"hey," i said. "that horse just fucking died."
The sonofobitch makes me proud.
Taibbi:
Before long, though, our convoy got lost. In an attempt to stay one step ahead of the insurgents, soldiers took strange roads and byways, trying as often as possible to take advantage of the Humvee's off-road capabilities, and in this case the convoy tried to sneak across southern Baghdad at night by crossing what appeared to be an old dried-up lake bed, along a "road" that looked to me like the top edge of an ancient dam that rose steeply twenty feet off the ground on both sides. It was slow, dangerous going along this semi-cliff without streetlights, and it was no surprise to anyone when the "road" suddenly came to an end and the convoy was left looking at a precipice that stared back at us in the darkness like a bad joke. We doubled back and made it to the Baghdad city streets, where we moved through an abandoned marketplace full of cats and other feral animals that were feeding on garbage and whose eyes glowed yellow in the headlights as we drove past. Packs of wild dogs chased us, barking at every turn.
It was just then that I saw it, off in the distance, far in front of the trucks. It was a horse -- a bright white horse, so horribly emaciated that you could see all of its ribs sticking out. It was wobbling, as though using every ounce of energy in its bones to stay standing. Sick as it looked, its white coat shone through the night, arrestingly pure, like the belly of a fish. It was also blocking the road, which pissed off the soldiers. American soldiers understandably do not like to stop their trucks for any reason, much less some raggedy-ass old horse. Our driver reached down and blasted the Humvee siren -- WOOO-EEEEEEEE! -- which startled the animal, causing it to lope off to the left shoulder of the road.
"Watch out for the...what the fuck is that?" shouted a sergeant named Vasquez.
"It's a horse," said the driver.
"Jesus. Somebody call the ASPCA," Vasquez said, looking at the miserable creature with pity.
"Or the glue factory," cracked the driver.
I looked out the Humvee window. For the first time I noticed that the horse's hind legs were blood-streaked. It appeared to be bleeding out of its ass. As we drove past it, it lumbered to the edge of the median strip, stopped and fell over.
"Hey," I said. "That horse just fucking died."
Nobody up front in the truck heard me. We drove on.
With only the occasional Greider essay and the regular pandering to the Democratic Party celebs, Matt Taibbi - whose stuff moves along at the same kind of sharp clip HST's golden oldies once did - is probably the only thing RS's got going that redeems the mag's long history of journalism and politics. He's one of our best writers now, hands down.
His last book.
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