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Chapter 1
Doves and dollars
    I never left the state of Kansas until I joined the army. In fact, I’d hardly ever left our farm.
    â€˜That Great War is nothing to do with us,’ Ma used to say. ‘You stay out of it, Joe.’
    Our farm was a patch of dirt. Dad did the ploughing and sowing – I never liked horses, and they didn’t like me. Ma kept the old tractor running and the pick-up truck that got us to Great Bend – every time I touched a machine, it broke. I minded the pigs and chickens, and the pigeons. Maybe you wouldn’t think of farming pigeons.But Ma sold them to Mr Lamarr at his White Dove restaurant in Great Bend to be made into pigeon pie. We needed the money, but I felt bad about the pigeons.
    I liked to train my birds to fly back home. Some days I’d run ten miles across the range, then tie a message to the bird’s leg and set it free. Those little messages got back to our farm long before I did.

    From time to time Ma came back from Great Bend with a newspaper. After dark we’d sit round the oil lamp and read about the Great War over in Europe.
    â€˜Looks like America’s going to send men across to fight,’ Pa said one night in the lamplight.
    â€˜Well, they ain’t taking my little Joe,’ Ma said.
    â€˜He has to be eighteen to fight. Joe’s only sixteen.’
    â€˜He looks eighteen,’ Ma argued. ‘If the army send men out to look for soldiers you hide in the barn, you hear, Joe?’
    Then one day in the spring of 1917 Ma came home wild as a mountain lion. ‘Some low-down crook of a farmer over in Dry Walnut Creek is selling Mr Lamarr pigeons for half what we charge. I had to take even less. We’ll hardly afford to eat thismonth,’ she sobbed, and tears ran down her thin, sun-stained cheeks. ‘All because of this farmer Muller.’
    â€˜Muller?’ Pa said. ‘Sounds German to me.’
    â€˜Exactly!’ Ma shouted. ‘And we’re at war with the Germans!’

    I tried to remind her: ‘You said the Great War is nothing to do with us.’
    She wasn’t listening. ‘It’d serve them right if I sent our Joe to fight them. They’d be beaten inside a week.’
    I tried again. ‘You said I was too young.’
    â€˜I’ll drive you in to Great Bend tomorrow. You can sign up for the US Army there.’
    â€˜But you said…’
    Ma wasn’t listening.
    We drove into the town the next day and saw a line of men outside the door of the Town Hall. Ma pushed me out of the pickup truck. I joined the line and shuffled along with the rest till I got to the desk.
    â€˜Name?’ the man in a khaki uniform asked.
    â€˜Joe. Joe Clay.’
    â€˜Age?’
    â€˜Sixteen.’
    The man rubbed his tired eyes. ‘We don’t take men as young as sixteen. You reckon you mean eighteen?’
    â€˜I suppose,’ I said. It was a lie. We both knew it.
    â€˜I’ll put down eighteen,’ he said. ‘Now put your mark here.’

    â€˜I can write my name,’ I said proudly.
    â€˜That’ll come in useful when you’re digging trenches,’ he muttered. ‘Here is a rail pass. Report to Kansas City troop depot a week today and they’ll train you up.’ He reached out to shake my hand quickly. ‘Welcome to the army, son,’ he said, then shouted, ‘Next!’
    And that was how I came to fight in the Great War. All because Ma got in a temper over a few pigeons.
    I can’t complain. Pigeons got me into the war, but it was a pigeon that got me out of it alive.

Chapter 2
Trains and targets
    I went off to Camp Lewis in Washington for training.
    First we learned to march. The sergeant said I was the worst marcher he’d ever seen.
    Then we tried shooting. My shooting was worse than my marching. When they gave me a rifle everybody hid.
    They tried me in the cook house but my porridge was so lumpy the sergeant said it could