Dispatch Number 11 -Richard

Baja California is a rugged outback when measured by any standard. A dry barren and unforgiving dessert landscape that claims scenes from the old westerns you once watched with intensity and curiosity trying to understand the life of cowboys in such harsh lands. Baja is such a place, it is a frontier of vast open space unsettled by people with just one major highway running north to south for about 1,000 miles, dirt roads make up the rest. Water is scarce and cactus aplenty. Some roads are graded while many are in poor condition that border on treacherous.

Americans are the foreign faces you see here. Many of them are tourists, some have seasonal homes, others come for last refuge. The refuge of the outlaw, the person running from something. It is perhaps this person that Baja offers the most to. Outlaws love Baja because no one asks questions here, police presence is limited and enforcement almost nonexistent. For the outlaw Baja is a very good place to hide or vanish.

Meet Richard a 64 year old man with a compact lean frame standing at 5 feet 6 inches tall with a full head of silver hair, unkempt that sprayed out from its part like pages of a book. And eyes that actually had a glint. He laughed and jabbered like smokers do and lit one after another with a Coke or coffee in the other hand. He was missing a large tract of teeth on the lower jaw. Richard was a tireless monologue that always knew more than you and would interrupt you to say so, then keep talking. He was a poor listener which was hard to endure because his tall tales would excite my own memory eager to tell some long forgotten exploit. You rarely completed a thought, a question or short story, as he would plow steadfast into one of his oft repeated stories.

His baying smile would leak out as he recanted an adventure with the result almost always being about him getting the better end of some deal. These exploits were his treasures which he happily told over and over. "I never cheated a man.", he touted when I first met him. I checked my wallet frequently after that. Life in camp with him was as colorful as his stories. He fueled his small camp fire with gasoline that shot flames up into the night sky.

He lived off the sea for most of his food by fishing and clamming, his grocery store was the Sea of Cortez, his car was an 18 foot aluminum boat. He shaved everyday yet managed to look wholly unkempt. In town he looked like a bum, hair straight up listing to one side wearing soiled clothes. To compliment this wild appearance he wore dirty goose feather house slippers around this balmy beach town. It made him all at once look wild, poor and eccentric. He could have been Howard Hughes wealthy or white trash poor, his jumpy dog, Paco would not tell me. Once again I was victim to my curiosity and needed to know more about Richard and his life story.

Richard was a guy with something to prove and stories to tell. All of the memories he shared had the same ending -Richard was a winner. Whether he was training a neighbors dog to stop killing chickens, selling green (nonburnable) firewood in San Francisco or life on the battlefield in Vietnam. In the contest of life Richard was a flurry of success.

After the Vietnam war, which he served in, he returned to his hometown of San Francisco, California. He had trouble making a living with his limited skills and resorted to something very unique: mugging muggers. He would dress up very nice with a pair of fake diamond rings and flash a thick wad of cash which was actually a stack of singles wrapped in a couple $50s, then order a ginger ale at the bar acting like a player. He would appear drunk while looking for a mark, another mugger, who thought he was setting Richard up, then Richard would mug him. He would walk outside prepared for the mugging, then catch the guy by surprise and take everything he had.

When mugging muggers did not pan out he discovered through some military buddies of a profession he was very well prepared for: the Professional Soldier. Soon he was off on his first two year contract fighting other peoples wars. This was his life for 14 years until he stepped on a landmine in Syria that left him club footed. A soldier that cannot run is no longer a soldier and it forced him to retired at age 51.

I noticed that he did not use the term mercenary. He explained the difference. The professional soldier works for the government in control of the country, lives in barracks and enjoys a soldiers routine while training and leading men in countries all over the world. A mercenary, on the other hand, is employed to fight in an armed conflict who is not a member of the state or military group. Mercenaries, he explained, tend to be men who enjoy killing. "They are killers.", Richard said with a finality and severity in his voice.

He had been shot twice, had his teeth rifle butted out, right hand sliced open by a bayonet, and his left foot shattered by a landmine. I saw the scars, holes, missing teeth, club foot and those glinting blue eyes. In Vietnam he was a nuclear weapons specialist in the Navy and spent much of that time in the deepest bowels of the ship performing maintenance on them. Even though he was in the Navy he somehow managed to go AWOL in the jungle with a machine gun and take up residence in a remote jungle village for six months until caught stealing ammo from a U.S. Army base only to be returned to his ship to perform nuclear duties again. He deflected my questions about court-martial with a wave of hand explaining that he played dumb and led them to believe he had shell shock.

After being returned to his ship, the U.S.S. Independence, he requested a transfer from that duty in hopes of a plum location at a ship yard only to be placed on a dangerous Navy river patrol boat running the Mekong river. It is the same kind of boat featured in the film Apocalypse Now made of plastic and about 30 feet long. His boat was attacked and the crew captured. Richard became a prisoner of war. While in prison at the infamous Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam his fingers were broken with pliers and his testicles shocked so badly it kept him from ever having children.

Some life. From Vietnam in the mid 1960s to the streets of San Francisco then to far away countries to fight other peoples wars. Richard was entertaining. His stories were always colorful even though they did not always manage to dovetail very well. My public laughter often morphed into private brooding by doubts I had about his outrageous stories.

It took two days for Richard to reveal why he was living in Mexico for the past 1 and 1/2 years. He owned a small ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains in California raising cattle and growing marijuana. He had two prior marijuana related charges and routinely exceeded his legal right to grow pot for medical purposes. A third violation of California's liberal marijuana laws would put Richard almost certainly in jail.

During a small brush fire on an adjacent property his pot farm was discovered by fire fighters. His neighbor rang him and said the authorities wanted to talk with him. Richard stalled them off by pledging to rush over with his medical marijuana papers to straighten everything out. He grabbed a bag of dirty clothes, ten grand in emergency money and fled for Baja in a truck.

He receives money from the States which is smuggled in by some friend. Richard is stranded. He has no U.S. passport and his tourist visa for Mexico has long expired. Every visit ended the same way with him saying, I'll see you when I see you kid.

Who else would I meet on this journey into The Americas?