Remember the Past

It seems Mike Peters' influence has reached South Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Arizona. I don't believe he has very large congregations in these states, but from what I have been able to learn, they are very loyal.

One of the reasons I wrote and have revised The Ghosts of November was to warn people about the proliferation of dangerous doomsday cults and alternative religions, like the Peoples Temple. Jim Jones had a sign over his throne in the Jonestown pavilion from which he directed the deaths of 913 of his followers and their children. It read "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."

I believe it is imperative the members of Mike Peters' Churches around the country are made aware of what happened in Jonestown Guyana 29 years ago. Please make this your priority as well. You may be saving lives.

Rogue Messiahs

I have just finished reading Rogue Messiahs, a book by Colin Wilson. Leaders like David Koresh, Jim Jones and Mike Peters, all have several traits in common. A major one is the use of sex as salvation. Jones was known for his sexual proclivities, sharing himself with men as well as women. Interestingly, he only chose people of his own race to have sex with. Is that a sign of some subtle racism in this man who claimed to champion the poor and down trodden?

Koresh had sex with many of the women in his sect. He often complained that it was a real chore and sacrifice for him. Some of his wives were 16 years of age and younger.

Mike Peters obviously has some sexual issues, especially when it comes to intimate relations between the husbands and wives of his group. Like Koresh and Jones before him, one of Peters' main games is to have the wives degrade their husbands. Often Peters takes trips accompanied by some of the wives, never by their husbands, apparently.

Messiahs are nothing new. The Christian church was hardly a few hundred years old before they began coming out of the woodwork. Mike Peters appears to be only the latest version of these frequently mentally disturbed men, and sometimes women, who have become self-proclaimed representatives for God, and often say they are God himself.

I have received some emails and comments from former members of Peters' Church in Indianapolis. Most fear him and many feel he may be the next cult leader to order his followers into oblivion a la the drinking of Flavor-Ade as they did in Jonestown 29 years ago.

Anyone contemplating being led by or following Mike Peters to their own deaths really should read Rogue Messiahs. It may just pop their cult bubble and make them realize how foolish they have been.

One last note to the Peterites who may be reading this post. Although I am not a Christian, at one time, I was a BTC (if you are one you will know what it means). Consider Mike's order that his followers not associate with non Peterites because they are pagans. Is this what Jesus did? Did he only associate with those who believed in him? Of course not. He went where the sinners were so they could be saved. Mike Peters doesn't want his followers to do the same because then he will be exposed for the fraud he is.

Links

http://www.indianapoliscult.com/allatmikesfeet/welcome.aspx

http://obadiah1317.wordpress.com/tag/mike-peters/

http://tobysthoughts-jtc.blogspot.com/2006/07/regarding-peters-internet-and.html

http://wordpress.com/tag/mike-peters/


http://www.factnet.org/discus/messages/3/18551.html?1143572810

http://noahlot.blogspot.com/2006/08/2-tim-27-reflect-on-what-i-am-saying.html

People's temple - The Play

Two years ago last month, the Berkeley Repertory Theater premiered "The People' Temple." The writer-director, Leigh Fondakowski, spent three years researching archives and interviewing surviving members of the Peoples Temple (note the absence of an apostrophe to differentiate the name of the play from the church).

The play begins in a library with a white-gloved archivist lifting a choir robe from a box. It ends in a jungle enclave in Guyana called Jonestown.

Fondakowski used interviews with survivors and copious amounts of audiotapes that were found in Jonestown as well as letters and other archival written materials as sources for the verbatim dialog of the play. This method of writing the play allowed the true feelings of those who lived the Jonestown trauma to come through.

Her writing methods are very similar to those of another play The People's Temple is sometimes compared with, "The Laramie Project." Moises Kauffman and his Tectonic Theater Project used interview transcripts to craft their powerful account of the reaction to the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The play has been performed in venues across the country and was turned into a well-received HBO movie.

The People's temple has only played to audiences in Berkeley and at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota as far as I can tell. However, the artistic director of the Denver Theater Company, coincidentally, where The Laramie Project premiered, has said he hopes his theater will perform it in 2008. Hopefully The People's Temple will play to many more theaters across the country in 2008 since it is the 30th anniversary year of the Jonestown Massacre.

