Hemingway Days and Bukowski Nights: A Novel by M. W. Downs

By M. W. Downs

Adam Blankenship, a young war correspondent embedded with the US Army is badly wounded during the early days of the Iraq War. In an attempt to save lives, he fired an auto-grenade gun to stop an inbound suicide truck bomber. His reward, returning to L.A. broken and angry after losing his job along with his lower right leg. Adam becomes a full-blown alcoholic with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) who takes Vicodin to numb the pain.

He embarks on a novel about covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It might help him uncover the truth about why he was disgracefully fired from his job, then kicked out of the military hospital in Germany. It was likely because Adam ran afoul of the powerful Colonel Shilling, calling him out for chasing Jihadis into the desert rather than helping the dead and wounded after the ambush. He took what was left of their operational vehicles and security, abandoning the men.

The colonel pressured authorities to classify the ambush and lawyers from the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) coerced Adam into signing a Non-disclosure Agreement, forcing Adam to disguise his true account of the war as fiction to please his nervous publisher.

Sarah Murry, Adam's stepsister and forbidden first love, is a tall, green-eyed beauty. A B-movie actress filming a 1970's gangster movie starring one of the famous Goodwin brothers, she's not sure which one. Multitalented, she is also a painter who works long nights on large, abstract oils brimming with vibrant imagery, symbols, and pop-mythology. Sarah has loved Adam since he protected her from the mean girls in high school. She can see his struggle with pills and booze, but stands by him even after he brawls with her surfer boyfriend Johnny. They move into a hostel in Venice Beach then meet Bobby, a punk rock poet who hates the world. They become roommates, fast friends, and rivals as Adam fights to get his book published in full, risking jail time to get the truth out and clear his name.

Hemingway Days and Bukowski Nights depicts three young artists who work just as hard as they play. It's also ponders the pain and stupidity of war, how to live with PTSD, carry the regrets and loss and try to live a better life after trauma. Let fear pass through you. Have the courage to tell the truth. Maybe, even find a chance at love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gen X Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662927157

Book preview

1

ANBAR PROVINCE

THE CONVOY THAT WE were attached to was traveling west on a long black road that shot arrow-straight into the desert. Sabine was shooting video of the empty hardpan through the right rear window of the Humvee. I watched her until she put down the camera, then looked out past the rising heat swells to the horizon. The mountains in the far north were low and dull in the sun. The dunes in the south were shallow and rippled by the wind and the sand that blew across the road and out into the empty desert was the color of instant cocoa powder.

Our Humvee was tucked in behind a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, choking on the pungent wake of the light-armored personal carrier’s exhaust, its twin tracks rattling, with two more Humvees behind us. We were deep in the middle of what the sergeant called the nothing. The Iraqi’s called this vast but mostly empty part of western desert the Badia. The heat had been oppressive since early morning. The noonday sun was white hot and ultra-bright, leaving the flat terrain completely without shadow. The horizon ahead of the convoy was flat too, so flat that it resembled an impossibly long bicolor flag that was equal parts cloudless blue sky painted over a barren landscape of sepia and gray.

I had not written a word for hours. There had been no other traffic on Highway 10 since we had passed through the last checkpoint on the far outskirts of Ramadi, just a few displaced civilians walking along the side of the road, some carrying large bundles or baskets, families pushing makeshift handcarts stacked high with their belongings, a half-starved dog always following the Iraqis, mangy beasts that would stop to bark at our vehicles as we passed by.

I leaned up between the seats and looked at the computer mounted on the dash. We were 320 kilometers west of Camp Rifles, based at the former Ramadi Palace Complex, headed for the Jordon Frontier. There was little to see now except for the occasional pipeline or crossroad. This extension of the Syrian Desert was a sand-blown wasteland of ancient lava flows that had long served as a permanent barrier between the Levant and Mesopotamia, and the men in the Humvee rode along in a silence that was only punctuated when someone asked for another bottle of water.

