Anyone who knows me and this blog knows that I love this series on First Lines (see HERE) even more so than any of these other series that I post about (HERE, HERE, and HERE). So, this one, from WEB Griffin resonated with me.
It's bit of a doozey, longish, but ultimately worth it. Plus the book itself is a long one so why shouldn't the first line be too.
I really like the way that Griffin describes McCoy and what I like about it, is that he is describing every single enlisted PFC in the military. This was basically me in 1996. I could have been a walking talking McCoy in real life in Fort Benning.
If this was written for me, it would be:
PFC Richard G. Hannah, US Army, stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at his footlocker at the end of his bunk. He was wearing his fatigue pants and AR 670-1 Coyote Brown Men's Military T-Shirt, 1 each, Jungle Boots that he had bought off the rack of the local surplus stores because they were no longer standard issue but everyone in the battalion wore them, and uniformity was the key to survival in the battalion. No socks, no underwear. Also the standard at battalion. His eyes were blue but did not sparkle, rather they had a hidden luminescence, his hair, had he not shaved it each Sunday night with every other Ranger in the battalion would have grown out reddish-brown. He looked down and his lips pursed without thought. He had been raised in an upper-class neighborhood . . . THE upper-class neighborhood in Houston, TX, and gone to a prep school there for nine years, an education that created a foundation for him, and even now as he looked down and considered the problem in front of him, his mind worked furiously, maybe too furiously, as it had been trained to do from having been at St. John's for all those years.
Maybe not quite to WEB's standards, but close.
No comments:
Post a Comment