Wasn’t so long ago, indeed, it seems like only yesterday, Mr. B.’s teachers were complaining about his penchant for drawing knights fighting monsters with swords and machine guns. This horrible fixation on weaponry and violence, they said, was a bad, bad sign. Psychiatric help might be advisable, etc., etc.
Today he brought home a book from the school library on the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Huh? He said there were lots more like it in the school library and he planned to read a few more for his nonfiction reading requirement. After all, he got an A on a reading test on the Bradley book. High incentive there, as you might imagine.
Like a lot of other fourth graders he prefers fiction (generally fantasy) to nonfiction, so his teacher is constantly pushing nonfiction to balance it out. He said she didn’t mind the Bradley book and he found it interesting. Wanted to know if me and his godfather, who fought in Vietnam together, had Bradleys back in those ancient days. Nope. I showed him in the book where it said the Bradley wasn’t introduced to the Army until 1981. That was twelve years after our time.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 