But is it worth £238?

Last night, a fellow from Great Britain told me he looked up The Ghosts of November on Amazon.com UK.

The Ghosts of November at Amazon.com in the United Kingdom

He surprised me when he told me what the book dealer was asking for it - £238 or almost $500. That's about 25 times the original retail price of $19.95. On May 31, it was listed at £120, still much higher than in the USA.

On the USA's version of Amazon.com, the book is going for $120. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone paying that much for it.

The Ghosts of November at Amazon.com in the USA

I am seeking a literary agent to represent the revision of the book with publishers. The new and improved Ghosts has so much more than the first edition, I don't know why I can't find an agent interested in pitching it to a publisher.

When I send book queries and proposals out, I include the URL to this blog. Perhaps some agent out there will see this and kindly explain to me why, with the first edition selling for almost its weight in gold, why they feel this book is not for them?

The Ghosts of November on Ebay Half.com

The Next Jim Jones?

Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, a 61-year-old Puerto Rican preacher
who or a few years has been creating himself for several years now, is quickly gaining notoriety as the cult leader most likely to succeed Rev. Jim Jones as the leader of the most dangerous doomsday cult in America.

The strange and apparently charismatic de Jesus Miranda, began his cult activities benignly enough by simply declaring himself "Jesus Christ." This pronouncement didn't exactly stop the presses. It's not like no one has ever done that before. But this time, Jesus Christ accompanied the announcement of his presence with the great news that with his return to earth, Satan has been defeated and for his followers, there is no such thing as sin.

Gullible Latino believers have come to this cult in droves, giving the man who calls himself Jesus money, jewelry, cars, boats, houses and even a multi million dollar business. There are now said to be some 300 congregations across the USA, Central and South America, who believe in de Jesus Miranda. With more Rolexes that one man can wear and his own private jet, the would-be Jesus decided to take his new religion to yet another unbelievable height -- he declared himself the anti Christ and had the number "666" tattooed on his body. That should have sobered up some of his followers drunk on the prospect of an end to sin, right? After all, the anti-Christ, he's muy mal, no?

No, his claim that he is both Christ and anti Christ only increased the fervor of his believers. They began getting "666" tattooed on their bodies.

de Jesus Miranda tells his followers that the Catholic Church, which a good many of them used to belong to, was evil. Proof of that was the fact that celibate priests participate in pedophilia and other sexual perversions. Perversions members of de Jesus Miranda's Growing in Grace cult movement are exempt from -- no more sin, remember.

He encourages his followers to picket and demonstrate outside traditional churches from other religions and they do. They even have been known to disrupt services. De Jesus's tactics are not unlike Jim Jones, who also used his temple members to protest as well as to support politicians, an activity de Jesus has yet to get involved in.

But he obviously exhibits control over his sheep much the same way as Jim Jones did over his Peoples Temple. Could Growing in Grace become the next Peoples Temple? There are many who believe it already has.

Three Central American countries have banned de Jesus from visiting their countries and having meetings there. However the thousands of followers de Jesus has in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras still can see their leader by satellite.

Growing in Grace bears watching. If a cult leader can convince his congregation to get the anti Christ's number tattooed on their bodies, what is keeping him from telling them to whip up some cyanide laced grape ade and partake? Or worse yet, what's stopping him from getting more physical with his actions against traditional churches?

Charles Huff -- A Legend in His Own Mind

Many conspiracy theories abound about the Jonestown Massacre. Some of them seem to have a basis in fact, like the discrepancy in body count that was due to the infants and children being placed in a mildly concave area and then layers of older children and adults laying over them. If you were not there, this seems like an unbelievable story.

But many conspiracies have been fueled by the statements made in a letter by a man named Charles Huff who purports to have been one of seven Green Beret troopers who were the first Americans to arrive in Jonestown after the massacre. I know that claim to be false because I was the third American soldier of the task force in Jonestown. My commander and brigade surgeon were the first two, but they didn’t stay any appreciable amount of time.

