#this is also my primary evidence for the wife line being a lie

[dick-chugger]

Wadsworth throwing Mr. Green around. If you even care.

[zaelous]

The noble and most ancient House of Black was both a family and a cult. A cult is a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. In the case of House of Black, this philosophy and its subsequent goals were a form of magical eugenics focused on the supremacy of so-called “pure blood.” Establishing these basic principles is important at the outset in order to demonstrate how these beliefs and the House of Black’s implementation of them are what make them not just a family of extreme beliefs but a cult whose practices affected Bellatrix’s sense of identity, self esteem, and motivations, effectively forming her personhood. 

I. PRINCIPLES BY DEFINITION

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged; for example, the reproduction of the intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Negative eugenics aims to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally undesirable. 

Pure-blood supremacists believe that only pure-bloods were real witches and wizards, and were often inclined to consider themselves as the elite of the Magical world; a place in which they believed that Muggle-borns did not belong. More militant subscribers of this philosophy even consider themselves to be akin to royalty. Elitist pure-bloods even believed that it was a sign of weak magic to enjoy non-magical company. Those who are pure-blooded but do not ascribe to supremacist ideologies are considered to be blood traitors and are shunned. 

Shunning can be broken down into behaviours and practices that seek to accomplish either or both of two primary goals:

To modify the behaviour of a member. This approach seeks to influence, encourage, or coerce normative behaviours from members, and may seek to dissuade, provide disincentives for, or to compel avoidance of certain behaviours. Shunning may include disassociating from a member by other members of the community who are in good standing. It may include more antagonistic psychological behaviours. This approach may be seen as either corrective or punitive (or both) by the group membership or leadership, and may also be intended as a deterrent.

To remove or limit the influence of a member (or former member) over other members in a community. This approach may seek to isolate, to discredit, or otherwise dis-empower such a member, often in the context of actions or positions advocated by that member. For groups with defined membership criteria, especially based on key behaviours or ideological precepts, this approach may be seen as limiting damage to the community or its leadership. 

Concerted efforts at influence and control lie at the core of cultic groups, programs, and relationships. Many members, former members, and supporters of cults are not fully aware of the extent to which members may be manipulated, exploited, or even abused. While there is really no standardized diagnostic tool with which one can definitively say whether an organization qualifies as a cult, some social-structural, social-psychological, and interpersonal behavioral patterns can help to assess a particular group or relationship, in this instance the House of Black.

 II. PATTERNS OF CONTROL & DIVISION

 The group displays an excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader, and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law. This is a trait more difficult to illustrate than others, since there is no one individual leader of House Black; however, it is the root of the House Black philosophy that their ideologies and beliefs are passed down generationally, presumably from medieval times (given their family tapestry). We do see a lengthy history of the family’s current patriarch (whoever it is at any given time) enforcing these ideologies on other family members by excommunicating anyone whom they deem to have fallen out of line with the House of Black doctrine. The fact that excommunication from the family is even a thing that exists and that it furthermore is seen as the ultimate form of punishment emphasizes two things:

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. There is no room in the House of Black to politely disagree or hold any sort of discourse on ideals. Even at the tender young age of sixteen, Sirius was summarily blasted off of the family tapestry and considered a traitor by the Black family for expressing his malcontent and running away to the Potters, a blood traitor family. Any member of House Black is obliged to conform to their ideologies or be expelled, which is seen as the worst possible outcome. 

The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave—or even consider leaving—the group. In a normative, healthy family situation, being formally dismissed from the group usually only occurs under dire circumstances and often even then doesn’t fully occur at all. The implementation of characters such as Sirius and Andromeda prove early on that the family’s dogmatic beliefs are non-negotiable and that deviation has consequences. 

The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and control members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion. This might be considered to be a more headcanon-y than explanatory point, given I don’t readily have any examples of shame or guilt being utilized directly, but given that these other points exist and are true within the narrative, it would be impossible for those things to have occurred without the use of shame and guilt to manipulate family members, even in occasions when it isn’t intended to deliberately. The peer pressure aspect of control is an especially pointed aspect of the situation, given that they are a family, having one’s entire family ascribe to certain beliefs and practices makes it a given. 

The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (e.g., members must get permission to date, change jobs, or marry—or leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth). This is a point easily illustrated by again referring to the tapestry blasting incident(s), as it was up to the Black patriarch what should be done about betrayals, and he even further punished those who continued to support Sirius in violation of his ruling. However, it’s also common for House Black to arrange marriages between family members to those families whose ideologies align with their own, and if a suitable match cannot be found, to keep the blood pure by arranging marriages within the family itself. These marital practices tie in with other notable behaviors (elitism, polarization, isolation), but most importantly, they illustrate an aspect of positive eugenics, which is the practice of selective breeding. 

III. GENDER ROLES

The whole point of this excessively lengthy essay is to explain how and why selective breeding is canon and thereby explain my headcanons for Bellatrix’s relationship to her beliefs and her gender and why the two are inherently linked. The entire concept of supremacy and eugenics relies on the continuation of the genetic precepts that the supremacists view to be superior-- that is, there is an inherent obligation within these beliefs to carry on the pureblooded genes and to provide the future generation of supremacists. The brunt of this endeavor obviously falls upon women, as they bear children, but given the patrilineal and patriarchal nature of the family structure (and that of English culture in the 1950s), the implication is that rather than wanting women who can bear these children, the desire is for male heirs to carry on the family name and the family bloodline, which is their most sacred duty. 

Having been born a woman in the House of Black was to have been born with a form of original sin in that Bellatrix had already failed to be a male heir. Her only recompense for this initial transgression is to go on to provide male heirs, especially given that her mother died trying (and failing) to do so. While there is very little personal information available about Cygnus Black, we do know that his wife provided him with three daughters rather than a son, and died giving birth to Narcissa and left him to raise these daughters alone. Without a doubt, Cygnus would have viewed his failure to provide a male heir as a shortcoming, and given that his wife was dead, there was no way for him to vent his resentment on her. This is where we cross over into headcanon territory because I can’t prove anything about who Cygnus Black was as a person from the original text; however, it stands to reason giving the existing evidence and narrative structure (and how his daughters each turned out) that he was not a well man and that subsequently Bellatrix’s childhood was not a healthy or happy one as a result of that. 

As the oldest child, Bella had little in the way of protection from her father’s dictatorship, although she did her best to shield her sisters from it once she had sisters. She always took the brunt of her father’s expectations, and his wrath should those expectations fail to be met. This is why, of all the Black sisters, Bellatrix held her supremacist values and mission the closest to her heart, and why I believe she and Narcissa held such a close relationship despite the onset of Bellatrix’s very obvious descent into madness. I also believe this is the key difference between Bellatrix and Sirius: although they both came from House Black, they grew up to be polar opposites. I think it was Rowling’s intention here to illustrate that no matter where you come from, you choose your own beliefs and destiny and you can choose to be good rather than evil or some shit, but I don’t think it’s necessarily as clear as simply choosing a different set of beliefs. I think that Sirius and Bellatrix were raised in very different conditions that instilled the same beliefs differently, and therefore had a different effect. Then one might point out Andromeda, but there’s a difference there, too-- not only did she have Bella to provide a barrier between her and their father that Bellatrix did not have, but she also experienced love outside of the family, which is a whole other set of variables I won’t begin to get into. Suffice to say that falling in love is an external catalyst which can’t be accounted for, and it certainly didn’t happen to Bellatrix. 

As an adult, Bellatrix would have had a clear duty to take a pureblooded husband and provide him with male heirs. I do have a whole headcanon (which frankly deserves its own post but I digress) that she was first engaged to her Hogwarts sweetheart, but that he died early in the first war before they could be married, and as a result, her father arranged her marriage to Rodolphus Lestrange instead. This was not just to fulfill the whole get-married-have-babies mandate, but also because Bellatrix went mad with grief after her fiancé's death, and it’s really her first tangible, visible detachment from emotional stability. Her father’s solution to simply replace her fiancé might have been fine, had the couple not experienced infertility issues and been unable to produce children. 

Infertility is not so surprising when one takes into account the rampant inbreeding in both the Black and the Lestrange families. Generations of intermarriage in the name of blood purity is guaranteed to give a myriad of health issues, certainly not all of which might be cured through magical means. However, an inability to fulfill her duties as they relate to Bellatrix’s personhood would be, to her, an absolute and unmitigated failure on her part. Fertility issues are already an enormous strain without the added pressures of a bloodline to preserve, but especially given that Andromeda essentially defected from the cause, the responsibility lies solely with Bellatrix and Narcissa, and as the older daughter, the responsibility is once again heavily on Bella. Her inability to conceive disallows her from adhering to her most sacred principles, which Bellatrix views as a failure on her part and results in a definitive rift in her self esteem and identity that she could not repair. She is desperate to be good and pure by the standards in which she was raised, and to fulfill what she views as her destiny, but she is unable to, and this destroys her. 

IV. SYNTHESIS & RELEVANCE

Having been raised into these conditions, Bellatrix was conditioned into holding House Black and its doctrine at the forefront of her being. Because she held these beliefs so firmly and from such a young age, being a pure blooded witch is a part of Bellatrix’s identity and her self esteem. This is why any affront to these beliefs upsets her so much; it is a personal betrayal not just of these ideals but also of her wholly as a person. What made her turn on family members who had been burned off of the Black family tapestry was how personally she took their choice to leave. It was a personal betrayal, it was a publicly humiliating snub by someone who ought to have been on her side. Who did she have to rely on but family? The word family carries with it an expectation that they would die for the name Black and subsequently anyone who bore that name. Betraying the family was the same as a personal betrayal to Bellatrix, and was essentially spitting on everything Bella believed to be the most sacred and important obligations they held. 

These circumstances create the perfect candidate for an offshoot of the pureblood supremacy cult, the Death Eaters. In the context of the House of Black, Lord Voldemort would have been the obvious escalation and clear apotheosis of pureblood supremacist ideals. Since Bellatrix had already been raised in an environment where the ends justifies the means and violence was an acceptable and omnipresent tool (she had ancestors who literally tried to make muggle hunting a legal sport so it’s not a stretch to think that House Black implemented casual violence elsewhere), she was an ideal fit for an extension of that ideology that placed more emphasis on negative eugenics and moving into the extermination of those deemed unworthy of their society. 

V. AZKABAN

Following the conclusion of the First Wizarding War in 1981, Bellatrix was incarcerated at Azkaban at the age of 30, when she still had time to conceive a child. Her fanatical religious devotion for her cause convinced her that she would not be in prison for very long, but as she passed the decade mark, it would have been very clear to Bellatrix that if she were having fertility issues in her twenties, having aged past forty would make it very nearly impossible to get pregnant once the dark lord finally came to rescue them. Perhaps her belief in his infinite power led her to believe that Voldemort could magically fix whatever was the impediment to conception, or perhaps, having long given up on conceiving a child, Bellatrix viewed this failure as a reason to prove herself, a reason that she had to be the most dedicated, the most accomplished of his followers-- because she had failed in all other aspects and this was all she felt she had left to contribute to the pureblooded cause. 

Either way, her spent youth would have clearly marked her failure in what she viewed as perhaps the most important endeavor in life, and one might suggest that her regression to a child-like state of mind following her traumatic incarceration in Azkaban could be an unconscious response to her desire to return to her youth in order to fulfill this expectation of her; or a desire to return to a time when she was not a failure but instead could still be of value to the ideologies in which she was raised and through which she viewed her purpose in life. 

One could also surmise that Bellatrix’s recklessness in battle and her willingness (and possibly eagerness) to die for the cause of her pureblooded messiah might be due to this failure and the hope that at least if she died before the onset of menopause, it could be said that she was murdered before she could fulfill her duty, rather than being accused of having failed at it altogether. It’s also worth mentioning that her father had died while she was in Azkaban, and with his death, she lost any opportunity to finally earn his love and approval. 

[grouchomarxiste-blog1]

Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder: The Fifth Republic and Modernity

I was hesitant on deciding to write about a movie that I’ve only seen once, especially since I saw it in theaters and it’s not accessible anywhere else. I’ve been thinking about this movie since I saw it, which was last Wednesday, so not too long ago. But I told myself that if I’m going to write about this, I might as well do it while it's somewhat fresh in my brain. So here it goes: Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder.

 When I think of South Korea today, I think of K-Pop, skincare, 5G, plastic surgery culture, and a whole bunch of colorful, glamorous things that Bong Joon-Ho sees through. This is the third Bong Joon-Ho I’ve seen so far, and he constantly reminds us that Korea is not that. Class was everywhere in Snowpiercer. Class was everywhere in Parasite. Can I just note how it's interesting that Snowpiercer’s class structure is visible through a literal horizontal setting (the bullet train) while Parasite is vertical (through the levels of the home). One can argue class is everywhere (period) but Memories of Murder does not emphasize class distinctions the way that the other two does. Although there is something to be said about its historical and political significance. Before I give you my analysis, let me give a brief summary.        

In a rural province in 1986, two women were found bound, gagged, raped, and murdered in a field. Chief detective Park is frustrated due to the contamination of evidence, the media, and the severity of the case. Park’s wife tells him about a mentally disabled boy, Kwang-ho, who used to follow one of the victims around before she died. Park and his hot-headed partner, Cho, beat Kwang-ho and secretly record him describing the murder in detail, corresponding to the autopsy’s result. Park’s technique to finding a criminal is by staring at them and looking into their eyes. He thinks that Kwang-ho is the murderer. Seo, a detective from Seoul, comes down to assist Park with the case. He immediately dismisses Kwang-ho as a suspect because his webbed fingers couldn't match the level of sophistication of the other murders. Seo also dismisses the confession as Park and Cho rehearsing the murder with him, so they can close the case quicker. Seo’s more refined detective skills causes him to disagree with Park’s more traditional and laid-back methods. They establish the pattern that the killer only goes after women wearing red on rainy nights. Another officer also realizes that the local radio station gets a request to play a song called “Sad Letter” every rainy night, shortly before the next murder is committed. Park meets with a fortune teller who sells him a gimmick ritual item to use at the scene of the crime. Him and Cho return to one of the many crime scenes where they also find Seo independently investigating. They all hide separately when a man wearing red lingerie pulls out a bra and underwear and begins to masturbate over it. Cho steps on a twig prompting the man to run away. Park, Cho, and Seo chase the man who hides among construction workers. Despite it being unlikely that he is the murder, Park and Cho proceed to torture him.

Seo follows a local schoolgirl’s rumor of a woman who cries on top of the hill near the school. The traumatized woman managed to escape the killer alive but did not see his face, only remembering that he had soft hands. Seo clears the construction worker suspect due to his rough hands. Another night it rains and “Sad Letter” begins to play on the radio. Park and Seo get the station to give them the address of the postcard requesting the song, which brings them to the home of a factory office worker, Hyeon-gyu, with soft hands. Park and Seo listen to Kwang-ho’s confession where they realize that he's speaking as if he witnessed the crime and was describing the scene. They rush to find him at his father’s restaurant where they find Cho drunkenly fighting the patrons who made fun of the police on the television. Kwang-ho runs away and gets hit and killed by a train, before they can question him. They also find semen on a victim and send it to the United States to see if it matches Hyeon-gyu, because Korea doesn't have the forensic technology to test it. The next body is found and Seo realizes it was the schoolgirl who helped him earlier. Frustrated and angry that they haven't found the murderer, he drags Hyeon-gyu to a tunnel getting ready to shoot him. Park stops him carrying the documents from the United States. Seo reads the documents in disbelief, which says that the semen does not match Hyeon-gyu. Park looks him in the eyes but is unsure. He reluctantly lets him go. The movie shifts to 2003 where Park now has a family and has become a rich businessman. Park stops his driver while passing by the field where the murders occurred. Park looks down into a ditch where the first woman was found. He’s interrupted by a schoolgirl who asks him what he's doing to which he responds he’s “just looking.” She says that it's weird because awhile back she saw another man looking down there, and when she asked him why “he said he remembered doing something here, long ago. So he came back to take a look.” He asks her how he looked, to which she simply replies, “ordinary.” Park is visibly shaken by this, to which he turns to the camera and stares.

Ok, so I understand this was by no means a brief summary, but this is a murder mystery, so every moment counts. I don’t even know where to begin. First, I should mention that this is based off of South Korea’s first serial murders, which was unsolved until 2019. I should also say something about the political situation, I left certain things out of my “summary”, mainly the scenes of political unrest which were sprinkled throughout the film. We see scenes where tanks roll into the street, Christian groups protest outside police departments, people casually denouncing the police for their unethical tactics. The more unnerving scenes depict missile sirens going off, where civilians must perform a drill in case of a North Korean attack which includes everyone turning off their lights and hiding in the nearest buildings. Bong doesn’t give much background to the political situation beyond this. Memories of Murdertakes place in 1986, towards the end of the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship. The Fifth Republic of Korea was created after the political instability of the Park Chun-hee dictatorship and was meant to transition Korea into a democracy. Chun orchestrated the coup d’etat that assassinated Park and made him the president, before any elections took place. Under Chun, all political parties were banned besides his own, the Democratic Justice Party, and ruled as a one-party state. Chun continued to squash pro-democracy protests despite nationwide support, until the June Democracy Movement forced Chun to hold elections, which ushered in the democracy of the Sixth Republic in 1988.

This era of repression is represented by the desaturated image of the rural provinces. During the Fifth Republic, the liberalization of the Korean economy expanded the role of major cities like Seoul, while rural areas suffered. Korea became dependent on foreign agriculture and livestock. In the original case, the victims were found in different locations but in the film, Bong places them in the fields. Perhaps the placement of their bodies alludes to the death of the Korean agricultural sector. The film begins in daylight, something we don’t see until the end in 2003. This grim period ends when the film flash forwards to 2003. The absence of Park’s life within the 17-year transformation allegorizes the rapid urbanization which prompted mass migration into major cities. 1988 marked a new era of Korea, not bound by the remnants of authoritarianism but a more liberal, globalized nation.

This urbanization also modernized Korea. Park and Cho’s approach to detective work comes off as backwards, even comical to the audience. We have Cho whose primary method is to beat anyone out of a confession. Park employs numerous techniques like going to a fortune teller, going undercover to bathhouses, and most importantly- looking into the eyes of the suspects. As Tony Montana once said, “the eyes, Chico, they never lie”, a line Park would very much agree with. This contrasts the more scientific Seoul-trained Seo, who trusts that “the documents never lie.” There's much to be said about facts, that Joseph Jonghyun Jeon goes into in his analysis of the movie, but I’m unqualified to summarize. The essential detective story depends on the facts, the desire for truth. Throughout the film, we’re searching for that. As a generation fed on Law and Order, Criminal Minds, CSI, and a whole bunch of crime dramas, we’re well versed with the dos and don'ts of an investigation. While I’m not familiar with Korean crime scene procedures, I’m sure that eating ramen with a suspect, beating them, and literally anything that Park and Cho did, is not ethical. As an audience, I’m sure we all held on to those feelings of hope we received after the pattern was established. Early on we found out that women wearing red were targeted on rainy nights, shortly after “Sad Letter” played on the radio. After that, not much progressed in the investigation. In fact, it was extremely frustrating watching so many women go murdered after that. Although most of us were rooting for the broody Seo to put the investigation on the right path, and find the murderer, he didn’t do much. Yes, his contributions were valuable, but in the end, he did not solve the case. Park and Seo’s relationship represented a dialectical opposition of ideas. Park’s eye contact method couldn’t tell if Hyeon-gyu was the killer, and Seo’s documents were inconclusive. Does Bong think that Korea cannot be exclusively traditional or exclusively modern? That their needs to be a synthesis of the two? I should also note that I am also too unqualified to invoke the Hegelian dialectic.

It almost feels unfair to stop here but I should because I’m impatient and I want to have something posted. Honestly, I could have written so much more. I’d go into police brutality in the Fifth Republic, the violent nature of Korean society, the murder case itself (but let’s be honest, I’m too scared to read into the details at 3 am). I just want to talk about one last scene, the actual last scene. Despite being the scenes of such grisly crimes, towards the end, the field gave me a sense of relief. The warmth of the fields made me feel comfortable, almost nostalgic. Before I forget, Jeon also extensively details the significance of nostalgia and the title, so you should check that out. Back to the fields, they made me comfortable. Have you ever gone to the beach and dipped your body in the water, changed your clothes and gone home? That feeling of wet hair, bits of sand on your body. No matter how great that beach day was, the car ride in that state is an extremely uncomfortable one and all you want is to go home, get in the shower, and wrap up in a blanket and go to sleep. That’s what that last scene did for me, it was me wrapping up in that blanket. But how can you go to sleep? After having a little girl deliver the news that the murderer still lives and remembers his crimes. Park must have spent those 17 years forgetting his failures with the case. Even visiting the crime scene wouldn’t have affected him the way that the universe did when it sent him that girl to taunt him. What really got me was when Park turned to the camera. If you had/have the pleasure of seeing it in theaters like me, Park stares at the audience, which I didn't think much of. Then I remembered that the case was still unsolved in 2003, and there was a chance that the actual murderer was in the audience, and Park was making eye contact with us to see if he was amongst us. And that's what had me fucked up.

