“It’s easy for people in modern society to romanticize Indian life, and it might well have been easy for men like George as well. “Y’all will only be remembered for the last thing you ever did,” Caldwell warned them one warm spring night.” They’d made it through the dangers of combat and died within sight of their barracks in Vicenza.
In past years one drunken paratrooper was struck by a train and killed and another died of an overdose. They find themselves at train stations and on sidewalks and in police stations and occasionally at the medical facilities. The drinking starts immediately and continues until unconsciousness and then resumes whenever and wherever the men wake up. As soon as they’re discharged they can do whatever they want. The men will fly into Aviano Air Base, take a two-hour bus ride to Vicenza, turn in their weapons, and then form up on a parade ground called Hoekstra Field. The men who already have girlfriends arrange to have them stock up on beer, steak, whatever they’ve been craving for the past year. When they’re down at the KOP they use the communal laptops to try to arrange girlfriends for themselves when they get back. It’s starting to dawn on them that they’ll probably never walk to the top of Honcho Hill again or get dropped onto the Abas Ghar. “There are two months left to the deployment and the men devise all kinds of ways to quantify that: number of patrols, number of KOP rotations, number of mefloquine Mondays.
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