Wrath of Grapes is a collection of short stories about my time in the U.S. Air Force.
I have put in my time in Uncle Sam’s Military. So have a lot of other fellows. I was pretty lucky, I reckon. I enlisted in peacetime and was out before Vietnam got going. When I had a about a year left in my four-year hitch, the Berlin Wall was built. We thought for a while that the Wall may start a ruckus, but that didn’t pan out. As I said, I was pretty lucky.
The Wrath of Grapes
& Other Stories
by H.D. Ingles
To this day, I believe that enlisting at the age of nineteen was one of the smartest things that I ever did in my life. Now, don’t get me wrong. I never was a really good soldier and I could have never made it a career, but those four years were good for me. I learned how to be a man. I also learned the basics of the career which I only recently retired from. Oh, yes. One more thing. While I was in the Air Force, I did manage to have a little fun, too.
True Stories
These short stories were written individually during the last decade of the Twentieth Century. This book merely brings the stories together under one cover, along with any editing which was required.
The few little stories that I have put together in this book are true. All of this stuff really did happen just about the way I told it. I will have to admit, though, that some of the conversations may make me look just a bit smarter than I really am. Of course, if you think about it, you’re pretty darned smart when you’re about twenty or so. Don’t you remember? Anyway, except for some amount of exaggeration as to my brilliance, the stories are true.
Language
In the stories, I made it a point to not use extremely foul language. In most of the conversations in the stories, the language is much “cleaner” than as it really happened. So, if you’ve been in the Service, feel free to translate the “damns” and “hells” to what you probably really would have said. It’s not that I’m a prude. It’s just the fact that the omission of really foul language flat-out didn’t hurt anything. And, to be honest about it, tap dancing around the foul language sometimes made situations a bit funnier.
One last thing. Some of the stuff that I’m telling you here makes me look like a pretty stupid, devil-may-care jerk. I reckon that, at times, I was. But just remember that you are reading only a few pages of incidents covering a span of four years. I did my job while I was in the Air Force. I believe that I did it pretty well. I am still proud of the fact that I spent four years in the service of my country. (That may sound corny, but it’s true.) The point is, though, if you can’t be stupid a few times when you’re single and twenty (or so), when can you be stupid?
One more last thing. In these stories, I used my middle name. Don’t ask why. It’s a long story.
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