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West—that signified his brothers in arms, he thought: We stand on the wall, guarding this country’s foundations.
    Before the 2010 elections, the House Democrats had forty-two black members. The Republicans had zero. Now there were two of the latter. The other African-American freshman, Tim Scott from the old slave market town of Charleston, South Carolina, had made it clear during the 2010 campaign that he had no interest in joining the Congressional Black Caucus with its liberal agenda. West hadn’t discussed the subject with Scott. In Scott’s view, politics was beside the point. Allen West was beside the point. West’s parents had spent most of their young lives in south Georgia, where society’s tenets were inalterably color-coded. Raised in Atlanta less than two miles from Ebenezer Baptist Church, West could still remember the primal wailings of his mother and his aunts the night Martin Luther King was shot. To honor the perseverance of his forebears, West knew what he had to do.
    “My parents were Democrats,” he told Jim Clyburn when they metand shook hands. “I think they’d be proud of the decision I made to join.”
    The seventy-year-old Democrat replied, “And my parents were Republicans. Welcome.”
    John Lewis welcomed him as well. “We’re looking forward to working with you,” the Georgia congressman said.
    “My parents used to vote for you,” said West. “I’m from right near your district at Grady High School.”
    “I get my laundry done at the dry cleaner’s right over there!” exclaimed Lewis.
    Thought West: Yeah, so don’t come down to my district anymore and campaign against me like you did last October!
    “Never see your color as a crutch,” his father used to tell him. Herman West was an Army corporal who had helped liberate Rome in World War II. His older brother was wounded in Vietnam. His mother worked for the 6th Marine Corps District headquarters in Atlanta. West joined the ROTC at the age of sixteen. Instructed the father: “You make yourself so good that you can’t be denied.”
    The Corps became his world. He did not fraternize or smoke or drink or do drugs—not then and not to this day. At jumpmaster school in 1984, he blew out his knee on a night jump from an aircraft and attended graduation on crutches. His first tour of duty was with an airborne battalion unit in Vicenza, Italy. At the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm in March 1991, Captain Allen West stood beside the tent in Safwan where Iraqi generals signed on to the terms of the cease-fire agreement—and he thought to himself, We’ve left a dictator’s military intact. He strongly suspected that he would be back in Iraq one day.
    A dozen years later, Lieutenant Colonel West was commanding a 4th Infantry Division battalion in the central Iraq town of Taji when he learned of a plot to assassinate him. After a roadside bomb hit his unit, he decided to take the report seriously. On his orders, an Iraqi police officer named Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi, who supposedly had knowledge of the plot, was detained and brought back to the base for interrogation.
    Hamoodi insisted, through several hours of questioning, that he knew nothing. Then West entered the room. The lieutenant colonelsat down in front of the detainee, on a stack of MRE boxes, and placed his 9mm pistol on his lap, with the barrel facing Hamoodi. “You’re either going to tell us what we need to know,” said West, “or I’ll kill you.”
    Hamoodi repeated his denials, and one of West’s soldiers punched him in the face. They dragged the Iraqi policeman over to a weapons clearing barrel and shoved his head down into it; West held his pistol against the back of Hamoodi’s head. He counted backward from five. Hamoodi still offered nothing. West then fired off a shot, purposefully missing the detainee by maybe an inch. Hamoodi promptly collapsed, invoked Allah, and proceeded to rattle off names and locations. Arrests were made. Nothing of substance