Huff’s story was printed in the Church of Scientology International’s Freedom Magazine in 1995. The cult, in an attempt to seem more mainstream, had taken over the Cult Awareness Network, whose newsletter first published Huff’s sensational lies.

Mr. Huff’s excerpted letter follows.

“I was assigned with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, 1st Special Forces Panama. On November 18, 1978, we were alerted by the State Department to “rescue” American citizens in Guyana.

All the information we knew was that a U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and his staff were killed or wounded and American lives were in danger. Within five hours of the request of the U.S. embassy in Georgetown, Guyana, and the State Department we were “on site” in Jonestown.

This claim is patently ridiculous. The State Department was not even aware of the massacre until late Saturday evening. Unless Huff and his team were sitting in a hotel at Timheri International Airport, they could not have flown to Jonestown and arrive on November 18. The task force’s helicopters were not ready to fly until Monday, November 20. So right from the beginning of his letter, Huff, whose bona fides as a Green Beret have yet to be confirmed, is a liar.

For the next 30 days we stayed to return the compound back to the Guyanese government. When we arrived at Jonestown, we were met by the local Guyana Defense Force (six local policemen).

This is Lie #2. The GDF did not arrive in Jonestown until the morning of the 19^th and there were more than a half dozen troopers in the security force. I met them and rode in a helicopter with some of them.

We found one elderly woman who had slept through the murders.

The elderly women, Hyacinth Thrush, was discovered Sunday morning, 19 November, by GDF troopers who found her wandering in shock through the enclave.

Sixteen American personnel committed suicide upon their return to Panama and other places. Three were murdered. One year later, those of us still alive were recalled from the Nicaragua Civil War to hear a CIA briefing on all the events which led up to Jonestown. As a veteran of Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf and Somalia, I have never been more affected than the Jonestown murders.”

I was stationed in Panama for another two years. There were no American personnel that I knew of who committed suicide. Some became alcoholics, but I knew of no one who died at their own hand or anyone else’s. As for this fantasy CIA briefing about events leading up to the massacre a year before, that doesn’t even sound reasonable. Why would soldiers be recalled from their duties in a combat zone to receive a briefing about something that happened a year earlier?

Reunion?

I went to the Military.com URL today, researching the whereabouts of some of the people involved in the Joint Humanitarian Task Force to Guyana. I was researching the veracity of one of the alleged minor figures in the conspiracy controversy that has grown up around the Jonestown Massacre. I will have more on that later in the week.

But while seeking out my former comrades, I came up with the thought of having a reunion of task force members. November 18, 2008, will be on a Saturday and that will make it exactly 30 years to the day of the unprecedented mass murder/suicide. What better way to commemorate this horrific event than with a reunion of men and women who haven't seen each other in three decades?

I envision having it in my adopted hometown -- Indianapolis. After all, this is the city that Jim Jones first preached in and the original home of many of the followers that left the Hoosier State for California and eventually Jonestown, Guyana. I have emailed the men from my unit who had email addresses in the Military.com site, but that was only two former soldiers. If anyone knows the whereabouts of MAJ Victor Burgos, the 193rd Infantry Brigade Surgeon in 1978, CPT Richard Skinner, the commander of the 601st Medical Company at the time and SP$ Randy Fielder, SP4 Clifford Yoder, and SP6 Sam Bernal, I would appreciate it. I already know how to contact the other two members of our medical team -- SP4 Eric Vega and SP4 Mike Sanborn.

Any other members of the task force, no matter what branch of service, are invited to join us from November 17 thru 19, 2008, as we gather in Indianapolis to keep alive the awful experiences we shared so long ago. Perhaps then we can alert those who were not born then that "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Email me at JeffBrailey@military.com or by calling (317) 627-0359 and leaving a detailed message of how to contact you, if you want to be part of this historic reunion.

The Anniversary Syndrome

(I wrote this essay for the Jonestown Institute's annual newsletter a couple of years ago.)

There was a time when I did not believe in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Part of the reason for my skepticism may be that I was a professional soldier, and psychological disorders, particularly this one, were often considered career-enders.

