Chapter Five
The old Tri-Motor bounced along the dirt runway at Mandalay and lumbered into the air. I tightened my seat belt and listened to the second and third engines compete with one another to see which one could out-misfire the other.
It wasn’t because of Major Kala-Byan that I sat in a rusted metal seat with my teeth rattling—it was because of Kayin. She’d persuaded me and Raji to go along with the major and his outfit of wide-eyed boys to the wastelands of Ethiopia on his harebrained training mission.
“Just to help care for the young men,” Kayin had said to us after the major left my room at the hotel. “Some of them are no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. We have no doctors or nurses. Your medical education could save someone’s life.”
“What type of training is this?” Raj
