The most amazing parts of the writing experience continue to arrive unexpected.
In 1987, I was flying Blackhawk helicopters for a living with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. My unit was deployed to the California desert, in training for the future wars that started a year after I outprocessed. We spent about forty five days living in the sand. Peacetime army stuff, no comparison to what more recent veterans have accomplished.
About midway through this deployment, I was informed that a chaplain had come by and dropped off a box of brand new paperbacks. I didn’t know where they came from, or how he decided we’d get them. I gave everyone in the company a shot at the treasure trove. The books disappeared until only two books were left.
One of them was Gods of Riverworld by Phillip Jose Farmer, the fifth and final book of his Riverworld series. They are a great set of sci-fi books about a world where everyone ever born is resurrected. I’m pretty sure that there are no other books where Mark Twain and a repentant Hermann Goering share the stage. I’d finished the fourth book of the series a few months ago and could not believe my good luck.
So for days, I spent my free hours in the blazing desert reading about people in a riverboat on an alien planet. Dozens of other soldiers were transported to other places at the same time. Good books unleash that amazing power of the human imagination in a way that movies and video games just can’t. I’d always appreciated the effort someone took to provide an escape for soldiers serving their country, but I didn’t know who to thank.
This week, the amazing author Joe Kinney clued me in that he had a route for shipping books to soldiers in Afghanistan. Coincidentally, those soldiers serve in an aviation brigade, just like I had, out of Fort Drum, NY, where I’d done plenty of winter training. So I packed up copies of my novels and sent them off.
So while I could never thank anyone for sending me to Riverworld one last time, I was able to do the next best thing, and complete the circle I’d entered over twenty years ago. Maybe there will be a guy on a cot reading my Black Magic next week who will one day send his novels to a new generation of warriors. Stranger things have happened.
Authors who want to send copies of their works overseas can send them to:
SGT Baugh, Mark
TF Falcon (Bagram Airfield)
HHC 10th CAB
APO AE 09354