Glory Road Read Free Page B

many people who do not know the odds (poor, but computable) for improving a poker hand in the draw, but are anxious to learn. When we got to Italy I had a beautiful tan and a sizable nest egg.
    Early in the voyage someone went broke and wanted to put a Sweepstakes ticket into the game. After some argument Sweepstakes tickets were made valuta at a discount, $2.00 US per ticket. I finished the trip with fifty-three tickets.
    Hitching a flight from Napoli to Frankfurt took only hours. Then the Fairy Godmother Department handed me back to the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments.
    Before going to Heidelberg I ducked over to Wiesbaden to see my mother, my stepfather and the kids—and found that they had just left for the States, on their way to Elmendorf AFB in Alaska.
    So I went to Heidelberg to be processed, and looked the town over while the red tape unwound.
    Lovely town—handsome castle, good beer, and big girls with rosy cheeks and shapes like Coca-Cola bottles—Yes, this looked like a nice place to get a degree. I started inquiring into rooms and such, and met a young kraut wearing a studenten cap and some face scars as ugly as mine—things were looking up.
    I discussed my plans with the first sergeant of the transient company.
    He shook his head. “Oh, you poor boy!”
    Why? No G.I. benefits for Gordon—I wasn’t a veteran.
    Never mind that scar. Never mind that I had killed more men in combat than you could crowd into a—well, never mind. That thing was not a “war” and Congress had not passed a bill providing educational benefits for us “Military Advisers.”
    I suppose this was my own fault. All my life there had been “G.I. benefits”—why, I had shared a bench in chem lab with a veteran who was going to school on the G.I. Bill.
    This fatherly sergeant said, “Don’t take it hard, son. Go home, get a job, wait a year. They’ll pass it and date it back, almost certainly. You’re young.”
    So here I was on the Riviera, a civilian, enjoying a taste of Europe before using that transportation home. Heidelberg was out of the question. Oh, the pay I hadn’t been able to spend in the jungle, plus accumulated leave, plus my winnings at poker, added up to a sum which would have kept me a year in Heidelberg. But it would never stretch enough for a degree. I had been counting on that mythical “G.I. Bill” for eating money and on my cash as a cushion.
    My (revised) plan was obvious. Grab that trip home before my year was up—grab it before school opened. Use the cash I had to pay board to Aunt and Uncle, work next summer and see what turned up. With the draft no longer hanging over me I could find some way to sweat out that last year even if I couldn’t be “Herr Doktor Gordon.”
    However, school didn’t open until fall and here it was spring. I was damn well going to see a little of Europe before I applied nose to grindstone; another such chance might never come.
    There was another reason for waiting; those Sweepstakes tickets. The drawing for horses was coming up.
    The Irish Sweepstakes starts as a lottery. First they sell enough tickets to paper Grand Central Station. The Irish hospitals get 25 percent and are the only sure winners. Shortly before the race they draw for horses. Let’s say twenty horses are entered. If your ticket fails to draw a horse, its wastepaper. (Oh, there are minor consolation prizes.)
    But if you do draw a horse, you still haven’t won. Some horses won’t start. Of those that do, most of them chase the other horses. However, any ticket that draws any horse at all, even a goat that can barely walk to the paddock, that ticket suddenly acquires a value of thousands of dollars between the drawing and the race. Just how much depends on how good the horse is. But prizes are high and the worst horse in the field has been known to win.
    I had fifty-three tickets. If one of them drew a horse, I could sell that ticket for enough to put me through Heidelberg.
    So I stayed