f a i l b e t t e r . c o m

Tom Paine's first novel, The Pearl of Kuwait, is scheduled to be released in March 2003.

In it, the life of California surfer Cody "Cowboy" Carmichael is forever changed when he meets Private Tommy Trang at boot camp. Trang is not your typical American patriot: his Vietnamese mother was raped, his father an unknown US marine, and his heart soon belongs to a sixteen year old Kuwaiti princess trapped behind the lines when the Iraqis invade her country. Together, the two teenage marines are ready to wave the American flag all the way to Baghdad, or at least into occupied Kuwait to rescue the Muslim 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 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.

Tom Paine's short story collection Scar Vegas was a PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist, an American Library Association (ALA) ‘Top Ten’ book of the year 2000, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

It was also a Barnes and Noble Discover Award winner, and a Village Voice ‘Writer on the Verge’ selection.

His short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Playboy, optioned by Francis Ford Coppola and Disney, and awarded an O. Henry Award and two Pushcart Prizes for the best short stories of the years 1996, 1997 and 1998. He is a former private in the United States Marines.

The Pearl of Kuwait
Excerpt

All 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 U.S.S. 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 US 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 starting 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 US 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 like 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 perfom 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 M-16 bullet casing in his fingers like he was waiting for the call to arms. It looked like a real old bronze bullet casing, kind of crushed like someone stomped on it. All Trang would tell me about the bullet 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 from my fellow marines, as it had a killer stars and stripes painted on it topside. Anyway, Trang said, "Tell me something cool, Carmichael." One thing about our being serious comrades-in-arms, over time the immigrant Tommy Trang started to talk like me some, using words like dude and cool and like.

So I told Trang about Kuwait. I told Trang the Kuwaitis were so loaded they like could buy most of America. I told him they were so loaded because 500 million years ago these like amoebas died and fell to the bottom of the sea, and this layer of dead amoebas got pushed down underground and became a layer of limestone geologists call 'Arab-D', and this limestone was like a sponge full of oil. Trang wasn't into amoebas, or oil, and told me tell him some cooler stuff. So I told him the shoreline around here was once called the 'Pirate Coast', and that Arab pirates used to attack British ships from the islands and inlets roundabouts and slit the throat of all the infidels on board yelling praises for Allah, and that the Brits had to mount expeditions from Bombay against these pirates, and pretty much took over the place in 1839. It was a lousy old guidebook, but Trang made me read everything there was about the throat-slitting pirates, and every time I stopped he kicked the bottom of my rack. I remember I had stopped again as there was nothing more about Arab pirates, and when I continued I read, In the days before oil, Kuwait was known for its pearl traders...

Tommy Trang's freckled semi-Asian face emerged over the upper bunk, and his green-yellow cat eyes were like glowing, and he asked to see exactly where it said about the pearls in the guidebook. After a while I got to know when Trang's cat eyes were glowing and his rock jaw jutting, watch out! I put my finger on the section and handed over the book, and then Tommy Trang read to me-kind of slowly and with some accent so you could tell the powerful dude wasn't born in America--about the major beds of pearls off Kuwait. In the days before oil there were 10,000 divers off the coast of Kuwait bringing up pearls. Trang jumped off his rack and read about the old pearl trading days in the Kingdom of Kuwait. He was totally stoked about the historical pearls of Kuwait, but not out of like historical interest. It was Trang's opinion that the country of Kuwait was so loaded that they didn't give a damn about pearls anymore, so for fifty years or more those fat clams had sat down there on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, greedily hanging on to pearls as big as Trang's fist. That's what I got for the next week: Trang shaking his clenched fist in my face and saying this big, man, pearls this big.

Tommy Trang didn't keep his vision of monster pearls to himself. One time I came in and found him shaking an empty duffel bag in front of Warrant Officer Ptiovik and saying how they could fill one of these bags in an hour with the biggest pearls. Warrant Officer Pitovik was a grizzled helicopter pilot, and Trang told me later Pitovik was good to go, he'd drop us in the waters off Kuwait at night in our scuba gear, and extract us a few hours later for a cut of the pearl action. Trang was talking about 'utilizing' a helicopter from the Marine Corps for our own private pearl salvaging operation off Kuwait, and if we were caught we'd be in Leavenworth for ten years banging rocks.

