described as a monster mask was standing there, making scary noises while trying to get into their apartment. They claimed to have kicked the guy out before slamming the door, but the guy kept on banging on the door a while before moving on to other apartments. The caller also said that they had heard more screams from down the hall, so the monster may have been trying to get to other people.

When my dad got to the building, he found a man shambling around inside covered in blood, and he got the guy turned around and realized that he had found this monster. The guy had attempted to take his own life by putting a gun under his chin and firing upwards. However, he had screwed the angle up and blown off his jaw on part of his nose, but he was still alive and in extreme shock. He had been walking around the building knocking on doors trying to get someone to help him, but his bloody torn up face had everyone terrified so they kept slamming the door in his face to get away. My dad said it was the last part that really got to him, how someone in their time of need could be turned away by so many people.

Sure they didn't ask to have something so horrifying darken their door on a weeknight, but at the same time, both he and I can't assume the despair that man must have gone through. To be so troubled that you try to check out, then be treated like a monster when you're at your lowest point in life. He said it's things like that which stick with you and I completely understand why. Way back in the early 2000s, myself and two of my fellow officers went to perform a welfare check on an elderly woman who hadn't been seen in a couple of weeks. She'd lived alone except for about eight cats and who knows how many kittens. The moment we get close to a window, we could see what remained of her through the glass, but the stench was so extreme that they couldn't get in. In the end, the fire service had to enter with breathing gear to actually get her out. It really was that bad.

She had died of natural causes, apparently, but obviously the kiddie brigade had gotten hungry eventually. As they waited for breathing gear to get in, my mate and his colleague were watching through the window when he shouted, Jesus Christ, they're eating her! And watching as the scene was slowly consumed. Probably only a few nibbles by then, but they all seemed to go on a self-imposed diet for a few days afterwards. It made the press at the time, and from what I was told,

all but one of the cats had to be put down as they were so emaciated by the time the police attended. Definitely the most messed up call I'd ever attended and since that day, I've always had a subtle but very visceral reaction to the sight of a cat eating its dinner. To be continued... Thank you. Grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data. Located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends.

And I'll see you again soon.