For more information: Talking PointsNot the War Imagined Page 8: But I did watch a two thousand-pound bomb strike the earth less than thirty yards from me and my platoon. In Army-speak, that was what we would call a “significant emotional event.” And I did shoot some guys—even killed one of them. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was a pretty big deal to me. I saw soldiers bending under the stress of guerilla war in the mountains and in cities. I met Iraqi translators who walked the thin line between patriotism and treason every day, for months on end. I ate in their homes. I watched their neighbors call them traitors. I could have easily died at least half a dozen times that I know of. I was scared that I was going to die a hundred times that number.
$25—The Price of an Insurgent Attack Page 203–206 The dive horn began blaring inside my head. Failure was suddenly not just an option. It was likely. For the first time in my life, someone was leveling an RPG at me, preparing to fire. Mother. Fucker. TV had rotted my brain. The guys in the car had no intention of making a break for freedom. They wanted to scrap. Why the RPG round did not fly off the launcher at that moment, slamming into the windshield of my humvee, killing all seven of us, I wouldn’t find out until later that night. For the moment, though, I was using the extra microseconds to think. Suddenly the passenger-now officially a combatant-withdrew the RPG and the door swung shut-for a second. Then, to my surprise, it opened again. We were now coming up quickly on a T-shaped intersection. As the car took a right turn, nearly flipping, the RPG was dropped out of the door, onto the road. We flew right past it. As we came around the corner behind the Passat, we were within fifteen feet of it. I could see people on the sidewalk scattering. It was as if they could sense the impending danger. The corner turned, I saw something else being raised in the back seat and pointed at me-either another RPG or an AK-47. This time I was not going to wait around to find out what it w— Neither was Lawrence on the SAW. He squeezed the trigger on the machine gun and held it there. The sound of this weapon, not twelve inches from my head, it was indescribable. It was so fucking loud that all I wanted was for it to be over. I wasn’t just hearing it in my ears. It was penetrating into my head, making my brain tingle. I didn’t know things could be that loud. Not to be outdone by Lawrence, and still aiming at the Volkswagen’s back windshield, I started shooting . . . and shooting . . . and shooting. All I could think of was that we had no cover. If the gunmen packed inside the still-moving car were able to launch a single rocket-propelled grenade we would be dead. The fear washed over me instantaneously with tsunami-like force. I suddenly became desperate to kill them before they got off a shot, and the only cover I could think of was to keep shooting. It wasn’t a complete thought, though. I didn’t have time for that. It was more like an instinct. I knew that a wall of lead was all we had. My vision quickly became telescopic as the adrenaline forced me to focus on nothing but the back windshield of the car in front of us. All I could see was smoke, flying glass, and red tracers coming from my M4 and Lawrence’s machine gun. Time and space no longer existed as it had only moments before. As I continued to fire into the back of the car, I felt like it would never end. At the moment, with death swirling around me, I felt like I couldn’t be killed—like I was never going to die. Each time I pulled the trigger of the weapon I’d slept with for nearly two years, it felt like had become an extension of my body—as if I were willing those in the Passat to die. And couldn’t pull the trigger fast enough. Detachedly, I noticed Corn trying to squirm between Lawrence and me. I could feel him trying to get in on the action. He managed to fire three or four rounds before he got squeezed out. Lawrence, on the other hand, continued to hammer away at the car by coldly and steadily using up his ammunition. The sound and vibrations of our barrage began to swallow me up and my vision became tunneled. Because of that, I didn’t see two gunmen roll out of the left door of the back seat. Lawrence did however, and he drew a bead on both of them, knocking them down with his second long burst from the SAW. I kept firing into the back of the car. The cacophony of gunfire continued for an eternity-or five or ten seconds. Hot brass shell casing were pinging every which way-bouncing off the railing of the humvee, off of the each other, onto the sandbagged floor, onto the concrete below. Finally something in the trunk of this car-not twenty feet in front of us-made a popping noise and caught on fire. The blue Volkswagen Passat rolled to a stop. I’m in the bottom of a well. Someone is yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” I know that I’m not shooing my gun anymore, but this is all I know. I was still staring at the Volkswagen in the light of the streetlamps, I could feel people moving around me. People are jumping out of the humvee. I’m not sure what to do. The barrel of my weapon is hot. It feels just like it does