What the intruders didn’t understand is that they were coming in at the wrong place. It was not the technology that they needed to attack, but the human mind, the way it failed, how it fell short. She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple—hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat.
