Warriors, Wannabes & the Perils of Practicing Law

I grew up in Australia during an age when war tended to be glorified. Our teachers taught us that our young nation came of age through the heroism of our fighting men at Gallipoli during the First World War. There were pictures of that fine fiasco all over the school walls.

I call it a fiasco because management landed the troops in the wrong place—a narrow beach backed by an impossibly steep cliff—topped by a bunch of Turks with machine guns. Needless to say, casualties were high.

But the men continued to climb into the Turkish bullets. To the glory of Australia.

Perhaps that’s why, in 1965, when the draft lottery for Vietnam was introduced for all twenty-year-old's, I looked forward to being picked. An adventure, I thought at the time. At twenty, you believe you’re invincible.

Much to my parents delight—and my chagrin—I was not one of the chosen. 

Many years later, I met Wayne King in the Dominican Republic. He was born in Canada where there was no Vietnam draft. But at age twenty—obviously equipped with around the same mental capacity as me at that age—he decided to volunteer. His plans were thwarted by an older brother who put him in hospital over his stupidity.

A dog of war

By the time I got to know Wayne, he was a lawyer practicing in Kingston, Ontario. I had lunch with him twice in that city and both times he insisted on sitting with his back to the wall facing the restaurant entrance. I never discovered whether this precaution was to prevent a disgruntled client or an outraged prosecutor from sneaking up behind him and slipping a steak knife into his back.

Although I never witnessed Wayne in court, he was reputed to be a flamboyant advocate. An acquaintance who was defended by him described him as ‘red-faced and passionate, his black robe billowing out like a crusader’s cape as he strode back and forth before the jury’.

As fate would have it, his dramatic approach to the defense of a particular villain resulted in his undoing; at the age of fifty-something, cape billowing impressively as he swept around a crowded courtroom, his ticker gave up the ghost and he crashed to the floor, never to rise again.

Then there was Trenton. Crazy Trenton, trying to outrun his Vietnam demons on his motorcycle. He arrived in the Dominican Republic a couple of years after me. I only rode with him once—that was enough.

He’d been a helicopter pilot over in Vietnam and been shot down in hostile territory. Apparently his best buddy had been injured too badly in the crash to walk away so Trenton, rather than allow him to fall into the hands of the Viet Cong, shot him at his friend's request. Hardly surprising that the memory would chase him.

Returning from a bar one night on his motorcycle, Trenton hit three cows that had wandered onto the highway and cut two of them in half. The police figured he was doing over a hundred miles per hour when he finally escaped his demons.

In the 80's and 90's, the Dominican Republic was a kind of dumping ground for the wanted, the unwanted, the damaged and the different.

It's also where I met Larry, an aggressive five-foot-six martial arts expert who was reputed to have beaten Chuck Norris in one bout.

Larry became addicted to warfare. He did three tours in Vietnam and volunteered for a fourth. He was sent for psychiatric evaluation and turned down. It seemed that the army wanted fighters, but not overly eager ones.

He became a mercenary in Angola where a twelve-year-old kid blew off his leg with a shotgun.

Despite losing his leg, being bayoneted in the butt and shot a couple more times, I believe that if the military had put out a request for one-legged soldiers, Larry would have been first in line to volunteer.

And thus is the nature of Man: Davina