Chapter 1

The sky was dark and the air smelled of musky corn; well I was in Red Creek a small town in Georgia. Essentially a small dot on the map, the population has been going down ever since the major companies bought the land off the poor farmers and the ones who didn’t sale couldn’t compete with the others. Although there were still a handful that wouldn’t sell.

        “Damn!” The heater in this stupid old police car was busted again. “Oh well, who cares I’m here” I looked up into the sky looking for the circling vultures old Mrs. Johnson described. I guess she had nothing better to do than to look out her window and report some ugly vultures flying around a circle. It was a strange site they were circling around but not landing. I pulled off the road and onto a small dirt path into a cornfield. I stopped the car and got out, I had to go the rest of the way on foot.

        I walked towards the edge of the cornfields. I felt a feeling of dislike as I approached it, once you live around it all you life you start getting annoyed of it. I staggered up to the corn and spread the tall plant apart and noticed a pre made trail. As I walked through it an increasing aroma of raw flesh increased. Suddenly the trail ended and a blurry, person shaped, outline appeared on the ground, the smell now very unpleasant. I took out my flashlight and….

                                      Chapter 2     

        “Was there anyone you saw before this incident?” asked the F.B.I. agent.

        “No I was just responding to a complaint and found Tommy Smith on the ground slaughtered.” I replied.

        “Take a couple of days of work Mike, and we’ll call you if we need you.”

        “Are you sure you don’t need me now.”

        “As I said we’ll call you”

        I got up from the chair and headed on home to relax and try to forget about what I just saw. I just can’t let this go; I’m a police officer I have to try to help. And also I’ve been trying to get that promotion and this might be just the thing to get it. Who could have done this, every one is loved Tommy. He did have the biggest cornfield, maybe someone wanted it. No I don’t think anyone would be that greedy. I better get some rest; I’ve got a long day ahead of me.

        The gravel colored clouds rolled over the orange horizon and just hung over the land as if attached to a string. I got up took a shower, dressed in my uniform. I told myself I wasn’t going to miss a day of work just because of what happened yesterday; in fact, that was part of my job.

I stepped into my vehicle and turned on her stunning V-8 engine and heard her purr. I reversed out of my driveway and speeded to the police station, awaiting some news on the murder and a special assignment.

“I see you decided to show up for work today Mike.” Said officer McHenry

        “Wouldn’t miss something like this. Probably the best case I will ever receive.” I replied.

        “I like to see your enthusiasm, but we’re assigning this case to Antwon Hammond”

        “To who?”

        “Antwon Hammond, he’s an experienced detective and will prove good use to this case.”

        “Come on boss! Let me help with this, I can do it, come on. Don’t make me beg!”

        “Alright, I’ll give you a chance. Go meet him on the crime scene, you’ll be his assistant.” He replied as he wrote down a note.

        “Thanks you won’t regret it sir!” I yelled as I ran across the room and out the door.

        As I pulled up to the taped up crime scene I noticed an odd gentleman in tuxedo checking out the body, I thought to myself that must be Antwon. I opened up the door and a burst of heat and that smell of the body entered the vehicle. I slammed the door shut and walked over to the man in the tuxedo. “Antwon?”

        “Sorry, wrong person” replied the man.

        “Do you know were to find him?”

        “He is in the building over there.”

        “Thanks”

 I walked over to the tent wondering how this Antwon actually is; he must be some awesome guy to have a name like that, well I will have to find that out for myself. I walked over there and spotted the building, I was feeling nervous because this was my first murder case; because living in a small town like this nothing bad ever happens. I knocked on the door and waited, finally it opened but there was nobody there.

“Hello, I’m here to see Antwon!” I yelled into the room.

“Hey I’m down here!” Said Antwon. I looked down and almost burst out in laughter. He was a midget, not that I hate midgets I just didn’t expect him to be a midget. I mean have you ever seen a midget detective, oh well I’m going to have to work with him so I better get used to it.

“Oh hey there, Officer McHenry sent me to help you out and be your assistant on this case.” I replied while trying not to make a face.

“Alright well the first thing you can do is hand me the coffee on the top drawer and then I’ll tell you everything I know.”  He said with a high-pitched tone.

“Alright so do you have any leads, clues, evidence?” I asked anxiously.

“Hold your horses kid, I just got here. I’ve been waiting for you to get here so we can get some real work done.”

         “Alright so lets get to work.”

        “Ok, go out there and check out the crime scene and I’ll meet you there once I finish my coffee.”

        “Alright.”

I got up from the uncomfortable plastic chair and headed on over past the yellow police tape and examined the scene, I wasn’t sure what to look for so I made sure to make it look like I was working. As soon as I got up to the edge of the cornfield the memory came back, the smell, which was still there, and the bloody body I saw on the floor. It was a cruel memory that will surely haunt me the rest of my life; luckily the body was gone and being look at by professionals to determine the manner of how Tommy died and when he died. 

Finally Antwon got here about ten minutes after I left the building, oh well as long as he gave me a job to do I’d be happy.

“Do you know what to look for?” Antwon asked as if it were a common question.

