Boom, boom

As of this writing, several explosions, presumably small 60mm mortars from the sound and rate of fire, have detonated in the last minute within some nearish distance of where I'm sitting. This has caused widespread ironic cheering among the dozen or so of us in here.

Update: My one line response a moment ago to Mom's email ending with: "I'm glad to know where you are, and that you are safe for the time being."

Yep, relatively safe.

That's probably the most normal and personally unnatural response I've ever written.

The camel's nose in the tent

Through a comedy of errors I won't bother relating I have become stuck at my intermediate destination, a large base in Iraq. Instead of reaching my ultimate post nearly two weeks early, I'll be getting there with the rest of my company.

Which thankfully won't be too much longer. Although my company will be the last to join us, other parts of my battalion began arriving last night. This, alas, is a disaster for my living conditions. The rest of the advance party was kicked out of our temporary individual rooms to go live with everyone else in mass tents. I missed the bag truck and thus stayed alone one more night with 58 degree air conditioning.

Which seemed fine until I went in search this morning of a new home and discovered the few open spots were top bunks cheek by jowl with one thousand privates I don't know, a few lieutenants I sort of know, and immediately adjacent to a company commander I don't answer to. I asked my commander which tent he'd crammed into, and when I went there to look for him and say hi...

HOLY SHIT. He and two other company commanders, two of whom have elements of their companies here and should arguably be sleeping with them, are holding down a single tent that could painfully hold 80. But it could easily hold me in the back half, coincidentally without power to keep me in the dark and forgotten, and with a partition to screen me from their presumed conversations about idiot lieutenants and lieutenant colonels.

Did I dare sneak all of my gear in there without prior permission while they were out? You bet your ass I did. Did I pray CPT S, my easygoing boss, and not CPT B, who eats lieutenants for fun, or CPT F, who is pretty erratic, would find me first? Sure. Did I expect that finding me fait accompli, out of duty unform in PTs would help sell it? Muahaha!

In the event, CPT S and CPT B came in together, initially puzzled as to what fool had stumbled into the dark back half of their tent with a red lens flashlight. When I identified myself and asked if I might stay there out of the way "if you have no objection," CPT S gave a bemused "ok" half a beat ahead of CPT B's "objection!" This led to the further face saving "duh" admonition that I not use their front door.

Tomorrow it is likely my boss will tell me I really shouldn't have tried to muscle in there without permission and will tell someone else that he would have done the same thing. What irks me, however, is that my fellow lieutenants who never would have dared it and would have heaped endless scorn on me if I'd been chased out will never give me the proper respect for my successful gamble to get more privacy and space than almost anyone else in the battalion.

Which I can live with, as long as those sons of bitches don't try to move in next to me and ruin my good thing. Tomorrow's challenge: getting an electrical repair team in to find out why all of my wiring is nonfunctional without attracting attention to my peevesome presence.

Regurgitations I

Here's a republication of the emails sent out to those on my mailing list so far. If there's no computing privacy at my ultimate destination you won't get (m)any more of these, and the email list itself remains the only way to find out in a timely manner if I get blown up, so if you'd like to be added follow the link and email me.

Greetings from Kuwait
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 20:54

I left Colorado Springs Saturday evening and after stops in Bangor, ME and Leipzig, Germany landed in Kuwait just after midnight local time on Monday. It was 94 degrees with about 100% humidity.

We're now at a camp further inland, where it's retarded hot but slightly less humid. Around 2 a.m. it feels like a normal August afternoon in Houston and is quite bearable. Today I took a five minute walk at 2 p.m. and almost passed out.

We spent the first day sleeping in a large airconditioned tent. Today and tomorrow the rest of the company had to go spend an overnight trip on a small unit tactics range. I had to take a finance and range safety officer course and stayed behind, so my first collapse from heat exhaustion is still a few days off.

