Surprises

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of a person or action described in this story to an actual person or action is purely coincidental.

All the persons participating in sexual activity in this story are over the age of eighteen.

None of the descriptions of military personnel or practices should be taken as a description of how such things actually work, although the whole DEI drive seems to be negatively impacting military recruitment and readiness at this time.

The introduction is a little long, but eventually this does become a romance. I hope you find the patience required to get to the romance worth the time and effort.

The section of the Appalachian Trail called the Hundred Mile Wilderness is located in Maine. It is the remotest section of the trail.

SURPRISES

PROLOGUE

My life has been radically changed, mostly but not always in a good way, by a series of surprises. The first was definitely not one of the good ones. Things did get better, later, as you'll see.

The brigade staff meeting was just ending when COL Harrison said to me, "LTC McKenna, may I see you in my office after we're finished here?"

"Yes sir. What do you need?"

We walked into his office and COL Harrison closed the door. "Billy," he said. "When is your tour as Third Battalion commander over?"

"About two months, sir. Why do you ask?"

"I came from the division commander's office shortly before the meeting. She made clear she is not a fan of yours."

Our division commander was a two-star general, the first minority woman ever to command an infantry division. She had taken command shortly after our last deployment to Iraq. She was not an experienced combat leader and had made it clear that her first priorities would be raising the division's DEI scores. As a result, her initial reception by the troops had been less than enthusiastic. Many of them now referred to her as "General Diversity" and held her in complete contempt. I'd tried very hard to stamp that out in my battalion, sharply reprimanding any of my troops, including my officers and senior non-coms, who I heard use the term.

"I don't understand, sir. We were the best battalion in Iraq on our last deployment and we've nailed every single training problem since I took command. You've told me yourself that you thought we were the best battalion in the division and so did General Michaels before he left command."

"Well, Billy, she's taken a real dislike to you. When I asked why, she had several issues."

"What were they, sir?"

"Give me a second. I took notes, because I had a hard time believing what was coming out of her mouth."

COL Harrison pulled his notebook out of his pocket and began. "First, she hates that you're a rural, southern, redneck who still talks like he's from northern Alabama after twenty-five years in the Army. Second, she is disturbed that you're the only non-West Point graduate in the command structure and even more disturbed that you started your career as an enlisted person and went to Officers Candidate School. Third, she finds it strange that you're the only senior officer in the division who doesn't drink alcohol or have a social life. You only drink soft drinks at military functions and never bring a date to social functions. Your primary hobby seems to be solo backpacking trips in the wilderness. For some reason, she thinks that failure to drink or to connect with a significant other is a deficiency in your ability to command. Fourth, you don't seem to give a damn about the whole DEI thing. You've been adamant about doing your reviews and promotions strictly on merit, regardless of what that does to your DEI scores. And finally, although she didn't say this, I could see it's a big factor. She hates that the troops serving under you worship the ground you walk on. She knows what they think of her and having them treat you as all but godlike is just flat pissing her off."

I had to give that some thought. General Diversity (for that was now what I was going to call her mentally, if not aloud) knew enough about me to know that I did not share many of her values. My primary, indeed, virtually my only, function as a battalion commander was to ensure that my battalion was the best trained, best equipped and best led unit it could be. I had prided myself on accomplishing more in terms of peacekeeping in our sector of Iraq on our last deployment than any of the predecessor units in that sector. And I'd done it with only a handful of casualties. Surely that had to count for something.

"Permission to speak candidly, sir," I asked.

"Certainly, Billy. You've earned the right to be completely candid with me. And let's cut this "sir" crap out. Just like when we're having dinner with Alyssa (the colonel's wife), I'm Bob and you're Billy."

