Word: weste
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...forget who exactly had thought the idea up, but I remember, after a brief and excited discussion, pinning a printout U.S. map to the wall, with a thin pencil line charting a bus route from East Coast to West. Going cross-country by Grey-hound, I thought, would be something: distance I could feel. More pressingly, my free moments were ticking away. Summers were starting to disappear, and in the not so distant future I’d have to get a job that, unless I became a teacher like my parents, would involve a sprinkled dribble of vacation days...
...nighttime you pass cities briefly and only once in a while, because those rides are just getting from one place to another. No one talks on the night buses. As the buses got further south and west the drivers make their announcements in Spanish. “Cinco minutos aquí.” Sometimes we would pass a truck on a country road with the truck coming in our direction and the bus would vibrate a little with the shadow of impact...
...been devastated by unrelenting Taliban IED attacks. Since their deployment in July, more than 30 soldiers from that brigade have been killed by roadside bombs. Gates had a message for them: "We're in this thing to win." Obama had said nothing of victory during his speech to the West Point cadets. "You can't tell soldiers to fight for a draw," says one of Gates' staff aides. But Gates never got to give his pep talk. There would be no trip to Kandahar, or anywhere for that matter. The helicopters were grounded by the Afghan weather...
...Whatever Gates chooses to take a position on, Gates is the single most influential guy," says Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a skeptic of the Administration's strategy in Afghanistan. Gelb points out that in early December, days after President Obama's West Point speech announcing his decision to send 30,000 additional troops (on top of the 32,000 deployed in 2009) to the war zone and then begin bringing them home in July 2011, Gates went on the Sunday talk shows to say the withdrawal would depend on conditions...
...Minister in November, Gates was told that when he entered through the East Wing, a gauntlet of press would ask him what he was wearing. "Why would they ask me that?" he replied. Not wanting to be part of the red-carpet scene, he slipped in through the quiet West Wing entrance and went straight to the bar. For dinner he ate half a basket of dinner rolls, preferring them to the gourmet Indian-fusion cuisine being served to the dignitaries in the dining room...