I'll be leaving Kuwait much earlier than I originally thought. My company will be here most of a month, but I leave in a little over a week for a forward operating base in northern Iraq. All the company level officers with my job are going early to start some preparatory work.

For $5 an hour I can purchase internet access that is much, much slower than my 28.8k modem in 1997. Don't expect daily email updates while I'm here, because I might finish my tour before the email program gets around to loading a second time.

I do not know my address here yet, and it's doubtful that anything sent to me here would reach me before I leave for Iraq. I'll only be on the FOB in Iraq for about 4 weeks before moving to a hell hole patrol base in the middle of nowhere for the next year, so I'm not sure it makes much sense to send mail there, either. I may send you the Kuwait one anyway and trust my company to bring anything that arrives after I'm gone when they join me in Iraq.

Notes on foreign travel and people: All of the old people in Maine have nothing better to do than hang out at the airport shaking the hands of the troops who stop over there, the German airport stepladder guys are 13000% times as efficient as the Kuwaiti ones, the ice cream at the dining facility here is the best I've ever had, and the guy serving it tonight had the most impressive unibrow IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. Seriously, that lump of hair between his brows was almost as big as my fist. I should show him the flyer in our barracks tent for the beauty salon on post. If they'll give me a biking wax for $17.00 and do my back for $20.00, surely they can fix his problem for a hundred or so.

More when I get an address or anything else noteworthy happens.

* * *

Leaving Kuwait
Monday, September 15, 2008 21:19

I'll be leaving Kuwait for Iraq via some method to be determined on Wednesday. I'll initially be at a very large base in a city north of Baghdad.

Of my seven previous days in Kuwait, two were spent doing a moderate amount of stuff, and the rest doing nothing at all. I can only hope higher levels of leadership are productively engaged, because at my level we're sleeping, playing video games, and eating way too much food.

But that changed today, as tomorrow I am the officer in charge (OIC) of a live fire shooting range. During preparation today I walked 94 miles, sweated 11.3 gallons, visited the battalion operations center 28 times, developed 10 blisters (three of which bear sub blisters) and accomplished one and a half useful things. Tomorrow will be better provided no one gets shot in the foot. I give us a 96% chance of success.

My next email should be in a few days from Iraq.

* * *

Hurry up and wait (still in Kuwait edition)
Thursday, September 18, 2008 21:16

For the third day in a row my move to Iraq has been delayed. The first two days all nonemergency flights were banned due to dust/sand storms. The latest delay is because there is a backlog of people who need to go places, and my group is not very high priority. I won't be going tomorrow (Friday, about eight hours ahead of Central) and there's no guarantee it will be Saturday, either. Stay tuned.

Let me describe beautiful Camp Buehring, Kuwait, where I am currently trapped. It's a largish spread of air conditioned tents and cheap permanentish buildings on a flat wasteland of dust and rock interrupted by concrete blast barriers.

There have been almost no attacks on US forces in Kuwait, and I believe zero on or inside our bases, but they put the barriers up just in case. Past units have painted a very large number of them with artwork incorporating their unit crest, motto, and other stuff. Some are very good, many are tacky, a few are surprising. There's one near my tent painted by a Corpus Christi National Guard unit, right next to a medical reserve unit out of Houston. My favorite one has substandard artistry, but is for a medical helicopter evacuation unit with the best nickname/motto ever: they are the "Grave Robbers."

The other form of art here is the grafitti in the latrines. The best collection is, of course, Chuck Norris jokes, including some Army themed ones. "Chuck Norris is his own QRF." (Quick Response Force, the guys who come save you when you're in trouble.) "Chuck Norris carries a .50 cal on a sling." (That's roughly a hundred pounds of machine gun.)

The best one, though: "Even Chuck Norris can't unfuck 1st BCT, 4th ID." We in 2nd BCT, 4th ID, feel the unknown author's pain.

