Combat flying skills made helicopter pilot a hero in Vietnam, a dangerous criminal back home

Editor's note, March 14, 2018: This story appeared in The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 27, 1987. It was republished in connection with Jim Little's death at age 73 in the Palo Pinto County Jail. The images are digital reproductions of the photos from the newspaper .

A laserlike shot of sunlight hit him square behind the sunglasses as he turned the helicopter to the east, hovering 7 or 8 feet off the ground and sliding sideways to clear the tail rotor. With room now to maneuver, he increased the pitch, forcing the helicopter into a  gut-grabbing, angling ascent.

His eyes took in the instruments in front of him and the ground below him, looking for muzzle blasts. The heavily armed troop supporting him scanned the same terrain, poised with automatic weapons. Two tours in Vietnam had taught him that these few seconds made him the most vulnerable. He'd live longer if he stayed the hell away from clearings like this.

Instinctively, he made a beeline for the woods, hugging the helicopter to the tree line like a cue ball on green felt. He was looking for sanctuary, staying barely high enough to avoid the bush, but low enough not to become a blip on some distant radar screen.

A sense of pride and accomplishment swept over him as he pushed the Bell 206 farther and farther from the chaos. The mission was a success: no shots, no injuries. Throughout the Southwest, morning newspapers on Feb. 16, 1984, reported what officials termed the first bank robbery in

At least one investigator noted that while they didn't know who they were looking for, they knew it was someone who "knows a hell of a lot about flying helicopters," and probably someone familiar with military assaults.

What the investigator didn't tell reporters was that it was almost certain to happen again. This one was too brazen, too precise; this one was a confidence-builder.

Five months later, midmorning on July 20, a helicopter floated out of the sky onto the parking lot of the tiny Valley View National Bank north of Denton. A steady stream of traffic passed about 25 yards away on Interstate 35 as four heavily armed men ran in a semi-crouch from the helicopter into the bank.

As a woman pulled from the drive-through window, the pilot in the idling helicopter waved and smiled at the children in the back seat. Five minutes later, the helicopter and the money were gone.

It would be a few months more before investigators were able to prove it, but James Richard Little was the who in the chopper. Three years later, the why still has a life of its own.

Isolation in Leavenworth is overwhelming. It's even tougher for ex-cops like Jim Little. "It's like being a pariah," Little says.

Jim Little turned 43 in June in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, an oppressive, hope-diminisher of an institution in Kansas. This isn't the Bureau of Prisons' end of the line -- Marion is the final stop -- but by the time the track reaches Leavenworth, the trip's almost over.

That he got 25 years for a bizarre pair of bank robberies is not an issue with Little. But the extra three years tacked on for a seemingly implausible, equally unorthodox conspiracy to escape from the federal penitentiary in El Reno, Okla., is -- a confirmation for him of how corrupt The System really is. One more time, Little says, the government sledgehammered a gnat.

And there's the irony he sees over and over, in a mental tape the former Army warrant officer can't turn off: "The only time my war record has been acknowledged by society was when they used it against me in court to show how dangerous I am, how they should treat me differently."

That Little is bitterly anti-establishment is obvious. Not so easy to understand -- even for Little -- is the odyssey that landed him in his cramped portion of Cell House 107.

In the first-floor cell he shares with a Colombian who speaks little English, Little spends endless hours reliving crucial moments in which he abandoned the rules by which he once lived his life. Indeed, the man who spent only a half-hour with the FBI cursorily confessing his role in the robberies now spends a part of almost every day writing about the changes in his life. He admits that the brutal self-examination often leaves him with more questions than answers.

Like his prison file, other government records lend pieces to the paradoxical puzzle of a ninth-grade dropout who fought off a hardscrabble and emotionally fraught childhood to become, at least for a while, a much-appreciated cog in The System. He was proud to have been a flag-waving, by God, American: "I always threw myself totally into the things I believed in. That's why I went back to 'Nam the second time. I felt guilty I didn't do enough the first time."

Little won more medals in two tours in Vietnam than the Army left room to record on form DD-214 in his service records; they had to be typed on another sheet. Among them were two Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Army's highest aviation medal; a Bronze Star; and 50 Air

The exploits behind the honors reveal a young pilot who did more than was required, one who volunteered for opportunity. He earned his first Distinguished Flying Cross in 1968 as a command observation pilot in the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. He was hovering low and slow over heavy bamboo in the foothills of the Central Highlands, searching for an Air Force pilot who had ejected from an A-37.

