Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method, page 15. Click here to see the page at full size. |
*sigh*
Well, what are you going to do? On the flip side, this next little bit is actually loosely based on a true story. In fact, lots of the weirder stuff in this book is loosely based on events that happened to my father over the course of his travels with the Marine Corps, mostly in Africa.
Back in the day, Dad was on whatever task force it was that was looking for a place to put an air base midway between the U.S. and the Middle East. That place wound up being Diego Garcia, but for a while, they considered putting it somewhere else--like Kenya or Zaire. So Dad went to scout these places and came back with more than a few hair-raising stories. He was tight-lipped about it for years, but eventually he started drinking, and he was a maudlin drunk. That's how I learned what he'd really done for this country, and as part of what this story is, I preserved some of the crazier portions of his life, albeit in a form that's totally unrecognizable to the events as they actually occurred.
It is, after all, not exactly my place to tell my father's secrets to the world.
Still, to the extent that this story is about anything real, it's about the difficulty that my father had with leaving the Marine Corps and learning to deal with civilians on their terms. Granted, he never had Spice the Mad Drug Dealer after him, but he had his struggles, and I went along for the ride.
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