The Devils Punchbowl

About the Book

Luke, Pepper and Benny, seniors at Del Norte High, plan what they consider a perfect joke to pull on their girls. But, as sometimes happens, jokes backfire, and they meet, an unknown deity in the local graveyard on a dark foggy night. Graduation looms just around the corner and, their girls, still mad about the gross joke in the graveyard, refuse to have anything to do with them, so they spend their last day of school alone. That night at their senior prom, Benny and Lily are an instant hit, when they sing a special song they have composed. The evening ends in happiness, the girls forgive them for their bad joke. The Backpacking into a rough, craggy wilderness area, they hike 4,800 feet up along an extremely arduous switchback trail to the awesome beauty of a lake . . . a glacial cut cirque set deep within the Siskiyou National Forest Wilderness Area, The Devils Punchbowl. The Returning to the fissure they had discovered the year before, they struggle through long crevices, narrow passages and ancient underground waterways to find the immense cavern still brilliantly lit by a mysterious unknown source; explore a cave filled with stone tablets, examine a robot and discover a spaceship. In nervous anticipation and excitement they explore the spaceship and surrounding caves and caverns . . . until subtly moving shadows form in the entrance to a hall they have dubbed the weird corridor. Billowing inward, its undefined edges hover, vague and fuzzy within a darker mass, and meshing, became part of the ship’s wall. Deep, within its entrance choked with layered stacks of moving clouds, a void forms. A black hole.

About the Author

I had twenty six years total military service. My first ten years was as an enlisted man. Starting as a very young and naïve seventeen year old navy recruit and finishing my enlisted time as a combat engineer platoon sergeant. In 1962 I completed Special Forces training and was assigned to Seventh Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in 1967. I served three tours of duty in Vietnam, twice as an enlisted man and once as an officer. Some of my more memorable assignments were as a military advisor with the so called NON-COMBATANT units under MACV, prior to the country’s status being changed to a combat zone in 1965. After my last out of country assignment, I was the S-3 Operations and Intelligence staff officer, support command, 172nd Light Infantry Brigade, Fort Richardson, Alaska. My last active duty assignment was as the senior advisor for USAR Alaska.