Sabine leaned forward and pointed her camera at Lance Corporal Rios in the driver’s seat. Rios let out another grumbling sigh. He took his right hand off the wheel and flexed his fingers until they popped.

I said, What’s the problem, Corporal? Your hand hurting?

Na, man, it’s this slow-ass Bradley in front of us, Rios said, making a chopping motion at the hulking light-armored personal carrier as he talked. Sir, I can’t see shit and we’re like crawling out here. Speedy Gonzales, no quero, Rios said, using the cartoon character’s voice. No quero mucho, señor…

That’s the one and only time I ever saw Sergeant Hanson smile. He had his field glasses up, scanning a deep broken crack in the desert floor that snaked around on the north side of the highway. The sergeant replied, Well, Speedy, what do you want big daddy to do about it?

Rios cleared his throat. Sir, permission to open up our spacing a few meters?

Sergeant Hanson grabbed his spit cup and held it to his mouth for a few seconds before he let fly. Horrible smelling stuff. Menthol. Just like the cigarettes he smoked nonstop back at Camp Rifles. Hanson was a big, bald country boy from Southern Indiana who always considered his words carefully before answering. He said, I understand your concerns, corporal. But if we get in a tussle out here in bum-fuck, you’re going to be glad to have that big bastard in front of us. Not to mention the chain gun that it’s packing.

Corporal Hobbs ducked out of the gun turret and sat on a stack of ammo cases between our seats. He was a tall white kid from Kentucky with a bad complexion and a constant smile. Hobbs rubbed his knees and said, What the hell, Rios? Why you always bitching to go fast? I like it nice and slow out here in the sandbox. Thirty-five, forty miles an hour max. That way I can see all the trash and stuff piled on the side of the road before we roll up on any fresh digs and shit.

Rios said, Hobbsie, man, you know I’m from L.A. Driving forty is like standing still.

Alright, ladies, said the sergeant. Time to shut up and color.

Hobbs said, You got it, sir, and stood back up in the turret, grabbing hold of the Mark 19 grenade gun. I had witnessed it in operation in Afghanistan. It was a belt-fed automatic 40mm grenade launcher, its deadly barrel the size of a baseball bat, a weapon that Hobbs lovingly referred to as ‘My Big Motherfucker!’

I had turned twenty-one in the fall during my required one week of basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. I wrote for American Transatlantic Press (ATP). Sabine Charles was the daughter of a retired African American major general and a famous French sculptress and activist who had been arrested nine times for various protests, including the current war in Iraq. Sabine was twenty-five but seemed older. She had skipped three grades in primary school and already had a degree in cinema from the Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts and a master’s degree in the History of War from the College International de Philosophie, and she had a fine artistic eye and had proven herself to be fearless with the camera since we had started working together in Afghanistan.

Sabine was quite cynical about Americans, though in a comical, resigned way that I found alluring, and she was as curious about war and its inner workings and just as gung-ho to experience it all as I was then. Sabine was tall, just a few inches under my height of six-foot-one. Her auburn hair was slightly kinky with light amber highlights and her mocha-colored skin was just a few shades darker than the desert-pattern camo uniforms worn by the squad.

Army Intelligence had almost no information on Anbar Province, so CENTCOM and its coalition partners had initially planned for a great deal of resistance in this area, a large but mostly empty state that was dominated by Sunni Muslims that were closely aligned with Saddam Hussein. Tensions had been surprisingly low during the first five weeks of the war. That changed in late April when the 82nd Airborne killed seventeen civilians in Fallujah. After being surrounded by an angry crowd of chanting demonstrators outside of a school that served as the Ba’ath Party Headquarters, our troops had opened fire, insisting that they were fired upon, while the survivors, not surprisingly, claimed that the Americans had perpetrated an outright slaughter. In the weeks that followed, Anbar Province had become a hotbed of suicide bombers and IEDs, which at that time we were still calling roadside bombs.

