I first attended Miller School as a civilian summer camp kid in 1973 and 1974, while the regular military boarding school students were home for the summer. Camp lasted for three weeks and was led by Tom Hart. Full of vigor with an affable personality, he was a teacher, the rifle range instructor, and the judo master to the boarding school cadets when school was in session. Often times while wrestling around with us, he exhibited insidious behavior like sticking his tongue in our ears or kissing us on the face. During TV hour, just prior to bedtime, he would always sit a boy on his lap, personifying a father’s love to kids who had seldom, if ever, enjoyed such attention. Slowly, over time, he gained more and more of our trust.

Knowing that I couldn’t return to public school, Hart, at the urging of my father, coaxed me into attending regular military boarding school. The sprawling campus had a separate barracks for the junior cadets. Hart was the sole director and in charge of the junior barracks, around thirty-five kids between sixth and eighth grades. He was also a teacher in the upper school where the classrooms and the upper classmen—ninth through twelfth graders—were located. To assist him in the junior barracks, Hart handpicked his “proctors,” usually an eighth grader that wouldn’t have to transfer to the upper school, where life was much stricter. Proctors had special privileges that included having doors on their rooms—the rest of us had a sliding curtain. The criteria for being selected a proctor included having a higher than average GPA, performing well on room inspections and drill routines, and being generally respected by your fellow cadets.

The small three-level brick barracks was located about a half-mile from the upper school and our rooms were approximately ten-foot-by-twelve-foot cubicles. The TV room was located right outside Hart’s private quarters, on the lower level, where the ping-pong table and pinball machine were also located.

Our days were pretty predictable. We would get up in the morning, hit the head, muster outside, and march to the upper school, where the chow hall, classrooms, and upperclassmen resided. After classes, we walked back down to the junior barracks and cleaned our rooms prior to afternoon drill that was usually followed by a friendly game of football or softball.

On some weekends, I went snake hunting in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I usually caught black rats, blue racers, king snakes, and little ring neck snakes. One time, I thought I had caught a baby yellow rat snake and carried it all the way back to the science lab. There, my science teacher gingerly informed me that I was holding a venomous copperhead. After cautiously dropping him into an aquarium, we dissected it in science class a short time later.

In the evenings, we had study hall, which lasted for ninety minutes. During that time, however, instead of studying for tests, some cadets were studying each other. Knowing it was just a matter of when and not if I would be sexually attacked, I kept a vigilant eye and—other than a couple of bedwetting beatings—managed to make it to the end of my first year unscathed.

In seventh grade, though, things started getting more perverted. Hart too, seemed to be getting even friendlier with me. He would often give me an extra cheeseburger on a McDonald’s run to Charlottesville, slip me a few quarters for the pinball machine, even sit me on his lap and let me steer his Town & Country station wagon all around the school campus. Like in summer camp, Hart was extremely protective of me. During TV time, he would periodically choose me to sit on his lap. Since we wore nothing but briefs, he often stroked our back and legs, carefully—though noticeably—measuring our response the entire time.

After classes one day, I returned to the junior school to find only one other kid.

“Where is everyone?” I asked him.

“Do you really want to know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Follow me,” he said as he led me up to the vacant third floor.

No sooner than we were in the hallway, then I could simultaneously hear cries of terror and salacious moans coming from vacant rooms at the other end. What I saw next was an image so abominable that it burned a permanent imprint in my memory. A few boys were being sexually tortured against their will while others were mutually consenting to group orgies and one-on-one sodomy. Shocked out of my gore, I had never witnessed anything like it—not even in foster care. I remember being barraged by a conundrum of feelings, not the least of which was utter paralysis. In one room were naked boys being held against their will, repeatedly sodomized and or forced to perform fellatio. One or two fought with everything they had, screaming and cussing the entire time, while a couple of others cracked under pressure—begging for mercy and crying for their mothers—as they were robbed of not only their virginity, but their innocence and human dignity as they lay there in helpless anguish. Yet, in the very next room, a couple of boys were mutually consenting to sodomy and orgies. The paradox of extreme emotions (shock, fear, and compassion) nearly rendered me unconscious. Were it not for the fear of being gang-raped, I would have fainted on the spot.