I served two tours in Vietnam as a medic with the 85th Evacuation Hospital. I worked a minimum of 12 hours a day, seven days a week on the Recovery Room/Intensive Care Unit. It was not pleasant duty. Day after interminable day, we treated American soldiers, airmen and marines with horrendous wounds of war, civilian women and children who had grotesque burns or missing limbs and enemy prisoners-of-war with wounds so severe, we often were barely able to put them back together again.

Every day represented a new and different assault on the psyche of medics serving on the line or in hospitals. I'd like to believe it was the innate compassion most medical personnel possess that allowed me to perform agonizing duties with professional acumen and the psychological detachment necessary to remain reasonably sane.

Despite these experiences, I did not exhibit any symptoms of PTSD when I returned to the U.S. after my tours in Vietnam. In fact, when I would hear or read about fellow soldiers or vets who acted out in an inappropriate manner, ostensibly because of the trauma they experienced during the war, I considered them frauds or weaklings who were probably psychologically flawed before entering the military. It wasn't until many years later that I recognized exactly how complicated and fragile the mind is.

In 1978, I was confronted by an event so disturbing and so massive in scope that it caused me psychological distress that continues to have an effect on my life to this day. I spent nine days in November of that year as senior medic of the Joint Humanitarian Task Force sent to Guyana to recover the remains of the victims of the Jonestown Massacre.

I was part of a team of about three dozen men and women who were deployed to Guyana on November 20, two days after the deaths. The event that had occurred there happened in an extremely hot tropical climate that caused all sorts of complications for body retrieval, identification, and removal. We also worked under incredible time constraints, since the conditions that hastened body decomposition served to create a very real physical health hazard for our team. Beyond that, the mental strain was almost overwhelming.

To this day, 25 years later, after being afflicted with Parkinson's Disease, after going in and out of states of homelessness for the past five years, after two divorces, and after fighting a powerful gambling addiction, I still consider the nine days spent in Guyana as the worst period of my life.

Yet, immediately after it was over and I returned to my duty station in the Panama Canal, my life seemed to return to normal. For a year, I rarely talked about or even thought about the Jonestown Massacre and my connection to it.

However, as ordinary as my life was during the weeks and months subsequent to this unprecedented military mission, there was a tiny seed of trouble hidden deep within my psyche waiting to emerge and disturb my conscious life. It happened very suddenly and dramatically.

That bad seed began to sprout almost exactly a year of my journey to and from the hell that was Jonestown. It was a Sunday in November 1979. I was walking past the bakery in Balboa, Panama on a peaceful pleasant morning. Delectable aromas were wafting from the open door of the shop, enticing customers to come in and buy the sweet breads and pastries it was famous for. But my olfactory nerves interpreted the odor as being the sickeningly sweet smell created by 914 bodies rotting in the tropical heat. I immediately vomited on the sidewalk.

Embarrassed by this reaction I had no control over, I dashed to my car and quickly returned home. Although not consciously aware of any changes to my normal behavior, I am told that for the next two weeks I was uncharacteristically moody and depressed. I cried for no apparent reason, argued with my spouse over petty and inconsequential grievances and treated my children with impatience and indifference.

My nights were marked by difficulty in falling to sleep and then abruptly waking up in a cold sweat after experiencing very realistic nightmares that resembled scenes from the classic horror film, Night of the Living Dead. It was as if the former residents of Jonestown were literally visiting me. Sleep was not a pleasant restful pastime during the next two weeks.

Just as suddenly as my bizarre behavior manifested itself, it disappeared. My wife and children who had spent a fortnight being cautious and tentative in dealing with me, slowly realized I was my old self again. Life was back to normal again until the following November when the symptoms returned for two weeks.

My family put up with these annual changes for five more Novembers until I finally achieved an epiphany provided by a very unlikely person at a very unusual location. My bowling team at Fort Sill, Oklahoma was participating in our weekly Tuesday night league game. It was my turn to bowl and I picked my ball up from the rack, approached the lane, released the ball and delivered a rare, for me, strike.

Rather than reacting joyously to this happy feat by shouting and issuing traditional high-fives to my teammates, I simply went back to my seat and sat down.