The first round of ground fire -- there would be maybe 2,000 rounds in all -- went through the cockpit six inches behind Little's head. But he stayed as long as fuel allowed; he knew the pilot had to be there. The downed pilot was never found.

Not long after that, Little returned to the States for the first time in more than a year: "I watched everyone going about their normal lives and I was aware of the feeling that no one knew me or cared where I had been. . . . Yet that feeling that I was somehow 'special' was so strong, I had to consciously talk myself into adjusting."

During his second, voluntary tour, Little established himself as a top pilot in "The Rebels," the 235th Air Assault Company, one of the toughest Cobra gunship groups in Vietnam. And when it was all over, in November 1970, the vague pain he felt two years earlier had become quiet bitterness.

"I left the most personal part of me in Vietnam, that part that truly enjoys life and can be happy and loving. I left it there because my country would not let me come home. They didn't want me. I was a murderer of women and babies and old people and innocent civilians. And I became impersonal. But the pain remained and festered. And pain creates anger."

The anger didn't boil over; in fact, there was just enough steam to barely rattle the top on the pressure cooker.

Jim Grotts, then pastor of the Anchorage Church of Christ, had grown accustomed to seeing Jim Little and his family on Sundays. It was 1975, and his congregation was growing, numbering about 600.

After resigning from the Army in 1972 ("I was bored to death"), Little had worked briefly for Bell International, living in Iran and training the shah's soldiers to fly helicopters. But since mid-1974,

Jim Little, when he was in town, and his family were regulars at Grotts' church. There had even been discussion among the church's governing body of appointing the tall, easygoing Texan to an elder's post.

But on this day early in December 1975, it was a troubled Jim Little who sought his pastor's counsel. Little had scored near the top on an entrance exam for the Alaska troopers; he also had serious moral questions about accepting the job.

"Jim talked to me several times, really worrying about whether he should take a job that might require him to kill somebody," recalls Grotts, now a Veterans Administration psychologist in Dallas. Little acknowledged killing scores of people in Vietnam, Grotts says, "but the fact that it was institutionally authorized made it OK for him. But if it came down to his making a personal decision whether or not to kill someone as a trooper, he felt like that was going to be different.

"Jim is a man with a very strong sense of right and wrong and a concrete attitude toward right and wrong," Grotts says. Finally, Little equated being a trooper with being a soldier; a trooper, he decided, was merely a blue-uniformed version of the olive drab soldier he had once been. He signed on and, as with everything else he believed in, he threw himself into it.

His time as an Alaskan trooper was an idyllic chapter played out in a setting whose beauty and ruggedness captivated him. Alaska was a world away from his hand-to-mouth upbringing in Big Spring, Texas, where his father, an alcoholic, had undergone shock treatments at Big Spring State Hospital and his parents eventually had separated.

Alaska offered a new lease on life, and Little had always enjoyed being part of organizations. Almost immediately he did something that not only earned him respect among his colleagues but, for some, was unsettling. He simply refused to accept that a man injured in a snowmobile accident outside Fairbanks was dead. For 25 minutes after other officers had given up on the victim, Little tried in vain to breathe life into him.

That Little had trouble accepting death was not new, according to those who had known him as a bush pilot. Little, they said, had pushed the limits of helicopter and treacherous weather to fly an injured boy through Portage Pass to an Anchorage hospital. They also credited him with saving the life of "Chief Sunshine," an elderly Indian who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Severely hemorrhaging stomach ulcers would have killed him, they said, had it not been for Little rushing

As a trooper, Little made headlines for saving the life of another officer. He had thrown himself at a deranged man and wrestled away a cocked gun pointed at the other officer. Little again made the papers in August 1978 -- when the troopers fired him. He had been too aggressive, officials said, in his arrest of a young man whose mother was a prominent local lawyer. It wasn't just the arrest of the lawyer's son for reckless driving; Jim Little, in his three years as a trooper, always was too zealous, they said.

Little's former supervisor, Trooper Lt. Jay Yakopatz, believes officials "simply didn't know how to take him, with his aggressiveness.

