rlfj: Blog

And so our journey together ends. This story has been just as enjoyable to write as AFS was, and without the heavy political tones that some readers objected to. Like AFS, it ended up going places I never quite expected, but I think it concludes satisfactorily. If there was one overall theme to what people wanted to read, it was Grim vs. Candy Pants at the end; that was always my intention, and I think I did it properly.

Many readers wanted Grim to keep going from 2010, but I always wanted to end in a current time frame, taking down the villain. I had a wide range of suggestions of what Grim could do in the future – many chapters on Reaper babies, including lots of girls, and catching grief from the men in the family, with Grim delivering babies during a hurricane/snowstorm/shootout; Al Qaeda/ISIS/Mexican drug lords coming after Grim and/or his family; Grim as a guest lecturer/instructor at the Georgia Police Academy and/or the FBI Academy in Quantico; Grim and Kelly meeting/hosting/rescuing Tolley Hunter during a visit to Georgia; Grim’s life being made into a book and/or movie, like Audie Murphy’s; Grim and Candy Pants in a gigantic showdown. Those were just some of the suggestions. Many of these ideas had merit, but at some point a character becomes a caricature and, ultimately, a cartoon.

Still, Grim has been one of my most popular characters. He’ll be back for a couple of sequels. Just be patient. I’m returning to AFS for a bit.

A couple of readers pointed out that Atheringdon would almost certainly have been through Fort Benning at some point in the past. The point was that as an officer his experience would have been significantly different than from the enlisted trainees.

A few readers pointed out that Armor is actually at Fort Knox. Sorry folks, but Armor was at Fort Knox. In 2010, as part of the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) program, The Armor School was moved to Benning.

Not a whole lot to blog about this time. Grim is winding up his publicity tour and getting back to his normal life, though normal for Grim is extraordinary for most of us.

The ‘wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs’ line did not originate in the film American Sniper, but showed up earlier, in a book by Lt. Col. David Grossman, On Combat; it was suggested by one of my military editors, jjmcdonald7911. Another similar quote is that ‘people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf’, generally attributed to George Orwell, though his comments were a restatement of something said earlier by Rudyard Kipling, and only put in the final form years after Orwell’s death, by Richard Grenier. That quote I used in AFS, so I didn’t want to trot it out here.

There was one relatively minor complaint about the last chapter. How could a battalion think a soldier was dead when the CO of the battalion knew he was alive? Okay, that was a stretch. In the story I addressed it by having the CO transfer out almost immediately, which we see in Chapter 67. Realistically, though, it’s a stretch. On the other hand, I have received countless emails from veterans who agreed that military bureaucracy could be maddening, and reported how they had lost promotions, pay, and decorations in the system. I would not be surprised to learn that something like this has actually happened.

In a totally separate and completely unrelated note, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, corrupt officials and judges routinely declare living people dead, usually after being bribed by relatives trying to inherit land. It is next to impossible to ‘come alive’ afterwards. There is actually an Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People, made up of these ‘zombies’, which fights for their legal rights. I saw this on 60 Minutes once. Amazing, the junk you remember.