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For Junior

For the first time in days, he sat alone accompanied only by the sound of the constant English rain as it hit the roof filling the small room with silence. He sat in the near darkness at the varnished oaken table, the room only lit by the embers of the tip cherry of his ever-present cigarette. He crossed his legs and looked down towards his lap, at his legs, splattered with ever-present English mud, somewhat unbecoming the uniform of a commanding officer. The mud was from an airfield he had visited a few hours before, visiting the troops of the 101st Airborne.

He himself had never seen combat, his battles were always in rooms like this one, one party jockeying for power across a large varnished table in the bloodless but never ending combat that is politics. He hated it, it was unbecoming, but it was a job to be done. He hated the way that those in the press called him a hero, when all that he had done that could even remotely be called heroic was serve as an aide to the most pompous man on the face of the earth, General Macarthur, who was now serving in the Pacific, and for that, The General was always most grateful for the distance.

The fireplace cracked as the burning of the moist English oak reminded the General of the passage of time, the gradual darkening of the sky through the windows told him that this most unusual time of peaceful solitude was growing short and his appointment with the pen and paper before him would not wait no matter how he delayed.

Yet, he could not get their faces out of his mind. The airborne troops he had met that morning, who had met him so enthusiastically as to nearly sweep him off his feet. He stood quietly and somewhat reverently in their group, smoking, listening nodding his head up and down and offering the small talk found on street corners, asking them questions about their towns and families, baseball scores and petty gossip. As he walked back to his car, across the wet grassy airfield he could not help but think that most of the men in the crowd he had just stood in would not survive the events of the next 24 hours. They looked back at him as he stood by his car and waved, as they looked through the windows of the C-47, wondering if the folks back home would ever believe that they once met General Eisenhower one rainy day in June ata grassy field in the south of England.