I am so behind on providing your weekly dose of Nabokov. So sorry. And something must be up in St. Petersburg, because another guest author has had to step in again today to perk your day up with lovely dispatches from a foreign land. In honor of Reichen's victory, we take you to a military scene today, the opening paragraph of the extraordinary book, The Things They Carried. It will be my pleasure to transcribe it:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.

Something, isn't he (Tim O'Brien). Nice way into a Vietnam horror show. I'm usually one for plunging right in, but Southeast Asia is a place readers might be hesitant to join him--what a perfect way to draw us across that ocean. My favorite moment was him tasting the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. What a tiny exquisite touch.

The next paragraph plunges you much more vividly into the battlefield itself, but always in terms of the things they carried. What an incredible way to illustrate what was really important to each of these people: Weight was everything when you were humping miles every day, and the non-essentials that you dragged along just because you needed them--because for you, they were essential--revealed everything about your character.

An extraordinary piece of work.

I just got a press release from SLDN a minute ago:

Reichen Lehmkuhl of “Reichen & Chip,” the grand prize winners in the sizzling summer series The Amazing Race, has agreed to appear in a documentary film investigating the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The film, set to start production this fall, will span the ten-year history of the policy and follow the building political momentum to overturn it. Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) will be supporting the project throughout its production. . .

“The Pentagon is firing three people every day simply because of their sexual orientation,” Lehmkuhl said.  “If the same thing were happening in corporate America, most citizens would be rightfully outraged.  The fact that our nation’s largest employer discriminates against gay Americans under the sanction of federal law is equally appalling.” . . .

For more information, call John Bowab at Morelight Productions, LLC; 310-659-7455.

And don't forget to sign their Lift The Ban petition.