America's foreign wars

repost with edit/America's foreign wars
Unit Ohio, NCO training section 200; rambling coyotes

fiction
edward w pritchard


Most of the new recruits were alone sitting in groups of two or three at Bob Heton's Kentucky Fried Chicken here in Kent . Some were outside in winter cold clutching dearly to girl friends, a few Mother's were sitting in the parking lot in expensive cars with Son's leaning at the window and a half dozen soon to be soldiers were standing outside the doorway having a last smoke with their new Sergeant.

My son and I had been sitting here for over an hour having the original recipe fried chicken. There was plenty of chicken left and the sides were untouched and Paulie was passing out the balance of the box to the young men sitting around us. No food was allowed on the bus to Camp Perry Joint Training Center. Paulie and I were sitting at the same table we were at nine years ago when Sheriff Winston, my high school Assistant football coach, had called me here at midnight to retrieve Paulie and Sam Murphy for being inside the fence of the East Ohio Gas building.

As I watched Paulie interact with the other boys I doodled  arrows with my thumb on the frosted window. Bob needed to get some heat here in his restaurant. I was fighting off the urge to check over Paulie's small suitcase he was allowed to take on the Bus to Camp Perry. After Camp Perry Paulie had ten weeks of Basic down South and then four months of individual training before his unit of the Ohio National Guard went to Pakistan. Paulie stood by the windows a minute and watched the couples outside kissing desperately. I read over the brochure about the operation at Camp Perry again. I had under lined most of it and drawn a few arrows. Paulie didn't want to take the leaflet with him and had handed it back to me. The Adjutant General in command at the Camp Perry training center is a woman.

The Sergeant shook my hand. I hadn't been in the military but my Dad had; he wouldn't talk about World War two. I listened to the Sergeant organize the group and get them on the bus. One of the  Mother's was having trouble with her car and I took a look under the hood; standing by the car I could hear hear the Sergeant on the bus giving the squad their new nickname, the Rambling Coyotes. After the bus pulled off I watched it enter 76 West toward Lake Erie. The brochure had said they had a State of the art Dining facility at Camp Perry. I didn't know if the Camp where Paulie would start his training at to be a soldier sat directly on Lake Erie. I wanted to call my ex-wife but she had said goodbye yesterday to Paulie. Driving back to my apartment over the slippery treacherous roads I  kept worrying about the bus and wondered how long it would be before Paulie could give me a call.

That night about about four AM I awoke from a bad dream. In my dream Paulie was standing with a soldier with a turban on his head, Muslim style. Both were wearing an American civil war gray uniform and both had twin artificial legs, the kind of artificial limbs that looked like springy thin metal pogo sticks. In my dream both the soldiers, Paulie and his enemy were standing very still, looking ancient, like images from a sad old fading picture.