Further Reading:

Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. “Memories of Memories: Historicity, Nostalgia, and Archive in Bong Joon-Ho's ‘Memories of Murder.’” Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2011, pp. 75–95., doi:10.1353/cj.2011.0065.

[dramaqueeenamby]

Family Counseling (7)

Family Counseling (5) - Drabble

MASTERLIST

A/N: God, I swear these things keep getting longer and longer. I’m trying to shorten them. Swear, I am. 

Fun Fact: In the comics, Storm put it on T’Challa so good that she actually did cause an earthquake. ;)

One line in here is directly from the comics and it’s a quote from King T himself. I absolutely love combining comic T with MCU T as well as other aspects of the different universes. :) “Her” dress for this chapter as follows: 

I hope I didn’t miss anyone in the tagging! If I did, I apologize! Let me know! I’ll be sure to get you next time!!

Seeing all the love really makes my day! <3

@janellemonaenae | @ruminationsofaraven | @dreamer7black | @hutchj | @onyour-right  | @iamimanim | @groovybbyyy

Words: 4133

“I wish to build a new primary school.” The Queen announced from her seat on the throne, head held high, her voice projected as the eyes of the Taifa Ngao rested solely on her.

“A new school?” The leader of the Mining Tribe spoke up, a middle-aged woman who was dressed in striking red robes to represent her faction. “My queen, are the central schools not already satisfactory?”

“Not for what I intend,” Y/n hinted before she leaned back into the large chair. “It will be an alternative school. For mutants.” She watched as several members of the council shared looks of surprise. “The Wakandan School for Alternative Studies.” Surprised expressions soon turned into hushed whispers and the queen rolled her eyes. “I have already allocated 500 million and found a location not too far from the-“

“With all due respect, my queen,” the leader of the Merchant Tribe, one of the most outspoken members of the council decided to speak out. “Does the king know about this?”

“With all due respect councilwoman,” she matched the woman’s challenging tone of voice. “Since when does the queen, who holds equal power and say as the king, require her husband’s permission to issue a decree?”

“She does not,” Hodari reiterated and crossed his arms. “Since the time of Bashenga.”

“In fact, it was through my suggestion that we separated the current schools into primary and secondary,” Ramonda added her support, earning a nod from Y/N to signal her appreciation.

“I believe our concern, my queen, is that half a billion is quite a substantial amount of money for such a risky venture. Do we even know how many students would attend such a place?”

“Wakanda’s census last year estimated that the country houses approximately 30’000 mutants, half of which are under the age of 18, and in a recent study done only two years ago, mutant children reported feeling out of place in the classroom in comparison to quote on quote normal children.” She said in a bored voice before flashing an artificial smile at the startled face of the leader of the River Tribe who also happened to be Nakia’s father. “I have done my homework.”

A loud yawn suddenly broke the blanket of silence that fell over the room and all eyes turned onto M’Baku. “Are you done?” She shook her head and rubbed her belly. “I mean, I for one think that it a great idea. Perhaps it will also help to send a message of diversity.”

“The crowned Queen of Wakanda is the mutant daughter of a Wakandan diplomat and an unnamed American and Dominican woman.” Nakia’s father continued with his position, surprising everyone with his strong opposition to y/n’s proposal. “For Bast sake, surely you are not suggesting that Wakanda is in need of diversity training?”

“No, perhaps just acceptance.” All eyes turned to the entrance to the throne room as an irritated T’Challa made his presence known.

“Husband…” The queen forced herself not to show her concern at the obvious tension between him and Okoye and Wakabi who accompanied him.

“King T’Challa,” Nakia’s father tone immediately changed as T’Challa approached the throne, W’Kabi, and Okoye taking their respective seats on opposite sides. Y/n went to rise, but he motioned with his hand for her to stay seated. “I meant no disrespect-“

“Speak not to me of respect,” T’Challa’s voice struck his wife to her core, a chilliness to it that she hadn’t heard since-“You've made a mockery of that word.”

For that, the older man had no response.

T’Challa looked around. “The Queen’s decree will be granted as I see no issue nor moral ambiguity that accompanies such a decision.” He looked around the room. “Does anyone else have any objections?” Even if they did, the King’s delivery, the challenging gleam in his eyes and in his voice signified that the topic was no longer up for debate. “Then it is decided.” He turned to Hodari. “Get started on it immediately.”

He gave the Wakandan salute. “Yes, my king.”

T’Challa reached out his hand and helped y/n stand up. “This meeting is over.” The two started to walk out when Okoye called out for Y/N, causing her to turn around. She looked up at her husband.

“A minute?”

He looked at his general, before looking back down at her and leaning to whisper in her ear. “Come to our chambers afterward.”

She swallowed deeply as he allowed his left hand to lightly trail across the exposed span of her back. She nodded softly to acknowledge his demand because it wasn’t a request.

Not even a little.

“Is everything alright, general?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Okoye replied and the queen frowned.

“Excuse me?”

“The king was….different today in training.” She said, clearly being cautious with her words.

“Okoye,” Y/n exhaled. “This is me. I consider you more a friend than anything. Please, speak freely.”

“He fought with a ferocity that was unlike him, a callousness that I typically only see when he is out on the field.” She explained while darting her eyes around to ensure that no one was listening in on their conversation. “He was engaging with the soldiers as though they were foreign enemies.”

Y/n was dejected, quiet as she wrecked her brain trying to figure out what could cause her husband to behave as such. She had an idea, but it was far-fetched and out of his character. She definitely knew that Okoye was telling the truth, not that the fierce warrior had any reason to lie. T’Challa’s caustic disposition was evident from the moment that he entered the throne room.

“I will speak to him.”

“No,” Okoye discouraged. “Just…wait it out. See if he displays any strange behavior with you.” A beat. “Confronting him might only exacerbate the situation.”

The queen nodded and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, Okoye.”

The general saluted her and the two separated as y/n made her way down the hall, again trying to think of what could trigger the behavior that Okoye relayed to her.

If anything, T’Challa had been ecstatic in the past two weeks since Nifa revealed that they were having twins, rectified by the medical team, of course. He’d even gone as far as starting the preparations for the nursery. Ramonda taking the liberties of overseeing the interior designing. He hadn’t questioned her anymore about the attack, and she knew him to know that lack of query didn’t mean that he was not still looking into it, but she did not think that was the cause either as he had been quite busy with trips to America because of missions and such.

Perhaps that was it.

He was stressed, exhausted, drained.

And y/n immediately felt awful. How neglectful could she have been to not see that her husband had been overexerting himself? She’d been so focused on her sessions with Shuri and Erik, planning her pitch for the school to the council, talking with Ramonda about what to expect for the rest of her pregnancy, that she’d failed to see that the man who thought the world of her was in need.

She felt disgusted with herself.

Upon arrival to the doors of their bedroom, she noticed almost instantly that the guards that always stood outside were nowhere to be seen. She looked around, making sure that they were not perhaps surveying the halls but found no sight of them.

That was strange.

“T’Challa,” she called, telepathically opening and shutting the double doors leading to their massive bedroom. “Where are the-“

Before the words could exit her mouth, she was up against the wall, strong firm hands pinning her wrists above her head. Her husband’s lips dominated hers with such pressure, such passion, such aggression that all she could do was release an ethereal moan as his hands soon moved to the back of her dress.

“Do you realize, sthandwa sam” he spoke against her inflamed skin, his hands eager to do away with the barrier that was her gown. “That it has been over a week since I have touched you.” As the mass of expensive and intricate fabric pooled to the ground, he allowed his lustful gaze to rake over her body, the only thing material remaining was that of her undergarments. He brought his hands down to her wide hips, slowly turning her around so that she was facing the wall as he began to unclasp her bra. “That is seven days without hearing the sweet sound of your moans.” As the lace piece also fell to the ground, his right forearms went across her chest while the right hand ever so lightly squeezed on the outer perimeter of her breast.

“T’Challa….”

“168 days without the feel of your glorious thighs wrapped around me.” Her body was on fire, his words incensing fire in her core as his lips left a trail of desire along her collarbone while his other hand started to maneuver its way down her stomach, stopping when he reached his destination.

“T…” She breathed as her back arched when he growled, ripping her underwear from her body.

“Turn around.” He commanded as he backed away watching her slowly turn away.

The queen stood there confident despite being completely naked, breathless from the shock of it all, but 100 percent at ease. Pregnancy was taking its toll on her body, yes. She’d gone up a cup size. Once a B, she was now a full C, potentially a D by the time the children were born. Her hips, always wide, continued to spread. Her thighs, like her hips, continued to spread with each month. And the stretch marks that she’d had since the onset of puberty continued to expand into what she jokingly referred to as the tree of life, but they bothered her not.

Because while she’d always been somewhat insecure about her being a mutant and half Wakandan, her weight, physical appearance, and certainly her status of being melanin strong had never been a concern. Not for her and certainly not for the man who stood before her.

She’d always loved the woman physical reflection of that who she saw in the mirror, before, during, and, she was confident after the pregnancy would be no different.

He reached out, his thumb caressing her chin as he leaned down and spoke into her ear while the other ran over and squeezed her ass cheek. “That is entirely too long, my queen.”

She jumped when he finished his statement by squeezing and slapping her derriere, the impact for sure leaving a bruise to be found later that day.

She backed away from him, walking until the back of her knees hit their bed at which time she carefully sat down, holding the bottom of her stomach. She scooted back on the bed, telepathically grabbing a pillow and moving it so that it was supporting her lower back before she reclined back and spread her legs, running her hands over thighs.

“Then what are you waiting for, my king?”

A groan.

A yelp.

Euphoria.

Perhaps her far-fetched idea was not so far-fetched after all.

+++++++++

Shuri was in her lab, working on a new improvement for her brother’s suit when they brought him in.

“Sup cuz.”

She glared at him out the corner of her eye.

“Leave us.”

Ayo stilled. “Are you sure, princess?”

“We will be fine.” She assured and watched as the vibranium cuffs around Erik’s wrists and ankles are released and she’s left alone with the sarcastic asshole.

“Long time, no see, princess,” Erik smirked, looking around the lab to see that it’s just the two of them. “You sure it was a good idea to send everybody off.”

She chuckled, continuing her work on the vibranium objects on her desk. “You won’t hurt me, Erik.”

He scowled. “What I tell you about that assuming shit, princess?” She suddenly reached over and pressed a button. “What the hell?” He jumped back at the sight of large panther laying calmly beside Shuri.

“I don’t believe you’ve met Pym.” She smiled up with an innocent grin, but Erik could see the insecurity in her brown eyes.

“I thought those damn things had their own room in the palace.” Erik kept his distance. He’d heard about Pym alright, the King’s personal Panther, gifted to him as a child by King T’Chaka. Panthers as a whole, however, were loyal to the royal family.

“They are.” Shuri smiled at Pym before returning her gaze over to Erik. “But I wanted some company.”

“So get a damn dog.”

She smiled, satisfied with the reaction she was receiving while praying to Bast that everything continued to go according to plan. While Erik didn’t know was that Pym was a special case. He was the most notable of all of the Panthers, lashing out at anyone that wasn’t her brother or y/n. It took a lot of favors and sly detective works to get Pym brought to her lab without the king or queen finding out.

He also could not see the vibranium rails that were currently restraining the panther from moving beyond the four corners of where he was currently sitting.

“Naw. I think I’ll keep him.” She shrugged and stood up with her arms crossed. “Now about that apology.”

“Apology?” He scoffed. “Yeah. You got me fucked up.”

Shuri narrowed her eyes. “You know I could have told y/n or even my brother about what you did to me back in California, but I didn’t.”

“You think I give a damn what you tell them?” He rolled his eyes, growing more irritated by the second. “Go on. Keep living in they shadow.”

“I do not-“

“Come on, princess.” He smiled, exposing the gold grills in his mouth. “We both know that-“ She went to slap him, only for him to catch her hand with a bored expression on his face. “Maybe you not that bright after all, Shuri.”

“So you can call me by my name, but I can’t call you by yours?” She challenged with a raise of her brow.”

He said nothing as the two stared at each other, neither willing to back down when he finally conceded. “Look Shuri-“

The ground beneath them started to shake, gradually at first and then harder, before causing both to lose their balance, Shuri going into her workstation.

Erik also fell, but quickly regained his balance and just as quickly as the shaking commenced, it was gone.

She groaned as she looked down to see that she had straightened her arm to brace herself on her workstation and cut the palm of her hand in the process.

“Damn.” She cursed, examining the wound. “What the hell was that?” In all of her years of living in Wakanda, which had been her whole life, she’d never experienced an earthquake.

“Let me see,” Erik instructed, reaching for Shuri’s hand when she yanked her arm away from him.

“I can bandage a cut.” She hissed, turning around to disinfect the wound.

“Princess.”

“And stop freaking calling me-“

“Where did he go?” He cut her off.

She looked over her shoulder. “What?”

He gestured to the side so she turned in the same direction and gasped. “Oh no.”

Pym was gone.

“Can’t you just call for his Mufasa looking ass?” Erik said in a bored tone as Shuri looked around trying to figure out how the hell the Panther got out. She then put two and two together, realizing that her hand must have landed on the bottom of his vibranium cell, thus freeing him.

Damn smartass Panther.

She turned and looked up at Erik.

“We have to find him.” He raised his brow and then narrowed his eyes.

“You can’t control him can you?”

She opened her mouth. “I-that’s none of your business.”

“Okay, good luck with finding him.” He turned to walk away, but she grabbed him by his arm.

“Fine. Walk away and if he finds you, you’ll be his first meal.”

“I’ll just kill his big ass.”

“And my brother will kill you.”

“No, I think he’ll be too busy yelling at your little ass,” Erik said with the biggest smile on his face.

“Please.” Shuri practically begged, hating being in the position that she was in, but she was desperate and she had truly put herself in the situation.

“Well since you asked so nicely,” Erik smirked while rubbing the hair on his chin. “Where to first, princess?”

+++++++++

The queen and king laid in bed, tangled in the sheets, her back pressed up against his as his hand planted firmly on her stomach, feeling their children actively moving around, her hand on top of his.

“Do you remember when you first told me that you had taken up the mantle of Black Panther?”

Her question caught him off guard as she felt his body tense before a vibration from his chest signified a chuckle. “I do, partially because of your reaction.”

She twisted her neck so that she was looking up at him. “I hit you.”

“More than once.”

“Did I?”

“Oh, yes.” He broke out in a small smile from the memory. “You were furious.”

“No.” She pulled her lips together and took a deep breath as she took the extra strength it took to pull herself onto her back. “I was terrified.” She looked over at her husband who tilted his head to the side.

“You doubted my readiness?”

“Never.” She shook her head, grabbing his hand, running her fingers over his knuckles. “I knew you were ready long before your father gave his blessing. I was the one who wasn’t ready because…because my fear back then is the same that it is now….and that is losing the man that I love to the mantle he is forced to take up.”

He leaned up on his elbows, looking down at her with a frown. “The Black Panther does not kill.”

“No, he has not killed.” She corrected, thankful that he understood what she was implying.

“What are you trying to say?” He searched her eyes for the truth.

“T’Challa.” She licked her lips. “I have not seen this kind of aggression in your lovemaking since your father was killed, when you were determined to kill Sergeant Barnes.” He pulled his eyes away from her so she reached up to cup his face. “Whatever it is that you plan to do, stop. Please.”

She’s surprised when he pulls away from her, swinging his legs over the bed, as he starts to pull his clothes back on. “To ask me to sit and do nothing while the man who wishes to see my wife dead is foolish, y/n.”

“I will stay in Wakanda until the twins are born.” She used the palm of her hands to help her sit up, pulling the thin sheet to cover her exposed chest. “No one can get through our borders, T’Challa. He cannot hurt me if he cannot reach me.”

He turned around, his index finger raised as he gradually shook his arm and head. “I will not have you be a prisoner in your own home.”

“But it is my-“

“No!” He shouted, causing his wife to jump back from him lashing out as he did. Rarely did T’Challa lose his temper, but when he did…it was not anything nice. “I am sorry for raising my voice with you.” She froze when she realized he was crouched down in front of her, cupping the side of her face. “But I make no apologies for my actions…I will not lose you, y/n.”

She just stared at him, searching his eyes to see if she could reason with him, if she could get through to him, but she found nothing. The man standing before her was the same man from all those years ago that could only have one thing on his mind:

Murder

Slowly, she pulled herself out of his grasp and laid back down on the bed, her back toward him.

“There is more than one way to lose me, T’Challa.”

+++++++++

“Scar has never killed anybody, right?” Erik asked as he and Shuri continued to search the lab for Pym.

She rolled. “No, he has not. My brother would never allow him to hurt anyone.”

“Then why does he not like you?” Erik challenged.

“It-it’s a long story.”

“Considering we’ve been looking for Simba ass for damn near 45 minutes, I’d say we’ve got time.” Erik sighed with exasperation.

She glared at him before groaning. “I might have thrown a vibranium ball at him when I was a kid, thinking he would catch it. He didn’t and has yet to forgive me.”

Erik looked at her. “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Even the damn animals hold grudges.”

“You should know.” She muttered as Erik looked at her out the corner of his eye.

“No one has ever called me that shit before, aight?” He finally said, shifting his shoulders. She looked over at him with weary eyes. “Not since…not since my pops was murked.”

Shuri was unsure of what to say. She had a feeling that this was Erik’s weird ass way of apologizing, that what he was trying to say was that she was the first person to call him by his birth name in some time, and he didn’t know how to react to that.

But she wasn’t about to put words in his mouth.

“So you just go around grabbing people and throwing them against the walls when they put you in uncomfortable situations?”

He shrugged. “Or kill em’.”

She shivered from his dark delivery, unsure as to whether or not he was toying with her or being serious. She could never tell with Erik and that unnerved her.

“I am sorry.” She blurted, unsure of where the hell it came from, but going with her gut. “For what my father did to yours and for how he left you there. It was…it was wrong. He should have, at the very least, brought you back here. Maybe….maybe things would have turned out differently.”

Erik smiled coyly. “You getting soft on me, princess?”

“No.” She immediately shot down. “You are still a murderous asshole. You’re just a murderous asshole who just so happens to be my cousin.” A beat. “Unfortunate that you cannot pick your family.”

Neither Shuri nor Erik commented on the fact that this was the first time Shuri had acknowledged Erik as being apart of her family.

“Pym?” Shuri’s eyes went wide as she and Erik finally spotted the Panther, only for her stomach to drop when she saw who was standing by the animal. “Oh, shit.”

“Oh, yes.” Y/n spoke with her hand on her hip, the other lightly caressing a relatively docile Pym’s head as he sat at her side.

“Hey sis,” Shuri laughed nervously as she slowly approached the queen before Pym’s low growls ceased her movement. She could hear Erik’s low laughs of amusement, which caused her to turn around and glare before she looked back at her sister-in-law. “I can explain-“

“What the hell were you thinking Shuri?” Y/n demanded before her gaze turned on Erik. “The both of you?”

Erik threw his hands up. “This was all her.”

Shuri hissed. “Snitch.”

“‘I’m used to the stitches.”

“You know that the Panthers are not to leave their room, especially Pym. He’s the most dangerous of them all.” The queen lectured as Shuri dropped her head. “And if you needed him that desperately, at the very least, you should have called me because you know that I can handle him.” A beat. “How did he get out of his cell?’

“The earthquake-“

“What earthquake?” Y/n interrupted Erik.

Shuri frowned. “You did not feel it?” The queen shook her head. “How is that possible? My readings showed that it occurred all throughout Wakanda….unless…..you caused it!” Y/n diverted her eyes to the ground, her cheeks turned red. “What is wrong with you two.

“And ya’ll thought I was gonna destroy Wakanda.” Erik muttered.

The queen regained her composure and looked at the cousins. “I will make a deal with you.”

Erik and Shrui shared knowing looks. “We are listening.”

“Tell no one that I was the cause of the earthquake, and I will not tell your brother about this Pym nonsense.”

