This crime scene cleanup book remains a working draft. Words, sentences, paragrpahs, and pages change without notice. This autobiographical, non-fiction exercise does contain filler information to help breach a lagging memory. Expect some details to lapse into filler-fiction for the sake of creating a story from fragments of my memory.
Eddie Evans -- Crime Scene Cleanup
It's about criminality here, there, everywhere.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
| Watts Burns |
|
Chapter 1
Crime Scene Cleanup Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 1 Page 2
We did not burn Dwang. At this time in my young life I knew nothing about burning peasant homes. My day would come. When it did I began to reflect on my first pass from the Army. "What would I do?" if someone burned my mother's home?
A hot, dark, smoky night introduced me to crime scene cleanup in Los Angeles. At about 10:00 p.m. I stood on the 710 northbound stranded. Eddie Bravo had said, "No way, I'm not going farther. I'm going home." He passed the turnoff to his home twenty minutes earlier. I would find my way home from here. part of Los Angeles burned below us.
Eddie Bravo's new 1964 Mustang's taillights' bright shining light slowly dimmed in the smoke. He loved his car. The draft quickly removed his little red car; tonight he meant to return it home safely. After Advanced Individual Training at Fort Ord, he may not have a chance.
His taillights disappeared. Below, fires scorched street pavement, buildings, cars, and trucks. Piles of car tires billowed black clouds of caustic burn rubber. In this way the "Watts' riot" of July 1965 lit the Los Angeles sky for many miles around. Me, I stood like a figurine gawking at hundreds of people below. They ran to-and-fro. Mostly young black men, they shouted and reached toward the sky while as they ran into stores. Running out they carried small appliances and other goods. I viewed what I would later call a "prelude to a Los Angeles crime scene cleanup."
I knew better than to leave the freeway's safety. So I began walking northward, carrying my duffle bag, hoping someone would take pity on this young, white Army private. Stranded on a freeway above thousands of angry young black men gave me a surreal scene, although in those days surreal had no place in my vocabulary. Vietnam would thoroughly acquaint me with it. I walked alongside the 710 that night for an hour or so. Finally, an older man driving a rickety pickup truck stopped and offered me a lift. In thirty minutes I reached my mother's home. Little traffic shared the roads that night. Fear kept Los Angeles at home that weekend. My rescuer drove off, happy to have helped a soldier in a tight spot. We had both witnessed an historical episode burnt into Los Angeles' social fabric for all time. As it turned out for those young black men about to join me in Vientam, they were actually getting hands-on training for VN.
If there had been any doubt about social and economic relationships in Los Angeles to this point in time, I saw it written clearly below the 710 Freeway. A non-participant observer, I had played a small role in this civil disturbance. Like so many other race tainted police and civilian relationships, two Highway Patrol Officers tried to arrest a young black driver for drunk driving. Tensions were already strained, the August heat wave added to frayed nerves, and this one incident sparked a 6 day race riot. Stores burned belonged to both white and blacks. In total, 38 people died, 28 of whom were African American. I would breach rhe race gap in Vietnam as so many other Los Angeles County solders learned that "races" carried meaninglessness to the obsurd.
During the days between August 11 to August 17, 1965, estimates placed about 50,000 people among the rioters. Many residents in area of Los Angeles referred to this event as a "rebellion" and continue to do so. In seems ironic today that so many "rioters" would die in Vietnam.
Known as a "best" slums, this area of Los Angeles reflected rising expectations within the rapid social change of this historical era. Deteriorating living conditions, poor police relations with residents, and job opportunities continued pointing to the need for a "War on Poverty" as it came to exist under the Johnson Administration. This civil society war on poverty coincided with the enormous waste of resources dedicated to the growing Viet Nam War. At this point of history some 50,000 US soldiers stationed in Vietnam added to our nation's growing debt and our debt ceiling. We learned then that war's cost too much in money and lives; today were wrestling out of two wars.
It soon became clear that the Viet Nam War would take precedence over our efforts to eradicate poverty. Money and resources could not cover the costs of both, and both were riveted with political problems. Viet Nam soldiers in the ranks came from draftees, mostly those without an interest in serving in Viet Nam. From their ranks grew an anti-war movement within the miolitary as years passed and Viet Nam added to disillusionment and distress among young and old. Stereotypes of "welfare mothers" with many children were often portrayed or the stock of practical jokes among the less liberal US citizens. Media accounts of welfare fraud often added dry tender to the growing unpopularity of the welfare state. In all, either guns-or-butter became nether guns nor butter as our nation moved through the 1970s into the 1980s.
