Battle Cry Read Online Free Page A

identification.
    “Danny,” Sarah Forrester called from the kitchen. “You’d better drive over and pick up Kathy. Dinner will be ready in a half hour.”
    “O.K., Mom, it will be half time in a couple minutes.”
    “Bud!”
    “What?”
    “Start setting the table.”
    “Aw, gee whizz, Mom.”
    Hello again, football fans. This is Rush Holloway, the old Wheaties reporter here in the nation’s capital where thirty-five thousand pack Griffith Stadium on this beautiful December afternoon to witness the battle between Steven Owen’s New York Giants and the Washington Redskins.
    The noise you hear in the background is the public address system paging Admiral Parks. They’ve been paging several top brass during this second period….
    Mickey Parks has just replaced Ki Aldrich at center. Incidentally, Mickey is a distant cousin of Admiral Parks. Great favorite with the Redskin fans. Now in his fourth season with the Skins….
    We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you a news bulletin. Airplanes, identified as Japanese, have attacked the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned to this station for…
    First and ten on their own forty-yard line.
    “Did you hear that, Dad?”
    “Er…er, what? I must have been dozing.”
    The phone rang. Bud raced to it and then turned the receiver over to Sarah Forrester. “Henry,” she called, “where is Pearl Harbor?”
     
    Henry Forrester rapped softly on his son’s door, then entered. Danny lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. His father sat on the bed’s edge.
    About the room hung pennants of Forest Park High and a half dozen college teams. The dresser bore a dozen team photographs and there was a larger one on the wall of the Baltimore Orioles. A baseball autographed by Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx and Lefty Grove adorned the center of a small desk.
    “Son, won’t you come down to dinner?”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “Your mother is awfully upset. Cigarette?”
    “No thanks.”
    “Don’t you suppose we should talk this over?”
    “Every time I try to make sense Mom starts bawling.”
    Henry Forrester walked slowly to the dresser and studied a trophy atop it. Danny had run the last twenty-five yards of a relay race on a cinder track after losing one of his spikes.
    “Maybe we could talk between ourselves. You owe me that much.”
    “I don’t understand it myself, Dad.”
    “Wilbur Grimes told me yesterday. They’ll take you at Georgia Tech right after February commencement.”
    “It just doesn’t seem right. Me going off to college to play football with a war going on.”
    “But Danny, you’re only seventeen. They don’t want you. If they need you, they’ll call you.”
    “We’ve been over it fifty times already.”
    “Yes, and we’ve got to have a showdown. Neither your mother nor I can go on with this daily sulking. And I’m not signing any papers until I know a reason why.”
    “Have it your way.”
    “I could understand it if you weren’t happy here or if you were a rattle-brained kid. You’ve wanted to be an engineer since you were Bud’s age. You’ve got everything now, a home, friends, I let you drive the car…Mother and I talked it over. We decided that you could go to M.I.T. if that would help change your mind.”
    “It isn’t that I’m not happy, Dad.”
    “Then why the Marine Corps?”
    “Don’t keep asking me.”
    “What about Virgil?”
    “He wants to go too, Dad…but with his mother so sick.”
    The balding man snuffed out his cigarette. “This whole damned thing makes me feel like a miserable failure.”
    “Cut it out.”
    “I don’t think we’d better pull any punches, Danny. We’ve done that too often. I feel like one of those fathers who is a star boarder in his own home. I’ve really never given you and Bud the companionship you’ve needed.”
    “You don’t have to go blaming yourself because you have to beat yourself out to keep the business going.”
    “I’ve envied you, son. You’ve