A Man Named Dave

clutched the letter. “Why is my life constantly plagued with so much bullshit!” When my own mother tried, for twelve years, to kill me, I never fought back. I never ran away. I had just taken the abuse by adapting every moment of every single day to surviving. And foster care was no breeze, but I made the best of it. As a teenager I’d worked my tail off while normal kids were having the time of their lives. While scores of others waltzed into the recruiter’s office to enlist, it took me forever to join the air force. When my lifelong dream of becoming a fireman was shattered because of some foul-up in the paperwork, I bit my lip and pressed on. And now I couldn’t even help my father because he had no address or no phone number for me to call. I couldn’t even disturb Mother and beg her for information on Father because I have been excommunicated from her precious family – I was not worthy of the privilege of having her unlisted phone number. As I sat and stewed at my latest predicament, I so badly wanted to be anyone other than David James Pelzer. I covered my face with my hands as if to squeeze an answer from my brain.
    The only alternative I could think of was if Father by some chance wrote me again. Maybe then he would scribble his address. Whenever I was faced with overwhelming, impossible odds, I always turned to God. As a child I always felt guilty, begging for His time to help me, but now I pleaded for God to keep my father safe and warm. Mostly I begged for God to somehow ease my father’s pain. “Please,” I whispered, “do what you can to protect my dad. And please, deliver him from all evil. Amen.” After pleading with God I discovered that a film of snow covered my fatigues, the bench I was sitting on, and the entire air base. Even though the tips of my fingers had turned purple and my ear lobes raged with pain, I somehow felt warm inside. As I stood up and walked back toward the barracks, a howling wind blew in my face. I didn’t blink an eye. “It’s up to God,” I said to myself. “Only He can save my father now.”
    Days turned into weeks, which turned into months. As much as I waited, as much as I prayed, I never heard from Father.
    After graduating from specialty training, I was transferred to my permanent base in the Florida panhandle. Just as my counselor in basic training had boasted, I expected to serve in a typical setting while overseeing civilians who ran the kitchen. But it was not meant to be. I was stationed with a combat engineering group, which entailed spending most of my time laboring under the cover of a tent rather than simply monitoring others in an air-conditioned building. I dreaded rolling out of bed in the early morning, before driving over an hour, in the middle of nowhere, to the field site, and work straight through without a break, then finish the day at eight that evening, only to repeat the cycle the next day. I detested the job, and I felt as worthless and degraded as I had when I lived with Mother.
    As always, I swallowed my pride and rose to the challenge. However, as much as I tried, it seemed that I could do nothing right for my two hard-nosed supervisors, who berated me every minute of the day. I refused to cave in. Because I had a hard time getting the field burner units, which cooked the meals, up and running in time, I had to begin my day at three a.m. rather than four-thirty. By the time others showed up to begin their shift, I had almost everything cooked and on the serving line and ready to be dished out. But that was not good enough for the sergeants. When I accomplished that feat, I only found myself being chewed out for something else. Every week, it seemed to me, the harder that I’d focus on my tasks, the more I’d screw up. I seemed to be in the middle of a never ending cycle. It never failed: I always had everything under control, right up until the moment the sergeants peeked in on my progress, only to find me fighting off my latest blunder. A short time later I discovered I was the only cook preparing all the meals, while the sergeants and other airmen seemed content to watch me sweat away.
    Then one afternoon, out of the blue, my supervisor, Technical Sergeant Campbell, a towering black man who always bellowed at me while his gleaming white teeth maintained a vise lock on one of his huge cigars, called me for what I thought was another lecture on my shortcomings. “I tell you, Airman Pelt-der, you a working fool,” he stated with a wide