Babylon by Bus
Babylon by Bus: Or, the true story of two friends who gave up their valuable franchise selling YANKEES SUCK T-shirts at Fenway to find meaning and adventure in Iraq, Ray LeMoine, Jeff Neumann, Donovan Webster,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594200912
DDC: 956.70443092
Edition: Hardcover; 2006-08-03
Summary:
Jeff and Ray had la vida: selling YANKEES SUCK T-shirts five months
of the year in front of Fenway Park and spending the rest of the year
traveling the world. Sure, they'd go back to college at some point,
but for now, the future was comfortably on hold. But the play button
got pushed for them after the Sox broke their hearts in the 2003
Series. In the painfully clear light of the morning after, they
looked at each other and faced up to the fact that they were in
danger of becoming losers. Sad cases. What to do, where to go if
you're a young American man craving experience and wisdom in late
2003? If you're Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine, you go to Baghdad. And
so they did. You might not think these two scruffy, lovably clueless
characters would have made attractive candidates for the U.S.
government to run the desk in Baghdad's Coalition Provisional
Authority that served as the interface between the CPA and the Iraqi
people, fielding complaints and requests for aid from all over for a
city of more than five million people. You might be naïve. But Ray
and Jeff would prove to be dedicated and ingenious public servants,
and they managed to do a great deal of good during their tenure in
the face of staggering frauds and feuds. They also had their full
share of the wild times that young people under immense stress in war
zones have had from time immemorial, especially young people who
return each night to a hermetically sealed safe zone flush with money
and all the temptations, legal and illegal, that money attracts.
Hard-core smart, hard-core scathing, hard-core funny, this is
Apocalypse Right Now-explosive and appalling. 'Roid rage fueling gang
wars between rival private-security contractors; staggering fraud
involving phantom construction projects; naïve young Americans given
responsibilities for which their lack of qualification would be
laughable if the consequences weren't so dire-this is the inside-out
view of an occupation gone wildly wrong, from the point of view of
two radically unaffiliated authors, members of no tribe, beholden to
no one, and afraid of nothing.
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