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Scattered Hearts Available at Barnes & Noble for the NOOK Scattered Hearts Available at Sony for the Sony Reader Scattered Hearts goes beyond traditional Valentine's Day tales, offering the reader a collection of stories and poetry, as creative as the thirteen individuals who envisioned them. Read about a boy's surprising choice for birthday party guests. Fly with a Viet Nam pilot whose links to love are baby bottles. Stand alongside a young woman who must face down society and family to be with her soul mate. These are three of the stories and poems that will touch your heart, and perhaps offer a new way of viewing the one day of the year dedicated to honoring love. Love isn't easy, but, the trip is always worth the ride EXCERPT Baby Bottles by Aubry Johnson
Baby bottles are common and familiar to almost everyone. They come in pastel colors, speak of love and caring. Every time I see babies with their bottles, my memory goes back two score years. To a time before everyone walked around with a cell phone in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. A time when my world was unstable and unpredicable. *****
Baby bottles full of ice and dripping with condensation, bulged from my flight suit pockets in a very unmilitary manner. I climbed through 10,000 feet altitude over Da Nang, South Viet Nam. My wingman rode tight and in perfect lock step with my every move. Operation Rolling Thunder was underway. After long and tedious deliberation, the politicians in Washington had decided we would bomb North Viet Nam... again. The targets all picked in Washington, with more consideration given to politics than to any strategy, frequently were worthless and always dangerous. As proof of this the objective of today's mission lay to the area west of Hanoi, which required an approach through the heaviest concentration of missiles and the biggest group of MIG fighters in the north. Do not hit the airfield at Hanoi where all the MIG's are based. Do not fire on anything in the city of Hanoi, where all the missile batteries are located. Let them fire at you, but do not fire back. The 'Rules of Engagement had obviously been promulgated by mad men with the apparent purpose to thin the ranks of Air Force crewmembers. The 'Rules of Engagement' were the orders that permitted fighting a war while remaining socially and politically correct at all times. Correct if you could manage to survive. On this day, we were armed with AIM-9 Sidewinders for short range, and AIM-7 Sparrow missiles with an effective range of twenty miles. We were required to visually identify any target before firing. And since the Sparrow was not an effective weapon close in, this meant we had to fly up, identify the enemy, than back off twenty miles and shoot. The moisture caused by the melting ice in my baby bottle was running down my side, melting away even now, just after takeoff. E-mail a friend about this item. Join the Desert Breeze Publishing EXCLUSIVE BOOK CLUB!
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