Despite the threats and abuse, several prisoners who had too much to lose by rioting, getting months added to a sentence that might end in days, slipped under the picnic tables. Others, such as Donald T. Wilson and Michael Fryer, tough and intimidating even to a crowd of rioting inmates, openly defied the rangers’ orders and remained seated. The two men sat quietly, watching and daring anyone to try something with either man.
Kenny Brookman screamed when he saw the three black men running at him. He tried to wave to the Marines in the towers to open fire, but Ax Man Anderson took him down with an outstretched right arm, as he ran past the guard, clotheslining Bad John across the throat, lifting him off his feet, and slamming him to the ground, flat on his back. As Brookman rolled on his stomach and tried to get back to his feet, Sam Martin kicked his size twelve, extra-wide Bata Bullet tennis shoe hard into the downed lance corporal’s ribs, knocking the air out of the crumpled man’s lungs.
“Call me one black motherfucker, motherfucker!” Martin yelled as he kicked Bad John again. “Say it, motherfucker. I want to hear how tough you get now with my boot in your ass!”
Clarence Jones looked over his shoulder and noticed a Marine standing on the catwalk outside the guard tower overhead the blockhouse and saw the man raising a rifle to his shoulder.
“He gonna shoot!” Jones yelled and grabbed Martin by the back of his shirt collar and pulled him to the ground with him.
Suddenly several gunshots cracked overhead, and Brian Pitts jumped under the picnic table with Randal Carnegie and Bobby Matthews. All three men looked toward the sally port and saw Celestine Anderson on top of Iron Balls Mike Turner, beating his head against the hard-packed ground.
More than a dozen single-shot reports of the tower guards’ rifles echoed across the prison yard, and rapidly sent the hoorah into full-blown chaos. While some men ran for cover, many others, angered by the shooting, rose in rebellion, and now sought to destroy everything in sight. Prior to the shooting, the company of guards rallying in the blockhouse had a chance at regaining control of the inmates, but not now. Not after the shooting had served to ratchet up so many prisoners’ emotions to such a high frenzy that they now vented their anger with unbridled outrage and showed no thoughts about danger or consequence.
“That sounded like gunfire!” Chief Warrant Officer Frank Holden exclaimed, and then dashed into the upstairs hallway of the main cell block when a second volley echoed through the brig. “We’ve got big trouble outside!”
James Harris casually stepped to the side of Gunny Ted MacMillan’s desk, where he had begun telling the watch commander a bullshit story about Brian Pitts organizing a gang of white supremacists, and that was why he had lost his temper with the man. While he spun his yarn, Mau Mau spied the gunny’s infamous Babe Ruth signature model Louisville Slugger baseball bat leaned in the corner of the control unit, behind the senior guard’s desk.
“Sit your ass on the floor, now!” MacMillan ordered Harris, and then looked at Paul Fletcher. “You stay in here with this maggot while I go out to the sally port with the gunner and check this shit out.”
Holden had already started down the stairs when MacMillan ran after him.
“Ten to one they got into it with Turner and Brookman again,” the gunny said, running after the chief warrant officer as the two men hurried down the concrete steps to the lower deck.
“What’s going on, man?” Harris said, sitting on the floor, easing his feet underneath his body so he could spring for the bat before Fletcher realized he made his move.
“Prisoner Harris, keep your mouth shut and remain on the floor,” Fletcher said, and took the nightstick from the silver ring on his Sam Browne belt.
“Why you be down on me, man? I ain’t done shit,” Harris said, putting his hands over the top of his head so Fletcher would realize that the prisoner meant him no harm.
Staff Sergeant Orlando Abduleses, a dark-skinned Marine from Sacramento, California, whom everyone had nicknamed Abdul the Butcher, had charge of the guards in the exterior posts and in the blockhouse. When the fight began, he immediately sent six men rushing toward the trouble. They made it only halfway through the crowd of inmates before scores of prisoners took them down, and sent the Marines running back to the administration building. Then the tide of excited prisoners turned toward the cell block and pushed forward, surrounding Celestine Anderson, Sam Martin, and Clarence Jones as they pummeled Bad John Brookman and Iron Balls Turner.
“Control! Control! Blockhouse, over,” Staff Sergeant Abduleses shouted over his handheld walkie-talkie and squawked through the radio speaker of the unit resting in its battery charger on Gunny MacMillan’s desk.
