This school left me as a shell of the person I could have been. My entire life has been spent unlearning and repairing myself from what they did to me, and with no support from family or anyone else. I was at Bethel for so long because my mother divorced her second husband within six months of me arriving at the “school”, ended up in a battered women’s shelter, and essentially abandoned me to the school. Instead of money, they got skilled work out of me.
My memory is foggy, but I do remember the day I was picked up. We lived in Moorpark, CA at the time, and it wasn’t the first reform school they had tried to send me to; after the last one I had run away from left me to be picked up by the police and held at a mental facility, my mother lied to me and plied me with a drink she knew I liked, to get me to come home. The “bounty hunter” was waiting there, in my room. I was handcuffed, shackled, and transported to LAX, to fly from LA to Atlanta, and then Atlanta to another regional airport. But I could not board the plane shackled and cuffed. When we landed in Atlanta the “bounty hunter” went to have a cigarette, and the moment his back turned I disappeared. I fled into the residential area outside of the airport and just did my best to lay low. Eventually a woman took me in and called the police; not long after I would be picked up again by the bounty hunter, and driven from Atlanta to Lucedale in cuffs and shackles.
When I arrived, it was like stepping into another world. This was before the second barracks, or the tall and electrified fences; it was just a long dusty trail passing a single two-story barracks down to a turn-of-the-century farmhouse. They wanted to “break” everyone who would come in there; it was a mantra that seemed to be recited by everyone around the new arrivals. I had long, well-kept hair at the time, and very soft features, leading a lot of people to think I was a girl. This would be a theme through my stay with the Fountains.
As I was being led by two of the other cadets (students at the school would be given “ranks” and responsibilities which went along with that; among those responsibilities would be the orientation of new cadets) to the barracks to have my head shaved, as everyone did, and I don’t quite remember what I said but I sassed off as one of the “Senior Cadets” spoke to me and he turned around, grabbed me by the throat, and threw me. My head was shaved and all the clothes that had been sent with me were thrown away, to be replaced with green camouflage pants, white undershirts, light blue uniform shirts and navy blue trousers.
During orientation, you are not able to make a move or a sound without the approval of a Senior Cadet or a member of the staff. Psychological games are played to create pain associations; the most commonly known is the poking of one’s eye, if they say “I” instead of “this Cadet”; the revocation of personal pronouns and constant “wear-outs”, alongside being punched, kicked and thrown around for even the slightest movement or sound eroded me until I was perfectly pliable. With me, during orientation, was an 11 year-old kid. Should I ever show weakness during a wear-out or orientation session, he would be punished, and likewise. As I became more silent, more hypervigilant, he seemed to become more sadistic, more enthralled with violence.
Conflict between cadets would occasionally be sorted out through the use of a boxing ring, or pugil sticks (a 4′ PVC pipe with padding on either end, like used on American Gladiators) — and might always made right. Should you get into a fight with someone the fight would be broken up, gloves and head padding (of the most ragged variety) would be put on both people involved, and whoever knocked out the other person was in the right. After all, the righteous do not falter. At only 65-75lbs the entire time I was there, I was never well-suited to this; however, I had no choice on many occasions. On one, I broke. We were lined up for pugil sticking after I had fought with someone, and this guy was two years older than me and like 120lbs. I lost my mind in that moment and tripped him to the ground, and just started pounding the pugil stick into him, so brought to animalism that I could not stop.
It would be a month before the first time I spoke to my mother, after arriving. All phone calls were monitored, and punishment for speaking anything but what you would want heard by the person listening in was swift and severe. The physical punishment was extreme enough, but the mental manipulation that went along with it was more stomach-churning to me. Herman Fountain himself would ask you questions, screaming in your face with each question, and interrupt you before you could finish even three or four words. He would decimate the statement that he thought you were going to finish with, force you to admit you had lied (even if you had spoken the truth), and if you showed any other weaknesses, those would be exploited to the Nth degree.
Early on, as a more sadistic punishment, I was stripped naked on a cold night with all of the cadets surrounding me, on the basketball court. I was hosed and everyone around was required to point and laugh at me. I can’t even remember why, but for twenty minutes, naked and ashamed, I was mocked, yelled at, derided by everyone else.
But I wasn’t always treated as badly as everyone else. When Herman Fountain and John Fountain saw that they had a use for me, that would save them the money and potential trouble of hiring someone from outside, I would be given “special” privileges to walk around the property, whether to maintain air conditioners (a trade they taught me; at least, with regards to the models of air conditioners they bought), install phone wires and security cameras, and set up computers for the staff. Being “special” wasn’t wonderful, though; special might as well have been a slur to the cadets, and they had no respect for another cadet who did not suffer with them through whatever the drill instructor had for them that day. If I would get in trouble, whether by a drill instructor feeling the need to put me in my place or genuinely doing something I shouldn’t, the other cadets would take that opportunity to get their licks in. I remember a cadet who returned after “graduating” from the school; when he came back he was already about to turn 18 so they immediately made him a Senior Cadet. He didn’t like that I wouldn’t download pornography for him using the school computer that I had hooked up, and took me aside in an empty barracks to beat the shit out of me; no gloves, no restraint, he boxed in my stomach and jaw until I could do nothing but whimper.