It was the 29th of May 2003, just our second day out of the Green Zone and our first full day embedded with the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment (3rd ACR). Casualties were up and the peace was quickly falling into chaos, and the lack of finding any real evidence of weapons of mass destruction was puzzling to the press and foot soldier alike.

The Humvee rumbled on through the desert, our small square windows cracked open, offering a steady breeze of heat and sand that mixed with the strong diesel smell in the truck, swirling in vaporous circles that smelled like gun oil and industrial plastics and body odor all at the same time.

Sergeant Hanson had his field glasses up scanning the empty horizon. He asked where we were from without looking at us.

Paris, Sabine told him. But I spend many summers in San Francisco with my father. He is retired marine.

Jarhead, huh? How about you, Reporter?

Chicago… suburbs. Westchester. I know, it sounds Richie Rich.

It sure does, said Hanson. Your people come from money?

My mother’s got money. Me, not so much. Been on my own since I was seventeen. I got my GED. Worked in television for a while—

Okay, Chicago, the sergeant said. "Don’t need you to read us War and Peace on it all. Roger that?"

Roger that, I said. You think we’ll make it to the border before dark?

Depends on how long we got to play with our peckers at the mass grave site, he replied, punching his gloved finger at a map on the big computer screen mounted on the dash.

Tell me about this fourteen-year-old kid that we’re picking up?

A friend of mine runs the detention center at Al Waleed. Says the Iraqi kid’s alright. I guess he speaks four languages. His daddy’s a general. Was one. Off the record, we caught the general, his son and three other Iraqi officers trying to cross into Syria at the border. We flew the general back to Camp Rifles and I guess some intel prick from the Sixty-sixth went too far. The general had a heart attack or something. Died in our custody. Big fucking stink about it. That colonel that’s riding in the last Humvee is here to handhold the little fucker back to Baghdad and go smooth shit over with the locals.

Rios said, By smooth shit over, the sergeant means pay off the haji kid’s family. Connected Iraqi’s get big payoffs when we shwack ‘em by mistake.

Hanson nodded. Sometimes we got to pay the fuckers off even when we do mean to shwack ‘em. Religious leaders. Connected officers. Mostly Shia Muslims that are supposed to be on our side.

Right shoulder! Hobbs barked out on the coms. Hundred meters!

I see it, the sergeant said, picking up the radio. Fox-one, this is Fox-two actual. Possible roadside bomb.

Roger that, Fox-two. The radio squawked and the Bradley braked hard, its engine chattering and popping, a black cloud of exhaust pooling in front of us. The Bradley went to work right away with its chain gun, a 25mm M242 cannon, slamming round after round into a pile of mattresses, wooden chairs and cardboard boxes that were stacked beside the highway. The first ten explosive-tipped rounds blew apart the mattresses and splintered the chairs off into the distance, then something glinted in the sun and there were a series of loud PING sounds as shiny fragments were flung downrange. When the firing stopped there was little left of the pile, just mattress fluff, coils, and shredded wood, the smooth sandy shoulder marred with fresh pockmarks, a handful of dented pots rolling around in the ditch fifty meters up the road.

The radio broke in. It was Colonel Shilling, his croaky high-pitched voice unmistakable. Fox-one, this is Alpha-one. Nice shooting, gentlemen!

The gunner’s a chick, Rios said and snickered.

Excellent work! the colonel continued. "Now, proceed…"

Roger that, sir, the Bradley Commander radioed back. Fox-one out. We’re Oscar Mike.

On the move, I said to Sabine.

Please, Adam. I know what Oscar Mike means. Sabine shook her head and clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth several times to show her displeasure. Then she laughed at me and squeezed my thigh. Do you have any more of that Turkish gum for me, Blanky?

