“There was another time when Mike was really foul mood and we had to make a pit stop so he could use a porta potty. Mike went to use the porta potty and we were waiting inside the RV. It was joe’s idea, but we all got out and started to rock the thing back and forth. We didn’t mean to, but we ended up tipping the porta potty over while Mike was in it! Then we attacked him with air freshener”

“Leo grabbed the neasrest thing he could find- a Porta-Potty seat- and threw it at the face. Leve me alone!”

“On a scale of one to ten, I'd say you rate a one. If the Porta-Potties are ten.”

“What packages we were allowed to receive from our families often contained handkerchiefs, scarves, and other clothing items. For some time, Mike had been taking little scraps of red and white cloth, and with a needle he had fashioned from a piece of bamboo he laboriously sewed an American flag onto the inside of his blue prisoner's shirt. Every afternoon, before we ate our soup, we would hang Mike's flag on the wall of our cell and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. No other event of the day had as much meaning to us."The guards discovered Mike's flag one afternoon during a routine inspection and confiscated it. They returned that evening and took Mike outside. For our benefit as much as Mike's they beat him severely, just outside our cell, puncturing his eardrum and breaking several of his ribs. When they had finished, they dragged him bleeding and nearly senseless back into our cell, and we helped him crawl to his place on the sleeping platform. After things quieted down, we all lay down to go to sleep. Before drifting off, I happened to look toward a corner of the room, where one of the four naked lightbulbs that were always illuminated in our cell cast a dim light on Mike Christian. He had crawled there quietly when he thought the rest of us were sleeping. With his eyes nearly swollen shut from the beating, he had quietly picked up his needle and begun sewing a new flag.”

“Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order.”

“...Ame when this is all over we need to have a serious discussion about Mike. I think he has way too much frosting on his flakes.- Donnatella”