C.: I got up early today to work out and to prepare my briefs for my meeting with the big boss. When I got home, I realized something: cats don’t wear underwear! So, I decided to sit down and read an excerpt from one of d.c.’s manuscripts. It’s a chapter from the book, REPRTS FROM SOUTH AMERICA AND THE LEGEND OF THE ISLAND OF PISHON. This chapter is called “The Sharpshooter.”
Since d.c. and Eudora are spending St. Patrick’s Day doing yard and I’m getting ready for my big meeting, I thought that I would share this chapter with you readers.
THE SHARPSHOOTER
An Army recruiter rarely encounters a recruit that is so superior to his or her peers that he or she is coveted for the special forces from the time s/he enlists. Sergeant Darin Davis encountered only one such individual in his thirty-plus-year career. Even more rare was the fact that the recruit was a tiny female who seemed to have the power and energy of an ant. She seemed to be able to lift more than twice her weight. She was also an excellent fighter. She understood the principles of martial arts better than any recruit that Sergeant Davis had ever encountered. The fact that she was ambidextrous made her even more effective. That made her a large asset in hand-to-hand combat. However, even in the twenty-first century, the American armed forces are reluctant to put women on the front lines during combat. They are afraid that, if captured, the females may be used as bargaining chips. That was fine, Sarge reasoned, he had other plans for this young lady.
This recruit had 20/15 vision in both eyes. That’s what the doctor wrote on her physical form. When questioned, the doctor said that the chart only would measure vision at 20/11 vision at best. The recruit had easily read the letters at the bottom of the chart at twenty feet with both eyes. The doctor was reluctant to write that down, though, for fear he would be ridiculed. No other recruit ever had an uncorrected vision that was that good. The best eyesight anyone had ever measured was 20/15. Those are the numbers that the doctor wrote on his chart.
Sergeant Davis invited the young lady back to the doctor’s office. He backed the young lady up to the end of the hallway. She could still read the letters for 20/20 vision at that distance. Out of curiosity, the sergeant took the recruit to the firing range. She hit the bullseye on the target from 500 yards with open sights on her first shot. At nine hundred yards, she could do this with her scope properly sighted in. The sarge put a match up and held it with some tape. He asked the recruit if she could light it at 100 yards. On her second attempt, the recruit lit the match with her bullet without breaking it. Sarge was impressed, but the young lady insisted on becoming a medic, not a sniper. The two struck a deal. The sarge said, if the recruit would agree to be trained as an FBI and CIA sniper once she left the armed services, the U.S. Army would train her as a nurse.
Sarge was tasked with recruiting military personnel to become snipers for clandestine missions for the FBI and the CIA. He could not let this opportunity slip away, he reasoned. The young lady would be a valuable asset to the two most powerful law enforcement agencies in the U.S.A.
After much consideration, the young recruit agreed to the deal. She believed that the U.S. Army was the best at training nurses of any of the armed services in America, if not the world. She didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to take advantage of this deal that had been offered to her. As a long-lost relative is about to find out, the young lady never lost the skills that the Army taught her as an Army special force’s unit Ranger.