ess obvious, one. "Oh, I was in that Operation Armada at
Golden Gate. Had to be patched up."

He must have figured, Ferd had been a kid then, and I hadn't been too
old. Odds were, we'd recall the episode, and no more. Unfortunately, I'd
been a ham operator and I'd been in the corps that beamed those
fireships onto the Invader supply fleet in the dense fog. The whole
episode was burned into my brain. It had been kamikaze stuff, though
there'd been a theoretical chance of the thirty men escaping, to justify
sending them out. Actually, one escape boat did get back with three men.

I'd learned about those men, out of morbid, conscience-scalded
curiosity. Their leader was Edwin Scott, a medical student. At the very
start he'd been shot through the lower spine. So, his companions put him
in the escape boat while they clinched their prey. But as the escape
boat sheered off, the blast of enemy fire killed three and disabled two.

Scott must have been some boy. He'd already doctored himself with
hemostatics and local anaesthetics but, from the hips down, he was dead
as salt pork, and his visceral reflexes must have been reacting like a
worm cut with a hoe. Yet somehow, he doctored the two others and got
that boat home.

The other two had died, but Scott lived as sole survivor of Operation
Armada. And he hadn't been a big, bronze, Latin-Indian with incongruous
hazel eyes, but a snub-nosed redhead. And he'd been wheel-chaired for
life. They'd patched him up, decorated him, sent him to a base hospital
in Wisconsin where he could live in whatever comfort was available. So,
he dropped out of sight. And now, this!

Clyde was lying, of course. He'd picked the episode at random. Except
that so much else about him didn't square. Including his name compared
to his physique, now I thought about it.

* * * * *

I tabled it during our odyssey home. But during post-mission leave, it
kept bothering me. I checked, and came up with what I'd already known:
Scott _had_ been sole survivor, and the others were certified dead. But
about Scott, I got a runaround. He'd apparently vanished. Oh, they'd
check for me, but that could take years. Which didn't lull my curiosity
any. Into Clyde's past I was sworn not to pry.

We were training for our next assignment, when word came through of the
surrender at Kelowna. It was a flare of sunlight through a black sky.
The end was suddenly close.

Clyde and I were in Victor