Because of suspicious happenings at my house just before the latest outbreak of rioting and looting broke out throughout the country, which diabetic complications may have been involved in but probably were not, my son has temporarily taken me to his home in southern California. I have my cell phone and computer with me and hope to continue working for the re-election of President Trump and helping some of his friends in Washington State get elected to Congress. The many cuts and bruises I sustained are steadil healing.

   My vantage point in this election is that of a Vietnam War veteran, who is fully familiar with the methods used by politicians in the Democratic Party and a few RINOS in the past to provide a final solution to the veteran problem. Personal records are included to illustrate extreme situations, but they are not included to illustrate my situation.   I am introducing them to provide proof of the hopelessness of veterans in the United States at the times of their discharges, unless they have a great deal of luck or have relatives with businesses capable of hiring them.

   The first set of documents attached show the planning used by the Federal civil service to violate the veterans` preference laws as they existed in the late 1970. They began to appear after James Earl Carter won the election of 1978 and continued until it was clear that Congress was not going to repeal the laws giving preference to Vietnam War veterans. These letters focused on alleged conflicts between veterans´ preference laws and efforts to give preference to members of other groups for which Congress was asking employment preference. The fundamental flaw in this reasoning was that black, white, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, female, and every other identifiable group of Americans had served honorably and with distinction during the Vietnam Era, and if hiring had been limited only to veterans, a fully ethnically diverse workforce could have been recruited.   Clearly, the intention of Carter`s administration was to keep veterans from competing fairly for available jobs. The result was the rapid appearance of homeless veterans in the streets of America. When Congress refused to pass laws to eliminate veterans`preferance, Carter forced through his program using executive orders.

   The most destructive of these orders gave supervisors the right to dismiss any newly hired civil servant within the first year of employment without giving any reason. Carter alleged that the hiring process took one year to complete, so no supervisor should be limited to completing his selections within the first year. This proved to be an effective way to keeping veterans out of the civil service. Only the number of veterans hired initially had to be reported to the U.S. reported to the U.S. Department of Labor, which considered the number of veterans actually retained to be irrelevant to the the problem of veterans` unemployment. It hit veterans belonging to groups traditionally facing discrimination particularily hard. Black veterans assumed a large percentage of the homeless on the streets of most American cities, for example. Many were starving and also facing freezing temperatures in northern cities while the Vietnam War was still going on.

   A second set of records provides some personable military records, showing my activities during the Vietnam war. They attest to active duty from January 9, 1963 to Nov. 10, 1968, when I received my honorable discharge as a captain. After completing pilot training, I flew the C-130 aircraft based at Naha Air Base on Okinawa, frequently flying flying in and over Vietnam. After 18 months, I voluntarily began a one-year assignment as a forward air controller in South Vietnam. I extended my tour of duty twice so that I received by honorable discharge upon arrival in the United States.

   The records are provided not to make this report about me but to show the hopelessness that many veterans must have felt discharged in a country with a Democratic administration hostile to them. The attached records show orders awarding me the Distinguished Flying Cross with 1 oak leaf cluster, the Air Medal with 29 oak leaf clusters, and the Vietnamess Cross of Gallantry w.sil. star, as well as sevice awards. I flew over the southern part of North Vietnam, the Communists` supply routes of eastern Laos, Khe Sanh during the seige of the Marine base there, and the A Shau Valley at various times, logging a total of 1897 combat flying hours. Compare this with my record of employment after the war. November 10, 2020 will be the 52nd anniversary of my honorable discharge. During those 52 years, I have had only one opportunity for long-term gainful employment in the United States, which turned out to be no opportunity at all.

   Because I wanted to pursue a career in the natural sciences, the Department of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University seemed to be a suitable place for Graduate Studies. I took the Biology achievement test of the Graduate Record Examination as soon as I returned to America and was still waiting for my score when I travelled to Cornell University in early March.

