Surviving and thriving through great danger

She Who Must Be Obeyed suggested that Piney write about the dangerous episodes in his life that were in the shadow of death! Piney laughed and answered, "I'll do it if I can remember them!"

He remembered being physically beaten unconscious at age 21 by a group of thugs hired by a half-crazy mountaineer. Piney survived with good medical treatment. The thugs were later executed for murder. Then he went in the service, and as one of 19 Navy men, was shot after helping blow up two submarines in southern Ireland in WWII. In the same war, he stopped on a London street on his way to a large military meeting at midnight to light a comrade's cigarette, and his life was saved when a bomb 100 yards ahead killed 1,800 Americans, his fellow soldiers.

Soon after, he was sent back to America to officer training school by his boss, Eisenhower. The first plane carrying him and others crashed in the Azores and the second without any internal heat left Piney and other passengers at a clinic in Newfoundland.  But he got home after two years abroad in one piece. After the war and more education, Piney was five years in France working for his old boss Ike when two separate escapes happened, and these involved mob riots like we see on the TV news now every week, riots especially in the Arab nations.

The first was when the Rosenbergs were executed; the Communists in Paris held a screaming protest by the Paris Opera. Piney and his wife knew nothing of the execution nor the riot and came out of the subway facing the Opera, going to see Mourning Becomes Electra.

They didn't make it because the French police machine-gunned the Communist crowd, killing 26, and Piney and wife quickly dived back into the subway and went home.

A year later, when the University of Paris' final examinations were announced, 50 percent of the seniors had (rightfully!) failed and got no diploma. They rioted in the street by Piney's apartment and surged upon his car, having just killed an old lady in a small Renault.

Piney leapt into his antique Rolls-Royce and tore through the murderous crowd, and made it to the American Embassy parking lot where he hid the car and returned home on foot until the monster kids had dispersed. There is no doubt that any human being getting in the way of this angry mob would have been beaten seriously and possibly killed. This mob behavior has been a annual response to the disappointment of failing grades.

Soon after that Piney was flown to Egypt with serious documents for the ambassador (Caffery) and was put up in Shepherd's Hotel near the embassy. An angry crowd displacing King Farouk as ruler attacked and set on fire the hotel. Piney and his U.S. Marine guard were on their room's balcony when a rifleman shot at them and the Marine guard dropped a heavy steel chair six floors down upon the shooter. Then the two fled to the embassy where they were flown to Italy in the same plane with Ambassador Caffery, and King Farouk! Then back “home” to Paris!

Enough of that thought Piney. Is that kind of danger now openly extant across the world?  Perhaps so, but when we read of the protests of the “Occupiers” in America and the police throwing them out, there have been so far, if the news be true, no shootings by police here, and no killing in the U.S. of protesters since Kent State. Piney and She thought that as the world certainly grows into a one system as it is doing that America can still retain its relative sanity and peaceable actions, even as riots multiply across the world.

A writer, Bill Cobbs divides his time between Florida and Southwest Virginia.