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.