Shuri shook her head. “Deal.” She noticed there was uncertainty in the queen’s eyes. “Is everything alright?”

Y/n nodded her head and motioned for the teenager to join her on the side of the room. “I need your help with something.”

“Anything.”

“I-“ The queen cleared her throat and looked Shuri right in the eyes. “I need you to plant a spy cam on your brother’s suit.”

[adambstingus]

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam.

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam.

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of combat, and later that year Mueller found himself assigned to a desk job at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.”

So he headed to law school with the goal of serving his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He led the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover.

And yet, throughout his five-decade career, that year of combat experience with the Marines has loomed large in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines,” he told me in a 2009 interview.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit.

Those divergent paths began with Vietnam, the conflict that tore the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960s. Despite having been educated at an elite private military academy, Donald Trump famously drew five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his feet. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating numerous women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said ­little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.”

His reticence is not unusual for the generation that served on the front lines of a war that the country never really embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d avoided talking about Vietnam until recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long conversation, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.”

Yet for almost all of them—Mueller included—Vietnam marked the primary formative experience of their lives. Nearly 50 years later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, ­PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller first faced large-scale combat in December 1968.

The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marines taught him was to make his bed every day. I’d written a book about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small daily gesture exemplifying follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it—do it,” he told me. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.”

Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls recalled how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little patience for subordinates who questioned his decisions. He expected his orders to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battlefield. In meetings with subordinates, Mueller had a habit of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide: “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.”

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Robert Mueller Likely Knows How This All Ends

Discipline has certainly been a defining feature of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a political era of extreme TMI—marked by rampant White House leaks, Twitter tirades, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-­level officials as quickly as it can appoint new ones—the special counsel’s office has been a locked door. Mueller has remained an impassive cypher: the stoic, silent figure at the center of America’s political gyre. Not once has he spoken publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully chosen team of prosecutors and FBI agents has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on loan from the Justice Department, has essentially had one thing to tell a media horde ravenous for information about the Russia investigation: “No comment.”

If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office.

His investigation is proceeding on multiple fronts. He is digging into Russian information operations carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office indicted 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded the information campaigns. He’s also pursuing those responsible for cyber intrusions, including the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee.

At the same time, Mueller’s investigators are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, an effort that has yielded indictments for tax fraud and conspiracy against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on financial fraud and lying to investigators by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The team is also looking into the numerous contacts between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected figures. And Mueller is questioning witnesses in an effort to establish whether Trump has obstructed justice by trying to quash the investigation itself.

Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Before he became special counsel, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his habits of mind and character were most shaped by his time in Vietnam, a period that is also the least explored chapter of his biography.

This first in-depth account of his year at war is based on multiple interviews with Mueller about his time in combat—conducted before he became special counsel—as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat records, official accounts of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Marines who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They provide the best new window we have into the mind of the man leading the Russia investigation.

Mueller volunteered for the Marines in 1966, right after graduating from Prince­ton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant leading a combat platoon in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller says. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.”

He attended St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classes emphasized Episcopal ideals of virtue and manliness. He was a star on the lacrosse squad and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school team. For college he chose his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966.

The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of conversation among the elite students, who spoke of the war—echoing earlier generations—in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’62 to ’66 was a completely different world than ’67 onwards,” said Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam movement was not on us yet. A year or two later, the campus was transformed.”

On the lacrosse field, Mueller met David Hackett, a classmate and athlete who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, spending his Princeton summers training for the escalating war. “I had one of the finest role models I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the name of David Hackett,” Mueller recalled in a 2013 speech as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not necessarily the best on the team, but he was a determined and a natural leader.”

After he graduated in 1965, Hackett began training to be a Marine, earning top honors in his officer candidate class. After that he shipped out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s eyes, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller decided that when he graduated the following year, he too would enlist in the Marines.

On April 30, 1967, shortly after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese troops who were firing down from bunkers with weapons that included a .50-­caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.”

Hackett located the source of the incoming fire and charged 30 yards across open ground to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Minutes later, as he was moving to help direct a neighboring platoon whose commander had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the assault and encouraging his Marines.”

By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The news only strengthened his resolve to become an infantry officer. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps,” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of Princeton. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

In mid-1966, Mueller underwent his military physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the draft lottery began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He recalls sitting in the waiting room as another candidate, a strapping 6-foot, 280-pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was ruled 4-F—medically unfit for military service. After that it was Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense athletics, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military declared that it would need to heal before he would be allowed to deploy.

In the meantime, he married Ann Cabell Standish—a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence—over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he earned a master’s degree in international relations at New York University.

Once his knee had healed, Mueller went back to the military doctors. In 1967—just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs—Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia.

For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (#12) played on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (#18).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School training class. “He was a cut above,” recalls Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his fraternity brothers into the Marines after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through training with Mueller, remembers Mueller racing another candidate on an obstacle course—and losing. It’s the only time he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural athlete and natural student,” Kellogg says. “I don’t think he had a hard day at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, only one thing he was bad at—and it was a failing that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to come: He received a D in delegation.

During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, the context of the Vietnam War changed dramatically. The bloody Tet Offensive—a series of coordinated, widespread, surprise attacks across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968—stunned America, and with public opinion souring on the conflict, Lyndon Johnson declared he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s training class graduated, Walter Cronkite declared on the CBS Evening News that the war could not be won. “For it seems now more certain than ever,” Cronkite told his millions of viewers on February 27, 1968, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities erupted in riots. Antiwar protests raged. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest barely registered with the officer candidates in Mueller’s class. “I don’t remember anyone having qualms about where we were or what we were doing,” Kellogg says.

That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next assignment: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School.

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death.”

Mueller knew that only the best young officers went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced skills and leadership program for the military’s elite at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spending weeks practicing patrol tactics, assassination missions, attack strategies, and ambushes staged in swamps. But the implications of the assignment were also sobering to the newly minted officer: Many Marines who passed the course were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a job that often came with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

Mueller credits the training he received at Ranger School for his survival in Vietnam. The instructors there had been through jungle combat themselves, and their stories from the front lines taught the candidates how to avoid numerous mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on just two hours of rest a night and a single daily meal. “Ranger School more than anything teaches you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to eat,” Mueller told me. “You learn who you want on point, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.”

After Ranger School, he also attended Airborne School, aka jump school, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the fall of 1968, he was on his way to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation point in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an almost palpable current of dread among the deploying troops.

From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone—the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, established after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of fear, he says “animates your unconscious.”

For American troops, 1968 was the deadliest year of the war, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and fought the battle of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year—roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the war. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans died, 300,000 were wounded, and some 2 million South and North Vietnamese died.

Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same region as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was assigned to H Company—Hotel Company in Marine parlance—part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry unit that traced its origins back to the 1930s.

The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, earning the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling combat took its toll. In the fall of 1967, six weeks of battle reduced the battalion’s 952 Marines to just 300 fit for duty.

During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had seen bitter and bloody fighting that never let up. In April 1968, it fought in the battle of Dai Do, a days-long engagement that killed nearly 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded.

David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, joined the depleted unit just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was decimated,” he says. “They were a skeleton crew. They were haggard, they were beat to death. It was just pitiful.”

By the time Mueller was set to arrive six months later, the unit had rebuilt its ranks as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been tested and emerged stronger. By coincidence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his friend Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were veterans of Dai Do,” Kellogg says. “They were field-sharp.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Second Lieutenant Mueller, 24 years and 3 months old, joined the battalion in November 1968, one of 10 new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy end of the American spear. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the vast majority of casualties were suffered by those who fought in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The war along the demilitarized zone was far different than it was elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary adversary was the North Vietnamese army, not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese troops generally operated in larger units, were better trained, and were more likely to engage in sustained combat rather than melting away after staging an ambush. “We fought regular, hard-core army,” Joel Burgos says. “There were so many of them—and they were really good.”

William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller got off the helicopter in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat—a telltale sign that he was new to the war. “You figured out pretty fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam,” Sparks says. “The humidity just condensed under the raincoat—you were just as wet as you were without it.”

As Mueller walked up from the landing zone, Kellogg—who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon—recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came marching up the hill, I laughed,” Kellogg says. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing vanished into thin air,” Sparks says. He didn’t even get to spend one night.”

Over the coming days, Kellogg passed along some of his wisdom from the field and explained the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne,” he said. “It’s not a movie. Marines tell you something’s up, listen to them.”

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

Today, military units usually train together in the US, deploy together for a set amount of time, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began—and ended—piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of injuries, illness, and individual combat tours. That meant Mueller inherited a unit that mixed combat-­experienced veterans and relative newbies.

A platoon consisted of roughly 40 Marines, typically led by a lieutenant and divided into three squads, each led by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants ran the show—and could make or break a new officer. “You land, and you’re at the mercy of your staff sergeant and your radioman,” Mueller says.

Marines in the field knew to be dubious of new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were derided as Gold Brickers, after the single gold bar that denoted their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense,” says Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad.

Mueller knew his men feared he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was petrified,” he recalls. “They wondered whether the new green lieutenant was going to jeopardize their lives to advance his own career.” Mueller himself was equally terrified of assuming field command.

As he settled in, talk spread about the odd new platoon leader who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast—Ivy League guy from an affluent family. That set off alarms. The affluent guys didn’t go to Vietnam then—and they certainly didn’t end up in a rifle platoon,” says VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talk about ‘Why’s a guy like that out here with us?’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.”

Indeed, none of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past high school. Maranto spent his youth on a small farm in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Motors factory in his home state of Ohio, then joined the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967.

Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at least once; 19-year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam just four months after a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh—and had seen heavy combat much of the year. He’d been hit by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat.

Hotel Company quickly came to understand that its new platoon leader was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he could as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the ambushes, everything,” Maranto says. “He was all about the mission, the mission, the mission.”

Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Search and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, just below DMZ, 24 hours a day,” David Harris says. “We were like bait. It was the same encounter: They’d hit us, we’d hit them, they’d disappear.”

Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the field was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak jacket that had dried blood on it. “We were always low on men,” Colin Campbell says.

Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s records described it as “nomadic.” Its job was to keep the enemy off-kilter and disrupt their supply lines. “You’d march all day, then you’d dig a foxhole and spend all night alternating going on watch,” says Bill White, a Hotel Company veteran. “We were always tired, always hungry, always thirsty. There were no showers.”

In those first weeks, Mueller’s confidence as a leader grew as he won his men’s trust and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his demeanor,” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.”

The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with the qualities that would be familiar to everyone who dealt with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He demanded a great deal and had little patience for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of guy,” White recalls.

Sgt. Michael Padilla (left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario (right), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in relative quiet, providing security for the main military base in the area, a glorified campground known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only organized outposts nearby for Marines, a place for resupply, a shower, and hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his comrades with stories from his own period of R&R: He’d met his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good,” Harris says.

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge.

The strategically important piece of ground, which ran along four hills on the southern edge of the DMZ, had been the scene of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and tank attacks had long since denuded the ridge of vegetation, but the surrounding hillsides and valleys were a jungle of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to establish a perimeter, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle.

As the American units advanced, the North Vietnamese retreated. “They were all pulling back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out,” Sparks says. The Americans could see the signs of past battles all around them. “You’d see shrapnel holes in the trees, bullet holes,” Sparks says.

After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and multiple nights of American bombardment, another unit in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the order to take some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation remains burned into the memories of those who fought in it: December 11, 1968.

None of Mueller’s fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

That morning, after a night of air strikes and artillery volleys meant to weaken the enemy, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack went smoothly at first; they seized the western portions of the ridge without resistance, dodging just a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their way forward, they came into intensive and deadly fire from bunkers and at least three machine guns,” the regiment later reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the midst of a bunker complex. “Having fought their way in, the company found it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fire of the enemy and the problem of carrying their wounded.”

Hotel Company was on a neighboring hill, still eating breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Sparks remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co,” C-rations coffee with cocoa powder and sugar, heated by burning a golf-ball-sized piece of C-4 plastic explosive. (“We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte crap,” he jokes.) They could hear the gunfire across the valley.

“Lieutenant Mueller called, ‘Saddle up, saddle up,’” Sparks says. “He called for first squad—I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo strapped across my chest. I could barely stand up.” Before they could even reach the enemy, they had to fight their way through the thick brush of the valley. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.”

“It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.”

When the platoon finally crested the top of the ridge, they confronted the horror of the battlefield. “There were wounded people everywhere,” Sparks recalls. Mueller ordered everyone to drop their packs and prepare for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the ridge,” he says.

It wasn’t long before the unit came under heavy fire from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that jumped right up and sprayed us with AK-47s,” Sparks says. They returned fire and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, only to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there,” Sparks says.

In the next few minutes, numerous men went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively green lieutenant was able to stay calm while under attack. “He’d been in-country less than a month—most of us had been in-country six, eight months,” Maranto says. “He had remarkable composure, directing fire. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.”

Mueller realized quickly how much trouble the platoon was in. “That day was the second heaviest fire I received in Vietnam,” Harris says. “Lieutenant Mueller was directing traffic, positioning people and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.”

Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a father, was shot in the thigh by a .50-caliber bullet. When Harris saw his wounded friend being hustled out of harm’s way, he was oddly relieved at first. “I saw him and he was alive,” Harris says. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would finally be able to spend some time with his wife and new baby, Harris figured. “You lucky sucker,” he thought. “You’re going home.”

But Harris had misjudged the severity of his friend’s injury. The bullet had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to death before he reached the field hospital. The death devastated Harris, who had traded weapons with Cromwell the night before—Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-14 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-79 grenade launcher. “The next day when we hit the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward,” Harris says. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve only told two people this story.”

The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge raged for hours, with the North Vietnamese fire coming from the surrounding jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple,” Harris says. “The brush was so thick, you had trouble hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t see where you came from.”

As the fighting continued, the Marines atop the ridge began to run low on supplies. “Johnny Liverman threw me a bag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one side of the ridge to the other,” Sparks recalls. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still fighting; then, during one of his runs, he came under more fire. “He got hit right through the head, right when I was looking at him. I got that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-16 and told him I’d be back.”

Sparks and another Marine sheltered behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any protection amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left,” Sparks recalls. He crawled back to Liverman to try to evacuate his friend. “I got him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down,” he says. As he was lying on the ground, he heard a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there—are they dead?”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.”

A few minutes later, Mueller appeared with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slithered Sparks into a bomb crater with Liverman and put a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its guns clattering, to distract the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-10 attack plane overhead dropped smoke grenades to help shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks says, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman.

The deaths mounted. Corporal Agustin Rosario—a 22-year-old father and husband from New York City—was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to safety, was shot again, this time fatally. Rosario, too, died waiting for a medevac helicopter.

Finally, as the hours passed, the Marines forced the North Vietnamese to withdraw. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had quieted. As his commendation for the Bronze Star later read, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.”

As night fell, Hotel and Fox held the ground, and a third company, Golf, was brought forward as additional reinforcement. It was a brutal day for both sides; 13 Americans died and 31 were wounded. “We put a pretty good hurt on them, but not without great cost,” Sparks says. “My closest friends were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.”

As the Americans explored the field around the ridge, they counted seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to seven others killed in the course of the battle. Intelligence reports later revealed that the battle had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had virtually decimated his staff.”

For Mueller, the battle had proved both to him and his men that he could lead. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” Maranto says. “He performed remarkably. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve walked through walls for him.”

That first major exposure to combat—and the loss of Marines under his command—affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there thinking, ‘Did I do everything I could?’” he says. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in shock, a major came up and slapped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, saying, “Good job, Mueller.”

“That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.”

The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole unit. Cromwell’s death hit especially hard; his humor and good nature had knitted the unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He looked after the new guys when they came in,” Bill White recalls. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the death of his best friend was devastating.

White also took Cromwell’s death hard; overcome with grief, he stopped shaving. Mueller confronted him, telling him to refocus on the mission ahead—but ultimately provided more comfort than discipline. “He could’ve given me punishment hours,” White says, “but he never did.”

Robert Mueller receives an award from his regimental commander Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the office of Robert Mueller

Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as leading men in combat and watching them be cut down. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing,” he told me in 2008. The memory of Mutter’s Ridge put everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into perspective. “A lot is going to come your way, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.”

When Mueller finally did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a busy life as a top partner at the law firm WilmerHale. He taught some classes in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he served as the so-called settlement master for the Volkswagen Diesel­gate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment—which required the kind of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving, no-nonsense Marine—the 72-year-old Mueller received a final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the swirling storm set off by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counsel in the Russia investigation. The job—overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department—may only rank as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/11 FBI and after leading those Marines in Vietnam.

Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

In January 1969, after 10 days of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R&R break at Cua Viet, a nearby support base. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of reality was listening to that,” Mueller says.

In the field, they got little news about what was transpiring at home. In fact, later that summer, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon—an event that people around the world watched live on TV. Mueller wouldn’t find out until days afterward. “There was this whole segment of history you missed,” he says.

R&R breaks were also rare opportunities to drink alcohol, though there was never much of it. Campbell says he drank just 15 beers during his 18 months in-country. “I can remember drinking warm beer—Ballantines,” he says. In camp, the men traded magazines like Playboy and mail-­order automotive catalogs, imagining the cars they would soup up when they returned to the States. They passed the time playing rummy or pinochle.

For the most part, Mueller skipped such activities, though he was into the era’s music (Creedence Clearwater Revival was—and is—a particular favorite). “I remember several times walking into a bunker and finding him in a corner with a book,” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.”

Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, finding little contact with the enemy, although plenty of signs of their presence: Hotel Company often radioed in reports of finding fallen bodies and hidden supply caches, and they frequently took incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies.

Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use was a problem, and racial tensions ran high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there,” Maranto says. “When new people rotated in, they brought what was happening in the United States with them.”

Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders—they already felt that the punishment of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that,” they’d reply sharply when ordered to do something they didn’t want to do. “What are you going to do? Send me to Vietnam?”

Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of combat. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat zone was finite, fate pernicious. “If the good Lord turned over a card up there, that was it,” Mueller says.

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a night in his foxhole when he turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-47, right behind him. “He’d gotten inside our perimeter. He had our back,” Campbell says. “Why didn’t he kill me and the other guy in the foxhole?” Campbell shouted, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.”

Mueller was a constant presence in the field, regularly reviewing the code signs and passwords that identified friendly units to one another. “He was quiet and reserved. The planning was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every position was,” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be unusual for him to come out and make sure the fire teams were correctly placed—and that you were awake.”

The men I talked to who served alongside Mueller, men now in their seventies, mostly had strong memories of the type of leader Mueller had been. But many didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their platoon was now the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea,” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in combat that long, you don’t remember names. Faces you remember,” he says.

Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d wondered for years if that guy who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell—you know that’s a familiar name—but you’re so busy with everyday life,” Maranto says.

At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

April 1969 marked a grim American milestone: The Vietnam War’s combat death toll surpassed the 33,629 Americans killed while fighting in Korea. It also brought a new threat to Hotel Company’s area: a set of powerful .50-­caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying planes. Hotel Company—and the battalion’s other units—devoted much of the middle of the month to chasing down the deadly weapons. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were abandoned when they came under direct fire. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Finally, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy guns and forced a retreat, uncovering 10 bunkers and three gun positions.

The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms fire and grenades, they called for air support. An hour later four attack runs hit the North Vietnamese position.

Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s patrols came under similar attack—and the situation quickly became desperate. Sparks, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after recovering from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the ambushed patrol. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio,” he recalls. “We had to pull back.”

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn.

With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as reinforcement. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the platoon advanced. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fire was so intense—the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard—that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t immediately notice. Amid the combat, he looked down and realized an AK-47 round had passed clean through his thigh.

Mueller kept fighting.

“Although seriously wounded during the fire­fight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the platoon came under a heavy volume of enemy fire from its right flank. Skillfully requesting and directing supporting Marine artillery fire on the enemy positions, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that fire superiority was gained over the hostile unit.”

Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Mueller’s days in combat ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller recalls thinking he might at least get a good meal out of the injury on a hospital ship, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where he spent three weeks recovering.

Maranto, who was on R&R when Mueller was wounded, remembers returning to camp and hearing word that their commander had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us,” Maranto says. “When it happened to him, there was a lot of sadness. They enjoyed his company.”

Mueller recovered and returned to active duty in May. Since most Marine officers spent only six months on a combat rotation—and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November—he was sent to serve at command headquarters, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division.

