The Cloud Atlas Read Online Free PDF Page B

rest of him had just been rushed back to the base hospital, though he would die before he arrived. Those of us who remained had been told to fan out over the frag-fragmentation-zone. We were looking for parts of the bomb he'd been working on. I didn't even know what I'd found until I bent down, and even then, it was a moment or two before the recognition took hold and I began to retch.
    I was unprepared, in every respect. We didn't train with live ordnance; but in this case, a truck accident had left a bomb in a precarious spot on base, and Gottschalk, an instructor, saw this as a valuable teaching opportunity. He positioned us someplace nearby but safe, and then went to work. Later, they told us that that was how he had wanted to go, but I didn't believe it. No one wants to go like that, and Gottschalk had told us in the classroom how he had once dreamed of becoming a pilot. When that hadn't worked out, he decided to give bomb disposal a chance.
    My career path was more direct. I'd earned my way into explosives training. In part because I was book-smart and good with diagrams, but more because I scored the absolute lowest-of any recruit, ever, I was told-in marksmanship. As one sergeant put it, me with a gun in my hand was a bomb waiting to go off-so why not volunteer to go to school where I could learn to prevent similar explosions?
    I did learn. Quickly. And I became consumed with strange, twin desires. One, to prove myself so expert that those who once laughed at me would feel ashamed that they ever had. And two, to edge as close to death as I could as often as I could, with the faint, teenaged hope that I might just die-and those who had once laughed at me would feel even worse.
    My drive was mistaken for talent and my recklessness for courage, and the result was that I was promoted rapidly (not such a feat, sadly in bomb disposal, where sudden openings were frequent). I made sergeant in just a matter of months. But by then, my war-with those who had laughed-was over. My zeal went away with Steven Gottschalk's hand, just as surely as if he had reached inside me and pulled it out himself. But it was too late; my course was set. I finished training and received orders for the South Pacific.
    As I was processing through the Fourth Air Force headquarters in San Francisco, however, an officer decided that I should “make the most” of my “layover” by undergoing some additional training across the Golden Gate, where the army had established a network of coastal artillery batteries and a small garrison, Fort Cronkhite.
    Fort Cronkhite was an unusual place. Designed to help repel an invasion, it often looked as though it were being invaded. Soldiers in training regularly stormed the small cove where the fort was located, taking the wide stony beach and then working their way up the ravine behind, picking their way around the fort's tidy collection of red-roofed, white-clapboard buildings. Beyond the buildings, the slope climbed sharply into the Marin Headlands, grassy hills that formed that part of the continent's final defense against the Pacific Ocean. From a distance, it looked as though the Headlands ran parallel to the shoreline in a long, smooth ridge, but up close, what looked like innocent folds in the earth's fabric turned out to be countless ravines, great and small.
    Viewed from the ridgetop gun emplacements, the fort resembled a California-style summer camp-broad, meadowed hillsides gone gold for lack of rain, the ocean beyond making a slow, vain, glittering entrance late each morning as the fog burned off.
    Instead of training, I was given the duty of inspecting the gun batteries' concrete bunkers. They were fitted with clumsy booby traps, designed to explode if the positions were ever overrun. After the first day I'd determined they were more likely to kill our boys-I was surprised, in fact, that they hadn't already. The colonel leading me around was so proud of the setup, however, that I knew I couldn't be