Free Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) by Joseph L. (FRW) Marvin; Galloway William; Wolf Albracht

Leander, a welder at John Deere, the giant manufacturer of tractors and farm implements, loved me and all his children. But he rarely showed this affection; taciturn and emotionally closed, a compact, muscular, and short-fused man, he punched like a prizefighter and relied mostly on his fists to communicate his displeasure with me. As I entered puberty, my beloved mother, Germaine, a sensitive and intelligent woman, was diagnosed with depression and hypertension. Like many depressed women of that era, she was severely overmedicated. She was soon bedridden, and rarely left her room for days on end. Mom died of a stroke in 1965. My relations with Dad, which had never been good, chilled to an icy truce.
    I am the middle child: Sister Nancy and brother Bob were the oldest, while Don and Mary Beth followed me in birth order. We had always looked out for one another; after our mother died, we became even closer. When Bob finished high school, he escaped the limited horizons of small-town life and enlisted in the Air Force.
    Our family wasn’t poor in the classic sense. We had enough to eat, a safe roof over our heads, decent clothes to wear, and we all went to Catholic schools. But there was no money for anything else, period. When it was time for me to start high school, we didn’t have enough for tuition at the diocese school, Alleman High, where all my elementary school friends were enrolled. I found an after-school job in a grocery store to help pay my tuition.
    Alleman was coed; most of our teachers were nuns or priests. Student discipline was strict, and most teachers enforced school policies and their own classroom rules with corporal punishment. I soon learned not to complain to my father about being spanked or slapped or having an ear twisted: That always triggered a second beating, from him.
    At this time in my life, academics didn’t much interest me; studying was not my thing at all. Instead, I devoted my high school years to enjoying myself. Soon the nuns had labeled me: I was the boy who would never live up to my potential. Held to such low expectations, I did my best not to disappoint anyone: I was happy to earn a C and believed that my parents should also have been happy. I was a classic underachiever—but I
was
voted “Most Fun to Be With” by my senior classmates.
    I was big and strong but, in the grand scheme of things, only an average athlete. I was desperate to make the varsity football squad, to become a prince of the campus. In my junior year, however, my job conflicted with football practice. I deferred varsity dreams until my senior year; by then, I had enough work seniority to demand a schedule that allowed for after-school practice. With much help from my coaches—and I mean they gave me every possible break and spent hours and hours with me—I made up for my lack of native ability and playing experience with sheer desire. I never started a game, but I played often enough and well enough to earn the respect of my coaches and teammates—and a prized varsity letter.
    This became tremendously important to me for reasons I had no way to predict: Being part of a team, as I saw and experienced, was a powerful force multiplier. Earning that letter was the turning point in my young life, my first glimmer of the power of my own possibilities.
    But only a glimmer. As I approached graduation, the future I envisioned for myself was much like the one most of my classmates imagined: I would get obligatory military service out of the way, return to the Quad Cities, and find an apprenticeship in the building trades.
    Yet I was anxious to put the humdrum ordinariness and rigidity of small-town life aside, if only for a few years. I wanted adventure. I wanted to break out of the Quad Cities cycle of going nowhere in record time.
    With my best friend, Joe Murphy, I spent a few weeks considering service options. I could enlist for three years in the Army, or four in the Marines, Air Force,