"Recently — some thirty-five summers later — I returned to San Diego. Everyone had told me I wouldn't recognize it, but I did."

I WAS SITTING RADAR.

Actually doing nothing.

We had been up to 75,000 to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Miramar eventually in the F-14. It doesn't matter much after you've seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We'd had three sunsets already. I guess it's what you'd call really living the day.

But then,

"John," said I, "this plane's on fire."

"I know it," he said....

Barry Hannah

https://thecraigcliff.blogspot.com/

Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Miramar base.

I'm a Lieutenant Commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.

Barry Hannah, "Even Greenland," from Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories (1986)

"HIYA DOIN', MIKE." I immediately recognized the hard, clipped New York tones of Richard "Dick" Slattery, in spite of the many years we had not seen each other. The last news I'd had of him was that he was second-in-command in DEA's San Diego office and was close to retirement himself....

"I know you're a short-timer, but I got something that might interest you," said Slattery as if we'd spent the last ten years in the same car pool. "You ever been to San Diego?"

"No," I said as I peered out the door of my little cubicle at my group lounging restlessly around the squad room in their flak jackets, their eyes signaling me that they were waiting for me to get off the phone, "I hear it's really nice," I heard myself say.

"It's fantastic. You'll love it."...

Michael Levine on SunUp San Diego

YouTube

David Wheeler was out of the rough prison denims of the Oklahoma City jail and into a new wardrobe, provided by our taxpayers, including a twelve-hundred-dollar pair of alligator boots and a twelve-thousand-dollar Rolex watch, and living in a luxury beachfront home in La Jolla, California, from where he began attempting to contact all his alleged corrupt Mexican police friends....

In the evening, after I had been furnished a black Mercedes 450SL sports coupe as my undercover car, checked into the Catamaran Hotel in La Jolla, showered, and changed, [DEA agent] Hoopel drove me to the undercover house to meet the rest of the cast....

The house was an impressive California ranch house perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific....

The living room, long, spacious, and plushly furnished, with an entire glass wall facing the ocean, was alive with activity. Technicians worked at perfecting the wiring of hidden cameras and electronic listening devices as the members of the undercover team and another half-dozen Customs agents assigned for surveillance lounged on plush, comfortable furniture....

The attic, reachable only with a ladder lowered through a trapdoor in the garage roof, had been converted to a control room from where all the action and conversation below could be viewed and recorded with hidden cameras and microphones....

On the morning of September 21, 1987, Wheeler and [Customs agent] George parked their rented Mercedes sedan at the Tijuana border crossing and watched three grinning Mexicans cross into California on foot. They already knew the barrel-chested Pablo Giron but the other two were strangers.

The first, a tall, gaunt man with a thick shock of white hair, introduced

himself as Efren. He was later identified as Efren Mendez-Duenas, listed in the DEA computer as a "Mexican national," and an "enforcer for Bolivian cocaine traffickers." The machine called him "extremely dangerous." I later learned that the reason his body was so emaciated was from having had half his stomach shot away in a gunfight. The third man was introduced as "Hector." Hoopel later told me that he was Hector Alvarez, a member of the press corps for Salinas de Gotari, the then leading candidate for the presidency of Mexico....

At the end of the meeting Giron had followed me out to the Mercedes. "Don Luis," he said when we were alone in the darkness,

"right now I cannot be of much use to you, but I am very close to the man who is going to be president of Mexico. After the election I have been promised the job of chief of police in Tijuana. Then we can really do something."...

I left San Diego generally pleased with the meeting.... I flew back to New York, leaving the negotiations up to the San Diego Customs and DEA....

I arrived in San Diego late in the evening of January 4, 1989, almost a full year since the arrests....

By now everyone in San Diego had probably heard about my memo, and I certainly hadn't spared [Hoopel] in it. I had already been told by a friend in San Diego — whose name I won't mention because he is still on the job there - that the SAC (the head suit) did not even want to see me in the DEA office. I was persona non grata in San Diego: I had told the truth....

David Wheeler began his testimony on January sixth and immediately began attracting international press coverage. During

his earlier years of dope trafficking in Mexico, he claimed to have worked with Nazar Haro, the onetime head of the Mexican DFS [Mexico's equivalent to the CIA] who had recently been appointed the head of the Mexico City Police Intelligence unit. In 1974 the San Diego U.S. attorney, William Kennedy, had tried to prosecute Nazar Haro for his participation in an international car-theft ring but found the prosecution blocked by the CIA and the Justice Department, which did not want to lose Haro as a prized intelligence source. When Kennedy, now a San Diego superior court judge, made this public, he was fired from his post....

At lunch in the cafeteria of the Federal Building, George introduced me to a pretty blond woman who had been attending the trial every day and taking notes. She was the owner of the undercover house in La Jolla. She told of first learning about the true identity of her tenants when the arrests were shown on national television. She, of course, was suing the government....