I reached into my pocket and gave her a stick. Sabine liked to chew on the spicy lemon and black pepper gum whenever she was nervous and I liked the wide berth that our convoy was giving the scattered debris along the side of the highway, our vehicles rolling onto the opposite shoulder as we passed by it.

Hey, Sergeant, I said. What do you think about Colonel Shilling? You know anything about the man?

I don’t think, Reporter. That’s not my mission. Shilling is high up in military intelligence so if you’re thinking about writing about that haji general or his son, I’d stow that shit. You didn’t hear it from me or anyone else in the Third. If Shilling decides to burn that interrogator from the Sixty-sixth, he’ll use you all to do it. Otherwise, you’ll never get the story past OP-SEC.

Yeah, they’ve already embargoed a couple of stories I filed when we were in the Green Zone. I called C-PIC and asked why but they had no clue. Don’t know when I’ll get a pass from the media gatekeepers at OP-SEC. A friend of mine that was embedded with the Second Marines did an interview with a couple of civilians that got shot up at a checkpoint outside of Basra. Broke the rules. Sent his ass home. We all get the two main rules. Never I.D. a unit’s position until the OP is over with. And no pictures of dead U.S. personnel. Especially if their families haven’t been notified.

I can film them, Sabine said. But we have to blur out the faces and all of the markings and these things.

I added, No pictures of damaged or destroyed coalition vehicles. Can’t talk to Iraqi fighters. No stories about fratricide.

"What can you folks write about?"

Long glowing stories about all you badass professional soldiers doing your jobs under very difficult circumstances.

Hanson grinned and nodded his approval, then Sabine sighed at me and said, Adam, don’t be a kiss-ass...

I said, The army brass and guys like your Captain Greer spoon-feed us most of what we can report on. Not that I don’t like your boss. Seems like a stand-up guy.

Hanson said, Yeah, well everybody’s got a job to do.

We met Colonel Shilling along with the rest of the men at 0-600 hours when he landed at Camp Rifles in a UH-60 helicopter with a British forensic scientist named Cox. Shilling was high up in military intelligence, a member of the 1st Military Transition Unit, 1st Infantry Division. I called up my pal Mitch Collins from CNN and asked what he knew about Colonel Shilling. Collins told me that the colonel was a fast riser. A team player. He was a fixer. He had a big office in the lush convention center in Baghdad that served as the Coalition H.Q. Shilling was a gruff five-foot-five-inch firecracker who marched up and down in front us that morning while he told us the true nature of our mission. Our convoy was tasked to link up with a group of Kuwaiti forensic scientists who were investigating a mass grave site eighty kilometers southwest of the border. The 43rd Combat Engineers were already on scene with the Kuwaitis excavating the site. Our convoy was to deliver Dr. Cox to the mass grave site, then provide security for him and the other forensic scientists to examine the bodies until dark. We would then head north on Highway 1 and escort the team up to Al Waleed where we would bunk out for the night at Tiger Base, an old train station that had been repurposed as a detention center. In the morning, we were to leave the forensic team behind, pick up the general’s son, plus a truckload of other HVTs (high value targets), then haul the prisoners back to Camp Rifles for detention and interrogation the next day.

I opened my pen knife and sharpened four number two pencils. Rios was staring at me in the rearview. He said, Man, is it true that you reporters can’t carry weapons?

Yeah, that’s true.

That’s crazy, man.

Technically, I’m not even allowed to have this knife.

Sabine said, Also, our company had to buy all of our own protective gear. The body armor. The helmets.

Except for our MOPP gear, I said, patting the bag that contained my emergency protective chem-suit and gas mask. The army loaned us this stuff. It’d be no good to have reporters choking on poison gas. Also, we can’t wear clothes with markings of any kind. Worst part is we’re stuck with these black vests and helmets in this damn heat. All our gear is Polish made. Left over from the Cold War.

Sabine leaned around Hobbs’s thighs and tapped my knee. Adam, do you think they will make us wear the whole chem-suit and gas mask at the grave site?

