Chapter 1
“Dev, what makes you tick?”
“Hatred. Pure hatred!”
“What is wrong with you, Sheehan?”
“Listen up, Captain,” I said, swiping the shot glass off the round table with my left hand while standing up and knocking my chair over backwards onto the floor, all in one motion. The people sitting nearby jumped up from their tables and backed away. “Do you want me to lie or do you want to hear the truth?”
At the sound of the shattered glass, the bald-headed bartender vaulted over the bar and stood next to me with a bar towel in his right hand.
“Listen, Dev, we don’t need any trouble from you,” he hissed through his teeth.
“What are you going to do? Call the cops?”
He shook his head. “Yeah, like that’s going to help, seeing that both of you are wearing your black uniforms right now.”
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled.
“Calling the cops won’t help, but instead I’ll whistle and Shorty will show up from the kitchen. He still remembers the night you sucker-punched him and handcuffed him to the tree outside. He believes the leather blackjack attached to his wrist will make the difference this time and you know, he’s itching to find out,” he said with a smirk on his pockmarked face.
“Bring him on! I’m ready!” I said, clenching both fists and stretching up to my full height of six feet three inches.
“Dev, sit down,” said Captain, tossing a twenty-dollar bill onto our table. “Here’s for the damage. We won’t cause any more trouble tonight, okay?”
The bartender scooped up the bill with his left hand and headed back toward the bar, slapping the towel against his right leg as he walked.
I picked up my chair and sat down, looking across the table at Captain Salvatore Testa, my best friend since attending third grade together at Holy Rosary Grade School, in what used to be Little Italy in northeast Los Angeles. Time had treated Captain well over the previous twenty-six years. Thick dark hair and clear brown eyes complemented his iron-man chiseled body. But his phone call at 1700 hours to meet him at Bundy’s Bar, near Echo Park, had irked me because I had other plans for the evening, which had to be canceled.
“Is this about Kathy?” he whispered.
Just hearing her name spoken by a friend who knew her prodded me out of my sour attitude into a solemn one. You’d think that I would have been better about hiding my feelings after eighteen months, but the guilt I felt over her brutal murder had not lessened one bit inside me. Whiskey helped, but still the nightmares returned every night, showing her bloody body lying in that hospital’s parking lot. Her second trimester baby boy, which had been ripped out of her stomach, lay atop her. His decapitated head had never been found and was probably resting in the murderer’s trophy case.
“How can it not be? She was my kid sister, for heavens’ sake. I practically raised her after Mom died.”
“Dev, I know, I know,” whispered Captain leaning across the table, “but are you working on her case?”
“I work it on my off-hours. So, it’s not hurting your precious budget.”
Captain slammed the table with his right fist.
“Lieutenant Sheehan, we’re talking about conflict of interest, not my budget!”
“Cap, she and her son’s murders have officially been placed in the cold case file. You know as well as I do with three to four hundred new homicides in LA every month and an understaffed police force, their murders will never be worked again. I promised myself I would find that man and bring him to justice.”
He blew out his breath. “What do you have so far?”
“I have copies of all the files and reports. I’ve checked them out. The biggest error that I can see is that the investigators focused too long on a seventeen-year old MS-13 member. Eventually, a cop came forward with an alibi for the kid, saying he was in a fight at a McDonalds, twenty miles from the murder scene. By that time, the investigators overlooked what I believe was the best lead.”
“Okay, I’m hooked. Tell me more.”
“A witness saw a medium sized, well-built, red-haired man with a grocery bag walking down the sidewalk. She said he had a large “Roll Tide” tattoo on his left shoulder and wore black pants, black shoes and a black sleeveless t-shirt.”
“What are you doing with that info?”
“If the man was walking, it means he may have lived in the area. So, I’m going door to door. Someone is bound to know something, right?”
“Keep me in the loop and don’t do anything crazy.”
“Okay.”
Captain folded his arms across his chest.
“I didn’t call you here to talk about your investigation or your life. I came to ask you to head a security detail tomorrow, guarding Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Grayson Armstrong and three other important men.”
“What?”
“General Armstrong will be hosting a meeting with General Yitzhak Ben-David of Israel, General Akeem Najjar of Jordan and General Rashad Kadir of Syria at LAX Airport tomorrow at 0700 hours. It’s a secret meeting and will be held in a cordoned off room. We are backup to the Elite Special Reaction Team Forces who are guarding the four generals, but I want our butts covered.”
“What if I say no?” I asked, knowing his answer ahead of time.
“Then I’d have to order you to do it, Lieutenant Sheehan.”
“Okay, my answer is yes.”
Captain handed a command packet with all of the needed codes and security info across the table to me. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, next to my backup pistol.
“And Lieutenant Sheehan?”
“Yes, Cap.”
He stood up, leaned over and looked straight into my eyes. “I’m walking out of Bundy’s Bar right now and so are you. That’s an order.”
I smiled and stood up.
“Hey, bartender,” I shouted over my shoulder at the bartender. He turned to look at me. “Tell Shorty, I’ll see him next time, when I’m alone.”