George and I stood outside the courtroom as Wheeler testified about his trip to Bolivia. Bill Ott, a reporter for The San Diego Union, stepped out in the hallway. "Say, that guy Wheeler really tells a great story," he said.

George and I looked at each other. "Yeah, he's good," I said.

"You can sure tell he's a screenwriter," added Ott.

Michael Levine, Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence, and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War (1990)

AGAIN WE LEFT THE COAST and struck inland. After crossing Aliso Creek the road led up a long winding canon, and then descended steeply to a wide green valley in which ranged great bands of cattle. It was the Home Ranch of the Santa Margarita, one of the largest of those princely estates in which the lands of California were held under the former rule. The house is a charming adobe roofed with tiles, built in the Spanish mode around a flowery patio.

Cascades of roses, bougainvilleas, and trailing geraniums pour over every fence; hammocks, benches, and an "olla" of cool water invite one into the shade of the veranda, where antlers of deer are set above the heavy doors and barred Spanish windows; hill and valley, as far as the eye can range, are stippled with grazing cattle; and the air of the whole place is that of large, simple interests, moving quietly on year by year from a serene past to a tranquil future....

From here we took the road to the east through the rural town of Fallbrook. This is one of the many California towns that owe their birth to great expectations 'Which have never been realized. Fallbrook once boasted a railroad, but the timetables know its name no more. A large hotel, its gay paint subdued to a pessimistic gray, bears the inconsequent name of "The Naples." The only signs of life revealed by a careful survey of the main street at midday were two urchins eating icecream and an elderly man with a faded valise who stood gazing up and down the street, evidently looking for means of escape.

J. Smeaton Chase, California Coast Trails: A Horseback Adventure from Mexico to Oregon (1913)

WRIGHTSON DROVE OUT OF THE AIRPORT and nosed the car right at a stop sign. "The marina is close. We go down Harbor Drive, make a right (continued from page 24) on Nimitz, a right on Sunset Cliffs, and voila, we're there. I'll show you the city tomorrow, after we pack Miller's precious snake onto that cargo plane." Ioka nodded, looking out her window....

Michael Maryk (left) and Brent Monahan (right); photo Milwaukee Sentinel, Nov. 14th, 1979

"This is Mission Bay. Over there is the famous Sea World Park," Wrightson announced, pointing first straight ahead, then to his right as they drove over the floodway of the San Diego River. "Now, if I can only figure out how to get off this concrete maze and over in that direction." While he maneuvered the station wagon, Ioka looked past his handsome profile to the west, where boats of every size, shape, and description were moving out of the bay entrance channel and into the sparkling ocean.

Michael Maryk and Brent Monahan, Death Bite (1979)

LIKE LENIN IN HIS SEALED TRAIN we rolled swiftly and unheralded across the Deep South, Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, New Mexico, Arizona, and, finally, California, where we bivouacked under canvas in Linda Vista, a few miles north of San Diego. The First Marine Division had sailed for Guadalcanal from San Francisco, Norfolk, and New Orleans, but our port of embarkation would be Dago.... Most evenings we had liberty in Dago. Nights we slept beneath blankets.

"You can recall boarding an APA [troop transport] wearing a field marching pack, your seabag on your shoulder...."

Recently — some thirty-five summers later — I returned to San Diego. Everyone had told me I wouldn't recognize it, but I did. The smog was new, and Linda Vista had vanished beneath weeds and new construction, but the part of the city I knew best was still familiar. The Grant Hotel, though seedy and dwarfed by the gleaming Little Americana Westgate Hotel across the street, looks as it did from the outside, which is mostly how I saw it then. The uniform store still stands on Broadway, four blocks from the waterfront, though it now provides uniforms for nurses, chauffeurs, doormen, orderlies, elevator operators, and policemen. Balboa Park is largely unchanged. A short walk from there takes you to the enormous Marine Corps parade ground, where with a little tug you watch field-hatted DIs chewing out trembling boots. Across the water an immense aircraft carrier looms grayly. The gaping docks at the foot of Broadway are unused, but if you close your eyes you can recall boarding an APA [troop transport] wearing a field marching pack, your seabag on your shoulder, saluting the ensign on the fantail even though you couldn't see him. And a brief stroll from the transport bays takes you to the railroad station....

[A] girl named Taffy Meredith, from [Bareass's] Midwest hometown, was working for the government in a town south of Dago.... Bareass had told her he'd try to find someone suitable for her here. "Lovely tail, more your type than mine," he said. He'd phone her, tell her I was collegiate, and set up a tryst.

We met in the San Diego Zoo. The lioness was pissing at the time.

There I was, as agreed, and just as I heard a feminine rustle approach,

this coarse beast ejected a stream of urine like water from a garden hose.

William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980)

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