A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

was difficult. It appeared to be the culmination of a perfect romance when Amy and Eric Shaw were married in January 1964, in Olympia. Amy was then eighteen and Eric almost twenty-one.
    The future seemed all charted out for the couple, but then the Vietnam War intervened and Eric was drafted. He was inducted into the Army on December 5, 1966. He went off to basic training, and Amy stayed behind. She was enormously pregnant with their first child, and frightened to travel to a strange Army town where she didn’t know anybody. Eric seemed to understand her need to stay in Olympia. Their little girl, Rose*, was born in 1967.
    With her husband headed toward the Far East, Amy was having a very difficult time. For some reason, Eric had never signed the papers that would qualify her to receive dependent’s benefits, and she had barely enough to live on. She wrote to him again and again asking him to sign the papers but he never seemed to get around to it. In the meantime, she lived on their savings. Her friends were worried when they realized that Amy had actually lost weight because she had run out of food. In desperation, Amy finally wrote to Eric’s commanding officer to ask about her benefits.
    It was possible that Eric never got Amy’s letters, and Amy hoped that was true; she didn’t like to think that it was out-of-sight–out-of-mind as far as she was concerned. She had agonized about writing to his C.O., but she was desperate. Then she worried that her husband might be angry when he found out she had gone over his head.
    Eric was very much occupied at the time fighting a war. The Army suited him. By March 20, 1968, he had risen to Specialist 4th Class in Company B, 1st Battalion. He was an expert in light weapons, something he realized wouldn’t be of much use in the civilian world. But he knew he could use the G.I. Bill when he needed it to go to college. The world outside Vietnam seemed as distant as another planet.
    Amy waited for him to come home and busied herself taking care of their little girl. And once she began to receive her dependent’s allotment check, her life became much easier.
    Eric did come home, far sooner than they had hoped, but under tragic circumstances. The six-foot, one-inch, 170-pound soldier had seen duty all over the north part of Vietnam and he had almost begun to believe he was invincible. But one moonless night, as he was walking guard duty near the Cambodian border, a sniper with a Russian AK-47 fixed Eric in his gunsight. The blast hit him in the right shoulder, traversed his chest, and exited near his stomach. And it severed his spinal cord.
    From that moment on, Eric Shaw was a paraplegic, his spinal cord severed at thoracic level three. He still had some strength in his arms and upper body, but his legs began to wither and they would never support him again. He was sent home to Madigan Army Hospital in Tacoma to heal and to begin rehab.
    Eric was awarded a Bronze Star, an Army Commendation Medal, Vietnamese Service Medal, Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal, National Defense Service Medal and a Combat Infantryman’s Medal. And he would be eligible for extensive educational, housing, and living expense benefits. But, before he was thirty, he was profoundly disabled.
    Amy and Eric were together again, even though he offered her a divorce. She shook her head in disbelief. She had loved him when she married him, and she still loved him. She told him she would stick with him. Eric had not lost his ability to engage the physical side of their relationship, and Amy became pregnant for the second time. This time they had a son.
    With Eric’s benefits, both he and Amy enrolled in Bellevue Community College east of Seattle. It looked for a time as though they really
could
pick up the pieces of their lives and start over.
    But things were never the same again. The first overpowering romantic love they had shared was gone. According to those who knew Eric well, he had always found men superior to females. Women were second-class citizens to him. And that included his wife. His confinement to a wheelchair seemed to make him even more adamant about male superiority.
    Eric considered jealousy a weakness, and he often said that women were far more jealous than men ever were—always snooping and asking questions. He liked to come and go without explaining himself. The marriage began to crack around its edges, minute flaws that were scarcely noticeable but which weakened the structure