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.

I once had lunch with Annette aboard the Navy carrier USS Bennington. I was a Navy journalist covering the “Sea Fair” and the “World’s Fair” in Seattle. I picked up Jazz great Jonah Jones at his hotel to give him a lift out to welcome the fleet. When officers aboard Bennington attempted to weed me out dockside, Jonah shook his head. “Huh-uh. This boy’s with us.”

That was how I had lunch with Annette.

The year Ronald Reagan was elected President, I was doing a year’s active duty with U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets). I did four years with the Navy and another 25 with the Army, active and reserve time. I never had lunch with President Reagan—but I would have liked to.

My introduction to C&W music star George Jones came about because of a ski trip with an old army buddy, Alan Bodine. Until then, I was into Rock ‘n Roll—Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chubby Checker… I had grown up out in the country with Grand Ol’ Opry on the radio every Saturday night. The “old folks” gathered ‘round to listen to Little Jimmy Dickens, Grandpa Jones, the Carter Family, Hank Williams… I always found something else to do, until later, when the Opry ended and the old people started telling stories about the Good Old Days.

Anyhow, Bodine and I decided to make a quick run to Colorado to snow ski. He only had one day off, which meant we drove 600 miles after he got off work Saturday, skied Sunday, and drove back Sunday night after catching a couple of winks.

We drove Bodine’s car. His radio didn’t work or something, but he had a tape player—and only one tape, that being by George Jones. So for 24 hours total drive time, we listened to Step Right Up and Wine Colored Roses and He Stopped Loving Her Today… Over and over again.

By the time we got back to Oklahoma I was ready to give George my first born. When he died, it was like losing family. All I could think of was George and Tammy Wynette and He Stopped Loving Her Today.

On October 5, 2005, Sergeant Joe Kapacziewski and his soldiers in a Stryker vehicle were attacked by enemy fighters. Severely wounded, he endured more than 40 surgeries before he chose to have his right leg amputated below the knee. He had one goal in mind: return to the line and serve alongside his fellow Rangers

Back In The Fight by Sergeant Joe Kapacziewski and Charles W. Sasser (released this week by St. Martin’s Press) tells the thrilling combat story of Sergeant Joe Kap, the only American amputee in the military to return to full combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Available at most book stores now, as well as on Amazon.com.

My background: I am a freelance writer/journalist who retired after serving 29 years in the military (both active and reserve). I was in the U.S. Navy for four years (journalist) and the U.S. Army for the remainder of my service, including 13 years in U.S. Army Special Forces (the Green Berets).

To my surprise as I approached the podium, Barry Sadler’s Ballad of The Green Berets began playing on loudspeakers throughout the cemetery. The Ballad is virtually the signature of the Vietnam War and the birth of Army Special Forces. John Wayne and all that.

I’m a tough guy—I was also a cop for 14 years—but tears came to my eyes as I stood there, frozen in wonder and gratitude at one of the most heartfelt receptions I had ever received. But it wasn’t over yet. Out of the north came the thunder of approaching jet fighters. Three F-15s flew over low in formation, rendering their salute to fallen comrades. It was an overwhelming scene: the Ballad and now the aircraft; all the good people with their children; the old vets from World War II, Vietnam, and younger ones from the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, some of them in uniform.

The Ballad ended. The jet wagged their wings and became specks against the horizon. For what seemed an eternity, I remained completely silent at the podium. So did the audience. I doubt there was a dry eye in the cemetery. I finally found my tongue.

“God bless America!” I cried. “May it always be free and the home of the brave!”

The cemetery erupted in cheering. There still is a real America out here.

The worse thing about getting old is that you outlive all your friends. It can happen that you outlive so many from your own era that it becomes difficult to find anyone who remembers it with you. . . Some memories are best left buried, some questions unanswered. . .

An aging Vietnam vet returns to modern-day Vietnam to find answers in Charles W. Sasser’s The Return. Now available on Kindle at Amazon.com and Nook at  BarnesandNoble.com.