"He pursued criminals with diligence -- dangerous individuals, from Hell's Angels to murderers and rapists," says Yakopatz, now in Palmer,  Alaska. "It didn't make any difference to Jim. He didn't back down. And some people couldn't understand that."

An arbitration court overruled Little's firing and ordered him reinstated with back pay in August 1979. For Little, it didn't change what had happened. He returned to duty, but resigned 10 months later. The firing, he believed, was more of the puzzling, unappreciative pattern society had shown since his return from Vietnam.

But among those who know him best -- his family, his minister, fellow officers and old friends -- there is agreement on at least one thing: A different Jim Little emerged after he lost his badge and gun. In fact, they say, the new Jim Little was a total stranger. You could see the difference in his eyes, they say. Peggy Little Ivy, his sister, says those eyes were icy cold; sometimes, she says, you could see pain.

Many of the events of Jim Little's life in the early '80s are uncontested, indeed matters of public record. But the interpretation depends on who is talking.

Little describes that period as a docile "quest for truth," a marijuana-aided journey that led him to

He decided he could never find truth as long as he was bound by materialism, so he gave away the possessions that mattered most: his gun collection and camping equipment. He moved his family to an isolated log cabin in remote Alaska, where he spent the next several weeks smoking dope and meditating. He searched for a higher meaning than The System had provided. He had to have an order, he said, to the chaos he could no longer tolerate.

The drug use surprised those who knew him well, those who knew he was not one of those perpetually stoned soldiers of the Vietnam stereotype. But smoking dope, Little says, added phenomenal clarity to his understanding of the Bible, which he read cover to cover. Finally,

It is only recently, maybe within the last three months, that Little can admit his self-styled "quest for truth" merely traded one chaos for another.

"I created many illusions, which caused a great deal of pain. But it also taught me reality. In a sense, I was out of touch with reality for a long period of time."

Kathy Little had managed to understand some strange goings-on in the past -- like shortly after their marriage in 1971, when she found a pistol beneath his pillow, and when, in the middle of the night, he had hit her in the mouth during a violent nightmare.

But shortly before leaving Alaska, she saw something more alarming: Jim went berserk. "He never tried to hurt me or the kids," she said, "but he started throwing plants, kicking chairs and turning over the dining room table." She wrestled him to the floor and held him until the rage subsided. He remembered little of the episode, but he remembered he couldn't talk, "not in words, just sounds."

Like her husband, whom she divorced earlier this year, Kathy Little gropes to explain those times. "Injustice was the crux of the whole thing," she says. "Hour after hour, we'd go over this. He'd say, "Why is society like this? Why do good people get punished? Why doesn't God just end this?"

His own strange behavior was not lost on Jim Little. During the same period, there was a profound moment, he says, when he was "floating out of his body, with two realities."

Jim Grotts splits his time between the Dallas Veterans Administration Medical Center and an austere storefront called the Vet Center, where he deals daily with Vietnam veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Indirectly at least, Grotts has kept track of Jim Little in the 12 years since he counseled him at the

Grotts was concerned by what he saw.

That Jim Little, Grotts says, may not be all that different from an estimated 800,000 other Vietnam vets who seemingly coped well with the war's death and destruction only to suddenly crash years later. Catalysts for such crashes generally are new forms of stress, Grotts says, like bankruptcy, divorce or death of a loved one.

There have been similar mental breakdowns tied to other wars: In World War I, it was "shell shock," in World War II, it was "combat fatigue." It erupted spontaneously, generally on the battlefield, when the mind simply couldn't handle any more fear or guilt. This happened in troops who knew they were there for the duration. With no end in sight and their mental reserves spent, the inevitable psychotic break occurred. In Vietnam, though, every soldier knew -- if he was still

"So what you had there (in Vietnam) was a guy who was barely holding on with bloody fingernails, thinking as long as he could count down and see only "X" more days, he gets to go home instead of just going ahead and giving up and having a collapse," Grotts says. "He thinks, "If I can just get out of here and go home, I'll be OK.' Unfortunately, they had depleted their resources to deal with stress."

It wasn't until 1980, however, that psychologists and psychiatrists accepted post-traumatic stress disorder as a legitimate, treatable diagnosis. Psychologists say cases frequently respond to therapy within 90 days. But for the disorder to become obvious, there has to be a catalyst to set off these "walking time bombs."