I knew nothing of crime scene cleanup, even while witnessing one of California's crime scene cleanup jobs arrive. A monumental cleanup would follow. In fact, crime scene cleanup remained in our future as did so many other monumental crime scene cleanup jobs. In these days, we were at a loss for words to explain criminality in its various forms and permutations, locally and internationally. Removing criminality's damage remained unnamed for another war.
For two days I too ran to-and-fro while visiting my peers, catching up
on the latest gossip, and watching the minutes tick away. Los Angeles became a central point of discussion as I visited old friends, relatives, and old hangouts. Racism reared up just about everywhere, but not in ways I remained ignorant. The racism I witnessed remained tempered, somewhat ambivalent of its object hatred. I suppose ignorance guided this type of racism. Decades later it had give way to a live-and-let-live and "They're no different than us" attitudes.
I should note that during these days men remained in the more lucrative working class jobs. Mail carriers were literally mailmen. Police Officers were all men. Bus drivers and truck drivers were all men. Life in Southern California remained on its gender fault lines until the 1970s. IBM's 650 mainframe computer brought this matter to a modern juncture: Men worked on the mainframe, the hardware. Women did not enter the computer operation's room in large corporations. Women were "key-punch operators," monotonously keying bits of binary information onto data cards. Men took control of these cards at the card reader's optical scanners for input of the digitized information to the IBM 650.
This line would not hold. Women were as able, if not more so, than men to breach the gender line as they jumped beyond computer operations into computer programming. They too would share in this new, well paying, middle-class-like employment opportunity. Women like my oldest sister would studiesd this new form of techno-knowledge religiously. They would not, could not be held at bay. They too would become keepers of this new sacred techno-knowledge of business and science. Gender discrimination began to fall, but it would take years before sex-bias joined the civil rights movement in earnest.
The Watt's riot had starkly outlined the social divide between whites and blacks in our United States in the 1950s. After all, should we have expected better from the home of Hollywood and Disneyland? In a similar way, the IBM 650 would starkly outline the social divide between men and women in the 1970s. When Martin Luther King arrived in the mainstream media, a slowly growing, black middle-class became his hope for the African American working class and lumpin-proletariate. After his death and a little time, a black middle-class had less concern about those on the food chain then their own mall experience. In both the Los Angeles area as well as Vietnam, we would learn the meaning of blood contaminated by bloodborne pathogens. Suddently, almost overnight, Los Angeles' biohazrds from blood were legislated into existence by our US Congress. One's "racial" category would not hold in this biological fiction,
Racial stereotypes fell when it came to biohazard cleanup all over the United States. The seriousness of biohazard cleanup remains relatively safe for blood cleanup in Los Angeles, Vietnam, and elsewhere. No one seemed to care much about bloodborne pathogens during blood cleanup in Viennam. Of course, one might argue, HIV and hepititis C were unknown or undiagnosed. If anything, today we would witness mass bloodborne pathogen casualties on the African Continent and the American Continenet, otherwise. Could it be that our moon-suited crime scene cleanup companies run a flim-flam on American consumers, relative to the hazards of crime scene cleanup? Such a manipulation would syncronize with that of the tricks played upon Americans by their governments in war and death cleanup.
I had on idea as I flew back to San Francisco's International Airport that I would take part in the greatest American flim-flam since World War I. What I knew for certain I knew by my mother's look as we parted at LAX. Saddened, she expected me to do my best in Vietnam. Here generation fought the Nazis, and in here mind my role now somehow carried that duty over to Vietnam.
From the airport I caught a bus to Fort Ord. I had given some thought to the Watts' riot in my short time at home, my first pass from the US Army. "They better not burn my mother's house down," I repeated to my peers. All shook their heads in unison, none daring to show fear or too much concern. We were all concerned though. "What did it all mean?" we wondered to ourselves. No one knew. We had no way of knowing in those times that the black rage below the 710 turned inward, not outward. Their places of business, grocery stores, laundry mats, automotive garages, even dental clinics were going up in smoke. The arsonists had not thought to expand externally into "whities" turf.
President Johnson meant to enhance life for all Americans. He hoped to do so while fighting a third-world country and increasing federal programs for the needy. These "welfare programs" would create jobs, but for more paper pushers than laborers in many cases. Guns-and-butter pushed the US economy into great debt. In those days the United States remained a manufacturing, exporting powerhouse. It's ability close gaps between debt and solvency remained strong. Johnson and his fellow liberal democrats hoped for a Keynesian movement of capital as government money flowed into households.