By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his combat tour complete, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he sent off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said years later in a speech. “There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Over the years, a few of his former fellow Marines from Hotel Company recognized Mueller and have watched his career unfold on the national stage over the past two decades. Sparks recalls eating lunch on a July day in 2001 with the news on: “The TV was on behind me. ‘We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller.’ I slowly turned, and I looked, and I thought, ‘Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running joke he’d had with his former commander: “I’d always call him ‘Lieutenant Mew-ler,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s Mul-ler.’”

More recently, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after spending six months in combat with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special counsel investigation unfold and laughed at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the news talking about the distractions getting to him,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a con­tributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/177389887717

[samanthasroberts]

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam.

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam.

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of combat, and later that year Mueller found himself assigned to a desk job at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.”

So he headed to law school with the goal of serving his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He led the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover.

And yet, throughout his five-decade career, that year of combat experience with the Marines has loomed large in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines,” he told me in a 2009 interview.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit.

Those divergent paths began with Vietnam, the conflict that tore the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960s. Despite having been educated at an elite private military academy, Donald Trump famously drew five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his feet. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating numerous women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said ­little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.”

His reticence is not unusual for the generation that served on the front lines of a war that the country never really embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d avoided talking about Vietnam until recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long conversation, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.”

Yet for almost all of them—Mueller included—Vietnam marked the primary formative experience of their lives. Nearly 50 years later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, ­PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller first faced large-scale combat in December 1968.

The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marines taught him was to make his bed every day. I’d written a book about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small daily gesture exemplifying follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it—do it,” he told me. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.”

Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls recalled how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little patience for subordinates who questioned his decisions. He expected his orders to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battlefield. In meetings with subordinates, Mueller had a habit of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide: “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.”

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Discipline has certainly been a defining feature of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a political era of extreme TMI—marked by rampant White House leaks, Twitter tirades, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-­level officials as quickly as it can appoint new ones—the special counsel’s office has been a locked door. Mueller has remained an impassive cypher: the stoic, silent figure at the center of America’s political gyre. Not once has he spoken publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully chosen team of prosecutors and FBI agents has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on loan from the Justice Department, has essentially had one thing to tell a media horde ravenous for information about the Russia investigation: “No comment.”

If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office.

His investigation is proceeding on multiple fronts. He is digging into Russian information operations carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office indicted 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded the information campaigns. He’s also pursuing those responsible for cyber intrusions, including the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee.

At the same time, Mueller’s investigators are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, an effort that has yielded indictments for tax fraud and conspiracy against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on financial fraud and lying to investigators by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The team is also looking into the numerous contacts between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected figures. And Mueller is questioning witnesses in an effort to establish whether Trump has obstructed justice by trying to quash the investigation itself.

Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Before he became special counsel, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his habits of mind and character were most shaped by his time in Vietnam, a period that is also the least explored chapter of his biography.

This first in-depth account of his year at war is based on multiple interviews with Mueller about his time in combat—conducted before he became special counsel—as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat records, official accounts of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Marines who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They provide the best new window we have into the mind of the man leading the Russia investigation.

Mueller volunteered for the Marines in 1966, right after graduating from Prince­ton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant leading a combat platoon in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller says. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.”

He attended St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classes emphasized Episcopal ideals of virtue and manliness. He was a star on the lacrosse squad and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school team. For college he chose his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966.

The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of conversation among the elite students, who spoke of the war—echoing earlier generations—in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’62 to ’66 was a completely different world than ’67 onwards,” said Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam movement was not on us yet. A year or two later, the campus was transformed.”

On the lacrosse field, Mueller met David Hackett, a classmate and athlete who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, spending his Princeton summers training for the escalating war. “I had one of the finest role models I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the name of David Hackett,” Mueller recalled in a 2013 speech as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not necessarily the best on the team, but he was a determined and a natural leader.”

After he graduated in 1965, Hackett began training to be a Marine, earning top honors in his officer candidate class. After that he shipped out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s eyes, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller decided that when he graduated the following year, he too would enlist in the Marines.

On April 30, 1967, shortly after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese troops who were firing down from bunkers with weapons that included a .50-­caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.”

Hackett located the source of the incoming fire and charged 30 yards across open ground to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Minutes later, as he was moving to help direct a neighboring platoon whose commander had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the assault and encouraging his Marines.”

By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The news only strengthened his resolve to become an infantry officer. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps,” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of Princeton. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

In mid-1966, Mueller underwent his military physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the draft lottery began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He recalls sitting in the waiting room as another candidate, a strapping 6-foot, 280-pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was ruled 4-F—medically unfit for military service. After that it was Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense athletics, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military declared that it would need to heal before he would be allowed to deploy.

In the meantime, he married Ann Cabell Standish—a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence—over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he earned a master’s degree in international relations at New York University.

Once his knee had healed, Mueller went back to the military doctors. In 1967—just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs—Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia.

For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (#12) played on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (#18).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School training class. “He was a cut above,” recalls Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his fraternity brothers into the Marines after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through training with Mueller, remembers Mueller racing another candidate on an obstacle course—and losing. It’s the only time he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural athlete and natural student,” Kellogg says. “I don’t think he had a hard day at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, only one thing he was bad at—and it was a failing that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to come: He received a D in delegation.

During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, the context of the Vietnam War changed dramatically. The bloody Tet Offensive—a series of coordinated, widespread, surprise attacks across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968—stunned America, and with public opinion souring on the conflict, Lyndon Johnson declared he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s training class graduated, Walter Cronkite declared on the CBS Evening News that the war could not be won. “For it seems now more certain than ever,” Cronkite told his millions of viewers on February 27, 1968, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities erupted in riots. Antiwar protests raged. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest barely registered with the officer candidates in Mueller’s class. “I don’t remember anyone having qualms about where we were or what we were doing,” Kellogg says.

That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next assignment: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School.

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death.”

Mueller knew that only the best young officers went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced skills and leadership program for the military’s elite at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spending weeks practicing patrol tactics, assassination missions, attack strategies, and ambushes staged in swamps. But the implications of the assignment were also sobering to the newly minted officer: Many Marines who passed the course were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a job that often came with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

Mueller credits the training he received at Ranger School for his survival in Vietnam. The instructors there had been through jungle combat themselves, and their stories from the front lines taught the candidates how to avoid numerous mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on just two hours of rest a night and a single daily meal. “Ranger School more than anything teaches you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to eat,” Mueller told me. “You learn who you want on point, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.”

After Ranger School, he also attended Airborne School, aka jump school, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the fall of 1968, he was on his way to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation point in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an almost palpable current of dread among the deploying troops.

From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone—the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, established after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of fear, he says “animates your unconscious.”

For American troops, 1968 was the deadliest year of the war, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and fought the battle of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year—roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the war. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans died, 300,000 were wounded, and some 2 million South and North Vietnamese died.

Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same region as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was assigned to H Company—Hotel Company in Marine parlance—part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry unit that traced its origins back to the 1930s.

The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, earning the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling combat took its toll. In the fall of 1967, six weeks of battle reduced the battalion’s 952 Marines to just 300 fit for duty.

During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had seen bitter and bloody fighting that never let up. In April 1968, it fought in the battle of Dai Do, a days-long engagement that killed nearly 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded.

David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, joined the depleted unit just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was decimated,” he says. “They were a skeleton crew. They were haggard, they were beat to death. It was just pitiful.”

By the time Mueller was set to arrive six months later, the unit had rebuilt its ranks as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been tested and emerged stronger. By coincidence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his friend Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were veterans of Dai Do,” Kellogg says. “They were field-sharp.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Second Lieutenant Mueller, 24 years and 3 months old, joined the battalion in November 1968, one of 10 new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy end of the American spear. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the vast majority of casualties were suffered by those who fought in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The war along the demilitarized zone was far different than it was elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary adversary was the North Vietnamese army, not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese troops generally operated in larger units, were better trained, and were more likely to engage in sustained combat rather than melting away after staging an ambush. “We fought regular, hard-core army,” Joel Burgos says. “There were so many of them—and they were really good.”

William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller got off the helicopter in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat—a telltale sign that he was new to the war. “You figured out pretty fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam,” Sparks says. “The humidity just condensed under the raincoat—you were just as wet as you were without it.”

As Mueller walked up from the landing zone, Kellogg—who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon—recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came marching up the hill, I laughed,” Kellogg says. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing vanished into thin air,” Sparks says. He didn’t even get to spend one night.”

Over the coming days, Kellogg passed along some of his wisdom from the field and explained the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne,” he said. “It’s not a movie. Marines tell you something’s up, listen to them.”

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

Today, military units usually train together in the US, deploy together for a set amount of time, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began—and ended—piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of injuries, illness, and individual combat tours. That meant Mueller inherited a unit that mixed combat-­experienced veterans and relative newbies.

A platoon consisted of roughly 40 Marines, typically led by a lieutenant and divided into three squads, each led by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants ran the show—and could make or break a new officer. “You land, and you’re at the mercy of your staff sergeant and your radioman,” Mueller says.

Marines in the field knew to be dubious of new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were derided as Gold Brickers, after the single gold bar that denoted their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense,” says Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad.

Mueller knew his men feared he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was petrified,” he recalls. “They wondered whether the new green lieutenant was going to jeopardize their lives to advance his own career.” Mueller himself was equally terrified of assuming field command.

As he settled in, talk spread about the odd new platoon leader who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast—Ivy League guy from an affluent family. That set off alarms. The affluent guys didn’t go to Vietnam then—and they certainly didn’t end up in a rifle platoon,” says VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talk about ‘Why’s a guy like that out here with us?’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.”

Indeed, none of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past high school. Maranto spent his youth on a small farm in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Motors factory in his home state of Ohio, then joined the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967.

Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at least once; 19-year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam just four months after a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh—and had seen heavy combat much of the year. He’d been hit by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat.

Hotel Company quickly came to understand that its new platoon leader was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he could as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the ambushes, everything,” Maranto says. “He was all about the mission, the mission, the mission.”

Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Search and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, just below DMZ, 24 hours a day,” David Harris says. “We were like bait. It was the same encounter: They’d hit us, we’d hit them, they’d disappear.”

Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the field was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak jacket that had dried blood on it. “We were always low on men,” Colin Campbell says.

Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s records described it as “nomadic.” Its job was to keep the enemy off-kilter and disrupt their supply lines. “You’d march all day, then you’d dig a foxhole and spend all night alternating going on watch,” says Bill White, a Hotel Company veteran. “We were always tired, always hungry, always thirsty. There were no showers.”

In those first weeks, Mueller's confidence as a leader grew as he won his men’s trust and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his demeanor,” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.”

The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with the qualities that would be familiar to everyone who dealt with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He demanded a great deal and had little patience for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of guy,” White recalls.

Sgt. Michael Padilla (left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario (right), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in relative quiet, providing security for the main military base in the area, a glorified campground known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only organized outposts nearby for Marines, a place for resupply, a shower, and hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his comrades with stories from his own period of R&R: He’d met his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good,” Harris says.

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge.

The strategically important piece of ground, which ran along four hills on the southern edge of the DMZ, had been the scene of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and tank attacks had long since denuded the ridge of vegetation, but the surrounding hillsides and valleys were a jungle of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to establish a perimeter, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle.

As the American units advanced, the North Vietnamese retreated. “They were all pulling back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out,” Sparks says. The Americans could see the signs of past battles all around them. “You’d see shrapnel holes in the trees, bullet holes,” Sparks says.

After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and multiple nights of American bombardment, another unit in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the order to take some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation remains burned into the memories of those who fought in it: December 11, 1968.

None of Mueller's fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

That morning, after a night of air strikes and artillery volleys meant to weaken the enemy, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack went smoothly at first; they seized the western portions of the ridge without resistance, dodging just a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their way forward, they came into intensive and deadly fire from bunkers and at least three machine guns,” the regiment later reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the midst of a bunker complex. “Having fought their way in, the company found it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fire of the enemy and the problem of carrying their wounded.”

Hotel Company was on a neighboring hill, still eating breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Sparks remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co,” C-rations coffee with cocoa powder and sugar, heated by burning a golf-ball-sized piece of C-4 plastic explosive. (“We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte crap,” he jokes.) They could hear the gunfire across the valley.

“Lieutenant Mueller called, ‘Saddle up, saddle up,’” Sparks says. “He called for first squad—I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo strapped across my chest. I could barely stand up.” Before they could even reach the enemy, they had to fight their way through the thick brush of the valley. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.”

“It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.”

When the platoon finally crested the top of the ridge, they confronted the horror of the battlefield. “There were wounded people everywhere,” Sparks recalls. Mueller ordered everyone to drop their packs and prepare for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the ridge,” he says.

It wasn’t long before the unit came under heavy fire from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that jumped right up and sprayed us with AK-47s,” Sparks says. They returned fire and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, only to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there,” Sparks says.

In the next few minutes, numerous men went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively green lieutenant was able to stay calm while under attack. “He’d been in-country less than a month—most of us had been in-country six, eight months,” Maranto says. “He had remarkable composure, directing fire. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.”

Mueller realized quickly how much trouble the platoon was in. “That day was the second heaviest fire I received in Vietnam,” Harris says. “Lieutenant Mueller was directing traffic, positioning people and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.”

Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a father, was shot in the thigh by a .50-caliber bullet. When Harris saw his wounded friend being hustled out of harm’s way, he was oddly relieved at first. “I saw him and he was alive,” Harris says. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would finally be able to spend some time with his wife and new baby, Harris figured. “You lucky sucker,” he thought. “You’re going home.”

But Harris had misjudged the severity of his friend’s injury. The bullet had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to death before he reached the field hospital. The death devastated Harris, who had traded weapons with Cromwell the night before—Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-14 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-79 grenade launcher. “The next day when we hit the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward,” Harris says. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve only told two people this story.”

The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge raged for hours, with the North Vietnamese fire coming from the surrounding jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple,” Harris says. “The brush was so thick, you had trouble hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t see where you came from.”

As the fighting continued, the Marines atop the ridge began to run low on supplies. “Johnny Liverman threw me a bag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one side of the ridge to the other,” Sparks recalls. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still fighting; then, during one of his runs, he came under more fire. “He got hit right through the head, right when I was looking at him. I got that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-16 and told him I’d be back.”

Sparks and another Marine sheltered behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any protection amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left,” Sparks recalls. He crawled back to Liverman to try to evacuate his friend. “I got him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down,” he says. As he was lying on the ground, he heard a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there—are they dead?”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.”

A few minutes later, Mueller appeared with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slithered Sparks into a bomb crater with Liverman and put a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its guns clattering, to distract the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-10 attack plane overhead dropped smoke grenades to help shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks says, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman.

The deaths mounted. Corporal Agustin Rosario—a 22-year-old father and husband from New York City—was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to safety, was shot again, this time fatally. Rosario, too, died waiting for a medevac helicopter.

Finally, as the hours passed, the Marines forced the North Vietnamese to withdraw. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had quieted. As his commendation for the Bronze Star later read, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.”

As night fell, Hotel and Fox held the ground, and a third company, Golf, was brought forward as additional reinforcement. It was a brutal day for both sides; 13 Americans died and 31 were wounded. “We put a pretty good hurt on them, but not without great cost,” Sparks says. “My closest friends were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.”

As the Americans explored the field around the ridge, they counted seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to seven others killed in the course of the battle. Intelligence reports later revealed that the battle had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had virtually decimated his staff.”

For Mueller, the battle had proved both to him and his men that he could lead. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” Maranto says. “He performed remarkably. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve walked through walls for him.”

That first major exposure to combat—and the loss of Marines under his command—affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there thinking, ‘Did I do everything I could?’” he says. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in shock, a major came up and slapped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, saying, “Good job, Mueller.”

“That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.”

The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole unit. Cromwell’s death hit especially hard; his humor and good nature had knitted the unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He looked after the new guys when they came in,” Bill White recalls. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the death of his best friend was devastating.

White also took Cromwell’s death hard; overcome with grief, he stopped shaving. Mueller confronted him, telling him to refocus on the mission ahead—but ultimately provided more comfort than discipline. “He could’ve given me punishment hours,” White says, “but he never did.”

Robert Mueller receives an award from his regimental commander Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the office of Robert Mueller

Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as leading men in combat and watching them be cut down. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing,” he told me in 2008. The memory of Mutter’s Ridge put everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into perspective. “A lot is going to come your way, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.”

When Mueller finally did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a busy life as a top partner at the law firm WilmerHale. He taught some classes in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he served as the so-called settlement master for the Volkswagen Diesel­gate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment—which required the kind of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving, no-nonsense Marine—the 72-year-old Mueller received a final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the swirling storm set off by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counsel in the Russia investigation. The job—overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department—may only rank as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/11 FBI and after leading those Marines in Vietnam.

Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

In January 1969, after 10 days of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R&R break at Cua Viet, a nearby support base. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of reality was listening to that,” Mueller says.

In the field, they got little news about what was transpiring at home. In fact, later that summer, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon—an event that people around the world watched live on TV. Mueller wouldn’t find out until days afterward. “There was this whole segment of history you missed,” he says.

R&R breaks were also rare opportunities to drink alcohol, though there was never much of it. Campbell says he drank just 15 beers during his 18 months in-country. “I can remember drinking warm beer—Ballantines,” he says. In camp, the men traded magazines like Playboy and mail-­order automotive catalogs, imagining the cars they would soup up when they returned to the States. They passed the time playing rummy or pinochle.

For the most part, Mueller skipped such activities, though he was into the era’s music (Creedence Clearwater Revival was—and is—a particular favorite). “I remember several times walking into a bunker and finding him in a corner with a book,” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.”

Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, finding little contact with the enemy, although plenty of signs of their presence: Hotel Company often radioed in reports of finding fallen bodies and hidden supply caches, and they frequently took incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies.

Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use was a problem, and racial tensions ran high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there,” Maranto says. “When new people rotated in, they brought what was happening in the United States with them.”

Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders—they already felt that the punishment of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that,” they’d reply sharply when ordered to do something they didn’t want to do. “What are you going to do? Send me to Vietnam?”

Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of combat. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat zone was finite, fate pernicious. “If the good Lord turned over a card up there, that was it,” Mueller says.

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a night in his foxhole when he turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-47, right behind him. “He’d gotten inside our perimeter. He had our back,” Campbell says. “Why didn’t he kill me and the other guy in the foxhole?” Campbell shouted, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.”

Mueller was a constant presence in the field, regularly reviewing the code signs and passwords that identified friendly units to one another. “He was quiet and reserved. The planning was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every position was,” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be unusual for him to come out and make sure the fire teams were correctly placed—and that you were awake.”

The men I talked to who served alongside Mueller, men now in their seventies, mostly had strong memories of the type of leader Mueller had been. But many didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their platoon was now the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea,” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in combat that long, you don’t remember names. Faces you remember,” he says.

Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d wondered for years if that guy who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell—you know that’s a familiar name—but you’re so busy with everyday life,” Maranto says.

At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

April 1969 marked a grim American milestone: The Vietnam War’s combat death toll surpassed the 33,629 Americans killed while fighting in Korea. It also brought a new threat to Hotel Company’s area: a set of powerful .50-­caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying planes. Hotel Company—and the battalion’s other units—devoted much of the middle of the month to chasing down the deadly weapons. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were abandoned when they came under direct fire. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Finally, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy guns and forced a retreat, uncovering 10 bunkers and three gun positions.

The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms fire and grenades, they called for air support. An hour later four attack runs hit the North Vietnamese position.

Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s patrols came under similar attack—and the situation quickly became desperate. Sparks, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after recovering from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the ambushed patrol. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio,” he recalls. “We had to pull back.”

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn.

With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as reinforcement. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the platoon advanced. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fire was so intense—the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard—that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t immediately notice. Amid the combat, he looked down and realized an AK-47 round had passed clean through his thigh.

Mueller kept fighting.

“Although seriously wounded during the fire­fight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the platoon came under a heavy volume of enemy fire from its right flank. Skillfully requesting and directing supporting Marine artillery fire on the enemy positions, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that fire superiority was gained over the hostile unit.”

Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Mueller’s days in combat ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller recalls thinking he might at least get a good meal out of the injury on a hospital ship, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where he spent three weeks recovering.

Maranto, who was on R&R when Mueller was wounded, remembers returning to camp and hearing word that their commander had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us,” Maranto says. “When it happened to him, there was a lot of sadness. They enjoyed his company.”

Mueller recovered and returned to active duty in May. Since most Marine officers spent only six months on a combat rotation—and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November—he was sent to serve at command headquarters, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division.

