Charles W. Sasser

There is something glorious—and a little ominous—about a snow capped mountain peak when you realize you will be assaulting its summit to stand atop the world. Mount Rainier is the highest peak in the contiguous U.S. at 14,411 feet, the most heavily-glaciated in the lower 48. It claims an average of two mountaineering deaths each year. . . In 1981, eleven climbers died in an ice fall attempting to ascend it. Less than half those who start the climb make it to the top.

I met my assembled climbing team at base camp—fifteen other men, one woman, and a guide. I was the oldest, pushing 60. We had been instructed to be in top physical shape when we arrived. The others were young and looked strong as they described their conditioning routines:

“I run 15 miles a week…”

“I lift weights…”

They looked me over. I was an old man and not particularly impressive looking. They wouldn’t have picked me out in a crowd anywhere in the world. I’m also a man of few words.

“I stay in shape,” I said.

For team work drills at base camp, I showed up in blue shorts over red longhandles and an orange knit cap sporting a wild turkey feather. I wear whatever is easiest. I could almost read my teammates’ minds: That old fool thinks he’s going to climb the mountain!

The team roped together into five-man elements for the final assault against the mountain on the second day. The others were beginning to have second thoughts about me. The guide placed me on point of the lead element.

There is something incredibly exhilarating about climbing a mountain—the view, the camaraderie of like-minded adventurers, the challenge of facing off against a worthy opponent, of stretching muscle, mind and endurance to the limit.

“You had us all fooled, old man,” said a new friend, Tom, from New Jersey.

I grinned at him and kept thudding on. I had one goal and nothing was going to stop me. I’m single-minded that way.

One of my team slid off into a crevice. As leader, I hit the ice, dug in my crampons and ice ax and held.

Team members began falling out. Tom grew deathly ill from altitude and went back. Only seven of the original seventeen made it to the summit. As I was first element leader, I reached the top first. I was all grins, rosy red nose, and flapping turkey feather. The top of the world—at least the top of the lower U.S.

My wife Donna Sue met Tom when he returned sick to base camp.

“Chuck is my hero!” he exclaimed.

The guide was forming a climbing expedition to Mount Everest, the tallest peak in the world. He asked me to be part of his team. It was probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid.

“Sergeant Kap is living proof that all Special Operations men are cut from the same cloth… Kap’s decision to serve alongside his fellow Rangers (in combat) after having his leg amputated is an incredible story of determination…” Brandon Webb, NY Times bestselling author of The Red Circle commenting on Back In The Fight by SFC Joseph Kapacziewski and Charles W. Sasser (St. Martin’s). Released on 7 May, Back In The Fight is now available at most book stores.

Riding a camel is a highly-overrated enterprise. Camels smell bad, are evil-tempered, and they’ll spit on you every chance they get. Jihadist contempt, I suppose.

It was the second day on the Sinai Desert out of Darhab, heading west across simmering flats toward a low ridge of badlands.

“Race to the hills!” the kid from Belgium challenged.

Donna Sue (wife) and I were the “old people” among a group of ten college students and teachers from all over Europe we had linked up with to sightsee Egypt on the cheap by camping out. Renting camels and taking off across the desert seemed the Lawrence of Arabia thing to do. I was ready for a race.

Another thing about camels: they’re tall and long-jointed and, while they cover territory in great strides, they do it in apparent slow motion. I’m a former rodeo cowboy accustomed to mounting fast, quick quarter horses. The bump… bump… bump of riding a camel tempts you to put the spurs to him and speed things up.

A half-dozen of us goosed our camels into the race. They responded by passing gas and grumbling as they gradually shifted into high gear. It was no “And they’re off!” moment. It was more, “Ladies and gentlemen, while they’re leaving the starting gate, we’ll break for a word from our sponsor—Camel cigarettes taste good!”

So I’m whaling ol’ Clyde on both flanks and we’re a length out ahead toward the finish line at a break in the ridgeline. Clyde was a long-legged dude, big, mean, and ugly with a mind of his own. I had this race won when he happened to spot some tasty tidbit to one side on the desert floor.

Long neck snaked over. He dug in with all fours and displaced a truckload of sand, as the rest of the field thundered past. I grabbed leather, hair, hump, and neck. By the time I got him straightened out again, we had some ground to make up. I came in second when I should have been in the winner’s circle.

What ol’ Clyde needed was focus.

Explorers from Earth established a colony on a distant planet. Now they set out on the long trek back home to rediscover their origins and learn the fate of their ancestors. . .What they find is Hell on earth, a post-apocalyptic society that threatens their souls and their lives…

From Sanctuary, a new SciFi novel by Charles W. Sasser on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and selected book stores.

Perhaps there are rational explanations for the chilling 700-year-old scream that jolted me out of my sleeping bag in the Anasazi wastes of northeastern Arizona. My first thought was of the child whose braid of hair I had discovered in the Keet Seel ruins—and of cannibalism.

