Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC by Larry Correia Read Free Book Online

have rationalized the dream. The brain does funky things with trauma. The dream could have been reconstructed memory.
    That would have required me being as completely idiotic as the rest of my family.
    Shortly after I’d gotten the full skinny, a chaplain came through the ward bringing aid and comfort. He already had my religion. As the biggest stick in the eye I could imagine to my mother, if she ever found out, when asked my religion in MEPS I’d answered “Primitive Baptist.” I really had no idea what Primitive Baptist meant but it sounded bad. The chaplain, an Episcopalian, tried manfully to support me in my simple faith.
    “Father,” I said as he was trying to figure out how to deal with a bereaved Primitive Baptist. Should he ask if there were snakes available? “Primitive Baptist was a joke. I was raised Atheist. My mother refers to me as a babykiller.”
    “Oh,” he said then: “What?”
    “No offense but is there a Catholic priest around? And how do I officially change my religion?”
    A Catholic chaplain eventually made the rounds. He was a young captain, Air Force, who was Vietnamese of all things. I’d gotten to the point that I could more than grunt and moan by that time. So we talked. He had no problem with the vision or the possibility that it was simply a pain and trauma induced dream. Either one worked equally well in his mind. He dismissed it being reconstructed. Based on my general knowledge, I could have created it while trapped in the rubble. Or it could have been Saint Peter.
    “The real question is the matter of the sign,” Father Van said, thoughtfully. “It very well might involve a bottle of ketchup. Stranger signs have happened. But I rather think it will be something else. Just leave yourself open to the sign revealing itself. You don’t have to look for signs, my son. A sign from God is always rather clear.”
    He had the inclination, but not the time, to go through all the matters necessary to convert to the Catholic faith. He suggested, since I was shortly going to be shipped stateside, that I do so there. And possibly when I’d gotten out of the full body cast.
    “Pretty hard to kneel like this, sir.”
    “Keep the faith, my son,” Father Van said. “And that saving sense of humor.”
    I was eventually put on a plane and shipped half-way around the world to end up at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, DC. Same place they took President Reagan. Who, without any word to the press, met the plane, talked to all of us and shook my one good hand.
    He looked me right in the eye as he shook my hand with his left.
    “Glad to have you back, son,” the President said, solemnly. “You’re a credit to the Marine Corps.”
    “And as soon as I’m out of these casts, I’m going to be back in action, Mr. President.”
    You could tell he was trying not to tear up.
    The White House photographer took our picture together. I have it framed on my wall, President Reagan smiling solemnly and me grinning ear-to-ear in my full body cast. Which he even signed.
    He’d made a lousy choice to proceed with that particular mission. Dick, hornet’s nest. He’s still one of the two greatest presidents of the twentieth century and I’m going to almost give him the edge on Eisenhower.
    Then came possibly the single worst moment of my life. Including waking up in hellish pain in the rubble of the destroyed barracks.
    My mother came to visit.
    Picture if you will. It was an open bay ward. By the 1980s, even for enlisted they preferred shared rooms. The bay looked as if it hadn’t been used since the Vietnam War. When I mentioned that, one of the nurses admitted it hadn’t been used since World War II, just updated. Slightly.
    And in comes my mother. Because, as “next-of-kin,” she’d been informed her precious son had been returned to the United States. And why don’t you visit?
    I guess she managed to keep her mouth shut past security. But once she was on the ward, all hell broke