young Davis was curious about several photos of cadavers taken by the proprietor and posted on the bulletin board in the café. The proprietor explained to Davis that the bodies were of young Mexican men, all executed in arroyos along the border by being shot in the back. Davis remained haunted by the photos of the corpses, and the experience would influence his ideas on the border for the rest of his life. Davis described the family home as absent of books save for the Vulgate Bible, but his parents were avid readers of newspapers and the Reader's Digest. The family were some of the only Catholics in the neighborhood, and the young Davis often found himself in fistfights with his fundamentalist neighbors, which contributed to him renouncing religion at the age of 10 and gravitating towards science with the advent of Sputnik. Davis was a patriotic and conservative pre-adolescent, enlisting in the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton's "Devil Pups" program, and until he was 15, had a picture of Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb" on his wall. Davis's patriotic phase was eroded by the dysfunction in his suburban Bostonia. At 12, Davis witnessed the aftermath of the Pendergast murders near his home, where 5 members of a family, including 4 children, were murdered by Carl Eder. Davis recalled the scene as if "...somebody had taken a bucket of red paint and thrown it on the walls." Davis also faced difficulties with a childhood bully in his neighborhood, Gordon Neumann, who was hostile to children, and would later go on to shoot six, killing one of them, and then killing a woman before burning himself to death in 1993. Neumann, who was much older, had previously attacked Davis in second grade, but he was rescued by his father who "almost killed" Neumann. Domestic violence was present in the community but never discussed, and he recalled hearing women and children being frequently beaten while in his backyard in the evenings. Teenage years In high school, Davis became interested in history from the stories of his teachers, who were World War II veterans. He was eventually exposed to John Hersey's Hiroshima, a reading which challenged all of his ideas on patriotism and the United States. At 16, his father suffered a catastrophic heart attack which undermined the family's financial security. Davis had to leave school to provide for the