Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

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So Ted got drafted and I got drafted and sent to South Korea. Ted went into combat, into the war, and I didn’t. When he got out of the army and returned to Akiak he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He had survived the bullets, but he couldn’t stand being back in Akiak. He had nightmares from all of the killings. He survived that, survived enemy bullets, but he couldn’t survive alcohol. We actually ended up coming back to Akiak at almost exactly the same time, except that he came from Vietnam and I came from South Korea.

Frank taught me a lot when I was younger, but I was close with all of my brothers. Walter was one of the top sprint mushers in the Bethel region. He was the best in the west, you might say. In 1983 he competed in the Iditarod and finished in thirty-first place. That year Rick Mackey won and the race was still slower. It took longer than twelve days to take first place. Walter finished in over fifteen days.

For a while after that I kept asking him if he wanted to keep running the Iditarod and he said he did not. He said, “No, Mike, you do it. I’ll just run the Kuskokwim 300.” And that’s what he did. He won all of the races around here for about ten years, the short ones and the middle- distance ones. For us, the Kusko 300 in Bethel, which everyone thinks of as the best and biggest middle-distance race, was even more important than the Iditarod.