to wave in Harraday’s face, a gesture that defined the knife-edge of identity and proved to Harraday that, whatever Harraday was, Danny wasn’t that.
Instead of going to dinner, Danny made his way to the latrine, where he took off his uniform jacket and carefully rolled the sleeves of his T-shirt in overlapping folds, which made his bulging biceps look almost as big as, if a little softer than, Kelly’s biceps looked when he rolled his sleeves the same way. Danny glanced behind him to make sure he was alone, listening carefully for the sound of footsteps on the packed earth outside the door. But most of the troops were in the DFAC and all was quiet. He stood at attention in front of the rectangular sheet of metal that served for a mirror and searched his face for signs of what he was thinking and was glad when he couldn’t find any. Then he took a deep breath and thrust his fist into the air. The exposed ridge of arm muscle hardened, and for a moment he didn’t recognize himself. His gray eyes darkened a shade closer to black, and his brows soared above his nose like the wings of a raptor.
Danny was startled to find that the gesture had both an outside and an inside. All he had known of it before was what it had looked like when someone else did it and also that it had worried him, the kind of worry that turned to anger before you knew it was really fear. But now, standing in the latrine where the only observer was a tinny mirror image of himself, he felt the adrenaline rush and almost understood what Kelly and Pig Eye had been thinking when they had practiced the gesture on the rest of the battalion. He could almost feel, rising within him, a big Fuck You to the war.
2.4 Le Roy Jones
L e Roy had to laugh. All he had to do was say “slave labor” and everyone’s panties were in a twist. He had to laugh at the fresh, unbaked faces of the new recruits, who didn’t know the first thing about war but were about to find out. And there was Pig Eye, waving a torn envelope and wondering now that the US of A had them in Iraq, was it allowed to keep them there?
“Shit, man, they can do anything they want,” said Le Roy. “Isn’t proving that the point of the war?”
“But,” said Pig Eye, and then he just stood with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out and the letter hanging limp at his side.
“Slave labor,” he said to Kelly, and it was a beautiful thing to see that man’s muscles tense and his eyes become hard and dense, like if you touched Kelly’s trigger, they’d come shooting out of their sockets straight at you. Kelly could be a politician, the way people automatically looked in his direction—if he could control his temper, that is. If he could control his mouth.
Velcro said, “Nobody here cares what color you are, Jones. You have to go back home for that.” But Velcro was like an android, strictly by the book. If something wasn’t written down in a manual, Velcro didn’t know about it. So Le Roy said, “Slave labor” to the new recruits, and he laughed to see their jaws drop open and their eyes go wide. Jeezus, it was funny. What did they think they were getting into? What did they fucking think?
It was funny until a current of something that wasn’t quite so funny ionized the air around him. It was what his girlfriend E’Laine would have called paranormal because she believed in electromagnetic fields and how energy was neither created nor destroyed, which meant that when people died, their life force had to go somewhere—and where it went, she insisted, was either into other people or into the atmosphere, so that at any given time a person might be surrounded by a hundred souls or blobs of plasma and electrons or whatever it was that hadn’t yet found a new body to inhabit.
So it was natural Le Roy thought of E’Laine when the current made the hairs on his arms stand up, for even though he considered E’Laine’s energy conservation theory to be superstitious and probably false,
Instead of going to dinner, Danny made his way to the latrine, where he took off his uniform jacket and carefully rolled the sleeves of his T-shirt in overlapping folds, which made his bulging biceps look almost as big as, if a little softer than, Kelly’s biceps looked when he rolled his sleeves the same way. Danny glanced behind him to make sure he was alone, listening carefully for the sound of footsteps on the packed earth outside the door. But most of the troops were in the DFAC and all was quiet. He stood at attention in front of the rectangular sheet of metal that served for a mirror and searched his face for signs of what he was thinking and was glad when he couldn’t find any. Then he took a deep breath and thrust his fist into the air. The exposed ridge of arm muscle hardened, and for a moment he didn’t recognize himself. His gray eyes darkened a shade closer to black, and his brows soared above his nose like the wings of a raptor.
Danny was startled to find that the gesture had both an outside and an inside. All he had known of it before was what it had looked like when someone else did it and also that it had worried him, the kind of worry that turned to anger before you knew it was really fear. But now, standing in the latrine where the only observer was a tinny mirror image of himself, he felt the adrenaline rush and almost understood what Kelly and Pig Eye had been thinking when they had practiced the gesture on the rest of the battalion. He could almost feel, rising within him, a big Fuck You to the war.
2.4 Le Roy Jones
L e Roy had to laugh. All he had to do was say “slave labor” and everyone’s panties were in a twist. He had to laugh at the fresh, unbaked faces of the new recruits, who didn’t know the first thing about war but were about to find out. And there was Pig Eye, waving a torn envelope and wondering now that the US of A had them in Iraq, was it allowed to keep them there?
“Shit, man, they can do anything they want,” said Le Roy. “Isn’t proving that the point of the war?”
“But,” said Pig Eye, and then he just stood with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out and the letter hanging limp at his side.
“Slave labor,” he said to Kelly, and it was a beautiful thing to see that man’s muscles tense and his eyes become hard and dense, like if you touched Kelly’s trigger, they’d come shooting out of their sockets straight at you. Kelly could be a politician, the way people automatically looked in his direction—if he could control his temper, that is. If he could control his mouth.
Velcro said, “Nobody here cares what color you are, Jones. You have to go back home for that.” But Velcro was like an android, strictly by the book. If something wasn’t written down in a manual, Velcro didn’t know about it. So Le Roy said, “Slave labor” to the new recruits, and he laughed to see their jaws drop open and their eyes go wide. Jeezus, it was funny. What did they think they were getting into? What did they fucking think?
It was funny until a current of something that wasn’t quite so funny ionized the air around him. It was what his girlfriend E’Laine would have called paranormal because she believed in electromagnetic fields and how energy was neither created nor destroyed, which meant that when people died, their life force had to go somewhere—and where it went, she insisted, was either into other people or into the atmosphere, so that at any given time a person might be surrounded by a hundred souls or blobs of plasma and electrons or whatever it was that hadn’t yet found a new body to inhabit.
So it was natural Le Roy thought of E’Laine when the current made the hairs on his arms stand up, for even though he considered E’Laine’s energy conservation theory to be superstitious and probably false,
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