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Forever.”
    Although he had acquired the tat as an aspiring teen tough guy in his old Irish-Catholic neighborhood; an inscription below was in Hebrew: “ HaMe’ez Menatzeakh ”: “Who Dares Wins,” the slogan of Israel’s elite special police paramilitary counterterrorism unit, Yamam, Yehida Mishtartit Meyuhedet. The unit was developed jointly by the Israeli Police and the Israeli Defense Forces specifically to combat Palestinian terrorism in-country and in Gaza. He added the motto as a soldier in memory of his best friend from that unit who had died fighting Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.
    “Bold,” the doctor observed. “Very Southie. Especially the Hebrew motto,” he wisecracked. “Isn’t that where you’re from, South Boston?”
    Maran just smiled. Like every son of Southie, he was proud of it.
    It had been a baptism of fire, the way Maran was raised black and Jewish-American in irrepressible, two-fisted but decidedly fair Irish-Catholic Southie. It was a town where he was accepted as one of the gang under the code of urban loyalty to its own citizens of every stripe and variety, most of whom, like himself, traced their families back to immigration sometime in the not-so-distant past.
    His old neighborhood had a reputation. But it drove him crazy to hear his hometown maligned in one-sided, biased movies and nation-al newspapers like the New York Times that pictured Southie as a hotpot of hopeless second- and third-generation Irish bigots. Like most American urban communities, it had a healthy sprinkling of streets filled with other ethnics. In Southie’s case there were Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians. He knew the truth. Firsthand. Simple class-based bigotry that infected truth in the liberal media. And he knew the difference between those same propaganda dicks who distinguished between blue collar and white collar workers with the old Soviet-catchphrase, “Working Class,” as if human beings were broken down into different species according to their education or wealth or jobs. He hated that jarringly divisive phrase as the kind of Cold War propaganda that launched “class struggle” and “people’s democracy” as American political concerns, among the evil Communist movement’s greatest coups. It was something he only heard from the so-called “elites” but never back home in the old neighborhood.
    “Old Harbor Village housing projects. Great place to grow up, have some fun, patriot,” he bragged to the doctor. “They called me ‘Cocoa.’ But that never bothered me. We were all in the same gang. We had an Arab kid we called ‘Ahab’ and a Greek, ‘Adonis.’ Just fun.”
    He didn’t feel like explaining his identity confusion, mixed loyalties, fear of isolation. It was painful. So he never did. Avoidance and denial were specialties. He was what they called ‘complicated.’ That’s why he didn’t bother to worry about who he was and why he kept his uncertainty masked when he could. It was also what led him into the U.S. Army and branded him with a fierce loyalty to its principles. There, he never had to worry about confused identity. There, allegiance was clear and he considered himself a patriot, All-American, just the way he felt as a teenaged member of the project’s South Boston Shamrocks, the street gang and football team he left to attend West Point, endorsed by Jack O’Bryan, Southie’s congressman.
    “Mack, you have a decent chance of recovery. The MRIs and CAT Scans of your brain show a slight bruise, however,” the neurologist told him.
    “How bad?” Maran asked.
    “Some of the effects could be permanent. We won’t know for, let’s say for the sake of argument … six months. In the meantime, relax. Most important, if you don’t want a recurrence, it’s vital that you stay away from stress. If you’re lucky you might avoid a recurrence, but even normal life could throw you right back to Cabinda. Trauma like this can repeat. We think you’ll get through this,