“I noticed there was a lot of blood were the body was.”

“Yeah, thanks Sherlock Holmes.” He said sarcastically.

“Alright, enough with the sarcasm. I mean that he was probably killed on the spot which means somebody must have scared him outside or was running from something.”

I replied feeling good about my answer.

        “Not so bad for a rookie. You’re probably right but don’t get too cocky we still aren’t sure. Well we will have to wait for the test to get back so we can know how he died and by what weapon so we can got to all the stores and get records of who bought what and when.” Said Antwon with a sound of assurance in his voice.

        “Well that sounds like a plan.” I replied.

Why should we honor veterans? Well veterans are the reason we are free and live in a great country! We should honor veterans for their sacrifice. They sacrificed their families, friends and most importantly put their lives at risk; I think they deserved to be honored. Don’t you?

            William Alexander Smillie Young is one of the many veterans who had survived Pearl Harbor. William Young married in 1939 and had one child who was a boy. In 1941 he was captured by Japanese soldiers while his family escaped. He was taken to a prisoner camp in Borneo in the February 1942 and was liberated three years later. He belonged to the 14^th brigade Royal Horse Artillery unit before this tragic incident. William Young is a great example of a veteran who sacrificed his family for us.

            Herber James Edwards is Great example of a veteran who risked his one life. Edward and two other of his soldiers were captured  while on a rail road from Thailand to Burma and became POW (prisoners of war). They killed a cow for food they desperately needed for him and his fellow comrades. He was caught by the Japanese guards and was sentenced to death, Crucifixion was a common way of torture, so he was tied up on a tree and beaten for days, but he survived, because his friend brought him food and water, he eventually escaped and deserves to be honored.

             Claude Choules was born in march of the year 1901 in Australia and was a veteran of both world wars. Claude Choules was a veteran of both world wars and was busy fighting in the war in his younger years to make friends and most of his friends died on the battlefield that took place in during the wars. The thing is that you also make friends in the army that will always be your friends because you grow a bond with someone that your life depends.

               Veterans always have to sacrifice something and we should honor veterans, if it wasn’t for these men and women we would probably be free like we are today. I believe we should honor veterans for all they had put up with to save strangers they don’t even know.

               I have learned a lot of things this quarter including thing like the art of writing an essay and adding information and detail to the story to make it more alive. The most important I think is the format of an essay. This interests me because you can write a whole essay out of on theory and a prewrite. I think that having a prewrite really helps, but I also think you don’t need one. You can just right a rough draft and work your way up from there. Well I learned a lot, so that’s what matters!

                 All of my writing is original because it came out of my own mind and thoughts. But the veteran’s essay, I’m not sure if it is original because it was assigned and veterans are a subject. I believe I painted a vivid picture for the reader and they hopefully enjoyed reading my essays, I tried to use more advanced vocabulary to enhance the essay and tried to use more transitions to make the word flow easier. I believe I made my stories clear and easy to follow and tried to make my essays interesting so they are more of fun activity then a chore. I revised my essays a couple of times but I lost some of my written rough drafts. I left them in my old folder when I got a new one and they got thrown out so I was quite disappointed.

                 My best example of our writing focus is my Freedom Essay because I have 5 paragraphs and I’m trying to get a basic message out. I revised it a few times and as I stated in the last paragraph my first rough draft got thrown out with my old binder. It is about my comparison with the amount of freedom and the responsibility it demands. I believe it is my best quality essay.

                  My most revised essay is the veterans essay. I left it on voice thread for about a week but got no comments so I was therefore disappointed and had to rewrite it based on what I thought needed to be changed and/or corrected.

                   My goal for improving my writing for next quarter is to not procrastinate as much and start writing essays earlier. I didn’t procrastinate too much this quarter but I’ll try to do better. I will also try to write more essays, I wasn’t really clear on what to do and how to do it but I got through. I’m going to try harder and ask for more help when I need it. So over all I’m going to try to improve my quality and quantity of essays. 

                        Everyone wants more freedom but maybe they don’t know what freedom is. Freedom according to a dictionary is the right to do whatever you want without being controlled or restricted by anyone else. But if you are going to do whatever you’d like you are going to have to be responsible for what you are doing. So my basic message is that more free demands more responsibility.

                       When you are free you automatically become responsible for your own future. If you are completely free you can do whatever you’d like but your going to have to be responsible for yourself because you are free so no one is responsible for yourself except for yourself. So you have to be responsible for what you do or its going to affect you and your future. Like if you are free to say what you want you have to be responsible for what you say, so you can say bad stuff to your teacher but its going to be a bad idea because you’ll probably get in trouble. And it will affect your future.

                      Freedom cannot be separated from responsibility. It is common for people to try to seek freedom while avoiding responsibility. The fact is that when you have more freedom you have to take care of yourself more so in return you get more responsibilities. Like if you ave the right to go to bed whenever you’d like you would have to think about waking up on time and the amount of sleep you’ll get but if you have a set time everything is already thought out for you.

