O. Paul Mortensen - No Ordinary Life: Short Personal Essays

No Ordinary Life

Short Personal Essaysby

O. Paul Mortensen

No OrdinaryLife Short Personal Essays by O. PaulMortensen

First Edition

Copyright 2021 by O. Paul Mortensen

All rights reserved. This book cannot bereproduced, scanned, or transmitted, electronic or mechanical,without permission in writing from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-63760-307-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-00598-584-4 (ebook)

COVER DESIGN created by Dorine CurreyRivers

BOOK EDITING and LAYOUT by Elizabeth BethPetty Bentley

Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebookis licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not beresold or given away to other people. If you would like to sharethis book with another person, please purchase an additional copyfor each recipient. If youre reading this book and did notpurchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then pleasereturn to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you forrespecting the hard work of this author.

Coeur dAlene, Idaho

This book is dedicated toan American hero, my brother, Rocky S. Mortensen, who valiantlyserved an ungrateful America in not one, not two, but three combattours as an infantry soldier with the United States Army inVietnam. Rocky continues to live the horrors of an ugly war lostonly by corrupt politicians.

O. PaulMortensen

All accounts written aboutin my essays are based on actual events. Except for high-profileindividuals or those whose permission was obtained and others citedin news media, I changed the true names of former co-workers,third-party persons and subjects investigated criminally during mycareer as a special agent with the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation.

All opinions expressedherein are solely mine and not those of the FBI or any otherfederal, state, or local government agency.

Contents

If you dont decide whereyou are going, life will decide for you.

Tim Allen

Believe you can and yourehalfway there.

TheodoreRoosevelt

Falling down in life isinevitablestaying down is optional.

Carrie AnnJohnson

Everything youve everwanted is on the other side of fear.

George Washington AddairJr.

Failure is a part ofsuccess.

Hank Aaron

Be a winner or a loser.Dont be a spectatordo something.

Anonymous

I have always found thatmercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Abraham Lincoln

Acknowledgements

Thank you, Stephanie AnnRodrigues, for finding me against all odds.

You began somewhere onMadeira Island, a Portuguese island in the Madeira Archipelago offthe northwest coast of Africa, as well as in Northern Africa,Senegal, Sardinia, Spain, France, England, Wales, Ireland,Scotland, Germany, and Guyana then escaped over dangerous oceansfor a better life in the Hawaiian Islands, on the other side of theearth, before restlessly backtracking to California in the hope ofa still better life.

I began somewhere inDenmark, Norway, Sweden, England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, aswell as Germanic and Northwestern Europe then escaped religiouspersecution for the Northeastern United States, for morepersecution with the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints, before struggling afoot across the barren, western plainsto Idaho and turn sod covered in sagebrush into fields ofcrops.

A dreamer, unafraid of theunknown, I set out in search of my own place in this world,traveling thousands of miles and halfway around the earth to findthat place. Finding you during my journey, Stephanie, was amiracle. With faith and love you stayed by my side livinghand-to-mouth without a complaint on a most unlikely roller coasterride along an event-filled track to happiness andsuccess.

Thank you, Stephanie, forentering my dreams and helping me find our place in this worldtogether.

Acknowledgments also go toElizabeth Beth Petty Bentley who professionally edited and formatted my work. Beth made me workhard to implement many necessary edits, but the composition andstoryline greatly improved. Thank you so much, Beth!

Additional thanks to DorineCurrey Rivers for the beautiful cover design, and for her mentoringand encouragement during the final stages of completion.

Introduction

NO ORDINARY LIFE is a compilation of 116 short personal essaysdetailing specific life incidents around which I also describe ingeneral what I was doing at the time. The essays explain how thoseevents actually occurred: things that I saw, heard, and smelled;the words that were spoken; the women; my hopes and dreams,struggles, failures and successes; situations and predicaments; themiracles; the spectrum of emotions. These are all written the waythey went.

I did not pull anypunches, as the saying goes. I apologize in advance to any readersI might offend with some of the words written, but those were thewords spoken or thought. It is important to me, however, that mywife, four sons and their wives and children, the rest of myposterity, and any friends who read this know where I came from,who I was, and what actual life events shaped me into the man Ibecame.

Many of my memories anddocumented events are associated with certain, favorite songsplaying on the radio at the time. Songs jog memories.

The events I chose to writeabout are taken from my earliest recollections and what my Dad toldme, from my professional log books, from travel vouchers, and fromextensive, personal journal entries, also corroborated by newspaperarticles. These are the incidents of a very young boy living in asmall town to a farm boy and teenager living in austere financialcircumstances on the southern Idaho desert; incidents of a collegestudent not knowing what profession in life to pursue to a diligentChurch missionary; incidents of a university graduate with a careergoal to a whitewater river guide; and incidents of a Marine Corpsofficer and eventual husband of a special lady who would help meachieve my elusive career goalbecoming a special agent with theFederal Bureau of Investigation. And the events continued followingmy retirement from the FBI.

No confidential sources oroperational methods were named or otherwise compromised in my FBIwritings.

Having earned a master ofscience degree along the way, I fully understand the meaning ofplagiarism. I acquired ancillary information from source materialby means of the Google search engine in support of writing about myexperiences. The reader can verify my supplemental information andcited sources the same way.

Louis LAmour was born onMarch 22, 1908, in Jamestown, North Dakota. He died on June 10,1988. He was a very popular American novelist and short-storywriter of western or frontier, science fiction, and adventurestories still published in many languages today. Many of his workswere inspired by his own life experiences.1 His writings grab areaders attention and interest from the first sentence. I dontrecall in which of LAmours books I read, but he wrote words tothe effect that everyone has a story to tell; it just needs to bewritten.

I make no claim that mylife experiences were any more extraordinary or unique than thoseof anyone else. No OrdinaryLife , however, is my story, and I hope itis interesting.

Polio Paul

I am the second oldest ofeleven children, six sons and five daughters, born to Orval StanleyMortensen and Myrtle LaRae (Severe) Mortensen in Saint Anthony,Idaho, October 8, 1948. They named me Orval Paul Mortensen. Myolder brother, Rocky S., was also born in Saint Anthony, July 31,1947. My parents were good, hardworking people. Dad graduated fromthe University of Idaho in 1949, with a bachelors degree inagriculture education. Dad also served in the United States Navyduring World War II, from 1943 to 1945. In southern Idaho Dadfarmed crops, taught school, then operated a dairy farm. We weremembers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,nicknamed the Mormon Church because of the Book of Mormon, a bookof scripture believed to be another testament of JesusChrist.