Hey guys! Thanks for sticking with me here. So just a few notes.
-I do not own any of the characters besides Arabella Malarkey.
-Much of the information in this prologue was taken from the book Easy Company Soldier by Donald Malarkey.
- I wrote this prologue to give everyone more of a background story on the Malarkey family, and just to give some backstory for Arabella.
Thanks again for reading! My muse loves reviews, she eat's em' up like nobodies business. So without further adieu, Collateral Damage.
...
"Arabella, here, let me help you with that." Don walked up the stepladder, taking hold of the basket ball hoop I'd been attempting to hang.
"Here, see that latch on the back? It needs to be hung up on those two nails... okay, there ya go. Thanks." I flashed Don a smiled before putting a nail in the bottom of the back board. Securing it to the building.
"No problem."
I climbed down the ladder, looking at Don, "So what are your plans for the day?"
"Not a whole lot," he lit up a cigarette before continuing, "maybe work, everyone might be having a bon fire on the beach tonight, if you want to come."
"I'll see if I can, I've still got some unpacking to do."
"Yeah, I do too." Don sighed.
Yeah, moving was a pain, especially this one. Dad has lost his insurance company, leaving him to drink and stop paying bills. We'd lost the house. Him and Mom had take my younger brother Robert and younger sister Molly to live with them at our replacement cabin in the Cow Creek Valley, near the area where our old cabin had burnt down in a forest fire. John had went to live in southern california with relatives, and Don and I were sent to live with our grandma Malarkey.
So there went my family, except for Don. I had been happy when my parents told us their plan to keep the two of us together, although it made sense with the two of us only being a year apart in age. Even though the past three summer's I'd barely seen him since he'd been working on Jim Crow Sands on the Columbia, seining salmon and putting them in boats. He'd come home to visit every once in a while otherwise he lived in the logging-camp rooms.
Now that we'd moved into my grandmother's house, I wouldn't see any of my friends from Astoria, wouldn't go to Astoria high school, wouldn't play soccer for Astoria.
"Hey! Ary! Think fast!" I snapped back into reality as Don threw a basketball my way.
"One on one?" I raised an eyebrow at him.
"Let's go!"
...
"Hey, Arabella, can you go clean table 13?" Louie asked from behidn the counter.
Don's girlfriend, Bearnice, well her father, Louie, owned the Liberty Grill which I was working at for extra money to pay off my tuition for the University of Oregon. I'd graduated from Astoria high, after I was allowed to go back for my junior and senior year, in 1940. Don and I had decided to take the weight off of grandma Malarkey's shoulders, so he rented an apartment from Bearnice's father.
"Yeah, no problem."
I walked up to the table, taking the coffee cups and putting them in the bin, same with the plates and silverware. It was then that I noticed a copy of The Evening Astoria-Budget, its front page ringed with the circles of the few coffee cups that had rested there. Its main headline tinged with dread:
FIGHTING UNDERWAY
My stomach fell to the floor, the same feeling I'd when my dad told us he'd lost his job and that the family would be seperating.
...
It'd been a year since I'd graduated high school, and six months since I'd started college. I'd joined the Mu Phi Epsilon sorority, while Don had joined the Sigma Nu fraternity.
One sunday morning in early December, I was laying on the couch after finishing the dishes from a party the night before when one of my sorority sisters rushed in, almost scaring me off the couch.
"The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor!"
The big question that week was which boys we thought would go off to fight. While fall term wound to a close, I finished off my finals in a breeze, and started packing for home. Don and I had made plans to hitchhike back home. I knew sooner or later he was going to ship off, something about us being Malarkey's, and that was what he was expected to do.
Shortly after the bombing I had been walking towards Don's fraternity house when I found my friend Timmy Hayashi, one of the best Japanese swimmers at UO, leaning against the wall of the library, near a bumch of phones. He was crying. I saw Don just down the hall from him too.
"What's the matter, Tommy?" Don asked.
Tommy paused for a moment and shook his head a bit. "Just talked to my folks back in Astoria. People are throwing rocks through the windows at their store." The idea sickened me. Don and I never saw him again. We both guessed he'd been sent to one of those internment camps.
...
"Hey. Anyone home?" Don knocked on the door to my room in the sorority house.
"Hey. Ready to go?" I asked, tossing my bag over my shoulder.
"Ready as I'll ever be."
Don and I headed to the road, and managed to hitchhike north to Portland. We were at a bus depot when Don noticed a Marine Corps recruiting sign across the street.
"Hey, I'm going to try the physical examine over there. See if I could be a marine. Okay? Hold this please." Don dropped his bag in my hands before sauntering to the building.
He returned about a half hour later, "The doc said I was one hundred percent fit, except for one thing."
"And what's that?" I asked, giving him back his bag.
"After checking my mouth he sad my teeth weren't up to snuff. And left me with no explination." He shrugged.
We hopped a bus headed for Astoria, I listened to the various conversation around me, everywhere you went the discussion was the war. Don was reading a November version of Reader's Digest. Some article about something called paratroopers, soldiers that were being trained to jump out of airplanes, a ridiculous idea to me at the time.
"Hey Ary, says here once the paratroopers get their silver wings to wear on their blouse they get to be cocky."
"Well, your already cocky enough. No need to get any silver wings."
"Thanks." Don rolled his eyes.
"Not a problem." I winked his direction and he went back to his reading.
Don and I arrived back to the Cow Creek cabin just in time for the holidays. With nothing but the pacific between Japan and Oregon, tensions were high strung. Astoria was a major shipping port after all, what was to stop them from bombing mainland United States?
After spending a few days back at home, Don finally brought up his plans for war. He mentioned the thought of being a paratrooper, and the idea of her son not taking a desk job but instead jumping out of planes caught her off guard and she broke down on the spot.
Our grandmother took it even harder, after losing her two sons, my uncles, to World War 1, the worries she'd experienced two decades ago were brought back. We never saw father on our trip, him and my mother weren't seperated legally, but in every other way they were. She lived at the cabin and took care of Molly and tried to handle Robert and his agressive behavior, and my father was usually at Warrenton or Astoria doing who-knows-what. He disappointed both me and Don.
Don and I returned to finish out our freshmen year of college and returned home for every break we could, and everytime Don would bring up being a paratrooper.
"You know what happened to your uncles." My mom would always say.
But thats exactly what Don was thinking, that the Malarkey's had unfinished business with the Germans. Don registered for the draft and moved to Oregon to work in a machinery shop, Monarch Forge and Machine Works, making propeller shafts.
In July, Don turned twenty-one and recieved his draft notice. He returned back home about a week after, just in time to get his papers to instruct him to report to Fort Lewis, a few hours north, near Tacoma. My brother was leaving to be a paratrooper.