Left for Dead (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was able to push the Ghia to the edge, but not out, of the hole. So I walked out to the nearby highway and hitched a ride from a trucker, who drove me down the road to a friend’s house. He knew a farmer with a tractor who pulled the car out of the mud for me. Then a morning’s worth of scrubbing and cleaning and voilà! The evidence was washed away, and my parents never found out. Until now.

For refreshments, we’d drive an hour north into Oklahoma and to a certain remote roadside establishment whose owner stayed in business, I believe, principally on the strength of his alcohol sales to minors. This was the sort of place where if you could say, “Scotch and wa-wa,” they’d serve it to you.

We’d buy a couple cases of Jax, a barely potable regional brand, since defunct, which my buddies and I drank as we rumbled around, shooting rabbits. Any beer we didn’t finish off we’d bury and then disinter for consumption on our next hunting trip, unbothered by the ugly things that can happen inside a bottle of beer when it sits in a shallow grave in 115-degree weather for a week or two.

Eventually, we tired of the two-hour-round-trip drive to Oklahoma to purchase just a six-pack or three of 3–2 beer—that is, beer with a 3.2 percent alcohol content, about the equivalent of old apple juice. So on one excursion I bought several cases and secreted them away in the family camper, which we rarely used. This, of course, was my father’s signal to offer the camper for sale. When he took a potential buyer out one day to demonstrate its many features, Dad and his buyer found beer in drawers, closets and the fridge, everywhere I’d stuffed it.

Dad was angry with me. On the other hand, he didn’t have to buy any beer for the next couple of months.

These halcyon days finally skidded to a close with my graduation from Burkburnett High in June of 1964. Hubristically, I sent applications to first-tier universities such as Duke and Rice, not understanding at the time how thoroughly undereducated I really was. They, of course, rejected me, probably to a chorus of hoots and guffaws as they did.

So I chose Midwestern State as Kit had, and began my college education in a summer-school English class. I recall the course was taught by a good professor. He stunned me with a
D
on my first graded assignment. My life passed before my eyes.