“Stay put,” Lance Corporal Fletcher said, and walked to the gunny’s desk and picked up the radio. “Staff Sergeant Abdul, Lance Corporal Fletcher here. The gunny’s gone down in the yard with the deputy warden. Anything I can—”
Mau Mau Harris cut the lance corporal’s sentence short with Gunny MacMillan’s Louisville Slugger.
When the guard turned to answer the radio, Harris had quietly slid across the slick-waxed tile floor, grabbed the baseball bat, and sprang to his feet with a roundhouse swing, catching the lance corporal behind the ear and sending him tumbling over the desk, unconscious and badly injured but still breathing.
“You big-ass motherfucker,” Harris said, looking at the crumpled Marine and then taking another swing through the air with the yard-long, flame-treated ash wood club. He wiped a spot of blood off the bat against his trousers leg and then yanked down all the handles in the control unit.
Mau Mau danced into the hallway and started to jog downstairs, but then looked at the bat once again, and turned toward the gate that led into the maximum-security section of the cell block.
“Yo, Elmore,” Harris said with laugh. “Maybe you be wondering why your cell door just slide open. Elmo! Here I come, baby!”
When the doors to the sally port sprang open, Celestine Anderson led a wave of prisoners inside and met Chief Warrant Officer Holden and Gunnery Sergeant MacMillan head-on. Other prisoners had surrounded and taken down Nathan L. Todd, and now sat with him trapped under a picnic table.
“Bobby, I think Harris has fucked up,” Brian Pitts said to Robert Matthews, looking around him and realizing that Mau Mau had already spent more than enough time to get down to the yard once the interior gates had sprung open, and he still had not emerged from the building. “He’s gone after Elmore, that dumb sack of shit. We’ve wasted way too much time waiting on that fucked-up asshole. Let’s run on down to the fence before the guards get their floodlights set up and put a reaction team in here. I guess Harris would rather be stupid and poor.”
Just as the two conspirators headed across the chaotic prison yard where some inmates crouched under picnic tables, trying to avoid injury from the crowd of several hundred men gone wild, now trying to destroy everything in sight, James Harris called to them, clutching James Elmore by the back of his shirt while the terrified man wiggled and danced in urine-soaked pants. When his captive would not move fast enough to suit him, Mau Mau gave him a rap across the legs with the bat, causing the snitch to let go a harsh scream.
“I told you not to fuck with that piece of shit!” Brian Pitts bellowed when he saw James Elmore and the crazy, smiling Mau Mau Harris.
“Shit, Snowman, I thought you like to see what this motherfucker do when I shove this bat up his ass,” Harris said, laughing. “Come on, man, don’t you want to watch me fuck this bitch with Gunny MacMillan’s big stick?”
“Were you born this stupid or did you have to work at it?” Pitts said to Mau Mau Harris while looking at the pitiful James Elmore with his pissed pants and gold front tooth.
“He killed Wild Thing, so he ought to pay somethin’ for it,” Harris said, shaking the frightened bag of wet rags as he spoke.
“No, he ratted us out!” Pitts argued, looking at Harris and realizing that it was useless trying to reason with the man. Then he shook his head and turned his back on Mau Mau, heading toward the fence. “Come on, Bobby, this stupid motherfucker wants to get us all hung out to dry with him.”
James Harris released Elmore, and the scared man dashed toward the cell block, hoping to find a good hiding place.
“Look, I let him go!” Harris said, following Pitts and Matthews.
“Huong and Bao killed Wild Thing and some other people, too,” Pitts snarled at Mau Mau. “You watched. Blaming that poor, stupid bastard. Fucking Elmore. That’s why you and guys like you end up in places like this, or dead. You have no balls to take responsibility. We all killed Wild Thing, damn you!”
Then Brian Pitts broke into a run toward the toilet facility and the fence line that now lay obscured in the darkness. Bobby Matthews and Mau Mau Harris double-timed close behind him.
“Get those cutters going, man,” Pitts said to Bobby Matthews, breathing hard and looking to see if anyone watched them.
Matthews began working the sharp blades of the ten-inch-long diagonal cutters into the fence wire one link at a time, using both hands to snap the pliers’ jaws together. His weak grip frustrated James Harris, who tossed the baseball bat aside and then yanked the tool from the man’s hands and went to snipping a hole with one hand and pulling apart the chain-link fabric with the other.
