Excerpts

After breakfast the next morning, I reached into my pack, found Meredith, and settled back to read when the GI in the upper bunk that made the L connecting mine remarked, "So far all you've done this trip is read and stare out the window. What's that you're reading now?" "There's nothing better to do," I told him, showing him the novel. "I'm a poor poker player, and besides I'm too poor to play." He asked with just the slightest sarcasm if I were a "college boy or something." I told him about my year at UT and the semester at A&M and ASTRP. He laughed and said, "I was in the Asstrap too. That's what we called it at Penn State, and I had a semester at Muhlenberg before that." I laughed and asked him why he wasn't reading. We talked about college and agreed we wished we were back and then talked about what we'd do after the army and what we would study. He said he would probably, like his father, go on to law school, and I said I had no idea what I would do, but I doubted that I would continue in premed. "You read so much, maybe you should be an English major," he said. Then he told me how much he liked English when he was in high school. I told him my sister was finishing her BA in English at UT and that she wrote about not wanting to teach, although she had thought about it. If I ever taught, it would have to be in college, I told him. When he asked me why I had changed my mind about going to medical school, I told him I wasn't the one who changed his mind, "They changed it for me. They called my bluff" It was getting easier to admit it every day.