American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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The GROM were a lot like SEALs: extremely professional at work,
and very hard-core partiers after hours. They all had Polish vodka, and
they especially loved this one brand named Zubrówka.
Zubrówka has been around for hundreds of years, though I’ve
never seen it in America. There’s a blade of buffalo grass in each
bottle; each blade comes from the same field in Poland. Buffalo grass
is supposed to have medicinal properties, but the story related to me
from my GROM friends was a lot more colorful—or maybe off-color.
According to them, European bison known as wisent roam on this
field and piss on the grass. The distillers put the blades in for an extra
kick. (Actually, during the process, certain ingredients of the buffalo
grass are safely neutralized, so just the flavor remains. But my friends
didn’t tell me that—maybe it was too hard to translate.)
I was a little dubious, but the vodka proved to be as smooth as it
was potent. It definitely supported their argument that the Russians
don’t know anything about vodka and that Poles make it better.
Being an American, officially I wasn’t supposed to be drinking. (And
officially, I didn’t.)
That asinine rule only applied to U.S. servicemen. We couldn’t
even buy a beer. Every other member of the coalition, be they Polish or
whatever, could.
Fortunately, the GROM liked to share. They would also go to the
duty-free shop at Baghdad airport and buy beer or whiskey or
whatever the Americans working with them wanted.
I formed a friendship with one of their snipers named Matthew (they
all took fake names, as part of their general security). We spent a lot of