Monterey, California
March 1969
Mako Sloane turned his pale yellow 1964 Volvo 544 on to Highway 68 from Salinas toward Monterey. He could barely keep a smile off his face as the lettuce fields and the emerald green hills of the Salinas Valley in early spring gave way to the coastal hills of the Central California coast cascading toward the Pacific Ocean. It was cool. So cool, in fact, that Mako stopped his Volvo, which he always like to think of as his ersatz 1948 Ford, and slipped a light sweater over his broad shoulders.
Unlike many of his fellow soldiers, Sloane had gained weight during basic training, and the strenuous exercise had augmented his already impressive physique, partially inherited from his athletic father and partially derived from hard physical labor working cattle and training horses on his uncle’s West Texas ranch. Standing slightly over six feet, with his short blond hair, Mako looked like the All-American boy, perhaps a disadvantage in those days of counterculture, acid rock, and Vietnam war protests in California.
Mako’s parents had decided, when he was thirteen years old, that life with them in the suburbs of Washington D.C. was having a deleterious effect on their young son. At first, the antics of the rambunctious youth had amused them, but later, after several cases of alleged sexual impropriety, one in Sunday School class with Alice, the young girl next door, and the other in the women’s dressing room in Lord & Taylor’s with Alice’s mother, Mako’s parents decided to ship him off to live with his uncle who owned a 3,500 acre cattle ranch near Sweetwater, Texas.
It was hoped that life in that bucolic, West Texas setting would provide alternate amusements for Mako, who in addition to an abnormal obsession with sex, at least for such a young boy, had also developed a taste for alcohol, marijuana, and the mind-altering drugs which were coming into vogue on the East Coast in the mid 1960s. The final straw for his parents came when his mother walked casually into his bedroom one Saturday evening and found Mako, tripping on LSD, completely naked, standing at his easel, and painting a scene depicting the Second Coming of Christ. That disturbing image, nonetheless, might have passed with the usual two-week grounding and forfeiture of his weekly allowance, had it not been for Alice’s presence on her knees in front of young Mako. Hurried phone calls were made, and Mako and his father began a three day drive to Sweetwater the following week.
In fact, once in Texas, Mako took to ranch life like a fish to water and spent hours each day horseback, virtually living in the bunkhouse with ‘Rabbit,’ the ranch foreman who was the acknowledged expert on horses in all of Nolan County, Texas. Whether it was information on ‘Old Sorrel,’ the foundation quarter horse sire from the King Ranch, or stories about John Solomon Rarey, one of the first documented horse whisperers, old Rabbit kept Mako spellbound with insights into horse psychology and training methods. Unfortunately for Mako’s parents, Rabbit had a weakness for Old Crow and Mexican whores, but there too, he gave Mako the opportunity to experience life in all its richness and bounty and called young Mako’s attention to the historical, linguistic, and cultural ties that bound Texas to Mexico, something that Mako would never have learned in the 9th grade Social Studies class at Sweetwater High School.
In fact, it was Mako’s precocious romance with Conchita Mendoza, the daughter of his Uncle Clay’s Mexican maid, and his close friendship with the other Mexican ranch hands, that gave the first indication of Mako’s extraordinary linguistic abilities. By the time Mako turned 14 and began studying Spanish at school, his fluency and near native pronunciation was the talk of Sweetwater. Uncle Clay began using him as his interpreter and took him on several cattle-buying forays into the Mexican state of Coahuila in the northern part of the country.
Regrettably, when he was 17, Mako unambiguously demonstrated that his familiarity with so many facets of adult life was not matched by an equal level of social maturity or sense of civic responsibility. On the return leg of a cattle-buying trip to Mexico, Uncle Clay’s Chevy pickup was searched at the Del Rio border crossing, and a five-pound packet of high-grade marijuana was found taped to the truck’s chassis. At first, Mako tried to plead ignorance, but once he saw that anything less than a full confession would bring on a catastrophic reckoning at the hands of his uncle, the lad manfully took responsibility for his unsuccessful and poorly thought-out attempt to introduce Mexican contraband into the United States. Mako spent that night behind bars in Del Rio, Texas.
Following lengthy consultations between Uncle Clay, Mako’s father, and the best criminal attorney money could buy in Sweetwater, Texas, the solemn decision was made that Mako would accept the judge’s offer of enlisting in the U.S. Army instead of the less appealing prospect of doing five to seven years in prison for felony drug trafficking.
Mako slowed his Volvo and exited on to Del Monte Avenue and slowly made his way toward downtown Monterey, looking for signs of the Defense Language Institute. He passed the Naval Postgraduate School on his left and caught his first glimpse of the ocean off Del Monte beach.
The boy always seemed to land on his feet, and instead of being designated to the infantry, or another combat arms unit and being sent to Vietnam, as the judge had probably hoped, Mako had aced the military language aptitude test and had been assigned to DLI to attend the 47-week Russian course. At the end of the day, Mako was astute enough to realize that he would rather conjugate Russian verbs in Monterey, California than train for jungle warfare at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
After a thorough reconnaissance of the Presidio of Monterey, Mako parked his car and walked across the street to Company C, a large two-story, modern building that resembled more a college dormitory than an army barracks. Just before he entered the building, Mako turned around and gazed down the hill toward Monterey Bay. With the cool sea breeze slapping him in the face and the smell of the Pacific Ocean drifting up from Cannery Row, the place seemed like paradise to Mako, who was used to cedar and mesquite-infested pastures and the smell of dry cow manure in the hot West Texas air.
Need to get busted more often, Mako thought with a wry smile and headed toward the administrative office to check in.