This guest Slog post is by Zachary Watterson, a writer who lives in Seattle.
In this season of goodwill, as we remember the less fortunate among us, Gary Sanford Raub remembers his friend John T. Williams.
- Zachary Watterson
- Gary Sanford Raub
Two days before he was shot to death by a Seattle police officer in August, Williams was walking down Broadway at 7 in the morning wearing a pink dress and no shoes. “That’s how far he was gone,” says Raub, who described Williams’s solo, pre-dawn pageant to me recently at the coffee shop at the corner of Broadway and Denny. Williams’s exhibition apparently wasn’t out of character. News reports have painted him as a man ravaged by chronic alcoholism, seizures, and severe cognitive impairment.
Like Williams, Raub resides on the streets of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Both men were born Native, Williams to the Nuu-Chah-Nulth First Nations tribe of the Ditidaht band, in British Columbia, and Raub to the Makah tribe in Neah Bay.
I used to see Williams wandering the streets near my apartment building. He seemed well kept and peaceable. But he punched a resident in the mouth at Skagit County detox center in May 2009. And it has been reported that the police were called, a month before his death, to take him away from Dick’s Drive-In on Capitol Hill, where he walked aimlessly among the cars and people, wearing no pants, his legs coated in his own filth.
As we spoke, Raub told me a bit about himself. He said he served in the war in Vietnam and was held in a prisoner of war camp in Cambodia for three years. While he was a POW, he said, he lived in a bamboo cage set in a river that rushed around his legs. His captors used a gaff on him and yanked out his teeth, he said, and as he talked, I could see his toothless gums. One day, Raub said, he was working in a rice paddy, when he saw a sharp rock in the water. He fell to his knees and stuffed the rock down his throat, he said. That night he used the rock to cut open the bamboo cage and escaped. Using skills he had learned as a boy, he studied the night sky and found his way to his base. Raub said that when he got there, no one could believe he was still alive.
Now it’s 40 years later, and he says he sleeps outside the Value Village thrift store. He quit staying in shelters after being robbed repeatedly. In the mornings, he trudges to the coffee shop. I have seen him trudging, like an old devout Buddhist, though he is a Christian.
There’s “one thing people don’t know about John,” Raub says. “He used to give money away.” He was a wood carver. “He’d sell one of his totem poles and have a pile of money.” Raub says “a lot of us”—meaning his tribe of Seattle’s homeless men—are saddened by Williams’s death. “Anybody who was on the street, John had a heart for. It makes me think: How ’bout talking with people instead of talking at people. We need more heart, less hurt.”
The fatal shooting of Williams is one of six incidents listed by the American Civil Liberties Union in its recent request for a Justice Department investigation into what it says is the Seattle Police Department’s frequent use of excessive force, especially against minorities such as Williams. As the city has seen with other Justice Department investigations, including the one into the King County Correctional Facility, where Williams spent part of his life, the probe is a step in the right direction. But the police department’s use of excessive force is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Perhaps it has something to do with the four officers who were shot dead in a Lakewood coffee shop last year. The man suspected of the execution-style murders, Maurice Clemmons, was hunted and killed by police shortly after the officers were slain.
There is a war in our city, and there isn’t a soul who can see its end. As Raub says, remembering his friend, “We need more heart, less hurt.”
@49: nice troll attempt, but I ain’t gonna bite…
though mmmmm, Kool Aid
I’lll concede one point fnarf, he’d have to be sane to ‘lying’. This is pure craziness, thrown in full public view by an irresponsible writer.
this didn’t happen because we never bombed nor had any bases in Laos either, right.
Quid pro quo troll-ise, . Quid pro quo
“this didn’t happen because we never bombed nor had any bases in Laos either, right.”
What are you talking about? The same Americans who would deny/cover up the bombings of Laos and Cambodia (far right wing) are the same people who would claim Americans were held in secret camps in Cambodia by the Vietnamese government, you moron. It’s something the Vietnamese government denied for 30 years after the war but right wingers in the US claimed these camps existed and help deny Vietnam diplomatic relations until 1995. Good job, you’ve just defended one of the main arguments the right wing used to strangle Vietnam for 20 years after the Fall of Saigon.
