De Amerikaanse schrijver Nick McDonell werd geboren op 18 februari 1984 in New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Nick McDonell op dit blog.
Uit: The End of Major Combat Operations
„XIX.
What the cook thinks of the press.
6am, surrounded by Iraqis, sixty-six hundred miles from Birmingham, pouring eggs out of a carton, in trailer next to a mortar crater.
Reporter: “You’re the cook huh? That’s a pretty Good job, I guess. So did you want to be the cook, or how do you get that job?”
XXIV.
Everyone had talismans. The story was such a cliché that I came to think of knowing what the soldiers carried for luck as a kind of reporter talisman. A mental rabbit foot, reassurance that you were not part of the circus, that in fact you were standing outside the tent and not responsible, somehow, for the all misunderstandings. As if, because you were not shooting, you were not as important (and therefore unimportant) as every GI. So, get this, I met a guy who carried a page from a little bible in a pocket on every limb.
More likely to save you than your talisman was your body armor, but lot of guys said that if it was up to them they wouldn’t wear the stuff at all. No one could outrun a ball bearing, but the thinking still was that it slowed you down. It was heavy, uncomfortable. Everyone always did wear it, though, and there were a lot of stories about how well it worked. One was about a sergeant who was walking in line through a palm grove when an insurgent popped up, maybe fifteen feet ahead of him and fired off a burst of rounds square into his chest. The sergeant went down, all the air blown out of him, but the armor stopped the rounds. His friends, not far down the road, were still lining the shooter up when the sergeant took out the insurgent from the ground, where he lay on his back. But as one Corporal pointed out to me as we talked about IEDs: no body armor on your legs.“
Nick McDonell (New York, 18 februari 1984)