Be honest about what you think, okay?
Larry Who 
Uncle Phil was a Hero
Phil Fielder was a handsome seventeen-year old Iowan whose remaining boyhood years were set aside by World War II. Four older brothers enlisted soon after Pearl Harbor. He followed their lead by signing up on July 10, 1942. After boot camp, he attended airplane mechanic’s school and specialist’s training for P-38 fighter planes.
But like many other young men, Phil hated sitting on the sidelines, thousands of miles away from action so he volunteered for gunnery school. The heavy casualties in the air war over Germany caused his transfer orders to quickly pass through proper channels for his relocation to Pueblo, Colorado. The Army assigned him to a B-24 bomber crew as a flight engineer and a machine gunner after graduation.
In the midst of the Army’s hurry-up-and-wait schedule, Phil married Helen Kimler on October 24, 1943. Their honeymoon was brief, but fortunately, she was able to travel with him to Colorado. The months quickly passed until Phil was assigned to a bomber crew. Helen left for Iowa, pregnant with their soon arriving child, while Phil flew off to war.
During World War II, more than 18,300 B-24 bombers were manufactured in America. It was a clumsy looking four-engine airplane with twin tails and a nose wheel. The cruising speed was 200 miles per hour with a maximum rating of 300 miles per hour. Aptly named the Liberator, it was armed with ten .50 caliber machine guns and could carry a payload of 8,800 pounds of bombs.
Though fondly remembered by their ten-man crews, the B-24’s were anything but passenger friendly. Noisy, bumpy, cumbersome, awkward, cramped, and uncomfortable with no heat, no restrooms, no pressurized cabins, no padding on the iron seats, and no kitchen facilities. Temperatures were as low as fifty degrees below zero at times with winds gusting through the cabins from the open bomb bay doors and machine gun turrets. Each man used an oxygen mask at altitudes above 10,000 feet and wore two parachutes: front and back.
Phil’s ten-man crew was a part of the 15th Army Air Force and the 485th Bomber Group. Their ages ranged from nineteen to twenty-three years old. Captain Tom McDowell was a respected veteran at the ripe old age of twenty. Uncle Phil was the second youngest and the only married man on the crew.
Landing in Venosa, Italy, the B-24 crew flew their first mission on September 6, 1944. Thus, began their countdown towards a minimum of thirty-five bombing runs over enemy territory before being reassigned to less hazardous duties.
Thirty-five missions over Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Thirty-five flights bombing oil refineries, railroad yards, ammunition plants, ball bearing factories, and whatever else. Thirty-five trips through anti-aircraft fire filled with deadly flak so heavy it appeared to be black clouds. Thirty-five times taking off knowing one in three planes might not return that day. Thirty-five tests of courage far beyond what normal men could ever hope to bear. It was no wonder these crews became life-long friends after enduring such perils together.
On one particular mission, Phil’s B-24 came under heavy anti-aircraft fire just after dropping their bombs. A piece of flak tore a hole in the hydraulic reservoir tank, spraying oil all over the cabin. If left unrepaired, the bomb bay doors would remain open and the plane’s wheels could not be lowered into landing position when they returned to the base. Valuable seconds ticked off. Something had to be done or the plane would have to be ditched, forcing them to use their parachutes. A dangerous last resort for B-24 crews.
“See if you can do something! And be quick about it!” shouted Captain Tom to Uncle Phil.
Phil saw a small broom under the pilot’s seat. He grabbed it, broke the handle off, and made his way toward the hydraulic tank.
The trek to the rear was dangerous under normal conditions because there was no aisle. Just an eight-inch wide catwalk spanned the thin aluminum doors, but on that day, the bomb bay doors were wide open with high winds ripping through them. The plane flew at an altitude of twenty-eight thousand feet, with temperatures at forty degrees below zero. Slippery hydraulic oil covered everything, including the narrow catwalk.
Phil unhooked his front parachute pack and edged sideways over the long oily catwalk, much like a high wire walker in a circus. He crossed the open bomb bay doors to the leaking tank. Arriving there, he cut off a finger on his leather glove, shoved the broom handle into the lopped off piece, and rammed the jury-rigged wad into the tank’s gaping hole. It worked. The leak stopped.
Was there a band playing for our hero when he arrived back at the base? No. Did any reporters rush to write about his heroic act of courage? No. Were any medals of honor pinned on his chest? No. Did he really expect to receive any of this? No. Phil instead received the grateful thanks from the ones he considered the most important people in the war zone: his crewmembers.
Phil and his crew completed their quota of thirty-five bombing missions in April 1945 and then were reassigned back to the states. There he reunited with Helen and finally met his seven-month old son, Philip, Jr.
Uncle Phil summed up his actions on that day with the hydraulic reservoir by saying, “Somebody had to do it. It just turned out to be me.”
(Excerpt from The Hunt for Larry Who by Larry Nevenhoven, © 2014, Amazon eBook)
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Tagged as Christianity, Fourth of July, Heroism, Patriotism