after we shoot at the range or in live fires. I have just finished firing it. I think I’m out of ammo. Is this real? Was I just in a shootout? Then I snapped back. I should jump out of the humvee. I moved. The first thing I noticed was that we had clearly won the fight. There were bodies and shards of glass everywhere. There was blood starting to pool. The next thing I saw was a soldier from one of the other humvees open the front passenger door of the Passat and pull one of the men out. Apparently he was still alive. Where did he come I turned around, looked back at the intersection, and started to move in that direction when I noticed the first RPG lying in the road. “Hey I need some help over here,” I called back in the direction of the Passat. No response. “Hey!” Nothing. Everyone was busy crawling all over the carnage. Fuck it. I ran out into the intersection and grabbed the RPG launcher. When I picked it up, the round started to fall out. Quickly, I moved to catch it before it hit the ground. If its been fired . . . All I needed was for the round to detonate on contact. I’m back in the Shah-e-Kot Valley, where Takhur Gar looms above me. I’ve just been told that the thing that fell out of the sky on my platoon’s position mere moments ago was a two thousand-pound satellite guided bomb dropped by an Air Force F-16. No one knows yet why it didn’t go off. It would have killed all of us. I don’t know this at the time, but no one will ever give me a satisfactory explanation. Now, nineteen months later, it’s happened again. As of that moment, I should have been dead twice. Not in the “that sure was close” way you experience in busy interstate traffic, but in the “This is no shit-I’m really not supposed to be here anymore” way. Page 211–212 “Hey Hameed, what’d you say to that guy?” I asked curiously. “I tell him,” he said in heavily accented English, “I make him eat his own guts if he doesn’t give us information.” “Yah, he says he was paid twenty-five dollars to attack TOC.”
What are the Rules? Page 118 No one had expected anything like this to happen. They had just quit. They had relinquished Babylon. And the people knew it too. The swell of on lookers began getting louder and more cheerful about the situation. It was as if none of us knew what to do. In our moment of victory over the Baath Party we were confused, and the Iraqis seemed to be as well. The sudden change in circumstances caught everyone off guard. No one knew whether to celebrate or to continue bracing for explosions. No one knew who was in charge anymore. You could hear the vacuum in authority sucking restraint out of the city. Page 119 Page 139–140 This wasn’t what I’d been trained for. I didn’t want this. It confused me. Where was the real enemy?
State of Insurgency Page 174 Pg 175 Pg 176–177 Pg 188–190 It was if no one had read a book on resistance movements and insurgencies—or seen the movie Red Dawn. It goes like this in every insurgency: there are few fighters that have a real political agenda for killing both the invaders and those who would build a new government, there are a few foreign zealots, a few religious zealots, a few more foreign religious zealots, and then there are the rest of them—the overwhelming majority of whom are young, impressionable, male, unemployed, bored and pissed about, among other things, the fact that their uncle was killed in an air strike or their cousin was killed at a traffic control point for not stopping soon enough. Without this last group there would be no insurgency. The population just wouldn’t support it in a place like Iraq. Maybe in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq. The New IED Page 194 Guns & Roses Page 121 Keeping both hands on the wheel, he was nodding his head backward, pointing with his eyes toward the back seat. I could see that he was smiling. I was confused. Slowly I took my gaze from his face and moved it along the car toward the rear window of the moving car. I expected to see some form of weaponry pointed at me. Instead, I saw a little girl of no more than five wearing a white dress. She was outstretched, leaning half of her small body out of the car’s backseat window. Her arm was fully extended. In her tiny hand she held a rose. Then things became clear. I said, “Hey man, get closer.” “What?” Hemingson asked incredulously. “Just do it,” I said, shifting my gun to my other hand. “Slow down and get closer.” When he did, I stretched out my arm in its desert camouflage sleeve, reaching for the little girl. A moment later I grasped the stemless rose, briefly touching her hand. With the flower now in possession, I withdrew my arm. She smiled at me. For a brief second I smiled back. As we began to pull away from the white car I glanced back at the man driving. Still smiling, he simply nodded at me. The Voice Page 17: Page 19: Page 85: But that’s when the Voice on the radio alerted us of an enemy mortar strike. I was told to gear up for a counterattack. While Croom hurried back to his truck, I wondered how anyone could have found us so far out in the middle of nowhere. Friendly Fire Page 86 I stuck my head out of the truck, looking for Sergeant Croom. “Hey, c’mere. You gotta hear this shit! An F-16 just took