By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his combat tour complete, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he sent off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said years later in a speech. “There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Over the years, a few of his former fellow Marines from Hotel Company recognized Mueller and have watched his career unfold on the national stage over the past two decades. Sparks recalls eating lunch on a July day in 2001 with the news on: “The TV was on behind me. ‘We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller.’ I slowly turned, and I looked, and I thought, ‘Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running joke he’d had with his former commander: “I’d always call him ‘Lieutenant Mew-ler,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s Mul-ler.’”

More recently, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after spending six months in combat with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special counsel investigation unfold and laughed at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the news talking about the distractions getting to him,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a con­tributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.

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Source: http://allofbeer.com/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

[allofbeercom]

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam.

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam.

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of combat, and later that year Mueller found himself assigned to a desk job at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.”

So he headed to law school with the goal of serving his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He led the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover.

And yet, throughout his five-decade career, that year of combat experience with the Marines has loomed large in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines,” he told me in a 2009 interview.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit.

Those divergent paths began with Vietnam, the conflict that tore the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960s. Despite having been educated at an elite private military academy, Donald Trump famously drew five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his feet. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating numerous women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said ­little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.”

His reticence is not unusual for the generation that served on the front lines of a war that the country never really embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d avoided talking about Vietnam until recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long conversation, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.”

Yet for almost all of them—Mueller included—Vietnam marked the primary formative experience of their lives. Nearly 50 years later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, ­PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller first faced large-scale combat in December 1968.

The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marines taught him was to make his bed every day. I’d written a book about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small daily gesture exemplifying follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it—do it,” he told me. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.”

Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls recalled how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little patience for subordinates who questioned his decisions. He expected his orders to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battlefield. In meetings with subordinates, Mueller had a habit of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide: “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.”

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Robert Mueller Likely Knows How This All Ends

Discipline has certainly been a defining feature of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a political era of extreme TMI—marked by rampant White House leaks, Twitter tirades, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-­level officials as quickly as it can appoint new ones—the special counsel’s office has been a locked door. Mueller has remained an impassive cypher: the stoic, silent figure at the center of America’s political gyre. Not once has he spoken publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully chosen team of prosecutors and FBI agents has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on loan from the Justice Department, has essentially had one thing to tell a media horde ravenous for information about the Russia investigation: “No comment.”

If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office.

His investigation is proceeding on multiple fronts. He is digging into Russian information operations carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office indicted 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded the information campaigns. He’s also pursuing those responsible for cyber intrusions, including the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee.

At the same time, Mueller’s investigators are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, an effort that has yielded indictments for tax fraud and conspiracy against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on financial fraud and lying to investigators by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The team is also looking into the numerous contacts between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected figures. And Mueller is questioning witnesses in an effort to establish whether Trump has obstructed justice by trying to quash the investigation itself.

Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Before he became special counsel, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his habits of mind and character were most shaped by his time in Vietnam, a period that is also the least explored chapter of his biography.

This first in-depth account of his year at war is based on multiple interviews with Mueller about his time in combat—conducted before he became special counsel—as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat records, official accounts of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Marines who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They provide the best new window we have into the mind of the man leading the Russia investigation.

Mueller volunteered for the Marines in 1966, right after graduating from Prince­ton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant leading a combat platoon in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller says. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.”

He attended St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classes emphasized Episcopal ideals of virtue and manliness. He was a star on the lacrosse squad and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school team. For college he chose his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966.

The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of conversation among the elite students, who spoke of the war—echoing earlier generations—in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’62 to ’66 was a completely different world than ’67 onwards,” said Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam movement was not on us yet. A year or two later, the campus was transformed.”

On the lacrosse field, Mueller met David Hackett, a classmate and athlete who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, spending his Princeton summers training for the escalating war. “I had one of the finest role models I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the name of David Hackett,” Mueller recalled in a 2013 speech as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not necessarily the best on the team, but he was a determined and a natural leader.”

After he graduated in 1965, Hackett began training to be a Marine, earning top honors in his officer candidate class. After that he shipped out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s eyes, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller decided that when he graduated the following year, he too would enlist in the Marines.

On April 30, 1967, shortly after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese troops who were firing down from bunkers with weapons that included a .50-­caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.”

Hackett located the source of the incoming fire and charged 30 yards across open ground to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Minutes later, as he was moving to help direct a neighboring platoon whose commander had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the assault and encouraging his Marines.”

By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The news only strengthened his resolve to become an infantry officer. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps,” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of Princeton. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

In mid-1966, Mueller underwent his military physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the draft lottery began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He recalls sitting in the waiting room as another candidate, a strapping 6-foot, 280-pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was ruled 4-F—medically unfit for military service. After that it was Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense athletics, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military declared that it would need to heal before he would be allowed to deploy.

In the meantime, he married Ann Cabell Standish—a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence—over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he earned a master’s degree in international relations at New York University.

Once his knee had healed, Mueller went back to the military doctors. In 1967—just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs—Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia.

For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (#12) played on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (#18).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School training class. “He was a cut above,” recalls Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his fraternity brothers into the Marines after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through training with Mueller, remembers Mueller racing another candidate on an obstacle course—and losing. It’s the only time he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural athlete and natural student,” Kellogg says. “I don’t think he had a hard day at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, only one thing he was bad at—and it was a failing that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to come: He received a D in delegation.

During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, the context of the Vietnam War changed dramatically. The bloody Tet Offensive—a series of coordinated, widespread, surprise attacks across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968—stunned America, and with public opinion souring on the conflict, Lyndon Johnson declared he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s training class graduated, Walter Cronkite declared on the CBS Evening News that the war could not be won. “For it seems now more certain than ever,” Cronkite told his millions of viewers on February 27, 1968, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities erupted in riots. Antiwar protests raged. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest barely registered with the officer candidates in Mueller’s class. “I don’t remember anyone having qualms about where we were or what we were doing,” Kellogg says.

That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next assignment: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School.

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death.”

Mueller knew that only the best young officers went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced skills and leadership program for the military’s elite at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spending weeks practicing patrol tactics, assassination missions, attack strategies, and ambushes staged in swamps. But the implications of the assignment were also sobering to the newly minted officer: Many Marines who passed the course were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a job that often came with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

Mueller credits the training he received at Ranger School for his survival in Vietnam. The instructors there had been through jungle combat themselves, and their stories from the front lines taught the candidates how to avoid numerous mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on just two hours of rest a night and a single daily meal. “Ranger School more than anything teaches you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to eat,” Mueller told me. “You learn who you want on point, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.”

After Ranger School, he also attended Airborne School, aka jump school, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the fall of 1968, he was on his way to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation point in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an almost palpable current of dread among the deploying troops.

From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone—the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, established after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of fear, he says “animates your unconscious.”

For American troops, 1968 was the deadliest year of the war, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and fought the battle of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year—roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the war. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans died, 300,000 were wounded, and some 2 million South and North Vietnamese died.

Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same region as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was assigned to H Company—Hotel Company in Marine parlance—part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry unit that traced its origins back to the 1930s.

The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, earning the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling combat took its toll. In the fall of 1967, six weeks of battle reduced the battalion’s 952 Marines to just 300 fit for duty.

During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had seen bitter and bloody fighting that never let up. In April 1968, it fought in the battle of Dai Do, a days-long engagement that killed nearly 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded.

David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, joined the depleted unit just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was decimated,” he says. “They were a skeleton crew. They were haggard, they were beat to death. It was just pitiful.”

By the time Mueller was set to arrive six months later, the unit had rebuilt its ranks as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been tested and emerged stronger. By coincidence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his friend Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were veterans of Dai Do,” Kellogg says. “They were field-sharp.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Second Lieutenant Mueller, 24 years and 3 months old, joined the battalion in November 1968, one of 10 new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy end of the American spear. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the vast majority of casualties were suffered by those who fought in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The war along the demilitarized zone was far different than it was elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary adversary was the North Vietnamese army, not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese troops generally operated in larger units, were better trained, and were more likely to engage in sustained combat rather than melting away after staging an ambush. “We fought regular, hard-core army,” Joel Burgos says. “There were so many of them—and they were really good.”

William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller got off the helicopter in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat—a telltale sign that he was new to the war. “You figured out pretty fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam,” Sparks says. “The humidity just condensed under the raincoat—you were just as wet as you were without it.”

As Mueller walked up from the landing zone, Kellogg—who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon—recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came marching up the hill, I laughed,” Kellogg says. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing vanished into thin air,” Sparks says. He didn’t even get to spend one night.”

Over the coming days, Kellogg passed along some of his wisdom from the field and explained the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne,” he said. “It’s not a movie. Marines tell you something’s up, listen to them.”

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

Today, military units usually train together in the US, deploy together for a set amount of time, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began—and ended—piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of injuries, illness, and individual combat tours. That meant Mueller inherited a unit that mixed combat-­experienced veterans and relative newbies.

A platoon consisted of roughly 40 Marines, typically led by a lieutenant and divided into three squads, each led by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants ran the show—and could make or break a new officer. “You land, and you’re at the mercy of your staff sergeant and your radioman,” Mueller says.

Marines in the field knew to be dubious of new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were derided as Gold Brickers, after the single gold bar that denoted their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense,” says Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad.

Mueller knew his men feared he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was petrified,” he recalls. “They wondered whether the new green lieutenant was going to jeopardize their lives to advance his own career.” Mueller himself was equally terrified of assuming field command.

As he settled in, talk spread about the odd new platoon leader who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast—Ivy League guy from an affluent family. That set off alarms. The affluent guys didn’t go to Vietnam then—and they certainly didn’t end up in a rifle platoon,” says VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talk about ‘Why’s a guy like that out here with us?’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.”

Indeed, none of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past high school. Maranto spent his youth on a small farm in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Motors factory in his home state of Ohio, then joined the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967.

Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at least once; 19-year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam just four months after a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh—and had seen heavy combat much of the year. He’d been hit by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat.

Hotel Company quickly came to understand that its new platoon leader was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he could as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the ambushes, everything,” Maranto says. “He was all about the mission, the mission, the mission.”

Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Search and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, just below DMZ, 24 hours a day,” David Harris says. “We were like bait. It was the same encounter: They’d hit us, we’d hit them, they’d disappear.”

Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the field was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak jacket that had dried blood on it. “We were always low on men,” Colin Campbell says.

Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s records described it as “nomadic.” Its job was to keep the enemy off-kilter and disrupt their supply lines. “You’d march all day, then you’d dig a foxhole and spend all night alternating going on watch,” says Bill White, a Hotel Company veteran. “We were always tired, always hungry, always thirsty. There were no showers.”

In those first weeks, Mueller's confidence as a leader grew as he won his men’s trust and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his demeanor,” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.”

The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with the qualities that would be familiar to everyone who dealt with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He demanded a great deal and had little patience for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of guy,” White recalls.

Sgt. Michael Padilla (left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario (right), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in relative quiet, providing security for the main military base in the area, a glorified campground known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only organized outposts nearby for Marines, a place for resupply, a shower, and hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his comrades with stories from his own period of R&R: He’d met his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good,” Harris says.

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge.

The strategically important piece of ground, which ran along four hills on the southern edge of the DMZ, had been the scene of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and tank attacks had long since denuded the ridge of vegetation, but the surrounding hillsides and valleys were a jungle of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to establish a perimeter, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle.

As the American units advanced, the North Vietnamese retreated. “They were all pulling back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out,” Sparks says. The Americans could see the signs of past battles all around them. “You’d see shrapnel holes in the trees, bullet holes,” Sparks says.

After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and multiple nights of American bombardment, another unit in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the order to take some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation remains burned into the memories of those who fought in it: December 11, 1968.

None of Mueller's fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

That morning, after a night of air strikes and artillery volleys meant to weaken the enemy, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack went smoothly at first; they seized the western portions of the ridge without resistance, dodging just a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their way forward, they came into intensive and deadly fire from bunkers and at least three machine guns,” the regiment later reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the midst of a bunker complex. “Having fought their way in, the company found it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fire of the enemy and the problem of carrying their wounded.”

Hotel Company was on a neighboring hill, still eating breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Sparks remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co,” C-rations coffee with cocoa powder and sugar, heated by burning a golf-ball-sized piece of C-4 plastic explosive. (“We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte crap,” he jokes.) They could hear the gunfire across the valley.

“Lieutenant Mueller called, ‘Saddle up, saddle up,’” Sparks says. “He called for first squad—I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo strapped across my chest. I could barely stand up.” Before they could even reach the enemy, they had to fight their way through the thick brush of the valley. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.”

“It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.”

When the platoon finally crested the top of the ridge, they confronted the horror of the battlefield. “There were wounded people everywhere,” Sparks recalls. Mueller ordered everyone to drop their packs and prepare for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the ridge,” he says.

It wasn’t long before the unit came under heavy fire from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that jumped right up and sprayed us with AK-47s,” Sparks says. They returned fire and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, only to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there,” Sparks says.

In the next few minutes, numerous men went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively green lieutenant was able to stay calm while under attack. “He’d been in-country less than a month—most of us had been in-country six, eight months,” Maranto says. “He had remarkable composure, directing fire. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.”

Mueller realized quickly how much trouble the platoon was in. “That day was the second heaviest fire I received in Vietnam,” Harris says. “Lieutenant Mueller was directing traffic, positioning people and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.”

Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a father, was shot in the thigh by a .50-caliber bullet. When Harris saw his wounded friend being hustled out of harm’s way, he was oddly relieved at first. “I saw him and he was alive,” Harris says. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would finally be able to spend some time with his wife and new baby, Harris figured. “You lucky sucker,” he thought. “You’re going home.”

But Harris had misjudged the severity of his friend’s injury. The bullet had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to death before he reached the field hospital. The death devastated Harris, who had traded weapons with Cromwell the night before—Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-14 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-79 grenade launcher. “The next day when we hit the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward,” Harris says. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve only told two people this story.”

The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge raged for hours, with the North Vietnamese fire coming from the surrounding jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple,” Harris says. “The brush was so thick, you had trouble hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t see where you came from.”

As the fighting continued, the Marines atop the ridge began to run low on supplies. “Johnny Liverman threw me a bag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one side of the ridge to the other,” Sparks recalls. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still fighting; then, during one of his runs, he came under more fire. “He got hit right through the head, right when I was looking at him. I got that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-16 and told him I’d be back.”

Sparks and another Marine sheltered behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any protection amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left,” Sparks recalls. He crawled back to Liverman to try to evacuate his friend. “I got him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down,” he says. As he was lying on the ground, he heard a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there—are they dead?”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.”

A few minutes later, Mueller appeared with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slithered Sparks into a bomb crater with Liverman and put a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its guns clattering, to distract the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-10 attack plane overhead dropped smoke grenades to help shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks says, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman.

The deaths mounted. Corporal Agustin Rosario—a 22-year-old father and husband from New York City—was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to safety, was shot again, this time fatally. Rosario, too, died waiting for a medevac helicopter.

Finally, as the hours passed, the Marines forced the North Vietnamese to withdraw. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had quieted. As his commendation for the Bronze Star later read, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.”

As night fell, Hotel and Fox held the ground, and a third company, Golf, was brought forward as additional reinforcement. It was a brutal day for both sides; 13 Americans died and 31 were wounded. “We put a pretty good hurt on them, but not without great cost,” Sparks says. “My closest friends were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.”

As the Americans explored the field around the ridge, they counted seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to seven others killed in the course of the battle. Intelligence reports later revealed that the battle had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had virtually decimated his staff.”

For Mueller, the battle had proved both to him and his men that he could lead. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” Maranto says. “He performed remarkably. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve walked through walls for him.”

That first major exposure to combat—and the loss of Marines under his command—affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there thinking, ‘Did I do everything I could?’” he says. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in shock, a major came up and slapped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, saying, “Good job, Mueller.”

“That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.”

The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole unit. Cromwell’s death hit especially hard; his humor and good nature had knitted the unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He looked after the new guys when they came in,” Bill White recalls. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the death of his best friend was devastating.

White also took Cromwell’s death hard; overcome with grief, he stopped shaving. Mueller confronted him, telling him to refocus on the mission ahead—but ultimately provided more comfort than discipline. “He could’ve given me punishment hours,” White says, “but he never did.”

Robert Mueller receives an award from his regimental commander Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the office of Robert Mueller

Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as leading men in combat and watching them be cut down. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing,” he told me in 2008. The memory of Mutter’s Ridge put everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into perspective. “A lot is going to come your way, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.”

When Mueller finally did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a busy life as a top partner at the law firm WilmerHale. He taught some classes in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he served as the so-called settlement master for the Volkswagen Diesel­gate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment—which required the kind of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving, no-nonsense Marine—the 72-year-old Mueller received a final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the swirling storm set off by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counsel in the Russia investigation. The job—overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department—may only rank as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/11 FBI and after leading those Marines in Vietnam.

Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

In January 1969, after 10 days of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R&R break at Cua Viet, a nearby support base. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of reality was listening to that,” Mueller says.

In the field, they got little news about what was transpiring at home. In fact, later that summer, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon—an event that people around the world watched live on TV. Mueller wouldn’t find out until days afterward. “There was this whole segment of history you missed,” he says.

R&R breaks were also rare opportunities to drink alcohol, though there was never much of it. Campbell says he drank just 15 beers during his 18 months in-country. “I can remember drinking warm beer—Ballantines,” he says. In camp, the men traded magazines like Playboy and mail-­order automotive catalogs, imagining the cars they would soup up when they returned to the States. They passed the time playing rummy or pinochle.

For the most part, Mueller skipped such activities, though he was into the era’s music (Creedence Clearwater Revival was—and is—a particular favorite). “I remember several times walking into a bunker and finding him in a corner with a book,” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.”

Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, finding little contact with the enemy, although plenty of signs of their presence: Hotel Company often radioed in reports of finding fallen bodies and hidden supply caches, and they frequently took incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies.

Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use was a problem, and racial tensions ran high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there,” Maranto says. “When new people rotated in, they brought what was happening in the United States with them.”

Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders—they already felt that the punishment of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that,” they’d reply sharply when ordered to do something they didn’t want to do. “What are you going to do? Send me to Vietnam?”

Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of combat. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat zone was finite, fate pernicious. “If the good Lord turned over a card up there, that was it,” Mueller says.

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a night in his foxhole when he turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-47, right behind him. “He’d gotten inside our perimeter. He had our back,” Campbell says. “Why didn’t he kill me and the other guy in the foxhole?” Campbell shouted, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.”

Mueller was a constant presence in the field, regularly reviewing the code signs and passwords that identified friendly units to one another. “He was quiet and reserved. The planning was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every position was,” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be unusual for him to come out and make sure the fire teams were correctly placed—and that you were awake.”

The men I talked to who served alongside Mueller, men now in their seventies, mostly had strong memories of the type of leader Mueller had been. But many didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their platoon was now the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea,” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in combat that long, you don’t remember names. Faces you remember,” he says.

Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d wondered for years if that guy who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell—you know that’s a familiar name—but you’re so busy with everyday life,” Maranto says.

At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

April 1969 marked a grim American milestone: The Vietnam War’s combat death toll surpassed the 33,629 Americans killed while fighting in Korea. It also brought a new threat to Hotel Company’s area: a set of powerful .50-­caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying planes. Hotel Company—and the battalion’s other units—devoted much of the middle of the month to chasing down the deadly weapons. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were abandoned when they came under direct fire. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Finally, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy guns and forced a retreat, uncovering 10 bunkers and three gun positions.

The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms fire and grenades, they called for air support. An hour later four attack runs hit the North Vietnamese position.

Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s patrols came under similar attack—and the situation quickly became desperate. Sparks, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after recovering from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the ambushed patrol. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio,” he recalls. “We had to pull back.”

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn.

With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as reinforcement. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the platoon advanced. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fire was so intense—the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard—that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t immediately notice. Amid the combat, he looked down and realized an AK-47 round had passed clean through his thigh.

Mueller kept fighting.

“Although seriously wounded during the fire­fight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the platoon came under a heavy volume of enemy fire from its right flank. Skillfully requesting and directing supporting Marine artillery fire on the enemy positions, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that fire superiority was gained over the hostile unit.”

Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Mueller’s days in combat ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller recalls thinking he might at least get a good meal out of the injury on a hospital ship, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where he spent three weeks recovering.

Maranto, who was on R&R when Mueller was wounded, remembers returning to camp and hearing word that their commander had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us,” Maranto says. “When it happened to him, there was a lot of sadness. They enjoyed his company.”

