As always
For Captain Tamara Long, USAF
Born: May 12, 1979
Died: March 23, 2003, Afghanistan
You fly with the angels now.
***
And
Keith Berdine
Born: June 18, 1964
Died: September 21, 2013
Miss you, buddy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
On the “how you shoot from a helicopter” thing, I had to go back to my buddy Emil Praslick, recently retired long-term NCO in the US Army Marksmanship Unit (USAMU). You might recognize the name as one of the sniper instructors from the Paladin of Shadow series. I figured if any of my various contacts had experience shooting a Barrett out of a helo, it would be Emil. Yeah, yeah, he did.
And I’d like to belatedly congratulate USAMU for beating the pants off of the Marine Corps at Camp Perry lately! Fun part? The Army’s primary shooter is SSG Sherri Gallagher (female badass, one each) who Emil specifically recruited from civilian shooting then “dialed in.”
Now, if they’d just put Emil in charge of Army’s football team…
Most characters are based upon someone. They may be “super-characters” but they generally have some basis. As Hemingway said, “Good writers create, great writers steal.” Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes you don’t even realize it.
It took me until this book to realize that Chad is based in part on a friend of mine from “Back in the Day” named Keith “Duck” Berdine. I first met Duck picking up some jeeps that were being redeployed back from Grenada. Pick up in Wilmington, drive to Fort Bragg. Total shit detail and a very long story why. I truly got the big green weenie on that one. God, I was pissed! But on the other hand, got to meet Duck and make friends, so not all bad.
(Being left behind when even the NCOIC went home, guarding a stupid piece of electronics when I had a twelve-hour drive ahead of me was part of the shit detail aspect. Stupid piece of “secure” commo! I could have cut the lock right off, but NO, it was a “secure lock” and had to be…Aaaagh! I had to wait two hours for the stupid duty officer, idiot lieutenants, to find the fricking KEY…Which turned out was in the box RIGHT BY HIS STUPID LIEUTENANT HEAD! Then there was the fact that it was Thanksgiving weekend and a freaking day off for the entire rest of the battalion since we’d been in Grenada for Columbus Day…Gah! Never mind. Army shit. Most of you get it. Yes, people, been there, done that, still pissy about it.
I ended up riding with Keith in an M151 doing road guard. It was a particularly dark night, black as pitch, back roads of North Carolina. We’d drive up to an intersection and block it to let the convoy pass through. Then Duck would put the hammer down and pass the entire convoy, in the left lane, on curvy two-lane back roads, at night, with the speedometer more than pegged, carrying on a conversation the whole way while waving his hands and paying NO and I mean NO attention to the road!
The looks, the crazy, the perpetual joie d’vivre. That was Duck. Wasn’t the cock hound that Chad is admittedly.
After years as an Air Marshal he died, really suddenly, of leukemia of all things. He left behind a wife and two children and many, many friends who remember him for his universal bonhomie and kindness.
Miss you, man. But in a way, through Iron Hand, you get to live again.
—John Ringo
We told the story of how the MHI Memoirs books came about in the acknowledgements of the first book. These are John’s stories unfolding in a world I created. My main role was to edit them to make sure everything fit what had already been established in the series.
I want to thank Mike Kupari, Whit Williams, and Peter Grant for some fact-checking help. And special thanks to Toni Weisskopf for being an awesome editor.
Most of all I want to thank John for writing these. Personally, my favorite thing about a Ringo novel is the contagious enthusiasm. You can tell that he had a lot of fun writing these, and that comes through on the page. The man is one hell of a storyteller.
—Larry Correia