For Jim Little, getting fired from the troopers "was the trigger," Grotts says. "That caused him to stop and really rethink whose side he was on. I think it was then that he became as disillusioned with the system as he did, and that left him with an emptiness, a vacuum which this Eastern mysticism . . . and some other people helped to fill so that it was fairly easy for him to swap sides, but to keep on being the same person he'd always been.

"Only now," Grotts says, "he knew he'd been used by the system, so he felt justified in fighting the system that he had once served." The scariest thing about the helicopter robbers was something the police couldn't know. While Little and Marvin Augusta Rodgers, the gang's leader, had cautioned the others not to harm bank employees, customers or "innocent people," cops were expendable. Police, the way Little had it figured, were little more than soldiers in a corrupt,

Rodgers, now serving a 55-year sentence in federal prison at Oxford, Wis., won't talk about the bank robberies. The self-imposed silence is a radical departure for the gang's most flamboyant member, the only one who refused to plead guilty. Rodgers, filing one handwritten motion after another, won the right to act as his own defense counsel, creating an ironic courtroom scenario: the alleged ringleader cross-examining former gang members, now appearing as federal itnesses, in an attempt to prove his own innocence.

Rodgers' posture, though, is no more curious than his bond with Little, a relationship bred in the fall of 1979 while Little was still a trooper -- albeit a shaky, recently reinstated trooper. Rodgers was an Anchorage gun dealer who counted several troopers among his customers. There was a machismo about Rodgers, Little recalls, that only fed the dark speculation among police that he was a former CIA operative; it was a mystique that Rodgers did little to discourage.

Rodgers soon would leave Anchorage for Texas to become an "executive security consultant." But not, as Little recalls, before asking Little if he would be interested in flying a clandestine mission

After Little's resignation from the troopers in June 1980 and his return to Texas, the two renewed their friendship, becoming partners in a part-time gun sales business in Houston.

But the friendship between Rodgers and Little went into dormancy again. Little, drifting from one flying job to another, finally moved his family to his in-laws' house in Graford, a West Texas wide spot of 500 on the edge of Possum Kingdom Lake. The Littles would split the next year between Graford and Collinsville, Okla., where Little's sister, Peg Ivy, and her family lived.

None of the relatives with whom the Littles lived had money. Little's in-laws, Glen and LaVaughn Lemley, couldn't pay their electric bill, so the two families sweltered through the summer of 1983. Little stole ice to fill an ice chest. He also shoplifted food to keep the families afloat. Winter at sister Peg's house in Oklahoma was the opposite extreme -- they almost froze.

Jim Little was continuing his "quest" and smoking marijuana heavily. A job appeared out of the question. The times he had tried, he couldn't find work, he said.

Rodgers phoned Little around Feb. 5, 1984, at Peg's mobile home in Collinsville; he said he wanted to drive up to Oklahoma to discuss a business proposition. The conversation was more than a phone call; Little had been praying for an answer to hunger and cold when the phone rang.

"I accepted the situation as God-sent," Little said, "so I went." But not before Rodgers bought $200 in groceries for the Littles and Ivys.

Little was Rodgers' last, if not most critical, addition to the unlikely gang he had assembled. Two were construction linemen Rodgers had worked with in the Houston area: Charles Ray Holden and Russell Earl "Lightning" Auzston. Auzston later would tell the court he had been lured into the gang with promises of learning to fly. He also would claim he was "threatened and later beaten unconscious" before reluctantly agreeing to the robberies.

Court records paint a pathetic picture of William Jeffrey Gross, another member of the gang. Gross, an ex-Marine, had been hospitalized three times for alcoholism and, according to psychological reports, had suffered organic brain damage "perhaps brought on by chronic

Based on witnesses' accounts, the gang was scary as hell, standing in a bank lobby with body armor and automatic weapons. It wasn't so much what they said, but the way they said it.

A single police unit, even several, wouldn't have been a match for the gang's firepower. When they made checks of equipment in the predawn hours before the Leesville raid, Little recounts an awesome inventory: his favored "Butcher Bob," a .41-caliber Magnum in a shoulder holster,

Jim Little's pride of accomplishment -- "You've got to remember that was really just a training mission" -- was short-lived. Things went sour for Little after their second job, the Valley View heist in July 1984. It wasn't just the fact they got only $20,000; increasingly, there was more than a little bad blood between him and Rodgers. Little says he no longer trusted Rodgers and finally told him to find another pilot. Little renewed his circuit between his relatives in Texas and Oklahoma.

