Ender's Game

Of course, I'm always glad when people like a story of mine; but something much more important is gong on here. These readers found that Ender's Game was not merely a 'mythic" story, dealing with general truths, but something much more personal. To them, Ender's Game was an epic tale, a story that expressed who they are as a community, a story that distinguished them from the other people around them. They didn't love Ender, or pity Ender (a frequent adult response); they were Ender, all of them. Ender's experience was not foreign or strange to them; in their minds, Ender's life echoed their own lives. The truth of the story was not truth in general, but their truth.

Stories can be read so differently--even clear stories, even stories that deliberately avoid surface ambiguities. For instance, here's another letter, likewise one that I received in mid-March of 1991. It was written on 16 February and postmarked the 18th. Those dates are important.

Mr. Card,

I'm an army aviator waiting out a sandstorm in Saudi Arabia. I've always wanted to write you and since my future is in doubt--I know when the ground war will begin--I decided today would be the day I'd write.

I read Ender's Game during flight school four years ago. I'm a warrant officer, and our school, at least the first six weeks, is very different from the commissioned officers'. I was eighteen years old when I arrived at Ft. Rucker to start flight training, and the first six weeks almost beat me. Ender gave me courage then and many times after that. I've experienced the tiredness Ender felt, the kind that goes deep to your soul. It would be interesting to know what caused you to feel the same way. No one could describe it unless they experienced it, but I understand how personal that can be. There is one other novel that describes that frame of soul and mind that I cherish as much as Ender's Game. It's called Armour and its author is John Steakley. Ender and Felix (the protagonist of Armour) are always close by in my mind. Sadly, there is no sequel to Armour as there is to Ender's Game.

We are the bastards of military aviation. Our helicopters may be the best in the world, but the equipment we wear and the systems in our helicopter, such as the navigation instruments, are at least twenty years behind the Navy and Air Force. I am very happy with the Air Force's ability to bomb with precision, but if they miss, the bombs still land on the enemy's territory. If we screw up, the guys we haul to the battle, the "grunts," die. We don't even have the armour plate for our chests--"chicken plate"--that the helicopter pilots did in Vietnam. Last year in El Salvador, army aviators flew a couple of civilian VIPs and twenty reporters over guerrilla-controlled territory and there were no flares in their launchers to counteract the heat-seeking missiles we know the rebels had. One of our pilots and a crew member were killed last year on a training flight because they flew the sling load they were carrying into the ~ at 70 miles an hour. It could have been prevented if our night vision goggles had a heads-up display like the Air Force has had for forty years. I'm sure you beard about Colonel Pickett being shot down in a Huey in El Salvador just a few months ago. That type of aircraft is at least thirty years. old and there are no survivability measures installed. He was a good man, I knew him.

The reason I told you about these things is because I wanted to paint a picture for you. I love my job but we aren't like the "zoomies" that everyone makes movies about. We do our job with less technology, less political support, less recognition, and more risk than the rest, while the threat to us continues to modernize at an

unbelievable rate. I'm not asking for sympathy but I was wondering if you and Mr. Steakley could write a novel about helicopters and the men that fly them for the Army twenty years in the future. There are many of us that read sciencefiction and after I read Ender's Game and Armour three times each I started letting my comrades read them. My wife cried when she read Ender's Game. There is a following here for a book like the one I requested. We have no speaker for us, the ones that will soon die, or the ones that survive...