out one of the fuckin’ Patriots!” He said, “No shit? Anybody hurt?” I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. “Uhh, I don’t know. They didn’t say anything about that.” Page 93 Perplexed, I asked him why. This makes no sense at all. “Sir, they said it’s a friendly grid. They said we just called in a mortar strike on our own scouts.” I am stunned momentarily. How can the scouts be that close to the sniper? That can’t be. Wait a second…A new thought begins to materialize in my rattled brain. “No. No,” I shake my head. Those rounds were close…Diaz saw one impact behind him,” I stammer. Jaw dropping surprise does not begin to describe what I am feeling. If it’s true…Words like “friendly fire” and “fratricide” begin to dance behind my eyes. “No sir,” Taylor says. “Battalion says that scout snipers are behind us and that they were engaging targets in the valley and they just reported being fired at.” I have now fumbled my platoon through our first combat action. I have ordered my soldiers to fire on their own scouts and asked my forward observer to drop mortars on these same soldiers. This is not my fault, but I can see that this type of work is not as easy as it looks on TV. Desensitized Page 102: Your personal weapon becomes the needle, and every time you charge the handle to lock and load before a mission, you inject the adrenaline, which, over time will become like heroine to you. You let yourself drift into an emotional coma. If you didn’t, you would go mad. Page 104: Or with RPGs and small arms fire. Page 106: Page 115 Fear Page 19: Page 21: Earlier that morning we’d been told we were going to war. The World Trade Center was still smoldering and, according the deployment order I held in my hand, we were part of the payback plan. I had been a platoon leader for 53 days. Page 84 Anaconda Page 32–33 At the time, only one American soldier had been killed at the hands of an armed enemy in nearly a decade. To most of the guys in the unit, the idea of someone really dying in combat was still abstract. We had been rocked gently to sleep every night by the thought that we would never be sent into a situation that wasn’t peacekeeping, security, or just something totally lopsided. A battle this size hadn’t happened since Vietnam. Operation Anaconda was legendary battle two days after it started. By the time it ended, it was already gaining an odd sort of mythical status in Army circles. Even though it was a small operation when compared to everything that happened later in Iraq, the mystique of Anaconda has remained. It had all the elements of a memorable battle, I guess. Elite American units. An enemy willing to stand his ground. Sweeping landscapes. American troops pinned down. Army Rangers refusing to leave a man behind. Massive bombing. Snipers. Mortars. And most of all, payback for September 11. It sounded great. It was everything I’d ever wanted as a kid designed to put the squeeze on hundreds of al Qaeda fighters found massing in the Shah-e-Kot Valley of eastern Afghanistan. Aiming to capture or kill them all in one place, the Army had devised a plan to encircle the valley with elements of the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain Divisions. Once the terrorists were trapped, friendly Afghan forces and their U.S. Army Special Forces sponsors would attack into the valley, covered by close air support. I gazed at the TV screen standing next to Sergeant Collins. Things just didn’t sound right. Abandoning vehicles? After spending several minutes scrutinizing every word out of the mouth of the newscaster, I began to think that if something had gone so terrible wrong, then it wouldn’t stand for long. Page 41 Page 44 Corruption Page 133 Page 157–158 I thought about that and realized that the guy’s plan had actually almost worked. That was how raids went in Baghdad—one guy would feed bad information to the American so that we would fuck with a guy that had fucked with him. The next night Croom suggested we go have dinner with Ammar’s family at their house in Daura. He was a sucker for home cooking, At first I was hesitant, buy then considered that we deserved it after another wasted raid that afternoon. An old guy had come to us at a traffic control point and given Ammar and Croom a tip. This time it was a weapons cache belonging to one of Saddam’s men, who also happened to be the guy’s neighbor. When we pulled “Saddam’s man” and his terrified family from their home and out into their front yard, the women and children were sobbing uncontrollably in standard raid fashion. The guy didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Then something dawned on him and he asked Ammar if this had anything to do with his neighbor. My shoulders had slumped, defeated. This time it was about a feud over a staircase. “Saddam’s man” had built a staircase that went up to his roof along the side of his house. The problem was, that on the staircase, you could see down onto the next-door property. He told us that, aside from being paranoid and senile, the old guy had become quite upset recently and accused him of spying on the man’s wife and daughters. I looked over the guy’s huddled, crying family. I was sure that they expected we were about to cart their husband and father off to Abu Ghraib over a dispute with their neighbor. I took one look at Croom and could see sweat running in rivulets down his bald head—probably from the combination of embarrassment and frustration. I tapped him on the arm. “Come on, man. Let’s get the fuck outta here. We’re wasting our time.” Easter Ordnance Hunts Page 143 I spent most of my second day in Baghdad tracking down the unexploded ordnance deposited by Air Force and Navy aircraft—along with that left by the retreating Iraqi Army. That day was like a big Easter egg hunt. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were actually competing with future insurgents to see who could collect the most Easter eggs by dark. Throughout the afternoon we found unexploded bombs, artillery pieces, caches of RPGs, and piles of anti-aircraft ammunition. Most of it we couldn’t transport in our humvees, so we just copied down the GPS coordinate for the piece in question and marked it on a map. Then we left, never to see it again. A Heartbreaking Day in the Life Page 145–147 The French speaker then managed to get across that the injured boy had been caught in the American bombings of this area several days earlier. He said he’d been hit with shrapnel. As he said it, he reached toward the other boy and pulled down his shirt revealing a row of stitches and dried blood on his chest. He paused, looking at me. Then he pointed to an apartment building and said, “Two children…from there…killed in the same attack.” He looked me in the eye. “You should not kill children.” I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? Does that cut it? I was skeptical buy I decided to give it a try. “Sorry.” The kid must have sensed the awkwardness for me because he suddenly declared, “George Boosh, good.” Then he continued, “But you will understand,” he said, his eyes again meeting mine, “This will be hard for us.” I had to say something then, so I just said, “I know.” At the time it was more or less a lie, since I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. Americans cannot comprehend what the Iraqi people have been through for the last five, fifteen, or thirty-five years. Take an average Iraqi family in Baghdad for instance. You live for twenty years under the reign of Saddam Hussein. During that time daily life is okay. You get an excellent education at Baghdad University, the electricity is always on, and there’s plenty of feed. But you’re cut off from the world—and your city is ruled by the secret police. You can’t say anything against the government, lest you run the risk of having your family tortured and killed. Even if you do support the government, there’s nothing to say you couldn’t run into Uday or Qusay Hussein one night at a restaurant—and that Uday couldn’t take a liking to your fifteen-year-old daughter. You lead an oppressive existence, but for the most part, it’s bearable. Then Saddam invades Kuwait. You talk about it over dinner with your family, and here, in the privacy of your own home, you all decide that this could be disastrous for Iraq. After the war, the United Nations, led by the United States, imposes harsh sanctions on Iraq. At first you think maybe there is a silver lining—that maybe this will force Saddam to change his ways. But then the food becomes rationed—along with electricity and the gasoline. The supply of medicine in the hospital dries up too. You go to the dentist for a toothache and he tells you it needs to be pulled. You say okay. But then he tells you there’s no anesthetic. It’s the sanctions, he says. For twelve long years you live like this—in a city under siege. The thought of a foreign invader coming to handle your own problems is painful to you because you are a proud Iraqi. But with two healthy children and one sick child, your family cannot bear to live like this much longer. Whether you are Sunni, Shia, or Kurd, you being to wish that the Americans would come. At the very least, their coming could not make life worse than it already is under the sanctions. Finally, the first bombs begin to fall. Terrified, you huddle with your family and your dog on the first floor of your home. You’ve barricaded yourselves with cushions from the couches because that’s all you have. As the bombs rattle the windows, through your fear, you think that Saddam and his thug government are finally getting what they deserve. Within days Saddam’s government flees. You are hopeful, buy you still sleep with your family on the first floor. One night you know the Americans are near—you can hear the shooting. You hear a tank rumbling through your neighborhood. You hear it fire once, and the sound is incredible—its deafening It fires again, But this time the round strikes close, shattering every window in your house. The next morning, while sweeping up the glass outside, you find that the American tank round landed in your neighbor’s house, killing his wife and two daughters. Distraught, you confront the first American you see on the foot the next day. You want to ask him what happened—you want to know how this could occur. Don’t the Americans have satellites and lasers to guide their weapons? As you approach the young man in desert camouflage, the