My first instinct was to blow the whistle, but the repercussions of ratting out fellow cadets were too severe. Fear and intimidation ruled with an iron grip. I didn’t dare tell a soul, not if I valued safety and acceptance.

At the end of that year, myself, and a couple of other cadets were playing a board game in a proctor’s room. Rumor had it that this proctor in particular was sexually assaulting younger cadets and that no one should be alone with him. Since a group of us were playing, I figured it was safe.

I figured wrong. I’d walked right into a trap.

Suspicious that I might have been a mole, since I wanted no part in the stroke and choke club, I was attacked shortly after we started playing. The proctor, several years older and larger, pinned me on my back and the other cadets positioned themselves to hold me down. Trying feverishly to shove his penis in my mouth, I clamped my teeth together so hard it would have taken a pair of hydraulic winches to pry them open.

“If you get it in there,” I slurred through my clinched teeth, “it’s staying. I don’t care if you bleed down my throat; I will rip your dick clean off your groin.”

He stopped, but not without first making it very clear that one word about the incident to anyone, and a rack attack would be all but guaranteed. A rack attack took place in the middle of the night and involved two cadets holding a pillow over your face while the others beat you with a bar of soap wrapped inside a sock. My first rack attack took place the year before, shortly after my fellow cadets discovered I was a chronic bed wetter. Promotion in rank and the perception that I was a pet cadet of Hart’s, thank God, put an end to them. Bed-wetting is a curse of the worst kind to a kid, especially in a foster home with a lot of other children, and worse yet . . . military school. Try as you may, you can’t hide it. The stench, the stains, and the saturation of your sheets and mattress gave it away every time. The taunting and the mental mayhem—just for being a bed wetter—were brutal, especially for the weak and the scared.

I went home for the summer shortly after that incident in anguish over what had taken place. I debated telling my father, but I couldn’t—he was so proud of the progress I had made (specifically in my grades, since I had made the honor roll) and spent the whole summer gloating over my grades and the keen eye I’d developed at the shooting range. Besides, as abhorrent as he was towards homosexuals, I was deathly afraid he would go postal on Miller School and unleash a fury of vengeance that would have landed him in prison or, worse yet, the electric chair. Torn with overwhelming confusion, shame, and guilt, I still returned for eighth grade.

Well into that year, after taps one night, Hart slipped into my room and invited me to come watch TV with him. Considered a privilege for doing well on room inspections and drill routines, it was the first time he had chosen me. I was ecstatic to have an extra hour of TV time to myself. Sitting on Hart’s lap was a foregone conclusion, since it was routine for a kid to sit on his lap during regular TV time. That particular hour, however, would wreak such psychological havoc on my life going forward, that it proved to be the genesis from which I developed an overt affinity for women and eventual addiction to heterosexual sex.

Stroking my legs while watching TV, in an unprecedented move, Hart nuzzled his nose in the back of my neck and began kissing me down my spine. Confused over my feelings and paralyzed with fear, I just sat there like a tombstone. Unfortunately, when he brushed his hand over my crotch, I couldn’t keep from pitching a tent, which, in his sick and demented mind, meant I liked what he was doing. He then slipped his hand under my briefs and started massaging my genitals. The more he did, the harder I got and the more frenzied he became. Before I knew it, he had me lying on the TV room sofa and was kissing and licking my entire body. When he got to my crotch, he hesitated and escorted me into his private quarters and sat me on his loveseat.

“Wait here,” he said as he walked through the door to his bedroom. A few moments later, he walked back out wearing a white, terry cloth robe, with a tobacco pipe in one hand and a bottle of baby oil in the other.

“You know, Kevin,” he said, as he lit his pipe, “I want you to come back next year as a proctor and stay here until you graduate. You have leadership skills, and I can use you to help manage the other students. How would you like that?” Nervous over the fact that he had dragged me into his studio apartment—something he had never done in all the previous times—I replied:

“I haven’t really thought about it.”

“As you know,” hesitating to take a drag, “It’s a lot easier down here than it is up there. The upper school is a lot stricter, and you’d have far fewer privileges.” He sat beside me and continued. “You’re old enough to smoke this—give it a good puff.” Like a first time toke on a joint, the smoke burned my throat as I reluctantly took a drag. “Here, drink this water and lay back . . . relax,” he said in a soothing voice.