My son Joshua and I had backpacked a grueling 18-mile round trip to reach the ruins. I have studied “The Ancient Ones” for over 30 years, being particularly intrigued by evidence that the Anasazi practiced ritual cannibalism. Stark fear may have led to the vanishing of the Anasazi from the American Southwest.

Anasazi Indians occupied the desolate Four Corners region for about 1,400 years in the pre-Columbian era, building a remarkably advanced civilization that constructed “apartment houses,” domesticated turkeys and grew beans, corn, peppers, and squashes. Traders, they obtained seashells from the west and copper bells from Mexico. They may have also received something far less benign from the south—tlacatlaolli, translated from the Aztec as man-corn, “a sacred meal of sacrificial human meat, cooked with corn.”

The peaceful and agrarian Anasazi apparently developed a dark side.

Archaeologist Walter Hough and Paleoanthropologist Tim D. White located sites in Arizona and New Mexico where they identified signs of cannibalism—cracked and shattered bones scorched by fire.

“They skinned them (their victims), roasted them, cut their muscles off, severed their joints, broke their long bones on anvils and hammer stones, crushed their spongy bones, and put the pieces into pots.”

During “The Great Abandonment” of the 13^th Century, the large Anasazi communities broke up, the inhabitants fleeing into the hills as though escaping from a palpable evil. Refugees built small isolated fortresses on cliffs and in the lee of canyon walls as if to protect themselves from cultural darkness.

Keet Seel, part of the Chaco sub-culture of New Mexico, lies tucked into the overhang of an enormous cave weather-eroded out of a canyon wall. That was where I found the tiny braid of hair, undisturbed for the past 700 years since the village was abandoned.

Alone in the valley, Joshua and I camped by the creek. Surrounded by the canyon’s silent cathedral walls, I lay awake gazing up into the stars while I reflected on the tiny braid of hair and the tangible, emotional contact it provided with a human being from centuries past.

The terror-filled scream echoing against canyon walls startled me awake. The little girl with the missing braid! I jumped up, prepared to rush to her rescue, only to be greeted by chortling laughter erupting from several points about the dark floor of the canyon.

Coyotes! They had slain a rabbit, whose death knell had chilled my spine. A rational explanation. Nonetheless, it was a long time before I slept again. I stood in the cool of a night older than time itself and couldn’t help feeling that the scream of a little girl with a missing braid may have reached out to me over the ages to express the horror of the curse that had destroyed her people.

“I had gone to war on trains and trucks and even elephants once, but this was the first time I ever went to war in a psychedelic-painted bus so crowded that about twenty people clung to the luggage rack on top while a turkey with its legs tied lay in the aisle. . .” From The War Chaser by Charles W. Sasser. Now available on Kindle.

Getting piranha-bit in the jungles of the South American Amazon Basin wasn’t exactly what I bargained for when I signed on to an expedition to help research a rainforest exhibit for the Tulsa, Oklahoma, zoo. Nonetheless, the scar makes a good conversation topic at get-togethers—just like the knife scar in my back, the bullet wound to my face, or 32 broken bones (last count).

It didn’t happen like in the old black-and-white Saturday afternoon matinees at the Ritz in which the hero—with whom I always identified—tracks a bunch of villains into the jungle and one falls into a stream, turns into a snack for a voracious school of piranha, and nothing floats back up a few minutes later except a skull and a femur.

As a kid I always dreamed of romantic adventures. What could be more adventurous than floating the Amazon River, running the rainforest looking for exotic snakes, bugs and animals, and photographing them? Where an agouti wanders through camp, native children keep baby anteaters and parrots for pets, and an old medicine man in a grass skirt teaches you how to fire a blowgun?

I borrowed a pirogue dugout canoe from an Indian one afternoon and paddled back into a narrow tributary to do some fishing—and perhaps photograph a big constrictor snake, jaguar, or something. I got out of the dugout on a clear bank, cut a sapling for a fishing pole, and soon caught a lovely piranha about the size of my hand. Since I intended to keep its jaws and teeth as a souvenir, I cut off the head and placed it next to me while I continued fishing.

Soon, I hooked a good-sized armored catfish. It was flopping all over the bank while I fought to subdue it. Not wanting the cat to knock my piranha jaws back into the water, I grabbed the severed head to toss it out of the way. Darned thing was like a snake—it doesn’t die until the sun goes down, as my old Indian grandma used to say.

The piranha jaws latched onto my finger like a bulldog on a steak bone, ripping through flesh and shooting blood.

I had the final satisfaction, however. Hanging from the wall in a corner of my library-museum is a wonderful piranha jaw with all its teeth.

“There is no mystery to becoming successful as a writer, no big secrets. There is, however, a sort of magic, a pathway of magic steps. . .” From Magic Steps to Writing Success, by Charles W. Sasser