Hella Nation - Evan Wright [17]
When the Americans say good-bye and walk back to their Humvees, Raheem follows. He becomes agitated, eager to say something, but uncertain of how to express himself. He grabs one of the Americans’ arms and asks, “How do I show my love?” The Americans look at him, puzzled.
“In my country,” Raheem starts, “I show love to my friend by hold his hand or put my hand on his shoulder. How do I show love to Americans?”
Quast takes his hand and shakes it good-bye.
BY THE TIME QUAST’S PATROL arrives back at the Wolf Pack compound, the second squad of the Fifth Platoon is preparing for its own patrol. Farrar grabs his helmet and groans. “The first thing I do when I get out of the Army is, I’m going to get some piece-of-shit job, go in to work the first day with my uniform fucked up, French fries hanging out of my mouth, all blazed, and they’ll say, ‘You’re fired!’ And I’ll say, ‘Fuck you, too,’ and walk out of there laughing. You can do that in the civilian world.”
One of the men asks Quast about that run to the Kandahar McDonald’s they’ve been talking about for days now. Quast steps up: “I’ve got some news about the McDonald’s in Kandahar.” He stares ahead, his deep-set eyes expressionless. “The translator who told us about that . . . turns out, he lied. There is no McDonald’s.”
The soldiers stare at the sergeant while the news sinks in: There are no Happy Meals in Afghanistan. One naive belief has been shattered, but the others, deeply held among the men in the Fifth Platoon, remain intact—their faith that brotherly love will protect them against the worst evils of war, and that by behaving with characteristically blind but generous American decency, they will triumph in Afghanistan where all others have failed. No one believes in the latter more than D’Angelo, the platoon realist. Though he often complains bitterly about his failure to engage the enemy in combat, he occasionally brings up his father’s experience in Italy during World War II. “My father’s family hid in a cave when the Americans invaded and fought the Germans. My father was seven, and his face was bleeding from a cut. They could hear the Americans outside, and my grandmother wanted to take him out to get medical attention. My grandfather said no, but they took him anyway. The Americans fixed his face up and gave them food.” D’Angelo stretches out his sleeve, showing off the flag and his patches for Ranger and Air Assault school. “Those were American soldiers.”
PISS DRUNK
It’s nine-thirty in the morning, and Jim Greco, rising star of professional skateboarding but in his own words a “regular, moderate dude,” weaves across the white carpet in his new, all-white luxury apartment just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, sucking on a jug of pink Gallo wine. With his black hair pomaded up in an unruly mass of spikes, black jeans and studded leather wristbands, Greco, twenty-three, bears a spooky resemblance to doomed punk rocker Sid Vicious. But when he speaks, the obtuse inflections that come out of his mouth are pure Italian-American—sly, menacing but playful, like De Niro in some street-corner role. Greco has the build of a bantamweight fighter, and his hands are gnarled and swollen from repeated abuse. “I broke my right hand three times over,” he says, reeling off a string of bar fights he’s gotten into while he was blacked out. “Then I made ghost”—he explains, using one of his own idiosyncratic expressions, “make ghost,” meaning “to leave town”—“and went to Phoenix and got into another fight when I had a cast on. My knuckle kind of healed in the middle of my hand. It’s baraka.” “Baraka” is another of Greco’s own terms. It means anything that