"You know my background." And indeed, he did. I'd been raised by my grandparents, Pawpaw and Meemaw, after my parents' car had been totaled by a runaway logging truck, killing both of them, when I was two. Pawpaw had been a WWII vet. He'd dropped out of high school at 16, forged his parents' signatures on his enlistment paperwork, and joined the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor. During the next four years he'd seen action in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, southern France, and Germany. His best friend, a high school history teacher in civilian life, had been killed in action along the Siegfried Line. His unit had liberated one of the concentration camps. Although he never wanted to talk about the war, he had shared two things with me. The first was that he'd promised his friend that he'd keep on learning, and he had. Pawpaw was an avid reader of history, biography, and other educational non-fiction, a trait he'd passed on to me. And the second was that no one who had not seen a concentration camp at the time of it's liberation could truly understand the horrors he and his fellow soldiers had discovered.

Meemaw had been a high school classmate. She and Pawpaw had been dating when he quit school. Before leaving for basic training, he'd proposed to her. She'd promised to wait for him. She had. They'd been married within days after he returned from active service, bought the farm I was raised on, and, to my knowledge, never left Alabama again except to see me graduate from basic training and from OCS.

My mother had been a 30-year-old single woman, a spinster by the standards of her place and time, when she met my father at work. Mother had been a secretary at the local Tennessee Valley Authority office since graduating from high school. By the time she met my father, she'd become the de facto office manager, a position that the TVA would not give her officially because she lacked a college degree (and probably because she was a woman). My father had been transferred there as the new office manager when the former manager retired. He and my mother had immediately bumped heads, repeatedly. After she proved right a couple of times, he began to see the virtue of listening to her. Conversations at work had led to invitations to dinner, to more dates and finally to a proposal. They'd been married three years when I was born and had died shortly after their fifth anniversary. If my father had any living relatives at the time of his death, he'd never mentioned them. Nor had he left any record. If my mother knew of them, that knowledge died with her. In any event, no one ever came looking for my father and my parents' deaths left me in the care of my maternal grandparents.

My grandparents had lived in Franklin County, Alabama. It was thinly populated, rural, and still overwhelmingly agricultural. There was very little population movement into the county and most, if not all, of the residents spoke with a distinct southern accent as I was growing up. Because my grandparents were hard-shell Baptists, I'd been raised without alcohol, a television or seeing a movie. In fact, the first moving picture I ever saw was a film in health class in tenth grade. I'd learned to speak the way my neighbors did and had never lost the accent. Nor had I tried. I'd found it distinctive enough to be recognized instantly in combat situations, a plus, rather than a minus.

I'd enlisted in the Army as soon as I graduated high school, getting Meemaw and Pawpaw to sign off even though I was a few weeks shy of my 18^th birthday. College was not something I could afford without the assistance of the GI Bill. I fully expected to serve my initial enlistment, leave the service, and go to college. Pawpaw's reading habits had accelerated college attendance for me in an odd way. At my first duty assignment, I'd ended up driving for the battalion commander, a job usually given to a specialist. I'd been reporting into battalion headquarters for assignment when I was dragooned by the battalion command sergeant major after the specialist who normally drove broke a leg. Because of my farm background, I could drive almost any piece of equipment. The meeting that the battalion commander was attending broke up earlier than expected and he'd found me deeply engrossed in Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror." A history major himself, he'd quizzed me on the book the entire drive back to his office. He'd then requested that I continue to drive him, monitoring my reading and continuing to discuss what I was learning. I'd been driving for him about six months when the battalion CSM called me into his office, handed me a package of papers and told me to complete them and return them to him. It was an application to the local college using the degree completion program sponsored by the Army. The colonel and the CSM had arranged my schedule so I could attend classes and even held me over six months after my scheduled transfer date so I could complete my degree. Once that was in hand, they'd handed me the application packet for Officer Candidate School and stood over me until I'd completed it. With their strong recommendations, I was accepted and commissioned a second lieutenant upon completing the OCS program. Years later, on one of my stateside tours, I'd gotten an MBA from the local university. It had taught me a great deal about budgeting and managing projects, which I'd applied to my commands and staff positions.

General Diversity was right about my being a teetotaler. I'd not developed the taste for alcohol as a young man and continued to avoid it as I'd grown older. That part of my hard-shell Baptist raising had stuck with me.

