Word: bells
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Before he left for Iraq, Shaun Blue never talked about the war with his friends. He didn't need to. "We all knew where each other stood," says Mike Bell, a fellow Marine who attended the University of Southern California with Blue. They were juniors when the war began. "All of us wanted to go. All of us wanted to be there...
...asked for a copy of Moby Dick as a Christmas present in second grade.) In college he was as serious about conditioning his body as he was his mind. He played pickup basketball in some of L.A.'s toughest neighborhoods. Once, late at night, after drinking beer with Bell, Blue told Bell he was going for a run. He donned a flak jacket for added weight and ran the darkened L.A. streets alone for hours, finally returning to the house shortly before dawn...
Blue set off for his first deployment to Iraq on July 4, 2005. He joined the Marine campaign in Anbar province, leading a platoon in the Fallujah area. Even in the desert reaches of Iraq, Blue found ways to call Bell and his younger sister Amy Blue, who was living in Ireland at the time. "Those phone calls from him were the highlights of my days," says Amy. "Hearing him across all those miles, it was like he was right there with me." He was killed halfway through a second tour in Anbar, while riding in the passenger seat...
...wanted to fight," says Bell of his fallen friend. "He really, really did. He couldn't wait...
...plague of modernity has brought to our backbiting a new crudeness. We have eschewed toady gentility in favor of self-serving strife. And now the scoundrels bring us Risk, to rearrange that nasty competitive instinct along arbitrary House lines. The opening bell had hardly sounded before the color-coded trash-talk began. Those same horrid specimens who might otherwise have greedily withheld a study guide or sabotaged a classmate’s project instead spend their hours hijacking his account and sending his beloved soldiers to their doom. The effect is less severe, but the motive just as inglorious...