Chapter 74: Hawaii

I had been to Hawaii twice before, once on my first time around, and the other with Marilyn on the trip her parents gave us for our wedding. My first time, way back when, we had stayed at a resort on Hawaii itself, the Big Island, and while we did a little traveling, we never left the island. On the trip this time, we had stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which is on Waikiki Beach near Diamond Head.

This third trip (for me) was going to be a bit different. Harlan and Anna Lee might be living in paradise, but they wouldn’t be living on the beach in paradise. Harlan, despite being an all-around great guy and fine fellow, was just another regular payday captain in the Army. He had made Captain at about the time I was being discharged. They told us they had a place on base, and Schofield Barracks is pretty much in the center of the island, not on the waterfront. I talked to Taylor about it, and she had been out there. She suggested the Royal Hawaiian - why stay at the same place as before!

Flying to Hawaii is one of those forever flights, because that’s how long they take. Taylor’s itinerary had us getting ferried to BWI by Lloyd Jarrett in a turboprop, and then flying nonstop to LAX, where we would catch another flight to Honolulu. No matter what, it takes an entire day to go there and an entire day to get back. I figured in another couple of years, we would be able to charter a plane even for this, and not just to go to the Caribbean. Now, unless it was company business, I thought that was a bit extravagant.

I was also worried about what my friend would say. He knew me as just another asshole captain in the Army. He knew I had blown my knee out, and that I was medicalled, although I had yet to tell him about the vacation jaunt in Nicaragua. He didn’t know, though, that I had serious money. He was bound to find out, sooner or later, and I just hoped it didn’t screw things up. Most of my life I had hidden my wealth, although that was becoming more difficult. Originally it had just been my lawyer and accountant; now it included all the Buckman group, Marilyn and her family, and Tusker and Tessa. Very soon it would become impossible to hide; I would only be able to disguise the extent, not the existence.

I just hoped it wouldn’t screw up our friendship. Big money can change things between people.

We flew out of Westminster at oh-dark-hundred, before dawn, to catch the earliest possible flight to Los Angeles. Marilyn had screamed at the inability to take more than two large suitcases, but I kept reminding her that where we were staying, we could get housekeeping to do the laundry. (I didn’t tell her what that would cost; why cause trouble!) Because of the time difference, we made it into LAX around 11:00, and then transferred to a different flight. That left a little after noon, which got us into Honolulu around 5:00 in the afternoon by my watch. Just to make it more confusing, they don’t have Daylight Savings Time in Hawaii, so we were landing at 2:00 PM Hawaii Time. Even with first class seating, and even though Charlie had been an absolute perfect angel, it was still mind-numbingly exhausting!

Anna Lee and Roscoe met us at the gate. Roscoe was sleeping in a stroller. As soon as we came through, she jumped up and down and waved to us. I was too tired to do anything other than wave back, but Marilyn dumped Charlie on me and scampered over and gave our friend a big hug. I trailed behind, burdened by my son and his gargantuan diaper bag. I swear, I could carry him inside it!

“Hi, Carl! Good to see you! Oh my God, that must be Charlie!” gushed Anna Lee excitedly. “Oh, I want to see him!”

I handed him across. “Here you go, then. Feel free to keep him. Send him back in about 17 years or so.” I handed the diaper bag to my wife. “Your son smells. I think he needs a new diaper!”

“Some father you are!” answered Marilyn. She smiled down at Roscoe, who was stirring awake. “Hi there, Roscoe! Remember me? It’s your Aunt Marilyn!”

Roscoe took one look around at the busy terminal and let out a wail. I just rolled my eyes. “You two handle offspring. Let’s get out of everyone’s way. It’s safer.” The women took the babies off to the bathrooms and I dug out the luggage tags and waited for them to return.

They were gone the better part of fifteen minutes. Anna Lee led us down to Baggage Claim, and it’s a good thing she did, since the signs made no sense whatsoever. She pointed me towards the carousel. We had Marilyn’s two suitcases, my B-4 and a hanging bag stuffed to capacity, and a suitcase and rolled up stroller for Charlie. I got most of the stuff and dragged the suitcases out of the throng and dumped them in front of Marilyn. “Hold onto these. We’re still one short.” I dove back into the mass of people and got to the front just in time to see my hanging bag disappear around the other side of the carousel. I had to wait a few more minutes for it to circle around before I could grab it.

