Colbert’s team drives along a winding canal, watching for enemy forces, while Person discusses the band he formed after high school, Me or Society. A heavy-metal rap group, his band once opened for Limp Bizkit at a show in Kansas City.“We sucked, but so did they,” Person says. “The only difference is, they became famous right after we played together. I became a Marine.”
Colbert brings up a mutual friend in the battalion who listens to death metal and hangs out in vampire clubs in Hollywood.
“You remember that time he went out dressed in diapers and a gas mask?” Person says, laughing appreciatively.
Trombley, who seldom jumps into conversations between Colbert and Person, can’t hide his disgust. “That’s sick. Can you believe we’re defending people’s freedom to do that?”
Colbert corrects him, delivering a sharp civics lesson. “No, Trombley. That’s good that people have the freedom to do that.We’re even defending people like Corporal Person, too.”
Through the heightened alert, Colbert spends the night calming his team.When Garza takes the watch on the Humvee’s Mark-19, Colbert tells him, “Garza, please make sure you don’t shoot the civilians on the other side of the canal.We are the invading army.We must be magnanimous.”
“Magna-nous?” Garza asks. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Lofty and kinglike,” Colbert tells him.
“Sure,” Garza says after a moment’s consideration. “I’m a nice guy.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Colbert says, highly annoyed. He’s lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company
radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. “Sir, our great commander,” he says, referring to Encino Man, “just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them.”
Person laughs. “Brad,” he says, calling Colbert by his first name. “Check it out, over there.” He points to a spot near the barricades into the city. Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.
“Person,” he asks, “are those ducks . . . ?”
“Yeah, they’re fucking.” Person laughs.
While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who’s just finished shaving. “Pappy, you missed a spot.” Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy’s sideburns. “Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little,” Reyes explains.
“The battalion commander thinks I’m a bum,” Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.
“Brother, that’s ’cause he don’t know what a true warrior be,” Reyes says, clowning.
The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy, quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as “your normal North Carolina loser,” and says he’d barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of “husband and wife.” After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy’s head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, “Looking like a warrior, Pappy.”
Walter Hasser, who shot the man in the blue car, is one of the most well-liked Marines in the platoon. He’s twenty-three years old, six feet two inches tall and knows the lyrics to just about every hit country song recorded between 1960 and 1974.Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash are his heroes. He has a beautiful country singing voice, and in his case Colbert makes a special exemption to his “no country music” rule.
Hasser, who has maintained his distant silence for days since shooting the man in the blue car, breaks into laughter. “Look at you, Ray,” he says, pointing at Person. “You’re a fucking mess, man.”
Person’s face is smeared with ravioli sauce, fluorescent orange in the sunlight. More of it’s splattered down his pale white chest, with drippings on his toes. “What?” Person asks, perplexed.
“You’re a fucking messed-up hick who can’t even eat ravioli.” Hasser doubles over, facedown in the grass, laughing.
Swarr is one of the more eccentric characters in the battalion. Tall and square-jawed, he looks like your average Marine, but in his off-hours Swarr is an artist who writes and directs ultra-low-budget videos. “I’m like the Ed Wood of my generation,” he says. “My goal in life is, people will go in the video store and find my movies in the Cult Film section by Toxic Avenger.”
Then the voice of Captain America comes over the radio, quavering and cracking. “Enemy, enemy! They’ve got us on both sides!”
“Oh, my God!” Person says. “Is he crying?”
“No, he’s not,” Colbert replies, cutting off what will likely be a bitter tirade about Captain America. In recent days, Person has pretty much forgotten his old hatreds for pop stars such as Justin Timberlake—a former favorite subject of long, tedious rants about everything that’s wrong with the United States—and now he complains almost exclusively about Captain America.
“He’s just nervous,” Colbert says. “Everyone’s nervous. Everyone’s just trying to do their job.”
“We’re going to die if we don’t get out of here!” Captain America screams over the radio. “They’ve sent us to die here!”
“Okay,” Colbert says. “Fuck it. He is crying.”
Colbert says,“You know, I don’t miss anything from home. The only exception is my bike. I miss that. Speed, solitude and no one can touch me.”
“You mean you’re out here in the middle of nowhere, and you miss being alone?” Person laughs quietly. He doesn’t say anything else, which
is kind of amazing. After a month of insane, nonstop chattering in the Humvee, he barely talks now. When Person detoxes from Ripped Fuel,
endless days of mortar fire, ambushes and sleepless nights behind the wheel of the Humvee, he turns into a soft-spoken guy from Nevada, Missouri, pop. 8,607. He now admits to me, despite his relentless mockery of the Corps, “When I get out of the Marines in November, I’m going to miss it.”
нет, всё-таки надо перечитать. некоторые моменты я всё же упустила.
перечитать и пересмотреть и вообщеееее
пардон, когда о них заходит речь, я начинаю вести себя как полная дура и ничего не могу с собой поделать) просто не обращайте внимания)