So, my time in the Keys afforded me the time to catch up on a bunch of articles I’d ripped out of magazines over the past few months waiting for the chance to read. Here are a few that I recommend reading:
• “When the roof collapses, it hits Chris Carmer in the head and he drops to the floor and he’s on his knees and now the wall with the shelves full of beer is falling toward him and then the roof opens up above and behind him and it sounds like the devil is shrieking in his ear and he feels his legs being sucked up toward the hole and he knows that Rick Ward is squatting next to him and so he grabs Rick Ward’s belt with one hand and the falling shelves with the other and he buries his face in Rick’s soft back and he tells himself that although he is about to die he should just hold on for as long as he can, because it is better to go down fighting.” [“Heavenly Father!” “I love you all!” “I love everyone!” “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! …” Esquire, Oct. 2011]
• “And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. “We should run,” she says, but you say, “It’s too late.” And then: “We’ll be fine.” Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea. These will be your last words to her—We’ll be fine. And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.” [“The Man Who Sailed His House,” GQ. Oct. 2011]
• “This is what makes you mentally fagged. Having to write a half column story with every name, address and initial verified and remembering to use good style, perfect style in fact, an get all the facts and in the correct order, make it have snap and wallop and write it in fifteen minutes, five sentences at a time to catch an edition as it goes to press. To take a story over the phone and get evrything exact see it all in your minds eye, rush over to a typewriter and write it a page at a time while ten other typewriters are going and the boss is hollering at some one and a boy snatches the pages from your machine as fast as you write them. How long would a lot of people I know last at that before going wild. Or work from 8 am sat staright through to 1 sunday morning and then be so bushed you cant sleep. And remember Pop Ive been down here seven months and hadnt ever done anything more strenuous before in the line than have five or ten hours to ge[t] up a trapeze story.” [The Hunt for Hemingway, Vanity Fair, Oct. 2011]
• “In South Africa between 1967 and 1999, 14,629 elephants in Kruger National Park were culled, to keep the population at the park’s perceived carrying capacity of 7,000. Dr. Markus Hofmeyr, head of Kruger’s veterinary wildlife services, wrote the standard operating procedure for culling: you start with a brain shot from a helicopter with a high-caliber weapon, not less than a .375. ‘The spasmodic jerking of one or more legs is frequently indicative of a good brain shot.’ Once the animal has collapsed, you fire a second ‘insurance’ shot to make sure it is dead. Your first target should be the matriarch, ‘which anchors and confuses the rest of the group, [so they can be] quickly dispatched, as they mill around.’ After some orphan bulls who had watched their mothers killed grew up into psychotic teenagers who raped rhinos and attacked tourists in Pilanes National Park, this procedure was modified. Now if you’re going to do it, the most ‘ethical’ thing is to kill them all, to gun down the whole family. South Africa is keeping open the resumption of ‘lethal management’ as an option. [“Agony and Ivory,” Vanity Fair, Aug. 2011]
• “Afterward, Obama and his advisers went into a second room, down the hall, where others involved in the raid—including logisticians, crew chiefs, and SEAL alternates—had assembled. Obama presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation and said, ‘Our intelligence professionals did some amazing work. I had fifty-fifty confidence that bin Laden was there, but I had one-hundred-per-cent confidence in you guys. You are, literally, the finest small-fighting force that has ever existed in the world.’ The raiding team then presented the President with an American flag that had been on board the rescue Chinook. Measuring three feet by five, the flag had been stretched, ironed, and framed. The SEALs and the pilots had signed it on the back; an inscription on the front read, ‘From the Joint Task Force Operation Neptune’s Spear, 01 May 2011: ‘For God and country. Geronimo.’’ Obama promised to put the gift ‘somewhere private and meaningful to me.’ Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.” [“Getting Bin Laden,” New Yorker, Aug. 2011]