first thing he does is point his rifle straight at your chest. You can see that he is more terrified and confused than you are. You show him that you’re not a threat and continue moving in his direction. He screams something at you in English and fires a shot in the air. You plead with him in Arabic that you only want to talk to someone. That is when he comes over and throws you on the ground pointing his weapon at your head. Your family comes outside, crying. Lying there, your face in the dust and your lip now bleeding, you wonder how things have ended up this way. Interpreters/Do Unto Others Page 164–165 For Ammar, it wasn’t a question if he would do it, but of how much stuff he could bring and how much more money he was going to make. Mohamed was a harder sell. He told me that he was going to have to discuss it with his family for a few days. I was disappointed to hear that he was considering not coming because I’d gotten so used to working with him over the past several weeks. The morning of the day before we left, Mohammed announced as soon as we picked him up for work that he would be joining us on the trip. He seemed reluctant, but resolved to go through with it all the same. I felt that it wasn’t any of my business to really probe and find out what the issues were. I just accepted his decisions and left it alone. All he asked was that he get to go home that afternoon to gather his things and to have a final dinner with his family that evening. When we picked him up that night, he was waiting patiently with a single bag outside some shops on a prearranged street corner in Daura. When we pulled over he approached with some members of his family. I’d never met them before. His father was balding, middle-aged man, and he was wearing a button-down white shirt and khakis. After I shook his hand, he looked at me enthusiastic, yet somehow hesitant smile. Then he said in broken English, “Please take care of our son. We love him very much.” It was a terribly direct statement and I could sense the fear and concern. It’s funny—that was the only time a parent of one of my guys ever appealed to me directly to take care of his or her son. I still hear those words sometimes. It was something about the way he looked at me when he said them. He had so much faith in us, as Americans, that he was willing to give us his son. Long after I was done with the war, I got an e-mail telling me that American soldiers had shot him behind the wheel of his car when he hadn’t stopped at a checkpoint in time. He had lived, but the three bullets that struck him had permanently mangled his left arm. And even though they’d shot him by mistake, the military refused to provide or pay for his medical care. I often wonder what he thinks of us now. On the ride back, I wondered what the conversations had been like in Mohamed’s house that week. I figured that it was Mohamed’s mother who was terrified of letting him go. In the end, they probably decided that just having an income would make it worth it. I gazed at the sky as it faded from purple to black, feeling the wind rushing in through the open window of the moving humvee. Then I looked at Mohamed riding on the bench in the bed of the truck. He seemed to content and happy; he seemed at peace with having just joined an Army. Maybe he figured he could do some good for his country. The war seemed to be over and the reconstruction looked to be in full swing. I looked ahead at the traffic. Things were looking up. I wondered if this meant that we might be heading home sometime soon. Page 167 I walked toward Ammar and asked him what they’d said. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said shaking his head and waving me off in his normal cocky manner. “Some punk just called me a traitor.” Friendly Fire Page 177 I am in the mountains, standing next to Sergeant Collins. The Shah-e-Kot Valley, still smoking after an endless week of pounding stretches out before us. It is a clear dusk and now that the sun had dropped behind the ridge to the west, we can each see our own breath. A B-52, thousands of feet above us, is flying in our direction. Without taking his eyes off the plane, Collins says, “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if he dropped his payload right now?” Yeah, it would,” I say. “Hey, wait a sec…What is…” A dozen little pale dots are now visible below the flying aircraft. Slowly, they fall behind it-drifting in our direction. He has dropped his payload of dumb bombs. For a second I want to panic. I realize that if I could run at this altitude, there’s no way I could outrun such a number of bombs. If they are going to hit our position, they will hit it, and we will be vaporized. Even if the pilot has made a mistake, even if he realizes it, there’s nothing he can do to call them back. It has already happened to us once. Reading my mind, Sergeant Collins, eyes still glued to the sky, says, “That’s the kind of shit you can’t run from.” The bombs gradually float directly over us, getting bigger by the second. Their trajectory takes them onto the south side of the mountain next to us, where they impact with not-too-distant thuds. The Fallen Pg 181–183 Ted looked at me, his grin widening. Then he