Good Man Gone Bad_An Aaron Gunner Mystery by Gar Anthony Haywood

Author:Gar Anthony Haywood [Haywood, Gar Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945551673
Goodreads: 45749741
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Published: 2019-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

He awoke in a hospital bed back at Camp Evans thirty hours later. He’d had the kind of luck a grunt only saw once. Had the satchel charge gone off at his feet, rather than down into the foxhole after bouncing off his chest, he would have lost one leg at the very least. Instead, the blast had merely torn his right thigh open from knee to hip, a flap of flesh and muscle peeled up and back like the lid on a rations can. The army surgeons had simply sewn the flap back on and plucked a pound of shrapnel out of it and the rest of his lower extremities. The result was a lot of pain but no paralysis; when the time came, he’d walk out of the hospital tent on his own two feet, without the aid of crutches or, worse, a wheelchair.

Jolly had been even luckier, though of course, his good fortune had not come cheap. He’d been in the process of scurrying down out of the foxhole, Duke slung over his shoulders like an oversized duffel, when the satchel charge exploded. Without the white boy’s body between him and the blast, he would have been decapitated; instead, he was merely dotted with shrapnel and sent flying down the hill. Duke was ripped to pieces, but Jolly’s only significant injuries, as near as he or the medics could tell, was a badly sprained right ankle and a laceration of his left ear that required stitches to save the lobe.

The bitter irony stuck in Gunner’s craw for a long time. Jolly had been bound and determined to have Duke die that day, and hell if the giant bastard, for all of Gunner’s efforts to stop him, hadn’t finally gotten the job done, inadvertently or no.

But there was greater insult added to Gunner’s injuries left to come. Less than three weeks later, the US military command would capitulate to the NVA and abandon Firebase Ripcord altogether, following up a complete withdrawal of troops with a wave of B-52s that would turn the base back into the rubble from which it had been built. Duke’s name was then added to that of the thousands of others who had died in Vietnam to no apparent purpose.

Gunner was back home in the States and out of uniform by year’s end. His war was over and his country’s would be soon enough. He wasn’t the same man coming out of Vietnam he’d been going in, but he was alive and whole and for that he couldn’t help but be grateful. He resigned himself to putting the war behind him and, for the most part, was successful. The noticeable limp he would walk with for several years yet was the only vestige of Firebase Ripcord he gave any thought to, until one day in the spring of 1971, when he received a phone call from a man he didn’t know. It was Duke Wayne’s father.

He said the last letter he’d received from his

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