I bulled my way out again, and got in front of the ladies, who had wisely pulled everything back towards a wall. I dropped the hanging bag on top of the others and bent backwards, stretching. Then I leaned forward and got a hug from Anna Lee. “It’s good to see you.”

“Same here! Oh, Carl, your son is adorable!”

I glanced over at Charlie, now sitting in his stroller. He had slept most of the flight and now was looking around curiously. Next to him was Roscoe, now about a year-and-a-half old, who had stopped fussing and was working on a bottle of formula. “Really? Adorable?” I looked over at Marilyn. “Did we get an adorable child someplace? Was there a mix-up?”

“You are an awful person,” she replied. “I don’t know why I married you!”

I simply held my hands out, palms towards each other about a foot apart. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

That earned me a squawk of outrage from Marilyn and a loud laugh from Anna Lee. “You sound just like Harlan,” she said.

“Hey, I’ve seen your husband in the shower, back in boot camp. You know what they say about black guys? It’s just not true.” That got another set of laughs and squawks.

“I’m going to tell him you said that. So where are you staying?”

“The Royal Hawaiian.” I dug out my paperwork. “Know where it is?”

“Sure. Do you have a car reserved?”

“Supposed to. Where’s your worse half?”

“He had duty. He’ll see you tomorrow. He’s taking a few days off.”

The rental cars weren’t at the airport, but offsite, so we had to wait around for a shuttle bus over to the rental area. I grabbed as many bags as I could carry and hobbled and waddled my way over. The ladies each grabbed a bag and started pushing the strollers. At that point Anna Lee and Roscoe took off, Anna Lee promising to meet us over there in her car. Between the shuttle bus and the line at the counter it took us almost twenty minutes to discover my reserved full-size Ford was not available. I could, however, rent a full-size Lincoln for only a small upcharge. What a racket! I was too tired to care and if I argued I’d probably lose the Lincoln. I signed on the dotted line and got the keys.

We loaded everything up in the car, and then we found Anna Lee as we left the rental area. She was driving a blue Ford Fairmont Futura, probably the world’s ugliest car. She had the window rolled down and was waving at us. She yelled out, “Follow me!” We nodded back and followed her out of the airport. It wasn’t hard to follow her, since the Fairmont was easy to see, with its two-tone paint job and weird vinyl roof.

The Royal Hawaiian was not just one more of the big, towering behemoths lining the beach west of Diamond Head. It was an older style hotel that was startlingly pink in an age of concrete and glass. I would have preferred a bungalow of some sort, but they simply didn’t exist in an area convenient to us. We had a suite reserved. Who knew - maybe we could have a luau and get Gidget and Moon Doggie to sing! Still, after an entire day on airplanes, it looked like heaven.

Our two-car caravan pulled up to the front, and Marilyn and I got out. Anna Lee stayed in her car. We walked over to her, and she said, “I can’t stay. I need to get back to the base and start dinner. You’ve got our number?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what ours is, but if you call the main desk, I’m sure they’ll put you through,” I replied.

“Great! I’d get out and help, but I’d probably have to put my car in parking, and these places cost a fortune. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She waved and took off.

Marilyn and I headed over to the car, where a bellman approached us. “Checking in, sir?”

“Yes, and can we get a valet to take this off our hands?”

“Certainly, sir.” He made a hand motion, and a second man came over. We got the luggage loaded on a cart, and I handed over our keys and a tip to the valet, getting a receipt in turn. The bellman led us to the front desk.

I laid my paperwork down on the registration counter.

“Aloha!” said a perky and pretty tanned Oriental girl. “Checking in?”

“Aloha to you, too. Yes, please, we are. We’re the Buckmans.” I slid my reservation notice across the counter.

Keani, that was her name according to the name tag, took the notice and went through her paperwork on her side of the counter, to pull out a set and start sorting through it. “Yes, sir, one of the Royal Hawaiian suites, the King Kamehameha Suite, very nice.”

“Great! Right now, I would almost settle for a beat up No Tell Motel. Where do I sign? I have been flying since dawn!”

She laughed and slid the paperwork across to me, with several Xs where I needed to John Hancock them. “Sorry about that, but if Paradise was easy to get to, it wouldn’t be Paradise.”

