Free The Fourth Sunrise by H. T. Night Page A

what that kind of war does to a man like who endured that awful war for years on end like Captain Jack. I was one of the lucky ones. Maybe not as lucky as the draft dodgers, but I was only there for about six months.”
    “ Why only six months?”
    “ I broke my leg.”
    “ In combat?”
    “ No, playing volleyball. By the time the reports got to Washington, D.C., they read as if I had gotten injured in combat. The truth was, I went up to spike the ball and landed on a teammate who had fallen to the ground. I broke my right leg in four different places, completely ending my military career and ultimately, my baseball career.”
    “ I thought your shoulder ended your career?”
    “ No, my shoulder just ended me having a shot to be a better homerun catcher than Mike Piazza. It forced me to DH and play the outfield and in the minors, those are the most competitive positions. It’s all hitters. I could hit, but never enough to be called up. Then I was drafted and then the broken leg during the war hospitalized me for an additional year. When I was done, there was a chance I could have returned to baseball, but I just chose to do something else.”
    “ Which was what?”
    “ Hold on, this is where the story gets really good.”
     
     
     
    Chapter Thirteen
     
     
    April 1971 – Hanoi, Vietnam - American Occupation Campsite, 10:30 p.m.
     
    “ I couldn’t tell you how much I was against the war by the time I got drafted. But I did the right thing and went. It wasn’t easy and I had put baseball on hold for what I thought was a short time. Little did I know that I would never again step on a baseball diamond.
    “ Some Army buddies of mine were playing cards with a couple of other guys in one of the barracks. Some guys in the room were of higher rank than others. The higher-ranked guys liked to have me around because I was a professional baseball player. By that point, I still felt I had a shot at the majors. I was still working hard in the minors before I was drafted. Most guys, that’s all they wanted to hear. They just wanted a guy around who reminded them of apple pie and baseball. I was like their mascot. And Captain Jack took a liking to me.
    “ We often just talked about life. It was a different place then. Smoking grass and getting plastered on anything alcoholic was a daily occurrence. I liked Captain Jack. I could tell he was a really good guy.
    “ When I first met him, I had no idea who he was. He was just like any other guy who would talk about his family. He really loved his family. He had a little boy and seemed to be all he could talk about was getting out of Hanoi alive so one day he could teach him to be as good as me in baseball. I gravitated toward Captain Jack because he was a simple guy like me. We liked fishing, playing cards, and just talking about anything that would keep us miles away from our actual day-to-day realities of bullets whizzing by our heads. Although he liked talking about his family, he only referred to them as his wife and son. It was obvious that he was holding back certain details about his life and I quite wasn’t sure why, but I respected his privacy.
    “ On this particular night, there were six of us playing poker in Captain Jack’s barracks. Four captains and two privates. I was a private and so was this rich kid, Mike. We were playing a variety of poker games with lots of action. We were playing for money, hash, cigarettes, alcohol, or whatever someone had that another person wanted.
    “ The other private was a rich kid whose dad sent us over a lot of extra supplies for everyone. So, he was more than welcome to any party the officers were throwing, especially a poker game where they could clean him out and make him write to daddy for more money.
    “ I was playing on past winnings. I had cleaned up a couple of times in the past with some good poker nights.
    “‘ Hey, do you think they are close?’ Captain Humphries said to Captain Jack. Captain Humphries was a