Generation Kill
A friend of mine lent me Evan Wright’s Generation Kill. I nearly abandoned it after the first chapter, as the requirement for starting the reader in media res made it appear like just another brainless war book. But I persisted, and am glad that I did. My favourite passage in the book describes Espera, a part-Native American, part-Hispanic Recon Marine:
As he’d gotten older, Espera’s begun to accept that maybe the white man’s system isn’t all that bad. Travelling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to the stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the world live. “All these countries around the world, nobody’s fat,” he says. “Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat.”
Well worth reading the whole book.
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