“Help me push this shit apart so we can get out this motherfucker,” Harris grumbled, struggling with the fence, trying to pry open a hole big enough for the three of them to climb through.
While Pitts and Matthews strained to enlarge the hole, Harris snipped against the heavy-mesh steel fencing and slowly spread open a widening gap. However, beyond the fence, Lieutenant Schuller had engineers lay down three rows of German tape stacked as an additional barrier outside the twelve-foot-high fence, after the two inmates had escaped the prior week.
Harris looked at the coiled wire with the razorlike barbs on it and then glanced back at Pitts.
“We ain’t cuttin’ through that shit,” he said, still snipping at the chain-link, but now thinking about the next barrier.
“Low crawl under it, just like in boot camp. It ain’t tied down,” Pitts said, looking at the coils and noticing that the engineers had not yet driven stakes to hold the wire in place against the ground. “We’ll get a few cuts, and rip our clothes to shit, but we can slide under it. Just take a little time.”
“What the fuck, man, you leaving without saying good-bye?” Randal Carnegie said, coughing after running across the prison yard when he noticed in the low light cast from the end lamps on the nearby hooches the three men cutting the fence.
“Who that flaky-Jake with you, Randy?” Harris said, looking over his shoulder as he worked on the fence and seeing the Chu Lai Hippie accompanied by the slimeball Kevin Watts.
“My bunkmate, he’s cool,” Carnegie said, putting his arm around the dark-haired and pale-skinned Watts.
Brian Pitts looked at the unwelcome company. Neither man comprehended even the basic notion of loyalty. The Hippie had allegiance only to himself, and Watts would be a turncoat in a heartbeat and lie with a straight face. While he didn’t like James Elmore one bit, Brian Pitts thought even that sorry bag of worms had more redeeming qualities than Kevin Watts.
“That lawyer friend of yours you keep bragging about,” Pitts said to Carnegie. “You think he would help us once we get out?”
“I don’t know, man,” Carnegie said, and looked at the growing hole that Harris managed to get cut in the fence. “I ain’t leavin’. I only got two more weeks left and I’m gone home and out of the crotch. Watts here got three years to do, so he might want to tag along with you guys.”
“He’s welcome to run with us,” Pitts said, smiling at the intruder and considering that the skinny, out-of-shape Watts wouldn’t put up much of a fight when the time came to dump his scaly ass. They could easily leave him dead in a ditch once they had put a little distance between them and the brig.
Suddenly a flickering yellow glow began to illuminate the fence line where Pitts and his cohorts worked to escape from the brig before the guards got organized, and the inevitable infantry reaction platoon could arrive and secure the surrounding area.
“The dumb motherfuckers are burning the hooches!” Pitts shouted at Harris. “Come on, let’s try to get through the fence before the guards see us. It’s going to look like broad daylight here once these cracker boxes start flamin’ up.”
“Fuck, yeah!” Harris yelled, and raised his fist in the air after seeing the rows of prisoner quarters starting to lick flames through their windows and roofs. “Burn this motherfucker down!”
He had no more than shouted when the five prisoners heard the unmistakable chop of an M60, .30-caliber machine gun opening fire toward them. Outside the fence they saw the splashes of dirt leaping from the ground as the bullets struck twenty feet from them and began to close in their direction, warning the escaping inmates to turn back.
Brian Pitts fell hard against the head wall, gasping for breath, a dozen feet back inside the fence and shouted to Harris, who now worked more frantically than ever trying to open the hole so they could still escape.
“Look at him,” he said to Bobby Matthews. “That’s what I loved about that guy. He has never considered impossibility. We’re fucked, but that dumb bastard thinks that he can still get through this fence, and those bullets will just bounce off his hard head.”
“Hey, bro, me and Kev, we’re gonna head on back to the picnic tables,” the Chu Lai Hippie said, patting Brian Pitts on the shoulder. “Better luck next time.”
Pitts said nothing, but just leaned against the side of the head, its opposite wall now starting to burn. He stayed there, watching Mau Mau Harris desperately fighting the fence wire while the guards fired their machine guns down the outer perimeter of the fence until the man finally looked over his shoulder and saw the Snowman shaking his head and motioning to him to give up.