No idea.

I can barely photograph with all of that shit on me. One hundred degrees and a gas mask makes me look inhuman in ten mean-its.

I loved the way she said minutes.

Rios said, What do you embeds think happened to the WMD?

Don’t know, man, I said. Been two months of a lot of foreplay with no sausage produced.

Nice, said Sabine. All men are pigs.

Oink, oink, Rios said, Seriously, I’m not so sure they’re even out here, dude. In the first days of the war, we were in the south at Najaf, at this site with these huge-ass bunkers with these big old hydraulic doors. We nabbed like three hundred prisoners. Killed thirty Iraqi troops. A handful of officers. Then the Seventy-fifth EXT teams showed up. These guys that fly around with chem and nuke sniffers mounted on their choppers. Testing all that shit. Had this New York Times chick named Miller with them.

Judith Miller, I said. Personal friend of General James Marks. Marks is head of the WMD search teams. Miller’s the only journalist embedded with the EXT teams. I’d say that she was lucky but they haven’t found squat and more than once she’s been caught pumping up a site that ended up just being a dusting of fertilizer. Or a bit of residue inside a couple of rusty old shells from the nineteen-eighties.

Rios said, Yeah, we found some of that shit too. They were all hot and bothered about finding wax on the tips on a couple of 155mm shells. Wax is a common tool to contain chemical agents. Anyway, some early testing came back as mustard gas. But they retested the shit, and in our case, it was nothing. Sure got front page news for a day or two though.

Yeah, said the sergeant. And nobody gave a shit about what we did down there.

Rios said, Sergeant thinks the weapons got moved out to Syria.

Damn right, Hanson said. It’s been almost nine weeks. Where is it all? They had hundreds of bunkers pre-marked to search. Where are all the hot operable shells? Where are the mobile labs? Why can’t we find anything of substance?

I said, Hell if I know. Maybe the Iraqis buried it all while we debated going to war for a year. Or like you said, Saddam could have shipped it out to his allies in Syria.

Sabine said, I think maybe that my mother was right. The whole weapons of mass destruction thing was a ruse to steal the gas.

Too easy an answer, Hanson said. I’m with you, Reporter. We waited too long. I think Saddam had the stuff trucked out to Syria. In the end I think we just fucked up.

Well, I said. If that’s true then George W. will have some serious splainin’ to do.

Sabine said, This is Lucy, no?

Yes, I said.

Never fucking heard of it, Hobbs said from the turret. We could all hear each other on the coms.

Old school television, I said. ‘I Love Lucy.’ Her husband was the Cuban guy, always yelled out that line whenever Lucy screwed up which was often.

Rios, said, "Yo, that’s my boy! Rickey Ricardo, man. My abuelo loved that shit. Hey, Bushy! Rios sang out with perfect inflection. Ju’ got some splainin’ to do!"

Operation Iraqi Freedom had gone so well at first that many journalists had developed a giddy aloofness about the war that Sabine and I found embarrassing. Even a few of our friends from the hotel in Baghdad had ceased asking the military and the political wonks tough questions. When President Bush landed on that aircraft carrier and stood up with the unfortunate Mission Accomplished sign behind him we thought we’d be home by the end of summer. We were wrong. We were in the Green Zone then and the air conditioning kept out the heat and the war felt like a video game on our cell phones and television screens complete with persistent POPS going off behind tall concrete walls, an occasional mortar, car bomb or suicide attack piercing our highly guarded bubble.