I have almost nothing to do here 3 days out of 5. Today I played computer games for four hours and sat in on a couple of hours of briefs with my commander, who has been gone for a week. Tomorrow I'll have a four hour class on counterinsurgency, and probably goof off in the afternoon. Once I get to Iraq I'll be insanely busy, probably more than any other officers in my company, but for now I plan my day around avoiding boredom and heat interspersed with occasional training.

Next update from Iraq. Probably. Eventually.

* * *

Welcome to Iraq
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 18:49

With four hours warning, I packed my bags and reported to the pick up site at midnight local time. A little over an hour later we'd left our camp here for an airfield about an hour away. We dumped our bags off on a pallet, went inside, and were offered our selection of "Jimmy Deans," the Army's colloquialism for the only biological weapon it allows its soldiers to eat.

I skimmed some of the less disgusting offerings and settled in to watch the world's most confusing dubbed Chinese movie. Mystery Science Theatre 3000, your country needs you! Come back, all is forgiven. My concentration on the incomprehensible movie was periodically interrupted by an Air Force announcer claiming mutually contradictory things about other scheduled flights. I'm glad I wasn't going to Anbar, because within three minutes there were, were not, and were again 20 space available seats for that flight. I figure the Air Force is doing well if there is even a place to land there.

Before my head could explode or the movie get even weirder, a man came in to tell us that our bags were in the wrong place. Three (Indian) civilian employees of airfield were available to point out to us where to move our bags without actually helping. Waving their arms and saying "no, over here, Meester" is probably earning them $40 an hour. God bless America.

We took off around 6 a.m. in a C130, after I managed not to fall down on the ramp miserly covered in nonstick surfacing, and not to break my neck at the double take I was forced into when I saw the Air Force girl whose job was apparently to sit there and look pretty.

The flight was uneventful until the last ten minutes, when the pilot decided to do some acrobatics. I think this is normal right before landing to make it harder for anyone with a portable surface to air missile, but given the timing I think he was just fucking with us. I broke out into a full body sweat, stared hopelessly out the tiny porthole window too high to allow any sight of a ground reference unless the idiot pilot turned us entirely upside down, which he did not quite do, and with bitter amusement contemplated the pretty Air Force girl mopping up my half digested biowarfare meal off the floor. Alas, our pilot regained his professionalism for the last eight minutes and we landed without my hurling.

Various highly efficient by somewhat confused people in the welcoming party whisked us around from place to place, shocking most of us by trying to get us away from this nice, new base as fast as possible to the hell holes where most of us will spend the rest of the year. Myself and one other, headed individually to tiny outposts in the middle of nowhere, got delayed at least one day, so I get to wander around this stupidly large base and use their much faster than in Kuwait internet connection.

It's cooler and less humid here, and kind of looks like a sandier, bigger Port Isabel, Texas (family will understand) with a lot less Mexicans. It's an old pre-war Iraqi base, so there are some interesting big concrete bunkers we never got around to bombing, and quite a few old artillery and anti-aircraft guns scattered around collecting dust and rust. The only other scenery is the dining facility, which is slightly smaller than a Boeing aircraft factory and rather nicer than any mall food court I've been in. We sat in amazement at the food, decor, and people; my suggestion that a guy fortunate enough to spend the next year here create a "women of FOB Warrior" calendar was well received.

I have no real idea how long I will be here, but probably not more than another day or two. Then I catch a helicopter flight out to the patrol base where my company, when they arrive in another week and a half, will spend the rest of our tour. They supposedly have internet out there, although I have no idea how fast it is or how easy it is to get access.

[paragraph deleted]

Welcome to the Dark Side

I'm on FOB Warrior in Iraq for a shortish bit of time, on what is for some reason known as the "Dark" (as opposed to "Light") side of base. Apparently cardinal directions were too cliched for someone.

The dining facility is 500% better than Kuwait. The PX is 50% smaller. But it had It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 3, so all is forgiven.

Stop me if you've heard this one before

I'm flying to Iraq tomorrow. Allegedly.

