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Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share. story you’re about to hear is true. The story requests I get from my time as a police officer, especially a narcotics agent, are many. I get them all the time. I bet you’ve seen some crazy things they say, which is really an invite to tell me some of the crazy stuff that you’ve heard or that you’ve done. But this one is a story that involves one of the best friends I have on this planet. He was my partner. And for several years, we were the dynamic duo chasing folks in the illicit narcotic game here in Arkansas. He’s now the mayor of a small town in southeast Arkansas, and he’s doing an absolutely phenomenal job. He is my brother. He is a longtime, close, personal friend of mine. His name is Jason Akers. But we’ve got a lot to talk about, so join me at the fire and let’s get started. I’m not sure when I decided to be a policeman, but when I did, it was at a very early age and I never looked back. What prompted that interest is lost to the cosmos. I don’t recall a pivotal moment for any service-related desire except for the moment I described when I visited the Tomb of the Unknowns as a six-year-old boy in episode 429 of This Country Life entitled Service. I described how witnessing the changing of the guard ceremony during a visit to Arlington National Cemetery had a deep and profound effect on me, one that never went away. I had the opportunity early in my career to work where I grew up, policing in the community where if I didn’t know them or they didn’t know me, we each knew someone in common. It didn’t take me long to figure out that in that position there came a large amount of responsibility responsibility to help people when they need it. I also learned that given the right situation or better yet a bad situation that there’s no accounting what some folks will do. Being naive to the ways of the world was a disadvantage and while it is inherently human to trust everyone in their word it is prudent in that type of work to have some verification. I promise officer I didn’t know that was in my pocket. Now, trust me, I have heard them all. And most of the time, the denials and infractions didn’t really amount to much. It wasn’t that serious in the grand scheme of things. And I always tried to work those situations to my advantage. When I was assigned to narcotics, which took up nearly half of my 32-year career, I was always willing to trade up the latter. While I’ve never condoned drug use in any manner or had any desire to try it myself, I could see there was a difference between the seller and the user. The user was a way for me to work my way toward the source. The varying degree of use was also a factor in how we dealt with that end of the problem. At any point when the quality of life for children in association with those users was challenged, they became priority one. I realized that some drug laws have changed since I retired, and some of them dramatically. My opinion or yours on whether it should have been sooner or never has no more bearing on how I went about my job than anything else. I swore an oath to enforce the laws that were current at the time of my service, and no opinion mattered beyond that. The law was the law, and it was my job. Jason Akers is one of the best friends I have on this planet. and was also a colleague at one time. We were working undercover in South Arkansas, and through a laundry list of informants of small-timers, he’d worked the information up to a significant couple who were responsible for a lot of meth coming in out of Mexico. The case had been long and developing with hundreds of man-hours and months of investigative effort. But it had led to this couple being the hub for the distribution of this variety of methamphetamine in Arkansas. It was here with this pair where we would play our final hand in this cat and mouse game of taking chances with our lives and their freedom. The meetup had taken weeks to set up. Greed and the promise of money to be made would be their ultimate undoing. and their resolve not to be caught almost became ours. Jason was the case agent and had been dealing with the man for weeks, although we’d surmised that the real head of this organization was the woman. She was always present on any phone calls, and he always seemed to defer to her on matters of money and amounts available for purchase. Jason had worked tirelessly to set this final deal up, a face-to-face with him for a large amount and a big payoff. We would meet at a predetermined location agreed upon by each of us. I would be Jason’s driver, and we felt sure that when he showed up that she would be with him. Now, we’d had other officers in forestry trucks checking the area earlier in the day and monitoring the only way in to make sure that we weren’t dealing our way into him. ambush or a robbery. They staged in a hidden location and waited for us to get there should something go wrong and we needed help. It was a hot afternoon and we sat in our SUV on an old logging road we’d both agreed to as the meeting spot. The meeting was set for 3 p.m. and we got there almost 45 minutes late on purpose. Time is nearly always irrelevant in the drug culture. For the better part of 20 years, I had to live my life on what we referred to as doper time. A timetable unmatched in irregularity with no rhyme or reason as to how it worked. See you in a little bit could mean a little bit or