Category / American Chaos

by Brian E. Holbrook

Miracle Baby

I was born at about 10:30 P.M. on January 21st, 1973 –less than 24 hours before the United States Supreme Court handed down their landmark decision on the case of Roe vs. Wade.

No one knew I was a miracle baby there. No one prayed over me, or prophesied over me, or spoke in strange tongues while grasping my scalp with hot, sweaty palms. I was just a weird kid who liked Phil Collins and Motown when everyone else liked Def Leppard and the Beastie Boys, and I found that was easier to live with. My mom wasn’t ready to let me leave the church, however –at least not as long as I lived under her roof. So I struggled through thrice-weekly services –once on Wednesday, twice on Sunday– for a couple of years.

I was three months premature, weighed just over three pounds, and was less than a foot long. I’d been a breech baby –meaning I was born feet-first– and the umbilical cord had been wrapped around my neck, cutting off my oxygen supply for quite some time. The doctors told my parents that I had very little chance at survival, and cautioned that if I did, I would certainly be special needs, severely brain damaged, and would require life-long care. To make matters worse, a feeding tube was incorrectly inserted into my lung instead of my stomach, so for the first few weeks of my young life I battled pneumonia.

My parents ignored the doctor’s dire predictions and prognoses and fought to make sure that I got the best care available to me in St Louis, Missouri in 1973.

And I pulled through.

I was the second of my mother’s children to do so.

My older sister, born in June of ’71, was also three months premature, just under three pounds, and faced similar health challenges. She also pulled through.

Not long after we were born, my parents moved several hours south to a little town called Poplar Bluff, near the Missouri/Arkansas border, around where they had both grown up and where they had been married. There, my mother found a church whose congregation couldn’t seem to get enough of the story of her miracle babies.

My sister and I were enrolled in the Christian school that our church ran, and soon all of the teachers knew our story. I don’t really remember a time that we weren’t held up as an example of God’s love and mercy. Teachers would tell my story to other kids in class while I squirmed uncomfortably at my desk. My sister and I would be called before church congregations and school assemblies to have people laud us and prophesy over over us and speak in tongues and exclaim about the big plans God had in store for us, and enumerate all the reasons he’d saved us.

In the late 70’s and very early 80’s, I don’t recall this ever being more than run-of-the-mill evangelism –“Come look at the Miracle Babies, saved by the Lord of Hosts!”– but something began to happen in the mid-80’s, after Reagan’s second term: abortion became a very big deal in the Evangelical church, and our story came to represent something very different to people, and they weren’t shy about telling me so.

I remember being used as an object lesson in front of a class.

Continue reading →
by Brian E. Holbrook

Lock and Load

The first mass shooting I remember happened in 1984, at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. It was far from the first mass shooting in America, it is simply the first one that I remember clearly. I remember being so distressed by the news coverage that I felt nauseated and near tears. The shooter, 41-year-old James Huberty, killed 21 people and wounded 19. I recall trying, in vain, to relate to my mother how deeply it distressed me. Years later, in 1995, when I was attending the U.S. Army Airborne School, at Fort Benning, Georgia, we would sing a cadence about that particular massacre that made light of the dead children. I always felt grubby and ashamed, chanting along to those verses that turned a heartbreaking and distinctly American tragedy into a joke that its troops used as a marching song.

The second mass shooting I remember happened in Stockton, California, in 1989, just before my 16th birthday. I’m sure that, America being what it is, there was at least one more mass shooting in between the two, but Stockton is simply the next one that I recall vividly. Patrick Purdy shot and killed 5 children and wounded 32 others at Cleveland Elementary School. For years, I couldn’t hear “Stockton” without thinking of the tragedy.

Somewhere in between the two, I began to have a recurring nightmare that plagued me for years. In the dream, I was standing on the cement pad that had passed as a playground behind the Christian school I attended. Somewhere beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the lot, a gunman would open fire, and I would watch in horror as kids and teachers were mowed down around me. In some versions of the dream, I was able to make it to a dumpster in the corner of the lot, behind which I would cower. In other versions, I could only stand, leaden-footed, on the spot as people were cut down around me. The dream became so pervasive that I would often daydream about it while I sat on the playground where I dreamed about it happening.

Even after I left school, I would have the dream at least a few times a month, startling myself awake when it became too intense and terrifying for my sleeping brain to handle. I might have been able to leave the dream behind, but America kept providing fuel for the nighttime fire: Luby’s Restaurant in Killeen, Texas in 1991; The Long Island Railroad shooting in 1993; the Fairchild Air Force Base shootings in Spokane, Washington, in 1994 –to name but a very few that I remember well.

I suppose I might have continued having the dream had I not been assigned to the 4th Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment after I left Airborne school. I arrived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in August of 1995, not long after the unit had returned from a deployment to the Sinai. My platoon leader was still telling stories about a paratrooper he’d had in his platoon that he called “Crazy Kreutzer”. I’d never met him, but I remember my PL finishing a story one day with the words “If I had to vote for the most likely guy to shoot up a McDonald’s, it would be Kreutzer.”

He was far from the only person with this opinion.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a McDonald’s, it was a football field, and it was scarily similar to my dream.

Continue reading →