I reached inside my army green canvas bag and passed around a paper sack full of cookies that my sister had sent over. It was so hot in the truck that the chocolate chips were soft and gooey and the cookies were warm and delicious. When the cookies came back around, I handed the rest of the bag up through the turret to Hobbs. He said, Thanks, reporter, and I buckled myself back into my seat. Sabine was filming through her window again. We could see smoke rising high into the sky from an engagement way north of our position and the contrails of two F-18’s heading straight up toward outer space. It was then that I noticed the overpass, about half a kilometer up the highway. It didn’t seem at all necessary. There were no roads leading up to the structure from either side. In this part of the desert any midsize sedan could cross over Highway 10 and drive out onto the volcanic hardpan almost anywhere. Maybe Saddam or some Ba’ath Party higher-up had secured a lucrative contract to construct a new highway connecting to Salah al-Din Province in the north. Maybe it was the start of a long-planned retirement suburb for loyal Sunnis who wanted to settle in the middle of a dry, hot plate in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe Saddam was planning to pump in water from the Euphrates River and create a grand opulent oasis for his cronies.

I noticed that Hanson was curious about the overpass too. He had his field glasses trained on it, scanning left through a sea of dunes that pushed up against an outcropping of jagged rocks to the southeast. The Bradley radioed in a threat under the bridge and slowed down, its chain gun taking aim at a foot-high shadowy crack at the bottom of the concrete embankment next to the two westbound lanes.

Rios said, Fuckin’ light it up, man! and then his face exploded and we were taking heavy fire from the rocks to the south.

The Humvee jerked forward and banged into the back of the Bradley which took off at full speed as Hobbs opened up with the auto grenade gun. We were moving fast under heavy fire with Rios slouched low against the door, his foot mashing the gas pedal. More gunfire snipped through my door. Sabine and I ducked down into the foot-wells just as an RPG screamed over the hood of the Humvee. I could see Sergeant Hanson, covered in Rios’s blood, trying to steer as we accelerated toward the Bradley, its chain gun pelting the rocks now, its engine chattering as it rolled forward at top speed toward the overpass.

Sabine was on her knees beside me with her camera held high, shooting footage blindly through my window. I peeked over the dash as another RPG slammed into the Bradley’s turret, blowing off its anti-tank missile pod, its chain gun still firing. Hanson was still trying to steer and open a med kit at the same time, so I crawled up between the seats and grabbed the wheel as a bullet cracked into the computer inches away from the sergeant’s face. Sabine was still pointing her camera at the enemy fighters with one hand and holding onto my ankle so hard with the other that my foot was going numb.

Hanson said, I got you, Rios! I got you man! wrapping gauze around the corporal’s ruined face, the top of his nose blown away, his right eye hanging free like a child’s pull-toy.

Between the pounding THUNK THUNK THUNKS THUNKS from the auto-grenade gun and the CHING CHING CHINGS of the Bradley’s chain gun along with the constant outgoing machinegun fire coming from the other two Humvee gunners, the convoy was almost to good cover at the overpass.

I felt the force of the explosion before I heard it. Just as the Bradley rolled into the shade of the overpass an IED planted inside the crack at the bottom of the embankment went off—blowing me back into my seat hard—the 28ton Bradley disappearing in a flash of fire and smoke that shot out at us from under the overpass. Next came the deafening CRACK-BOOM-BANG and the driver’s side windshield panel blew out and disappeared somewhere over my head, followed by a thunderstorm of heat and smoke and sand, a deafening buzz stabbing into my ears now, aching down into the inner recesses of my skull.

Hobbs’s body had crumpled down out of the turret on top of me, my face and hands covered in something hot and wet and gritty. Sabine looked unconscious curled up on the floor. She had a small head wound. A flap of skin the size of a quarter hung down from her forehead. It wasn’t bleeding at all. I touched her shoulder and she opened one eye, shook her head at me, then closed it, still holding the body of her camera, its view-screen shattered. Her camera lens was rolling around on the floor between us. I pushed myself up and twisted around to check on Hobbs. He was bleeding from his nose and his ears, out cold. We were still rolling fast toward the burning Bradley. Sergeant Hanson was coughing and spitting, wiping blood out of his eyes, trying to pull Rios’s locked right leg off the gas pedal, but it was too late.

