“Didn’t you know the first U.S. intervention of the post–Cold War period was in Greece?” In Greece? As I sat with them, not knowing about these things—about my own country—I felt as if a physical separation lay between us, as if I inhabited an entirely other universe. I had been charged with writing about them, for a magazine thousands of people would read, and yet whatever I wrote would to Greeks inevitably be read as if the magazine had dispatched an alien from another planet.