a week or never. You just never knew. But we sat there after turning around, facing the way we’d driven in, waiting on whatever was going to happen next, just like we’d done many times before in different situations and different places. We waited and waited and waited. The temptation to call at the forefront of what we really wanted to do, but playing the part of indifference and adapting to the significance of doper time overruled common sense. Anything more would have been suspicious. To truly understand and fit in that lifestyle took an inordinate amount of patience on our part. Dealing with people like that in a culture like that where time wasn’t of the essence was the reason I missed school functions, birthdays, and family gatherings. For all that it was and wasn’t Those times are what made me loathe the people who stood in between me and where I’d rather have been. They weren’t just drug dealers. They were an impediment between me and my family. At least that’s how I saw it. The days are longer in the summertime, and we could clearly see down the road, and by nearly 7 o’clock, over three hours since we’d gotten there, we saw the car turn onto our road. The surveillance team radioed us, they’re coming. Target vehicle, two subjects, one male, one female. Positive idea on both. I said to Jason, time to go to work. We watched them make the slow quarter of a mile approach as they creeped toward where we were parked. And I smiled as they got closer, masking all the anger I had after waiting all evening for these two yahoos. I hoped that I’d be putting them in a penitentiary very soon. An open mic would let our support team listen to everything that was happening in real time. I tried to put him at ease with a friendly face as Jason got out of the passenger side of the vehicle. She was driving and as she stopped with her window just the opposite of mine, I opened the door and got out. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anyone laying in the back seat and if there were any visible weapons that I could see. She rolled down her window and turned off the car. Window of my door was open and my pistol sat on the armrest within easy reach should I need it. Jason had one as well, tucked out of sight. We both watched the man get out of the passenger side of the car at her direction and walked back toward where my partner was standing. And I’ll never forget what happened next. The man was talking to Jason about the money we were supposed to have brought while my partner was asking to see the dope. Jason got a little tense with him and proceeded to tell him that we’d been waiting for too long and he should show us the dope now or we were leaving and taking the money with us. This played more on the bad guy’s greed than on his sense of security and he said, abre la cafuela, which I found out immediately means open the trunk because that’s what happened. She leaned forward and pushed a button on the dash. Now, obviously, I couldn’t see inside the trunk, but Jason could and the whole time I was watching the driver, she was watching them in the rearview mirror. I tried talking to her, but she ignored me and only glanced at me once before what happened next with the coldest set of eyes I’d ever seen on a human, much less a woman. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jason drop his cap, which was one of the signals we had that he either had the dope or this deal was fixing to turn into way more paperwork than either of us had planned on. Either way, it was time for both of us to start being the police instead of playing a bad guy. It was the next second that determined a whole lot about the rest of my life, as in if I was going to have any left after that moment. I heard Jason casually tell the guy he was looking at to put his hands up as he said I’m a police officer. You’re under arrest. And the man did what he was told, but yelled, Policia! while he was doing it. The driver never changed her expression, but in an instant she turned her gaze from that mirror to me and those cold, dead eyes showing no fear or alarm, no panic, just disgust and a seething expression of hatred. She reached down and grabbed a revolver with her right hand like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat and was leaning away from me toward the passenger side of the car. I assumed to fire that revolver in my general direction. Now my back was to the door of my ride and even though my pistol was only inches away, I wasn’t going to have time to grab it. I had quickly done the calculations. In what we like to call instant survival math, distance, reach, reaction time, weapon access, and who was acting first was where the numbers were being generated for this test question. I was betting my life and that of my partners on the figure that I was doing in my head. Now, this wasn’t going to get loud if I could help it, but it was obviously her intention to make it that way. I had to do something. and I had to do it right now. I yelled, Gun! I leaned in through the window, grabbed her hand and the pistol with my left hand before she got it past the steering wheel and momentarily put her to sleep with a right jab to the jaw. I stood up with her gun in my hand and pointed it back at her as she relaxed in the front seat with little birdies making laps above her noggin. I looked back at my partner. He was looking at me and shaking his head and said, man, what are you doing? I just shrugged my shoulders and smiled at