   When I arrived at the graduate school office, I was told that the deadline for submitting an application of admission had passed, but that admissions were still arriving and being accepted. However, I was told that I should see the student advisor for the institute in which I hoped to study. The student advisor I was sent to see was Dr. Barlowe, who told me that it was too late to apply. He asked me why I had not applied earlier. I told him candidly that I was in Vietnam until mid-November, and when I had arrived home, I was busy making arrangements to take the Graduate Record Examination and obtain applications from universities that had suitable courses form me. After hearing those things, he reacted by suggesting that I should not apply at all. He said that maybe I would be permitted to apply after waiting another year. He repeated the word „MAYBE“ with emphasis.

   It was already clear to me that there is a fundamental difference between not admitting someone to a graduate school and telling someone not to apply. The only real information that Dr. Barlowe had about me is that I had graduated from Manhattan College in 1963, had served in Vietnam as an Air Force pilot, and was attempting to apply for graduate studies at a time when applications were being accepted. I learned that Dr. Barlowe had come to Cornell from the University of Washington and had developed a reputation as a scentist who wrote few publications.

   Dr. Barlowe received telephone call and was distracted from our conversion. While he talked, I put my attention on a pile of applications of applicants who he said were being awarded fellowships. The GRE score on the application on top of the pile was 770. Later, I learned that this score was at the 90 percentile level. That, the score placed him in the top 10% of those who had taken that particular biology achievement test.

   As I left Cornell, I noticed a crowd at the airport operations office. They turned out to be reporters trying to find people to take their film reports back to New York City. It turned out that black students and other minorities were staging protests on campus to call attention to the fact that they felt discriminated against by the Cornell faculty members. I had already decided not file an application at Cornell. I had decided to apply at St. John`s University, where the Catholic student majority was definitely better disposed toward veterans than the faculty members at Cornell. A few days later, the results of my GRE biology achievement test arrived in the mail. My score was 990. 980 was the 99th percentile level. I had achieved a good place in the top 1%. I was sure that Dr. Barlowe would consider such a score far above anything a veteran could aspire to achieve. The distain with which faculty members of the best funded American universities held young Americans who preferred membership in one of the American armed forces to participation in the activism of a violent street mob protesting the draft was obvious. My application to St. John was accepted long beyond the closing date for applying, and I was awarded a graduate assistantship.   I was also asked to take the two ability examinations of the GRE: verbal ability and quantitative ability. My score on the former had placed me either in the upper 1% or 2%. The score on the latter placed me among the upper 4%.

   After completing my studies for the Master of Science at St. John´s, I was eligible for admission to doctoral studies at a German university, and while I waited for news about my application, I continued fly aircraft, mainly the DC-3, transporting food and other vital supplies from outlying cities to Phnom Penh. In late August of 1974, I flew to New York and a large wedding celebration at which Miss Woo Wai-Yuen, Sylvia, and I were married. Before she returned to finish her studies, we flew to Germany, where I discovered that I had been admitted to the Institute für Hydrobiologie und Fischereiwissenschaft of the Universität Hamburg. I discussed the continuation of my studies in Laos as my doctoral dissertation with the Director of the Hydrobiological Abteilung of the Institution, Prof. Dr. Hubert Caspers.

    Sylvia returned to her junior college to complete earning her Associate of Science degree, and I prepared for my German test for foreign students. I also had to wait for evaluation of my Masters Degree as equivalent to the German degree of Diplom. My preparations were almost complete when news of disaster began to arrive from Southeast Asia. One day early in 1975, John Yim, our company manager in Phnom Penh, headed for the airport but never arrived. Witnesses saw a man who resembled him being intercepted by soldiers who appeared to be Khmer Rouge and shot. His body was never found.

   In Vientiane, Laos, Communist Pathet Lao soldiers patrolled the streets together with soldiers of the Lao Army. The worst conditions were evident in South Vietnam, where a foolish government order to evacuate the northern provinces unleashed a panic, which packed the streets with refugees headed south.

   Obviously, the plans for a research project in Laos had become unfeasible. However, relocating the site of the project only about 20 km south would provide the chance to investigate rice fields containing the same species as those on the opposite side of the Mekong River in Laos. The population of the northeast part of Thailand speaks primarily the Lao language rather than Thai, and during the mid-1970s, rice was almost the only major crop planted in the Northeast, which was known as the issan part of Thailand.

