The Feathery Read Free Page A

a blank spot between several instruments on the fire-wall in front of him, and smiled.
     
    As the Cobra lifted off, there was transmitted banter with his fire control operator in the seat in front, about the mission and course to the target area. They flew low and fast over the desert for thirty minutes until the reported insurgent strong-hold was reached. They sighted their target. It consisted of two wood frame buildings. As Zachary started his pass to launch rockets at the buildings, all hell broke loose from both sides, front and rear. The helicopter started taking multiple hits from heavy caliber machine guns on the ground.
     
    "It’s a trap!" Zachary yelled, trying to bank the Cobra in a climbing, tight turn away from the ground-fire, but on that heading ran smack into two Stinger missiles shoulder launched by a pair of Iraqi bad guys. What happened next took place in fifteen seconds. The Cobra chopper started flying erratically because several hits severed a rotor blade and pierced some hydraulic control lines. Zachary tried, with the little control left, to make a hard-landing. But the Cobra was too low and moving too fast. The chopper hit the desert floor with a metal crunching impact followed by a ball of flame.
     
    First to reach the burning helicopter was a thirteen-year-old Iraqi boy. The wreckage was still burning fiercely when he got there. He picked up a singed snapshot from the sand and studied it for a moment. It was a picture of a kid swinging a strange object. The boy shrugged his shoulders, tossed the photo away and sat down on the sand to wait for the wreckage to cool so he could search it for a much better prize.
     
     
     
    SAN DIEGO
     
     
    T he rituals of the wake and funeral took on an unreal form for the late Captain Zachary Beckman’s thirteen-year-old son, Scott. The funeral parlor lighting came mostly from four large candles above the closed casket. Burning wax combined with the floral offerings to fill the viewing room with a sickening sweet smell. Relatives, friends and a detail of marines glided slowly passed the casket. Scott and his mother greeted each and listened to their whispers of the proper funeral words. No tears came from Scott Beckman because his sorrow was frozen stoically in place.
     
    Deep anger stayed with Scott at the graveside on a hill, under cloudy skies. Standing near a solitary palm tree, he watched his father’s casket being slowly lowered into a dark rectangular hole. After the burial words from a rabbi, a marine officer in dress uniform handed Scott’s mother a neatly folded American flag. As she took the flag in both hands, a group of Cobra helicopters flew below the clouds and low over the cemetery.
     
    A marine standing beside Scott bent down to explain a one-chopper gap in the formation. "That’s a missing-man formation to honor your dad."
     
    After weeks of holding back, tears started to escape…then Scott’s anger exploded in a sobbing reply: "Lot of fucking good that does…he’s dead."
     
    He ran through the crowd around the graveside, shoving aside those mourners in his path, then lunged down a hillside, dodging gravestones on the way until he reached a line of parked cars along the roadside. He found his mother’s Porsche and hit it with his fist. A bugler played taps, and that mournful sound was repeated by another horn in the distance. Shortly after the last note was played, Scott clenched his fist to punch the hood of the Porsche once again, but his mother came silently up behind and grabbed his arm with one hand and slapped his face with her black leather-gloved other one.
     
    "You’ve embarrassed me in front of my friends and associates!" Diane Beckman screamed into Scott’s tear-streamed face.
     
     
    It was a Saturday thirteen months after the funeral. Scott was with his best friend, Matt Kemp, who’d lost his father in Iraq when a roadside bomb had detonated under his Humvee. They were hanging out at a strip mall making plans to