I can cover twenty miles a day in such country, there is so much to see. I tracked down a mama grizzly and her twin cubs and trailed them until the sun set. Watching Mama teach babies how to dig for grubs and roots, schooling the little reprobates who only wanted to wrestle and tumble in the arctic sun.

I caught a couple of rainbow trout in a stream and added some grayling from a beaver pond. Building a fire, I grilled them fresh on long willow saplings for lunch.

I came across a ptarmigan. Not wanting to blow it apart with either my .270 rifle or my .357 “bear pistol,” I chased it all over the countryside flinging my five-pound bush knife/machete at it. It would be delicious roasted in camp, a treat to the other guys when I returned. Ptarmigan are dumb birds, really dumb. They won’t fly to escape, but I suppose it was hard to discern which of us might be the dumbest—the bird darting and dodging across the tundra or some lunatic chasing it throwing a big knife.

I found a likely stream and panned for gold. I snapped pictures. I ventured into an evergreen thicket to commune with a moose. A red fox stopped to look at me. I looked back.

A man can live a lifetime in days like that.

My partner “D” Turner and Bob harvested caribou within a few days while I spent days laboring across muskeg to fish in a river. Finally, I got serious. I scouted along a ridgeline and spotted a big bull caribou at the bottom of a valley at least 300 yards away. He was Boone & Crockett trophy quality—except he had broken off both antlers while fighting with other bulls during rutting. I don’t believe in trophy hunting anyhow.

I flopped down prone. It was a long shot, made even more difficult by shooting downhill and across a valley. I had been a police sniper and a firearms expert, as well as a medic, in Army Special Forces. I brought the bull down with a single shot.

Did I mention that I’m Indian and that we eat what I kill? Just like my ancestors.

There is no mystery as such to becoming a successful writer. There is, however, a sort of magic. If you long to publish what you write, to become a writer, perhaps I can help you find that magic pathway.

From Magic Steps to Writing Success by Charles W. Sasser, author of over 50 books and novels published in several different languages, including Russian, Chinese, Serbian, Thai, French, Spanish. . . Available on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com in paperback and Kindle.

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.

Nearly seven years previously, I had resigned as a police homicide detective to become a full-time freelance writer/journalist/photographer. My first novel was published, a second book in the works. Kathy (second wife), son Joshua, and I moved far back into the woods and lived for eight months in an 8×16-foot “tool shed” while I built our “real house.” The real house was now finished, but I wanted a house with natural native rock siding. I wrote in the mornings and worked on the house siding in the afternoons.

This was a period after I had become completely disillusioned with mankind, having witnessed little but death and violence and the dark side of humanity for 14 years as a cop in Miami, Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma. We didn’t have a telephone; if I wanted to talk to you, I would make the contact or you could write a letter.

To reach our cabin in the woods, you first traveled a highway, that turned into a blacktop, that became a gravel road, that morphed into a dirt road, that transitioned into two tracks through the forest, and finally ended at a single walking path through the oaks to the cabin. You really had to want to find me to get that far.

I was outside in the sun wearing only cutoff blue jeans and a pair of old combat boots, working on my cabin, when I suddenly heard a commotion coming through the trees. A gaggle of newspeople with cameras and TV feed, more than 20, suddenly emerged and fell all over themselves filming me while I stood there all sweaty and covered with cement dust. The news of NASA’s space finalists had just been released. I was one of them.

That evening, I appeared on major national TV networks almost au natural, as it were. News anchors made great fun at billing me “Li’l Abner goes into Space.”

(NOTE: The “Teacher-in-Space” flight crashed, after which NASA canceled the “Journalist-in-Space Project”)

We who were Human on Vrodia Kirkos, at least we who were still part human, had waited a thousand years for our own kind to come again—but none ever did. We longed for a signal, a sign, but the universe remained silent, eternal and unchanged…

From Sanctuary, a SciFi novel by Charles W. Sasser. Released this week in paperback on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and selected bookstores.