If you’re going to be historical ignorant, at least be politically consistent.
I know about the war as well or better than you, but the issue you are missing is that this was a last colonial expedition by the west- france then handed it over to the US, but then it became a false wall against the east/new communists and that it how it was sold to the us populace at least after 1963…. now it wasn’t that the U.S. wanted land per se but peoples to fight against the encroaching communist “menace”…a sham sham sham, that killed nearly 60,0000 US troops, but you have your stupid ass troll internet views. and I could go on with statements that people that were there so, fuck off harshly . dick.
The writer is obviously skeptical of Raub’s story and goes out of his way to insert a “he said” or another attribution in virtually every sentence during the paragraph that recounts Raub’s war story. If you can’t see that he’s deliberately paraphrasing a war story that was told to him over coffee and not reporting strict facts about the war – that’s on you. Not on the Stranger or the author of this article.
A sample:
HE SAID he served in the war in Vietnam and was held in a prisoner of war camp in Cambodia for three years. While he was a POW, HE SAID, he lived in a bamboo cage set in a river that rushed around his legs. His captors used a gaff on him and yanked out his teeth, HE SAID, and as he talked, I could see his toothless gums. One day, RAUB SAID, he was working in a rice paddy, when he saw a sharp rock in the water. He fell to his knees and stuffed the rock down his throat, HE SAID.
Thanks for the High School version of Vietnamese history. All true but sophomorically rendered to the level of a high school student you are.
OK, so how can you defend one the right wing’s most popular talking points in the 20 years they continued to ‘fight’ the government of Vietnam; they argued that the Vietnamese had secret prisons with US prisoners (unregistered with the red cross) in Cambodia during and after the war. If you want to defend that bullshit and Mr. Raub’s delusional claims to be eating rocks to escape one of these camps, be my guest. You and Mr. Raub are simple repeating well-worn, rightwing, anti-Vietnamese talking points that have been long disproven.
I’m assuming then you read Warner’s groundbreaking book and he’s rather astounding revelations about the role of King Bhumiphol; you seem to hint at it on one of your posts?
” last colonial expedition by the west”
Really? I’d argue the Iraq War was that too.
@56 shhh, so what the writer is saying is, “hey, this guy is nuts, so I’m going to use him as a character reference”.
I’d find a better way to make a point than using lunatics.
” last colonial expedition by the west”
during the real cold war
Iraq was a landgrab or resourcegrab such as it were. I mean was there oil in vietnam or southeast asia?
thats why vietnam was ideological and iraq is ideological plus.
Vietnam has oil and gas in the South china seas which is why china is making territorial claims in the region.
So I’m assuming you didn’t read Warner’s book. Pretty amaIbg since you discuss the same history but haven’t red what’s considered the best books in the issue in the past 15 years.
Typos from iPhone
That may be a high school version today of what is what it was about, but if you were a male then I would think that it would’ve meant a total different thing, like say being a grunt and perhaps losing a limb in ground combat or arming bombs for detonation over civilian targets just because you were born male in post WW2 america..
you may not like to think about it but that, and worse , was what those choices were about then…
@58 – I see it as an opportunity to let a person eulogize his friend. What’s anecdotal is presented as anecdotal. Astute readers, like yourself, can draw their own conclusions about the veracity of what he says — or about what he says says about him.
So I guess you haven’t read Warner’s ground breaking book on the war in Laos.
And what about poor Mr. Raub’s being forced to heat rocks and regurgitate them later!
If those oil fields do exist do then why are not the multinationals exploiting it as we speak, and why were the not providing security during the viet-nam war….. they are slackersssss.what w/ letting good ‘merican boys die.
” Astute readers, like yourself, can draw their own conclusions about the veracity of what he says “
So I guess that eliminates #1, Jen graves, from the ‘astute readers’ club.
