Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Phil Klay
Read between
April 2 - April 20, 2024
War remains a large part of who we are as Americans, with almost a sixth of our federal budget going to defense, keeping troops deployed in eight hundred military bases around the world and engaging in counterterror missions in eighty-five countries. And yet, thanks to a series of political and strategic choices, to the average American that’s mostly invisible.
Can service members maintain a sense of purpose when nobody—not the general public, or the Congress elected to represent them, or the commander in chief himself—seems to take the wars we’re fighting seriously?
“I had to write about this country whose story had been entwined with my country’s story for a generation now, for most of my life, so entwined that neither place any longer made sense without the other.” And more to the point, he asks, “As an American writer of my age, how do you not face Iraq?” But of course, in a war-weary
With such anemic congressional oversight, is it any wonder our wars have been handled so poorly, that overseas conflicts grow out of control, and that the public notices only when disaster looms? A nation unwilling to hold itself accountable perhaps deserves incoherent policy. But the Iraqi people, who will bear the brunt of the coming violence, do not.
out comes the hyphen—up goes the Stars and Stripes.
The demographics of the military don’t support the image—it’s actually the middle class that’s best represented in the military, and the numbers of high-income and highly educated recruits rose to levels disproportionate to their percentage of the population after the War on Terror began.
In its own way, American pop culture, with its increasing obsession with Special Forces conducting commando-style raids, seems to have come to a similar conclusion. Zero Dark Thirty, 13 Hours, and American Sniper offer a vision of war in which highly trained operatives kill undoubtedly evil people—bomb makers and torturers and sadists and thugs of all stripes—without forcing too much consideration about the overall outcome. In a raid, the moral stakes seem clear.
Libya and Yemen right now. If you narrow your scope sufficiently, there’s no end to what you don’t have to deal with.
will forever be haunted by the fact of carnage itself. The ones who actually looked straight into the eyes of death will scream out in the middle of the night and awake shaking in cold sweat for the rest of their lives—and there will be no idea, nothing save the memory of teamwork, to redeem them.
No number of film dramatizations of commandos killing bad guys can move us past the simple reality that Iraq is destroyed, there is untold suffering overseas, and we as a country have even abandoned most of the translators who risked their lives for us. Yet this fact seems not to have penetrated either the civilians we come home to or the government that sent us: “How many American presidents or members of Congress have suffered from PTSD or taken their own lives rather than live any longer with the burden of having declared a war?” asked humanities professor Robert Emmet Meagher. None, of
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“There’s a kind of emptiness inside me that tells me that I’ve still got something coming. It’s not a pension that I’m looking for. What I paid out wasn’t money; it was part of myself. I want to be paid back in kind, in something human.”
Pity places the focus on what’s wrong with veterans. But for veterans looking at the society that sent them to war, it may not feel like they’re the ones with the most serious problem.
Since, as recent history has shown us, violating the rules of patriotic correctness is a far worse sin in the eyes of the American public than sending soldiers to die uselessly, the political battle became intense, and the White House was forced to respond.
Those with questions about military policy are being put in their place more and more often these days.
Clever gun enthusiasts figured out how to bypass this with a device known as a bump stock—which uses the energy of the rifle’s recoil to assist in bumping the trigger against the shooter’s finger—and which helped the Las Vegas shooter achieve something like fully automated rifle fire.
If that bullet is the longer, heavier AK bullet, which only begins tumbling at depths of greater than 20 centimeters, it will travel through your body relatively hydrodynamically, its point mostly forward, like a professional diver entering a pool with little splash. If that bullet is from an AR-15, however, the bullet will begin tumbling at around 11 centimeters, like an out-of-control race car spinning as it moves forward along the track. By around 18 centimeters, the bullet will be at full yaw, tilted 180 degrees, doing a belly flop into the pool of fluids inside your body. Here, the bullet
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Simply put, early America had no gun culture. But Colt was an inventor. He could invent one. The first step was expanding beyond the narrow hunt for U.S. government contracts.
“What Colt invented,” the historian William Hosley wrote, “was a system of myths, symbols, stagecraft, and distribution” promising that ownership of a Colt would provide “access to the celebrity, glamour and dreams of its namesake.”
The American ideals of freedom and equality were recast, by gunmakers, in martial terms; self-reliance, respect, and freedom of movement were tied to the capacity to kill. “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men,” one advertisement
read, “but Sam Colt made them equal.”
And this market has been created out of a mixture of myths about American history, antigovernment rhetoric, paranoia, fear of crime, fascination with military hardware, and appeals to the insecurities of American men. These myths are the software American consumers are buying along with their hardware.
Any soldier can tell you that no amount of prayer provides security for the defenseless in a war zone. The good die. The bad die. The combatants die, and the children die. The old men and the women and the fathers and mothers and sisters and daughters and sons die. Sometimes, often, they die horribly.
When we return home, a new knowledge follows with us, the viscerally felt knowledge that men are cruel, that history is bloody and awful, and that the earth is a place where, no matter where you live, whether it’s New York or Fallujah, Chicago or Baghdad, we are regularly failing to protect our most vulnerable, our poor, and our desperate.
As I watch the catastrophe that has befallen Iraq, it now seems absurd to cheaply suggest that it built toward any greater purpose, or paved the way for greater peace and prosperity, or that it is anything more than a net increase in the suffering and horror of a world awash in blood, or that there is even a realistic prospect for any kind of justice, some kind of restitution or payment or balancing out, even in a small way, for what has been erased.
Trauma has less to do with a person than with how that person has grown around it. You cannot understand the harm that has been done without understanding the good suffusing the rest of life.
