November 2014

The Price

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00November 11th, 2014|Gold|

Excerpted from The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer

On the evening of November 8, 2003, at around 7:40 p.m., a two-Humvee convoy pulled out through the front gate of the American base at the Rashid military camp in south Baghdad. The mission was to pick up a sergeant attending a meeting at the combat support hospital inside the Green Zone. In the rear left seat of the lead vehicle sat a twenty-two-year-old private named Kurt Frosheiser.

There was nothing obvious to set Private Frosheiser apart from the tens of thousands of other young enlisted men who served in Iraq. He was from Des Moines, Iowa. He had a twin brother, a married older sister, and divorced parents. He had been an indifferent student and a bit of a rebel through high school, and by age twenty-one he was a community college dropout, living with his sister’s family, delivering, pizza, and partying heavily. He had a brash, boyish smile, with his father’s full mouth and lidded eyes; he liked Lynyrd Skynrd and the Chicago Cubs; and one day in January 2003, he flew through the door with the news that he had just enlisted in the Army.

His father, Chris, wasn’t thrilled to hear it. There was a war on terror going on, and the strong possibility of a land war in Iraq. But he didn’t try to argue with his son. In February, Kurt dropped by his father’s apartment around two in the morning after a night out drinking and said, “I want to be part of something bigger than myself.”

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June 2014

Losing the War

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00June 7th, 2014|Gold|

Excerpted from “Losing the War,” by Lee Sandlin

Whenever people talk about the meaning of history somebody brings up that old bromide from Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But that’s nonsense. The circumstances that created an event like World War II couldn’t be duplicated no matter how many millennia of amnesia intervened.

To the extent that the war had an intelligible cause, it was in the rancors left over from World War I, exacerbated by the Great Depression — and those rancors existed only because of decades of hatred and infighting among the colonial empires of the 19th century. But the brief dominion of the Japanese “coprosperity sphere” lasted just long enough to wreck the colonial system in Asia, and the final convulsion of war bankrupted all the great powers of Europe, leaving the former rulers of the world in abject poverty — food rationing in both Germany and England lasted well into the 1950s. The first new historical trend of the postwar era was the systematic shedding of colonial possessions, and the just-created nations were immediately absorbed into new alignments of power demanded by the triumphant global empires of the atom. The old architecture of the world devised by Europe was as harmless a memory as a dissipating storm front. Like most big events in history, World War II obliterated its own causes.

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New York, or the Feeling That Something’s Missing

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00June 4th, 2014|Life|

It’s very easy to make fun of New York and the artists who flock to it.

Ironic fixed gears; misappropriated plaid; male cutoffs and career baristas; an excess of profound utterances and an absence of thought. Add to this well-practiced angst, deep-rooted entitlement, and basically most of the shit on Girls.

But of course, this is a stereotype. While it carries a kernel of truth, it’s also a mean-spirited exaggeration, levied by certain groups of people against something alien and unknown.

It also comes from a place of fear: financiers and everyday breadwinners and government-minded folks like me, residing in a world of material cause and effect, do not want to allow the thought that these people with their heads in the clouds have found a way to live life better. We can’t allow the thought, at least without also questioning whether our own paths are the right ones.

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January 2014

Regarding Science, Conflict, and Regret

2015-01-23T03:57:32+00:00January 30th, 2014|Gold|

From C.P. Snow’s Science and Government, 1961:

[Discussing disagreements over the equations used to determine percentage of German city destruction in the British strategic bombing campaigns of World War II]

Let me break off for a minute. It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, men well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing.

Such calculations, on a much larger scale, are going on at this moment in the most advanced societies we know.

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?

They will have the right.

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March 2011

Somme

2015-01-20T03:27:09+00:00March 20th, 2011|Writing|

Originally published March 20, 2011

Because the sun hung so cheerful and bright, he pretended there was no war, and that his trench did not smell like bloating death.

Shaving by a shard of glass, he imagined he still looked a child of seventeen, instead of an old man of twenty.

Wincing as shells roared overhead, he pictured fireworks.  The first time he’d been taken to a show, he’d cried until his mother brought him home.  He had not gone to the fireworks after that.

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