   My wife and I rented part of a house near the northern border of Udon Thani. To the north of that were rice fields that were planted each year not long after the start of the rainy season, which began on or about the traditional Thai New Years Day each year. The daily rainfall ceased abruptly on October 15, and almost all rice fields dried out before the onset of the next rainy season. The study focussed on the species inhabiting the rice field and how they survived. Some of the fish species, such as the walking catfish and snakehead, were noted for making long, overland migrations.

   The flora and fauna from microscopic species to animals the size of the water buffalo were observed and catalogued. The methods used were to be employed again after I received my degree for projects along the Elbe Estuary in Germany, in the Pantanal in Brazil, along streams in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and in other parts of the world. To date, 11 of my books have been published, as well as more than 65 shorter publications. All of my research and teaching work was done in countries other than in the United States. I have taught graduate school courses in Germany in German and in Brasil in Portguese, but never in English anywhere. In 1996, I had been recommended for a sponsored professorship at a university, either in Uruguay or in Argentina, but the administrator objected because I was an American citizen. The program was intended only for citizens of countries in the European Union.

   In 1977, while in Udon Thani performing my doctoral research, the American Air Base at Udon Thani officially closed. I had fre            quently flown into and out of that base during the war. The main entrance to the base was surrounded by a horrible aggregation of repulsive looking shacks housing bars selling drinks stolen from the Air Force PX system and women peddling cheap sex. It was a case of „sexual revolution“ being forced on the American servicemen by the Johnson Administration in the spirit of the times. The base closed officially at noon on the day of its closing. I returned a library book in the morning and did some shopping in the city. Shortly before 2 p.m., I heard sirens and saw smoke rising from the direction of the Air Base. Soon a fire was visible near the main gate of the base.   The entire city of shacks surrounding the main gate was completely in flames, and almost nothing was left standing after the fires were extinguished. I did not think that insurance fraud could be so simple and obvious. However, my sources of confidential information assured me that the insurance companies had paid promptly and in full for the damage. Formal proof of this I never saw.

   South of the air base was a „secret“ base with sophisticated radio equipment reputedly for intercepting all or almost all of the radio messages sent in Asia. The fate of this facility was under discussion at the time. The gossip I was hearing concerned the daily discussions at the meetings between the Americans and Thais involved. I had no „official“ sources of information except for an occasional article in one of the Thai newspapers. At one point, the American negotiators argued that the base was vitally important for the defense of Southeast Asia. The Thais replied that the United States had controlled the radio facilities for a decade and still lost the war to the North Vietnamese.

   For me, the station was important for a completely different reason. The University of Maryland ran an Overseas Campus Program, permitting the students to earn college credit toward a Bachelor`s Degree. Earning a small amount of money to help me pay the monthly cost of our household in Udon Thani would have been very useful to my wife and me at that time, and I was able to find out quickly by asking at the base that courses in the natural sciences were hard to find within the University of Maryland Program but required courses for many students.

   My application was accepted by the University of Maryland, and I was sent a copy of the text book to be used for the course together with a list of dos and don`ts. However, when I showed up on the first evening of the course, I was told that the U. of Maryland office on Okinawa had cancelled my course. The explanation I was given was that a full-time instructor whose course could not be cancelled was scheduled to teach an English course that semester, but only three students had enrolled to take it. About 22 students had signed up form my biology course, which was a degree requirement for some programs but hard to find at most bases. That number of students who applied to take the course was only one or two below the average number for a course in eastern Asia. Therefore, my course could allegedly be given only if one or two more students had signed up for it at the very small base it was being given.

   I did not believe the reason for cancelling my course given by the University of Maryland, but other reasons deterred me from volunteering to teach for the University of Maryland again. The dos and don`ts of the university stated that the instructor should not criticize the text book. The book seemed weak in providing biological facts and principles, but it strongly promoted what was called at the time, „chemical evolution.“ That was an untested hypothesis that life can arise on a lifeless planet through a natural evolutionary process involving only chemical reactions. This hypothesis has been one of those that cannot be tested in any practical way and is supported only by argument.

