Hubbard chose a different punishment for another of the older members of the crew, Charlie Reisdorf. He and two other Sea Org crew were made to race each other around the rough, splintery decks while pushing peanuts with their noses. “They all had raw, bleeding noses, leaving a trail of blood behind them,” a senior auditor recalled. The entire crew was ordered to watch the spectacle. “Reisdorf was in his late fifties, probably. His two daughters were Messengers; they were eleven or twelve at the time, and his wife was there also. It was hard to say which was worse to watch: this old guy with a bleeding nose or his wife and kids sobbing and crying and being forced to watch this. Hubbard was standing there, calling the shots, yelling, ‘Faster, faster!’ ”
Hubbard increasingly turned his wrath on children, who were becoming a nuisance on the ship. He thought that they were best raised away from their parents, who were “counter-intention” to their children. As a result, he became their only—stern as well as neglectful—parent. Children who committed minor infractions, such as laughing inappropriately or failing to remember a Scientology term, would be made to climb to the crow’s nest, at the top of the mast, four stories high, and spend the night, or sent to the hold and made to chip rust. A rambunctious four-year-old boy named Derek Greene, an adopted black child, had taken a Rolex watch belonging to a wealthy member of the Sea Org and dropped it overboard. Hubbard ordered him confined in the chain locker, a closed container where the massive anchor chain is stored. It was dark, damp, and cold. There was a danger that the child could be mutilated if the anchor was accidentally lowered or slipped. Although he was fed, he was not given blankets or allowed to go to the bathroom. He stayed sitting on the chain for two days and nights. The crew could hear the boy crying. His mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, but Hubbard reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior. Other young children were sentenced to the locker for infractions—such as chewing up a telex—for as long as three weeks. Hubbard ruled that they were Suppressive Persons. One little girl, a deaf mute, was placed in the locker for a week because Hubbard thought it might cure her deafness.
Hubbard explained to Hana Eltringham that the punishments were meant to raise the level of “confront” in order to deal with the evil in the universe. One member of Eltringham’s crew on the Avon River, Terry Dickinson, a jocular Australian electrician, made the mistake of failing to order a part for the ship-to-shore radio. Hubbard sent a handwritten note to Eltringham ordering her to keep Dickinson awake until the part arrived and the radio was properly installed. If the crewman fell asleep, he would be expelled. Eltringham guiltily carried out the order, but she knew the hapless Dickinson couldn’t make it on his own, so she stayed awake with him for five days and nights, pouring coffee down his throat, walking him up and down the beach, and consoling him as he wept and said he couldn’t take it anymore. Eltringham believed she was saving Dickinson’s soul, as well as her own, but he left shortly after that incident, “a broken man.” Later, Hubbard wrote a note explaining that Dickinson “did not have the confront to see this through.”
“You would say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you speak out?’ ” Eltringham later remarked. “You see, I was a true believer. I believed that Hubbard knew what he was doing. I, unfortunately, believed that he knew what it was going to take to help everyone in the world and that, even though I didn’t understand, it was my duty to follow and support what he was doing. None of us spoke out. None of us did anything.”
IN THE SHIP’S LOG of December 8, 1968, Hubbard mentions an organization he calls SMERSH, a name taken from James Bond novels. Hubbard describes it as a “hidden government…that aspired to world domination!” Psychiatry is the dominating force behind this sinister institution. “Recently a check showed that we had never seen or heard of an ‘insane’ person who had not been in their hands,” Hubbard writes. “And the question arises, is there any insanity at all? That is not manufactured by them?” He said that SMERSH had made one big mistake, however; it attacked Scientology. He vowed revenge.