Interlude 2

Ray Wilson sorted out his books and the material he’d been working on before putting them into the daypack. Shouldering it, he locked the doors of his XC 70 and folded the key into its slot; Volvo includes the fold-in key as a part of the remote control unit. He pocketed the remote and headed off to class.

The Volvo had been a gift he made to himself after retiring. It was luxurious by his standards but not outrageously expensive, and Volvo had a reputation for durability and safety. It was easy on gas if he didn’t try to push the accelerator pedal through the floor. It was also peppy, very peppy when he felt a need for speed. Turbo lag? He’d never noticed it, if indeed it was there at all.

Spring was Ray’s favorite time of year. The weather was warm, not yet the full heat of summer but warm enough for the girls to begin stripping off the heavy clothes of winter. Shorts and T-shirts were common on campus, and Ray had an eye for legs, boobs too if they weren’t overly large. The observing was good, even very good from time to time!

He often ate lunch from the cafeteria in the Student Union Building. The lunches were OK, but it was the students in the SUB who improved the atmosphere quite a bit. Like the judicious dash of Tabasco that he’d learned to appreciate when eating field rations, the young women in the SUB made eating more pleasure than chore.

Ray was something of a loner on campus, being more observer than participant socially. He made no close friends, despite the fact that there was a large group of veterans attending classes. They were like Ray in many ways, and some of them shared his own experiences at least in part, but others had been infantrymen or cavalry troopers. Like Ray, they had come back to Fort Bliss after their term of active duty was finished.

El Paso has a large community of military retirees, and many had enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso by using their GI Bill entitlements as Ray himself had done. Once, they might have been air defense soldiers, but not now. Fort Bliss had changed; the desert ranges that had provided open space for firing air defense missiles had proved to be equally useful for training warriors who would fight in the Middle East.

The ranges had seen considerable history. Explorers had passed through, then returned to take up land. Spanish settlers had mined the mountains and farmed the lands along the streams, and later had come the prospectors and drifting Texans to establish their own mines, farms, and ranches. The native Navajos and Apaches had raided all of them equally from their mountain strongholds, and regardless of their origin or motivation, the newcomers had fought to hold what they had taken. They defended their possession of the harsh land they had grown to love, some of the time by legal methods but occasionally by means that didn’t quite fit that narrow definition.

Billy the Kid had ridden the historic ranges. Pat Garrett had pursued him across the empty landscape and finally killed him just a few miles away. Garrett himself had been killed in turn, while riding back from a ranch he’d taken up in the foothills of the San Andres Mountains. That happening, among others, had never been satisfactorily explained, and people even today didn’t want to talk about it. Memories are old, and families of the participants still live in the nearby towns. It was all part of the history of west Texas, the Tularosa Basin, and the ranges of Fort Bliss.

The land had, once again, been taken from its owners during the Second World War, and descendants of those owners had been trying to reclaim it ever since. But the government still needed a place where airplanes could practice bombing and strafing without worrying about grazing cows. Or cowboys tending the cows, for that matter.

The ranges extended across enough territory to be considered states in the Northeast. White Sands Missile Range and the nearby Albuquerque bombing range were there too, not always adjoining the Fort Bliss ranges but nearby. The first atomic bomb had been detonated in a deserted part of what was now the White Sands Missile Range.

Fort Bliss, home to horse cavalrymen, then to air defense missilemen, had now become home to desert warriors. Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Stryker armored infantry carriers roamed the vast ranges while their operators learned to use and maintain armored vehicles in the desert. Crews also learned to use the sparsely-vegetated terrain for concealment. The knowledge would serve them well in the deserts of the Middle East.

Many of those desert-war veterans now wanted nothing so much as a chance to forget past deployments. Certainly they didn’t feel the urge to talk about their time in service! They tended to be quiet, and like Ray himself, loners. Now they worked at attending school, just as they’d learned to work at soldiering in a harsh environment. Most were excellent students, more dedicated to learning than those who’d come directly to college from high school.

El Paso was a military-friendly city, bustling with energy and development. It had long been a contact point for trade with Mexico and the cross-border trade was booming. Some of the trade was legitimate. There were a number of warehouses along the south side of the city that stored goods under bond and held them for eventual transshipment around the country. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, had opened up Ciudad Juarez to manufacturing, and a number of multinational companies had taken advantage of the cheap labor available in Mexico.

Other parts of the trade was less legal. Drugs and people without documentation also flowed across the border here, as well as across the borders of California, New Mexico, and Arizona. The international border was better sealed now than it had been a few years ago, when it had been no more than a porous fiction. The improvements slowed, but never quite managed to stop, the illegal crossings.

Ray had crossed the border once, only once, after returning from overseas. Once was enough; he had left one war zone, he didn’t need to go visit another one even if the war in Juarez was between drug gangs and Mexican troops. Or drug gang and drug gang. Or drug gangsters and the gangs from south El Paso, some of whom were now working with wealthier, better-organized gangs in Mexico. Some of the gangsters were getting rich, but others were getting dead. Ray had decided they could do that without his help, and without him getting caught up in the gunfights.