Damned If We Do: A study in personalities played out in pictures
sketched by words.
One cold and cloudy Friday-the-Thirteenth, in my mail was a check
along with a request that I attend a funeral. The deceased, a total
stranger from a distant city, had signed both.
Later a 60-year-old journal arrives from the same. In his writings, Eric
tells about his life as a German soldier as the world falls from beneath
the Nazi Regime. In a desperate attempt to change the war’s outcome,
Hitler sends Eric and another young soldier to sabotage the Atomic
Energy Project in Tennessee by destroying high mountain dams. The
time-starved task begins.
The two young soldiers are locked in a cargo hold in a rusty freighter,
attacked with depth charges while in a submarine and dumped on an
island without food or drinkable water.
Eric’s opinion that American women are prudish is dispelled in the first
town they enter. He spends time in a house where three young
prostitutes live. They have no customers because the town is off-limits
to the military. Meanwhile, Eric’s accomplice rapes the town’s beauty
queen. For hours they dodge bullets and an angry mob. Meanwhile,
Eric loses an eye to a clothespin.
They face robbery or death by wandering into a hobo camp. A WWI
veteran befriends them with the loan of some quilts when they almost
freeze to death in a boxcar crossing the mountains. Eric’s accomplice
kills the old veteran for his coat.
Eric’s accomplice grows into a poster boy for evil -- crazy-mean in his
thoughts and hellish in his actions. Through flagrant acts of thefts,
rapes, and murders, he grows more ruthless with each action. His
hatred for all things American is demonstrated when he kills a farmer’s
cow, calf, and horse.
Internal conflicts haunt Eric like recurring nightmares. Yet, through his
daring and fortitude, he places enough dynamite to level any mountain.
The accomplice’s hand is on the detonator and his revolver is pointed at
Eric’s head. Suddenly, from across the dam, the girl that the
accomplice raped the previous night walks through the fog.
Some have asked, “How can so much be in one book?”
Could this have happened? Did it? This book contains the only paper
trail that exists.
If you would like to read some
excerpts from the book, follow
to sections from the book.