ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1981, one day after the IRS declaration of insolvency, the Treasury Department moved in without notice and seized all bank accounts that had Bobby or Sara Wapinski’s name, including all corporate accounts, their personal checking, their small personal savings, and the three accounts Bobby had opened in his name “In Trust For” Noah, Paul, and Am. The seizure removed all monies from the accounts, left High Meadow, EES, The Institute, the farm, and the Wapinskis, unknowingly, absolutely penniless. On Monday, the ninth, Sara attempted to cash a twenty-dollar check at Mill Creek Falls Savings Bank but was turned away without explanation.
On that same day Bobby returned to RRVMC for an Agent Orange screening retest. Why he’d put it off I don’t know, or maybe I do. Maybe I’d have done the same. The doctor had called him numerous times, had ceased trying to get him, instead had talked to Sara. Half an hour after Bobby’d left, federal marshals arrived with demands that all property and all rights to all property be surrendered to the federal government. They politely demanded that everyone exit the barn, empty handed (including not even being able to take the warm Styrofoam cups of coffee Van Deusen and Mariano had walked in with half an hour earlier), then they proceeded to padlock the barn doors. That some property belonged to individuals other than Bobby made no difference. Eviction notices were served on every person at High Meadow.
By midafternoon Bobby had still not returned. However, Mark Tashkor, Jesse Rasmuellen, and Lucas Hoeller all had come, had argued with the marshals, had set off in different directions to challenge the orders, to file appeals, to obtain a stay of the seizure proceedings. Anything to buy time.
Nothing worked. Nothing worked completely. As the weather turned cold, as Bobby returned to RRVMC again and again for more tests, more needles, blood samples, and rechecks, vets began to leave High Meadow. Some of the newbies checked into RRVMC’s new PTSD program. (Posttraumatic stress was now officially recognized by the psychiatric community, and thus by the veterans hospital system, as a distinct disorder.) The hospital enthusiastically accepted any vet claiming PTSD problems—because its new, expanded funding was directly proportional to the number of PTSD-vets it serviced. RRVMC encouraged all its Nam vet patients to lay the blame for all their problems on their Viet Nam experience—an outgrowth of the funding process and Binford’s research.
EES closed.
Many of the High Meadow staff—Van Deusen, Mariano, Wagner, Gallagher, me—picked up part-time employment in town, then quickly pirated portions of EES’s equipment, moved it to my yard and garage, and to other locales about Mill Creek Falls. That enabled the vets to regroup, reopen—not at High Meadow but soon in a vacant mill by the Loyalsock, and not as EES but as ETS (a pun on Estimated Termination of Service), the new letterhead reading Environmental Thermal Systems.
Stronger legal efforts ensued. Hoeller, Tashkor and Rasmuellen took it upon themselves to force a reversal of the IRS ruling. They first obtained limited relief; the farm being allowed to operate within limited parameters—specifically disallowing any capital expenditures. The IRS (via court alteration of the initial ruling) allowed Sara and the children to remain in the house. The judge further acquiesced: Although he closed High Meadow as a community and as a corporation, he allowed it temporarily to be run as a family farm with “no more than twelve nonfamily employees.” That allowed needed latitude. Rifkin stayed on, as did Thorpe, Renneau, Denahee and others. Sherrick split, went back to Indiana or maybe to Illinois or Iowa. Said he had old business to straighten out. Erik Schevard took over farm sales. Vu Van Hieu still handled the books. Ty stayed, not in the bunkhouse with the others but in Pewel and Brigita’s original cabin in the woods on the far side of the pond. I don’t believe his depression could have been deeper but with all that was coming down, and all the scurrying to regroup, none of us noticed.
Bobby had no gumption left for legal battles. Instead he found himself battling for his life. “We don’t want to make any conclusions from one test,” he was told. “There’s a chance something else caused these results.” Then, “We won’t know for sure until we take a biopsy and analyze it. We don’t want to jump to conclusions until we can verify the findings.”
In short order his symptoms spiked—fever, fatigue. He lost sight in his left eye. He moved, temporarily, bitterly, hoping they’d find it was bacterial or amoebic, maybe melioidosis or liver or lung flukes, not to the provincial RRVMC but to the Veterans Administration Hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, where the hematologists were among the top blood experts in the world.
On Wednesday, 16 December 1981, Robert Wapinski was diagnosed as suffering from aplastic anemia.