The burdens we carry
(Part 3 of series. Mark Gudmundsen shot and killed Alexander Norte in Part 1. Gudmundsen found not guilty of murder in Part 2. Oct 2 and 9 SJR or sjrnews.com.)
We all carry personal burdens. Some are conquered easily and others are not. The more difficult ones are sometimes rechristened as demons. Alexander Norte’s demons had their genesis years before in France. Mark Gudmundsen’s were born when Norte drew his final breath.
The respect Gudmundsen received from his peers had less to do with his ability as a cowboy than his intellect. He was bright, well-educated, and compassionate, and his friends were scattered from his boyhood home of Burley, ID, to southern Utah and beyond.
His academic talent came from his mother, described in her obituary as one of Utah’s most educated and widely traveled women. As an English professor, her three children were taught early in the proper use of the language.
As they entered adolescence, each had acquired an eloquence in speech and written word far beyond their years. As a high school senior, Mark won a regional essay contest with a composition on a not-so-sophisticated subject, the mule.
When he arrived in San Juan County after the Norte trial, he had two years behind him at the University of Utah, not your typical itinerant cowboy of the day.
He worked for the SS Cattle Co. until World War II broke out. Then, with his cowboy friends, he signed enlistment papers and entered the service of his country. There, he was assigned to the Army Air Corp and trained as a gunner on a B24 Liberator bomber in the South Pacific.
After 200 hours of flight time, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the fourth-highest military award for heroism and the highest for those who fought in the air. He later added two Oak Leaf Clusters to the honor.
Norte’s demons were born in France, surrounded by filth at the bottom of a muddy, rat-infested trench on the front lines of The Great War.
He enlisted in 1917 and served in the 18th Field Artillery in The Second Battle of the Marne, a three-week skirmish in July and August of 1918. Nearly 135,000 soldiers ended up dead or wounded, including Norte. He was gassed on the first day.
A British officer described the effects of gas warfare, “...gray faces and protruding eyeballs, clutching their throats and choking as they ran, many of them dropping in their tracks and lying on the sodden earth with limbs convulsed and features distorted in death.”
Gratefully, he didn’t suffer the worst like some, but no one could have survived that conflict with its mud, rats, and death and not suffered emotional scars to last a lifetime.
When the term Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) was coined in 1980, we were tempted to believe the condition arrived in modern times. I don’t think so. I think the foundation of PTSD began when Cain raised his arm in anger against his brother.
In 1935, Norte screamed he was a PTSD victim when, weeks before he died, said to the sheriff: “...I’ll kill those Irishmen if they get on my land; I’ll get as many of them as I can and then put a bullet in my head; I have nothing to live for; they will lose more than I.”
After the war, Norte never completely adjusted to civilian life. The only bright spot in that dark period was the birth of his son in 1920. It wasn’t to last.
The family he longed for vanished before his eyes a few short years later when his wife took their son to California. His eternal loneliness was assured when she later filed for divorce.
Bursting from his camp that November afternoon, he was granted his wish for life to end. With each warning shot, he didn’t stop but quickened his pace toward the man with the gun until the last bullet stopped him dead.
When Gudmundsen saw no weapon on the dead man and realized no threat existed, the dead man’s demons became his own.
The next and final chapter in this story, “Bound by More than Blood,” is about the relationship between granduncle and grandnephew Jacob Adams and Mark Gudmundsen and the conclusion.