Warrant Officer Pitovik came to me privately to assure me he'd drop us and extract us up as part of some other operation, and so no one would ever be the wiser. And then a black marine sergeant dude who called himself Mr. Slick got right in my face and said he was replacing me on Operation Bigass Pearl--as this Mr. Slick called it--as Tommy Trang said I didn't have the balls for this walk in the park. This Mr. Slick kept calling me 'Sunny', which was a nickname slapped on me by some marines on account of my being a blond surfer from Huntington Beach, California, and generally having a stoked 'good to go' vibe at all times and under all circumstances. Anyway, after the visit from Mr. Slick-who was an A-okay dude if you got past the ghetto gangster act-I went to Trang and told him I was in, and so we slapped each other five and shouted the Marine Corps seal call of OOhrahhh!, and scrounged up some excellent maps of the waters off Kuwait, and sat down to make it a mission. We picked a drop, adjusted our schedules over the next few days to fit in with Pitovik's flight plans, and figured what stuff to snag from the scuba locker. Mr. Slick pulled back and agreed to stay on the helo, when it was clear we needed another guy up in the rotor, and we promised him his quarter share of pearls anyway.

Nobody really questioned if the beds of ancient pearls were still in the waters off Kuwait, and if they were there, maybe the clams weren't sitting in the waters smack off the beaches in front of the skyscrapers of downtown Kuwait City, waiting for two teenage scuba-diving reconnaissance marines to shovel them up into mesh bags. The night before the operation neither of us slept, and Trang went on and on about how if it worked out, this was just the sort of stuff we'd tell stories about when we were old dudes, and then Trang changed his mind and said he was never going to be an old dude in a VA hospital telling stories, but wanted to keep rolling the dice as hard and fast as he could until they came up snake eyes, and he slapped his shoulder tattoo which said, DIE A HERO. Anyway, I pointed out to Trang we weren't fighting, or dying with any luck, but trying to get our asses tossed into the brig for the sake of a bunch of pearls mentioned in an old Kuwaiti guidebook. I said there wasn't even any honor in it, and Trang looked bummed when I said this, as I guess he figured I had a point.

The actual trip to the jump zone was like a party. Sgt. Pitovik brought along a couple of older warrant officers who hammered beers and slapped our backs and told us we were two crazyass leatherneck marines from like the heroic days of yore, and said they just wanted a pearl each as a souvenir. One of them said this was the sort of legendary stuff they experienced when they joined the marines, and they were proud Trang, Slick, and me were not worried about our long-term careers in the Marine Corps like so many other zipperhead marines nowadays. It was kind of cool having these old warrant officers so into Trang, as to be totally honest I got the vibe that your average marine had Trang pegged as a nutcase. I guess because Trang was always fired up with schemes like this pearl operation, or generally tossing off an attitude that he was like the greatest warrior in the history of the Marine Corps. Add to Trang's cocky attitude that he like a 'semi-gook', and reminded some marines about how we lost the war in Vietnam just by his grinning face, and what I am saying is that I was like his only good friend in the Corps.

Anyway, that night the helicopter whoop-whoop-whooped with us over the black waters of the gulf. Looking back, we could see the lights of the USS Inchon retreating, and ahead, the skyscrapers of downtown Kuwait coming at us fast. The door to the helo was open and the warm air whistled by, and Trang and I were dressed in our black scuba gear with tanks on our back and mesh bags and flashlights in our hands, and I wanted to call the thing off, but then I got punched in the gut with the sure knowledge I was like meant to hang with this excellent dude Tommy Trang, even if it meant risking Leavenworth. Warrant Officer Pitovik said we were over the drop zone, and he hovered. The office towers of downtown Kuwait were a couple of football fields away.