What they don’t know is that I often posed as a victim when I was a cop; surprised a bunch of bad guys. I’m also a former Army Green Beret soldier, a long-distance runner, had boxed in the Navy, and turned professional as a kickboxer.

Back from the sandbox, I shaved and showered and put on clean jeans and was walking around downtown Madrid gawking like a tourist and waiting to go to the bullfights that evening. It was midday and the streets were crowded when some character dropped on his knees right in front of me and tugged hard and repeatedly on the cuff of my jeans. He was the distraction.

Startled, I glanced down. At the same time, a hand from behind snagged my wallet from my front pocket. Both thieves took off running, darting and dashing through the crowded streets.

I’ll bet you a dime to a thousand pesos these particular thieves had never been chased by an American senior citizen. When the guy clutching my wallet looked back over his shoulder and saw this old man hot on his heels. . . The expression. Priceless!

I snatched him by his shirt collar and jerked him nearly out of his sneakers. I had bought a bottle of wine earlier that I wanted to take home and was carrying it on my wrist in a plastic sack. I broke the bottle over his head. Wine and glass showered everywhere.

By the screaming, you would have thought the thief was the victim.

He tossed my wallet at his partner-in-crime, which left me with the choice of holding onto the bird in hand or recovering my wallet. I reached my wallet a few steps ahead of the second thief, who wanted no part of what was left of my wine bottle.

Together, they hotfooted it down the street like the devil was poking them with pitchforks. I couldn’t help myself. Laughing, I mean. I’ll bet they’ll never forget it.

I also bet they’ll take a closer look at the next old guy they try to mug.

Poor Barbie doll. . . Go figure. Try to please all the various grievance and victim groups in a culture gone mad with political correctness and what you get is a short, fat, dark-skinned lesbian Barbie with thick thighs, pimples, and a gimpy leg. She’ll walk on crutches while living on a street grate and suffering from drug addiction and AIDS. She has two fathers who are priests accused of molesting altar boys and a mother madly in love physical-wise with her Doberman. . .

From Going Bonkers: The Wacky World of Cultural Madness, by Charles W. Sasser. Now on Kindle.

There was blood upon the risers,

John “Mad Dog” Carson, assistant engineer sergeant of ODA-213, 12^th Special Forces Group, died. He went out the same way he lived—bigger than life. Rough-spoken, tough as the iron he worked after he returned from Vietnam. The strains of the old Airborne song Blood on The Risers wafted across his memorial service at the cemetery, appalling those at the funeral who didn’t know that side of him, causing old team members to, misty-eyed, grin and remember.

Green Beret teams are tight, like brothers. There isn’t much we don’t know about each other, warts and all. Sergeant Carson’s persona of “Mad Dog” generated its own yarns…

Our team from the 12^th and a team from the 7^th SF Group were coming down off a mission with a few suds at a little Special Forces bar outside the gates of Fort Bragg. Suddenly, the front door of the bar flew open and a cold wind gusted in. A behemoth of a woman filled the entire doorway, hands on her hips, tree-trunk legs spread and balanced for action. She glowered around the barroom. Even the juke box seemed to die down and whimper. All over at the bar and at tables and booths, big, tough Green Berets hunkered down into their shoulders and looked away, hoping she wouldn’t notice them.

“Are there any men in the house?” she roared.

Three or four soldiers from the 7^th got up and slunk away to the Men’s, followed by several 12^th troopers. Like they were scared she wanted to fight or arm wrestle.

Mad Dog turned on his bar stool to confront the intruder while every other grunt in the joint tried to become invisible. He let out a low growl from deep in his chest and looked the woman over.

“That is a woman, right?” Rock Taylor whispered.

“Generically speaking,” Mad Dog rumbled.

