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What does 'serving up payback' mean? Hello! Can you help me to understand a sentence in a book that I am reading? The paragraph is: „For the previous year and a half, we’d been training to deploy. We’d trained in Thailand, the Philippines, East Timor, and Australia over the last few months. As I watched the attacks, I longed to be out of Okinawa and in the mountains of Afghanistan, chasing al Qaeda fighters and serving up a little payback.“ What does the part 'serving up a little payback' mean? It is about taking revenge? But then, the 'serving up' confuse me. What does ist mean in that case? Oh, and I'm happy if you would correct my writing here. Trank you!

Answers · 3

1
Yes, it's basically revenge, or the "eye for an eye" philosophy. We have an expression, "revenge is a dish best served cold". Perhaps the writer was hinting at the action in that phrase, but sometimes "serve up" is simply used to mean "give".

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