The Humvee crashed hard into the right rear track of the Bradley and spun sideways into the bomb crater. I reached for Sabine and my body kept going in that direction. My helmet cracked into something solid and then I felt my consciousness spark out, then come back again, and after that the tumbling began and I was tossed forward and upside down, and then I was falling and spinning all at once and I felt myself being lifted up and out and up and up and up...

2

ADAM

I HEARD A LOUD hollow bang and opened my eyes, the soft blue light of the cabin coming into focus. I didn’t move. Everything was fine. I was on a passenger jet somewhere over the Western United States. I realized that I was holding my breath again. I took a deep breath and blew it out very slowly. My mouth was dry, my guts pulled in tight. The airplane hit another air pocket, skipped forward and the fuselage dropped hard with another loud bang. A leather briefcase and a mess of coats fell out of an overhead bin up in business class and landed on an old man’s head. He told everyone that he was okay. I was okay. I patted the breast pocket of my worn leather bomber jacket, felt my pill bottle inside and took another deep breath. I reached into the camouflage backpack that Doc Reynolds bought for me after they kicked me out of the military hospital in Germany and pulled out my last single-serve bottle of whiskey. I drank that and motioned for the flight attendant to come over. She was tall and blonde and perfect and already annoyed with me from before.

One more Dewar’s-rocks, please.

I’m sorry, sir. Beverage service is closed.

I gave her my best grin. Please, Sandy, just a Dewar’s. Don’t need a cup. And a Miller beer if you will. I’m in considerable pain here. I folded my right leg over my left knee, exposing the black carbon fiber of my prosthetic leg. I held up a twenty, my right hand still red from so many stiches, the tip of my right thumb and index finger both severed behind the nail.

The flight attendant put her hands together as if to pray. She said that she was, So… sorry. She told me again that beverage service was closed.

Just give the guy a damn Dewar’s! a man’s voice barked out from a few rows behind us. Can’t you see he’s been wounded over there?

I looked back at two young marines in desert camos and nodded my thanks as the flight attendant scurried back up to the kitchen area to go speak with a razor-thin flight attendant who looked like an elegant schoolmarm. The older flight attendant looked at me with an emotionless squint, then picked up the cabin phone to speak with the pilot. I shrugged at the marines, and said, Uh-oh… One was short and Middle Eastern looking, and the other was big and mean, his massive arms folded across his body to both fit into his seat and try to keep out of the aisle. He was massaging his right fist, looking at my backpack quizzically. It had a digital-pattern desert camouflage design that was only used by the marines then and there were a dozen squad patches sewed on it from every branch of service from friends that I had made while recovering from my surgeries at the military hospital in Landstuhl.

Where’d you get hit? the big marine asked me.

Highway 10. Way out in Anbar.

What service?

Reporter, I said. I was embedded with the Third ACR, Second Squad.

We’re First Battalion, Seventh Marines. Man, you should’ve been with us. Our embed didn’t get a scratch.

If only, I said.

The older flight attendant hung up the phone and spoke to the young blonde one. She nodded and disappeared into the kitchen area. Things were looking up. She came back out with a tray and brought over three mini-bottles and three plastic cups filled with ice. She smiled and said, Here you are. Compliments of Captain Simmons. U.S. Air Force, retired. She placed a napkin and a cup of ice on my tray table, poured my whiskey, then served the two marines. I raised my cup to them all and took a big fat swallow. The big marine said, Thank the captain for us. Then I winked at the flight attendant and said, Yes, ma’am. Many thanks to all, now how about that beer? and several rows of passengers laughed. The flight attendant bit her lip. She turned around fast and walked back up the aisle and I could tell from the way that she was swinging her hips that she was smiling.

3

SARAH

I WAS RUNNING LATE because they wanted me to stick around after my audition so another creepy dude to come look me over for a sixty-second Target spot that I was up for. Non-speaking role. Typical Hollywood bullshit. I finally just walked out, with