The Blood Flag Read Free Page B

Finally, he said, “Jedediah.”
    â€œNice to meet you, Jedediah. What’s your last name?”
    â€œWhat’s it to you?”
    â€œI just think it’s polite.”
    â€œWhat makes you think I’m polite?”
    I leaned forward slightly. “Nothing.”
    â€œThom. And that’s spelled
T
-
h
-
o
-
m
. Pronounced ‘Tom.’”
    â€œInteresting. Where are you from, Jedediah?”
    â€œYou’ve got a lot of questions. Where are you from?”
    â€œMidwest, originally.”
    â€œSo. You’re a Yankee?” His southern accent was very noticeable. He truly seemed offended that I was from the North.
    â€œThat bother you?”
    â€œJust means you couldn’t be a member.”
    â€œOf what?”
    â€œDon’t worry about it.”
    â€œI still would love to know where you’re from.”
    â€œIrmo.”
    â€œWhere’s that?”
    â€œSouth Carolina.”
    He pronounced it
Sath Kaylina
. “What part of the state?”
    â€œNear Columbia.”
Klumbya
with a barely perceptible “ah” at the end of it. More implicit than overt.
Klumb
. He went on, “So what’s your story?”
    I began telling him about my experience in Recklinghausen. He watched me carefully, holding me in his stare. I told him about Normandy, about the Legion of Honor, and my father’s flag in the basement. And I told him about the neo-Nazi group marching in black hoods with white masks and Nazi armbands.
    He asked, “That bothered you?”
    â€œYeah. Having just been to Normandy it stunned me that there are still neo-Nazis around ready to cause more problems.”
    He leaned back slightly and played with his coffee cup. I then could see the tattoo marks on his first, second, and third knuckles of his left hand.
L
-
E
-
R
. Ah. When he put his two fists out together his hands spelled
HIT
LER
. He looked at me with a look that I couldn’t quite identify. Something between pity and disgust. He said, “So this was news to you? That there were still Nazis around?”
    â€œI was surprised that they were so overt about it.”
    He nodded slowly and stared down at his cup.
    I looked at him and looked back at Karl, then looked at him again. “So what can we do about it?”
    â€œDo about what?”
    â€œNazism. Neo-Nazis. How do we shut them down?”
    Jedediah sat up taller and rested his massive arms on the table. He looked like an MMA fighter. I found myself studying the tattoos to try to make sense of them. I looked back at his face. He finally said, “You can’t. There are a million neo-Nazi groups in this country alone. Some of them are run by idiots. Some of them are run by men who are smarter than you are. I know you don’t think that’s true, but it is. Smart in a twisted genius sort of way. They don’t talk to each other that much, sometimes they hate each other, and there are rivalries, conflicts, and attempts to undermine each other. They think a lot of the same things, but they aren’t united. So even if you took out two or three groups, it wouldn’t have any effect on the others. They’d probably be glad. Like rival gangs. Everybody wants to be the big-ass neo-Nazi group in the country with a hundred thousand followers; the group that marches right down on the capital one day wearing black shirts and swastikas. But until somebody gets those numbers, until they can dwarf all the others, you can’t take them all out at once. You have to do it one at a time. And it’s not easy. You have to catch them committing a crime. First Amendment protects almost everything they say in the U.S., so it turns into criminal investigations, which is pretty tough because they don’t act like most gangs. They don’t sell crack or run prostitutes. They think that’s all evil. They are all about being tough, wearing steel-toe boots, strutting around, spouting slogans, and