Paradise General Read Online Free

I could hope was that his steamy dump wasn’t an omen.
    We decided the whole family would drive me to the airport and attempt to perform an artificially cheery goodbye. Then I’d head off east while they’d head back for a family breakfast, all of us pretending the next few months would speed by like a meteor.
    The flight from Denver to Atlanta was a quick one—too quick as I thought about how I would spend the next several months in a life foreign to what I had lived for five decades. Instead of privacy, I would spend every hour surrounded and suffocated by others—in a noisy, chaotic, and often bloody environment. Toeing the line, saluting, acting like an officer, and making sure my monotonous uniform fit proper regulations—with no loose threads. No matter how hard Itried, I still had trouble adjusting to the fact I was a soldier.
    I reached into my back pocket and pulled out, after my official orders, the most important papers I would carry this deployment: my dad’s wallet and logbook from his days in World War II. I read the names of the men he commanded: White, Murphy, Kuel, Rizzi, Stein—more than three dozen in all—and wondered how they, and their families, felt on the day in 1943 when they reported to duty, especially the ones whose names my dad had crossed out by a single line. These were young men who died in combat, and in small letters next to their crossed-out names and lives were the penciled-in names of their replacements. Some of those names wound up being split by a pencil stroke, too.
    World War II was the “good war,” but I wondered just how good it was to those families who received the dreaded telegram from the War Department, saying their husband, son, or brother wouldn’t be coming home. And now more than fifty years later had still not come home. How was life for those families in the decades since? And how would life be for the families of the more than four thousand Americans who wouldn’t be coming home from my war? Could I and would I make a difference? My mind and heart argued the question. I thrust the thoughts and numbers from my brain, wondering as my plane began its descent whether I was equipped to prevent any more patriotic deaths in a controversial war.
    In Atlanta, I made my way to the connecting gate to Columbus, home of Fort Benning, where my father had spent the first months of his war attending infantry and officer candidate school.
    At the gate, I caught more than a few soldiers staring at me. Most were sharply dressed in creased and pressed battle uniforms and there I was, slouching against a wall in faded jeans and T-shirt—a pretty cool T-shirt actually, with a silk-screened picture of a surfboard cutting through a curling wave.
Oh man, here we go.
I didn’t need a bunch of hard-asses giving me
the look
. Worse, what if the gawkers were the doctors I’d be working with? Shit. I needed relaxed, notrigid. Pranksters, not pricks. As we boarded our puddle jumper for the flight down the road to Columbus, all I could think of was how I could survive life with a bunch of industrial-strength douche bags for the next four months.
    The first thing to hit me when we landed at the small Columbus airport was the thick Georgia humidity, the second was the piercing screech of a wide-brimmed sergeant yelling for everyone to get on the buses after grabbing our bags.
    â€œHow quick we leaving?” I asked.
    â€œQuick. Real quick.” He scowled.
    â€œI gotta pee, Sarge.”
    â€œMake it quick. Real quick. Buses wait for no one.”
    Big Hat finished his sentence with a face-shattering grimace, but since I wasn’t in uniform, he didn’t know whether to yell at me or play it safe and treat me like an officer. My advanced age probably tipped the scales toward courtesy.
    One empty and happy bladder later, I left the bathroom and was met with an “Are you by any chance a doctor … uh, sir?”
    Big Hat