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1 " Both men rubbed their chests and winced, the areas around the impacts were brilliant red and swollen. “That hurt like hell!” This was from Jacobson. “You’re lucky the Lieutenant was just firing paintballs, Private.” Jack was sure Jacobson was understating his case. The Rossman Model MP5 was accurate to over one hundred feet, with a muzzle velocity more than two times that of the recreational Co2 guns available to the general public. They certainly packed a hell of a wallop. The critiquing of the exercise continued for the rest of the day. Many important lessons had been painfully learned or relearned. Measures could now be taken to address the last of the shortcomings of base security, lessons which could and would most certainly be passed on to other base commanders. After all was said and done the exercise was deemed a success. Lieutenant General Roy and Colonel Hart sat back during most of the meeting. The general was again very impressed with Jack and Donny as they critiqued the exercise. The operation had, unfortunately, gone exactly as Jack had presented it to the two of them just two days before. But what impressed Lieutenant General Roy the most was the ease of leadership of both men. "
― Ronald Fabick , Turbulent Skies: A Jack Coward Novel
2 " He sighed. All good intentions aside, sometimes he wondered, who am I kidding? Because sometimes he wondered if what was really driving him was guilt; guilt for walking away that November morning, through the acrid smell of burning fuel and the burning rubber smell from the bombed-out Jeeps; for looking at his hands and counting his fingers while the smell of the moist earth ejected by exploding Viet Cong shells mingled with the stench of burning flesh; and most of all, for being able to walk at all and for being able to see, smell and experience the nightmares that still haunted him nightly and the visions that still came during the day. He was guilty for feeling relief— relief that it was not his mangled body lying half-in and half-out of the blackened shell of a burned-out military vehicle; it wasn’t his headless torso next to a crater; and, it wasn’t his body zipped into one of the dark plastic body bags that lined the edge of the tarmac, waiting for pickup and removal by the C-130 transports the day he went home. "
3 " He remembered heat like this from an earlier, more frightening time in his life. As Giti drove, his thoughts wandered back nine years in time … across the Pacific Ocean, back to another life, when his body was drenched in sweat and his skin was prickly just like it was now—back to the jungles of South Vietnam. "
