loud.
“You wanted music,” Jake said, nodding toward the table of singing soldiers. “You’ve got music.”
“Oh, that’s lovely. You think of everything,” Karin said.
“I try.”
“Any aftereffects from your incident yesterday?” Karin asked.
Jake took a swallow of root beer before he answered. “He tried to kill me, you know.”
“What? Who tried to kill you?”
“The flight student I had yesterday. Oh, he might pretend that those geese hit us, but I know better. He went out looking for them. Every student I have ever had has tried to kill me. Oh, yeah, they all say they are just making honest errors, but I know better. I sincerely believe that it is a conspiracy.”
“I’m sure it is. A left-wing conspiracy, no doubt,” Karin said. “Every flight student you have ever had has been a part of the left-wing conspiracy.”
“That’s true. But it isn’t just the flight students. I mean, think about this. Ever since I got my wings, people have been trying to kill me. Did you know that in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were actually shooting at my helicopter?”
Karin laughed. “As I recall, you were flying an Apache while you were in Afghanistan, and doing quite a bit of shooting of your own. You didn’t get your Distinguished Flying Cross for making sightseeing trips.”
“Still, you would think they would have more respect for a disparate collection of oscillating parts that, somehow, manage to levitate.” Jake held up his right hand to call one of the harried waiters over, even as he was using his left to push another piece of fried catfish into his mouth.
“We’ll need another platterful,” he said when the waiter came over.
“We don’t need another whole platter unless you are going to eat them all yourself. I’m absolutely stuffed,” Karin said.
“No sweat, I’ll eat them.”
“Do you ever fill up?”
“Eventually,” Jake answered.
CHAPTER THREE
Major General Clifton von Cairns, the commandant of Fort Rucker, used one of the larger classrooms to have an officers’ call for all department, division, and section chiefs to talk about the troops that would be returning to the States. He admitted, during the meeting, that he had no idea what this would portend. The problem would be in finding billets for all of them.
“We don’t have space for them, not in our CONUS TO and E units, and not in our training commands. Department of Army has asked every post commander to inventory their facilities with an eye toward absorbing the influx.”
“General, will we be able to handle such an increase ?” a colonel asked.
“Yes, of course. We had much larger numbers of troops in garrison during World War Two. Of course, we also had a lot more military posts then. The problem now is that since BRAC, so many posts have been closed down in the last several years that it is going to make it difficult.”
“How long has DA known about bringing all the troops back to CONUS?” another colonel asked. “What I mean is, why didn’t they give us prior warning?”
General von Cairns looked at the colonel with an expression that mirrored his frustration. “Colonel Haney, from what I was told by the Army chief of staff this morning, Department of Defense learned about this at the same time we did: when the president announced it during his inaugural address.”
Just over one month after Ohmshidi ordered all overseas military to return to the continental United States, Fort Rucker was filled to capacity with returning soldiers, and in order to accommodate the influx, all training activities were suspended. It would have been difficult to continue training activities anyway, because, in a cost- cutting measure, the Department of the Army was now regulating the total number of hours that could be flown in any week. Once Fort Rucker got their allocation, it would hold the hours in a pool and pilots who needed flight time for pay purposes would have to apply for that time. The problem was there were not enough hours allocated to the fort to enable all the pilots to make their minimums, and as additional rated officers arrived, the situation grew even more critical. General von Cairns had been correct in anticipating difficulty in completing the flight program and his recommendation to Jake to expedite the last cycle barely enabled the twelve students to complete their courses.
At the post hospital, Karin was having her own problems. Reductions in Medicare and Tricare denied civilian health care to military retirees and their families, so they were remanded to military base hospitals. As a result the case load at the hospital was greatly increased. VA facilities all across the country were closed, and those who were eligible for VA benefits were instructed to go to active-duty military hospitals on a space-available basis only.
This increased patient load meant that Karin was working longer, harder hours each day, and was often too tired to visit Jake. But tonight she came by, bringing hamburgers and French fries from a local drive-in.
“Do you have any idea how much two hamburgers and two orders of French fries cost?” she asked. Then, without waiting for a response, she answered her own question. “Eighteen dollars! Can you believe that?”
“Everything has gone up,” Jake said. “In order to have enough to meet all the new projects, the government has begun printing money hand over fist. Gregoire says that the presses are running nonstop. Obviously the more money you have in circulation, the less value it has, so that things that have real value, like food, are seeing drastic increases in price. I bought two twelve-packs of root beer this afternoon on the way home from work. Forty-two dollars.”
“You might want to think about giving up your root beer,” Karin said.
