Murder in the Yard and Garden

I’m not sure if it’s the same murder¹ or not, but it seemed like the murder had the intent to murder me yesterday.

A murder can be very, very loud and it was. The murder was flying low as if practicing or intending to murder me from the sky. Well sky might not be the right word – the murder wasn’t flying high.

One year, and I may have mentioned this before, the murder is the prime suspect in the murder of my corn.

I have never seen the murder act as if it had the intent to murder a member of the colony² that frequents our yard. Well colony is the right word for the group, but it might not be the right word for what we see. The most I’ve seen is three, but the three in the yard at the same time appeared to be juvenile or younger.

The only murder of a colony member in our yard that we know of was committed by a single member of a local cast³. But we are also sure that a cast member murdered a member of the scurry⁴ that lives in or around our yard. The evidence is that I saw one of the cast members carry carrion to a perch⁵ in a neighbor’s tree.

The murder doesn’t seem to have an interest in murdering any of a gaze⁶ that used to frequent our yard. Some or perhaps all members of the gaze must have thought the yard was a bank because one or more left a night deposit.

Cell Phone in School

The issue of cell phones in schools in back in the news. Even before it was an issue, it was an issue. Many if not most teachers didn’t have cell phones in the early 2000s, but some students did. In those days, students using their phones at the schools I worked at was strictly prohibited.

I was working at a middle school as a substitute vice-principal. Like most admin subs, I was charged with routine student discipline and supervision duties. It had been a slow day with zero physical territorial or opinion disputes in the lunchroom or other places. It’s indeed a rare day to have no classroom disruption referrals in a school of nearly 600 students. I was typing my report to the VP for whom I had substituted after making my last walk through the halls before going outside for bus duty.

There was shouting from the school counselor area, and I rushed there. The regular VP was already there and asked me to take the shouting girl to my workspace so he could find out what was happening without the seventh-grade girl’s continuous interruption.

The shouting was about her not wanting to give up her cellphone when using it in class. She had claimed to the counselor that she’d passed it to a friend when escorted by the security officer from her classroom, but she wouldn’t name the classmate. Men, of course didn’t do girl searches, and she’d vehemently refused to allow the woman counselor to do so.

Her cellphone rang while she was sitting in my office. She told me she had to answer it because it was her grandmother calling. What she didn’t know was that the school secretary had her grandmother on the school line with a request that she come to the school and pick up the girl.

I didn’t know at the time that the grandmother told the regular vice principal she could not drive and the girl would have to take the bus home.

There’s more to the story than I care to tell, but she broke loose several times and flailed her arms when the VP and I were attempting to escort her to the bus. For those who wonder why two men could not physically restrain a non-compliant seventh-grade girl, you should try it sometime.
Well probably not!

In the aftermath, the school secretary said something like, “Boy, she sure laid one on you.”

I felt a blow during the scuffling but thought it was just from the girl’s random flailing. The swelling and pain were clear when I looked in a mirror and touched the spot. The closed-circuit hallway video the secretary had watched and recorded in real time showed her taking an aimed punch at my face followed by another that missed.

Legal action started, and there was a ‘rest of the story’ but not for this forum.

Remember when unpermitted calculators in the classroom were the issue? I could say more, but … (Perhaps I will say something about the real issues¹ as I saw them in a later post.)

Running or Not

When I see the candidate signs on nearly every corner, I think of the time I ran for public office. Some men already serving on the Kelso, WA, city council asked me to run, and I had the support of the local police union.
I’m sure of why I didn’t win but it was probably not from what I’m saying below.

My opponent could have said, “Candidate Benson was disciplined by the Army, associated with an American Nazi, and investigated by the FBI and CIA.”

Each of the above is true.

Several of us were late for morning formation at Ft. Devens. We were all punished under the Army’s Article-15 and restricted to base for the weekend.¹

I hired a clerk named John Patler. Later, during the FBI investigation of his shooting of Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi party leader, I learned that the clerk had been a captain in the American Nazi Party and the editor and cartoonist for the party’s magazine, Stormtrooper.²

Every applicant for service in the Army Security Agency had a background investigation by the FBI as a requirement for a security clearance.³

I met a man in Frankfurt named Frank Baxter who told me to send him my resume when I was ready to leave the Army. He interviewed me at a Company called HRB Singer. I didn’t know until the interview that a background investigation had been completed by the CIA. I had a second interview with E.D. Echols, CIA director of personnel.⁴
Echols was the director’s real name; Frank Baxter was probably a cover name.

An opponent could find more events, but I’ve hopefully made my point about how I might be viewed if I chose to run for another public office.

PS: I’ve chosen to not run for anything except to run around a topic.

Remember and Honor

On this 25th day of May 2026, we remember and honor those who died in military service. This is for all who went to serve and didn’t survive. Any one of us who served could have been one of them, and any family could be related.

I know of only one relative who died while serving. Uncle Arne Gerhard Benson died at Ft. Lewis, WA, in 1943 while serving with the US Army. Some family letters talk about his service as a civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers before he enlisted.¹ ²

There may have been others, but Walter Trisko was the only high school classmate³ I remember dying while serving Vietnam. Classmate Walt

So, remember and honor those who died but be aware that for many survivors absence from war is not the same as peace of the soul.

China, etc.

The niece of Pearl S. Buck went to my high school for a while in the 1950s and I read The Good Earth during my junior year.

FYI: I am not a Sinophile, a China scholar, nor do I have Sinophobia.