What the market will bear

I visit the main Post Exchange at least once a day out of a sort of horrified professional interest. Combining my three careerish interests in life, I'd like to track down their buyers, shoot them, and then sue their estates to recover the cost of the bullet.

No organization has ever so abused a captive market as AAFES. They've got the most unimaginable dreck possible on the DVD racks, for example. Naturally, they sell it at full $20 prices, although I guarantee this was superdiscounted trash from the distributors. But a private with low tastes and too much money going unspent in his bank account doesn't mind supporting their 80% markup. The only cheap ($9.95) DVDs I found today were, of all fucking things, movie disks combined with CLIFF'S NOTES! Wuthering Heights or The Crucible, take your pick. There were plenty left, and probably will be when the 5th Iraqi war wraps up in 2230.

Or take the magazines. Please. We've got 20 varieties of fitness/body building stuff, 15 on cars, and 10 on computer games. Given the sensitivities of our hosts, we only have half a dozen skin mags here, far less than usual, and those without nudity. But holy crap, was I ever shocked to see appearing yesterday for the first time in my 18 months in the Army an actual newsmagazine for sale on post. They had Time, and, be still my heart, the Economist!

Both were three weeks out of date.

All I can be

(Me:) So did you notice that all of the Australians left?

Not true, I saw two at breakfast this morning.

Yes, two, not the hordes running around in their ball of ice cream uniforms that you find so amusing. Thus, it is accurate to say that all of them left.

You are retarded.

Maybe they went to an AO down under, where women do something I can't remember and men plunder in violation of General Order #1A.

They might have just moved to another part of base.

I don't think so; they're gone. Perhaps a dingo took someone's baby, and they're the dingo incident QRF.

It's "a dingo ate my baby."

I'm pretty sure you're wrong, but that's beside the point in my contemporary example. You'd be more likely to want the QRF for a dingo abduction, not a hit and run killing.

You sure are fixated on the Australians.

I'm not the one who was always freaking out about how absurd he found their uniforms! But it's possible that I have unresolved issues.

True lies

Last Sunday: You're flying to Iraq on Wednesday.

Tuesday: You're not going tomorrow. Maybe Thursday. Check in tomorrow evening.

Wednesday: You're not going tomorrow. Check in tomorrow evening.

Thursday morning: The sandstorms cleared. You might be going tomorrow.

Thursday evening: More important people than you are first in the queue. Maybe Saturday.

Friday 7 p.m.: You're leaving at 0100 tonight.

John F: Well, they weren't lying about you leaving on Saturday.

Friday 9 p.m.: Never mind, you're not leaving "tomorrow" afterall.

Me: Haha, good joke, Sergeant A. Ha! Ha... Ha? Son of a bitch! Well, I'm glad I didn't call Mom to tell her I was leaving yet and-- Fuck! I better unpack.

In the last four days I have gone to one four hour class and screwed around the rest of the time. They can't even schedule me to go to a range or do any other training because no one knows if I'm going to be here tomorrow, or the tomorrow after that, or the tomorrow...

It's possible that I have unresolved issues

Woo hoo! I can no longer remember what combined email/phone disaster caused it, but for the first time in five years I'm back in contact with my best friend from college. Thanks, Facebook. I'd forgotten what a huge hole losing her left in my life. I expect I would have made better decisions if I'd still been talking to her at least once a month. And if I'd not missed the invitation to her wedding, maybe she'd still be married.

Boo hoo! My last sick, twisted paranoid fear about nobody in particular has been laid to rest. Who do you blame when you have no one left to blame but yourself?

Don't worry, I'm sure I'll be telling you all about it soon enough. Sigh.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find a live round so I could inflict a SIGACT on myself

I made four trips to the battalion tactical operations center yesterday to get a memo so I could conduct a reconassiance of a range I had to run today.

Oh, you need full names.

Oh, you need two vehicles.

Oh, I forgot to change the purpose, and the battalion XO is the wrong
approval authority anyway.

