A number of people have asked me whether I’ve lost my feel for the Hammer series in the eight or nine years since I most recently wrote a story in it. Judge for yourselves, of course, but I personally think it’s obvious that the damage is still there. The ordinary civilian I was in 1968 was ground to pebbles. In the past 40 years I’ve glued enough of the pebbles together to pass for normal under most circumstances; but trust me, I’ll never be a civilian again, much as I would like to be.
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But that brings me to a final point, something I didn’t realize myself until shortly before I started to write this story. A friend asked me whether I would rather be a Nam vet with my present writing career or a lawyer who hadn’t been drafted.
I started to say that I would much rather not be so screwed up, and that being a writer has never been that big a deal to me. Both those things are true, but I realized that they didn’t completely answer her question.
I know a lot of writers whom I don’t respect. Likewise, I know a lot of lawyers and really a lot of people with Duke diplomas whom I don’t respect. Therefore I don’t see why anybody should respect me because I’m a writer, a lawyer, or a Dukie.
The thing is, I do respect anybody who served with me in the Blackhorse or in a comparable unit, in Nam or elsewhere. They may be drunks or druggies, they may have screwed up their lives beyond belief or redemption, but they once put it on the line in a way that very few people do.
Unless you’ve been a part of an elite combat unit in a war zone, you can’t really understand what it feels like. There’s Us and there’s Them, and “Them” is everybody else: the fat cats and politicians, the actors and sports stars. They all count for less than we do, because we are the Blackhorse.
Purely because of luck—you’ll note that I don’t say “good luck”—I became part of one of those elite combat units. The status comes with a price, which “Save What You Can” makes pretty clear to readers; but I honor the status in others, and I would be unwilling to give it up in myself.
As messed up as I am, I’m proud to be able to say, “I rode with the Blackhorse.”
THE END
Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 31