LITMIR.BIZ

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on the Internet that you shouldn’t eat mice because you could get some disease,” Pete said.

      “I wouldn’t eat mice because I’m a vegetarian,” Keishon stated with a shudder.

      Pete grinned. “You’d eat ’em if you were hungry enough.”

      Infuriated by his attitude, Keishon yelled, “Would not!”

      “Would so!” Pete shouted right back.

      “Williams and Greene, cease and desist!” Joe barked.

      The two kids looked at him in astonishment before Keishon loftily informed him, “It’s not nice to call someone by their last name.”

      It wasn’t nice for them to argue when his head felt like it was going to detonate. But then the world wasn’t a nice place. The sooner they knew that the better.

      How was he going to manage cooped up in this tin can of a van with five kids for hours?

      He just had to stop thinking of them as kids and instead treat them as recruits. Really short recruits. Maybe that would help his stress level.

      He’d dealt with raw recruits before.

      “Isn’t this van equipped with a video player?” Pete asked.

      “She won’t let us watch The Matrix,” Gem quietly complained.

      “I’ve already seen it ten times,” Pete bragged.

      “Then you don’t need to see it again,” Prudence said. “Instead I want you to notice how the trees change as we head away from the coast and head for the mountains.”

      “That was some big bad kind of tree on the base,” Sinatra noted.

      “It’s 350 years old,” Pete said.

      “That was just an estimate,” Rosa reminded them.

      “Now she’ll probably tell us how many inches the tree grows every year,” Pete said in exasperation. “She’s the class math whiz.”

      “So why were you all chosen for this mission?” Joe had almost slipped up and called them kids. Mistake. Short recruits. Really short recruits, that’s what they were.

      Not that the image was helping as much as it should.

      “We are the five finalists in our class Knowledge Fair. Our projects were chosen by Principal Vann as the best,” Sinatra proudly stated. “We had to come up with a hypothesis and then try and prove it was true. Mine was that the Internet improves kids’ grades if they use it for researching science homework projects.”

      “My hypothesis is that a vegetarian diet is healthier than a nonvegetarian one,” Keishon said.

      “Mine was that the hole in the ozone layer is changing the climate,” Pete said. “Gem’s was about the life cycle of a frog and Rosa’s was about using rings in a tree to figure its age.”

      “Do you do have to do a hypothesis to be in the Marines?” Rosa asked him. “Do you have to prove that something is true?”

      Did he have something to prove? Constantly. Corps values—honor, courage, commitment—were the life-blood of a Marine. From the second a recruit stepped off the bus at Marine Corp Recruit Depot the Marine Corps created a change of mind, body and spirit meant to last a lifetime. They were constantly taking on challenges that proved a recruit was worthy of being called a United States Marine.

      Did he have something to prove? You bet. Was he still worthy? Joe didn’t know…and that was one of the many things eating away at him.

      “In the Marines, do you have tests like we have in school?” Rosa continued.

      Focus on the facts and figures, he ordered himself. “Boot camp has five graduation requirements—rifle qualification, swim qualification, a physical fitness test, battalion-commander’s inspection and scoring eighty percent on academic tests.”

      “Eighty percent isn’t that good,” Keishon pointed out. “That would only be a B in our class.”

      “Depending on the scores of the rest of the class,” Rosa said. “Girls can be Marines, right?”

      “Affirmative,” Joe replied. “I pointed out their training area and barracks area during the base tour.”

      “Girls can be whatever they want to be,” Prudence added.

      “Were you ever a Marine?” Rosa asked her.

      “No,” Prudence replied. “I always wanted to be a teacher.”

      “There aren’t any teachers in the Marines?” Rosa said.

      Prudence shook her head. “Only drill instructors, and they aren’t the same thing.”

      “I don’t know,” Joe drawled, giving her a wry look. “I can easily imagine you barking out orders in BWT, ma’am.”

      “What’s BWT?” Pete asked, always eager to learn something new.

      “Basic Warrior Training,” Joe replied.

      “You think Ms. Martin is a warrior?” Pete said.

      Joe nodded. “She was raised by a warrior.”

      “That would be my mom,” Prudence told her students. “Not that my dad is any slouch, either,” she noted with a grin. “After all, he is a Marine.”

      “I was referring to your father,” Joe said.

      She gave him a mocking look. “No kidding.”

      “Is kidding allowed in the Marines?” Pete asked.

      Joe thought back to the numerous practical jokes he’d played on his brothers or his buddies over the years. “In very special circumstances and under certain conditions, then the answer is that sometimes kidding is allowed, yes.”

      Pete frowned. “I didn’t think warriors were supposed to be kidding around.”

      “Sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you going when it seems impossible to continue,” Joe quietly said, his smile disappearing. And sometimes even that didn’t work.

      The Fates had to be laughing their heads off at him, crammed in a tin can van with five kids and his C.O.’s daughter. Yeah, someone up there was no doubt having hysterics right about now.

      Too bad Joe wasn’t laughing with them. A year ago, none of this would have bothered him. But then Joe was a very different Marine than he’d been a year ago.

      So far he seemed to be the only one aware of it. But that awareness was slowly eating away at him, along with the guilt and the secret shame that he was no longer good enough, strong enough, courageous enough to be called a United States Marine.

      He bolted down those dark emotions and focused his attention on the passing scenery. They’d left the coastal plain and the short palmetto palms behind. They’d also passed the urban areas of Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem, traveling clear across the state until they were now surrounded by pine forests. The green foothills had given way to bigger mountains, their rounded curves flowing from one ridge to the next in layers of smoky-blue.

      The kids…er…the very short recruits continued peppering him with questions for the remainder of the drive. Every so often, Joe would turn to look at Prudence to see if he could read her thoughts. She didn’t talk much, letting him do the bulk of the work in responding to the questions being tossed his way by her ubercurious students. The small smile on her lips made him think that she was enjoying putting him in the hot seat.

      Looking at her mouth made him hot, hot in a different way. Hot to kiss her, hot to taste her mouth, part her lips with his tongue and…

      Joe blinked. What was he doing? He had no business fantasizing about his commanding officer’s daughter. No business at all.

      Ordering his gaze away from her, he reminded

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