"Brailey, you don't bowl enough strikes that you should be that nonchalant," asked a member of my team who happened to be a psychologist. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing," I replied flatly.

Later, over pie and coffee with our spouses, the psychologist looked at me and said, "Do you feel all right? You look pretty depressed."

"I'm fine," I responded, not really realizing nothing could be further from the truth.

"No, he's not," said my Vietnamese wife. "He gets like this around Thanksgiving since he came back from Jonestown."

I am sure a 1000-watt halogen light bulb literally appeared over my head as I heard my wife's pronouncement and consciously recognized that I was indeed weird every November. My psychologist teammate told me to stop by his office the next morning.

He and I spent several hours that week discussing my behavior, its causes and means to control it. I came to learn I had a form of PTSD called "Anniversary Syndrome." It seems people affected by severe emotionally traumatic events are capable of suppressing them for most of the year, but when the date of the event looms annually, it triggers something within the brain that causes one to relive the terrible time.

After a relatively short period of informal therapy sessions, I succeeded in overcoming the bizarre behavior that plagued me for six Novembers. I was actually able to file my Jonestown experiences deep within the recesses of my brain and keep them from surfacing for the next 14 years.

I was a newlywed in February 1998. My second wife and I married on Valentine's Day. A couple of weeks later, we were sitting on our patio drinking coffee on a sunny Saturday morning. The portable phone rang and I answered with a cheery "Hello."

"Hello. My name is Jim Hougan. I am producing a documentary about Jonestown, and I'm looking for Jeff Brailey," a voice on the other end of the line said.

The hair on the nape of my neck stood up as I heard the word "Jonestown" for the first time in about a dozen years. "How did you find me?" I asked cautiously.

"Your name is on the list of soldiers who were on the Joint Humanitarian Task Force and I did an Internet search on your name and found your website. Are you the same Jeff Brailey?" Hougan asked.

I admitted it, and we spent the next 20 minutes chatting about my experiences in Guyana. I agreed to appear in the documentary, and Hougan said he'd come to San Antonio or send me an airline ticket to a city where he would tape the interview.

As I hung up the phone, my bride who had listened to my side of the conversation with wide-eyed curiosity, asked what I was talking about. I told her, "Jonestown."

"You were there?" she asked.

"Yes." I replied.

"IN THE CULT!?!?" she shouted.

"No, part of the cleanup," I said.

We spent the next few hours discussing the massacre and then went on to enjoy the remainder of our Saturday. That night, my wife shook me awake from a restless sleep. I asked why she had woken me up. "Because you were screaming in your sleep," she replied with a look of fear on her face.

"Uh oh, they're back," I said resignedly.

"Who's back," she asked.

"The ghosts," said I.

I went on to explain the Anniversary Syndrome that had bothered me years before. But this was February, not November, and I was a little rattled by it.

It was that very night The Ghosts of November: Memoirs of an Outsider Who Witnessed the Carnage at Jonestown, Guyana was conceived. It was my wife's idea that if I wrote about it, the ghosts would go away. I wrote the book in four months. It was published and released by J&J Publishers on October 31, 1998.

Writing the account of my nine days in Guyana, appearing on radio talk and television news shows, speaking at book signings and to civic groups, all were cathartic experiences that seem to have exorcised my ghosts for the time being.

Anniversary Syndrome is not the only ill-effect that Jonestown had on my life. Although I was brought up in the church and attended a Christian college, my spiritual life has never been the same. I still consider myself a Christian, but I am a very cynical nontrusting one.

While I still have a belief in God, my faith has been shattered. I will not trust His self-appointed representatives. It was not long after Jonestown that Jim and Tammy Bakker's sins against their flock were exposed, that Jimmy Swaggart tearfully confessed his infidelities, that Oral Roberts conned thousands of his followers into sending him millions of dollars so God would not "take him home," and that Robert Tilton was caught bilking gullible elderly Christians living on fixed incomes out of their money.

I began equating the antics of God's conmen with the evil deeds of Jim Jones that culminated in the taking of 914 lives in Jonestown. In my mind, most television evangelists are no better than he was, and the only thing that separates them from him is the fact that they have not become homicidal maniacs – yet.

