Day Like Any Other (eBook)

A Novel

Tom Oliva (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
366 Seiten
Ballast Books (Verlag)
9781964934297 (ISBN)

Infos

In this action-packed, post-apocalyptic story, a retired Marine risks everything to defend life as we know it. It's a day like any other for Andy Lemon and his family before the world changes forever. Technology stops working. Natural disasters rock the earth. Cars start exploding. Shaken by an unknown event, America-the land of the free-turns apocalyptic overnight, and all hell breaks loose. While Andy, a retired Marine, knows how to protect his family from the chaos, other citizens are tricked into government camps with horrid living conditions. Confronted with the plight of his people and plagued by visions of loss and defeat, Andy decides he must act before it's too late to save his family and his freedom. At the White House, President Keller, blackmailed by the mysterious Mr. X, knew all about this deadly event-and did nothing to stop it and guard his people. With the other top government officials locked in the Capitol Building, Mr. X has the president under his thumb, right where he wants him, and the American people are paying the price. On his fateful journey to the capital to save his country, Andy reunites with his band of brothers and forges surprising alliances. Together, they recruit other freedom fighters to their cause and begin to uncover the truth of what the government has been hiding. When it matters most, they must risk everything on the battlefield to liberate their people and reclaim their livelihood. In A Day Like Any Other, join our hero on a riveting fight for freedom from tyranny and consider your own destiny.

Gunnery Sergeant Tom Oliva entered the United States Marine Corps in 1986 and retired in 2006. Throughout his twenty-year military career, he worked in aviation life support systems on fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. Tom participated in three combat tours in the Middle East between 2002 and 2005. Tom grew up on and now lives on Long Island, New York. He works in the aerospace industry and spends his spare time writing. A Day Like Any Other is his first novel.

Textauszug

Chapter 4

The suburbs north of Philadelphia

It was a toss-up. What was more annoying: the kids arguing about whose turn it was to feed the dog or the alarm clock buzzing away on its third snooze, sounding annoyed that Andrew wasn’t up yet? Or perhaps getting up and going to a job he truly hated was the real annoyance. No matter. He was already late, and even though the little voice in his head kept saying, Call out today; you really need to call out today, he ignored it as he shut off the alarm and dragged himself to the shower. It was a day like any other, and he needed to get on with it.

Andrew Lemon, like most Americans that morning, was simply living the American dream. He had a good job that paid well. He had retired a year ago from the US Marine Corps after twenty-two years of service as a Gunnery Sergeant. With two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan, he had done his duty to his country and was now moving on to the next phase of his life as a civilian. His wife of eighteen years, Melissa, had stood by him through all of his deployments, and their relationship was as strong as ever. They still truly loved one another after all this time. They had two children—a son, David, age sixteen, and a daughter, Kathryn, age thirteen. Along with his marriage, they were the true joys of his life. With another combat deployment looming, he had opted to retire rather than put his family through another eight months of angst with Daddy in harm’s way.

Andy was a fourth-generation American of Italian descent, though his name didn’t suggest it. When his great-grandparents arrived in the country, a mix-up at Ellis Island had forever turned the ancient family name of Limongi into Lemon. It wasn’t uncommon for customs inspectors at Ellis Island to mutilate difficult-to-pronounce ethnic names into something more Americanized.

Most times, the immigrants didn’t discover this issue until much later in the process due to the language barrier, and once they understood the error, they figured it wasn’t worth the hassle. They were just happy to be in the United States, so they moved on with their new “American” names. So just like that, Antonio Limongi had become Anthony Lemon. Andrew’s grandfather used to say, with his hands in the air and his shoulders shrugging, “America give us a lemon, so we make lemonade!” It was a running family joke that was just a matter of fact. They were the Lemons.

His great-grandfather had come to this country with ten dollars in his pocket, a pregnant wife, and a dream to start a better life. He worked hard at several odd jobs before finding steady work at the local grocer in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Well-liked by the owner as his hardest worker, eventually he was brought on as a business partner. Anthony Lemon, his wife Marcella, and their two sons, Anthony Jr. and Michael, were a turn-of-the-century American success story.

When the US entered World War II, Michael Lemon signed up to serve in the US Marine Corps before they could draft him into the Army. He deployed to the Pacific and served as a private in the Second Marine Division. He fought and was wounded on the Pacific island of Saipan. He returned home and took over the family grocery business from his father. He married and had two sons, David and Peter.

David followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the US Marine Corps before he could be drafted. He deployed to Vietnam and was wounded at the siege of Khe Sanh in 1968. He returned home after recovering from severe injuries, but instead of taking over the family business—a career his brother gladly undertook—David decided to go to college and earn a degree in criminal justice. Soon after graduation, he joined the NYPD.

