The Pearl of Kuwait

by Paine, Tom

• ISBN13: 9780151005185
• ISBN10: 0151005184
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

He's California surfer Cody "Cowboy" Carmichael, and his life is forever changed when he meets Private Tommy Trang at boot camp. Trang is not your typical American patriot--his mother was a Saigon prostitute, his father a dead U.S. marine, and Trang's heart soon belongs to a sixteen-year-old Kuwaiti princess trapped behind the lines when the Iraqis invade her country. Together, the two marines are ready to wave the American flag all the way to Baghdad, or at least into occupied Kuwait, to rescue Princess Lulu. During the exciting, moving, and often hilarious account of these two AWOL marines sneaking through the Iraqi lines, the mellow Carmichael gets to know the heart of Pvt. Tommy Trang, and discovers a new brand of patriotism that is gripping, contagious, and as deep as life itself.A powerful first novel by an award-winning writer, The Pearl of Kuwait is Romeo and Juliet meets Lawrence of Arabia. Tom Paine has created an enthralling, joyful, and original story with the classic ingredients of love and war.

Author Biography

Tom Paine is a graduate of Princeton and the Columbia M.F.A. program. His book of short stories, Scar Vegas, was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection, a Talk Magazine "Talk 10" Pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for the hardcover and the paperback. He lives in Vermont.

Excerpts

Chapter 1All marines serve a six-month tour at sea at least once in their hitch as marines, and Tommy Trang and me were stationed together as Force Recon marines with another eight hundred marines on the amphibious assault ship USS Inchon in the Persian Gulf. Three months before the Gulf War and we were off the coast of Bahrain. We were chilling on our racks down within the Inchon, and I was telling Trang again about how like one time I had come in to check on him when he was in Walter Reed Hospital-he had been 'injured' during some advanced reconnaissance training at Quantico-and found a full colonel from the U.S. Rangers in there in dress uniform with all sorts of combat medals from Vietnam, and how the old dude was holding Trang's hand and crying like you have never seen a man cry, and how this was one combat-hardened old warrior dude and how he started banging his fist on his heart. I was telling Trang this again as it was curious stuff, but also thinking it might prompt him to open up about his Vietnamese past, as all he had been willing to admit as truth to date was that he was born in Vietnam in like 1974, that his father was a U.S. marine, and that he had been brought up in Trenton by his Vietnamese mother until she died and he joined the marines with faked papers at sixteen. If you asked him for more data, he'd just parrot his name, rank, and serial number with a grin. But then one day, with an even huger grin than usual, he let on his real last name wasn't even Trang, and that in Vietnamese Trang was like a girl's 'flower' name like Rose. It turned out Trang had enlisted under his dead mother's first name, to like win some honor for her.Tommy Trang's favorite book was Winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and he stuck his grinning face in it every day for an hour, like others read the Bible. The more he read that book of mostly dead war heroes like Smedly Butler and Herman "Hard Head" Hanneken, who had earned their country's highest military honor for valor, the more bummed Trang was that we were like just steaming in circles around the Persian Gulf. He was just totally confident about his warrior skills, Tommy Trang. More than any other marine of my experience, Trang was hungry for trigger time so he could perform some heroics. Most marines wrote him off as a cocky gook, but as a surfer I got a kick out of his stoked vibe of superiority. Sometimes I'd see him just sitting on his rack spinning an empty M16 shell casing in his fingers like he was waiting for the call to arms. It looked like a real old bronze shell casing, kind of crushed like someone stomped on it. All Trang would tell me about the shell casing in those early days was that it came from like the Vietnam War.Anyway, one day Trang just tossed the book of soldier heroes across the room with a hardcore groan and kicked upwards into the rack above, where I was sitting on my Cordell surfboard-without the fins-and reading. The board had general approval all around f

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Excerpted from The Pearl of Kuwait by Tom Paine
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