Hillbilly Elegy
asshole with an IQ of 2 thinking he is Bobby bad ass but he wears girls underwear. I hate all of them.” When I read that outburs ...
miles away. In boot camp, mealtime is a marvel of efficiency. You walk through a cafeteria line, holding your tray for the servi ...
suffer from indigestion (which feels about the same). The only discretionary part of the exercise is dessert, set aside on small ...
smacked the cake out of my hands and moved on to his next victim. I never grabbed the cake again. There was an important lesson ...
Marine Corps boot camp is set up as a life-defining challenge. From the day you arrive, no one calls you by your first name. You ...
who dropped out—mostly for medical reasons—served to reinforce the worthiness of the challenge. Every time the drill instructor ...
no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I ha ...
On my first day home from boot camp, I walked into the barbershop of my grandfather’s old friend. Marines have to keep their hai ...
hair before, and I’d walked by his shop nearly every day for eighteen years. Yet it was the first time he’d ever shaken my hand ...
The new perspective went both ways. Many of the foods that I ate once now violated the fitness standards of a marine. In Mamaw’s ...
few short months, the Marine Corps had already changed my perspective. I soon left home for a permanent assignment in the Marine ...
before I left was that some tragedy would befall my family while I was away, and I’d be unable to help. Luckily, that wasn’t hap ...
obliged. Mamaw was old, frail, and sick. I no longer lived with her, and I was preparing to go fight a war. Though her health ha ...
never accepted anything from me—not money from my paycheck at Dillman’s; not a share of my boot camp earnings. But she accepted ...
a week on small-stakes tables, earning four hundred dollars a month. I had planned to save that money, but instead I gave it to ...
Arnold Schwarzenegger as the embodiment of the American Dream: a strong, capable immigrant coming out on top. But I saw the movi ...
for the kids, and buy nice Christmas presents for Lindsay. On one of my trips home, Mamaw and I took Lindsay’s two oldest kids o ...
sense of safety and stability at my best. I was either being chased by the bad terminator or protected by the good one. But I ha ...
room of a Walmart Supercenter as car technicians changed my oil. I called Mamaw on the cell phone that I paid for myself, and sh ...
morning to a call from my sister, who said that Mamaw’s lung had collapsed, that she was lying in the hospital in a coma, and th ...
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