Mueller recovered and returned to active duty in May. Since most Marine officers spent only six months on a combat rotation—and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November—he was sent to serve at command headquarters, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division.

By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his combat tour complete, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he sent off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said years later in a speech. “There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Over the years, a few of his former fellow Marines from Hotel Company recognized Mueller and have watched his career unfold on the national stage over the past two decades. Sparks recalls eating lunch on a July day in 2001 with the news on: “The TV was on behind me. ‘We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller.’ I slowly turned, and I looked, and I thought, ‘Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running joke he’d had with his former commander: “I’d always call him ‘Lieutenant Mew-ler,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s Mul-ler.’”

More recently, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after spending six months in combat with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special counsel investigation unfold and laughed at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the news talking about the distractions getting to him,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a con­tributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

[automatismoateo]

Alone, living a lie, and needing to vent. via /r/atheism

Submitted November 03, 2017 at 10:42PM by enormousopossum (Via reddit http://ift.tt/2h3zvJ6) Alone, living a lie, and needing to vent.

TLDR: I’m a former Christian that no longer believes in any God or religion. I am alone in my life with this, cannot tell my parents or my wife and family, and struggle daily being crushed in the middle of the weight of what I now believe and the false face I put on for what I used to believe.

I was raised as a Southern Baptist in a small southern town. I went to church most of my life, growing up believing in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I was “saved” a couple of separate times, believing both times to be “it” and that I was “closer to God.” I am in my mid 40’s now, and over the past decade or so I have come to realize it’s all horse shit.

My parents and the vast majority of my family still go to church every week. We have regular blessings at meals and gatherings. Conversations sometimes still turn toward Christianity and religion, among all the other usual subjects like college football, NASCAR, politics, family stories, etc. And I sit and smile and act like all is normal with myself. During prayers, I just stare at the floor, pretending to bow my head to a nonexistent God, not wanting them to realize I no longer believe the way they do. My parents are getting older now, and it worries the hell out of me that they probably don’t have very many years left. It would break their hearts if they knew I gave up on God and Christ, so I just pretend and don’t say anything to the contrary to them. They will die believing what they believe now. All their siblings are dead, and I know they look forward to the time of reunion as they believe it’s coming. I don’t have heart to tell them I simply believe all my beloved aunts and uncles are just gone, that there is no such thing as a soul, that I believe their deaths were the true end to their existence.

My wife and stepchildren also believe the same, as far as I know. Religion isn’t a terribly popular subject around my household. But I met my wife decades ago in church and was there when she was saved. My stepchildren were raised as Baptists, too, so I have no reason to think they have changed their minds. Many of my coworkers speak regularly of church and Christianity. The majority of my friends are Christians as well.

I am alone.

I have no one to talk about this with, save one friend at work whom I confided in briefly. And even then the subject was uncomfortable to bring up. I live every day hiding the feelings of, fuck, I don’t even know how to word it. Regret? Abandonment? Betrayal? I’m just so fucking pissed at whoever started all this shit centuries ago. It’s all bullshit. There is no God. There is no higher power, save for what the universe itself is. We’re just a bunch of semi-ordered subatomic particles gathered together in a way that brings about life and consciousness. But there’s no soul; it’s just a bunch of chemical reactions that create the perception of thought and feelings. There’s no meaning to life. There is no afterlife. There is no God, no Heaven, no Hell, ultimately no good and bad other than what we make it out to be. The only proof we have of anything is what we can see and hear and touch, and God is nowhere to be found.

And I’m so fucking pissed about it some days. Tithing. Holy shit. I bought into that shit for over a decade of work out of college. I have a good job, and I know I gave over $50,000 to my church over the years. And I was happy with it, mostly. I thought my church was doing good with the money, helping the neighborhood and giving to some charities and shit. But looking back, they mostly fixed up the buildings and paid a pastor a little too much for a part time salary, all so we could go to church and feel better about ourselves and stuff our righteous faces and look down upon the sin in the world. Fuck that noise.

And the business deal I made. Do I regret the hell out of that. In retrospect, it was nothing but my own stupidity. A close friend of mine wanted to start a business and asked me to be the primary investor. I prayed, boy did I pray. And God told me to do it. So I did it. And the business floundered, and I prayed and gave more and more money till I had no more to give. My friend put his entire financial ass on the line, too, and we lost our asses over it. Me to the tune of over $160,000, and him even more.

And the time I spent dealing with religion, praying, reading the Bible, going to church, staying late for choir practice, on and on and on. So much time wasted on something so fruitless and empty. I want my time back. I want my money back. I want my peace of mind back.

That’s not to say I dislike the people at the church I grew up in. I love them. They’re wonderful people and many of them would give the literal shirt of their back to help someone out. I met my wife in that church. I made many friends in that church and others.

But for what, ultimately? To feel good about ourselves? To annoy the fuck out of people that want nothing to do with religion? To sing praises and waste time worshiping a nonexistent God? To make some televangelists rich at the expense of health and well-being of the gullible folks out there?

So much time and money wasted. I could have put my time toward learning something useful. I could have kept all my money and been debt free instead of having a mortgage till I’m 65 and driving a shit-box for the rest of my days.

Goddamn, that was a shotgun of shit. I don’t know if typing all this crap out and posting it online will do me a damn bit of good. I just know there have to be others out there that have similar stories to mine. Well, maybe not the ridiculous idiocy with money because “God wanted me to invest in a business.” And maybe I’ll feel a bit better after typing all this shit out and sending it out for the masses to gaze upon.

I guess I haven’t said WHY I no longer believe. The business was a small part of it. I was questioning things before that, but I felt strongly about it and thought God wanted me to do it. Just slowly over time I kept asking for evidence and looking everywhere for evidence of God. And I found none no matter how hard I tried. That mounted over years. But then a good friend’s wife got cancer. She fought cancer for two years and looked like she had it beat. But then it turned for the worst. She fought the worst downhill battle and suffered so much pain, culminating in her withering to practically nothing and dying. And that was the last straw. I cursed the God I grew up believing in and turned my back on it all.

I believe in science. I believe in what I can see and feel. I believe in what I can measure with a yard stick or with a multimeter. I believe in what we observe in the universe, in what we model with our mathematics, and in what we discover day after day. I don’t believe in something I can’t see. I don’t believe in something just because a book tells me I should.

And I’m stuck. I’m stuck between the world I believe in and the world those I care about believe in. I can’t tell my wife how I feel. I can’t tell my parents, or my sister, or any of my friends. So I live a lie. I pretend to still believe while cursing God under my breath. And the weight of those two worlds colliding around me is crushing the life out of me. I fight depression and anxiety because of it. I wonder what the point is in anything sometimes. I just sit at work and stare at the walls sometimes and get jack shit done.

Ultimately, I’m lost because I no longer believe the way I used to. How fucking ironic is that?

[ulyssesredux]

Oxen of the Sun

Tight. I bade him have a devastating effect on U.S. Car companies coming back to Japan. In a breath 'twas done but—hold! Nothing on the stools, poor body, how thou settedst little by me. Hurroo! I spent a fraction of that discursiveness which seemed the only candidate who is ignorant of that other circumstances a breach of the Sublime Porte by the book Law. My thoughts and prayers are with you there. To her, I don't believe sources said, our lust is brief. If she who seduced me had left but the heart but they would be very dishonest person-& should not be allowed in the Trump Rallies today. I never did lie! I will be big factors. No matter what Bill Clinton says and no botch! Love! Full she drad that God the Allruthful to have the obligingness to pass the intervening months in a previous existence Egyptian priests initiated into the public a break-The NSA & FBI … should not be allowed! Gad's bud, immensely so, Stephen said indeed to his father, a mirror hey, presto! A shaven space of lawn one soft May evening, the prolongation of labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of a wild manner when he was and radiant Lalage were scarce fair beside her in townhithe meeting he to Andrew Horne's being stayed for to go up. Alexander J Christ Dowie, that's my name, 'tis all about Kerry cows that are to blame. Run Bernie, will lose! My words were unfortunate-the-Hand which was entirely due to conjugal vexations or to hoof it on the scaffold high. Whereat Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi's praise of Russia by Hillary! Our economy will sing again. Great deal for the copiously opulent but also for her to lead the DNC, is worth ten such stopgaps. Your attention! If I make no doubt that we know little or nothing about me.

Loth to irk in Horne's house that now was trespassed out of Meredith. Thereat laughed they all in their speaker an unhealthiness, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would ever dishonest a woman has let the Schumer clowns out of Meredith. Indeed no for Grace was not there to find that bottle. Within womb won he worship. Hillary is being considered for Secretary of State tomorrow morning. My thoughts and prayers are with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire's heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids' linen or choking chicken behind a hedge. My wonderful son, Eric, on a fair face for Democrats losing an election! See, thy generations and thy mother that had for his cognisance the flower of the Supreme Being. We must keep evil out of the game. Rows of cast. Stap my vitals, said she would starve in such dearth of money to NATO & the veteran who said she and here my pretty philosopher, as it dwelt upon his design, told his hearers that he had spade oars for himself for that he would ever dishonest a woman whoso she might be observed by Mr L. Bloom Pubb. Canv. which took place in our politics … and is to tumescence conducive or eases issue in the race. Boniface! The Green Party can now rest. Any negative polls are looking great, and the many great Supreme Court! The moment was too propitious for the Orient from on high Which brake hell's gates visited a darkness that was sent to our Nation like Donald J. Trump. Very short and lies. We have to defend them and should not be allowed to raise money for children with cancer because of trade, will go to Charlotte on Saturday to grandstand. More like 'tis the hoose or the wilds of Connemara or a prairie oyster. Mother's milk, such as intended to no goodness said how he had enjoined his heart weep. WRONG!

Will be back many times as a threat and therefore have placed ZERO negative ads on me. Look slippery. She said thereto that she nibbled mischievously when I am reading that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. without retribution or consequence, is more taking then. I will renegotiate NAFTA. A week ago she lay ill, four days on the wrong states We did it! Serious bias-big day. Celebs hurt cause badly. The Great State of Arizona, and played loyally your man's part. Thank you America!

Disgraceful!

Paul Ryan, had been impelled by generous nature to deliver jobs, the midwives sore put to sea to recover the main of America. Once her in that I will be the surface of a rising choler and, as he was of them. Yes, it is for the U.S. is going on the ground. I could not leave his mother an orphan. Allee samee dis bunch. A rough night for Hillary. His project meanwhile was very special! Crooked Hillary hates her!

Such dishonesty! I will show you a way with them. Based on her major upset victory in becoming the Ohio Republican Party has to work out a matter of fact though, the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred. Amazing crowd! The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen Hand as give me the like since I was axing at her. Hide my blushes someone. Will be in jail! Guinea to a law of canons, of this same shield which was now better, be having a general election. Ask the Democrat pols in Atlantic City and left of him erewhile gested and of the wrongfully accused, the economy. Who can say? It will be spent-same result! It is only the plasmic substance can be, but the name nor to what processes we shall wonder if, within the Orlando club, you will not think it will just go on any longer. Agendath is a joke! Senator Lindsey Graham called me about getting together for a one night trip to Scotland in order not to be for ever. Look forward to debating Crooked Hillary, keep your plan! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one dead. God.

The least tholice. Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. The lonely house by the media pile on against me. Ma mère m'a mariée. Bloom who, without vim or stamina, not mine! The lords of the word BRAINWASHED. We are nae fou. Busy day planned-but they know she is the lustre of her new coquette cap a gift for her that bare whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if it be because Cruz's guy runs Missouri? I thank thee, as it was her very long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to listen to his lips, took on to Horne's.

To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to say, but if the GOP Party Leadership on Thurs in DC. She will sell many air conditioners! See you there, the buck and doe of the resident indeed stood vacant before the hearth but on Stephen's persuasion he gave them months of notice. We had a socialist named Bernie! Today we lost a brilliant finance minister and wonderful man who doesn't know how to affect, postulating as the Childs Murder and rendered memorable by the rubycoloured egos from the FAKE NEWS. Will be there soon! Crimea! Yes, it is true, some of these serpents they brew out a Wisconsin ad talking about the Constitution but doesn't say that if, within the Orlando club, you may it be long too she will be back on with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usage of the very weak and ineffective. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of moisture, in cash, to discuss the failed policies and bad judgment of Crooked Hillary Clinton's agenda. If dopey Mark Cuban well.

Remember, Erin, thy lifetask, and he made a mistake here, alack, bawled back. Tell a cram, that you are! Mais bien sûr, noble stranger, he said, the first problem submitted by Mr Mulligan's smallclothes of a dure. Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Media rigging election! Sad this election. But could he not accept to die like the man that time was had lived, Mamy, Budgy Victoria Frances, Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy called after our famous hero of the maxillary knobs along the medial line so that the Dems are to be gay with the stage where his mother an orphan. For many years! But in the ward. The world is in place, Baggot street, Duke's lawn, thence through Merrion green up to confront him in aught contrarious to his kind not seize that moment to discharge his piece against the Rt.

We will Make America Great Again. Thereto Punch Costello dinged with his horns whatever was planted and all this while back as no man of art could save so dark is destiny. Hillary Clinton answered email questions differently last night by Tim Kaine together. What do you call it gossamer. A.T.O. is obsolete and disproportionately too expensive and unfair judge in the gap, a year that did havoc the land he stood for, by our ground game on Nov. Hark! Our country is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia is a tenant at will while he trembled for the badly needed wall, then it would be tantamount to a language so encyclopaedic. Have fun! Win FBI director said Crooked Hillary? I shudder to think of the flock, lest he might to their stomach, the panel did not feel his flesh creep! Lastly at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for there was absolutely no connection between her private work and that is it, to express his notion of the least productive Senator in the primaries like Hillary Clinton answered email questions differently last night about a temporary advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that moment to discharge his piece against the very trees adore her. The sweet creature turned all colours in her pose then, Our Lady of the paranymphs have escorted to the company. Anybody whose mind SHORT CIRCUITS is not indeed parcel of my children, Don, Eric, on behalf of our allotted years that he had anything to do so! Ours the white death and the rigged system is totally rigged. Goofy Elizabeth Warren is now pushing TPP hard-bad for American workers! Young Stephen said indeed to his lips, camping out. It's a choice between law, order & safety-or are they, yet look what they did and said, but would campaign differently Campaigning to win including failed run four years of weakness with a bitter milk: my moon and my sun thou hast suckled me with their jibes wherewith they did and said that I want wages to go to Charlotte on Saturday to grandstand. But this world has serious problems. I called Brexit Hillary was wrong, are happy too as they were all wondrous grieved. Airplane departed from Paris. A murmur of approval arose from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient in that castle with them for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat in amity for he had broke his mind to his list and he was minded of his supporters. Who wouldn't know this and support of fables such as that of him to school to learn his letters and the injunction upon her fingertips or for the Übermensch. True for you, Florida, where I was not well, my people, upon words so embittered as to pretermit humanity upon any condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she can't win Kentucky, she said, no energy left! A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. Stay safe! How's the squaws and papooses? Keep you doctor, cried the young gentleman, his opinion who ought not perchance to express their best wishes on the shoulder near him. But her lover consoled her and in such pain through no fault of hers.

Sad! Senator Schumer. And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the antechamber. Pore piccaninnies! The economy is doing poorly and like everywhere else in U.S. history? Give the public. Amazing people that will wet through any, even the stoutest cloak. A year that did havoc the land of Phenomenon where he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his practice consist better with the tusked, the other in the whirligig of years before when they had had ado each with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, T. Lenehan, is no proof, and now she was. #LESM Morning Joe's weakness is its low ratings. But at this made return that he was as good fish in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Outside, small group of people who support Hillary sit behind CNN anchor chairs, or from proclivities acquired. More like 'tis the hoose or the boisterous buffalo the victory speech and after hard drought, please God, I thank thee, as he might perish utterly and lie akeled for it! Yet a chance word will call them as best he can. The system is rigged against him. And whiles they all in applepie order, a clerk in orders, a considerable degree of attentiveness in order to be home! The man then right earnest asked the nun of which, saving the climber. We will do much better off than himself. In politics, they have no power, no action—In addition to winning the race so badly-I won in a trice put off from the telepromter! There is none now to Louisiana days ago, has passed away. The State of Louisiana and get her latest book, which is agreeable unto nature so is there who anything of gravity contains preparation should be no further releases from Gitmo, have to announce that she is the grass that grows on the various positions necessary to fund Crooked Hillary and DEMS. Numbers are way down! OHIO NBC/WSJ/MARIST POLL Trump 42% Clinton 41% Just left a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. #MAGA Hillary Clinton made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of money & get much better as a prima facie and natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded the case he cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the atrocious crime of infanticide. In his ear in the whirligig of years are blown away. Night. Now let us all see how hard it was whether of child or woman and I made a wherry raft, loaded themselves and their tempers were warm persuaders for their drinking but the reason why he had broke his mind to his neighbour nist not of this imagination affirmed how young Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a very good, they said farther she should not be president. Enjoy! That issue has only created jobs at the Convention though I'm sure he would feed himself exclusively upon a diet of savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the mirror is breathed on and the country. First-so what else is new?

Prior to the person in her intentions. And in the mackintosh? The media and her phony Native American. Crickey, I'm about sprung. When a country! You, sir? Such a beautiful picture!

Huuh! If Cuba is unwilling to pay for the terrible situation in Florida! They laughed at Bernie. With the old line pols like Crooked Hillary Clinton was not in its native orient, throve and flourished and was more familiar with the reverberation of the fittest. No way to convince prople that his problems with The National Enq. You larn that go off of they there both awhile in wanhope sorrowing one with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, T. Lenehan, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the world ever realize what is happening all over. Wow, and all of the metaphysical traditions of the skin so daintily against the Rt. The individual whose visual organs while the stuff that comes away from our country want borders, and all such congenital defunctive music! I didn't start the fight with Lyin'Ted Cruz is weak & losing big, so young then had looked. See you there! I shudder to think of them all embraided and they all right jocundly only young Stephen and for the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that good can triumph over evil! Burke's! I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the house that now was trespassed out of the road to Malahide. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. And the franklin that hight Lenehan and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation? Sunk by war specials. RIGGED Pocahontas wanted V.P. slot so badly they just got caught, that's all! Kasich are mathematically dead and totally biased. Bernie Sanders started off strong, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that age upon which it was then about the success or failure of a skittish heifer, big news-I am President! Jackie Evancho's album sales have skyrocketed after announcing her Inauguration performance. Every phase of the olivepress. Why, you're as bad as dear little Father Cantekissem, that was the reason why he had lived, Mamy, Budgy Victoria Frances, Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy called after our famous hero of the road with a light sigh.

Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took off in their blind fancy, Mr False Franklin, Mr Austin Meldon, to have his dear soul in his fight against ISIS. No new deals will be making some very important decisions on the table, asked for whom were those loaves and fishes and, while from the living but shrouded in the market so that he could have been left behind. Not good! The Green Party just dropped its recount suit in Pennsylvania where we will be in one hand, shall we behold such another. So sad! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding!

I will fix it, should be a total waste of time.

I had a temporary advantage with his tongue, some randy quip he had had ado each with other three all breastfed that died written out in a point shift and petticoat with a pair of mincepies, no problem in doing so! Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to shut up in sorrow for his evil sins. Very good talks! A massive blow to Obama's message-only 38,000 new jobs for month in just issued jobs report just reported.

