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Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN-10: 1539819752
Type: Fiction
Pages: 520
Copyright: Nov 12, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781539819752
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
A novel about the effects of warfare on ordinary people and the rewards that come with reflecting on one's experience later and talking or writing about it. This is the fourth volume of a series called "Witnesses".
While he is a student at a community college in the United States, Paul Kingsley is horrified to learn that he is the illegitimate son of a notorious ideologue who re-established an underground, sociopathic cult called the Scythians. In reaction to his father's war on democracy, Kingsley leaves school and takes a step no Scythian would ever make -- he enlists in the American army and ships out overseas to serve behind the lines of combat in an Asian war. He marries, returns to America, and establishes a family.
In later life, he reaffirms his personal commitment to democracy by writing a series of novellas and short stories that feature ordinary Americans in times of war. Some of these writings appear in "Witnesses and Troublemakers", which is the fourth volume of a series.
Kingsley also encounters the self-appointed leader of the Scythians -- a distant cousin of his--and sets his sights on fighting the obnoxious cult before it gains a hold on American public opinion.
As well, the novel is about others who battle the Scythians, especially Stephanie Markham, the editor who works on Kingsley's stories and is involved twice in military actions that the Scythians bring on themselves.
Excerpt
After getting my work caught up, I sat in front of the communications equipment and daydreamed about what I might be doing instead of what I was doing – mountain climbing, playing volley ball on the beach, spending time with Sarah, when I suddenly heard the sound of gunfire from the Kulonese military encampment. Rockets swooped through the air and I saw through the window on the radio hut door the glow from two or three fires in the village. I heard mortars going off on the other side of the Danh River.
The radios suddenly went down. Henderson came into the hut and said that helicopters to evacuate us were on the way. We saw through the window that a company of enemy rangers had broken through the perimeter defenses. We heard an explosion; smoke pouring through the roof of the hut forced us outside with our rifles. We hurried around the corner to position ourselves behind the hut. A squad of scrawny kids in black uniforms ran across the compound toward the tents. They didn’t see Henderson and me at first because we were hiding between the hut and the back fence, so we fired at them till most of them dropped to the ground, one-two-three. Then I felt a rifle butt on the back of my head.
When I came to, I was face down on the grass behind the radio hut. Sergeant Henderson’s body was a few feet away. I heard shooting in the distance but nothing close by, so I crawled to the tent field and stopped. I saw the bodies of men I’d worked with for a year – either dying or already dead. I heard slow, irregular breathing. PFC Carson lay beside me with blood seeping through a gash in his stomach. Genoux was next to him, with his right foot tucked under his left leg; a hand still clutched the stock of his rifle. The side of his face was mashed in. Three birds wheeled and dived. I turned my head before their arcs made me dizzy, heard a sound, and saw an enemy officer tramping through the grass. I positioned my weapon and fired twice. The officer wobbled to the ground. I struggled up and walked a few yards. Pools of blood glistened here and there on the grass. I heard a whistling sound behind me that stopped in the base of my spine. My head reeled. I went down on my knees again.
A pair of hands gripped my shoulders. Another GI raised my legs. They carried me to a tent I hadn’t seen before, where I lay still and watched two chinchuks crawl along the tent poles. Nausea and my imagination caused them to grow and then shrink again – two tiny specks cavorting on sunbeams. They swelled and shrank again. I dozed off. When I woke up, a medevac helicopter was lifting me from the ground.
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