Gooney Birds
A WWII/Viet Nam Memoir
by Conrad Jestmore
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Conrad Jestmore
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To Dad, for the stories he tells us.
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“You want to play Spit in the Ocean for matchsticks?”
I’m eighteen years old sitting on my little shelf of a seat in the back of a C-130 along with fifteen other college students. We are waiting for take-off from Okinawa where our U.S.O. troupe just played a performance of Once Upon A Mattress and are heading to the Philippines for more of the same to soldiers on R and R from Viet Nam, and this escort officer strapped in next to me asks if I want to play poker. Before I can tell him I’m not interested, he pulls a deck of playing cards out of his shirt pocket, and then it happens. The metal shell of the plane, the harness straps, the tiny cockpit I can peer into, the deck of cards. They snap my mind back to a time when I was ten years old.