He then began to rub baby oil all over my back, slowly working his way down to my butt. I was scared, aroused, and humiliated all at the same time. Although I’d endured sexual abuse in foster care, it was never at the hands of a grown man. And, I hadn’t been going through puberty. I was livid at the realization that the last five years of “fatherly” love and affection, overt protection, coddling, special favors, and individual TV time had all been just patient maneuvering that culminated in this brief but brazen display of pent up, pedophile passion.

“Have you ever had an orgasm?” he asked.

“What’s that?” I nervously replied.

“It’s where your penis gets so excited; it shoots out a white gooey substance.”

The only visual I had of an orgasm was when I’d walked into that horrendous hump-and-pump scene on the vacant third floor the year before. Oddly, at first I thought the moans and groans of the ones that were ejaculating on the other boys were sounds of pain and discomfort, as if their penises were bleeding white blood. That is until they voiced their feelings of satisfaction and contentment right afterwards. I hadn’t personally ever experienced an orgasm, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond. “No . . . I haven’t.” I nervously replied.

“It’s the best feeling in the world, and I would love to have you experience it. Don’t be scared. Just keep your eyes closed and relax . . .” He then proceeded to take me in his mouth.

Lying there with my eyes closed, I realized the resistance I had maintained so resiliently had come to an end. Tears were running down my face as the very man I had come to trust as a father figure proved to be the provenance from which the perversion flowed. Lying there receiving fellatio from a forty-year-old man, I was rife with a conundrum of thoughts.

It’s a foregone conclusion, now, I thought to myself. Your destiny in life is to be a homosexual. It’s the hand that fate has dealt you. You can’t escape it. Resigned to the reality of the situation, I tried to turn off the labyrinth of shameful feelings while concentrating on having an orgasm. Yet, my mind was also trying to rescue me. Fight it! my conscience kept saying. Don’t do it—not here, not now, and not in his mouth! My body, on the other hand, wanted to get it over with and see what all the rage was about.

What was this feeling that had so many of the other cadets and grown-ups behaving like dogs in heat, I wondered, leaving them bankrupt of even a modicum of morality. I was curious to know why anyone would go to such extraordinary lengths to experience an eruption through their penis that only lasted for a few short seconds . . .

No, my conscious burst forward again . . . Fight it. But, how can I get out of this? Where can I go? Where can I run?

He turned me over. “Relax your butt. I’m going to slowly slide my finger inside your hole. After a while, you might feel a big sensation in your penis. When you do, don’t stop it, it’s the best feeling in the world.”

But, as he inserted his finger, it felt like he was shoving a baseball bat up my ass and all I felt was searing pain.

Frustrated at the lack of my enthusiasm, and the fact that I wasn’t cumming, his whole persona changed—he became enraged, squeezed more baby oil, and proceeded to finger me again and again. Unaware that he had taken off his robe, when I felt him trying to penetrate me with his penis, I jumped up, ran out of his private quarters, and raced down the hall and into the only head in the barracks that had a stall with a door on it.

Hart came walking in with my briefs a few minutes later. “Are you all right?” he asked in a fatherly tone, just outside the stall. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted you to know what it felt like to have an orgasm. I love you like my own son, and I would never do anything to hurt you. You know that don’t you?”

He spent the next thirty minutes—standing outside the stall—telling me my future with Miller School was bright. “I’m going to make you a proctor, Kevin. I can use your help with the younger cadets next year and you won’t have to transfer to the upper school. That’s just between you and me. A lot of other cadets want to be proctors, but you’ve earned the privilege fair and square.

What happened in my apartment stays between you and me, okay? I didn’t mean to scare you, and I won’t do it again. Fair enough?”

What could I say? The taciturn code of silence was just as prevalent as the abuse itself. What could I do? I couldn’t go to the proctors since one had already sexually assaulted me. I was also suspicious, now, that Hart was the progenitor of the homosexual epidemic that had engulfed so many of my fellow cadets. Over the next few weeks, I used my rank and seniority, and clandestinely questioned a few kids about their personal experiences with Hart. While a couple had admitted to being sexually molested—riddled with fear—most were reluctant to even broach the subject.

