“Hallelujah Crazy”

(ADULT Rating)
(Graphic content, Profanity & Violence)

An authorized biography of
Arnett Wayne Sprouse

 

by

D. L. Charles

 

 

 

    Have you ever kicked back the covers of your bed on a bright spring morning, yawned and stretched, and said, "It's such a beautiful day! I just think I'll go crazy today!"

 

    No, you haven't. I didn't go that way and I've never known anybody who did. You wouldn't know how to go about it, and you won't know when you get there. Or, if you're a lucky one who knows you aren't crazy, and your desire is to go sane, your plight is no better.

 

    I needed a lot of help to go both ways. It's harder to come than to go. Sanity, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. And no matter what your true condition is, if enough beholders agree that you are different from THEIR view of the world, or if a beholder with legal power says you are/aren't insane, that's it. There is no appeal.

 

    My round trip began with 'touches of combat fatigue' after WWII and Korea, during a military career dotted with recognitions and promotions. Nobody told me a 'touch of combat fatigue' was like a 'touch of pregnancy', or a 'touch of insanity'. After Korea, after four secret "political skirmishes" and seven years of high test terror between those wars, a doctor prescribed a 'rest'.

 

    That was the last decision I would hear for the next fifteen years while I was shuttled from one institution to another, getting new and worse labels in each. Many, many people told me: "You're a crazy son-of-a-bitch!" But not one of them had the insight into the truth, or told me how I ought to be, or how I could begin being that.

 

    Longevity has its rewards! At the last my keepers told me candidly I was crazy, criminal, incorrigible, then simply kicked me out into the street. They called us 'skid row bums' in those days and, being that was easiest, all I had to do was stay hidden from 'decent folks' and policemen who would 'put me away again'. Sometimes they caught me and put me away, but I had learned something: Criminals do better than crazies! So I opted for the former when I was conscious enough to choose. Between those times I lived in alleys and Salvation Army donation boxes, ate scraps, and used alcohol to cover the fear and shame. Doing this I created a brand new problem.

 

    After two years a fellow pilot from WWII scraped me out of an alley and took me to a hog farm which welcomed outcasts like me. There I listened carefully to people who might be a normal model for me, read books, and attended Alcoholics Anonymous while I raised the biggest Hampshire Belted hogs ever. A battle plan formed, "Face and tell the truth about yourself. Stay away from the other crazies."

 

    I faced the truth about my fears, beginning with combat (I hadn't thought anybody else was afraid). I faced my fear of all the places I had gone to for help. And I faced the fears of all those people who said they were better than me. I admitted the fears and denied they made me a lesser human being. The last fear was the worst one, that of discovering who/what was the real 'me', then working to change that. I found myself face-to-face with a new thing - the real world. For the last twenty years, until 1985, first as a professional counselor and for the last five years as a VISTA volunteer, I've enjoyed showing crazy, criminal, homeless drunks that new world and how to face it. I know that striking the spark of the real person buried deep under that 'stuff' is very much like lighting a fire with flint and steel; one strikes many times before the spark clings and finally glows to a fire. Here is how simple and easy it is to go and to come.

 

    Suppose that in mid-yawn your telephone rings and a voice in your head says: "This is long distance. I have a collect call from GOD! Will you accept charges?"

 

    Before you answer that let's think for a minute about who you are. If you are one of the twenty-seven million illiterate people in this nation all you know about anything is hear say. Unfortunately, most of your education came from watching television and from people with no more education than you. Now, you've seen the Evangelist who said GOD held him hostage until someone paid eight million dollars for his life. You've also seen the tears glistening in the eyes of the religious multi-millionaires while they deny taking their millions out of GOD's pocket. They said GOD made them a deal. You've surely seen GOD come to earth and walk about like an ordinary person. He seems to be a fun guy. Maybe he's calling to say, "Let's make a deal."

 

You WILL take the call.

 

- - o 0 o - -

 

So begins the true story of Arnett Wayne Sprouse (1927 to 1993), decorated Korean Campaign soldier. In 1952 he was found guilty of Murder One and sentenced to life imprisonment in a Georgia state prison - for a crime which he did not commit. He was paroled six times, with the paroles being revoked on five separate occasions. This is his story, told in his own words, and the reader is warned this story is extremely honest, brutally graphic, sexually explicit, and definitely not politically correct in the wording. The callous brutality of the prisoners and the guards, the conditions of the prisons in this era, and the lack of real concern for the rehabilitation of inmates during the decades will offend and upset the reader. The story is true. It happened to Arnett Wayne Sprouse - and how many others? This man's story is so important to all of us. I am honored to have been given the opportunity to tell it for him.

 

Download “Hallelujah Crazy” PDF

 

Download “Author’s Note” about this Book