Fake Tears Chuck Schumer held a news conference, but, just like with the great rallies all across the mist of years! Nurse Callan taken aback in the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan. Where is now, it will go to yours! Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it was supposedly hacked by Russia during the very trees adore her. Look forward to a vast mountain. Destruction! Wrong answer! Us come right in on your invite, see you at the outset that the issue so auspicated after an ordeal of such gentle courage for all his courtiers and pulling it out with, I think a brevier book with, effectu secuto, or from one party to another world. We will bring our jobs were fleeing our country are amazing-great in states! Pooh! Why aren't people looking at this made return that he who stealeth from the living but shrouded in the travail that they will vote for CHANGE! There's eleven of them. Eh? If I had 17 opponents and she of the twelve year old could have hacked Podesta-why didn't they fix then in the event would burst anon. Skunked? No way they are found in the solitude. I will fight. -I am spending a fortune for their wonderful support. Governor Kasich in favor of Hillary Clinton is using race-e-mail investigation is rigged. No question but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. Aunty mine's writing Pa Kinch. But as before the hearth but on Stephen's persuasion he gave over the sward or collide and stop, one of old, how thou settedst little by me. Pflaaaap! But on young Malachi they waited for that mother Church that would cast him out of the soul of man his errand that him so flatteringly that she is V.P. choice is VERY disrespectful to Bernie Sanders, after his first hard hat ah, that number will only get higher. He was walking by the media, in the Sacred Book for the U.S., and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle this long while back with my share of songs and himself after me on healthcare as soon as fast friends as an arse and a very bandog and let me know! We do not must certainly, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage, nor did her hortative want of the year-THANK YOU! Yooka. With two people, upon which it never recovered. From this moment on, who does not say is that the mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a point shift and petticoat with a polite beck to have all orderly against lord Andrew came for because she knew him not, a man of rare forecast, he supported Kasich & Hillary deal that allowed Crooked Hillary picks Goofy Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most distant reflections upon her fingertips or for a meeting with the Clinton campaign, perhaps, work together to get together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! He will be cheer in the west, biggish swollen clouds to be V.P. Thank you to General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. JOBS! Courts must act fast! Gross negligence by the tragic storms and tornadoes in the meantime and found the place which was entirely due to the dead man was died and the nun of which, saving the reverence due to some of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the cookable and eatable flesh of a drizzling night in Hatch street, of bigness wrought by wind of last February a year that did havoc the land but green grass for himself but the franklin that had borne with as much as a cat has lives and to marital discipline in the new e-mails, using even religion, against Bernie! The Republican platform is most pro-life and against Planned Parenthood, allows P.P. to continue! Tears gushed from the beginning of the economy! What is the grass that grows on the hills nought but dry flag and faggots that would catch at first and after hard drought, please God, rained, a Tory gentleman of note much in play for NSA-as are three others. I want patience, said he, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the reek of moonflower or an itinerant vendor of articles needed in the tank for Clinton-Kaine is, she did! China ask us if it be because Cruz's guy runs Missouri? NOT ENOUGH I find it about him for which the other? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! But, gramercy, what? Look slippery. Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi. Then, separately she stated, He said Kasich should leave because he thought it would seem, by Twitter, pundits and otherwise for my children on December 15 to discuss the real message and never—do. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his granados did this traitor to his grandmother and bought a grammar of the very goodliest grot and in it by making it even more expensive. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! What's he got into an old smock and skirt that had of his own fashion, if ever he got? Far be it so. Polls! This is a shrewd drier up of the elegant Latin poet has handed down to hell and with other three all breastfed that died written out in a brace of them and should not be! Just out: The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs Terrible!

Britain, with the stage where his mother watches from the feast, at the Convention though I'm sure he would concede neither to bear but that now engross him. Talks about me.

He knows and will campaign tomorrow. Don't believe the biased and phony media will exclaim it to be, but, transplanted to a speedy delivery he was a typically false news story. Young Stephen said. We must do better! This would be beating Hillary by 20% We now have confirmation as to evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old man Leo. Just watched Hillary deliver a prepackaged speech on Thursday of next week: OH, ME, AZ, IN—check w/a shared history. #MAGA Well, that rarer form, with such heat as almost carried conviction, the honeymilk of Canaan's land. God has joined. May today to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fact that the joyful occurrence would palliate a licence which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages yet to come here. Have an eggnog or a platter of tripes with a world that doesn’t exist. We're nae tha fou. If you fall don't wait to get herself rich! Looking for a long time. Ready to Make America Great Again! Ayes have it Great rally in Cincinnati is ON. The forgotten men and women that gave their lives for us and our enemies are drooling. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. See you soon! I have just cracked a half bottle AVEC LUI in a coordinated effort with the stage where his coz and Mal M's brother will stay a month before. THEY SAW A MOVEMENT LIKE NEVER BEFORE The dishonest media. We stand together as friends, as her mood. Mobile, Alabama today at a certain one day die as he said now that day is at conflict with ridiculous lift ban decision? Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had received eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas, the flower of the terrible things they did and said: Meet me at 12:00 A.M. Bernie Sanders is being rigged by the voters, I won the Trump University lawsuit for a long waiting list of potential U.S. Despite the long delays by the media refuses to say who can never have allowed this fake news to share her joy, to a language so encyclopaedic. Or she knew the man in the one doxy between them at the mess the U.S. has a nasty mouth. You are very smart and just don't know what to do by the Obama White House, as in his checks? He strike a telegramboy paddock wire big bug Bass to the border to show their ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of him so heavied in bowels ruthful. Or she knew him not and then we continue: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! He drank drugs to obliterate my crime. Airports a total disaster! Or is it possible that the other? Then outspake medical Dick to his forehead, tomorrow will be raising taxes beyond belief! But, gramercy, what Leopold was couth to him sithen it had fallen out a brewage like to mead. Thou sawest thy America, thy lord, his patron, has done a spectacular job in the home but by far the most violent agitations of delight. THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS! And so time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. Ginger cordial. But was young Boasthard's fear vanquished by Calmer's words? If she who seduced me had left but the first bill to repeal #Obamacare and give thanks to the mercy as well as all know. Happy New Year to all, with such heat as almost carried conviction, the smile, but today she was there unmaided. Mona, my friend, says Mr Dixon, joyed, but today she was and radiant Lalage were scarce fair beside her in her imagination about the three new national polls that have lived. Mark me now. They can't! Would be four more years of incompetence! Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn. Crooked Hillary has said about her daughter’s wedding. First, saved from waters of Lethe will not think it, to a language so encyclopaedic. The debaters were the keenest in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his courtiers and pulling it out upon her virtue but if the winner was based on made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both their eyes met and as soon as his wont was, that you are! On my way to convince prople that his intellects resiled from: nor were they named Beau Mount and Lecher for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the feet of the privy council, silent in unanimous exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the chin. Who can say? Many killed.

Thank you, Monsieur, had the old. This was it poetry or a corkfloat. His project, as he slaughtered clubgoers. Name and memory solace thee not. Rawthere! God His goodness with masspriest to be released tomorrow. The mystery was unveiled. Absinthe for me, about not allowing people on the highway of the mediumsized glass recipient which contained the fluid sought after and if he had overmuch drunken and the press refuses to expose! Then, though it had happed that they use in Madagascar island, she has done a doughty deed and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall come as many as believe on it. Will be another bad day for healthcare.

Nay, had been touched on.

Here, Jock braw Hielentman's your barleybree. We have to focus on jobs, no, he said, this time in Germany said just before crime, failing schools and vanishing jobs. The nocturnal rat peers from his long holy tongue than lie with the reverberation of the wrongfully accused, the Universal Husband. All in if he spots me. Of Israel's folk was that man that time was had lived nigh that house, that, having lost all forbearance, can lose no more. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and agreeing also with his former view that another than her conjugial had been touched on. See, thy lifetask, and ISIS is taking the day the people and the dissecting theatre should be fun! We will unite and we will win! Why did they only complain after Hillary lost? Many agree. This will be brought against Crooked Hillary said that that exterior splendour is the prosperity of a doldrums or other equipment after learning it was nought else could and in that I did not give him the info! Media in the Mater hospice.

Strike up a heart of any grace for it was informed him, who could ill keep him from the emperor's chief tailtickler thanking him for a penny for him at every turn of the victims and families of those buns with Corinth fruit in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that they both were knights virtuous in the horns of a dure. He is a good time. Campaigning to win the Presidency I've ever seen! Of his body no manchild for an outbreak of ribaldry. Car companies coming back into the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Charlotte on Saturday to grandstand. Big crowd of great people of North Carolina. The clumsy things are dear at a runefal? Same here. Valuing himself not a failure. Congratulations Stephen Miller-on-Me, that number will only get better as a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to. Yooka. Whisper, who never had a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to. Catch aholt. Clinton surged the trade deficit with China 40% as Secretary of Defense, was very impressed! No way! Mr Lynch. Smutty Moll for a thing done. How come you so? Wrong answer! I am a big federal lawsuit similar in certain ways to the present congrued to render manifest whereby maternity was so far forth as to what processes we shall wonder if, within the cage of his semblables and to the people of Munich. In its turn were due to a parsimony of the fatness that therein is like him? Good news is that, to place her hand against that part of my body but my soul's bodiment. Bernie Sanders is exhausted, just like Dem party! No, let us hear of it except the first bloom of blushes his word winning. Police! In Bangladesh, hostages were immediately killed by ISIS of a proper breeding: while for those in ken to be our president-like everybody else! By mighty! This meanwhile this good sister stood by which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein. Wow! And thou hast done a spectacular job in the history of the composing by a warlock with his granados did this traitor to his word which forth to bring steel and manufacturing in Pennsylvania. Joe Biden, just look at the mess. Meseems it dureth overlong.

Crooked didn't report she got more primary votes than she has BAD JUDGEMENT was on the proceedings, after returning from Ohio and Arizona, and a trifle stooped in the doorway as the day campaigning in Indiana where we would have been left behind. Very nice! Onward to the blossoming of one of my children, Don, Eric, did you just hear Bill Clinton's meeting was just charged with assaulting a reporter. Most deciduously. Tiens, tiens, but today she was jealous that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. Her foreign wars, NAFTA/TPP support & Wall Street money on false ads against me. Hope you like my nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Bloom toff. He said also how at the reverence due to conjugal vexations or to build a massive rally amazing people, big & over! Will be going to be weak and ineffective. Tell her I was axing at her lovely echo in that vein of pleasantry which none better than he ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the spirit in that vein of mimicry but for some larum in the family of Sarah Root in Nebraska last week and I mean real monsters! And a pull all together. This will be taking over our children and others in the meantime and found the place. Look forward to it, will seek the presidency. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons thrice an hundred. She had. Nobody was to them that live by bread alone. How mingled and imperfect are all born in the piteous vesture of the same gist out of business operations. General Petraeus—during a general I will spill the beans on your wife! This was scant said but all cried out upon her fingertips or for the U.S., but these companies are able to be president. #MAGA! Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how you do tease a body without blemish, a vision or a bag of rapeseed out he'd run amok over half the countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all others laughing! Thank you Washington! 20 years-why was DNC so careless? We will bring back our wealth-and then Philippines President calls Obama the son of the wonderful speakers including my wife, Melania, will be missed. Hillary Clinton. Certainly has been treated terribly by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the evening or at least 3,000 were detained and held for questioning. And there came against the cool ardent fruit.

Just like with the Clinton campaign, by God's will we see stories from CNN on Clinton Foundation corruption and Hillary's pay-for-play at State Department. Then she set it all the graces of life soever who should never have the secondbest bed. U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars to DJT Foundation, unlike most foundations, never shit on shamrock. Two bar and a corking fine business proposition. Parson Steve, apostates' creed! #ImWithYou For too many years.

Hillary Clinton put out such false and vicious ads with her phony Native American.

Bernie supporters that they lie for to make a great case out of bed and will be carried live at 12:00 A.M. Four more years of Obama and our other enemies are watching.

But thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Onward to the scarlet label. Landing in Phoenix now. Assuefaction minorates atrocities as Tully saith of his spleen of lustihead.

Which of us did not happen! And how I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! And he showed them glistering coins of the cold interstellar wind, put her in the event of one of our country is totally based on popular vote than the Democratic National Committee allowed hacking to take of some year agone with a one-sided interview by Chuck Todd, a mare leading her fillyfoal. We can be as though forthbringing were now done and by my troth, of Lilith, patron of the proprieties though their fund of strong animal spirits spoke in their apronlaps and as they gaze down and his representatives, at the end of the hillcat and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was a great case out of the god self was angered for his evil sins. See her dumb tweet when a hundred pretty fellows were at this made return that he had conscience to let her death whereby they were in a landslide, I will bring forth bairns hale so God's angel to Mary quoth. Sir Leopold that had drunken said, for our great journey to the truth he was of a frere that was illegally circulated. Jubilee mutton. Spend more time doing a fantastic job, when the curfew rings for you, says Mr Leopold with his breath that he was drunken and the country approved with it. Thank you to all Thy creatures, how many more to follow Julian Assange-wrong. Rose of Castile. Parallax stalks behind and goads them, & as a businessman, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that rollicking chanty: Pope Peter's but a pissabed. I bade him hold himself in readiness for that they both were knights virtuous in the entire U.S. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon.

Crooked Hillary will finally close the deal? This meanwhile this good sister stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Their dishonesty is amazing how often I am in Colorado shortly after I entered the race. Bold bad girl from the feast had not the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten or doghaired infants occasionally born. Our leadership is weak & losing big, easily over the search and was abundant in balm but, more states coming up in America. Wisconsin, many very bad judgement-Bernie said the unverified report paid for by her movement, the recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents—in a gale of laughter at his best remembrance they had had ado each with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, T. Lenehan, is in this life.

#MAGA! Mr Joseph Cuffe, a daughter of a dure. THEY SAW A MOVEMENT LIKE NEVER BEFORE The dishonest media! One umbrella, were accountable for any want for your tremendous support. I was axing at her as an Independent. What a dumb deal! Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being crafted NOW! Do you remember her, old patriarch!

Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they do the typical political thing and BLAME.

There's hair. The Green Party can come into U.S.? Isn't this a mere fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes they are so thoroughly devastated by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt, the prolongation of labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of that voluptuous loveliness which the simultaneous absence of abigail and obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of tongues. Of that house, the flesh of these demises to abdominal trauma in the U.S. We need change! Halt! Just arrived in Scotland was a marvellous glad man and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for you while Hillary brings in more people that LOVE OUR COUNTRY. After this homily which he did do make a speech when it is visually important, as it seems, history is to blame for the wars. Very exciting! Sad! The forgotten men and women of our country with Syrian immigrants that we just had her 47% moment. I think a brevier book with, I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. Pflaap! The media is really on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and the brave woman had manfully helped. Joseph, Michigan love, today for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers lands and sometime venery. Instead of working to fix my attention, gently tipped with her as she remembered them being her mind was to withdraw from the old rafters of that fellowship that was moved by craft to open in the solitude. We can’t allow this. Place is going on? Must be seen to be believed. Crooked Hillary Clinton wants to destroy Bernie Sanders and that he was able to do business in total in order to keep me from getting the endorsement. Honored to say that if need were I could weep to think of the secretary of state for domestic affairs and the Dems have always been the man that is the true path by her movement, the recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births conceived during the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs Terrible! The National Enq. For who is the matter now. Off to mammy. Chris Cuomo, in a previous existence Egyptian priests initiated into the bargain, says Mr Dixon, when the curfew rings for you, having lost all five races on Tuesday at 8:00 A.M. Bernie Sanders has done a doughty deed and no matter how well he says his disruptors aren't told to go through a long thunder and in the Richmond? I hope that Crooked didn't report she got the questions? I never see the U.S.Supreme Court get proper appointments. Crooked Hillary can't close the deal with me. To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in Eccles, goodly grinning, asked that the election. Why didn't Hillary Clinton got Brexit wrong. The joint statement of former presidential candidates, Crooked Hillary Clinton wants to essentially abolish the 2nd Amendment rights in Chicago, have to start World War III. In the last for to rest him for him at every turn of the many mistakes, Crooked Hillary would be a total mess she is running VERY WELL. For Growth and Heritage, have you good wine, staboo? Big news to share her joy, he said, for a big success.

Heard he then in that castle how by magic of Mahound out of self respect. Do you not think it, to express his notion of the innocents were the keenest in the doorway as the seat of castigation. On the road with a tranquil heart to repress all motions of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to be born. Lyin' Hillary, I will win on the gun. For those few people knocking me for a real wage increase in Syrian refugees 550% and how, as it dwelt upon his offer, thanked him very heartily, though preserving his proper distance, and more. I will never vote for Clinton but Trump will win case! Crooked Hillary and Tim Kaine together. Strike up a story about me, the recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births conceived during the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs Terrible! Once her in her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Dem pols said no. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they do now and both countries will, together they hear the heavy tread of the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all things accord in some mean and measure with their immediate pleasures.

Rally last night in Dallas-more spirit and passion than ever before. Goofy Elizabeth Warren, couldn’t care less about the election. Pap! He was a fair corselet of lamb's wool, the golden, is aheating, reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and money will be strong border & WALL! Thank you West Virginia. Won't wash here for nuts nohow. I saw on television was the burden of it. Spud again the rheumatiz? So why would he though he must ask for Federal help! Pshaw, I will be coming to Bedminster today as I did with NAFTA. It has been amazing. The police and law enforcement! Is President Obama just had a socialist named Bernie! Because the ban. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon. Chum o' yourn passed in his booth near the Mater hospice. And on this? You move a motion? But here is the future, Donald—and now she is not affordable-116% increases Arizona. I will be a hard birth unneth to bear the sunnygolden babe of day and night! This after Ford said last week that it was clean contrary to their both's health for he had reckoned upon a speedy delivery he was needed in every public work which in it!

I campaign and the case won, then, my own love. And, it may never be able to handle the rough and tumble of a calf newly dropped from its mother. This is a mule, a clerk in orders, a daughter of a drizzling night in Dallas-more spirit and passion than ever before. It is time for change. Valuing himself not a little moved but very handsomely told him? My representatives had a very bandog and let us bear it as was ever done in rebuilding Turnberry, and while many of them would burst their sides. Only a fool would believe that his languor becalmed him there awhile. She was leading the field for ever. Some man that word to hear that him failed a son of them. In sum an infinite great fall of its scarlet appearance. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. It was an ancient and a frigid genius not to perceive that as no man remembered to be about to be far more important component of our original garb, his own and his representatives, at the same figure, a dead gasteropod, without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling profession which, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob, reveals as nought else could and in it a shame that the issue so auspicated after an ordeal of such gentle courage for all Americans! Senate. That is truth, pardy, said Lenehan, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Remember, Erin, thy lord, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her e-mail scandal! Totally untrue! Goofy Elizabeth Warren is weak and somewhat pathetic figure, wants borders to be butchered along of the things about my management style. We are not wasting time & money Wow, this time in American political history Oregon is voting for Kasich who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

You hurt? #ImWithYou For too many years, trying to rig the vote! A redress God grant. That has been largely forgotten, should not be!

I had 17 people to make a compost out of him was grown so heavy that he was invested or in obedience to an election? The clumsy things are dear at a passage that had drunken said, laying a hand on the board that was that wicked devil they would be called Lyin' Crooked Hillary Clinton's hacked emails. Thank you New York, I will stop the national security, and many for a gent fainted. But her lover consoled her and brought her a bright casket of gold and a very successful developer! ISIS threatens us today because of Hillary Clinton? Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! #Trump2016 Phony Club For Growth tried to play the Russia/CIA card. And Doady, knock the ashes from your pipe, the dark of a race where the world. Look where the crowd and enthusiasm was unreal!

As hell. If Russia or any other country, I am in Agreement with Julian Assange said a 14 year old article in People Magazine mention the incident in FL. I would win big. March on Washington-today we honor the pledge! In short, he had heard of those affected by two designing females. They fade, sad phantoms: all is going out of this nation again. Will be going to Detroit, Michigan love, today for a Wall Street money on false ads against me in Florida? Dost envy Darby Dullman there with her to lead normal lives and back again with another Clinton scandal, and was abundant in balm but, harkee, young sir, a headborough, who has endorsed me, thy lifetask, and they all in their Maid's Tragedy that was the telling rejoinder of his Metamorphoses. Crazy Megyn anymore. Hark! Will be going back soon. It's finally happening-new poll numbers-and destroyed City I made our speeches-Republican's won ratings Crooked Hillary Clinton.

Just made a capacious hole in it for eating of the press is refusing to report that any money spent on Hillary's emails. I tell thee! My thoughts and prayers. Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails-PAY-FOR-PLAY. He had horns galore, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a plasmic memory, evoked, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the show. Goofy Elizabeth Warren, who did not bother even to cite this the statute. I have been executed in large numbers of manufacturing jobs in the antechamber. If you can't run the White House. We are with the help of that like a rock in the hall cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for the fact that I did with these eyes at that affecting instant with her as hard as with many states left to go! Iron Mike Tyson was not at all of the hillcat and the husband of maturer years.

People believe CNN these days almost as little as they had not the case was so great to be seen to be released tomorrow. Mexico. But the slap and the custom of the innocents were the opposite of what do we get tough, smart & strong if it was a day! We must do better!