One weekend a month, Hart was relieved of his duties and replaced by another faculty member that was assigned junior school guard duty. Hart usually left the premises altogether, opting to go to Crozet or Charlottesville, or at least that’s what he indicated. I often thought about blowing the whistle to one of his replacements, but after overhearing a passionate polemic that sounded more like a lovers’ quarrel between Hart and another male, prominent, faculty member, I didn’t trust a cotton-pickin’ soul.

The final straw came towards the end of the school year, when I was in the upper school. Two senior cadets dragged me into a cleaning storage room and tried to gang rape me. Fortunately, another upper-classman came to my rescue when the guy whose nuts I had in a vice grip started squealing like a pansy, while I pummeled the other one with a rusty, metal, mop bucket. My best defense, I had learned in foster care, was the element of surprise. Get your licks in before they get theirs. Only in this case, it was to save my ass, literally!

While at home that summer, I begged and pleaded with my parents not to send me back to what I had quietly coined the “Academy of Cock.” Since I had made good grades, gotten steadily promoted, and perfected my keen eye for expert marksmanship, they were perplexed over my incessant refusal to return. I was again rife with a plethora of thoughts and emotions, not the least of them the heavy burdens of humiliation, guilt, and shame. That, coupled with the fact that my father was a German immigrant imbued with a tinge of Aryanism and a Hitler-like disdain for homosexuals, prohibited me from telling them the real reasons. On top of them all, I just didn’t have the heart to shatter my father’s rose-colored perception that military school had straightened out his son. After all, I hadn’t been that crooked to begin with—I’d just had a monstrous sweet tooth that wouldn’t be denied.

Now, when I think of the forty-plus years that Tom Hart served Miller School and the thousands of adolescent boys whose parents trusted their kids to him, I shudder to think of how many may have shared a similar plight. Like the perfect storm, Miller School had been the perfect playground for a serial pedophile.

After scattering my father’s ashes near the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, where more D-Day soldiers died per capita died than anywhere else in the United States, we drove right past Miller School . . . and I had to know if Hart was still there. Nestled in the hills of Albemarle County, near Crozet, the sprawling campus, with its gothic-style brick buildings, had, since my days there, been used to shoot the movies Toy Soldiers (1991) with Louis Gossett Jr. and Major Payne (1995) with Damon Wayans.

As I walked into the South entrance of the upper school, an eerie feeling came over me—a picture of Tom Hart was hanging on the wall, alongside other distinguished alumni that had come and gone over the past 130 years. However, unlike the others, whose portraits had been taken in their golden years, Hart looked exactly as he had when I attended the school thirty years earlier. I saw it as a parting shot—a sort of “I got away with a heinous crime, and you can’t do anything about it” victory look.

The school was closed for the Labor Day weekend, and besides my mother and sister who had walked inside with me, I didn’t see a soul . . . just me . . . me and the flood of emotions that hit me like a Pacific tsunami at the sight of Hart’s picture. But just as quickly as it hit me, it left me, as though God had planned it that way to bring long-awaited closure to a dark chapter in my life. I would be remiss, however, not to admit that a small part of me wished Hart had still been alive—yes, I found out that he had died that summer, 2005, around the same time as my father—to endure the public humiliation, the embarrassment, and the shame that he had forced upon me and God only knows how many other innocent boys.

Out of respect for my father, I had once been resigned to carrying that weight to my grave. But now, my father had passed, and I found myself deeply disturbed over the fact that a pedophile was being exalted as an icon in the school’s otherwise rich and illustrious history. I was vexed over whether or not to finally blow the whistle; and, I didn’t come to a decision at that time. But, after two more years of contemplation, and in preparation for writing my memoir, I placed a call to the current superintendent of Miller School. I told him who I was and what had transpired at the hands of Tom Hart during my five-year affiliation with him.

To his credit, the superintendent was both cordial and polite as we talked at length about the detailed accusations I made against Hart. When I finally asked if the school had a record of other boys coming forward, he told me an official police investigation had been launched into Hart’s affairs several years earlier. That inquiry, he told me, had been based on a complaint that was made by a man who had attended Miller School at the same time I did. Unfortunately, due to the accuser’s psychological problems and a history of jail time, he had been deemed a less-than-credible witness and Hart had been exculpated of any alleged wrongdoing.