   On a more practical level, I had strong reason for criticizing the strict process of assigning grades for the courses strictly on curves. Military bases are built for specific reasons. It could be expected that the base where I would have given my course would be staffed with a large percentage of personnel highly skilled in technical specialties demanding special skills and knowledge. Larger bases would include most personnel working in more mundane fields demanding less intelligence and specialized skills. Marking each group of students using a curve only for their particular class would give the advantage to groups of students encompassing less intelligent and diligent individuals. I envisioned having to give grades of F to students who would have received an A if they had joined a class at a larger base with a more random assortment of skills and talents.

   In any case, I decided not to apply to teach for the University of Maryland again, regardless of my chances for actually being selected. In the long run, I could be satisfied that my time was better spent doing my research in the rice fields.

   In 1997, I applied for an announced vacancy as a scientist with the Forest Service at Fairbanks, AK. Because the examination showed me to be the best qualified applicant and a veteran eligible for preference, it was illegal for the Forest Service to pass me over without first holding an open hearing before the Office of Personnel Management. To try to get me to withdraw from the selection, two members of the Selection Committee invited me to Alaska. One was Tricia Wurtz, employed by the USDA Forest Service, and the other was F. Stuart Chapin, known as Terry, recently hired from the University of California at Berkeley. The money was to be disguised as a research grant, but an e-mail given me by the U. S. Office of Special Counsel revealed that the money was to be illegally taken from funds for equipment purchases. This e-mail was obtained by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in response to my complaint.

   It soon became obvious that the USDA Forest Survey was not going to abide by the settlement it had offered me.  Instead, it hired Deanna Stouder, a specialist at making cases for firing scientists employed at the time by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Her hiring was delayed by almost five months because the Office of Personnel Management suspended the hiring priveleges of the USDA Forest Service due to my complaint. Stouder went right to work upon arrival, cancelling my purchase of a professional microscope that I needed almost daily for my work. My order to purchase an Olympus microscope was cancelled. Her solution was for me to find a microscope at another Forest Service lab to share. The closest such microscope was located about 100 miles away, reachable by car after a long trip through mountains. Thus, every time I need to view the organisms in water samples through a microscope, I would have to take a round trip of more than 200 miles. Nobody at the other lab was using the microscope at the time, but lending it to another lab was out of the question for the lab that owned it.

   At the end of my probationary year, not more than $1000 of the $30,000 of the funds allowed for my equipment purchases had been spent. Until the end of the time, I had been lied to alleging that the allowance had been only $20,000. Before the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), Stouder denied all knowledge of what the remains of the $30,000 had been used for.

   Lies were freq uently told by Department of Agriculture witnesses, but complaints were not accepted by the administrative judges. After the hearing against the USDA Forest Service, Administrative Judge Sidney Farcy wrote in his decision that the MSPB was an executive administrative board and not a criminal court, so it had no power to impose penalties against government witnesses who lied under oath.

   In his own decision, which was almost 100 pages long, Farcy enumerated two alleged cases of alleged unsatisfactory performance on my part mentioned on or about p. 67. Both examples had been contradicted by agency witnesses, some of whom were hostile to me. He referred to other examples, that were not specifically mentioned, of unsatisfactory performance in his long decision. One of the two mentioned was in a project that was not scheduled to begin until November of 1999, more than six months after I had been fired. Proposals had been submitted together with two approved partners, but the evaluation would not be begun for several weeks. To me, the whole proceedings was a graphic example of how corrupt our Federal agencies had become and the thoroughness with which they are able to enforce their blacklisting of those who report actual criminal activities by Federal employees. While the Special Counsel employee who investigated my complaint played down the criminal nature of the actions by both the Federal employees and the faculty members of the University of Alaska, his supervisor supplied me with a copy of an e-mail from Tricia Wurtz of the USDA Forest Service to her supervisor, Hermann Gucinski, in Oregon, and to F. Stuart Chapin, the Third, a whizzend professor hired from the University of California at Berkeley so that some of his publications could be included in the list of those produced by the members of the joint Forest Service, University of Alaska research project, which had reportedly been funded with a $6,000,000 annual grant by the National Science Foundation. Because the group receiving the grant had produced so few publishable scientific results, its renewal was considered very doubtful. Due to the political prejudice against veterans of wars against Communist imperialism, hiring a veteran of the Vietnam War was deemed to be prejudicial to succeeding in getting the grant renewed. Wurtz recommended taking the money from project funds earmarked for equipment purchased to pay me the $20,000 bribe to induce me to withdraw from the selection.

