hello and welcome to coffee and story
time with lyman
i hope you're having a wonderful day
and i thought it was time for me to get
back
onto the camera
and tell another story
and have a cup of coffee with you
[Applause]
[Music]
what i want to talk about today is
something that happened to me
many years ago on october 11
2002
i am a retired military policeman of the
united states army an mp
okay i retired
as an e8
i was a master sergeant in the army
and
i was in at the time i was the pro
provost sergeant which means i was the
top non-commissioned officer not a
commissioned officer
and
a non-commissioned officer
in charge of
the military police station
on fort huachuca
in arizona
so
i had all the mps when they were working
law enforcement fell under me
i had
a person who was
a desk sergeant i think everyone knows
what a desk sergeant is an mp station is
essentially the same as a civilian
police station
so
this
sergeant he was an e5
he worked for me and he had been a desk
sergeant for a long time so what a desk
sergeant does is sits at the primary
desk inside the desk
inside the mp station
and people come in the door to talk to
him then he sends information out to the
mps what they need to do he answers the
phone somebody needs an mp to come to
their home or there was a car accident
or what have you
that person he or she will send an mp
patrol unit over there
okay so he handles all that and a lot of
paperwork
busy guy with a lot of responsibility
well this fellow
had been a death sergeant for long
enough
that he was getting pathetically
depressed
and he got into
drinking heavily
well one day when he was off duty
he came onto
the military installation fort wachuka
what i call a post an army post
and
he
wha he had his own we call it a pow
instead of prisoner of war a privately
owned weapon it was a nine millimeter
beretta
is what he was carrying it was his own
so he went to the mp station
and went inside to talk to
the death sergeant who was on duty at
that time
i believe this was a sunday
and the death sergeant said that
the guy was asking acting kind of
strange
and he knew he had his gun with him
he was in civilian clothes he wasn't on
duty
and he had told him that he was going to
go
some some place out of the way on on
this uh
fort wachuka which has a whole lot of
wooded areas
and
he had the feeling that this guy was
going to harm himself
so
what he did was he called up
myself
and the provost
marshall which is an officer this man
was a uh an o5 i'm sorry an o4 he was a
major at the time
but he was like
the policy maker
the the big man for the pmo
uh that and pmo
is of course the uh
provost marshall office so i worked
under that major
anyhow we got together and all the other
mps that were on duty and we went out to
where this guy was last seen
by a couple of our mps who were on
patrol
and those mps said that when they saw
him
that they were going to approach him and
he showed his gun to them
in a manner that made them feel
threatened
and he wanted them to go away and he was
by himself he was going to go off into
the the woods not driving
so
they thought he was going to harm
himself
and that combined with what the death
sergeant had seen got us all out there
so there we are out in this gravel road
not right where all the people
on the
installation lived but away from them
right out in kind of the countryside but
still on the post
so
lo and behold we see this guy walking
down the road
and i told provost marshall
that
you know we're kind of kicking it around
what do we do what do we do
so i told him i said well i
he works for me
we get along well how about if i just
walk up and talk to him so
he agreed so we had all these mps on
duty armed
back there with the provost
marshall
and they were walking at a distance
behind me in a group like
just kind of trying to keep me into eye
shot of this and i walked up
to the sergeant
and he told me to get away from him
leave him alone
so then i just started kind of just
talking to him
uh you know what's going on we heard
this we saw that and are you are you
upset about something you know just not
really deep questions he got
he wanted me to go away
so
what he decided he was going to do was
take his gun and point it to his head
he said you get away from me or i'm
going to pull the trigger
right so
i thought well i can't really go away
because then he might pull the trigger
if i stick around he might pull the
trigger
either way it's kind of a no-win
situation for me
so he started a little countdown
and by the time he'd get to one he was
going to pull the trigger
and
what i did was
since we were walking on a gravel road
and it was you know kind of uneven a
little clumsy walking on something like
that
what i did was i i stumbled once but
just like one time out of step and then
you know caught myself and walked along
like nothing had happened while he was
uh playing around with his gun
so i did that to make him think that if
i make a quick move it's because my
footing is bad
and we're continuing to walk
the other mp's behind us
so i thought okay now what i'm going to
do is i'm going to grab the gun
so with my he was on this side of me so
with this arm i reached up and he was
right right you know beside me almost
shoulder to shoulder
and i grabbed the gun and then real
quick i was going to wrestle it out of
his hand
well
he wasn't a big guy and i was probably
47 at the time i suppose he was like 37
but
he was pretty strong
and he won the wrestling match
so
as he pulled the gun down
he fired it
and when he fired it he shot me right
through here and came out back here
okay and that felt like an enormous hot
blast of air went through me
but i was still functioning okay now
this is all happening in seconds of
course
then
as we continued to struggle
the gun got pushed down further
because i was trying to push it down but
he had his hand on the grip and the
trigger and he pulled it again when it
was right next to my like my knee right
and he shot a hole in my left knee it
went in here i mean the exact knee the
joint and it came out over here and it
just blew everything in that knee
out
when that happened
i just
fell forward because i didn't have that
leg to stand on and it happened suddenly
so i wasn't prepared for it and i landed
