Ender's Game (Ender Wiggins Saga) Read Free Page B

novel that describes that frame of soul and mind that I cherish as much as Ender's Game.   It's called Armour and its author   is John Steakley.   Ender and Felix (the protagonist of Armour) are always close by in my mind.   Sadly, there is no sequel to Armour as there is to Ender's Game.
    We are the bastards of military aviation.   Our helicopters may be the best in the world, but the equipment we wear and the systems in our helicopter, such as the navigation instruments, are at least twenty years behind the Navy and Air Force. I am very happy with the Air Force's ability to bomb with precision,   but if they miss, the bombs still land on the enemy's territory.   If we screw up, the guys we haul to the battle, the "grunts," die.   We don't even have the armour plate for our chests--"chicken plate"--that the helicopter pilots did in Vietnam.   Last year in El Salvador, army aviators flew a couple of civilian VIPs and twenty reporters over guerrilla-controlled territory and there were no flares in their launchers to counteract the heat-seeking missiles we know the rebels had.   One of our pilots and a crew member were killed last year on a training flight because they flew the sling load they were carrying into the ~ at 70 miles an hour.   It could have been prevented if our night vision goggles had a heads-up display like the Air Force has had for forty years.   I'm sure you beard about Colonel Pickett being shot down in a Huey in El Salvador just a few months ago.   That type of aircraft is at least thirty years. old and there are no survivability measures installed.   He was a good man, I knew him.
    The reason I told you about these things is because I wanted to paint a picture for you. I love my job but we aren't like the "zoomies" that everyone makes movies about.   We do our job with less technology, less political support, less recognition, and more risk than the rest, while the threat to us continues to modernize at an
    unbelievable rate.   I'm not asking for sympathy but I was wondering if you and Mr. Steakley could write a novel about helicopters and the men that fly them for the Army twenty years in the future.   There are many of us that read science fiction and after I read Ender's Game and Armour three times each I started letting my comrades read them.   My wife cried when she read Ender's Game.   There is a following here for a book like the one I requested.   We have no speaker for us, the ones that will soon die, or the ones that survive...
     
    As with those gifted young students who read this book as "their" story, this soldier--who, like most but not all of the Army aviators in the Gulf War survived--did not read Ender's Game as a "work of literature." He read it as epic, as a story that helped define his community.   It was not his only epic, of course--Armour, John Steakley's fine novel, was an equal candidate to be part of his self-story.   What matters most, though, was his clear sense that, no matter how much these stories spoke to him, they were still not exactly his community's epic.   He still felt the need for a "speaker for the dead" and for the living.   He still felt a hunger, especially at a time when death might well be near, to have his own story, his friends' stories, told.,
    Why else do we read fiction, anyway?   Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language—or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story.   Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.
    Ender's Game is a story about gifted children. It is also a story about soldiers.   Captain John F. Schmitt, the author