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Being out in the middle of nowhere, exchanging gunfire with some real bad men, giving better than he'd gotten, but almost dying--those kinds of memories didn't go away in a few months. Every firefight--and he hadn't had that many--was as clear in his mind as the day or night it had happened. The thought that he might have bled to death in the woods and been eaten by scavengers wasn't so horrifying in itself. Hell, he was a professional soldier, getting killed went with the territory. But dying and leaving his son, just hitting his teens on his way to manhood, that bothered Howard more than it ever had. All it took was a real possibility he might actually buy the farm. Before, he'd been lucky. Never made it to a real war, and when he finally started seeing some action in Net Force, the bullets had zipped here and there, missing him. Julio had taken a round in the leg during the recovery of the stolen plutonium from the sons-of-whoever. Some of his troops had eaten frags from a mine or bullets from the mad Russian's hit man, Ruzhyo, the former Spetsnaz killer. Intellectually, he knew it was just chance and maybe a little skill that he'd never gotten hit; emotionally, he'd felt invulnerable, at least to a degree. Like God was watching over him because he was worthy. Yeah. Until that long shot in the darkness had plowed into him. A round from a handgun at rifle distance had killed that feeling of being bulletproof, oh, yes, indeed, it had.
    Even Achilles had his heel, and waking up in a hospital full of tubes did make a guy stop and consider the idea he wasn't gonna live forever.
    And while he wasn't afraid to go into battle--at least he didn't think so--he didn't want to die and leave his wife and son. They had become more precious to him when he'd realized he might lose them. He believed in the Kingdom of Heaven, and he tried to live his life in a moral and upright manner, but going there wasn't at the top of his to-do list for this year.
    He opened up a little more on the run, starting to breathe through his mouth more heavily now, as he looped into the next street over from his and headed for the circle at the end.
    He remembered another joke his father had told him:
    "So the preacher stands up in front of the congregation and says, 'How many of you want to go to Heaven?'
    "And all the hands in the church except Brother Brown's go up.
    "And the preacher looks at Brother Brown, who was known to drink a little even of a Sunday morning, and he says, 'Brother Brown! Don't you want to go to Heaven when you die?'
    "And Brother Brown says, 'When I die? Well, sure, Reverend.'
    "And the preacher says, 'Then, how come you didn't raise your hand?'
    "And Brother Brown says, 'Well, I thought you was gettin' up a busload to go now.' "
    He looped around the circle and headed back up toward the main street. A toy poodle in a fenced yard raced back and forth inside, barking wildly at him. Fish bait, his Daddy would call it. A waste of dog space.
    He could, Howard knew, become an armchair general, an REMF who directed operations at a distance. Net Force would prefer it that way, and probably nobody would think less of him for it, not those who had been on ops with him before, anyway. But sending a man somewhere he wasn't willing to go himself didn't seem right, never had.
    That left the other option, which was to retire. He could muster out with his current rank of general, draw a fair retirement, and get a job consulting somewhere, teaching, whatever. Probably do better moneywise than he was doing now. And be a lot more certain of being around when his son graduated from high school, from college, got married, and brought home grandchildren. Sure that was ten, fifteen years away, maybe, but he didn't want to miss it. And he didn't want to leave Nadine. If something happened to him, he'd always told her to remarry, find a good man, because she was too precious to waste away alone. And he meant it, too, but on a real, deep level, he had to admit