As I jumped from the helicopter I looked up and saw the flames of the Kuwaiti oil fields pluming in the distance, and then I shot down under the piss warm waters of the Persian Gulf in a tunnel of frothing bubbles. It is strange to think, but as I swam back up to the surface I thought: I am born! I am alive! It was like at that moment I was on my surfboard and looking down the vertical face of some legendary liquid mountain like the seventy foot waves at Maverick's. So I broke the surface with an shout and swam over to Tommy Trang when he popped up and I was just so totally stoked I started slapping his back, and he slapped mine as I guess he was feeling a similar power stoke, and we raised our fists together and pumped the Arab night air and yelled his tattoed motto, DIE A HERO!

When we dove down kicking our flippers to the bottom of the Gulf we found it was pretty barren. We swam along together shining our beams right and left, but it was muddy and barren as the moon, not a damn clam. I shined my light on Trang's mask, and he shook his head and pointed off into the black Gulf waters, and we'd kick hard onwards, but we found nothing in an hour to report except a big desalination intake pipe, and a busted up fish trap made of like woven palm tree stuff. Soon after we swam through this like white cloud of fish eggs or something, and then we saw this massive spaghetti highway of oil pipes. Finally I tapped Trang with the flashlight, and pointed to my watch, and motioned back to the drop zone with my thumb, and Trang shook his head and swam off.

And Trang started swimming fast, like he was trying to dump me. I whipped after him, until finally I grabbed his ankle and yanked him back pulling off a flipper, and jerked my thumb backwards toward the drop zone. Trang nodded, and his cat eyes were glowing in his mask, and I let him go, and damn if he doesn't keep heading off away from the drop zone with only one flipper, so then I grabbed him, and this time I didn't let go, but just kicked like a bastard until we broke the surface. What do you do when your buddy wants to screw up so bad?

I yanked off his mask, and my own, and started yelling how we had to get back for the Pitovik's pickup. He yelled like a total maniac how we had to keep looking for the pearls, how they were probably out in deeper water, how there was plenty of air and time, and then Trang tried to shove off me and swim away. I didn't let go of his mask hanging around his neck, and Trang and me started to wrestle and curse each other there in the Persian Gulf, and I told him he was a crazy gook just like the other marines all said and why the hell was I his friend anyway, and he slugged me in my nose so hard it rocked me back in the water and told me he didn't ask me to be his damn friend, so I slugged with a roundhouse that clipped his ear and told him, screw it, man, I ain't your friend then, and then he slugged me right in the mouth and knocked a front tooth right back to my tonsils, where it bounced like a pinball and I damn near choked on it and the blood.

I remember Trang shaking me like a dog and telling me to shut the fuck up because I was gurgling and yelling about the tooth. As I might or might not have said, Tommy Trang didn't swear--it was one of some secret set of ten personal 'rules for warrior greatness' he followed along with doing 500 situps or pushups every day--so hearing Trang swear I went dead in the water and then I heard it too. Someone was singing out there in the dark across the rippling waters of the Persian Gulf, and without another word we both started to stroke quietly toward the beautiful voice. It was a young woman's voice singing in Arabic and we were pulled to it like by a massive body magnet. We were able to barely see the dark outline of a funny-looking Arab rowboat of some sort, and in it a little figure dressed in black outlined against the quarter-moon night.

Then the figure ceased with the singing like she heard us frogmen coming, and there was a wooden scratching sound and we could see this figure shoving something off the bow. There was a splash, and then a real awful Arabic cry that daggered right into your heart. We both started sprinting toward the rowboat, and as we sprinted the big splash came as she went over the side, and we yanked down our masks, and dove, with me shining a light ahead as Trang swam like a torpedo in the funnel of light. We came on the now naked little Arab chick-she must have tossed off her robe at the last second-about thirty feet down, kicking hard for the surface with her free leg, the other leg tied by a yellow polystyrene rope to something heavy below dragging her down. Trang had his knife out, and was trying to both saw through this rope and kick with her for the surface from below. I tried without luck to shove my bubbling mouthpiece into her mouth, at the same time I kicked and pulled her upwards by the armpit, and then the Arab chick just sort of sagged into deadweight.