Thank you, Zach, for listening and for speaking truth with simplicity and spirit. Hope The Stranger will offer you a column – we could use a good war correspondent to remind us about what is real and what really matters. There are things which cannot be said, unless they are said very well. In the spin and babble of our time, such eloquence is rare. I lift up my hands to you and to those you honor with your words.
I first met Gary back in 2001 or so. He volunteered for many years at Harborview, providing the calm human contact from which newborns of drug-addicted mothers derived such benefit.
An unassuming guy.
Hey y’all remember back when I fucked Thomas Jefferson’s 13 pussies on the moon and then shot my load all over the top of Candy Mountain?
“we could use a good war correspondent to remind us about what is real”
Thanks for the laugh.
Let’s not judge Mr. Raub too harshly. Mr. Reagan showed that you can grow up to be President without knowing the difference between personal war experience and personal war movie experience. Tales of Vietnam-era captivity are as common as Jesuses and extra-terrestrial expatriates in Seattle’s homeless population.
But to anyone who credits this story, even tentatively, crushing judgment is due.
@69 Aww! <3
@glug…Umm, no issues with vets, per se…thanks for projecting though. I’ve got some uncles, cousins, a granddaddy and even some exes (no excuse for my lapses in judgment there) who are/were vets. Some are great people. Some are just too hung up on receiving accolades for a service which they volunteered to do, and I’m not impressed by it.
“But the police department’s use of excessive force is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Perhaps it has something to do with the four officers who were shot dead in a Lakewood coffee shop last year. The man suspected of the execution-style murders, Maurice Clemmons, was hunted and killed by police shortly after the officers were slain.”
Interesting that not one person challenges this mischaracterization, this slander. First, every shooting recently that has been investigated has cleared the shooting officer. Civil lawsuits have gone nowhere. For every legal purpose we recognize in this country, allegations of police excessive force are unsupported by the facts, at least to date.
Maurice Clemmons was seen in the cafe shooting these officers. He was armed with a weapon stolen from one of his victims. He was wounded in a way witnesses say the shooter had been shot at the cafe. He, a known suspect in police murders, refused a lawful order to stop from the officer who finally shot and killed him. There is no ‘suspect’ or ‘alleged’ about this. Nor is there much room for criticizing the actions of the officer who shot him. He wasn’t hunted down, he was the subject of a manhunt brought on by his own heinous actions. Had he obeyed the officers’ orders he would have received medical attention. Had he lived he would have been tried and convicted for these murders, in addition to the other crimes for which he was awaiting trial. Any expectation that a lone officer would refrain from shooting a physically larger recognizable suspect in multiple officer murders who refused several orders to stop is simply asanine.
Policemen are functionaries in our civic life. They earn a salary for their work, just as you or I do. They aren’t ipso facto heroes for the fact of being police officers, though on more occasions than with non-law enforcement their actions make them heroes. They aren’t supermen or superwomen. But they do have the same right to return home to their families after a shift that any of you do, or that the writer of this smear campaign, Mr. Watterson, does. Pull a gun on an officer, or threaten their life and you might just get killed for doing so. The solution isn’t slandering the police. It is obeying their lawful orders and contesting unlawful ones in the proper venue of a courtroom or police disciplinary investigation.
@73, so I make a post saying I keep my veteran status secret*, and you respond with rage that I am probably “demanding special treatment” for my veteran status? Yeah, sure, you don’t have issues at all. The follow up post where you say in a lapse of judgement you have multiple veteran ex’s – a solid indicator of someone without issues.
I”ve seem this gentelman Mr. Raub a lot , especially around the Value Village store in Capitol Hill, he’s always there, he looks like a nice guy, very calm, HE IS NOT CRAZY. I did not know his story, maybe its true, maybe not, but who am I to judge him? I did not know He was Native too. His skin looks very damaged. I can tell something really bad happened to him in the past. But I honestly I dont think he’s lying.