Up Country by Nelson DeMille Read Free Book Online

might re-appear, or even my girlfriend, Peggy, who I insisted not come to the airport. I realized that I really wanted to see her one more time.
    Despite the large number of guys my own age from the Boston area, I didn’t see anyone I knew. This was to be the beginning of my year of looking for familiar faces, and imagining them on other people.
    So, I stood there by myself while people around me stood quietly, or talked or cried softly. I’ve never seen so many people make so little noise.
    A few MPs stood at the edge of the crowd, looking for signs of problems among the young men who were about to leave for ports of embarkation and war.
    In retrospect, this whole scene had made me uncomfortable: the MPs, the mostly unwilling soldiers, the quiet families; the sum total of which was this very un-American feeling of government control and coercion. But it was wartime—though not my father’s war, which was about as popular as any war could get—and in wartime, even the most benevolent governments get a little pushy.
    This was November 1967, and the anti-war movement wasn’t yet in full swing, and thus there were no protesters or demonstrators at Logan, though there were a bunch of them around when I landed in San Francisco, and a lot of them a few days later at Oakland Army Base, urging the soldiers not to go, or better yet, to make love, not war.
    On that subject, my high school girlfriend, Peggy Walsh, was a pretty but rather repressed young lady, who went to confession on Saturday and took communion on Sunday. At a confraternity dance in St. Brigid’s High School gym, we were all made to raise our right hands while Father Bennett led us in renouncing Satan, temptation, and the sins of the flesh.
    The chance of Peggy and me having sex in peacetime were about as good as my father’s chances of winning the Irish Sweepstakes.
    I smiled at that thought and came back to the present. The taxi was making good time, just as my father had done so many years before. I remember thinking then, When you’re going to war, what’s the hurry?
    I closed my eyes and let my mind drift back to the months before I was waiting to board that airplane at Logan.
     

     
    I ’d gone into the army a virgin, but during advanced infantry training at Fort Hadley, I and some adventurous barracks mates discovered the young ladies of the cotton mills—lint heads, we called them, because they had cotton fibers in their hair from working in these hellish mills, doing whatever they did. The hourly pay was bad, but there were plenty of hours available because of the war. There was, however, a better way to make more money for less work. These girls were not prostitutes, and they’d make sure you understood that; they were mill workers, patriotic young women, and they charged twenty bucks. I was making about eighty-five dollars a month, so this was not as good a deal as it sounds.
    In any case, I spent all my off-duty Sunday afternoons in a cheap motel, drinking cheap wine, and picking lint out of the hair of a girl named Jenny, who told her parents she had a double shift in the mill. She also had a boyfriend, a local guy, who sounded like a total loser.
    Predictably, I fell in love with Jenny, but we had a few things going against the relationship, like my eighty-hour training week, her sixty-hour workweek, our bad-paying jobs, and me always being broke (because I paid her twenty bucks a pop), her other dates, which caused me some jealousy, my impending orders to Vietnam, and last but not least, her strong dislike of Yankees and her love for her loser boyfriend.
    Other than those things, I think we could have made a go of it.
    Also, there was Peggy, who insisted that our love remain pure. In other words, I wasn’t getting laid. Having discovered the forbidden pleasures of the flesh, however, I was obsessed with the idea of showing Peggy what Jenny had taught me.
    So, after infantry training and airborne training, back in Boston for my thirty-day