In the space of six months, they’d gone from a green and pleasant land to the hell of the battle. Bullets flew before they even got a chance to disembark. It seemed like half the battalion was dead or dying. He would never forget the stink of putrefying flesh mixed with cordite as they made their way through leafy country and across plains.

For most of the time he was protected by the rest of the guys who covered while he stayed well-hidden and picked off the enemy. If he’d been a cowboy, his gun wouldn’t have been long enough for all the notches. He was proud of, and horrified by, his work. They moved on: fighting, skirmishing, surviving.

Until the day a new stink hit their nostrils; the stink of human waste and wasted human life. The tragic parade of living dead, literally lousy, made him throw up. Bernie muttered ‘there but for the grace of God’.

Until that day, Mike Starsky had approached his job as sniper with mixed feelings; the men he picked off would have killed others, but dammit they were human beings and probably conscripted just like him.

But that anyone could do to others what he saw that day changed his mind. As the battalion progressed across the ruins of Europe, he had no compunction in picking them off.

He went home with medals and he let his little son play with them.

“I hope you will never have to see what I did, Davey. Or do what I had to do either.”

Twenty years later, David Starsky found himself in the heart of the jungle, finding the right position to be able to pick off the enemy and pick them off before they saw him.

Like his father, he had mixed feelings about shooting fellow human beings. Until the day, like his father, he came across a camp and saw the haggard ghosts of men in bamboo cages. The stench was unbearable; the human misery insupportable.

He saw what his father hoped he would never see: man’s inhumanity to man.

Like his father, he went home with medals.

Like his father, he used his skill with a gun in the name of law enforcement.

Now he was lying against the wheel of his car, and as the world blurred around him, he remembered white-wall tires, stained with his father’s blood. As he lost consciousness, he thought: “Like father, like son.”

In the episode “Quadromania,” Starsky’s head was slammed into a car window so hard that the glass broke. What happened after Hutch and K.C. found him in that alley?

K.C. drove faster than Hutch thought possible for anyone other than his partner. Rounding corners with near reckless speed, she somehow managed to keep all four wheels on the road. Grabbing the dashboard with one hand to avoid being thrown around in his seat, a familiar strategy, he took hold of the radio with the other and asked Kingston to have Dobey send a black and white to Lincoln & Pine. When they spotted the abandoned cab, K.C. pulled alongside it. Hutch saw no one inside, and his stomach sank when he saw the smashed driver’s side window, the window that had been intact when he’d goaded Starsky into taking on the fare that had turned out to be their perpetrator, Lionel Fitzgerald, disguised as an elderly woman. “…I’m sure he’d be very happy to take you anywhere you’d like to go, ma’am.” Why hadn’t he just let Starsky go home? Better yet, why didn’t he take a closer look at his passenger before driving away?

“Down the alley!” he yelled to K.C., but she was already headed that way. Spotting two figures at the very end of the alley, she gunned it, laying on the horn, which had the desired effect. Fitzgerald turned away from Starsky and toward the sound to see the cab bearing down on him. Suddenly thrust into a terrifying déjà vu, he froze, shrinking back from the oncoming cab.

Jumping out of the cab, K.C. and Hutch found Starsky sitting on top of a wooden crate. Hutch released the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding and they both rushed to him. Hutch paused for a brief moment to look at Fitzgerald, muttering lines of dialogue in a near catatonic state, and quickly decided he was no longer a threat. As he neared his partner, he could see blood on his left cheek.

“What took you so long?” Starsky asked lightly, trying to calm Hutch’s fears. He was too dazed to flash a grin at his partner, but could read the worried posture the moment he was able to bring him into focus.

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