As for celibacy, although not even Bob knew it, I was far from celibate, but I was extremely discreet. Meemaw and Pawpaw had failed in that regard. My dates tended to be with locals whom I met through the outdoors clubs I joined. There were any number of young and not so young single women who were enamored of the outdoors and delighted to have a fit male companion with similar interests, even if his accent could be cut with a meat cleaver. Most of them leaned very liberal, which was not a good mix with an infantry unit's officer corps, although it did seem to reduce any reluctance to engage in robust sexual congress. So I'd kept the two portions of my life separate. Few of my backpacking trips had been solo, Bob's and the general's understandings to the contrary notwithstanding.

Bob also didn't know that I'd been engaged once and married once. The engagement had been to another 2LT shortly after I was commissioned. Named Cassia Van Buren, she'd come from an old Dutch Hudson River family. Her ancestors had arrived in the new world in the early 17^th century and had prospered. I'm not sure what attracted her to me, but we'd met at a staff meeting, adjourned to the officer's club and then to her BOQ room. Within weeks we were living together. I'd proposed and she'd accepted prior to my meeting her family. When she took me home to the family mansion, it became clear to us that her mother and father strongly disapproved of Cassia's choice of a mate. A southern redneck with an accent so thick it made Brooklynese look like standard middle Atlantic-speak was not going to be an asset in Cassia's social or political life, at least as her parents perceived it. The pressure eventually got to be more than Cassia could handle and she'd finally returned my ring and left the Army as soon as her initial obligation had expired.

My marriage had been most unusual. I'd met Miriam on my first tour in Iraq. She was from an Iraqi Christian tribe, the daughter of a tribal leader. Miriam was British educated and spoke English with a decidedly upper crust British accent. My Alabama drawl had sent her into peals of laughter the first time she'd been confronted with it. She joked that she needed my first sergeant to translate the Alabaman into English so she could translate it into Iraqi Arabic. We'd connected and I'd courted her carefully and with her parents' full consent. I think they saw me as their entire family's ticket to America if things in Iraq went awry. We'd married six months into my tour in traditional Iraqi style, and she'd gotten pregnant almost immediately. We were overjoyed. She'd been attending a special holy day service at her family's church when two Shia suicide bombers detonated their explosive vests in the crowd. Miriam, her parents, and her two older brothers had died in the blast, along with most of the clergy at the service. Her younger brother and sister had survived. I'd been unable to get them to the U.S. but arranged for the two children to be educated in England with the help of a counterpart in the British occupational force whose father was an earl. I'd paid for their education in public schools, and both had gotten their degrees from Oxford, settling in the UK. We were still in regular contact.

As for the DEI issue, I was clearly a dinosaur, politically incorrect to the nth degree. My evaluations of my people were purely merit based. I'd given sterling evaluations to men and women, black, brown, and white, straight and gay. But I'd also been ruthless about weeding out underperformers. And I'd committed a major faux pas, I learned, when I'd turned down General Diversity's candidate to be my battalion XO because she was an AG officer with no combat experience. I'd installed an Hispanic male infantry captain as my acting XO instead until a permanent replacement with the skills and experience to take over the battalion should something happen to me could be located. Plus, I'd postponed DEI training repeatedly to get the battalion's equipment ready for its next deployment and get my people trained in the field.

So, I was clearly screwed. My career had reached the end of its lifespan.

"So Bob," I said. "What do you want me to do?"

"You'll have time in grade to retire as an LTC and twenty-five years in when your tour as battalion commander ends. I'll get the general to agree to give you the endorsement to your last officer's evaluation report you deserve and the Legion of Merit you earned if you'll put your papers in and retire after your change of command. I'll make sure the corps commander is on board before I approach her. He was very impressed with what your unit accomplished in its last tour in Iraq, but he's looking for a fourth star and won't be willing to overrule General Diversity and create a storm. Does that sound fair?"

"Well, not really, but it's the best deal I'm going to get. I know that even if I appealed her endorsement and won, I'd miss the next 0-6 promotion board and if that happens, I won't be able to retire as a full colonel anyway. I'll live with it." And so I did.