Marilyn laughed and I snorted. “I hear you. Of course, this is about as close to Paradise as I’ll ever get. Saint Peter’s never going to let me through the Pearly Gates.” That got laughs all around.

King Kamehameha must have done well for himself. We had two bedrooms, a gigantic living room and dining room, and a small wet bar. I tipped the bellman, and Marilyn turned Charlie loose to look around.

“It’s gorgeous!” said Marilyn.

“It’s not bad,” I said, agreeing with her. I opened the sliding glass door up and was hit with the warm tropical breeze. I could look out at the beach and the ocean lapping slowly at the sand. “I really can’t argue with you.”

“We should have them stay with us for the weekend,” added Marilyn. “We’ve got the second bedroom. We can put the boys out here in the main room and they can have the other bedroom.” She looked over at me for confirmation.

“Sounds good to me. Let’s ask them. No reason not to,” I said, nodding.

We unpacked, and then the first thing I did was to call back to the office and leave the phone number to the suite on the answering machine, with a note that we were six hours behind them, so don’t call when they came into the office. That would be three in the morning, and I would be cranky.

I unpacked my stuff and grabbed my toilet kit and a towel (we had towel and linen service.) After a quick shower and a change of clothes, I went out into the living room and lay down on the couch. I was just going to wait for Marilyn to come back, but I woke up about two hours later. It was still light outside, although Marilyn was snoring in the bedroom. I shook myself awake and looked in on her; she had simply collapsed on the bed still in her travel clothes. Charlie was curled up next to her.

I sat down next to her and nudged her shoulder. She grumbled in her sleep and tried to roll away. I nudged her again. “Come on, sleepyhead, wake up.”

“Go away,” she grumbled.

“Come on. If you stay asleep now, you’ll be up all night. Go get cleaned up and we can go eat.”

Marilyn grumbled some more but swung her legs off the bed and sat upright. “What’s for dinner?”

“Seafood and booze. Lots and lots of booze!” She just nodded and went into the bathroom. Charlie stayed sleeping on the bed. I looked him over and propped a couple of pillows around him to keep him from rolling off the bed in his sleep. Out in the living room I found a book showing the restaurants and services at the Royal Hawaiian. I shook my head as I looked over the list of rooms, since they all looked alike. I remembered learning during my Information Theory classes that the Hawaiian language only has twelve letters, less than half of what is in the English language. When you have a small symbol set, information density is limited, so you have large words that all look and sound alike.

We went downstairs and had dinner and about three or four drinks. We were too tired to do much more than push the stroller around the place and look at the beach. After the late local news, which is always interesting when you are in a foreign place, Marilyn and I went to bed and fell asleep, exhausted.

The next morning, we were woken up by Charlie, yelling up a storm in his crib. Marilyn and I nudged each other, trying to get the other one to go to work. I won, and Marilyn grumbled and got up, throwing her robe on to retrieve our son. I climbed out of bed, too, and headed into the bathroom. I returned to find her changing his diaper. “You want more of this?” I commented. Marilyn had recently begun quizzing me about when we could make the family bigger.

She grinned at me and handed me a very young man. “Absolutely! Don’t you?”

“That is questionable at best.”

Marilyn laughed. “Go warm up a bottle and feed him.” I was dispatched to fatherly duties while my wife went into the bathroom. I knew she would be in there the rest of the morning.

I set Charlie down for a moment and pulled on some gym shorts, and then he and I headed towards the kitchenette. I made some formula from powder and started warming it up in the microwave. I don’t mind the input; it’s the output that is the problem. Afterwards, I handed him the bottle and he fielded it like a pro. I took him and his seat outside to the patio and looked around.

Marilyn came out dressed in shorts and a tank top, with regular industrial strength underwear beneath them. This was another reminder this was a family vacation and not a ‘mommy-daddy’ vacation. She found me under the sunlight and Charlie gurgling happily and waving around his empty bottle. “Is this how you take care of your son?” she protested.

I looked over and waved at Charlie, who waved both arms back at me. “He doesn’t seem any worse for the wear. Where could he go?”

“Daddy thinks he’s so funny!” She picked him up and carried him back inside. “You don’t even have a sunhat on!” she told him. I rolled my eyes and looked back out at the sea for a moment.