boom in the gravel on my elbows like
this but
in a prone position straight out
okay so there i was
then
i hear him
his his you know moving around on the
gravel
and
so he shot me twice
at that point the mps behind me
had
uh prepared to shoot him
what he did next was
he got another round in the chamber
right
and that round in the chamber
did not go in correctly it kind of
tipped
and was caught he couldn't fire the gun
so the people in the back they don't
know if he had tried to chamber the
round and shoot me a third time because
the gun was on me and when he couldn't
shoot it a third time he decided to turn
around and point it at them
whether he was going to shoot them or
not
they didn't know all they knew is what
had already happened
so it looked to me to them like he he
was going to shoot me a third time but
then decided to shoot them
what they did was it dropped down to a
knee and he got shot
in the chest three times one of which
went through his heart and he died
probably 30 or 45 minutes later so when
i heard the shots fired i'm i'm on the
ground i'm conscious and everything but
uh i all i heard was him go
like that and
i i never even i couldn't even see if
he'd fallen down or not
so
anyway of course everybody runs up and
they're trying to give me first aid and
they're calling an ambulance to come
and they get me into an ambulance they
get him into an ambulance
we go to the hospital and in the
emergency room
i'm laying on a gurney
and there's a curtain and he's on the
other side of the curtain on another
gurney and then my first sergeant
he came around the curtain and told me
he says i want you to know i'm not going
to say the man's name but sergeant so
and so just died
so
that was that
and i ended up
uh getting my knee a lot of surgery down
on my knee very serious surgery
it's still kind of messed up today but
it's worked much better than they
thought it would work
uh i ended up getting
the biggest award the army had
for
an act of heroism outside of a combat
zone
so if i was in a combat zone
the highest thing you can get is like a
medal of honor
but
i mean inside a combat zone outside of a
combat zone like where i was there was
no war going on
um the highest is the soldier's medal
so that's what i was given and
for that and of course
a person feels terrible about a thing
like that i mean
it's nice to be recognized but it'd be
far far better if i could put on a
superman suit and
fly around earth spin time backwards and
do things different so this guy lived
through it
but of course that can't happen
so
i i think that's kind of an interesting
story to lay out for you
and uh as far as my knee goes the doctor
told me this is an interesting thing
here the doctor told me
that this was in o2
that in
probably no more than six years i would
have to get an artificial knee put in
because this one what they told me was
they put they put my joint they rebuilt
it with he said think of wood putty but
wood putty for bones he said that's what
we've done to your knee because the the
the insides were just gone
so he said but because of your age and
like i said i think it was 47 at time he
said if at all possible you don't want
to get an artificial knee now because
in 10 to 15 years you have to get
another one
and then you have to get another one and
he said that's a huge horrendous thing
to go through that operation and then
the recuperation from it
so they said wait until you can't stand
it anymore but within six years you'll
have to get it because you won't be able
to stand the discomfort the pain
so
what i did was of course i was in the
hospital for i think it was 12 days
and from there
i went home and recuperated there for i
think it was like
six six to eight weeks something like
that before i went back to work and of
course i was on a walker and i was on a
cane and prior to that a wheelchair but
anyway you get through all that now
um
what i had done
while i was recuperating at home was i
heard about something
that you could go to
uh a person who does healing
so
i went on the internet i found how many
of them were around and i did that
i contacted i don't remember how many of
them there were like 70 qualified people
they had a list of names i finally came
across i sent an email to all of them
and a lot of them wrote back and one of
one of them has said hey i already sent
you healing power did you feel anything
no i didn't
what they said you had to do
and i found a person who wasn't terribly
far from where i was
in
arizona
sinona
arizona
which is kind of a famous place for
being a kind of a woo-woo set up right
so
they said for
333
you come with cash and you give them an
even sum of money not 335 and they give
you two dollars change exactly 333
dollars
and uh so i went to this woman's place
spent the night in some little like
second house they had and then the next
day she
came and did this
healing work on me
and i like to believe in this sort of
thing but you know i keep an open mind
to it but not so open that my brain will
fall out
worst thing you could do is cost me 333
dollars and i could get over that
well anyway
what i wanted was for my knee to heal up
i wanted to be good to go right
so
this is 2022.
on october 11th it'll be 20 years since
i got shot
my left knee that was shot through and
still is basically consists of bone
putty
i never did get an artificial knee yet
gives me far less trouble
almost no trouble except i've lost a
little bit of the flexibility i can't
bend it back as far and i can't
straighten it completely straight almost
though but i can walk fine on it
my right knee
that gives me a lot of trouble i've got
arthritis in there and
cortisone makes a difference and
motrin makes a difference but
boy that thing has given me more pain
than my left knee has after the initial
healing up and i often wonder hmm
i wonder if that
healing power actually is the reason for
my knee feeling good
and i'm 66 and i'm in pretty darn good
health as it is now my blood pressure is
good
my cholesterol is fine
i feel okay
i'm a little too fat
but other than that
i'm doing really well so i just wonder
how much that affected me
pretty interesting
and that's it for
this
story
so
finish up your coffee
and i look forward to seeing you the
next time goodbye for now
[Music]
you