ride-to-be and self-kidnapping victim/perpetrator Jennifer Wilbanks
copped to several charges on Saturday, including illegal self-confinement
and terroristic threatening to your own persons. The missing Georgia
"runaway bride," as some less respectful newspapers have dubbed Wilbanks,
disappeared and reported herself kidnapped on the day of her wedding,
only to turn up later when she managed to escape from herself and phoned
her lucky husband-to-be, whose name we withheld out of respect to the
poor bastard.

Police found and arrested the abductor, Wilbanks herself, and held her in
custody as they built a case. Rather than face herself in court during a
lengthy trial, Wilbanks confessed to all the crimes she was accused of,
in hopes of getting the whole thing sorted out before her big wedding.
But Wilbanks didn't forgive herself so easily for her downfall.

"I also want to let myself know that I won't forget what I've done to
myself anytime soon," warned Wilbanks, in a statement released by her
lawyer, who may be Wilbanks herself in yet another impressive role. "Do
I hear that? I won't be getting away from me so easily. I'll let
me forget about me for a while, but one day, when I least expect it,
I'll turn around, and I'll be there. And I won't be happy."

Wilbanks refused to answer questions as to whether she was threatening
herself with bodily harm, and other reporters just laughed when this
correspondent tried to get them to back up his questioning.

With the abductee/abductor refusing to answer questions, the commune
sought out an expert on self-abduction, Audrey Seiler, a Wisconsin
college student who tried to kidnap herself in April of last year.
Seiler disappeared from her off-campus apartment March 27, 2004, and
was found four days later, telling police she was abducted by a man
with a knife. Seiler confessed to kidnapping herself only when police
discovered a videotape of the young woman buying a knife, duct tape,
rope, and cold medicine all in one purchase, though this reporter can't
picture a weekend coming and going without buying all of those items.

"I know in my case, it just came out of nowhere," said Seiler. "You're
walking along, you think everything's fine and dandy, then—bam!
You jump out of nowhere, put a hand over your mouth, and force yourself
into an alley. I had my car with me, which was lucky, so I forced myself
into the trunk, then had to get out and actually drive myself to the
hideout. But I kept a knife on myself, so I wouldn't try anything funny.
It's really scary. I've known myself for a long time, but I've never seen
myself like that before."

Seiler also admits she wasn't sure what made her kidnap herself; at first
she thought it was just a sorority prank or something, but then recalled
she hadn't pledged any sorority at all. At that point, she began to doubt
her mental stability.

"The police never understand," said Seiler. "They always think you can
wait for a moment when your back is turned and escape. But you're
paralyzed with fear, afraid of what you'll do to yourself. That's why I
didn't want to tell the police who had really done it."

As for the case of Wilbanks herself, the most recent victim/perpetrator
of self-kidnapping, Seiler had some thoughts on what might motivate her
to such a twisted crime.

"I really, really liked that Runaway Bride movie. She probably
did, too. She probably thought she'd kidnap herself, hoping a cool
Richard Gere-type, only not so gay, would come to her rescue. It never
works out, trust me. I was inspired by the movie Excess Baggage,
but it's never as fun as it looks. Spend a few days out in the woods by
yourself and it takes all the charm out of being held at knifepoint."

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"One day my brother Goose and I had treed a cat. It was barrels of fun, until we heard mom yell from the backporch, 'Kids! Come in and see!' Obviously we didn't know what she wanted us to see yet, but at the time we were hugely excited, it could have been anything, like a plate full of fresh cookies or the Kaiser's beard torn straight off his face.

We were delighted to see it was a brand new radio my father had bought! Everyone on the block had wanted a radio, even the people who already had them, although they wanted new ones, and now we had one!

My sister Stephanie, Goose, and I all gathered 'round the radio for hours listening to The Lone Ranger, Little Orphan Annie, The Shadow, and several racist radio shows I probably shouldn't elaborate on. It was the most fun you could ever imagine.

And when we weren't listening to the radio, we were talking about the radio. Stephanie and I would talk about what we thought the characters looked like, about the bright colors of the world the radio people lived in, and what The Shadow did to keep his laundry clean. Goose couldn't join in on account he had no imagination, something he inherited from mom.

Sure, we were disappointed later when we found out the radio wasn't even ever plugged in and it had been dad making all those voices we had been listening to. We probably should have guessed since the radio was so light, being hollow and having no electronic innards like a working radio. Goose is still mad at dad, rest his soul, but Stephanie and I say we still have our imaginations and memories, and they can't take that away without highly expensive surgery."

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In the army, I was a journalist. It beat having to pick up a gun and shoot at Germans, especially since I always had trouble telling Germans and French apart, and I wasn't really that good and differentiating the Germans and the English either. Some used a rifle, but my weapon was a pencil—you hit a man in the jugular just right, he'll wish you would have shot him instead.

It's no myth that the pen is mightier than the sword, even when you're not using it like a sword. A pen took down some of the mightiest men in the world, like Richard M. Nixon and Gary Condit. No president was ever taken down by a sword. Sure, more than one was taken down by a bullet, but the quote don't say anything about a gun.

I didn't know if I would have it in me to do what the army had to do. I thought you must really have to love war to put yourself in danger like they did. The army jumped off the boat and ran charging into German machine gun fire, or into minefields which blew up and maimed them, which is sometimes worse than getting killed. Some of them parachuted down in the midst of enemy fire to fight. If you think it sucks to have to jump out of a plane, try shooting at the enemy after you've somehow managed to get on the ground in one piece. But for me, there was a worry even bigger—if I had to, if it meant the difference between my life or the lives of my unit, could I kill another man? I was never so sure I could, so I chose the pen over the sword.

Sometimes the pen has to write about the sword, or the gun, and when you're an army journalist for The Stars and Stripes in wartime you don't have much choice. I was sent to interview commander of Allied Forces, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, later of "I Like Ike" fame. He was very philosophical, for a bald guy. He took one look at me with one of those special kinds of eyes, the kind that sums you up and gets you right in one look.

"Many people think the soldier loves war," he told a young Sampson L. Hartwig, which was me at the time, "but the soldier hates war most of all. It is the soldier who has to walk, eyes open, into battle on a daily basis. It is the soldier who has to put himself in harm's way. It is the soldier who has to die to ensure the freedom and safety of his country, and even worse, it is the soldier who has to aim his weapon, fire, and kill for his country. Yes, the soldier hates war more than anyone else."

And back then, it was true. That was before they invented hippies.

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