“Psychological problems . . . jail time . . .” I repeated. “Is it any wonder, really?” “Sometimes,” I told him, “there’s a fine line between a prisoner and a preacher, and a prostitute and a prophetess.” Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

During our conversation, I informed him, perhaps too clearly, that my call was not an attempt at extortion or anything of the sort, nor was I looking to soil the school’s reputation. I did however, request that Hart’s name be removed from the building that then bore it, and that he be remembered with an asterisk to denote that he had been a child-molesting pedophile. The superintendent promised to take it up with the school board and call me back with their decision.

Of course, that phone call never came. I do still hope, in fact I ask nothing else of Miller School, that the superintendent will have the decency to forward a copy of this book to the gentleman whose accusations were shunned those several years ago. To that fellow cadet, whoever and wherever you are, should you receive this book, I hope you feel exonerated and find some measure of solace in knowing you were not alone and that Tom Hart is now deceased. Like you, the havoc those years and experiences wreaked on my psyche haunted me for decades. Sadly, certain memories don’t fade. You just learn to live with them and keep them in perspective.

Eventually that summer, my father, thinking that I had been behaviorally reformed, came to see his highly disciplined product of the military academy as a successful investment. With that in mind, he thought it best to preserve his investment and enroll me in a private Christian school—Fairfax Baptist Temple Academy. The school was a Baptist church in Fairfax, Virginia, just up the road from George Mason University, and was one of the first to incorporate the PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement) learning curriculum—a self-study, learn at your own speed approach to education.

Much like my liberation from foster care, I had a new lease on life . . . a lease that—albeit at a Christian school—was to center around girls, and plenty of them. The fact that girls would be in abundance was much more important to me than the idea that the school was Christian. Although I attended chapel as part of our daily routine at Miller School, as well as Sunday morning service, the only god I knew there was Tom Hart. As far as I was concerned, Yahweh had forsaken Miller School long before my arrival, an absence surmised by the fact my prayers for protection and freedom from abuse had fallen on deaf ears going all the way back to foster care.

My parents only sporadically attended church services when I was growing up, and when we did, it was usually to a Lutheran church. I was so bored that I spent most of my time making paper airplanes from the Sunday bulletins. Church was so monotonous that I knew in advance how the whole hour would play out: We would start off singing hymns; the pastor would then make several announcements and acknowledge any visitors; the choir would then perform a couple of hymns, and then the ushers would be called forward to pass around the shiny gold-colored collection plates lined with red velvet. The pastor would then cite 2 Cor. 9: and maybe one of the seed-sowing parables in the gospels and stress the importance of being a cheerful giver. I always got a chuckle out of watching those parishioners who didn’t give anything and the guilty body language they exhibited when they just non-chalantly passed the collection plate to the person next to them. The pastor would then bless the offering before proceeding with his sermon. After that, it was closing hymns and then the benediction. My most embarrassing memory of church was a 1973 Christmas Eve candlelight service at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Springfield, Virginia. The building was packed with more than five hundred congregants. Of course, we sat towards the front. After a rousing rendition of “Silent Night,” which everyone had sung, the pastor motioned for us to be seated. Only my father, God bless him, stood back up and, in an impromptu moment, treated us all to a solo performance of “Stille Nacht”—Silent Night in German.

The pastor, who was about to start his sermon, looked back at the choir, confused, as if to ask, “Did I miss something?”

I looked around, and all I could see were one thousand eyeballs staring right at me.

By the time my father had finished singing “Stille Nacht,” my sister had turned ten shades of red and I had dived under the pews, looking for the nearest exit. Never had I been more excited to hear the benediction than I was that night: “And now, may the Lord bless you and keep you; may he make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you; and may he give you peace.” Besides being the first passage of scripture I ever memorized (Numbers 6:24-26), it was the only time I wanted to shout, “Halleluiah!” in church.

Baptist school, however, was a whole different ball game. Chapel was held twice a day, and “the Word” was used as a sword, to pierce your soul and drive you to the altar. At one point, I was making so many altar calls, I thought about wearing kneepads to school—and, while I had recited the sinner’s prayer and accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, peer pressure more than personal conviction drove me to do it. As far as I was concerned, God still owed me, and he owed me big time!

