Michael Malone - Weebly

his family, then his teachers, and then his military
superiors. All had judged him unmanageable in every
cordoned area where they had had him in charge—
playpen, playground, or combat zone. They judged him
prickly, touchy, purposely unpleasant. Unlike his affable
brother, Arn, he had made few friends. They said the
marines would be the perfect place for him, since what
he needed was straightening out, a firm hand, the goal
of becoming a man. They thought he should be shipped
somewhere (far from Dingley Falls, Connecticut) to get
rid of all that young hostility and aggression. In 1965,
when he was twenty-one, they sent him to the other
side of the world to kill people. In 1970, he had come
home, still a man of violent instincts. He had not been
typically violent. Unlike many, he had not crawled out
of that darkness mad.
When his comrades in arms had whacked off the
heads of Vietnamese, stuck cigarettes in their mouths,
and photographed these trophies, he had responded
with only a slightly heightened degree of the angry
disgust with which he had regarded, for example, an
Argyle pimp in a peach and burgundy Eldorado, or a