glanced at someone who was standing on the other side of the table. He looked like he thought we were playing a joke on him. “Yeah right. Whatever,” he quipped. “Seriously, why am I not still asleep?” The war wasn’t real yet for Ted. I looked him directly in the eye again. For some reason I had the strange urge to laugh. Nerves. I’d never before announced a death to someone—at least not one that mattered like this did, anyway. I stifled the smirk and kept a straight face. When I spoke, I spoke softly and awkwardly. “No man, I’m serious. We got two dead. Commander’s on his way back with Mike.” Ted’s eyes doubled in size. He grinned again in reflex, except this time he looked nauseous. He said, “Who was it?” I just shrugged. “Don’t know yet.” When Captain Jones burst in with Bandzwolek behind him, they strode directly to our table and sat down. We waited in an awkward silence for 3rd Platoon’s leader. He was coming from the town of Zumar, five miles away. It seemed like hours—the fidgeting and the glances and the nervous exhalations. Finally, he walked though the screen door carrying his green bound notebook. Then we learned details. Justin Garvey and Jason Jordan. I didn’t know either of them personally. I only knew their faces and names—from passing them in the upstairs hallway at Fort Campbell to sharing time in the chow hall line in Kuwait to any other number of places. Five minutes earlier they had just been two sergeants in the mortar platoon. Now, all around the battalion, their names were being seared into our collective memory. It’s like that the first time you’re given the names of people killed in your unit. You get their names permanently branded onto your mind. Someone had fired RPGs at the mortar section’s convoy at nearly the same time as they hit the TOC in Tal Afar. The TOC took only a minor hit from two RPG rounds that took out a chunk from the outer wall, shredded a few cots, and caused one minor injury. The other half of the coordinated attack had turned out differently. The mortar platoon had been conducting a traffic control point that evening, stopping and searching cars, looking for anything out of the ordinary. They had run the traffic stop several miles east of Tal Afar. When they’d finished they had driven several humvees back in the direction of town. They were following the main road that links Tal Afar with Mosul, just after eleven o’clock at night. As they passed through the village of Abu Mariyah, a single RPG round struck the lead vehicle containing Garvey, Jordan and a sergeant named Doug Norman, a former Bravo guy I knew well. It was a one in a hundred shot, hitting the front windshield and killing the two sergeants instantly. Norman was thrown out of the bed of the truck with shrapnel embedded in both his legs. In a burst of adrenaline he was able to get up, recover his machine gun and return fire. He emptied an entire drum of bullets into the darkness, hitting absolutely nothing. Hate Page 186–188 I felt like we had been taken advantage of. We were professionals sent on a wild goose chase using a half baked plan for political reasons. Lying there restlessly, I was reminded of a Schwarzenegger line in one of his movies—when, after being used and lied to, his muscle-bound character had expressed perfectly what was on my mind. My men are not expendable. And I don’t do this kind of work. I longed for the clarity of purpose we’d had in Afghanistan. Building Trust Page 190–191 Reality Page 191–192 It turned everything sour. Driving around rural northern Iraq every day, I was used to seeing the shepherds herding their sheep in open fields. The thing was, they always wore red turbans wrapped around their faces the way you always see Palestinian terrorists wear them in videos and on posters. In the beginning, it was disconcerting to see that every day. The media had conditioned my brain to think terrorist whenever I saw the red mask, not shepherd. But sitting on their donkeys, the teenagers underneath the red masks always waved at us when we drove by. They seemed happy every time one of us waved back to them. Seeing people who looked the way I had been trained to think terrorists looked, and having them wave at me, taught me something about perception and reality. Why the Military Page 22 Page 22–23 What I Wanted Page 122 I was a raving storm trooper, but I was humiliatingly petrified of death. I wanted to fight, but I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I wanted to be a hero and I didn’t care if I was a hero. I felt alive inside, but disconnected from everyone. I loved my family and friends and I didn’t care if I ever saw them again. I was suffering from emotional whiplash. Leaving the Army Page 193 Page 193 Page 193–194 And I’d never felt guiltier. Going Home Page 214–215 Page 217 Page 250 He said of course he was. And then, in his Boston accent, he added, “Yeah, it was miserable…ya know…prob’ly the wust period of my life. I wouldn’t’ eva do that shit again in a million yea’s.” I agreed. Then he paused. “But ya know…we did have a pretty good time didn’t we?” A lot of people can’t understand a contradiction like that. But we can. We are enlightened.
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