   After appealing to the Board for review, an appeal was filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a court established mainly to review decisions by the MSPB. The court affirmed that it had not reviewed the facts in the case, where Farcy`s lies were most prominent. In other words, it did not review any of the most obviously mendacious justifications for the actions taken by the Forest Service. Certiorari was denied by the Supreme Court. Alexander, C.P. 1928c. New or little-known Tipulidae (Diptera).

   To the supreme disappointment of the Forest Service, I did not default on my mortgage, thanks to personal loans from relatives. However, there were no funds left for upkeep of the house I had purchased. I also had nothing left to move back to Germany. My neighbor told me shortly after I moved into my new house that no house in the neighborhood had been broken into for about 30 years. About 10 years after I moved in, a series of burglaries of my house began, accompanied by vandalism. Among other things, the front door frame was split by a hard kick under the door handle, and window panels were removed from the windows and smashed. Our ADT protection did little to help, and the sheriff declined to prosecute when some of the burglars were caught with loot from my house. Our insurance policy had lapsed because we were trying to lower our costs.

   A footnote must be added concerning some subsequent events. If I had chosen to take the employment in Alaska, my moving expenses would have been paid by the Forest Service. The Special Counsel advised me not to choose this option because of the alleged resentment I would face in Fairbanks. Such resentment would not be faced in Olympia, WA, he alleged. I was surprised to learn after I chose Olympia, that I would have to pay my own moving costs from German, which were no less than those to Alaska would have been. Once there, I would have to pay to send the household effects back to Germany if I did not stay in Washington.

   Immediately after I was fired, the Forest Service raised the allegation that the staff at Olympia did not know about my whistleblowing concerning the the bribery in Alaska. I was able to show a letter sent to my supervisor with all details of the bribery more than two months before my termination. The fact that the Forest Service raised this objection, however, shows that getting me assigned to Olympia was done in expectation of fighting a whistleblower appeal before the Merit System Protection Board before I had even agreed to the settlement agreement.

   Next, the house I bought for my family in Olympia, close to my working place, was right at the southern limits of greater Olympia. The cost of the house with almost an acre of land around it was about $150,000. My starting salary was $60,000 per year, but initial annual raises in the salary were high. I paid a large down payment, and I hoped to pay off the mortgage in just a few years.

   Under the circumstances, then, the Forest Service personnel involved in hiring me had known that the firing and blacklisting they were preparing for me would result in a foreclosure on my house, the destruction of my credit rating, and probably homeless status form my family. Nevertheless, about three months after I was fired, I was returning from the library on my bicycle and saw whisps of smoke coming from the direction of my house. As I turned the corner of my street, I saw fire trucks in front of my house and firemen spraying the smoking remains of my carport. Most of it was still standing, but the vertical supports were charred at their bases. If my neighbor had not seen the fire and sprayed it with his garden hose while his wife called the Fire Department, the flames would have been carried toward the house by the wind. It could then have burned the house down. The fire chief alleged that the fire had been started from a smoldering tree stump, which the son of my neighbor on the other side tried to burn the previous week. After the fire appeared to go out, it allegedly flared up, and burning grass set fire to the carport. To me, it could just as easily have been possible for a small plastic bottle filled with a flammble fluid to have been thrown at the corner of the carport and to have started the fire. One way seemed just as likely as the other.

Signed,

Charles W. Heckman,

05/29/2020

End of the introductory part

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