The Rescue of Private Pinter

By Scott C. Gruber

When Private First Class Howard Pinter stepped on a shrapnel mine while on patrol in Vietnam, he thought it was the end. After Howard was rescued moments before death and recruited by time-traveling entrepreneurs from the future, it turned out to have been a rather fortunate career move.

This time-travel short story adventure takes its characters on a chronological journey from the 1970s to the near future to the end of the Ice Age. Along the way they encounter budding romance, bitter rivalry, corporate greed, and geological catastrophe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott C. Gruber
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301698431

Scott C. Gruber

Scott C. Gruber is many things: a web producer by trade, as well as a huge science and technology nerd, an aspiring speculative fiction writer, a husband and father, and a proud skeptic.

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The Rescue of Private Pinter

By Scott C. Gruber

Copyright 2013 Scott C. Gruber

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October 19, 1971

Private First Class Howard Pinter had been in-country for about two months now, and had been surprised by just how little had happened. Sure, there had been the one firefight a few weeks back, and that corporal who'd been shot in the leg while heading to the latrine. Other than that, PFC Pinter's Vietnam War experience had consisted of a lot of sitting around, standing around, and occasionally walking around with a few dozen of his platoonmates.

Most of them were draftees, like himself. His September 14th birthdate had virtually guaranteed that he'd be drafted upon graduating from college. He'd thought about taking off-- running to Canada, running to Mexico, running to Antarctica, even. Somewhere in the world, there probably would have been a job for a young man with an undergraduate degree in physics and a head full of quantum equations governing energy transfer.

However, a mixture of inertia and resigned indifference had carried him to the recruiting office to report for duty instead. It just seemed to him that it would be easier to go for that Nobel Prize if he weren't a fugitive.

All he had to do was survive. So far, so good. He'd made it 1/6th of the way. Just ten more months to go. Hopefully they'd be ten months of patrols like this one, he thought. Long, uneventful walks along nameless dirt roads looking for weapons or bunkers or ammunition stashes or any other signs of Viet Cong in the area. All while trying not to get lost.

Not that this current patrol was lost, of course. Certainly not. They were just on an unmarked path that didn't quite match the platoon leader's map for the time being.

Howard took a final drag from his cigarette and tossed it onto the ground, stomping out the smoking ember. He nudged the stub into a patch of tall grass with his toe and was about to bury it in the soft dirt when he noticed a curious shape amongst the blades of grass. It was a roundish metal nub, covered in rust and dirt, with some tiny wires protruding from the top.

In short, it was every soldier's worst nightmare.

Sergeant, he shouted. We got a Bouncing Betty!

Shit! It's a minefield, shouted the sergeant. Everybody freeze!

This command had been largely gratuitous. The entire patrol had frozen like living statues the moment Howard had uttered the words Bouncing Betty. Howard had learned about them in basic training.

The Schrapnellmine was an old weapon, a very crude leftover from the Second World War that had found a new life in this new war. It was an especially cruel anti-personnel weapon. It contained