My unit gave me one of the great retirement parties in post history. Virtually every officer and most of the senior enlisted in the division attended. The corps commander put in a visit, as did his XO. Wisely, General Diversity responded that she was unable to attend. After twenty-five years in the infantry, I was LTC William T. McKenna, U.S. Army, Retired.

CHAPTER ONE

I began retirement by loading my backpacking gear, a few personal items from my career and the clothes I wanted to use in my truck. The furniture and other household goods from my apartment went to Goodwill. What they wouldn't take went to a local homeless shelter. What they wouldn't take went into a dumpster. I spent the next five months travelling around the U.S., backpacking along trails I'd always wanted to walk but hadn't had the time or the opportunity to explore. I spent time on the Pacific Crest Trail, hiked in the Superstition Mountains, hit numerous trails in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and then headed east.

I had planned to hike the last 300 miles of the Appalachian Trail, including the 100-mile wilderness portion. I'd heard through the Army grapevine that Cassia was now divorced from the husband her parents had picked for her and was now a mover and shaker behind the scenes in New York political circles. Before heading to New England to pick up the AT, I looked her up.

Cassia and I spent a wild three days, scarcely leaving her bedroom except to eat occasionally. For a couple of 40-somethings, we acted like teenagers. It was an incredible sexual experience. Sadly, the sex was all that remained of what we'd had in common. Our paths had diverged so far that there was no bridging the gap. When I kissed her goodbye at the end of our three-day marathon, I knew it was for the last time. She'd held a special place in my heart at one time, but she was a fond memory, not my future.

It took me a month to finish the 300 miles of the AT. After completion, I took a bus back to my truck, packed my gear and headed for Meemaw and Pawpaw's farm. They had left it to me when they died and I had rented the farmland to a neighbor, Ben Fellowes, on the condition that he watch over and maintain the farmhouse and barn. I'd agreed that any money he spent on that maintenance could be deducted from the rent and he'd been faithful about maintenance and documenting the expenditures.

I had tried to get back to the farm for special holidays whenever I was in the states and upon change of station leaves. Each visit revealed grandparents a little less robust and, toward the end, failing mentally as well. At the last couple of visits, there had been a girl spending time with Meemaw. Meemaw told me she was caring for her on occasion and that She was Ben Fellowes' daughter. The girl had been no more than twelve the last time I'd encountered her on a visit home. Since I spent most of my time working the farm with Pawpaw when I was home, I had little interaction with the girl. I did notice she seemed to pay more attention to me than I would have expected, but thought it was only because I was something of a novelty in the day-to-day of life in Franklin County.

Meemaw and Pawpaw died of the flu only a few days apart while I was in Afghanistan, and it had taken me a week to get home for their funerals. I'd stood at the front of the church, their only living relative, accepting the offers of condolence from the mourners. There'd been one mourner, a girl of about 15, who'd been almost inconsolable. She'd wept bitterly, hugging me so fiercely I could hardly breathe and soaking my shirt with her tears. I'd not recognized her as the girl Meemaw had cared for nor as one of Ben's children until Ben had come up and pried her arms loose from me so he could lead her away. She had not been allowed to come to the luncheon after the services.

After the interment, I'd asked Meemaw and Pawpaw's pastor why the girl was so upset. He'd explained. The story was typical Meemaw, caring for someone who needed help. Sarah (for that was her name) had lost her mother at age five. Distraught, she'd run away through the fields behind her house and those of Pawpaw until reaching my grandparents' farmhouse. Meemaw had taken her in, calming and consoling her, before returning her to her father. That had been the beginning of a ten-year relationship in which Meemaw became mother/grandmother to Sarah. When Ben remarried a few years after his first wife's death, Sarah and her stepmother had quarreled incessantly. Meemaw had allowed Sarah to spend enormous amounts of time with her, doing the things that a mother might otherwise do. As Meemaw had begun to fail, Sarah had stepped in to help clean and cook, caring for Meemaw and Pawpaw as if she were theirs. For Sarah, losing Meemaw had been like losing a mother for a second time. I now understood the reaction I'd seen at the funeral.