Oh? Somehow you got it right.

No thanks to you, asshole. I won't detail how far a walk this is or how hot it was, nor my quest to find the command sergeant major for his signature.

We got out to the range, made an elaborate plan for the very complex range involving 600 personnel, I fought to get two vehicles that supposedly did not exist but were imperative to be able to conduct the range, had our departure time moved up from 0900 to 0430 very late the night before, had the number of people to be trained cut by 70%, and arrived at the range to discover that there are contracted civilian personnel who apparently run the fucking thing and made most of my elaborate preparations totally unnecessary. Would have been nice to know, ops!

Tomorrow I should be leaving for Iraq. I will channel my rage into running from mortars.

Missed opportunities

I am obviously greatly depressed that I was unable to invest the $10,000 I'd planned a week and a half ago. Thanks, Bank of America, for letting me start an online process that didn't advertise the necessity of a faxed/mailed form that I can't possibly do from Kuwait.

End of the line

David Foster Wallace hanged himself. I almost begin to hope to plan to regret not finishing Infinite Jest.

Two word movie reviews

Iron Man: Massively overrated.

Tropic Thunder: Surprisingly underrated.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Just right.

Me scare you long time

So, where do you think our bus driver is from? I'm thinking maybe the Phillipines, but probably Malaysia or some other peripheral SE Asian country.

* * *

Apparently he's from somewhere were a two second following interval on the highway is the most that honor allows when you can't see around the vehicle in front of you.

* * *

They also use the passing lane in tandem with the vehicle in front. Nice. I can't wait to see what's oncoming when the guy in front pulls out of the way.

* * *

A pickup truck. Well, we outmass him at least 10 to 1, so the guys in the back rows who aren't thrown through the windshield should be ok. Hey, Matt? You're looking kind of pale, buddy. Look, the truck ran off the road to avoid us, and other than kicking up gravel and sand in the desert looks like he's ok. You'll see Lisa again some day, I promise.

* * *

You know, this is giving me confidence that I might have pretty steady combat nerves. Although I'm not sure that laughing at this is the most desirable reaction, either.

* * *

I think the truck running off the road rattled our driver. He's pulling up even closer to his buddy for comfort. One-one-thou--CRASH! Or maybe not. Mercedes buses probably have really great brakes, right?

* * *

Did we get everyone back on from the clearing barrels? Where's our driver? Oh, look, he just got off the other bus. The way he's laughing, I think he must have gotten confused. Matt? You can quit grinding your teeth. We're right outside the gate.

It looked like she was telling the truth, but you can never be sure with a woman, especially when she has blue eyes

Are you married?

Don't start with that.

So you are.

No.

I'll bet your wife is glad about it.

Dashiell Hammet is good.

I'm in Kuwait, sitting around reading while the rest of my company sweats on a range; I had to stay behind for a finance class that didn't take long.

I leave for Iraq as a member of the advance party in about a week. It should be marginally less hellishly hot and much less boring. Hopefully the internet will also be faster; I can only hope the speed of my current connection is due to Chinese/Russian/Iranian security services spyware sucking up everything that I write rather than a good faith effort by the contractor to provide a service worth $5 an hour.

They love to watch her strut

Um. No comment.

Das boot on the other foot

Today I made half a dozen Army employed civilians waste half an hour of their time waiting around for me complete personal errands. This is probably the greatest blow of the persecuted against the persecutors since Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated.

On that heroic note, barring some further schedule change I'll finally be flying out Saturday evening.

Palin power

After paying for a late breakfast yesterday at a SWPL place the woman at the register asked me if I'd seen Sarah Palin's big speech. When I admitted I'd only read excerpts on the web, she tried to give me a computer printout of the speech she had at the register. I have no idea how many of these she'd successfully given out earlier; I was the last customer out the door before they closed.