Except for about $700 he used to buy himself a pair of boots, a cowboy hat and a few ounces of marijuana, Little had given his share of the loot to his relatives. Glen Lemley, his father-in-law and a recipient of some of the money, describes Little as "kinda like Robin Hood." After the Leesville robbery, Little also had left $5,000 under his wife's pillow as she slept and gave a similar amount to his sister, whose husband, Neil, was out of work.

"Even though they call it robbery and by every precept of man's law it was," Little says, "I did not steal the money ... I had a need for the money, and there was no other way to get it ... ."

By September, Rodgers had a new pilot, yet another ex-cop named Robert Thomas "Smokey" Williamson. Williamson was to fly the gang's final mission, the Sept. 7, 1984, robbery of a bank in Overton, Nev., not far from Las Vegas. The gang flew into Overton in a stolen Cessna 210; they flew out with $114,680. But they left behind a prescription bottle issued from a Houston pharmacy in Auzston's name.

Holden surrendered a month later to an East Texas sheriff's deputy. Among those he named was James Richard Little who, with Kathy, was then in South Florida, still on his "quest." Little was destitute again, so he thought maybe he could smuggle a few drugs just to get on his feet.

On Nov. 24, as he drove his father-in-law's hammered 1973 Chevrolet to a convenience store in Key West to shoplift some smokes, he made an illegal left turn and a patrolman noticed the tags on the yellow Impala had expired. The police computer spit out the rest of the story.

Little refused to discuss the circumstances of the fugitive warrant on federal bank robbery charges. "He was very calm, very professional,' recalls Detective Emilio Yannacone, who had

The police didn't find any weapons. And when they searched Little's pockets, they found 34 cents. A local judge set Little's bond at $10 million. Pleading guilty "was the toughest thing in my life," Little recalls. F.R. "Buck" Files Jr., his court-appointed attorney and a Vietnam vet himself, considered the plea-bargained 25-year concurrent sentences a victory. Little had faced a maximum of 110 years.

Tough as his decision was to plead guilty, Little was to learn that doing time wouldn't be any easier. Convicts have their own social order, and they rank ex-cops somewhere down around child molesters.

Directly or indirectly, Little says, being a former trooper started his rung-by-rung ascension on the system's ladder of toughest prisons -- from Texarkana, a level 3 security prison, to Bastrop, a level 4, and, ultimately, to El Reno, Okla. The fact that the quiet inmate kept to himself, reading "weird' religion books, didn't help his uneasy image with convicts or guards. In Texarkana, he was moved after a guard overheard a conversation between Little and another inmate; the same happened in Bastrop after tension between Little and his cellmate erupted in a fistfight.

It was at El Reno, another level 4 prison, that the grapevine, Little's letters and intelligence developed by the U.S. marshals would prompt yet another transfer, this time to Leavenworth, an even higher security prison.

In the process, law enforcement would paint another, more sinister picture of Jim Little -- that of someone who could control minds even through letters. Strong enough, federal prosecutor Blair Watson pointed out, to entice his ex-wife's aunt, Linda Harris, to abandon her husband and children in Mineral Wells and move to El Reno.

Ms. Harris, a diminutive and soft-spoken mother of three, started writing Little "out of sympathy," she says, after his marriage to her niece, Kathy, fell apart with his arrest.

In their correspondence, Little and Ms. Harris, who had never had so much as a parking ticket, discussed his escape from El Reno. The plot was implausible -- it depended on Ms. Harris, who had never been in an airplane, learning to fly a helicopter -- but that didn't alter that the pair had discussed an escape. The letters were duly noted by prison censors.

A woman who called herself Eva Barnes -- actually an undercover federal marshal -- later approached Ms. Harris, claiming her boyfriend had heard through the prison grapevine of the escape plot. She wanted to pay Ms. Harris to let her boyfriend aboard the helicopter when it

Later, Ms. Barnes would wear a body mike when she met Ms. Harris at an Oklahoma City coffee shop. The quality of the recording wasn't great, but you didn't have to strain to hear Linda Harris accepting $5,000 in cash.

