Word: deserter
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...Well you can't keep a good novelist down, and 79 pages into Coetzee's first book since the Swedish Academy lauded the "icy precision" of his prose, Elizabeth is back, as hot and blustery as the wind off the desert. Until this point, Slow Man (Knopf; 265 pages) has been about the unraveling of retired photographer Paul Rayment in Adelaide. After his bicycle is clipped by a car, he loses first his leg, then his dignity and, perhaps, his mind. Dour of disposition and without family, he's drawn to his hot-blooded Croatian nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose troublesome...
...says, "but it's gotten harder with a blended family and most of our kids, ranging in age from 28 to 37, not living near us in Nashville." When the couple unveiled their plans, not every child was totally happy. Her 33-year-old daughter asked, "How can you desert us?" But it worked out fine. "You realize your kids can manage," Dianne says, adding that she did assuage her guilt with the one distraught daughter by cooking a traditional Christmas dinner for her and her friends four days before leaving for France...
...last time I was in an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter, it was screaming over the Iraqi desert, doors open, hot air blowing in like a blast furnace. That was in 2003, when I was an embedded reporter with an Air Force combat rescue unit. Today, as we tear across the woodlands of central Mississippi, I'm once again surrounded by guys in uniform whose mission is the same: to rescue people in need. But this time we are in my own country. The scene looks like a war zone, houses blown to splinters, cars abandoned on the roads, crowds...
...with it. But I was struck dumb on the first night of the war. I was just absolutely terrified. Nothing prepares you for being suddenly on the front line of an invasion, with 200 cannons going off, and people returning fire, and being in the pitch black in the desert, knowing that you're just going forward across the line of departure, and into the complete unknown on the other side. Nothing prepares you for that level of anxiety. I think most of the embeds felt it. I, perhaps, because I didn't really want to be there...
...just a normal cross-section of society. You had the bookish Marines, you had the sporty marines, you had the geeky Marines. Every walk of life was represented. The only thing they had in common is that they were highly trained killers, and happened to be in the Iraqi desert...