Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green

Informationen zum Autor Johnny Rico is the author of  Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green  and works as a freelance writer for magazines such as  GQ, Penthouse,  and  Men’s Journal.  His assignments have seen him going undercover in the US Army’s CONUS Replacement Center, interviewing mercenaries in Nepal, and racing across the earth as part of the Mongol Rally. He lives in the United Kingdom. Klappentext Outrageous, hilarious, and absolutely candid, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is Johnny Rico's firsthand account of fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, a memoir that also reveals the universal truths about the madness of war. No one would have picked Johnny Rico for a soldier. The son of an aging hippie father, Johnny was overeducated and hostile to all authority. But when 9/11 happened, the twenty-six-year-old probation officer dropped everything to become an "infantry combat killer.” But if he'd thought that serving his country would be the kind of authentic experience a reader of The Catcher in the Rye would love, he quickly realized he had another thing coming. In Afghanistan he found himself living a Lord of the Flies existence among soldiers who feared civilian life more than they feared the Taliban-guys like Private Cox, a musical prodigy busy "planning his future poverty,” and Private Mulbeck, who didn't know precisely which country he was in. Life in a combat zone meant carnage and courage-but it also meant tedious hours standing guard, punctuated with thoughtful arguments about whether Bea Arthur was still alive. Utterly uncensored and full of dark wit, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is a poignant, frightening, and heartfelt view of life in this and every man's army.Chapter 1 Night Patrol: Dancing with Cornflakes in Afghanistan I was somewhere in the desert at the edge of civilization when the psychosis began to take hold. My heart beats securely and steadily, buried deep somewhere in this gear I wear. It’s buried by bulletproof plates and flack vests and tactical vests and ammunition and global positioning system handheld devices and maps and red star cluster flares and grenades and canteens and cigarettes and gum and Jolly Ranchers, but my heart is in there somewhere. I can feel it thumping securely somewhere deep inside. I feel encased, entombed in a catalog of military waste. My hands, sheathed in thin trigger-ready gloves, feel like distant attachments, moving inexplicably without my knowledge as they crinkle and fist and smooth themselves in nervous fidgety tics. Something’s cutting into my hip. Some buried harness or piece of equipment isn’t fitting well. Something is always sitting wrong. You reorganize, readjust, refit, and go back out, and something’s always cutting you, biting you. My green night vision goggles with their scratched exterior lens make me think that the scratch is out there beyond my Humvee all-terrain vehicle flying through the open desert. I’m always wondering what’s beside that building or on the side of the mountain, and I have to always remind myself seconds later that it’s only my scratch. My little lens scratch. I can’t get foreground and background to come into focus simultaneously. I keep rotating my focus lever until I get tired and just leave everything blurry. It’s like playing with rabbit ears on an old decrepit television; you can’t get good reception no matter how much you mess with it. My night vision goggles keep slipping. I need a new mount. Mounts are hard to come by. Some guys had been waiting for mounts before we left for this deployment. The mounts had supposedly been “on order” for the last six months. I should’ve just gone on line and bought a new mount myself from a private company, and then I’d have had mine in six weeks like everyone else. It was the principle of the thing, though. I didn’t want to buy any more of my own gear. I’ve already spent thousands outfitting myself for the war, and ...

Product details

• Authors: Johnny Rico
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 24.04.2007
• EAN: 9780891418979
• ISBN: 978-0-89141-897-9
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 17 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries