THERE IS A GENERATION by WH Buzzard is the first in a four book series satirizing Baby Boomers, the 1950’s offspring of the Greatest Generation who grew into the 1960’s rebels that changed America forever. In Book One best friends Tim and Hect happen upon an abandoned auto junkyard and switched from rabbit hunting to a game of “War” with their semi-automatic .22 caliber rifles. The fun abruptly ends, however, as a boyish prank goes badly awry. They decide to set fire to a pillbox bunker, actually an old deserted shack, and burn the enemy out. The boys fashion a Molotov cocktail from gas out of a wrecked truck and heave the bomb at the structure. The dry sun-baked wood bursts into flames faster than a pile of tumbleweeds. To their utter horror a fire-engulfed figure appears in a window of the shanty-inferno. Believing they just burned alive a hobo using the place for a shelter and fearing they will end up on a hot-seat called “Sparky,” the popular nickname for the electric chair at Huntsville prison, the two flee into the desert. Now fugitives from the law they must leave behind their self-centered lives of ease and carefree devilment. Neither could be less prepared to suffer hunger and thirst, merciless desert heat and life on the road, not to mention encountering con artists, wily street people, and never before imagined poverty and slums, plus the mean streets of what they grew up believing was known as “the wrong side of the tracks.” Thus begin a series of adventures, or perhaps misadventures is a better description, through West Texas, New Mexico, and finally into Mexico itself where they are shanghaied into a training facility for anarchists called The Camp.

In Book Two the best friends have taken different paths. Last heard from Hect disappeared into the Mexican desert on the back frame of a speeding truck escaping a Juarez jail. Tim, meanwhile, returned home to find his at-her-wits-end mother ready to teach her son “the lesson of a lifetime.” Only what’s to be done with a willful teen in 1950’s West Texas? Why not what every other frustrated parent does with their bad seed and ship the dickens off to the strictest reformatory around, The George S. Patton Military Academy. Let those rough and tumble World War II veteran instructors teach him some discipline. The idea sounds abhorrent to Tim, however, who decides it’s high time to appease his conscience over deserting his pal in the Chihuahua desert, and skip town. Unknown to Tim, his friend has become a new man due to brainwashing at the training facility known as The Camp. He now despises born rich Americans, including his silver-spoon-fed best friend. Unaware of the other’s disapproval, Tim picks up the trail in Juarez, Mexico and follows it straight to The Camp where he too is confined and forced into the harsh paramilitary routine. As he and Hect butt ideological heads, they are selected for a mission back into the States to retrieve the psychotic genius who inspired the Camp system. Not only must they chauffeur the delusional madman, but avoid the Border Patrol and Mexican Federales. Chances are they both might wind up dead or in prison so that maybe going to the George S. Patton Military School wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Together again in Book Three, Tim and Hect escaped an attack by Mexican Federales on the Camp where they’d been forcibly confined in a World War II Russian Lisunov Li-2 transport. Flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the rickety twin-engine airplane tossed about in and around a lightning-filled thunderstorm until it looked a certainty their young lives would end in a fiery impact against the towering volcano, El Popo. Even if they missed being struck in half by a lightning bolt, if the planeload of top officials going to South America discovered the two were not members of an elite security team Tim and Hect might well be escorted to the exit less parachutes. Not until safely out of the storm did a much relieved Tim attempt a conversation with a fellow passenger in the hopes of finding out what he and Hect had gotten themselves into. Learning they were now part of an international effort to dismantle and remake western culture, their only hope of finishing the flight in one piece was to keep up the security bluff. Thanks to Tim’s creativeness and Hect’s bravado, once landed they made their escape and took refuge in the only safe haven in all of Bogota, the slums. No policeman or soldier dared set foot among the government-hating peons. For the first time in their lives Tim and Hect experience real injustice and oppression by a tyrannical administration. In the poorest of living conditions the two meet and are given shelter by a cripple named Darwin and his seething, fed-up neighbors. With the best of intentions, the pair start to work improving the ghetto by what they conceive an inspired idea. They set about exterminating a biblical plague of cucarachas, or cockroaches. Not only do they rid the place of the vermin, but also incite a local riot that turns into a full scale revolution and coup d’état. During the melee Tim is mistaken for a rebel leader and shot by a government undercover agent. Good gravy, is this the finish of our hero couplet? I think not as there is still a fourth book to go, but how in the Sam Hill could it be otherwise?