him.
“Hey, blood,” Celestine called back when he saw the Marine, a buddy named Wendell Carter, from Houston, his own hometown. He hadn’t known the guy there, but knew of his neighborhood. Just a bit south on Jensen Drive from Celestine’s own set of blocks. Since they lived so close to each other back there, both on Houston’s rough North Side, they called each other “homey.”
Carter stood in a cluster with two other Marines whom Celestine also knew well. The four of them worked at the wing’s communications section, a unit in Marine Wing Support Group 17.
Although fully trained at coordinating air and ground communications, and performing basic maintenance and repair on a variety of radio and telephone equipment, Anderson and these three other air wing Marines of African heritage had found themselves mostly relegated out to security patrols, humping the backache PRC-25 radios and carrying rifles.
“Celestine, my man,” Wendell called to his pal, and put out his right fist.
Anderson put out his right fist, too, and rapped it first on the top of Carter’s, then he tapped the bottom, and after that knocked each side, and finished the greeting by butting his knuckles against those of his friend. To complete the ritual, each man then took his clenched fist and struck it across his own heart, and lastly raised it defiantly above his head.
Dapping, they called it. Its meaning mimicked that of the African Masai warriors’ ritual greeting of his fellow Moran, and symbolized that neither man held status above or below the other, that both were equal, side by side, brothers in spirit and in blood. For Celestine, the greeting represented solidarity among his cohorts who shared his African roots, and his heritage of slavery in America from which his people still struggled to emerge today, even though the chains had been legally broken now for 102 years.
“Look at those fucking niggers,” a skinny, darkly tanned Marine named Leonard Cross said to three of his buddies standing with him in a small circle near the chow hall. The surly crew of four had spent the better part of the day filling sandbags and burning shitters downwind from Chu Lai’s population.
Laddie, as Cross preferred that his friends call him, wore no shirt, and had on scuffed-white combat boots and a pair of filthy utility trousers with the seat ripped out, but showed a failed attempt at a ragged patch job on the pants ass-end and at both knees. As he spoke, he let fly a stream of tobacco-brown spit that landed between his feet, making a small, dark lump in the dust.
“Fucking niggers,” two other shirtless grunts wearing similarly ragged, dirty trousers and scuffed-white boots mumbled in agreement with him.
Harold Rein, the fourth man in the group, who also dressed in the same filthy, disheveled fashion, said nothing, but visibly fumed, staring hotly at the quartet of dark green Marines dapping a dozen yards away from him, also waiting for the chow hall to open for early supper.
Although his mother in Dothan, Alabama, had named him Harold, after her father, nobody here called him by that handle. If they did, he generally let the offender quickly know his dislike for it in verbally harsh and sometimes physically brutal terms. Officers and senior enlisted he let slide, but still set them straight with some strongly worded slurs between “sirs.” People who didn’t want a hard kick in the nuts from Private Rein, or at the very least an earful of profanity, called him Buster.
The nineteen-year-old, already twice promoted to private first class, and likewise twice demoted back to buck private, sported a cartoon bulldog wearing a Marine campaign hat tilted over his eyes and then under-struck in a crescent below the bulldog’s jowls the letters USMC tattooed on his right forearm. On his left shoulder he had a rebel flag tattooed above a poker hand that held three aces and two eights.
Like his father, Buster Rein’s skin didn’t tan. It just
“Hey, blood,” Celestine called back when he saw the Marine, a buddy named Wendell Carter, from Houston, his own hometown. He hadn’t known the guy there, but knew of his neighborhood. Just a bit south on Jensen Drive from Celestine’s own set of blocks. Since they lived so close to each other back there, both on Houston’s rough North Side, they called each other “homey.”
Carter stood in a cluster with two other Marines whom Celestine also knew well. The four of them worked at the wing’s communications section, a unit in Marine Wing Support Group 17.
Although fully trained at coordinating air and ground communications, and performing basic maintenance and repair on a variety of radio and telephone equipment, Anderson and these three other air wing Marines of African heritage had found themselves mostly relegated out to security patrols, humping the backache PRC-25 radios and carrying rifles.
“Celestine, my man,” Wendell called to his pal, and put out his right fist.
Anderson put out his right fist, too, and rapped it first on the top of Carter’s, then he tapped the bottom, and after that knocked each side, and finished the greeting by butting his knuckles against those of his friend. To complete the ritual, each man then took his clenched fist and struck it across his own heart, and lastly raised it defiantly above his head.
Dapping, they called it. Its meaning mimicked that of the African Masai warriors’ ritual greeting of his fellow Moran, and symbolized that neither man held status above or below the other, that both were equal, side by side, brothers in spirit and in blood. For Celestine, the greeting represented solidarity among his cohorts who shared his African roots, and his heritage of slavery in America from which his people still struggled to emerge today, even though the chains had been legally broken now for 102 years.
“Look at those fucking niggers,” a skinny, darkly tanned Marine named Leonard Cross said to three of his buddies standing with him in a small circle near the chow hall. The surly crew of four had spent the better part of the day filling sandbags and burning shitters downwind from Chu Lai’s population.
Laddie, as Cross preferred that his friends call him, wore no shirt, and had on scuffed-white combat boots and a pair of filthy utility trousers with the seat ripped out, but showed a failed attempt at a ragged patch job on the pants ass-end and at both knees. As he spoke, he let fly a stream of tobacco-brown spit that landed between his feet, making a small, dark lump in the dust.
“Fucking niggers,” two other shirtless grunts wearing similarly ragged, dirty trousers and scuffed-white boots mumbled in agreement with him.
Harold Rein, the fourth man in the group, who also dressed in the same filthy, disheveled fashion, said nothing, but visibly fumed, staring hotly at the quartet of dark green Marines dapping a dozen yards away from him, also waiting for the chow hall to open for early supper.
Although his mother in Dothan, Alabama, had named him Harold, after her father, nobody here called him by that handle. If they did, he generally let the offender quickly know his dislike for it in verbally harsh and sometimes physically brutal terms. Officers and senior enlisted he let slide, but still set them straight with some strongly worded slurs between “sirs.” People who didn’t want a hard kick in the nuts from Private Rein, or at the very least an earful of profanity, called him Buster.
The nineteen-year-old, already twice promoted to private first class, and likewise twice demoted back to buck private, sported a cartoon bulldog wearing a Marine campaign hat tilted over his eyes and then under-struck in a crescent below the bulldog’s jowls the letters USMC tattooed on his right forearm. On his left shoulder he had a rebel flag tattooed above a poker hand that held three aces and two eights.
Like his father, Buster Rein’s skin didn’t tan. It just
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