“What’s for breakfast? He might be satisfied with a bottle, but I’m not,” asked Marilyn.

“Hey, back in college, that was the breakfast of champions.”

“Well, we’re not back in college. Don’t give your son any ideas,” she answered primly.

I laughed at her. “Give me a break. He’s not even a year old yet.” I looked at him and said, “Do as I say and not as I do. When you’re old enough, I’ll tell you about what Mommy was like in college.” Almost in response, Charlie started gurgling happily and flapping his arms. “He likes that idea!”

My wife’s eyes widened at that. “You wouldn’t dare!”

I mimed toking on a joint, at which Marilyn squawked in outrage, and headed towards the bathroom. “Give me a few minutes and we’ll go out for breakfast.”

Breakfast was one of the strangest meals I’d had in a long time. Good, but strange. We ate in the main restaurant of the Royal Hawaiian, and you had the usual suspects - eggs, pancakes, bacon, and so forth - along with some tropical highlights like passion fruit/orange juice/guava juice mix. I ordered my standard eggs over easy with bacon. Then I said to Marilyn, “There’s Spam on the menu.”

“What’s Spam?” she replied.

I smiled and shook my head. “All those years around the Army and you don’t know what Spam is? Are you sure you’re an American?”

Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me. “So? I’ve heard of it, I guess. What is Spam, anyway?”

I gave her a wry smile. “S-P-A-M, Spare Parts, Assorted Meats!” That was the standard Army answer. “Actually, nobody knows for sure. I think it’s all the leftover pieces of ham you get when you carve up a pig. They grind it up and cram it into cans. It’s not the worst stuff in the world. Hell, my old man eats scrapple, that’s even worse!”

“What’s scrapple?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but from what I’ve seen, it’s the stuff rejected by the Spam people.”

Marilyn said, “Yuck!” I just nodded in agreement.

“Anyway, I mention that because Hawaii has four times the per capita consumption of Spam as anywhere else? It dates back to World War II,” I told her.

“What’s it taste like?”

I shrugged. “Like ham sausage, sort of. It’s okay. I prefer it sliced or cubed, and then fried.” Heaven knows, if you hang around the Army long enough, you’ll get to eat Spam. “I’ll get some with my eggs and you can have some.”

There was a message light lit on the phone when we got back to the room. Before I could check on it, the phone rang again. I was closest, so I picked it up. “Fortress of Solitude, Superman speaking.”

A loud bass laugh came from the other end. “In a pig’s eye! If you’re Superman, I’d prefer Lex Luthor!”

“Harlan, how they hanging?”

“Just like always, one below the other. You just getting up?”

“We’ve already been out to breakfast. We just got back.”

“Well, drive on up. I’ll meet you out at the main gate. Half an hour,” he said.

I looked over at my wife “Make it an hour. Half an hour to drive and half an hour to get Marilyn out the door.” I hung up and turned to Marilyn. “Let’s put everything away and go.”

“Okay, first we need to change a diaper.” She picked up Charlie and headed towards his bedroom.

We made it there in just under the hour I had allotted. Marilyn didn’t take as long as I thought she would, but we had to get the car from the valet and get directions back to the highway. We ended up on H2, which ended just after you passed Wheeler Air Force Base and dumped us on Wilikina Drive. Harlan was sitting in the Ford Fairmont on the grassy shoulder of Wilikina. I beeped the horn at him, and he simply waved, and then made a ‘Follow Me!’ gesture and pulled out. I followed him through the gate and to a residential area. He pulled up in front of a small duplex. I parked behind him, and we all got out of our cars.

“Damn, boy, every time I see you, you just keep getting uglier and uglier! I almost didn’t recognize you with that faggoty mustache and beard,” he said.

“When Halloween comes around, I’m buying an eye patch and a sword, and I’ll pretend I’m a pirate. You’re still as ugly as ever. Who’d you have to blow to get a cushy gig like this?”

“Screw you.” We shook hands and then he looked over and said, “Marilyn, what are you still doing with this guy? You could be doing so much better!”

“I keep telling him that, too.” She handed me Charlie in his car seat. “Where’s your better half? I need a beer and somebody to complain to about men.” She kissed him on the cheek and then headed towards the house.

“Is that any particular men, or just a general men?” my friend asked me.

“Probably both. Say hello to the latest transgressor.” I lifted the car seat and Charlie looked at Harlan with wide eyes.

