Genocidal Organ Read Online Free PDF

vehicle to speed down the very road that we had been taking pains to avoid. With the exception of our nanolayers, we had to ditch all our fancy equipment. Even our SOPMOD modular assault rifles that, like some kiddie toy with interchangeable parts, could be turned into grenade launchers or laser-guided sniper rifles.
    It was better to ditch the gear than to continue on a long-winded night march through unfamiliar terrain. When it came down to it, we pampered Americans had an overprotective attitude toward our equipment that bordered on fetishistic. Our military technology was number one, we knew, and it was great that we were able to get so psyched about how awesome we were—I’ll admit I often felt a childish glee myself when faced with our latest fancy gadgets—but sometimes a person needed to forget all about what was fashionable and trendy and get back to basics.
    Alex was driving. I was sitting shotgun, keeping an eye out for anything that might be a threat while simultaneously trying to maintain a casual demeanor so that no one looking in at us would suspect anything. The fatigues we’d stripped from the dead soldiers and were now wearing had bloodstains all over them, of course, but they were in such a filthy state to begin with that a bit of water from our canteens was enough to rinse out the worst so that the rest more or less blended in.
    “It’ll be no time at all to our destination in this baby, sir,” said Alex. “I wonder what’s written on the side of this pickup, though?”
    “It’s Japanese,” I answered. I’d minored in the language back in college, and as a result I’d once been assigned to train up a section of their army. What was it called? Ji-eh-tai or something. … Anyway, the lettering on the side of the truck seemed to suggest that it had once been used by a tofu shop called Fujiwara. Would a Japanese tofu shop ever have imagined that their old, beat-up vehicle would have a new lease on life as a makeshift armored vehicle in a civil war in the boondocks of Eastern Europe?
    “They’re called kanji , aren’t they, the letters, sir? Pretty cool language,” Alex said.
    “Sure, when you can’t read them they’re more like a work of art than lettering, I suppose.”
    “So you’re saying that they seem cool only because I can’t read them?”
    “You could say that, yeah,” I said. “In the same way that it’s easy to reject a foreign culture you don’t understand, you can also end up putting it on a pedestal. Using words such as ‘exotic’ and ‘oriental’ to describe something as being cool, when really all you are talking about is a cultural code for some sort of ‘other’ compared to what you’re used to.”
    “I think I understand,” said Alex. “So a foreign language isn’t just another language, it’s also foreign , is that what you mean, sir? More like a pattern or motif on a textile rather than language as we know it?”
    “Something like that. Semantic bleaching, that’s what they call it when words lose their meaning—although I suppose it’s a little different if the words never had any meaning to you in the first place. Imagine a Scrabble board when the game’s being played in a language you don’t know. The whole board is just going to look like an abstract work of art to you, isn’t it?”
    We often played Scrabble back at base. Many a long afternoon was made shorter by the spell that magical fifteen-by-fifteen grid cast on us as it filled up with words. Williams, for example, was constantly pestering me to play just one more game. He always lost. And he always went into a snit afterward. His regular lament went something like this:
    “Okay. So they say the average American knows forty-five thousand words. Forty-five thousand! So why can’t I even think of enough words to fill a pissant board fifteen squares wide?”
    Incidentally, the highest-scoring word ever sanctioned in Scrabble once came up in a game between Williams and me. I was the