About the Author

A customer once curiously told Bergendahl Hawkins: "My friends have your number." Well, he, too, believes he has "his number." And that number is 976. To explain: over a decade ago, after a months-long bout of unexplained symptoms and increasing tiredness, he finally dragged himself to the hospital for a routine blood test. A day later, he received a call telling him to immediately go to the emergency room. That obscure number, you see, was his blood sugar level, he had developed full-blown type 2 diabetes. A level only reached, presumably, by skid row Sterno bums ("Vlaamsluecker," as they are interestingly and elegantly known in South African slang — spelling approximate) off their meds.

Numbers such as these properly belong to someone with the perseverance of a water buffalo. A person who, like the buffalo plowing a muddy field, will slowly slog through, knee-deep in mud, to the end of his furrow.

When he's not terribly, terribly busy attempting to restore the Republic to its former glory, Bergendahl, a handyman living in Los Angeles, enjoys tipping the velvet of an evening.

And, as can be readily discerned from the uncertain quality of this tome, he is almost wholly innocent of advanced, formal education and, indeed, has seldom been successfully menaced by it.

For him, writing this book was an easy, almost purely selfish decision. As von Kleist-Schmenzin once said to his son, Ewald-Heinrich: “… Wer in einem solchen Moment versagt wird nie wieder froh im Leben.” He, Bergendahl, simply couldn’t face the prospect of a lifetime of unhappiness (to put it mildly) and didn’t have the courage to leave (not that that would have helped; on the contrary); finding it less troublesome, really, to cross the Rubicon than to cross the Atlantic.

Cowardly, cowardly custard.


Midway?

• Initially heading the wrong way, it took an act of insubordination verging on mutiny by one of the squadron leaders, Waldron by name, for some to head in what turned out to be the correct direction.
• The planes his squadron flew had been obsolete since 1939.
• There was no fighter escort to be had.
• As was the quaint custom for torpedo planes, they went in low and slow, please.
• A-and the fact that their torpedoes were known to be generally NFG doesn’t seem to have overly troubled them, neither.
• I give you: Torpedo 8. <insert demented cackle>