Free Wrapped in the Flag by Claire Conner Page B

Nazi-loving extremist my parents brought home for supper.

    Sometime during their lurch to the right, my parents decided that dinner was the ideal time to teach us kids about Communism. They no longer mentioned Nazis or the Holocaust; Mother and Dad made sure that we understood that Communists were the real evil monsters.
    Before long, I could name all the Communist tyrants: Karl Marx, the father of Communism; Joseph Stalin, the scourge of Russia; Nikita Khrushchev, the current Russian gangster. In Asia, it was Kim Il-sun, the demon of North Korea, and Ho Chi Minh, the leader in North Vietnam. Finally, the newest member of the club was Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary just ninety miles off our coast.
    “These Commies make Hitler look tame,” Dad said.
    The ultimate fiend was Mao Zedong, the dictator of China. The scope of the murder and mayhem he’d unleashed on his own people was unimaginable; seventy million Chinese dead from starvation and mass murder. 14
    Statistics weren’t vivid enough for my parents, however. They used the dinner hour to paint detailed pictures of the horrendous things Mao ordered. Over chicken and dumplings, we heard about prisoners hacked to pieces by guards wielding machetes. Some unfortunates were forced to sit on chairs with seats of spikes. Their tormentors jostled the chairs until the victims were impaled. Thanks to my father, I learned how prisoners were forced to drink so much water that they died. From the specifics of sleep deprivation to the agonies of starvation, my parents shared it all.
    Most of the time I could drown out the stories by pretending I was somewhere else. My sister and I used to call that “flying.” We’d see ourselves hovering above the table just far enough away that we couldn’t hear anything. That worked, most of the time. But some stories we could not escape; theywere seared into our memories.
    One night, Mother described the atrocities in a village where Mao’s henchmen rounded up the women and girls, stripped them, and tied them to stakes. Nearby, the guards built fires and heated coals until they were red hot. Those coals were shoved into the vaginas of the victims. “You could hear the screams for miles,” Mother said.
    Another evening, Dad explained execution quotas. In some villages, every man, woman, and child was killed. In other places, children reported their parents for crimes against the state. The children were then forced to kill their own parents.
    “Remember this,” Mother said, “the day may come when you will have to turn on your father and on me. What will you do then?”
    Around the table, silence. Finally, I took the risk to answer. “No matter what, I’ll never hand you over to a firing squad,” I promised. My brothers and sister agreed.
    Mother, however, wasn’t convinced by our vows. “Don’t be too sure, children,” she said. “Until the worst happens, you never really know what you’ll do.”
    The worst did not happen, but that never stopped my parents. They were positively sure that every secret Commie and every liberal Democrat was working around the clock to turn the United States into Russia, North Vietnam, or, worse yet, China. No one in Chicago had been butchered by machete-wielding revolutionaries yet, but disaster was definitely coming.

Chapter Eight
The Black Book
    I want no part in this. I won’t even have it around. If you were smart, you’d burn every copy you have
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    —S ENATOR B ARRY G OLDWATER, AFTER READING
T HE P OLITICIAN
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R OBERT W ELCH’S SECRET MANUSCRIPT 1
    Chicago simmered in the summer doldrums. Up and down our street, kids ran through sprinklers. When the Good Humor truck arrived, they traded their nickels for ice-cream treats.
    The heat and humidity encouraged an explosion in the pest population. One afternoon I opened the metal garbage can and found handfuls of white, squiggly worms crawling over the paper bags. I screamed for Jay R. “They’re maggots,” he said. “Baby