Jonestown represents the impetus of my self-exile from organized religion, and phony television evangelists continue to provide me with plenty of reasons to continue to eschew the church.
Benny Hinn gives me the creeps, especially since I know he is a charlatan and fraud, yet the faithful continue to flock to and contribute to his dog-and-pony healing shows. Trinity Broadcasting and its boss, holy roller Paul Crouch, remind me of the power and charisma which Jim Jones used to control people. There are many more greedy and corrupt ministers using the media to make themselves rich.

Jonestown has alienated me from God. I suppose you could say this is evidence that far from being the God he claimed to be, Jones was actually Satan's servant.

At one time I believed that no matter how bad something turned out, there was always something to learn from every human experience, that some good would come from it, no matter how seemingly devastating the immediate outcome of it was. When I look back at the nine days I spent in Jonestown and the monumentally evil deeds that caused me to go there, I can honestly say I find no redeeming value in that experience.

E-mail from a Future Reader

Here is an e-mail from someone interested in the Jonestown Massacre along with my reply.

Sir,
I stumbled apon your writings about the jonestown tradgedy while preforming my own personal research and I have to say that I found your writings to be incredibly moving and captivating. I would like to purchase a copy of your book, but above that I just wanted to extend my own apreciation for your writing personally. Thank you for your words not just about the tradgedy, but about PTSD victims everywhere. Thank you for your contribution and I think you should write a screenplay about everything you wrote about in your article on the jonestown.sdsu.edu site.

SRA Graham C Walden
Aircraft Fuel Systems Repair Journeyman
379 EMXS/MXMCF
Al Udeid AB, Qata

*********************************************************************************

Mr. Walden,

Thank you for the kind words. Unfortunately, my book, published in 1998,is out-of-print. It is for sale used, on Amazon.com, but the price is usually very high. I have written a revision of The Ghosts of November which has about 50% new material, photos, footnotes, a map and diagram and it hopefully will be published next year. I am seeking an agent right now.

I have started a blogsite called The Ghosts of November which I am using to promote the book as well as a tool to show literary agents I am querying that there remains a great deal of interest in the Jonestown Tragedy.

http://novemberghosts.blogspot.com

I hope you will visit the blog, sign the guest book and participate in the forum. If I get enough hits, I think it will get the agents' attention. If not, I am committed to getting it published even if I self-publish again.

Thanks again for the encouraging words. I will place your email on the blog.

Sincerely,

Jeff Brailey

Hi There

I consider myself very fortunate. Despite the fact I'm going on 60 years of age and have had my share of adversity, I am still standing. I have had Parkinson's disease for about 11 years, was told three years ago if I did not undergo a quintuple coronary artery bypass, I would have a heart attack, stroke or die within three months (I didn't have the surgery and still live) and have various and sundry aches and pains. I lived as a homeless derelict for almost six years, am a non-practicing compulsive gambler, and have been thrice married and twice divorced. I still haven't let life's lows get me down.

I do have some accomplishments I am very proud of, the biggest of which was the publication of THE GHOSTS OF NOVEMBER in 1998. Although it was self-published, the book was a success. Out-of-print, you can still find used copies offered on Amazon.com for many times the book's retail price. As much of a highlight this achievement was in my life, the two year rewrite and revision I just completed, adding fifty percent new material, including photos, maps and footnotes is one I am almost as proud of.

Last week, I went to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in Colorado Springs, seeking representation from one of the literary agents who were there. I was fortunate enough to have a pitch session with one and she wanted to see my book proposal. I finally had my foot in the door!

This is the first step in a manuscript becoming a real book. As this process continues, you are invited to return to this blog on a regular basis to view progress from conception to birth. I will update the readers on problems with false labor and other setbacks and any doctoring (editing) that needs to be performed so the baby is born without any defects.

In the meantime, I'll post news and correspondence that will be related to the book and the Jonestown Massacre as we move closer to the 30th anniversary of the horrific event. I shall solicit your comments, contributions, critiques and questions. Any special events I have will be posted and I hope you will inform me of events you learn of. I hope you will join me.