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Remembering Paco In his reporting during the war in Iraq, our colleague Stephen F. Hayes frequently called on Sergeant First Class Curtis "Paco" Mancini, a 17-year veteran of the Davie, Florida, police department who had been recruited to train Iraqi Americans working with U.S. soldiers to liberate their native country. Hayes described Mancini as a "soldier's soldier"--a cliché, perhaps, but nonetheless an apt description of the burly 43-year-old with a shimmering Mr. Clean head. Mancini and his hand-picked colleagues trained the Iraqis at a military base in Tazsar, Hungary, and accompanied them first to Kuwait and later to Iraq. Their work was invaluable and led directly to thwarting several anti-coalition attacks. He came up with many of the nicknames the American soldiers gave their Iraqi-American buddies. One was known as "Tupac" because he listened to rapper Tupac Shakur. His brother and father were called "Three-pack" and "Six-pack." Another was known as "Burt Reynolds" for his resemblance to the B-movie actor. And there was "Robert DeNiro." "Every once in a while we'd get him to say, 'You tawkin' to me?'" Mancini recalled. "He was perfect." Ahmed, another of the Free Iraqi Forces who was known as "George Michael," told Hayes how he tried to recruit other fellow Iraqi Americans to join him in Iraq. "Let me ask you a question," he said to his friends in California. "Why the American people, why the American soldier, have to die in our homeland? I say we have to die there. So I say to them [he points], you and you and you, you have to volunteer so less American people go. If you are American soldier, you go to Basra, why you have to die there?" Curtis Mancini went to Basra. He didn't die there. He died in Ghazni, Afghanistan, on January 30, 2004, with seven of his fellow American soldiers, when a weapons cache exploded unexpectedly. Eight days before he died, Mancini was interviewed via email by his daughter for a school project. "Serve your country at least once in your life," he wrote, "preferably while you're young." Mancini's father, himself a U.S. Army veteran, spoke at a memorial service last Wednesday. "If he had his choice of dying, this is the way he'd want to go." In a sense, his son did have a choice. Upon returning from Iraq he volunteered to be redeployed to a combat zone. His father asked him why. "Because the job is never done," the younger Mancini said. Before he left, he told his mother that he had to go back now "so that my children and other people's children won't have to do it later." Said the elder Mancini: "He was a soldier's soldier." That Doggerel Won't Hunt Give Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe credit: He wanted a relatively quick primary season and it looks as though that's what he's getting, and we should be grateful. This thing can't end too soon. The rhetoric is getting almost unbearable. Just last week, poor Wesley Clark flew into New Mexico, where he announced, "It's gonna take one tough hombre" to beat President Bush. "And I'm one tough hombre," he added helpfully. The ethnic toadying is painful to watch. What will happen if he campaigns among American Indians? "I'm the real Kemo Sabe in this race!" Will he be a tough mensch in New York, an NWA in Detroit? Stop him before he panders again. And now John Kerry--a man with the finest education American private schools can offer, a man of the world who winters in Aspen and summers in Nantucket--has descended into doggerel under pressure of his frontrunner status. "Like father, like son / One term only / And Bush is done," he chanted at campaign stops last week. Well, two can play at that game. How about "IGNORE THE BORE IN 2004"? "BE WARY OF KERRY"? The possibilities are endless. If we could just figure out a rhyme for Nantucket. . . . Outside the Box THE SCRAPBOOK is not very big on the outdoors, but we do sometimes take vicarious pleasure in reading Outside magazine. We were more than a little astonished to come across an article headlined "The Case for Drilling ANWR" in the eco-glossy's February issue. Author David Masiel, who worked on barges before turning to writing, interviewed Washington wonks and Alaskan oil crews, as well as environmentalists and indigent tribesmen. What he's produced is a model of one-man investigative journalism. He argues that carefully targeted oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge can be done safely. The Bush administration has made this argument in the name of energy independence; more important to Masiel is the economic benefit that would flow to the Inupiat villages of Kaktovik, on Alaska's northern shore. With special issues devoted to the nation's water supply and in-depth coverage of tropical rainforests, no one's about to accuse the crunchy-cute Outside magazine of being a patsy for Bush. Which makes it all the more courageous of them to publish this piece. Chief Wiggles Update Several issues ago, we highlighted on this page the charitable work in Iraq of a pseudonymous National Guardsman and blogger, "Chief Wiggles," who inspired and helped organize a gigantic distribution of toys from American donors to Iraqi children. Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Bush paid tribute to the chief: "Our people in uniform understand the high calling they have answered because they see the nation and the lives they are changing. A guardsman from Utah named Paul Holton has described seeing an Iraqi girl crying and deciding then and there to help that child and others like her. By enlisting aid through the Internet, Chief Warrant Officer Holton had arranged the shipment of more than 1,600 aid packages from overseas. Here's how this man defines his own mission: 'It is part of our heritage that the benefits of being free, enjoyed by all Americans, were set up by God, intended for all people. Bondage is not of God, and it is not right that any man should be in bondage at any time, in any way.' Everyone in this room can say amen to that." Breindel Award Applications are invited for the annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award is named for longtime New York Post editor and columnist (and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor) Eric Breindel, who died in 1998 at the age of 42. It is presented each year to the columnist, editorialist, or reporter whose work best reflects the spirit of Breindel's too-short career: love of country, concern for the preservation and integrity of democratic institutions, and resistance to the evils of totalitarianism. Last year's posthumous winner was Michael Kelly, the columnist and Atlantic Monthly editor who was killed in Iraq while on assignment. Previous winners have included author Victor Davis Hanson and National Review managing editor Jay Nordlinger. For an application and further information about this year's contest, which once again features a $10,000 award, please contact Germaine Febles, 212-843-8031, or gfebles@rubenstein.com. The recipient will be announced in June.
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