The Senior Drill Instructor, William Knott (who I recently discovered went on to found Restoration Youth Academy) was perhaps the most sadistic person I have ever known. After I had been there for about 9 months, and he had heard (without anyone letting me know) that my parents were divorcing and not returning for me, he took a shine to me and tried to take me under his wing similar to how Herman Fountain did with regards to electrical work. But Knott, he wanted me to be his “house-mouse”. I had no understanding of the connotations this term carried at the time, but to me it meant that I was his personal servant; I would provide massages to his back and feet at request, I would keep his reports and do his assignment rosters, I would keep his “instructor hut” (the only room in the barracks other than the isolation room) in perfect clean condition, and at his request I would sleep under his desk in the instructor hut, in case he woke up in the middle of the night and “needed me.”
But Knott wasn’t like Fountain; he saw no need to confer privilege. So I would become a point of contention for the two of them; both wanted to use me personally but neither wanted the other to be able to intercede. Fountain would have me climb into attics in 110-120F weather to crawl through fibreglass insulation and install cameras, with complete coverage of each of the barracks buildings. He would watch these cameras day and night, and if a single camera was even out of place, he would call me out of school or drill to fix it. On one occasion I grabbed the wrong spool of wire, when installing a camera in the Laundry House (all laundry facilities were manned by the cadets). The cable I had grabbed was a heavily-shielded phone cable, rather than a coaxial cable, and after running the cable, myself, between two poles and discovering my mistake, I tried to cover up the problem by attaching the coaxial core to one of the phone cable strands, and the mesh surrounding the coaxial cable to the other phone cable wire. This resulted in a weaker signal across the distance it had to travel, and a distorted picture. When Herman Fountain found out, I was made to hold the spool of cable out in front of me for hours, as he berated me on his front porch. He loved to call me “stupid” in the loudest voice he could, which every cadet would imitate when they had the opportunity.
There were things that happened there that I can’t even fully explain, such as arranged boyfriends and girlfriends. When a cadet who would not be returning home made it far enough through the program for long enough, sometimes the Fountains would pick a girl from the Girls Academy who is also never going home, and tell them that they are a couple and have them share dinner on the Fountain’s porch. They trained fighting pitbulls there, and would tell us they feed them gunpowder and creatine. When the Fountains bought “the back 40” acres of property beside their own, drill and school were almost entirely abandoned for construction projects in that back 40 acres, building a house for John Fountain and assisting while people dug a lake. During the swampier seasons this area would be a swamp and a common form of punishment was drowning in the mud; they would hold your head in the sloshy mud being made by the artificial lake and work being done around it until you passed out, then would slap you awake and punish you for weakness.
Occasionally they would stage “rule breaking” situations. I was accused of stealing something, I can’t even remember what, and I bawled, arguing for six hours straight until I pulled my glasses off my face and snapped them in half in confusion and frustration, trying to assert my ignorance of anything they were accusing me of. But it didn’t matter; if they wanted to punished you you were punished. On another occasion, two boys were discovered to have been masturbating together — an act the Fountains considered homosexuality. One of these boys was another one of the “special” cadets — this one William Knott’s favourite, a Canadian boy whose family had abandoned him to the school much like mine had. What started with two boys was soon expanded until six “flaming faggots” had been rooted out and separated from the “platoon”. They would march separately to and from the chow hall, forced to hold the loop of the pants of the person in front of them similar to how orientation is led around, but they were also forced to call specialized cadences as they marched, shouting “WE ARE THE FAGGOTS, THE COCK GOBBLING FAGGOTS” and far, far more that I will spare you. Likewise, the cadences called when the main platoon marched to the chow hall, they would have cadences called which mocked the boys who had been taken up in this way.
We started construction on the second barracks in the first year I was there. I say we, because only two outside contractors were hired to build this two-story, basketball court-sized building. All other work was done by the cadets. Because I had been groomed to do electrical work, I ran every bit of molex wire which powered that building. The top floor would serve as the “orientation barracks” while the bottom floor became a standard barracks. New arrivals were always kept on the second floor of buildings, to better deter escape. After the second barracks was the eight foot cattle fence; a feature of the property that would become a favourite of another Drill Instructor by the name of Fortenberry. He would force cadets to grab the hot wire and the fence as a punishment, and scream at them not to let go.
For most cadets, every day was tightly regimented. One did not have time to even think to themselves until after 7pm, if you were so lucky to be in the barracks at that time. The more creative individuals found ways to make and hide homemade alcohol in holes in the walls and ceilings of the old barracks, and one entrepreneuring kid even professed to me once of making “toothpaste LSD”. Despite the regimentation, it was run by the cadets at most points and if you could share your freon-huffing hiding spot or laundry room orange moonshine, you could probably get away with it until the Senior Cadet you shared with gets in trouble, and needs someone to throw under the bus to maintain his standing.
Nonetheless, you will still wake up at 0500, you will have 2 minutes to make your bed, then you will have 60 seconds to shower, without a shower curtain and with a Senior Cadet or staff member watching, then 60 seconds to brush your teeth and get out of the bathroom. You will wait in line, at attention, the entire time before, and you will wait on-line (standing with your shoulder parallel to the foot-post of your bunk, at attention) until everyone is done. Every one of these things is done on command, and it is this progression that makes up every day. We would march in formation where ever we went; including when we would go into town on double-time marches (runs). At every minute, every movement and sound you were making was prompted and previously-defined, and the only thing that was worse than living in that regimented manner was living partially outside of it, with everyone around you able to see that you have liberties they don’t, they won’t have.
I can go no longer. This is no short story, and there was never any relief for me from it; my family wants nothing to do with me and I am alone in the world, working my ass off at a job just to get by and not fall into homelessness again. This place did its goddamnedest to destroy me. And the crime I had committed? I found ways to evade observation on the internet, by setting up a free ISP to use separately from the AOL account my parents wanted used, in order to use IRC chatrooms of which they disapproved.