“Damn, he’s too cute to be your son.” As we watched, Charlie’s little face screwed up and he looked like he was concentrating, and then he relaxed happily. “I think I know what that means.”

“It means it’s time to go inside and find his mother!”

“We’re having sandwiches for lunch and a barbecue later,” said Harlan.

“Sounds good!”

We went inside and then on through to the back yard. All the windows in the house were open, and the breeze was blowing through. “No air conditioning?” I asked.

“Don’t have one. Don’t need one. Same with the furnace. Don’t have it and don’t need it. However, we do have a fireplace,” he told me.

“A fireplace?”

Harlan grinned. “Everything was built before the war, and they used blueprints from somewhere on the mainland. Since officer’s quarters had fireplaces, well...”

I just shook my head in disbelief. That sounded like perfect Army thinking.

I remember when I was on the Big Island my first time through, seeing the construction standards and telling Marilyn that if I even looked at blueprints like that, I could get arrested back home. Housing construction was marginal at best compared to stateside, but it was satisfactory for Paradise. It never got hot enough to need to cool down and never got cold enough to need warming. There were no floods or blizzards. Most homes had no insulation. On the Big Island, where the topsoil was only an inch deep, if that, and under which was volcanic rock, a lot of houses had the water and sewer lines lying on top of the ground. Un-fucking-believable!

I gave Charlie back to his mother and grabbed a chair around the table on the back patio while Harlan went back inside and grabbed some Budweisers. Marilyn picked up Charlie and held him to her nose, then looked daggers at me and took him inside. “I think I just got busted,” I whispered.

“No shit, Sherlock!” he said quietly back.

Roscoe toddled out through the open door, wearing his diaper and a t-shirt/shorts outfit. He had a binkie in his mouth and came over to me, looking up at me with curiosity. Who was this new guy in his house? Satisfied, he kept moving along to a Little Tikes playhouse in the corner. “He’s growing like a weed,” I commented. The last time I had seen him he hadn’t been much younger than Charlie was now.

“Tell me about it! It’s a good thing I’m in shape, because he has more energy than Anna Lee and I do together.”

“Charlie, too. He’s just figured out crawling, and he doesn’t go around things, he goes through them!”

The moms came out of the house, with Anna Lee carrying Charlie and Marilyn holding a beer and an iced tea. She set the iced tea down in front of Anna Lee. Charlie was deposited in his seat on the side of the table and the ladies sat down with us. I cocked my beer bottle over at our hostess. “Not drinking?”

She shook her head and smiled. “I can’t, or at least, I shouldn’t.”

“Huh?”

Anna Lee gave Harlan a sly smile but didn’t say anything else. It was Marilyn who twigged to it first. “Oh my God! Congratulations!”

I looked at my wife. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s pregnant, silly!”

I swiveled my head to my old friend, who was grinning back at me. “I assume you had something to do with this.”

“So, I’ve been told. She keeps telling me she’s going to get an outside contractor, though.”

I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Well, congratulations the pair of you. Now I will never hear the end of it from her.”

“That’s right!” gushed Marilyn. “We need to catch up!”

“Catch up? With him around, I can’t even catch my breath!” I answered.

“I can chase one while you chase the other.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “Then we can’t do it. With my leg, I’ll never be able to keep up.”

Marilyn simply wagged her finger at me. “Forget it! I don’t want to hear it!”

I just rolled my eyes and drank some more beer. Marilyn and Anna Lee sat there and discussed baby and maternity related topics, which interested me not in the slightest. I shifted my chair around to keep an eye on them, but more to face Harlan.

He did the same. We talked about when the baby was due, and then the conversation invariably drifted to the Army. “So, what’s the Army got you doing out here, defending this little slice of Heaven?” I asked.

“It’s like I told you before, I’ve got a battery of M109s here with the 25 ^th.”

I smiled. “The Electric Strawberry needs self-propelled 155s?” The shoulder flash of the 25^th Infantry was red with a lightning bolt through it; it looked exactly like a bright red strawberry with a lightning bolt. “Which brigade?”

He shook his head. “None of them. We’re divisional level. The brigades are still using motorized 105s, like you had.”

