Dec 2023. Blues Vol 39 No. 12

WORDS BY SGT. MICHAEL BARRON, RET.
100,000 words? Are you kidding me?
If you’re a regular reader, you
know I’m working on a book that
was supposed to come out this
past summer. If you don’t know,
it’s a collection of forty years of
war stories. Some of which are
my own and over a hundred from
nearly 40 years of publishing The
BLUES and telling your war stories.
So, when the editor says, “send
me what you got, and we’ll go
from there.” I just gathered them
all together, put breaks between
each story, saved it and hit send.
Easy peasy right?
Nope. He calls me back and
says, “do you realize that you sent
me over 100,000 words?” Ah well
no. Is that a problem? You need
to go through and prioritize the
stories. Put the most important
or significant ones in the beginning,
and the less interesting ones
towards the back.
OK, I’m on it.
So, as I began the process, I
realized they were all significant
because they were in fact a part
of someone’s life. The officer that
wrote it and the people involved in
the actual event itself. To everyone
involved, regardless of how insignificant
or boring it may seem, it
wasn’t.
So, if it were you that had to
prioritize forty years of storytelling,
whose story would you send
to the back?
What would it be about? How
about a local woman fought with
her boyfriend every weekend.
Moved in and out of their apartment
so many times that the officers
responding to the disturbance
calls knew all the players by first
names. That is until one night they
arrived and found the female half
of the disturbance dead on the
sidewalk?
Or the time I got into a chase
that lasted so long, I had time
to stop, get gas, go to the bathroom,
get a coke, jump back on
the freeway only to discover I was
now the number one unit behind
the suspect vehicle in a chase that
had gone on for hours.
Maybe the story about a young
female that worked at an apartment
complex that was harassed
by a cop that refused to leave her
alone. The cop stalked her until
one day she just disappeared?
Vanished without a trace and to
this day remains a missing person.
Or the story about a girl who
showed up at a Stop-n-Go at 6am
in the morning, saw a cop drinking
coffee and said she and her
boyfriend had been kidnapped by
drug dealers. She managed to escape,
but he was still tied to a bed
frame and being tortured.
Getting shot always makes for
a great story, and there were lots
of them. Our editor Rex Evans
recounts his brush with death –
twice. My encounter with a truck
driver that left me and the truck
driver in the ER with gun shot
wounds. My partners tragic death
in the middle of I-45. The minute-by-minute
recollection of a
cop’s efforts to save his partners
life in the middle of a riot. Plus,
there are literally four dozen or
more just like these.
Speaking of riots. The past few
years, the streets of our cities
have become war zones. One story,
that actually became 4 stories,
takes us along for the ride of a
lifetime as officers get pinned
down and manage to save their
own lives as well as the citizens
that relied on them to save them.
Ordinary citizens, actually former
marines, join the story to assist
cops in the fight of their lives.
And who can forget about
the morons in city governments
across the country that decided
142 The Blues 40th Anniversary Issue