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Thursday, August 28, 2003
Take two Tom Clancy's and call me in the morning
War cheerleader Austin Bay proves that you can get a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and still write.....well, crap:
Our unit reached the Euphrates at three that morning, a full hour ahead of the generals' war plan. As the lead vehicle plowed down the sand bank toward a line of river reeds, mortars moving behind the recon platoon fired two red flares, the flares hanging up there, high, burning hard and long, arcing beneath the winter clouds in the night air over the water. The flares were bright, almost dazzling, and we could see ourselves in outline, tanks, men, the river, the world with a hot red edge.
And that was the moment. We stopped, all of us, and to a man, as if we were the same guy, we pumped out a whoop and shout that for a second seemed to stifle the idling whine of tank engines.
The whoops quit, the flares died. We looked at the muddy river out there in the dark that wasn't total. Since we were so used to the high-speed racket of a tank attack, those first moments at the river felt still --so flat, perfect still-- the clouds, the wet air, the world stopped cold except for the slow, molten water.
But hesitating there, strung out along the river bank after our race in the south Iraqi desert, even as it happened --if you snapped to facts-- you knew the magnificent sense of peace and calm was mental sham. Radio chatter from brigade, the tank engines, the sonic crack of jet aircraft, though numb ears ignored them they persisted, and they are not the details of peace.
Yet the sensation of it, the stopping hard at the river with the killing behind us, that sensation was so decent, a change of immediate condition you knew was better, and if you've been dulled by the quality hammering you take driving cross-country in a sixty-ton armored can, a few seconds of stillness will fool you, bait you with enough fraud calm to get you believing in peace.
I don't know. Do I prefer "mental sham" or "fraud calm"?
In all fairness I shouldn't compare Bay to Clancy, that's cruel. Austin Bay is more like Special Olympics Hemingway.
He has my permission to use that as a jacket blurb....
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