In some cases this approach worked. Many families found momentary relief from poverty. They used their new resources well while training for their future. Single mothers found income for baby sitters and returning to their educations. Some mothers found their welfare checks an opportunity to excel at pregnancy, thereby increasing their government check's size. Of course these recipients were small in number compared to what was coming, corporate welfare, billionaire bred politics.
Our Vietnam deficit spending changed our national debt into its own balance of power.
President Nixon invoked three powerful social change programs. First, he President Nixon he gave us our "war on drugs" in 1971. He also bombed Cambodia. Doing so unleashed Pol Pot's crazy communist peasants. Then, he the dollar from the gold standard. No longer would foreign-held U.S. dollars be convertible into gold. United State's citizens lost this privilege at the Benton Woods accords following the end of World War II. Rich nations with gold stood to profit in the billions because the held gold. Poor nations without gold reserves lost. Today, free-floating currencies now dominate world exchange markets, albeit as electronic impulses. Now Iraq and Afghanistan wars carry deficits far And away greater than our Vietnam deficit.
In less than twenty-four hours at liberty from the Marine Crop, Sergeant X blew his brains out with a powerful handgun. I learned these facts when an Oxnard hotel manager called and asked for a quote. Not a crony crime scene cleaner, I won the bid easily. Confusion seized my mind when opening the good sergeant's door.
What remained of the good sergeant would take some time to remove. Blood's decaying odor remained pungent sweet. No matter. I needed time to think. "Why?" became the one term pounding away at my mind, obstructing my cleaning. Like a stultifying drug, "Why" stopped suicide cleanup work as if by clock work. "He checked in." He went directly to his room. "Said, I just got in from Iraq." OK, live long and prosper, but this?
Now I've cleaned far too many military suicides, Army, navy, marine, no air force and no coast guard suicide cleanups mark my experience. My first navy cleanup lead me to Saratoga, New York, home of a nuclear submarine training school. My client, a civilian management company offered a reasonable price, but with one stipulation. "Clean this sailors uniforms and laundry." I did.
An inquisitive crime scene cleaner asks "Why" and "How" for different reasons. Professional cleaning reasons arise to catch a glimpse of that final moment as a suicide victim's body matter reacts to the laws of physics. Then there's the unknown physics of it all. Myriads of clear cranial fluid bursting beyond the reasonable laws of physics. These I hate. "Where'd it go?" Figure it out first. Then clean, then expect the unexpected. Spray at least two bottles of peroxide per head wound suicide cleanup. Anything less shows disrespect for physical violence. Spray enough and errant brain matters begins to bubble up-where least expected. always.
The good sailor's remains littered dozens of Colonel Sanders' fast food chicken boxes. Judging from their number, it looked like he ate like this for weeks. See Los Angeles blood cleanup for more on these issues.
We don't see economic distress in many suicides like the above sailor's. We do see economic distress in many suicides, though. Ideological , economic, and geopolitical ends add to our economic problems. After the war, the United States relied on the military power to fight the "threat of communism," to keep foreign markets open to trade and investment, and to safeguard global markets. Continued reinforcement of the armed forces in pursuit of these objectives has gradually led to the proliferation of a large military apparatus whose further growth seems to have acquired an autonomous, self-expanding dynamic that tends to be increasingly at odds not only with international peace and stability but also with broader national interests.
Our powerful military-industrial complex (the combination of the U.S. armed forces, arms industry, and associated economic and political interests) has effectively transformed the defense apparatus into a militarist, imperial establishment whose primary claim to the lion's share of national resources rests on instigation of wars and conflicts that, aside from moral issues, are not justifiable even on economic or geopolitical grounds for the imperium. This explains why, for example, official justifications of the U.S. military expansions and aggressions since the collapse of the Berlin Wall became confusing. We were due a "peace dividend," which we never saw. We saw a fuzzy geopolitics instead:: fighting against "rogue states," global terrorism, international drug trafficking, and militant Islam now justified the military industrial complex ;
Ismael Hossein-zadeh. The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (pp. 29-30). Kindle Edition.
Corporations are not evil. It does matter who controls a corporation for its final outcome. Corporations work to make money, a profit. Like Google. Google seeks a profit. It tries to do good. It builds windmills. This makes Google a good company. Just the same, given its actions, conditions, and outcomes, Google could become criminal in the context of criminality as used here.
Regressing, how many of these suicides have at least a thin thread of causation to Bush's Iraq War?
in an armed lifeboat, the United States.
Chapter 2 . . . . . . Criminality
How Crime Scene Cleanup Works for Families
