with an encounter in Iraq
It is early 1991, the height of the 42-day Persian Gulf War, in the Iraqi desert on the road to Baghdad. Some of the first U.S. Marine Corps infantrymen to enter through Kuwait in a caravan of Humvees are watching clusters of frail, threadbare Iraqi fighters—most likely teens but looking much older—emerge from makeshift bunkers and step forward in surrender. Among them is a thin young man clutching a wrinkled note. With fear in his eyes, he hands it nervously to a translator while speaking quickly in Arabic.
One of the Marines, 20-year-old sharpshooter Norris Hill from East Tennessee, shifts the rifle in his arms and nods toward the soldier. “What’s he saying?”