“As long as you don’t have to hump around those shells. I used to have a second lieutenant who managed to drop one on his foot while training at Sill. He showed up two weeks late in a cast.” We laughed through a description of Lucky Lou.

“Man, I can’t believe you are out. I always figured you as a lifer,” Harlan said after going back for another round of beers. Marilyn and Anna Lee had gone off to the kitchen to make ham and cheese sandwiches, with Roscoe following them, and now we were on our third beer of the afternoon.

“It’s the knee, man, no way around it.”

“Just how bad is it?”

I shrugged. “Most of the time I just have a bit of a limp. What happened was I ripped up a bunch of ligaments and messed up most of the cartilage in the joint. I can walk okay as long as I keep a brace or bandage on it, but forget about any distance, and no running either.”

“How’d it happen?”

“This is what happens when you leave a perfectly good airplane in mid-flight, before they have a chance to land and stop. I had a really bad landing. Simple as that,” I replied.

“When was this, when you were down in South America?” The Buckminsters had visited us in Fayetteville the summer right before I had visited Honduras. “The last time I saw you you were still a first lieutenant exec of a company of 105s, about to be promoted and sent to Fort Sill. The next thing I hear, you’re a captain somewhere south in taco land. What gives?”

I shrugged. “Sh...” I glanced over at Roscoe, who was in earshot, and amended myself. “ ... stuff happens.” Anna Lee and Marilyn gave me superior looking nods of approval. “We got tasked to provide a battalion task force to go down to Honduras to train their army. That’s in Central America, by the way, not South America.”

“Whatever. Nobody cares. Keep going.”

“So, we had a battalion of paratroopers, and my battery got tasked to be the support battery, plus the usual whistles and bells for support. Then the State Department weighed in on things. I had been running the battery as an exec without a captain just fine, but that wasn’t good enough. We needed a captain, so division rushed my promotion through and gave me the battery officially. By the way, that really pissed off my CO. I was glad to be away!”

“Hmmph!” grumped my wife. “I wasn’t so thrilled!”

“It’s not like they asked me about any of it, honey.”

“So, your bad jump was in Honduras?”

I drained my beer and reached for another. “Uh, yeah.”

It must have sounded odd to Harlan. He looked at me funny and asked, “So, what happened?”

“It’s like I said, I had a bad landing.”

Marilyn grabbed her handbag and reached inside. “You might as well tell him the rest. He’s going to learn sooner or later.”

That sobered me up some, and I sat upright and was saying, “Marilyn, stop it...”

She didn’t. She pulled out a mini-photo album and flipped through it and opened it to a small picture of me getting the Bronze Star at my discharge parade. I simply groaned when Harlan picked it up and looked at it. “What is that?”

“Carling got the Bronze Star,” answered Marilyn.

I muttered something under my breath, and Harlan handed the photo album to his wife. “The Bronze Star? They don’t give the Bronze Star out for bad jumps. Just what the hell did you do?”

“It was nothing really!”

“Carl, it wasn’t nothing, and you know it!” protested Marilyn.

“It’s classified,” I answered back.

“Who are they going to tell?” she replied.

I just shook my head in exasperation. Marilyn simply didn’t believe the concept of security applied to her. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut if you stapled her lips together! “Marilyn!”

“Come on, buddy, give!” said Harlan. Anna Lee looked on curiously, too.

I rubbed my face. “Okay, this is what happened. We were down there training the Honduran Army. Really routine stuff, good neighbors and all that crap. So, anyway, we’re nearing the end of the deployment, when the general running this whole shebang, a frigging five jump chump, comes up with this great plan to cement US-Honduran relations. He’s going to have the Honduran Air Force drop the American paratroopers and we’re going to drop the Hondurans.”

Harlan was following this closely. He also understood my reference to the five jump chump, since he now had his paratrooper wings as well. “Okay, I’m following you. I’m guessing this didn’t work out too well?”

I snorted and shook my head. “Not hardly. Here’s where it gets crazy. One of the paratroop companies was missing their FIST officer, and I got tasked to provide one from my battery. No biggie. My mistake was that I said it was going to be my last jump in Honduras and my last jump with the division. As soon as I got back home, I was going to Sill. So rather than pick one of my second lieutenants, I went myself. I mean, the whole thing was supposed to be a daytime milk run, almost a Hollywood jump, only with light weapons.”

Harlan nodded slowly. “And?”