Read My Men are My Heroes for Free Online Page B

driving on backroads so the gravel wouldn’t nick the paint.”
    Tucker and Cornelison razzed their buddy mercilessly about his cautious driving. “I could get out and run faster than he was driving,” Tucker says with a laugh. “I did it one time, and he drove off and left me!”
    Cornelison also gets a chuckle out of Essy’s characterization of Brad’s innocence. In Cornelison’s memory Kasal was a bit of a rake in Creston. He speculates that at least some of the trouble Kasal found himself in while cruising the Creston loop came from his propensity for seducing local girls.
    â€œWhen it came to women Kasal was something else,” Cornelison says. “He knew how to turn on the charm for the Creston girls. We liked to watch him work. He wouldn’t try anything with the girls from Afton because we were all too tight. We were very close friends, and everybody would have known what was going on. So we never really knew what he was up to, but we were like everybody else. We talked about cars, girls, and jobs, but mostly girls—except for Brad. Even then he was a gentleman. Brad wouldn’t ever say anything. He would just smile.”
KASAL AT SCHOOL
    Male or female, Kasal’s friends remember him as a natural leader at school. He never bullied anyone and he always watched out for his friends and classmates. Even though he could hang out with a rowdy crowd, he generally had a settling influence on the other students without being menacing.
    Kasal wasn’t particularly interested in high school except for sports and reading. He was a good wrestler and played varsity football, but he liked challenging himself better. “It takes more self-discipline to do hard things when nobody is making you,” he explains.
    Most of the subjects he studied in high school bored him almost to distraction, but he was very interested in history. He liked to read about military operations and wondered what it would be like to fight in battle. He discovered his heroes in the books he read about war and combat, particularly stories about Marines.
    When his thoughts began to mature, he shared them with his friends. They say that by the time they were in high school they already knew he was going to be a warrior or a cop or something like that. They saw a sense of adventure already evident in their friend long before he knew it for sure; they just didn’t know how to define it. Then he told them.
    â€œBrad knew what he wanted and where he wanted to go,” says Essy, “and he wanted to go in the Marines. He told me when we were maybe sophomores or juniors in high school, but he had mentioned that kind of stuff before then. I didn’t understand it, but I could respect it. Most of us did. Brad was always a leader in school, and the Marines didn’t seem too far-fetched for him.”
    There was one problem though, and Kasal finally got up the courage to admit it to Essy. He didn’t know how to swim. In fact he was terrified of the water.
    His other friends learned of his problem after his local recruiter informed Kasal that one of the tasks he absolutely had to complete in boot camp was to jump into a pool from the high dive while fully clothed. Worse, he had to then sink underwater, swim to the surface, and make his way to a ladder to simulate abandoning ship. There was no way around it. To graduate from boot camp, everyone had to pass the swim test—a time-honored tradition that has washed out more than one aspiring Marine.
    â€œHe came back from the recruiter and told us he had to swim, but he was afraid of the water,” Essy says. “He had a hard time telling us because Brad wasn’t the kind of guy who ever admitted being afraid of anything. So we decided we would teach him how to swim before he left. We told him we would take himto Shelley’s—she was a girl we knew who had a pond on her property outside of town—and teach him how to swim,