Indy
by David Blaine
This morning I was not allowed to eat breakfast because I took more than five minutes to shower. The eight weeks I did in boot camp when I was a Marine were easy compared to life here at the Indianapolis Federal Correctional Facility. This facility has one purpose, to break an inmate’s will to remain inside. I’ve been told that I can leave any time I want if I re-up in the Corps. Most of the inmates only stay six to eight weeks before agreeing to be released for military service, but I’ve been here two years serving a twelve-year sentence for home invasion. It doesn’t really matter what your term is. No one has served his full sentence here yet, and there is no parole.
When I did my stint in the Marines I was right out of high school and couldn’t find a job doing anything else. The world was fairly stable back then. We were occupiers, a police force more than anything. Since I’ve been out of the Corps they’ve had to invade one backwater country after another trying to put down the latest anti-American crazies or religious zealots. Now no one fit to serve in the Corps would join if they had a choice, but the prisoners from Indianapolis Federal will.
You might think that it isn’t a bad option for people who are convicted of murder, rape or child abuse to get out of prison and serve in the armed forces, and I’d agree with you except for one thing. Most of us don’t belong here. Oh, I know, you’ve heard that so many times before, but I’m saying that the real murderers and such were shipped out of this country long ago. It was a one-way ticket for those first sorry bastards. All that came home was a flag draped box with a hundred fifty pounds of generic remains. Once the penal system had been drained of able-bodied “volunteers” then people like me were arrested. I mentioned I’m doing a stint for home invasion. I was walking to work one morning and thought I heard a woman’s voice crying for help inside a first floor apartment. Smoke was billowing out the window. As soon as I ran in I knew it was a set up. There was no one in the apartment. A boom box was playing the distress call on a looped tape and a smoke machine was sitting on a table by the window. I turned to get out as soon as I saw the situation, but it was too late. Two policemen with fully automatic weapons were smiling at me. One held out his handcuffs and asked me to put them on.
My dad and all my uncles served in the military. Dad and uncle Ernie were in the Corps.
My other uncles, Don and Brad, were in the Army. I guess serving used to be honorable, something that made you feel patriotic. Now that almost all enlisted personnel come from a criminal background, wearing a military uniform is seen as a badge of dishonor.
It all started after the fourth Gulf war, when the United States tried to take out the Islamic regime in Iran. The president relied on intelligence from his usual inbred circle of advisors and disregarded the European Union’s warning that the Islamics were prepared to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The secretary of defense told the president that the E.U.’s idea was ludicrous, that it would amount to suicide by the Iranians. Nothing ever changes. No one has ever learned anything from history. When the airborne rangers and jarheads hit the Iranian desert, they started dropping faster than they could be replaced. When all non-essential troops were re-deployed to Iran from other worldwide locations, we lost them too. There was only one thing to do, go to selective service. It was an election year. The draft was a very unpopular option and the president’s party was unwilling to take that kind of hit. Most of the draft-aged men who weren’t in the service were the sons of powerful businessmen. Theirs were the families that made campaign contributions to keep the politicos in office. There was a plan B: Allow prisoners to receive a pardon and release if they would serve their country in a branch of the military.
This idea had immediate negative backlash from most Americans until they began to see the plan for what it was. We were in a dangerous position. Almost all of our military posts around the world were understaffed. No one wanted to say it out loud, but we were at our most vulnerable point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the sixties. The military was constantly fighting on multiple fronts around the globe and casualty rates were reaching in excess of seventy percent. Again, no one wanted to admit it, but the inmates weren’t trading their convictions in for freedom; they were trading them in for a death sentence.
About thirty percent of the prisoners opted for release on the first offer. When that was no longer enough to fill the enlistment shortages, living conditions were “tightened” at all penitentiaries. Then about another twenty percent of the cons decided wearing fatigues was better than lockup. Eventually life inside prison walls got so bad that people were dying. Medical treatment was withheld; meals were reduced. The diet was actually calculated so that the prisoners felt full but weren’t getting balanced nutrition. Within two years almost every man who was healthy enough to fight had left prison on the military pardon program. But it still wasn’t enough.
At that point another presidential election was three years off, and since the president was serving his second term, most people expected to see the draft implemented at any time. In a way, I guess it was. No one ever discussed it; you never read about it in newspapers, but there was a whole new type of “selective” service brewing.
The first step in the new plan began when federal marshals started rounding up anyone who had an outstanding warrant. People were sent to prison for falling behind on child support payments, or for being late on back income taxes. Some of these offenses didn’t carry long terms, and a lot of the offenders were willing to serve their sentence out, even if it involved hard labor. That’s when they built the super pen at Indianapolis. I once heard the warden’s assistant tell a visitor that Indy’s design was meant to make the prison at Guantanamo Bay look like a summer camp. Now prisoners started asking their lawyers about military service right at the trial. There was even a new term coined. No one ever said they were railroaded any more, just that they’d been “Indied”
After the real criminals were played out, the I.R.S. started doing a little creative auditing.
No one who owned a business and contributed to the right political action group was targeted. It was selective service in the fullest sense of the word. Eventually the federal marshals became the de facto recruiters for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. The point system they worked under was similar to the way traffic cops write speeding tickets. There was a lot of hollering about the injustice at first, but what choice was there? If no one served, our way of life was going to get skewered by someone that we probably weren’t even watching. The U.S. had screwed over so many factions in so many countries that there weren’t enough eyes to watch our backs.
People had to ask themselves, if someone has to fight, who better, your son or the kid across the street? It wasn’t long before no one saw anything when the marshals walked through the neighborhood. Eventually the arrested were transported right to Indy and arraigned at the penitentiary.
A couple of weeks before I came to Indy my son asked why we had to fight at all. It seemed to him that we had enough people to defend the borders of the continental United States, and probably Alaska, Hawaii, and our newest state, Japan. I tried to explain to him that almost everything we buy is made overseas in a factory or on a plantation owned by an American corporation. I tried to explain that these companies couldn’t maintain ownership or guarantee an uninterrupted supply of consumer goods without military security in their region. He asked why we couldn’t just let those countries take over their own factories and sell the products to us themselves.
I didn’t have an answer for that. But if I’m going to die over this, it’s going to be here, on American soil, not fighting in some foreign jungle or desert. And if I ever get out, I’m going to take my family and move someplace safe, some third world country like Mexico or the Dominican Republic. Someplace where a man can still find work and raise a family.
