Diary of Forget-Me-Nots by Jeffrey Beaty
I wrote this “Twilight Zone”-like short story about a war diary handed down from soldier to soldier in 1989. This was shortly before I actually joined the military, so it’s attempt to communicate a soldier’s life is pretty much a product of my imagination and watching too many war movies. The very brief story and my inexperience may have made the characters some what shallow stereotypes, but my later experiences in the US Navy during the Gulf War and its aftermath make me think none of those stereotypes are too far off the mark.
As far as the writing goes… I had very little writing experience when I wrote it, but I had written enough at this point to make a fairly good job of it. That and the fact that the story cites two very powerful poems by actual soldier poets from World War I and World War II make it into one of the few bits of my writing that I am not completely embarrassed by sharing. I had gotten the original idea in a college poetry class probably back in 1987, and it had sat around in my notebook and in my imagination for a year or 2 before I actually attempted to write it.
You can download the story in an Adobe PDF document that you should be able to read on most computers, mobile devices and e-readers with the appropriate app. In the near future I hope to add epub and kindle formats too.
To download the ebook, right-click the link below and select, “Save Link As”, or simply click on the link to open the ebook in your computer’s Adobe Reader app.
Download Diary of Forget-Me-Nots
203KB Adobe PDF, 11 pages, about 3900 words.
Sigh… Ok, I’m not really eating corn flakes. But it is much too early to be thinking this “deep” and depressed about something so trivial. Driving to work this morning, this song — heard a hundred times previous — really punched me in the gut. It’s a great song, but…
