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    Not your average children's author

    By George Jones
    Sand Mountain Reporter

    Published April 09, 2005

    Once upon a time, there lived in the forest a family of bears. There was Papa Bear, Momma Bear and…

    No, this is not the beginning of the familiar children’s story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, rather they are the opening lines for an, as yet, unpublished children’s book written by Stanley “Stan” Maxcy Jr.

    Many people have a preconceived idea of what the writer of a children’s story should look like and personify.

    For many, the person might be a cross between a beloved grandparent, Mother Goose or Uncle Remus.

    Maxcy is decidedly none of those.

    Had Macxy been a guest on the old television quiz show, “What’s My Line,” he would have stumped the panel easily.

    Maxcy is a paradox.

    Maxcy is a man capable, on the one hand, of writing “The sun was just coming up in the east, the birds started to sing and a light dew was upon the ground,” for a child’s storybook, yet on the other hand able to poignantly express a soldier’s anguish in his wartime remembrances with a poetic, “Just how long? I struggle so hard just keeping straight, the gooks and the war I will forever hate …the sights and sounds of death still abound. It’s no wonder my life often runs aground.”

    Maxcy was born April 9, 1944, in Portland, Ore. to career soldier Stanley B. and Jennie Maxcy.

    To have any hope of understanding the complex Maxcy, one must begin by realizing that sky diving at the age of 14, in part, was the genesis of his pushing life’s envelope and taking it to the edge the rest of his adult life.

    “I wanted to go for the gusto! And if there was a challenge I wanted to go for the challenge,” he said.

    For Maxcy the opportunity to achieve the “gusto” was symbolized by the Army’s Green Beret.

    “The elite,” he said, “wear green berets. And that’s what I wanted to be.”

    The man who would lay down his M-15 and later pick up a pen and become a writer, said very matter of factly, “I wasn’t Army – I wasn’t Navy, Marines or Air Force – I was a ‘Green Beret!”

    Maxcy added, “The Army sure didn’t claim us. The Navy didn’t claim us. The Air Force or the Marines – they didn’t claim us! We were our own breed.”

    The journey leading to the establishment of his “own breed” began with his enlistment in the Army in 1961. Following a short stint with a missile outfit he transferred to become a member of the Special Forces.

    He underwent parachute training with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell Kentucky.

    Then he went to Camp McCall, the Special Forces training camp near Fort Bragg, N.C.

    Following that Maxcy said, “I went to the Panama Canal Zone for guerilla warfare training.”

    “Our mission,” Maxcy said, “was to search, identify, penetrate and destroy.”

    The true paradoxical nature of Maxcy’s personality came through when he said, “We were trained in the massive kill and the assignment kill.” And he added with a hesitant nervous laugh, “So, I guess you could say we were assassins.”

    Maxcy admitted to having been responsible for the deaths of large numbers of the enemy in Vietnam.

    In 1962 he went to Vietnam as an advisor for a year.

    In 1968 he returned as a combatant.

    Maxcy candidly shared his experiences in the Vietnam War.

    A war that would, as it did so many vets, change Maxcy forever.

    One mission involved his parachuting from the belly of a B-52 from 30,000 feet into the jungles of Laos in what he said, “They called a halo jump. High altitude – low opening at about 6,000 feet. (He was provided a special five-minute oxygen bottle and protective sheepskin clothing for the jump).

    “The mission,” he said, “was to gather intelligence about what they (military brass) thought was a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) stronghold.”

    What he discovered was two divisions of NVA preparing to join the fight, in what became known as the Tet Offensive, against American positions.

    The mission was originally to be a 24-hour in-and-out proposition.

    Instead it lasted seven days.

    Special Forces soldiers are well trained in the art of self-preservation in a combat situation.

    Maxcy’s training would be stretched to limits the average person could not begin to comprehend.

    Maxcy landed safely and undetected and took up a position approximately 400 yards from the NVA position and with only one day’s food rations.

    Establishing a camouflage shelter he began gathering information and relaying it back to command on a daily basis.

    For a period of time Maxcy received no return communications, which caused him to ask, “Where are they at? Why aren’t they communicating? When am I going to get out of here? Where am I going to run? Did they just get the intelligence and have written me off?

    Then he said, “After you’ve been sitting there for four or five days you begin to think … I might as well go join them (NVA) and fight with them – the country don’t care about me!”

    “Then,” Maxcy said, philosophically, “you snap back and say, hey! If they’re not going to make a move, then I’ve got to make a move. I’ve got to get out of here.” Because he added, “In the jungle, sooner or later they’re (NVA) going to get the drift of something that is not ordinary – a human puts off an odor and they’re going to know and come looking.”

    The fact B-52s were going to bomb the place was an even more compelling reason to leave the area, Maxcy said.

    When asked what he subsisted on for the remainder of the seven days he said, “Do you really want to know? Well, I ate bugs, roots - (after a very slight pause) – human.”

    The individual in this incident Maxcy said, “Was a sniper that I got before he got me.”

    Maxcy reasoned, “In a situation like that you do what you have to do to survive. You don’t really have time to think about it. You do what instinct tells you to do. Afterwards you set there and … ya, I got sick, - but I wasn’t hungry.”

    In a discussion with a military doctor, the doctor told Maxcy what he had done was “cannibalism.”

    Maxcy calmly replied, “No, that was survival … that’s what the government trained me to do – survive.”

    As repulsive as it may seem to the average individual, it might do well to withhold judgment, because no one can say, with absolute certainty, what he or she would do in a similar situation.

    Look for more on Maxcy in an upcoming edition of The Reporter.
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway
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