Duane (let's call him) comes from Louisiana, where the gumbos and jambalayas come heaped with hot peppers — at least that's the way he makes them — and with such local cuisine, when would he ever get around to trying curry?
Our Christmas dinner was the first time he'd eaten Thai food, though he's been a world traveler, if you count Iraq, Afghanistan and a stop in Germany while he was in a coma. I'd made it subtle, milder than usual because it was a large batch and adjusting the heat for five people involved more fussing than I cared to do.
He complimented my dish, but it was clear he fancied more burn, so I gave him a bottle of Costa Rican "Inner Beauty" scotch bonnet hot sauce, and he shook out enough splurches to make a busload of Minnesotans cry for a week. Then he ate heaping seconds.
He's behind on his rent, but he starts a new job after the first of the year. He explains it differently, but it sounds like telemarketing to me. Credit consolidation. Maybe the idea is he'll be able to talk peer-to-peer with people struggling to get by. But this is not exactly the first choice of an ex-Marine who'd loved his dangerous work until a round took one of his lungs.
He's overcome a lot more. A string of foster homes, sketchy schooling, unemployment that led to drug dealing that led to an assault and a year in prison. The Marines had been where he fit it, with other young men from backgrounds like his, ready to do the country's worst work.
He did his duty, but sometimes that led to innocent people dying, he says. They came too close, despite the warnings. "We couldn't understand them, and they couldn't understand us."
He has his honorable discharge, but he doesn't want to mention his military background. It comes up anyway in the background check. He wasn't in the National Guard — a "potato peeler" — he was in black ops, and he imagines this marks him as unstable.
He'd go back in a second and put his life on the line for his country, if he could, he says, "but not to Iraq, not to a country where they don't want us."
"Of my old 14-man unit, only four of us are out in the world," he says. "The others have withdrawn into their families or disappeared. They can't leave the war behind."
It hasn't left Duane, either. He has bad dreams and night terrors, but he has other dreams, too.
He doesn't put it this way, but I will. Iraq is not the only country that doesn't seem to want him.