After joining the NYPD, David married his high school sweetheart, Anntonella “Ann” Rengazzi. She often teased David, saying, “What kind of Italian is named David Lemon? You’re not Italian. Someone just told you that, right?” David’s usual reply was to shrug his shoulders, raise his hands, and say, “Easy there, Mrs. Lemon” while feigning anger.

Ann and David followed the family tradition and had two sons: first Andrew, and then Anthony eighteen months later. Soon after Anthony’s birth, David accepted a job as a Nassau County police officer and moved the family out to the suburbs, being the first of the family to do the unthinkable and leave Brooklyn.

It was in this setting that Andrew grew up—in a close-knit family of war heroes, Italian traditions, and close family ties. Going to Brooklyn for holidays and family occasions was not to be missed. While it was always an adventure to visit Brooklyn, with its old-style rowhomes and old-world atmosphere, David knew that Andrew preferred the neatly manicured lawns with trees and shrubs that were a commonplace landscape out on Long Island. Life was good.

By the start of Andrew’s junior year of high school, he had already decided to join the Marine Corps like his father and grandfather before him. He ignored his father’s life-long advice to never join the Marines. He always told him, “If you go into the service, join the Air Force or the Navy. They got it good.” What David really meant, though he never actually said it directly, was, “Join the Air Force or the Navy, and you’ll live longer.” David had seen and experienced combat at its worst, and he didn’t want his sons to go through the hell he and his father had been through.

At seventeen, Andrew brought home a US Marine Corps recruiter so that David and Ann could sign the underage release form for him to enter the delayed entry program, which meant enlisting a year before he actually left for boot camp. It was with mixed feelings that David took this turn of events and his son’s decision to do the exact opposite of what he had told him. David was filled with a father’s pride but also full of apprehension over this decision. He knew Andrew could handle it; he just didn’t know what the world would have in store for his son. David was incredibly relieved to find out that Andrew would be guaranteed a Military Operational Specialty (MOS) in aviation. He knew that an MOS in aviation would spare him the hard life of a ground-pounding grunt and the ever-present specter of a sudden and violent death.

Many times in Vietnam, David had watched from the jungle floor as helicopters and jets flew overhead. He always imagined the comfortable accommodations those guys returned to every night. But in reality, he was only slightly jealous of those lucky bastards. He understood war and knew that no one ever really had it easy, nor was anyone completely safe.

David had gained enormous respect for those flyers on one fateful day while surrounded during the siege of Khe Sanh in 1968. He saw how they braved the storms of enemy fire in order to bring in supplies for the Marines and evacuate the wounded. After being wounded by a North Vietnamese rocket explosion, David left the besieged airfield on a Marine Corps UH-1 Huey helicopter. In most cases, the wounded were taken to the airfield for evacuation, which wasn’t any safer. Through the haze of being blown up and receiving a morphine injection from the Corpsman, he remembered the sound of the Huey coming in to get him. He also distinctly remembered the eruption of enemy fire from the hillside opposite his position. He would be forever grateful for those pilots and the enlisted crewmen in that Huey.

David’s injuries had been severe enough to require immediate evacuation. Fortunately for him, the portion of the perimeter where he had happened to be was just a few yards from a flat spot the pilots were familiar with. The bird that would carry him from the battlefield seemed to appear from nowhere. In reality, it had just dropped a load of supplies to another unit farther down the perimeter. It had flown in at treetop level and dropped into the landing zone (LZ) at such speed that David had no doubt it would crash right on top of him. He remembered thinking, Oh great, the medevac bird is going to kill me!

The pilot flared the helicopter’s tail at the last moment, hovered briefly, then settled on its skids. The crew chief was out before the bird had fully settled, waving toward the group surrounding David and preparing to carry his litter to the bird. As another burst of green tracers ripped the air overhead, the crewman started waving more vigorously while shouting something into his helmet-mounted microphone, undoubtedly informing the pilots what they already knew—that the LZ was hot and getting hotter. As David’s buddies were loading him onto the deck of the Huey, more rockets started landing dangerously close.

The crew chief wasted no time in giving the pilots the OK to take off while still strapping David down to the floor with a cargo strap. David couldn’t hear, but he was sure the crew chief, a short man with a thick mustache and a set of corporal stripes painted on his helmet, said, “Ready in the back.” Corporal Crew Chief had said it with such calm that David wondered if he knew he was at Khe Sanh in a hot LZ. The bird immediately lifted off and started forward in the same instant. As they were flying no more than five feet off the ground, David could see the heads of his litter bearers still dashing back to the safety of the trench line. He could also see the muzzle flashes in the jungle all pointed at him. Taking fire from what seemed like all directions and feeling very naked strapped to the deck of that metal coffin, David thought momentarily, Put me back on the ground where it’s safe! Regardless, the crewmen were busy manning their .30-caliber machine guns, showering him with...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.2.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-13: 9781964934297 / 9781964934297