him. I showed him what I had just taken away from her and said she had a gun. He said, oh, okay. And that was that. About the same time, the cavalry came sliding to a stop in a cloud of dust and bailed out like they were on fire to handcuff and told them to jail. And that was a Wednesday. Crazy times. But I was asked once what I’m most proud of over the course of the 33 years I carried a badge. Fact is, I don’t know for sure. I’d like to think I helped someone when they needed it. But I think about all the children that I came in contact with over that time, never really knowing the long-time outcome of their situations or how their lives turned out. Don’t remember their names except for a few first names, but I remember their faces and especially their eyes. Some looked at me with fear of the unknown when I took them away from the only place they’d ever known regardless of how bad that environment was. When you only know one thing, one way of life by the exposure of living in that environment, anything different is out of the norm and can be scary Security to a little one can be the very place that they’re really the least secure. I can’t tell you how many times I carried a crying child while they called out for the very person who was hurting them. I can be in a room full of people or sitting alone in a tree stand and I’ll see the face of a child with no other context of who it is or where it was and immediately remember the last time I saw them. Most times it was when Child Protective Services took custody. And after that, the records remained sealed and their whereabouts were unknown to me. There was one caseworker an hour away who I would contact that would give me very generalized updates on the ones I asked about, something to the effect of, that child is doing fine. I just had to accept that as being enough, and I guess it was. It wasn’t like I could have taken them all home. even though I wanted to. And out of all of them, there was only one who I was able to remove from a bad place and would learn years later that she had lived the life of a real-life princess. Her new parents raised her in a loving home where she has grown into a young adult, now living life to the fullest. I don’t know if there are others. I can only hope and pray that there were. So even though I’ve never been fortunate enough to talk to her since the day I removed her from that place many years ago, the answer to what I’m most proud of, it would have to be seeing that little girl getting a chance to be happy and being happy. I started my career thinking the world was mine to take care of, and if I wasn’t there, it wouldn’t get done. It didn’t take long to figure out that that wasn’t the case. People were doing bad things long before I got there and will continue doing them long after I’m gone. There were no celebrations when I retired. My co-workers bought a cake and I sat around with people I only saw four or five times a year and made small talk for an hour before Alexis Bailey and I made a run for the car. The next day, I had a kidney stone. There was a period of time in my life when being a police officer was what I was. All day, every day, everything else took a back seat, everything. It took a toll after a while, and I didn’t see any relief until I prioritized that portion of my life. I get asked by young officers and hopefuls for advice on getting into law enforcement, a career that has changed immensely since I retired almost three years ago. For a long time, I didn’t really know how to answer that. I’d done a terrible job the first two-thirds of my career of balancing work and family. Where I found my peace was first through my faith and secondly by realizing that being a police officer wasn’t what I was. It was something that I did. So here’s some advice from my cousin, Glenn Sly, a career officer who was an inspiration to me and sadly, passed away a few years ago. When I first started, he said, have friends outside of law enforcement. I didn’t know how important that was until I eventually brought into my circle people who hadn’t been jaded by the calamity and the chaos and the sadness that police work tends to convey. It was a breath of fresh air, to say the least. And my advice is There’s only so many hours in a day. Be strong in your faith. Be the police for your shift assignment and then be a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a significant other. Whatever your correct non-police identifier is and let the job be the job. Now you can also apply that to anything, by the way. I hope you enjoyed the police story episode. We may do another one one day. Who knows? Anyway, the World Championship Squirrel Cook-Off is Saturday, September the 12th, and me and Backwoods University Professor… lake pickle and the bradford flash case’s very own john pantuso and i will be there at the meat eater tent they tell me that we’re going to have this country life hats and my signature case pocket knives there while supplies last i’d Makes me think they’re limited on the amount of inventory that they could bring. So if you want one of those, you might want to get there first thing. They go pretty fast. We’re going to be there all day. Bring the whole family. It’s going to be a great, great time. And I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends and making some new ones. So next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y’all be careful. Thank you.
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