Sentimental Journey Read Online Free PDF

battlefield in the trenches of Belgium and France during World War I, the ones who’d worn gas masks that made them look like bottle-eyed elephants as they dodged mortar shells and faced the snarling teeth of German machine guns firing thirty rounds per minute. Those were the men who had learned initiative and leadership the hard way.
    But not Langdon. He was a rule man. A by-the-book officer. He had used the rule book to earn his way to a colonel’s silver eagle, and by God, he was going to run his little piece of the Army by that same book, whether it made sense or not.
    J.R. believed that Langdon was one of those officers who could easily send the men under his command to their deaths while following his damned book. He had all the flexibility of a cement block, a cunning ability to lay claim to the successes of those he commanded— which accounted for his rank—and a need for supreme power that made him all too dangerous. He was a man who talked the game of fighting, but hadn’t done much of it.
    Langdon had made it clear early on that he did not like J.R. After being reassigned last spring from Special Services, J.R. had driven into camp and reported to the colonel. Langdon had thumbed through J.R.’s impressive file, then tossed it on his desk and said, “I don’t like your reputation, Captain. Or your tactics. While you are serving under me, you will play by the rules. You will follow instructions to the letter. You will do exactly as I tell you. Is that understood?”
    J.R. had understood; his success was a threat to Langdon.
    General Marshall had thought he’d been giving J.R. a break when he came back from his assignment in Poland . The general had stationed him to a base close to home. J.R. had grown up in Newport , where his family owned an English Tudor mansion on Ocean Drive — one of those ostentatiously gilded fifty-room summer “cottages” with a dozen chimneys on the roof and a thousand rhododendron bushes in the garden. He’d spent his idyllic youth sailing in the Sound or walking on narrow white beaches, where more starfish washed ashore than pebbles. During summers home from West Point, he’d played baseball with his buddies at Cardines Field, drunk cold beer and eaten fried oysters in pubs with names like the Tides In and Blue Moon Saloon, places where you could sit on a red leather barstool and look down on Sayer’s Wharf and the old New York Yacht Club, and whenever a door opened you breathed in a little bit of the Atlantic.
    Colonel Langdon had all but eaten J.R. alive for the first few months he was stationed here. He’d learned to make the best of it till he could draw a new assignment. Until then, he was just a typical victim of Army-issue SNAFU.
    The screen on the front door rattled closed behind him. Here, inside camp headquarters, the rooms were small and hot. Whirring slowly overhead was a ceiling fan, and in a distant office a phone rang as loudly as an old tin alarm clock. A battle line of gray metal filing cabinets stood along the wall.
    Another of the colonel’s aides, a second lieu, with a broken stub of yellow pencil stuck behind one big ear, was sitting at a desk hunched over an old Royal typewriter, pounding away on the keys as if he were Count Basie.
    The kid finally looked up, then bolted to attention. “Captain Cassidy, sir.”
    J.R. returned the salute. “At ease.”
    The kid turned and looked nervously at the colonel’s door.
    J.R. hitched his hip on the cluttered corner of the desk, finished off his last olive, and set his empty highball glass on a stack of mustard yellow supply forms. He chewed on the toothpick for a moment, then slid it to the corner of his mouth. “From your look, Lieutenant, I’d say that the colonel’s his usual pleasant self.”
    “Worse,” the kid mumbled on a half groan. “He said to send you right in, sir. On—”
    “I know . . . I know . . . ” J.R. held up his hand. “On the double.” He stood and strolled toward the