My life was misspent, don't let me be misunderstood (reprise)1

As a belated apology for how crappy this blog has been for a long time, let me point out the problem - I am, unfortunately, rather satisfied² with life. A somewhat detached and pretentiously self-aware depression dashed with self-loathing provided the inspiration for the original blog, as so aptly parodied here.³ When, thanks to a certain woman, that existential despair went away, so did the blog.⁴

I wonder what inspired me to restart blogging. Hmm.

Anyway, while limitations implicitly, explicitly, and logistically imposed by being an Army officer have curtailed much of my potential blogging range, the real problem is that I'm not pissed off at the world or myself anymore. I was, for a while, "still angry"⁵ at a particular person, but that was never enough to bring this blog up to the entertaining train wreck standards of the old one, even before that particular angst faded down to a hollow ache.

I take the wishes of good luck that I've received to also be a wish that this blog continue to suck. Thanks, guys.

--
¹ - The original.

² - As I've noted in 34 conversations and counting: "I don't do 'happy.'"

³ - Not only accurate, but prophetic:

Update X: I looked outside and noticed that the plate was clean, but I didn’t see the cat. I went out to pick up the plate and noticed the cat spread out behind one of the small bushes next to the porch. I was rather surprised, considering how jumpy the thing seemed earlier. Not wanting to scare it I softly called out, “Here kitty-kitty.” No movement. I did it again. Nothing. I shuffled forward a little. Still nothing. That’s when I noticed the vomit. It was all over the corner of the porch. Sensing something was wrong, I moved in. Not only was the cat not moving, but it was stiff as 3 fingers of Glenfiddich. Oh, shit. Now that I think about it, those enchiladas were more like 2 weeks old. Damn it. Why does this always happen to me??? Now I’m going to have to bury it.

My cat died by...choking on her own vomit.

⁴ - The nonsense about job hunting was just that. Pure, if limited, romantic bliss is not conducive to blogging where I'm concerned.

⁵ - Not the primary motivation for the title.

Primary.

Shop before you drop

It is appalling how much money I spend on Army crap.

When I first got here and was immediately sent to the National Training Center, I blew about $200 on assorted field crap, including $30 on mandatory sewing so that my free issue stuff actually met unit standards, and most notoriously including $50 for the worlds' worst multi-hue "tactical" flashlight with buttons that are randomly pressed when stored in a pocket or pouch and that gives you a 1/4 chance of intentionally hitting the right color in the dark, although with practice you can then be sure of getting what you want on the second try. Until you put it back in your pocket. I've had soldiers from other units remember me struggling with that damn thing months later.

I threw it in the trash this morning. The green light came on and shone through the plastic bag.

Anyway, today I was told they found me a pistol to carry in Iraq if I could rustle up a holster for it. For $35, I could. Since this means I can lock up my rifle instead of carrying it around all the time in Kuwait, and passively intimidate Iraqis who apparently associate pistols with Saddam-era secret police assassins and find them much scarier than a rifle, it's money well spent. I suppose I can also use it to carry water pistols at parties when I get back. Good icebreaker.

I also dropped an almost even $100 on a new backpack to replace the issue "assault pack" that carries about 1/3 as much. Now I can squeeze a couple of books into my carry-on for the 15+ hour flight.

I used to keep receipts for this stuff, planning to itemize on my next tax filing. But of course, with over half a year of tax free overseas earnings and tax free housing and food allowances making up a significant part of my US income, I shouldn't actually owe any taxes. Damn it.

I feel worse for the unusually heavy flow of privates I saw blowing their wad in the military sales store today. Especially the morons who nearly wiped out the supply of 7.62 mm magazine pouches. Guys, the issue pouch isn't that tight or ugly. I long ago decided I'd rather get shot because it took an extra 0.6 seconds to yank a new magazine out than blow another $50 upgrading. It's the principle of the thing.

Hott

Today's high in Colorado Springs: 67 F with 34% humidity. I wore shorts.