                      I figured out that you need a perfect balance of freedom and responsibilities to maintain good organization. So you need to find that perfect balance so that you have as much freedom as you can handle and as much responsibility as you can handle. Like playing video games you need a balance of playing them and studying. The less you play the video games the better your grades are because you study more.

                      All of these are great examples on what my “theory” is. So please consider my main point on this essay which is that freedom demands responsibilities. And that you need a good “Ratio” of freedom to responsibilities. I hope my “theory” made sense to you and that you agree with most of my writing.

               Click, click, click. The roller coaster-like ride pulls just pulled in. We were next in line to the Jurassic Park ride in Universal Studios in Florida. My family and I didn’t know what to expect from this friendly looking ride so we took a chance and decided to ride it.

              We stepped into the junky looking boat and found our seats toward the back. At this point I was relaxed and calm, just thinking it was going to be a quite ride with some robotic dinosaurs. The announcer interrupted my thoughts and said “Keep your feet and hands inside your vehicle at all times!” At the pull of the green lever the bucket of metal jerked forward aggressively.

                     It was nice and peaceful with some realistic looking dinosaurs on the side eating grass and what not until we entered this long, dark hanger area. RAHHHR!!!! Raptors popped out of the ceiling and I was scared to the point were I was about to jump into the water and swim to Canada. I tried to relax and tell myself they weren’t real but couldn’t and just when  Ithought they were gone a huge T-Rex blocked the exit and I thought we weren’t gonna make. RAHHHR!!!! It growls again as we are going between his legs, everyone on the ride is screaming now. FOOSHHH!!!! We drop down a giant ninety degree drop and land at the bottom were the ride goes back to it’s resting area.

         The rain is falling, falling hard. Although it is not rain it is hail, hail the size of nickels. I was in the bathroom washing my hands and then all of a sudden I hear something hit the roof of the bathroom, so I look outside and see clouds. I immediately ran back to the trailer and hid under our awning.

“It almost never hails in my town,” I thought, so I took advantage of it and sat down and relaxed. I heat the small ice pebbles hit the nylon roof and it was strangely relaxing and soothing. It started to hail really strong but I stayed out there, my dad joined me and we were drinking “mate” (mah-teh), a popular Argentinean tea-like drink. BOOM!!!!! Thunder came out of nowhere, it was not your average, I wish there were no storm thought, it was a bold sound that made you wish the storm would last forever. Looking out and beyond was like one of those old pictures, which had lightning and a beautiful mountain range in the background.

The combination of hail, lightning, and gray cloudy skies were the most beautiful site in the world. The storm slowly came to a close. The hail eased, thunder disappeared, and the sky slowly opened like the way a door of an old house, the one squeak and it was over.        

VROOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I heard the giant sky blue jet boat glide up the crystal like river. It was 6/27/08, two days before my birthday, we were in Oregon on vacation and today we were going to take the famous Hell Gate boat tours. We were nervously waiting in the long line as the final boats were pulling in. The tours were approximately four hours long, so I thought they were going to be boring. I see the last boat coming in from under the bridge and then it does a three-sixty spin going well over sixty mile per hour. That event just change my whole thought about the tour.

            Now I was excited and eager, on the other hand my mother looked scared.

    “Finally” said my brother Patricio. Then the line started moving, as we headed down the boat ramp and stepped into the blue boat we decided to get the seats in the back of the boat because my mom didn’t want to get wet.

            The boat driver, which was also our tour guide, started talking about the boat,          “These boats are custom made to our specifications. They have three big block V8 putting out about 1,250 H.P. ect….”.  He started the boat and a magnificent sound of pure horsepower came out. We left the dock and headed down the river. Steve (the tour guide/driver) started talking about the bird, deer, fish, vegetation, and all that good stuff.

            After about an hour of the tour the fun part came, Steve just gassed the boat and we were going so fast that the front started to lift and we were gliding over it more than through it. The first Three-sixty spin came, we got some speed and then he just turned the boat and we spun. Everything was in slow motion, I was on the edge of the boat so it felt like I was going to fall off.

            The tour was over faster than I thought it was going to be. Good thing I went on it because that was one of the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

There it stood my new B.C. Rich Revenge Warlock guitar, which is a magnificent pearl white color with a black trim around the edge of the body, and had a long 24 fret maple wood neck with diamond inlays, rose wood fret board, B.C.R. Hum Buckers, Widow headstock, and chrome dials.

“This was an awesome guitar” I said to myself. I got this guitar as a birthday present for my thirteenth birthday. I have been asking for a new guitar for about a year because my old knock off Fender was sounding worse and worse and I wanted something new and fun to play.

 My parents took me to Guitar Center (In Concord), and I played like 100 different guitars until I found one that sounded good and was in my price range. I had come between two guitars at the end, an Ibanez and the Warlock. Both were exquisite guitars but I could only take one home. I was really pressured because half my family waned me to get the Ibanez and the other half wanted me to get the Warlock, and also the sales man was standing right over my shoulder waiting for me to buy one. I chose the Warlock. I like the way the B.C. looked and sounded so I just went with it. So that’s how I got the guitar. To this day I wonder what would have happened if I bought the Ibanez, I guess I’ll never know.