“With every head bowed and every eye closed, if you haven’t received Christ as your Lord and Savior, or if you’ve backslidden and need to get right with him again, I invite you to come to the altar now,” the pastor would declare after every sermon. He would then follow up with, “Two in the back are coming down. God bless you. The young lady in the third row, God bless you. God bless you and you and you, young man. Don’t be afraid to accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. I know there are more that the Lord is speaking to right now . . .”

As he called on students to come forward and get saved, I couldn’t help but sneak a peek to see who was responding. Sometimes a buddy on either side of someone would whisper, “Hey, man, he’s talking to you.” “No, dude, he’s talking to you!” “He ain’t talking to me, I went last week.” “Look, there goes Dave. If he’s going, you gotta go.” “I’m not going up there—you go.” “I ain’t goin’, are you crazy? No way, José. Besides, Lori is sitting in the front pew. She’ll think I’m a milquetoast.” “Are you kidding me? Girls love humility.” Humility . . . my ass, I thought to myself. Last I checked cheerleaders date cocky quarterbacks, not wuss’y water boys. Continuing with his ill-fated advice, “If you want her to dig you, this is your chance Dude. Go for it.” “Are you serious?” “Yes, I’m serious; now, go. Get up there.” As Jimmy made his way to the altar, we cracked up knowing he had just bought the bait . . . hook, line, and sinker.

Yes, altar calls were more about peer pressure than conviction of sin. And, for those guys deluded into thinking girls would like them that much more, the altar quickly became a favorite hangout. Although I said the sinner’s prayer on numerous occasions with sincerity and conviction throughout my childhood, I was never baptized—other than as an infant—nor did I have one of those Pentecostal, physically-manifested Holy Spirit experiences. Philosophically, I was at odds with the notion of salvation via self-proclamation. I saw it as a sort of self-deification—“I hereby pronounce myself Jehovah, judge, and jury, and do hereby decree my immediate redemption and subsequent entry into the Heavenly realm upon my last breath here on earth. Signed, sealed, and delivered on such and such day of our Lord (that’s me), nineteen hundred and seventy-seven!” Although the school eagerly encouraged personal proselytizing for Christ, not unlike door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen, I intrinsically viewed that as salvation for sale. Only instead of being suckered for fifteen hundred bucks up-front like you would for an overpriced vacuum cleaner, depending on the brand of belief, or particular denominational church that came calling, salvation via legalism could cost a lot more than that in the long run.

Because we were taught the doctrine of eternal security—“once saved, always saved”—I saw the sinner’s prayer as the best investment I could ever make. To me, it was fire insurance, protection from an eternity of roasting in a blazing inferno of fire according to Baptist doctrine—at the time, however, I saw it as a license for a lifetime of immorality. Sin to the end! I thought to myself. As long as I get in the pearly gates, the Billy Graham’s of the world can have all the heavenly crowns. Just keep my fanny from frying, Lord, and I’ll be happy with my harp in heaven.

Besides, I’d been dealt the hand I had to live with; while I may have had free choice in the manner in which I responded to the atrocities inflicted on me at such a young age, I would later conclude that the often promulgated and falsely understood doctrine of free-will is a man-concocted myth. Although I was in a new school and a socially healthy environment, I continued to struggle mentally and emotionally from my previous sexual abuses and homophobic fears. As I had been at Miller School, I was agitated over whether or not to confide in someone . . . and, in the end, I was still so riddled with guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation, that I could barely confess those abuses to God, much less the pastor. Instead, I tucked the experiences away in the deepest recesses of my mind until I would later deal with them through a variation of sex transmutation and meditation—convincing my subconscious mind that I was heterosexual.

To that end, it didn’t take me long at all to collect demerits for kissing a girl on the bus or behind the church. In fact, the more I fraternized with the girls and reassured myself that I wasn’t gay, the more popular I became and the more they liked me. Those were welcome feelings after what I had been through the previous five years. Unfortunately, several of the boys became increasingly jealous, infuriated by my boldness and the generous attention I gave the girls. Having been raised in conservative, Evangelical Christian homes; most of the boys were meek and tentative. They seldom looked at the girls, much less fraternized with them.

