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

loose.
    “Mom?” I asked. I was still in a full body cast. There was exactly zip I could do. But I knew what was coming.
    “Well, it serves you right, babykiller ,” she snarled, right there in front of God and everybody. Including about four Navy nurses and a Navy doctor. “The only thing that would make it better is if you’d been killed in that justified bombing! Down with Israeli! Down with the tyranny of capitalism! Down with the fascist Imperialists!”
    “Mom!” I shouted. “You don’t understand! You never heard I got promoted !”
    “What?” she shrieked. “Why should I care you fascist bastard!”
    “I got promoted to babykiller first class, Mom!” I shouted over her. “It only took bayoneting two hundred of them! They taste like chicken! Do the whole village! Do the whole village!”
    You could see the “what the fuck?” expressions on the shocked faces of the doctors and nurses. But shortly after that security was called and my mother was permanently blacklisted from Bethesda Naval Hospital.
    After she, and security and the doctors, had left one of the other Marines looked over at me.
    “Dude,” he said. “You’ve got a seriously fucked up mom.”
    “You think? What gave you your first clue?”
    “Babykiller First Class?” another said. “Oh, don’t make me laugh! It hurts!”
    “‘They taste like chicken!’” the guy all the way at the end of the ward yelled.
    Laughing hurt so good.
    Then, naturally, the Brentwoods came to visit. And stayed. They moved in with another Marine couple they’d known for years with a house in Alexandria. They not only visited me, they visited pretty much every Marine in the hospital. Mr. Brentwood had taken a leave of absence from the school district to make sure I was going to be okay. He spent the time he wasn’t talking to me going around the hospital telling WWII stories and explaining how, yep, recovery sucked pretty much the same now as back then. Mrs. Brentwood smuggled in real food.
    They almost immediately heard about the incident with my mother. Mrs. Brentwood tried very hard not to be amused.
    “Oliver Chadwick Gardenier,” she said, shaking her head. “That was…” She stopped, looking for the right stern words and started giggling instead.
    “Serves that harridan right,” Mr. Brentwood said, trying to keep a straight face.
    “Oh, God, I want out of this cast,” I said, chuckling. “I miss eating babies.”
    The casts slowly came off and tubes slowly came out. Then the fun part started: Physical tyranny.
    I knew there was a point to it. If there was going to be any chance I’d ever be able to be a Marine rifleman again I had to go through it. But it was really God awful. I stuck precisely to their regime. If they told me to lift five pounds ten times, I lifted exactly five pounds ten times. And that’s where it started, five pounds, ten reps. I was so incredibly weak I simply could not believe it. And I don’t care what they say, the hospital food did not help. I needed some of Momma Brentwood’s chicken fried steak and gravy.
    Finally I was released to go live with the Brentwoods’ friends, the Shermans, and made day trips to Bethesda. Then I could really start to recover. I’d lost major poundage on rubber chicken and half a beef patty. Momma Brentwood and Mrs. Sherman took turns ensuring that I gained all that weight back fast. They competed to see who could get me to pig out more. Mrs. Sherman was Korean and that’s when I started my life-long interest in ethnic foods. Her winter kimchee was awesome and her bulgoki was nearly as good as manna.
    But on another subject of food. At that time, you wouldn’t guess who had the commissary contract for supplying condiments in Navy cafeterias. That’s right. Heinz. Not only did every single bottle of ketchup have ‘57’ on it, every single damned ketchup packet had a ‘57’ on it! There were fricking 57s everywhere . It was driving me nuts!
    Fifty-seven Chevy? Maybe it had