Free The Cannibal Queen by Stephen Coonts

nice of the Marine Corps to share with the Navy. Actually, in spite of the hell those combat veterans put us through, I found myself acquiring a deep respect, affection even, for those model soldiers who tried to make military men of us college boys. That feeling has continued to grow as the years have passed.
    After six weeks of fun and games the sergeants sent me back to college via bus since the airlines were on strike at the time. I remember that bus station, dirty with the usual grimy patina and peeling paint of public buildings the world over, with one large fan suspended from the ceiling turning slowly, lazily, while the short-order grill filled the room with the odor of grease, a WHITES ONLY sign over one men’s room and a COLORED over the other. Integration had just arrived in the Deep South in 1966 and they hadn’t gotten around to repainting the signs.
    The next summer I returned to Pensacola for another six-week visit with a few handpicked drill instructors. We saw Pensacola for only a few hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The rest of the time was spend studying Navy stuff, marching and getting inspected and getting ready to get inspected again. The last week of AOCS I got to be a candidate officer, a term of art that meant that the academics and physical training were over and I got to march the other candidates around.
    One night that week, while I was standing an all-night duty officer watch, I sneaked into my drill instructor’s office, sat in his chair and put my feet up on his desk. It was a sublime moment.
    Then I noticed a metal box filled with file cards on the desk. I confess, I looked.
    Yep, each card had the name of a guy in my class. In the blink of an eye I had mine out. There were exactly three words on the card: “Lacks military bearing.” That was it. Nothing else. Staff Sergeant Balyette had chosen those three words to summarize my twelve weeks of AOCS and to predict my future in the military. He was an expert, so I knew it was true. They can put it on my tombstone as my epitaph.
    I came to Pensacola to stay and fell in love with the place in late May, 1968, as a spanking-new college-graduate ensign assigned to flight training.
    AOCS was turning out thirty new ensigns a week, the Naval Academy was popping them out, and the Naval ROTC units around the nation were shipping them here. The town was awash in ensigns the summer of 1968, or so it seemed to me. The “gouge” on the best restaurants—cheap with edible food— and fun places swirled through the training classes. We cruised the streets and went over the causeway to Pensacola Beach and sparked what few single women there were. I never managed a date.
    Still, we saw Pensacola as a great adventure, our first step into the real world after college, with a real paycheck and a real chance to succeed or fail solely on our own efforts. I still see her that way. I get a warm fuzzy every time I visit.
    In the last twenty-five years the city has doubled in size and changed dramatically. Now it has four-lane highways, a big civic center with an attached Hilton Hotel sporting a cutesy old-timey railroad station for a lobby, all the usual malls and three-bedroom two-bath suburbs. Here and there in this homogenized glitz are a few remnants of Pensacola the way it was before the developers and improvers got their hands on the controls.
    The saving grace is that the town is still full of young men—and now women—just out of college and trying to earn a place for themselves in naval aviation. For them the future is a bright glowing road that stretches ahead toward an infinite horizon. That is as it should be. Youth without optimism would be unbearable.
    The two men who made the most impression upon me at Pensacola were Jimmy Hanks and George Dustin. Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Hanks was my first flight instructor. Like most naval aviators, he was a medium-sized fit man who spoke softly and meant what he said. Fate had played him a nasty