There was no back door to the place. The only escape was to go through her. She looked around and seared everyone with a fierce, contemptuous smirk. Green Berets are gentlemen; they don’t fight women. Three or four more sneaked off to the latrine.

“Will anybody buy me a beer?” demanded the she-leviathan.

Which elicited a mass exit. Seemed liked both teams had an urgent need for the Men’s room.

Not Mad Dog. He turned full around on his stool to face the damsel in distress. Lightning crackled as the two clashed eyeball to eyeball.

“I’ll buy you a beer,” Mad Dog snarled. “Shut up and get your (blank-blank) over here.”

Out on the turnpike. . .Nail had seen a billboard that he suspected expressed the future of mankind: There is no God. Rational Atheism is the Answer. Was that truly what man had to look forward to? Belief in nothing?

From A Thousand Years of Darkness by Charles W. Sasser

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.

My partner Austin Roberts and I were working day shift Homicide Division. We found Theodore Duke, 68, sprawled face up on the bed in his cruddy skid-row hotel room. Strangled with a pillow case still around his neck. A tooth showed through a lacerated lip.

His trousers were twisted around to reveal a gaping rear pocket. It was empty.

Robbery-homicide.

A newspaper on the bed, a rent receipt, the knot in the ligature, and a roll-yer-own cigarette butt on the floor led us to suspect a stocky maintenance man who worked at the hotel.

Contrary to CSI, most murders are not solved by science. Only about one in a hundred is busted by anything other than simple, old-fashioned footwork.

I favored my partner with a tight grin when I spotted a can of Prince Albert roll-yer-own tobacco in the maintenance man’s shirt pocket.

“Old as you are, Austin,” I chided, “surely you remember the old detective movies on TV where the bright young detective solves the case in a surprise ending in the vestibule. The butler always does it.”

I turned to my suspect. He was as tight as a coiled spring. “Round up the hotel tenants and have them assemble in the lobby.”

It was an unusual gathering in that seedy hotel—a horse-faced man; the hotel manager with her crewcut and yellow tie; a paraplegic; a fat woman; some drunks; the pensioners. . .

They watched expectantly as I took the center of the floor.

“I suppose you wonder why I’ve called you here today,” I began. Roberts hid a grin.

I assumed a pose, hands clasped behind my back as I slowly and thoughtfully strolled around the circle of tenants, stopping before each to ask a question the answer to which I already knew. I finally reached the important one.

“Who,” I asked of the witness standing next to my suspect Houck, “can move anywhere in the hotel without being particularly noticed?”

From the corner of my eye, I observed Bill Houck wringing his hands and licking his lips.

I walked the length of the room, ostensibly deep in thought.

“The reason I called you all here,” I said in a flat voice, “is to let you know that someone in this room killed Mr. Duke.”

I worked my way around the witness circle toward my suspect, stopping before each resident to reveal a piece of the puzzle.

“Mr. Duke was killed for his money. . . The man who killed him was in the lobby when he paid his rent. . . Mr. Duke resisted. . .The killer hit him in the face. . . The killer grabbed the pillow case and strangled Mr. Duke to death. . .”

Houck was staring at me. He looked panicked.

I moved casually in his direction. Quite obviously, he was wishing he were somewhere else.

“The killer is standing in the lobby at this very moment,” I said, halting directly in front of Houck. “The man who killed Mr. Duke smokes roll-yer-own cigarettes.”

Houk’s hand reflexively leaped to conceal the tobacco can in his shirt pocket. Blood drained from his face. Eyes in the lobby riveted in terror on the maintenance man. I took one slow step forward and jabbed an accusing finger into Houck’s chest.

“You killed Mr. Duke!” I said in the most dramatic voice I could muster.

Bill Houck subsequently confessed to the homicide and was sentenced to life in prison.

“After this election, there will be no future elections in which the outcome is in doubt. We will control voting—or at least the counting of votes. . .” From Charles W. Sasser’s A Thousand Years of Darkness, the action thriller based on current events.