A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People by Carol Rutz Read Free Book Online Page B

underneath, and sat down. The avocado plant was cascading down from the center of the table so no one could see me. Maybe if they didn’t see me it would be true. Maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth.Then I remembered that nothing is as it seems and grownups only pretend to tell the truth. Daddy said I would always be his “Little Girl.”
     
    Luckily momma didn’t forget I was there. She would take time away from the care of my little sister to steal out of the house and sit with me on the porch. It was early morning and the sweet morning dew still lay on the grass. Rays of sunshine were falling from above, warming both my shoulders and my mind as her fingers were entwined in my hair. She worked the brush furiously to create the ringlets that crowned my face. I could feel her breath on my cheek, and her smellwarmed mybelly. It was our morning ritual, our special time. I grasped it to my breast, and held onto the feelings so tightly that it took my breath away. Too soon the boys would be whining for their breakfast and their lunches would need to be made. Yuk, baked bean sandwiches. Glad I didn’t have to go to school yet.
     
    Whenever I return to those days in my mind, I remember a day in August the following year. We are again sitting on the porch, momma and me. My head is in her lap, and we are waiting patiently as the rescue team searches for the body of my two-year-old cousin in the creek behind our house.
     
    It started so innocently with a game of follow the leader. Momma is upstairs checking on my little sister when my older cousin, Norman, has us form a line behind the garage. Holding hands with my brother and myyounger cousin, we follow him to the waters edge. It is a game. We like games! He chooses my younger cousin and starts spinning his little body, till he pushes him over the edge. I watch in horror, frozen like a statue, as he picks up a rock and hits him over the head as he comes up for air. My brother grabs my arm and we start to run, but Norman is too fast. He reaches out, and I soon become the center of a tug of war.
     
    “If you ever tell, I’ll do the same thing to you.”
     
    I believed.
     
    As Eva Mozes Kor, a child survivor of the Mengele Twins experiment said, “I was just a child who grew up fast, because children who have to face life and death situations are no longer children.” 61 For 40 years I placed this memory in a place in my mind where the pain of it could not touch me. Disassociation had become a way of life for me to cope with tragedy. I had no control over it. It was standard operating procedure, my mind’s way of allowing me to stay sane when everything around me was totally insane and out of control. It had also been the means by which the CIA chose to assure my silence and create personas to use in their experiments.
     
    Life was indeed uncertain. No one could understand why I still sucked my thumb or actually fell asleep during naptime in kindergarten. One moment I was watching Howdy Doody, Kookla Fran and Ollie or Mighty Mouse saving the day. The next I was being molested or poked and prodded by some government official. The days of making mud pies and playing store with my friend across the street were overshadowed by these dark sinister days and nights of terror. At times I would feel like an elfin sprite when I was running through the grass barefoot, catching fireflies and making rings and bracelets with them. Other times I wanted to join Buster Brown and go live in that shoe. I yearned for a gramps like Timmy and Lassie’s, and I would imagine that Zorro would come and put his mark right on daddy’s chest for the whole world to see. It never happened.
     
    I started first grade when I was five and a half, and sometime that fall I was playing at my aunt’s when I must have looked very forlorn. She came over and sat beside me on the cement porch rail and asked me,
     
    “What’s the matter, Little Girl?”
     
    That phrase again triggered Little Girl