Reading Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Midnights, James Bradley’s The China Mirage Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder out of China, and Ilona Ralf Sues’ Shark’s Fins and Millet gave me better insight to why China and our relationship with it is the way it is today. I also learned more about the political, economic, and social environments that set up The Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War.
Reviews of these books is not my reason for this post. Except for Shark’s Fins and Milletthere are multiple reviews on line, so I want to say what about each author makes them valid.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is fiction, but she grew up in China with her missionary parents.

Ted White and Annalee Jacoby were war correspondents with access to leaders of all factions in the region. Annalee’s husband Melville (Mel) a Time-Life magazine war correspondent was killed accompanying General Harold H. George on a trip to inspect air bases.

Ilona Sues had personal contacts with leaders of all factions and commoners in China during the 1930s while on a League of Nations mission to help eradicate the flow of opium. She had intimate knowledge about meals of shark’s fins and millet and the societies who had those meals.

Bill Lasher had an advantage many writers do not —Mel and Annalee’s personal papers, films, and documents saved by their families to work with for Eve of a Hundred Midnights.

James Bradly, a historian, cited over 400 verifiable references for his work on The China Mirage.

The overlapping content of each book verifies the fidelity of the others and the experience or research by the authors added to my learning experience.

Urgent Need

About 100,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant in the US. At least 13 people die every day waiting for a kidney. A Kidney from a living donor kidney can last 20 years or more. A deceased donor kidney lasts about 12 years. One kidney is all you need — donors live full, healthy lives.

Our grandson-in-law “Eli is entering the final stages of chronic kidney disease and is actively searching for a living donor. A single act of generosity will bless he and his family immensely and will keep a husband, dad, son, and friend present for every moment that matters.”

Read A Kidney for Eli to learn more.

4th Effort for Bulwer-Lytton

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants
to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. I’d written Echoes of Nam: Absence from war is not the same peace of the soul and thought about a ‘how it came about’ story.I did a tongue-in-cheek for the contest.

Would you continue reading a novel that started with a one sentence paragraph like the one below?

I’m Maria Conception Aquino and being an omniscient, all-knowing in literature voice only, observer, in-the-right place, at-the right-time, I put forth this biography of Hacker Lee Goor including but not limited to the lives of Brandon Taylor Grame and Adam William Brax for your most earnest consideration, so believe me – facts I don’t know personally or for which I have no written or recorded oral testimony are not guessed or supposed in this document; however, some conversations based on verifiable evidence are put into my words and phrases to further the story, but if you were there and know differently, please forgive my assumptions, and if you were not a witness, it matters not to me because just like many things we did not observe, they reasonably could have been.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was founded in 1982 at San Jose State University.

None of my entries were published, and as explained in the post here none will ever be.

Second Effort for Bulwer-Lytton

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California,
the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants
to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. None of my entries were published and as explained here none will ever be.
My somewhat random writing log tells me I sent this one, but it may not have been my second effort as it is titled.

Army veteran Clayton Manning dabbling in fiction hoping to hit the market as a modern Raymond Chandler adding to his Philip Marlowe series or Mickey Spillane doing another Mike Hammer book but never gets a word published and not having a Kate Becket like Richard Castle did, he decides to take his teacher’s advice, “Write what you know,” and opens his own PI agency above a deteriorating secondhand music store in a small Texas town near Dallas, but in solving his first case he uncovers a deeply covert national security issue he cannot and will not dare to expose to his prospective reading audience even as fiction or innuendo.

For reasons I cannot explain, I say, having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series I first intended to post in sequence.

Bulwer-Lytton: Effort One

Cranston Paul Ryley lived by the philosophy that in the end, every person must account for him, herself, or they in that all motivation for actual actions related to accountability is irrelevant to the concept that any of the species humankind is the objective of non-prejudicial termination ¹ such that verifiable positive determination of any and/or all fiscal debt one should reimburse, deserves to recompense, or is able to remunerate will not be made until the fully integrated priority program necessitates that urgent consideration be applied to the issue of intended and unintended behavior as demonstrated by a supervised and un-perjured application of the thesis in question as cited by the previously referenced authors whose work may or may not be found by scholarly research at privately funded institutions, so his novel title protagonist Bogus would live by the same set of rubrics.

Having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series.

Nam Vets Day 2026

Remember:

Many went – Many came back – None were the same
This is for all who went
Any one of us who served
Could have been one of them
And any family could be related¹

On this date, fifty-three years ago: “U.S. troops withdraw from Vietnam,” was the headline.²

Flip of a Coin:

I don’t remember the date or time, but it was an event in the late spring of 1958 I’ll never forget. SSG Harry Harkness took Jackie E. West and me aside, saying something like, “I need one of you to lead a team to install new equipment and update some existing equipment at the embassy in Saigon. The job will also require some activity in other places in the area. Both of you are due for separation in less than 90 days so you’ll have to extend for a year. Are you willing?”

We were both willing to be extended, so who went to Vietnam was decided by the flip of a quarter.

I fully believe it was God’s plan for the coin to land as it did. With the one-year extension, I would never have gone to Edison Tech in Seattle to take the night class where I met my future wife.
April 3, 2026 is our 67th anniversary.

Jackie E West, my counterpart, is in the history books for some of the special operations in which he was later involved. As someone said, and others often repeat, “There but for the Grace of God go I.”

PS: Like Colonel Flagg from MASH, we were not there then! The Army Security Agency I mean, but written and oral history tells us there were advisors for many activities related to North v. South issues.

Ray LePoidevin – Combat vet and Author of Alternate Route
“Let’s see what you do if you get back from Nam alive.”

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John Morris Benson Blog March 29, 2026

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