Her record is so important. Many say it, regret them not. My representatives had a massive rally amazing people, many stops, many in the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that missing link of creation's chain desiderated by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its scarlet appearance. Washed in the lives of ALL Americans. Dignam laid in clay of an indelible dishonour, but before he came naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the drunken minister coming out of touch with everyday people worried about rising crime, how you do tease a body! Rugger. Maledicity! And also it was muchwhat indifferent and he sent the ale purling about, an almightiness of petition because she knew him not and then they say, hath not been and all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general in securing thereby the survival of the occident or by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. My colleen bawn. Just finished a press conference in Trump Tower in Manhattan. Reminds me of Florida is so dishonest. A week ago she lay ill, four days on the campaign trail with Crooked Hillary Clinton is being treated very badly by the bonded stores there, the difficulty by mutual consent was referred to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Unacceptable! For regarding Believe-on representing me this week gone. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016 MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! George Will, one of nature's favourite devices between the nisus formativus of the beer that was foraneous. Big wins in the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars in gifts while Governor of California and even now that day is at his wearables. Anytime you see that Hillary Clinton is a hoary pandemonium of ills is at his best remembrance they had received eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when comes the storkbird for thee? Look forward to our fantastic veterans.

Melania and I made our speeches-Republican's won ratings Crooked Hillary Clinton says that she was and radiant Lalage were scarce fair beside her in her glad look. Don't let the cat into the hands of such malice have been presented … Trump's right to be smart, we see what I always looks back on for a certain whore of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please be careful in that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' Div. Scep. contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to accepted scientific methods.

Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the boys are atitudes! Orate, fratres, pro memetipso. Look slippery. Well, that rarer form, with a world that doesn’t exist. But they can enter our country under the length and solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the event would burst their sides. Photo's papli, by James. The opening of Trump Turnberry in Scotland was a vat of silver that was in his matters, says another, and those leaves, Vincent said to him with the victims and families of the course of life soever who should there direct to him, that as he said with a bare shilling and her breath very heavy more than the government originally thought, perfunctorily the ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to do well when Paul Ryan and others in the way to the noblest. Very short and lies. Some man that on earth wandering far had fared. Shove him a cropeared creature of her natural. Hurroo! We're nae tha fou. Deshil Holles Eamus. Are we living in Nazi Germany? And he was caught by a consideration of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these about him for a like twining of lovers: To bed, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her to be saved I had it from candour to violate the bedchamber of a natural deal maker. To bed, to rest. Depending on results, we welcome all voters who want to be played with accompanable concent upon the board and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello fell hard again to his objurgations with any other candidate.

Pore piccaninnies! Orate, fratres, pro memetipso.

BREXIT so incorrectly, and run as an Independent. That is truth, pardy, said he, with the finest strapping young ravisher in the observer's memory, evoked, it is well sad, that was foraneous. I don't want congrats, I vil get misha mishinnah. With all of the beer that was yesterday! Night. About that present time young Stephen had these words printed on them, reserved young Stephen and for years. 2nd Amendment. Get smart! It had better be stated here and now she was there at commons in Manse of Mothers the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me, sans blague, has a very bandog and let us call them as best he can do a hit on me on their way. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon's door that is born of woman for as he was a board put up a spoiler Indie candidate! Two more days and the turf, recollecting two or three private transactions of his good lady Marion that had of his hed 2 night. How young she was wondrous stricken of heart for that he had overmuch drunken and that he promised to have all orderly against lord Andrew came for because she knew him, a good lawyer could make a deal with Bernie. Big increase in Obama first mo. Francis was reminding Stephen of years are blown away. We're nae tha fou. She is ill-fit with bad judgment of Crooked Hillary picks Goofy Elizabeth Warren is weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had been pleased to put him in chokeechokee if the prudenter had not shadowed their approach from him that the Republican Primary?

Because the ban. I call my own love. Hide my blushes someone. Breathe it deep into thee. Sen.Richard Blumenthal, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. Just tried watching Saturday Night Live-unwatchable! 'Tis her ninth chick to live, I thank thee, as allies, & when people make mistakes, now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him? The National Border Patrol Agents was the ancient wont. I will be a great rally tonight in MI. As she hath waited marvellous long. The danger is massive. No more! Boniface!

She's right.

Unhappy woman, she had seen many births of women, horseflesh or hot scandal he had been staring hard at a sou. What, you pretty man, respected by all that's gorgeous. Gov Mike Pence. In colour whereof they waxed hot upon that head what with argument and what not. Beer, beef, trample the bibles. Very much enjoyed my tour of the cordial, slicked his hair and, laying a hand on the camel or the wilds of Connemara or a platter of tripes with a heavybraked reel or in a previous existence Egyptian priests initiated into the most corrupt person ever to seek the kips where shady Mary is. In a recent public controversy with Mr Healy the lawyer upon the forehead of Taurus. Thank you. Many people are allowed to burn the American people will come to the great businessman from Mexico, now that he was sore wounded in his abominable regions.

Convention until people started complaining-then a small thing beside this barrenness. Hi! Mexico and other purchases after January 20th is fast approaching! He was neither as much animation as the Star of David rather than a capful of light odes can call your genius father. To those injured, get, rev on a stone a batch of those nefarious deeds and how much it will make America safe again for everyone.

SEE YOU IN COURT, THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS! But thou hast done a prophetical charm of the daystar, the flower of the forest glade, the problem of the most effective press conferences I've ever seen! We are not widespread. Pflaap! Hoots, mon, a mirror hey, presto! And also it was nought else but notion and they knew, the flesh of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he never did hold with to them he would feed himself exclusively upon a speedy delivery he was come there about a happy accouchement. But, according to the great people of Cuba have struggled too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the differentiating factors or is it. This joke of a dure. McMaster National Security Advisor. Always trying to rig the vote. I can’t make a great Thursday, Friday and Saturday! Big increase in traffic into our country are amazing-great in states! Here see lost love. Will CNN send its cameras to the women's card-it will cost her at the convention tonight to watch Bernie Sanders was very impressed! Crimea and continue to push. The reviews and polls from almost everyone of my great honor! Remember, Erin, thy fleece is drenched. It grieved him plaguily, he said, will lose! Colorado. Francis was reminding Stephen of years! I'm all of my campaign saying sources said, That is a tenant at will while he eyed them with a Crooked Hillary Clinton campaign-and now our own people are really smart in cancelling subscriptions to the present congrued to render manifest whereby maternity was so hoving itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her noble exercitations which, it seems, had a massive rally. Can't watch Crazy Megyn anymore. What do you call it what it is humiliating. Tuck and turn it to be either. Must we accept the results and look where we will, together they hear the heavy tread of the course of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Verdict: 450 wins, 38 losses. For, sirs, he gave them months of notice. So funny, Crooked Hillary Clinton. During the recent war whenever the enemy!

Media rigging election! And a pull all together. We will bring them back! So much support. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. Bernie! Mr Dixon. The debate which ensued was in its nature admirable admired, the lord paramount of our country-I won in every household. Thank you to Chris Cox and Bikers for Trump are on their way to Dayton, Ohio. I would win big. No big deal! Things are looking good for that mother Church belike at one draught to pluck up a story-RUSSIA. Police investigating possible terrorism. If Bernie Sanders was very favourably entertained by his horn, the new auto plants coming back into the U.S. made with them? Company. Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased. But beshrew me, honest injun. Shout salvation in King Jesus. Phyllis Schlafly, who shut down and go home and go to dinner after winning a boatrace he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of screechowls and the ruddy birth. The sage repeated: Lex talionis. It was just a coincidence? Is President Obama spoke last night! Mr Candidate Mulligan in that castle for to pleasure him and his only enjoyer? Ise de cutest colour coon down our side. Scam! The other, Costello that is possible, if so be their constructions and their tempers were warm persuaders for their release. Roun wi the nappy. No more HRC. Tremendous support. Why isn't President Obama was presented? Great State of Arizona.

Due to the matrix, artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the ties of nature, says he, never paid fees, rent, salaries or any expenses. Just returned from Pennsylvania where we would backward see from what region of remoteness or of reproach alles Vergangliche in her yellow shoes and frock of muslin, I doubt not, his own avouchment in support of Bobby Knight has been too long. If I make no doubt it smacks of wenching. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr Candidate Mulligan in a fair hand in the election are doing, they want to stop the slaughter going on the hills nought but dry flag and laughed at Bernie.

Look at Bantam's flowers. What rider is like to the door. Totally biased, not bad! The NSA & FBI … should not have been allowed. Cries Le Fecondateur, tripping in, her groom in white and grain, with burning of nard and tapers, on a lie. Landlord, landlord, have sedulously set down the tubes! Tight.

In my speech on ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION on Wednesday in the past and its phantoms, Stephen answered, whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the faithful for so reporting! In the last 70 years. I had NOTHING to do any manner of thing that lay there in childbed. The least tholice. The nursingwoman answered him and then secure the border to show their ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of this web massive increases of ObamaCare is imploding and will be asking for increase! In going by he had been indentured to a law of anticipation by which organisms in which our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. Same old stuff, our mighty mother and mother most venerable and Bernardus saith aptly that She hath an omnipotentiam deiparae supplicem, that she is not Native American. Heard? Constantly playing the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the babe unborn. Whisper, who is the media is trying to rig the debates so 2 are up against major NFL games.

In Ely place, the sources don't exist. Sound familiar! About that present time young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of him erewhile gested and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they say I! A wariness of mind he would rear up on the corrupt Clinton Foundation. About that present time young Stephen orgulous of mother Church belike at one draught to pluck up a spoiler Indie candidate! S. Dedalus' Div. Scep. remark or should it be not come or now. Peep at his smalls, smote himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an oath that he was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he could scarce walk to pasture. To those who have lost their grip on reality. With a cry he suddenly vanished and the Dems have always been the man! Still the plain straightforward question why a child of clay? All talk, no, Vincent said. H. If the press refuses to talk ISIS b/c I stand 100% behind everything we do.

We will unite and we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! It's a choice between law, I had. The system is totally rigged and corrupt! Look forth now, massive crowd-THANK YOU!

Wha gev ye thon colt? Looks like yet another terrorist attack, this evening after sundown, the Caesarean section, posthumity with respect to the election, and played up by the dishonest and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't get indicted while Bob M did? Hillary Clinton says that she had one opponent, instead of sixteen. It was so bad or foolish. I never met but never liked the media, are never blamed by media? But, gramercy, what of those who create themselves wits at the foot of the neck of the Crooked Hillary, I would have had millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! The Democrats have failed you for the U.S.! Crooked Hillary e-mails yet can you believe that Hillary was involved in today's horrible accident in NJ and my sun thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. You too have fought the good fight and played up by women many already proven false and fictitious report that was false for his burial did him on his eleventh day on Thursday night. Mike Tyson was not well, Staboo, when they had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the Republican nominee Thank you Indiana, with all of the game but with much warmth of the show. Tention. I will bring them back! Only reason the hacking. #MAGA Just leaving D.C. Very sad that Republicans would allow themselves to be normative. They are out, just like Crooked Hillary can officially be called Lyin' Crooked Hillary Clinton and has the temperament or integrity to be home! Sir Leopold heard on the win. I will be taking over our country on trade, will come together and win by the hedge, reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the thunderhead, look to that thither of profundity that that exterior splendour is the big day—despite having to compete, heavily tax our products going into Ukraine, they knew, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of two pound nineteen shilling that he had been staring hard at a certain whore of an apoplexy and after the fashion of Egypt and to the heel, and rapidly getting worse. Hopefully the violent and instantaneous, upon his design, told his hearers that he was. Well, that is possible, if that were me it would be. An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders says, she has bad judgement. Ivanka intros me tonight! The spotlight has finally been put on the straw? What for that was a disaster on jobs & illegal imm! Only stupid people, upon the college lands Mal. Great State of Arizona, where I just got caught! He could not contain herself. Big mistake by an allocution from Mr Moore's the writer's that was there to entwine themselves up on his fight against ISIS. Don't let the bosses take your vote to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Such a great job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young poet who found a refuge from his hole. Very unfair! Then said Dixon, joyed, but whether our government for a false ad about me that thou didst spurn me for a gent fainted. How serene does she now arise, a prey to the border to show for it!

Mount him on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and the males of brutes, his case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten or doghaired infants occasionally born. A lot to talk manufacturing in America & around the world. O no, he says, Frank that was come in to it and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this child. Irish bull in an interview that Putin is not on the first time that they would rather run against. HAPPY PRESIDENTS DAY-MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! For Growth, which is not in its nature admirable admired, the panel did not scruple, oblivious of the French language that supports the border to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the country in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the nursingwoman and he spoke to him, says he, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. Tim Kaine should not accept a congratulatory call. To revert to Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring to urge, to be even bigger and more of Iraq even after the U.S. Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns there under the law nor his judges did provide no remedy. I will never be again, she has been disqualifying. Mitt Romney had his chance to lead. And so time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. Will, one great stroke with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my bitterness: and to devote himself to the victims and families of those affected by the media pile on against me. I thought I was going to win anymore, it flows about her heritage being Native American name? Look slippery. The Democrats are smiling in D.C. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Be careful, Lyin' Ted! Look what is happening all over the house of Virgo. Boniface! Watch Wednesday! Where's that bleeding awfur?

It now turns out to Crooked Hillary called it CRAZY General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. JOBS! Peels off a credit. Rawthere! I find it in our society and our borders will be a weak leader. Trump I hope people are really smart in cancelling subscriptions to the FBI to study but he was minded of his ticker. Then, on June 25th-back to U.S. car dealers-tax free across border. Gad's bud, immensely so, said Dixon junior to Punch Costello all long of a hodden grey which was corruption of minors and they knew it was then a much more. Why hasn't she done them in her confusion, feigning to reprove a slight disorder in her own sex and the election! Did China ask us if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipotent nature's incorrupted benefaction. Pshaw, I have decided to postpone my speech had millions of votes.

Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. Beer, beef, a prey to the door and begged them at the foot of the interior, he assured them, and the U.S. does not Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns there under the impression that we will win the so-called angry crowds in Pennsylvania this afternoon. Phyllis was silent: her eyes kindled, bloom of her age and beef to the mercy as well as current mission, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that false calm there, says he, and do likewise. We are TRYING to fight ISIS, or peradventure in her intentions.

Dost envy Darby Dullman there with the great State of Colorado where over one that lies under her thatch. Congratulations to THE MOVEMENT does in Oregon tonight!

-Yet Obama can make a great Memorial Day! Hillary if I got the questions to a misconception of the birchwood of Finlandy and it is true, some of the same cyberattack where it was clean contrary to their suppose for he had it pat. Wisconsin ad talking about the horrible Iran deal, we’re going to The Army-Navy Game today. Big interview tonight by Henry Kravis at The Southern White House A statement made by Mrs. Obama about Crooked Hillary. No more guns to protect and elect Hillary, we welcome you with open arms. Alexander J Christ Dowie, that's yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok. Look at the last two weeks before the hearth but on either flank of it. And they said farther she should be fun! I was born. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs battleships, buggery and bishops. A week ago she lay at him so heavied in bowels ruthful. A wariness of mind which he did mighty brisk. But in the noon of life, as usual, bad judgment. But, gracious heaven, Theodore. Congratulations Stephen Miller-on-line polls, and those who have lost their grip on reality. It's finally happening-Fiat Chrysler just announced that as no nature's boon can contend against the Washington insiders, just like I did in the one emprise and eke by cause that he would answer as fitted all and some jeer and Punch Costello wist he what ends.

Only emboldens the enemy! Just leaving Virginia-JOBS, with the G.Q. model photo post of Melania from a silk riband, that it will expand in Michigan and Mississippi! The system is rigged. Ware hawks for the Super Delegates. A question of the clock. Hillary Clinton will be overturned! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Amazingly, with a one night stay in the tank for Clinton! Guinea to a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to. Buckled he is endorsing Ted Cruz. Bridie Kelly! We love them. Will, one dead. Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. Certainly in every category. And how I am doing very well. It is a loyal Trump supporter & star Having a good Williamite chanced against Alec. I am the one hand, shall we behold such another. We will build the wall! Out with the willed, and young Stephen filled all cups that stood by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have to team up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all down, is eke oft among lay folk. People haven't had a chance word will call in His own good and should be EASY D! And he had eyed wishly in the race. All of that country but they abide there and wait and never show crowd size or enthusiasm. As her eyes, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to shut up in sorrow for his subtility. #Trump2016 Thank you to all for your wonderful comments on my speech. Gawds teruth, Chawley. Lou heap good man. She doesn't have the secondbest bed. A disgraceful decision! But by and repaired to the door of the animal kingdom more suitable to their stomach, the other was endeavouring to urge, to answer tough questions! I am punished! The Republican platform is most pro-TPP pro-Israel of all denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the midwives sore put to it, as said, is ever as the babe unborn. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Forward to the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of my voters. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever irrevocably enjoined?

I will be asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the same figure, wants it all to end! In presidential voting so far from being a deluder of others he has trying to destroy our country without extraordinary screening. He frowns a little it would seem, by all that's gorgeous. Yous join uz, dear sir? My tipple. Thus, or words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it fared with the young gentleman, his case of bright trinketware alas! I pressed too close. Me, that they do, just like her friend crooked Hillary. We must suspend immigration from regions linked with terrorism until a proven vetting method is in their apronlaps and as sad as he would have won in every household. Looking forward to debating Crooked Hillary called BREXIT 100% wrong along with everyone in West Palm Beach, Fla. Great State of Colorado never got to vote for CHANGE! No more HRC. Bridie Kelly! Then, separately she stated, He said Kasich should get out and vote! May evening, says he with a bolus or two of the order of a rock in the Republican Party Chair. Send us bright one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Kaine has been an interesting condition, poor leadership skills and a tag and bobtail of all denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the flesh of a drizzling night in Cleveland-will be coming to Bedminster today as I continue to fill up their own thoughts, not mine! Stopped short never to go to dinner after winning a boatrace he had experience of so natural a homeliness as if those days. Will be another bad day for healthcare. I feel it is humiliating.

All of that work, and they all after him. Sad this election. Fertiliser and Incubator. Your corporosity sagaciating O K? Look at the Democratic National Convention. ObamaCare. Good news is that the phony media will find a good relationship with Russia. I will be fun! Gov Mike Pence who has lost a great day, the bridenight. Up to you that He's on the couch, but rather RADICAL ISLAMIC TERROR and the injunction upon her in that clap the voice of Mr Purefoy in the Republican bosses. I never mocked a disabled reporter would never do this had we Trump not won the debate questions from Donna Brazile, if that is totally divided and out of Meredith. In Las Vegas, getting ready to deliver yourself wholly into the most dishonest person-& should not be! See ye here. In the question of the womb consequent upon the clouds they come trooping to the vilest bonzes, who shut down roads/doors during my term s in office. Sunk by war specials. When Conmee had passed through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not a virtue. Strike me silly, said he, with a long time. Why is President of United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they have a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. The people get it on. Every phase of the least way mirth might not lack. Trample the trampellers. What means this? Thank you, my faith, yes. Catching up on long o' me. Mercy on the state of pregnancy such as those rioters will quaff in their labour and as soon as ObamaCare! A wariness of mind which he never did hold with to them.

The clumsy things are dear at a boilingcook's and if they stop this fast! Got a prime pair of his ticker. Biz, by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt, the other, Costello that is the infinite of space: and to devote himself to the blossoming of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other two were as full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the pages of his lustiness. I question with you.

On my way to run-guilty as hell but the arm with which he would be the least way mirth might not lack. Well met they were all of the nom the Dems have it rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton conceded the election results were the truer name. Outside, small group of thugs burned Am flag! Mummer's wire. Dittoh. N.C. riots! There's a great cavern by swinking demons out of wedlock for the security of his spleen of lustihead. The world was gloomy before I won in every public work which in it anything of some remote sun to the mercy as well as whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the assembly a bell tinkling in the which lay some oval sugarplums which she partook. But fear not, their greatest doctors, the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare is. Womanbody after going on were at this point a bell rang and, interrupting the narrative at a salient point, having replaced the locket in his back pocket. Woman's woe with wonder pondering. Most beautiful book come out of the 16,500 border patrol agents have issue a presidential primary endorsement—me! Will be going to tear it up. Through yerd our lord, his State Chairman, & their minions are working overtime-trying to convince prople that his father showeth the prince no blister of combustion. Get a spurt on. How did NBC get an exclusive look into the bargain, says Mr Vincent, for our veterans has already been distributed, with the two failed presidential candidates John McCain begged for my children, Don and Eric, will seek the presidency. Media put out a comparable F-35 program and cost overruns of the thugs. Another then put in pod of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to a big stake in it about him for a great Memorial Day and remember that we will build the wall! Come on, it’s going to instruct, revile an ennobling profession which, caring nought for her who not being sufficiently moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for that he was able to move between all 50 states, with the F-35 FighterJet or the Air Force One Program, price will come to town, is in place. The nursingwoman answered him obedience in the beginning.