Today's high in Kuwait City: 104 F with 85% humidity. I will not.

Whither my good taste

I sort of promised a comprehensive Ryan Adams/Whiskeytown post some time ago. I'm obviously not going to get to it in the next year, but the essential genius and tragedy of the man is pretty well demonstrated by Wither, I'm a Flower, from the album Strangers Almanac, Whiskeytown's second. It just popped up on my random shuffle.

First, let us note that the iTunes version of Strangers Almanac (Deluxe Edition) has thirty-eight tracks. Several of these are repeat versions, but holy fuck. This sort of nonsense only got worse when he went solo. I think he has released something like 5 fantastic songs, 20 good ones, and 47 albums.

Anyway, as you can see at the link above, the lyrics to Wither, I'm a Flower would be simplistically stupid if they weren't stupidly simplistic. But listen to the sample available here. You'll hear an instrumental intro and then him sing a grand total of eight words in two lines. And it's beautiful.

And very, very stupid.

SPEAKING OF STUPID. The #1selling Ryan Adams song at the iTunes store is "Two", which is catchy sounding and the wussiest fucking thing ever sung by man. It makes every song ever referenced here sound like ganster rappers talking about fucking porn stars...with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat.

Repress your gag reflex and listen.



I haven't been this outraged since I saw that the Old 97's most downloaded song is "Question." Apparently the iTunes store is frequently only by myself and love sick 12 year old girls.

Addendum: I see that Hitchhike to Rhome, the Old 97's first album that I've only seen in a store once (I didn't buy it and have only sort of regretted it since), is finally available on iTunes.

Mail call

Watching from the room
As the troops go by.

You ought to be able to tell, I think,
Whether they are going or coming back
By just leaving the gaps in the ranks.

Which reminds me. If you'd like email updates on my status in Iraq, shoot me a bland email at dylan.LASTNAME@us.army.mil. I'll be putting together a mailing list both for my own "what I'm doing" bulletins and for my mom to make notifications if I am, shall we say, no longer capable of doing so.

Fun!

Addendum: Exactly, from this week's PostSecret. This one I also suspect to be true of several women, most certainly including my sisters, although n=1 for every girl who didn't write me back.

An allegory of your regress, in other people's tears and blood

Ann Althouse recently noted an undated list of 100 best first lines from novels. I'm pretty sure its several years old because I recall a similar effort in the distant past putting Iain Banks' The Crow Road in the 40's, and this one has sitting at 49:

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

In a competition for best endings, Banks would easily rank in the top ten with Use of Weapons, which upon completing in 2000 I threw down on my coffee table, stared at it, and repeated "fuck" in varying tones and volumes for a solid five minutes. It's kind of like Memento in book form if Guy Pierce had been half-eaten alive by insects, survived his own decapitation, and had a considerably worse formative experience than the murder of his wife and loss of his memory.

And it's back! No longer must you order it from overseas or search for bootleg Canadian copies that somehow illegally ended up in a Houston Borders. Orbit, which had previously reprinted Banks earlier Culture novels Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games, has now released UoW with a similarly gorgeous new cover. I rebought all three for $50.

Do I actually recommend you read it? Only if you are (1) highly intelligent, (2) previously familiar with Banks' Culture novels, and (3) absolutely committed to pushing through its somewhat confusing and narrative structure without skipping to the back to see how it ends, a vice of mine that I've developed of late.

If you've read it before, it might be a good time to reread the first couple of chapters and the last bits. I'd always thought the "use of weapons" referred primarily to the main character's mercenary exploits and ruthlessness, but contrast Skaffen-Amtiskaw's initial distaste for Zakalwe, S-A's own murderous backstory, and the way it seems to actually like and respect Zakalwe after the relevation at the end before becoming "engrossed in its [own] struggle to make good." Add in the business as usual epilogue and prologue to the faux-sequel, and you realize it really is about the Culture as a whole more than a (very) interesting character study of a presumably unique agent.