for his chow runners soon. When Corby saw Cannon approaching their group, he instinctively got up and straightened his uniform.
“Relax, Cookie.” Cannon squatted down to their level. “Good job out there, boys. Saw some excellent skills. Good teamwork too.”
Whoa, Em thought, actual praise.
Then as if Cannon hadn’t even said what he had just said, a look came over his face as he began to scream once more. “Where’s my chow runners?” he bellowed. Em was certain that Cannon knew exactly where they were. Yet he had a reputation to uphold.
After Corby and Larry began to double-time it to the chow hall, Cannon ordered Em to form up the flight. Em wondered if this was his “reward” for doing a good job. He quickly realized that the praise they had just received was for their ears only. When it came to where their little group stood with Cannon, absolutely nothing had changed. He had no intention of letting up on any of them.
As Em marched alongside the flight, he kept thinking of the feelings he had been having lately concerning Corby. He had briefly been envious of Corby. He could not quite come to terms with these emotions. Was he envious now that Corby was beginning to become a leader himself? Corby had always depended on Em. That’s just the way things were, according to Em. Now that Corby was showing some independence, Em realized he needed Corby to depend on him. It made him feel useful. After all, Corby had been leaning on him for most of their lives. Em did not know how it would feel to not have Corby around.
He marched the flight onto the tarmac in front of the chow hall. “flight! Halt!” he bellowed over the sound of a plane taking off. His eyes immediately found Corby and Larry. They were the last ones in the chow runner line. Two sergeants stood in front of them. Both of them had veins bulging from their temples. Em was no longer envious of Corby. He could not imagine having to put up with such abuse on a daily basis. Em felt a sense of pride in the way that Corby was handling his new popularity. Larry had learned how to deal with it also.
Em saw Jack snickering when he looked at Corby and Larry. Then he looked at Em and laughed out loud, narrowly avoiding drawing unwanted attention. Em could not help but smile himself. He thought that the four of them were going to become like the picture on the recruitment poster. Make lifelong friends, the poster said.
By design, their flight was the last flight through the chow hall. Whatever mud that had not dried while they marched around now dried and fell off onto the floor. Cannon gave them ample time to eat, which was unusual. Em sat at the table with Larry, Jack, and Corby. None of them cared that they were covered with drying, cracking mud. Their appetites were strong. They also did not speak until most of the food was gone.
“That really was quick thinking back there, Em,” Jack said as he stuffed carrots into his mouth. “I thought all that work was for nothing.”
“Thanks, Jack.” Em was chewing the last bites of the spongy meat product. “But if it weren’t for Corby and his team beating us to the end, it would have never worked because I would have been knocked into the pit.”
Corby just smiled and said, “Glad I could help, boys.” He looked at Em and said, “I really am glad you did it, Em. We needed to show Cannon, at least once, that we’re not the stupid hillbillies he thinks we are.”
“I don’t think you’re a hillbilly, son! I know you are!” Jack said in his most impressive imitation of Cannon. The laughter flowed easily again. They talked for over five minutes, which felt like a very long time, before they were ordered outside once more.
The afternoons were starting to heat up in Texas, and several airmen that had eaten too much had to fall out of ranks to throw up. Cannon only halted the flight and waited on them to return. He even let the rest of them stand at ease while they waited. Cannon led them through the residential part of the base. Em saw lots of women but very few men.
After a long hour of marching, Cannon halted them in front of the base theater. When they were told to form a single-file line, it was done quietly. They watched newsreel from the war, and lots of it was shocking to Em. The war was raging all over the world. The fun that he had been having was quickly replaced by images of war.
Cannon marched them in the opposite direction of the barracks when they left the theater. He let Em and his laundry crew head back to shower and prepare for the double laundry day. Em had to dress in a clean uniform. He was not happy about pulling it from his inspection-ready locker. He stuffed his dirty fatigues into his laundry bag. He put his writing pad in with them. One hundred sets of fatigues would keep them in the laundry room for at least an additional hour and a half. He should have plenty of time to write to Irene. Bam! He remembered it was day 14. Mail! He quickly went to the dayroom to see if there was a small bag. He looked through the glass in the door and saw an empty room. He thought about checking Cannon’s office, but the noise erupting from the stairwell halted him. The rest of the flight had arrived.
Cannon followed them in and went straight to his quarters. He immediately came out with a large duffel bag. Stenciled on the side was US mail. He called for the laundry crew and sent them into the dayroom to sort it. They dumped the contents of the bag onto the floor. Several small packages fell out, along with at least two hundred letters. All Em wanted to do was find the ones with his own name on them and tear them open and read them that second. They began to make piles in an alphabetical order. It did not take long before each of them found an envelope with their own name on it. Em and Jack held their envelopes and looked at each other. Their silence did not hide what they were thinking. They wanted so badly to open them. Logic overruled their haste, and they continued their sorting. Soon, they were down to sorting each pile by name. The S pile was by far the largest. Em had counted at least a dozen addressed to him, most from Irene. He began to smile and soon realized he could not stop. Cannon came in and told them to each get their own mail, gather the laundry, and get it done. They wasted no time. They gathered every set of clothes, all one hundred of them, and double-timed it to the laundry room. Before they filled the washers, each of them read one letter. Em had received the most by far. He counted twenty-two letters. Sixteen were from Irene. Three were from his mom, one from his dad, and one each from his two sisters. He opened one of Irene’s letters first. He had no way of knowing which one came first because the dates were not on the postmark. His small-town post office was behind the times. He opened the envelope carefully and was instantly overcome with emotion. He read:
My dearest Emory,
Six days and it feels as if you have been gone a lifetime. I know this is only the beginning and you are going to be gone for a long time. Never doubt that I will wait for you to come home to me. I don’t think I could live if I believed otherwise.
He read as fast as he could. He began to tear open another before he remembered about the one hundred sets of dirty fatigues. They were not as dirty as he had anticipated. Em realized that the obstacle course day had definitely been choreographed. They were last in line at chow hall, so they got to spend more time there. Also, the rest of the flight would undoubtedly clean the muddy mess they had left behind at the theater and the chow hall while Em and his crew finished the laundry.
Em spent the following three hours just as he wanted. He read some of Irene’s letters multiple times. He tried to answer every question she asked. The only one he could not answer was the one about what his job was going to be. He was going to have to wait a couple more weeks to find that out. He wrote he loved her for at least the tenth time and then counted the pages he needed to mail home. Irene would receive an entire notebook by the time Em was permitted to post his letters.
They finished the laundry. Jack and Em had perfected the routine, and now Summerkamp and McAtee were efficient at putting the laundry in delivery order. When they began to distribute it onto the bunks, they heard noise coming from the latrine. Em knew that was probably only the crew cleaning up after the shower bombardment that had just taken place. He guessed that the rest of the flight was cleaning the base theater. He looked up from the laundry and saw Corby coming his way.
“Hey, Storybook, did you hear from your sweetie? I did.” He held up a letter and grinned that stupid grin of his.
Em looked at the letter in Corby’s hands. He had