Both Little and Ms. Harris, who recently was paroled after six months in prison, describe the plot as just a dream to give them hope, something to cling to while Little's prison clock ticked toward parole. "It had to be more than pretend or fantasy," Little acknowledges, "but its primary purpose was simply a means by which we could find our true selves ... ."

Taking the $5,000, Ms. Harris said, actually was to have been a rip-off; there would be no escape. She hadn't taken any flying lessons and, when Ms. Barnes had asked to see the helicopter she planned to use in the escape, Ms. Harris couldn't find the airport.

"I wasn't myself," she recalled. "The whole way, I wanted somebody to stop me. I knew something bad was about to happen. I guess I really didn't want to do it."

Susan Otto had to go through bureaucratic hell to meet Jim Little, phoning federal marshals in advance and agreeing to visit on their high-security terms. Little, in fact, is the only client Ms. Otto has ever had that she couldn't interview under "normal conditions." She recalls notes taped on the door of his Oklahoma City cell warning jailers not to talk to the high-risk man inside. But mostly, she remembers "a striking man, a very powerful man."

Ms. Otto is an Oklahoma City lawyer and a federal public defender who is intuitive, tough and committed. She, too, met two Jim Littles: "There was this experienced, highly sophisticated weapon of war obviously too dangerous to be left lying around. Then there was the one

Though her job was to defend Little on the escape charge, Ms. Otto took time to learn more about him, such as details of the robberies. Bank robbery, from Ms. Otto's perspective, is a blue-collar crime practiced by criminals who are longer on macho than on gray matter. It's a high-risk, low-return endeavor thwarted by high-tech surveillance cameras, "bait bags' with exploding dye and time-lock vaults. "There's just easier ways to get money."

But there was nothing pedestrian about Jim Little, she recalls. "He's in a class by himself."

"For someone to pick such an extraordinary means -- the helicopter is one thing, but to roll into a bank in full police gear is another. In other words," Ms. Otto says, "it's not just an antisocial expression, but also an unusual motivation. It's no accident he was in a helicopter, dressed in full police gear. That, in his mind, was some sort of statement."

Groping for a defense wasn't easy. The conspiracy was, after all, not only outlined in letters but documented on tape. Ms. Otto "agonized' over the case. "I wanted very much for someone to speak to the court in this man's behalf -- someone had to."

Finally, Ms. Otto wrote the judge an unorthodox sentencing memorandum, terming the conspiracy a "pedagogical exercise." Her plea for Little was rooted not in anything she learned at the University of Oklahoma law school but in her undergraduate days at St. John's College, a small, respected, liberal arts school in Santa Fe, N.M.

Ms. Otto implored the court to "temper its judgment with the recognition that Mr. Little's actions were the result of the inner struggle and despair of a man who has yet to make peace with himself

Then, she quoted from existentialist philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism And Humanism: So there remains in me, unused and quite viable, a host of propensities, inclinations, possibilities, that one wouldn't guess from the mere series of things I've done ... .

Motive, while helpful in steering jurors to conclusions, is not what motivates the criminal justice system. It's the reality of the crime, not the subjective process that spawned it. Law enforcement, out of necessity, is a bottom-line business, acting on what it sees.

And what the system saw in Jim Little was a wacked-out Vietnam veteran, a cop-gone-bad who combined the expertise from both professions to hold up banks.

The legal files, which mandate that Jim Little's robberies and aborted escape will cost him 28 years, are sterile with legal phrases like knowingly, intentionally and willfully. These are the documents that get passed, impersonally and without comment, through the bureaucracy -- from FBI agent to prosecutor to judge to warden to parole officer.

Not recorded, though, in the voluminous court documents of United States of America vs. James Richard Little are any footnotes that would provide any rationale for the overt criminal acts, no matter how incongruous, that are described in such painstaking detail.

Neither is there anything in the file that would prove or disprove Grotts' theory that post-traumatic stress disorder accounted for the dramatic transformation of Jim Little, war hero and trooper, into Jim Little, bank robber.

In fact, court documents and Little's own accounts show that since his arrest and incarceration nearly three years ago, the system against which he rebelled has not examined him to find out why.