Trang yanked the final strands of the rope apart and we drove her hard to the surface. I held her head above the waters while Trang flopped in the dingy and then dragged her aboard. There was no way I could get in the dinghy too, so I just sort of treaded water and held the dive light so Trang could see what the hell he was doing, and he announced the naked Arab chick had a pulse but wasn't breathing, and I said to start CPR, and with his like palm supporting he gently bent her neck back. Her lips opened, and Trang lowered his head and just as he pressed his lips to hers her eyes snapped opened and locked on Trang and then she started gagging up seawater. Anyway, that kiss-if you can call CPR a kiss-was like the real beginning of all the adventures in Arabia for Trang and me.

Right after this sort of 'kiss of life' Trang layed on the suicidal Arab girl, the huge Kuwaiti Navy ship blinded us with a monster searchlight. We yelled and waves our arms and told them to cut that thing off, but they just burned it into us as they brought that bow damn near over us. Then like one of them threw us a ring buoy, even thought the ship was like now five feet away, and the idiot sailor hit me in the head with it-and it felt like it was made of solid wood.

So the Arab sailors snatched the naked little chick right away, and ushered us roughly down inside the huge ship to this like room with wall to wall white shag carpeting like you'd see in the 1970's America, and in the corner was like a serious golden throne. The Arab sailor dudes left us in there without a word, so Trang like right away hops up on the throne. He like looks around like he's thinking what to do next now that he's King of Kuwait.

Tommy Trang like pointed right then to the white shag carpet, and then I saw that I was leaving a trail of blood. It was dripping from my scalp and nose, down my wet suit and onto the floor. I was also bleeding from my mouth from Trang knocking out the tooth earlier in the evening, but had been swallowing the blood, and licking the hole with my tongue. Right then this like Kuwaiti officer comes in. Trang start jiving the dude from the throne like, Hey man, I'm you new King. Let's party!

The Kuwaiti Officer is like a doctor and starts to deal with my nose which he says is broken. When he finishes with screwing my nose back on and has it taped, he deals with my head wound. He has a little leather doctor bag, and I see him get out the needle and thread. Trang comes over to watch the doctor sew me up. I don't know, maybe it was because my man Trang was watching, but when the Kuwaiti doctor takes out the needle, I tell him no man, I don't need that novocaine, as I'm a US marine, Semper Fi! Doctor Kuwaiti says nothing, just gives me this cool Arab shrug that seems to say he figured I didn't need the freeze, as clearly I was one tough US Marine. If I had to do it again I might have opted for the needle, if my man Trang hadn't been looking on. Trang had the Doc look at my mouth, and when I opened up he started laughing, I guess at the gap in the front of my mouth. He tapped my guts, and I said no dude, I spit the tooth out. He shrugged again at my mouth and said, Inshallah. It was the first time we heard this phrase we were to hear so much over here in Arab-land, which boiled down to, God Wills It. I wasn't sure God Willed my tooth getting knocked out, if he hadn't been my main man, I might have rightly blamed Trang. The Arabs were big into Inshallahing just about every obvious screw-up.

No one came to see us after the Kuwaiti Doc left, and the door to the room turned out to be locked. Trang was clearly curious about what was going to go down next in our young warrior lives-and he gave off the vibe he figured it was all going to be cool. Trang always thought the next thing was going to be totally cool-he always had his arms wide open to his golden future. Anyway, when the Navy ship docked in downtown Kuwait, we were escorted off inside a crowd of like twelve Arab sailors, less apparently because they thought we were going to try to bust a move and escape, but more to like for some reason keep our presence a secret from anyone on shore. Somebody would have had hawk eyes to spot us, because like ten feet off the ship surrounded by all these Arab dudes we were shoved into a golden Jaguar with tinted windows.

There were four of us crammed in the back seat, with me and Trang in the middle back, and the driver and a silent dude in the front, and all were in the local robes. Nobody said a word, but the driver kept leering in the rear view window at me, and as we pulled up to the Sheraton's back door he said, "You see her big tits, the crazy little Princess?" Smash! The Arab dude in the passenger seat clocked him across the jaw with his left fist, and the driver's head bounced off the side window of the Jaguar and cracked it into a spiderweb.

Fall/Winter 2002

The Pearl of Kuwait
Excerpt

Fall/Winter 2002

The Pearl of KuwaitExcerpt

The Pearl of Kuwait
Excerpt