One way to get them to grow some gonads was to help boost our image and garner some respect from our heathen counterparts—the public school kids. Because we wore uniforms—the guys wore white, short-sleeved dress shirts with navy blue ties peppered with miniature American flags—we were perfect targets for public school kids waiting for their buses. Every time we made a stop to pick up one of our comrades in Christ, we were taunted with statements like, “Look at the sissy Christian boys,” or they called us names, like “Jesus Freaks.” While most of my Christian brothers and sisters turned the other cheek, I was fuming the whole time. And, after three days, the kettle finally blew—I brought two dozen eggs the next day and used them on anyone who dared to mock me, or my newfound friends. I was proud to be a Christian and all too willing to defend my faith and fellow riders.

My first target was a teenager who wore blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket—a “Fonzie” wannabe, though he lacked the swagger, not to mention the motorcycle. He had yelled, as expected when we stopped to pick up one of our own, “Look at the faggot Christian boys.” Prepared and armed, I hung out the window and shouted back, “I got your faggot right here,” and I pelted him right in the chest.

After that, I nailed someone at almost every stop. All it took was a wrong look or a sarcastic comment and I would hang out of the bus and fire back with, “I got your Christian . . .”—splat! “Oh, yeah? Pray on this . . .”—splat! “Goody Two-Shoes this . . .”—splat!

By the time we got to school, most of the kids had joined the action—ties and ponytails flapping in the wind, nailing mockers left and right. They’d been chomping at the bit to vent their pent-up frustration for a long time, just waiting for an opportunity to unleash. And, like Joshua at the battle of Jericho, I gave it to them. By the time we had reached the school, my fellow brothers and sisters had been converted to rogue rebels!

Upon arrival, I was quickly escorted to the senior pastor’s office. Three irate mothers had already called to complain that some Christian kid was egging little children who were waiting for their bus. Sure, a couple of eggs had gone astray and hit some innocent bystanders, but I considered that acceptable collateral damage in a time of war. For the most part, I was dialed in like a trigger-happy sniper on a target of opportunity.

As I sat in the office with the senior pastor, he asked if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.

“Numerous times,” I replied. “But he hasn’t saved me from much.”

“Well Kevin, Christians don’t hang out of buses throwing eggs at other children. Christ taught us to love everyone, including our enemies. He taught us that when we’re mocked or ridiculed, we should turn the other cheek and pray for our enemies.”

I was puzzled—the previous three years, I’d been taught to defend Miller School’s honor, our country’s honor, as well as our personal honor. On top of that, I wondered about defending Christ’s honor. “So, we just sit around and let them denigrate our school and make a mockery of Jesus Christ?” I asked.

“That fight wasn’t about our honor, and Christ can defend himself.”

“But, I’m proud to be a Christian.”

“Pride comes before a fall,” he said. “Jesus taught us not to be prideful. When he returns, he will exact the revenge and right every wrong that was ever committed against his children.” “When exactly, is he supposed to return?” I asked him. “Soon . . . very soon.”

“Well, if that’s the case,” I said, “I just lightened his load a little bit.”

He then prayed over me, gave me detention, and issued a stiff warning. “One more incident like that,” he said, “and I’ll have no choice but to expel you from our academy.”

That event did finally happen, but not until after tenth grade began. Ironically, it was one of those rare instances when I was accused of a crime I hadn’t committed. Encircled around a campfire while on a school camping trip, someone had lit a joint. Passed from one kid to the next, when it got to me, I just handed it off to the next guy since I’d never smoked pot before I was forty. The following day, one of the teachers became suspicious and found the bag of pot on the bus. Come Monday morning, we were all called into the senior pastor’s office and asked who had smoked it.

Now, while I hadn’t taken a hit, the kid who got nailed for bringing the bag had a long-standing vendetta against me—since I was tight with the girls—and accused me of smoking it. Then, in a show of humor more than humility, he dropped to his knees in the midst of us, proclaimed repentance, and begged for mercy and forgiveness. Asked by the senior pastor to do the same, I defiantly refused—then, as now, I would no more confess to a sin I hadn’t committed than I would deny a starving child food and water. And, that’s only because I sin so much that on those rare occasions that I don’t, I’ll confess to nobody, save God himself.

So . . .

Next stop . . .

Re-entry into public school and the million-dollar question. Could I make it all the way to graduation without being suspended or expelled?

Continue to Chapter 4 »