Stark's War by John G. Hemry

Author:John G. Hemry [John G. Hemry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-08-13T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter10

“You idiot.” His father had been mad as hell. “You want to be a hero? Join the police, for God’s sake!

At least then you could die in your hometown!”

Dad was still in his coveralls, wet and smelling of fish feed. Stark had stood before him, two months out of community college with a degree in inventory maintenance that qualified him to be a stock clerk in some big discount store owned and run by people who didn’t really care about people like him. Twenty years old, unemployed-looking-for-a-job-that-didn’t-doom-every-dream-once-dreamed, still dressing like the high-school kid he felt like inside. Nowhere to go, after wasting what educational chances he’d once had, until he ran across the recruiting spiel on vid during a break between old war movies. It had been a pretty forlorn recruiting spiel, as if even the actors used in it couldn’t quite believe anyone would actually join the military. To Stark’s own surprise, it hadn’t taken much to convince him to join; no matter how bad it would be, it was somewhere else, one last chance to break away.

Stark, facing his father, fought to speak calmly, but his words had come out sounding like a kid caught coming in after curfew. “I thought you’d be proud.” The hell he had. Like most of the people he knew, Dad had never hidden his contempt for the military, but it had sounded like a good potential reply when Stark had rehearsed the conversation beforehand.

“How could you have believed that?” Dad took a deep breath, looked around as if lost, then back directly at Stark. “Look, there’re laws. You get to change your mind. You’ve got, what, seventy-two hours? Tell them you’re not joining.”

“Enlisting.” Just knowing the term had somehow set him apart already. “And I’m not changing my mind.”

He had gotten mad, too, playing out another in the long series of fights for control, for independence.

“I’m an adult, I can enlist if I want.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing.” His father looked half frantically toward the living room, hoping to see Stark’s mother there, hoping for an ally, but she wasn’t due off her shift at the store for another four hours. Stark had planned that, knowing he couldn’t have faced both parents’ pleas. “For once, just this once, listen to me. I don’t know what they tell you, I don’t know if they wave a slick uniform in your face, all I know is nobody cares about the military. Do you know anyone in the military? Of course not.

They’re not like us. They get sent to places no one wants to go, to kill people, and usually end up getting killed themselves. Is that what you want, for your mother and me to get a letter saying you died doing something worthless, fighting a war someplace no one cares about?”

Stark felt himself wavering. His father couldn’t usually speak so well about important things, usually tongue-tied with anger or emotion, but this once at least he was managing to call up all the doubts Stark had earlier suppressed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.