Dear NRA Members, 2nd Amendment lovers, Fraternal Order of Police members, legislators, judges, voters, prosecutors, federal agents, state agents, municipal agents, county sheriffs, veterans...
Why Black Literature Matters
“The Thankful Poor”, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1894 Last month in The Atlantic, Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Al Aswany wrote an excellent essay on How Literature Inspires Empathy. He g...
Letters to Us: #1. May All Those Who Labor Find Rest
2015.09.06, Labor Day
Dear America,
You inspire me into a coma.
...
The Racist Arguments For, Against Gun Control
Gun violence is deeply entrenched in America. Chances are, if you’ve spent any time outside the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the last 30 years, you’ve been touched by gun violence personally—som...
Reinhold Messner as Nietzschean Übermensch
One month ago, on July 24, 2015, the sixth and final Messner Mountain Museum opened to the public on the top of a mountain in northern Italy, a couple hours from where I live. This newest museum is...
Thoughts on the Zombie Apocalypse
A piece about who finds zombie narratives compelling and why.
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Dispatch from Greece: Myth, Tragedy, Resistance, and Hope
Herodotus begins his great work by tracing the historical origins of the Persian War to myths involving conflict between Europe and Asia, such as the rape of Io and Europa by Zeus, the story of Jas...
Some Thoughts on the Assassination of Osama bin Laden
During my first tour in Afghanistan in 2005, I was one of those who still thought that the war was justified and worth fighting. The search for bin Laden was ongoing and America held (or was...
The Death Penalty and State-Sanctioned Violence
A confluence of recent events has led to the practice of capital punishment in America becoming a matter of greater public interest and debate for the first time in several decades. Foremost a...
Berlin, and the Trip East
They’re rebuilding Prussian Berlin. Not exactly the way it was before World War II, but Prussia is unquestionably the inspiration. The city is unified, the country is unified, and for the fir...
Curzio Malaparte: Great & Anonymous WWII Writer
How World War II gets remembered isn’t accurate, and for Curzio Malaparte, it's not even true. Not the American version, not the Russian, not anywhere, really. At best, our memo...
Why Don’t Afghans Love Us: Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue
There aren’t many “literary” fiction books out about Afghanistan, and almost none authored by veterans. Brian Castner, a veteran of Iraq, published an essay in Los Angeles R...
The Land of the Balaklava
“Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.” These are lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the L...
On Gun Violence and the Second Amendment
America has a problem with violence, and specifically gun violence. This is a fact, not an opinion, and is confirmed with a glance at the statistics, backed up as well by abundant anecdotal evidenc...
Preparation For The Next Life – What We Want Is Not What We Will Get
After war, most societies look for love. Instead of dealing with the various manifest issues that remain after years of chaos and wanton murder, they seek the understanding and hope that can o...
Top 4 Contributors on Wrath Bearing Tree, 2014
With so much incredible, breakthrough writing happening at The Wrath Bearing Tree this year, the editors wanted to set a moment aside from their around-the-clock analysis of emergent (and urge...
Brad Pitt and the Myth of the Wehrmacht
Brad Pitt loves playing in WWII movies. He loves fighting Nazis, who, incredibly, really existed, and were (if anything) even more evil than comes across on a movie screen. For 12 years, one o...
Goodbye to Christmas Truces
We have recently passed the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, which has occasioned a fair amount of press coverage looking back at the so-called (and ill-named) “Great War&rdq...
American Sniper and the Hero Myth
American Sniper, a new film based on the book of the same name, is being released on Christmas Day. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring and produced by Bradley Cooper, it tells the story of Nav...
Yes, We Tortured Some Folks
By now everyone in the world has heard about the recently released U.S. Senate Torture Report, which details the shocking and mind-numbing inhumanity of the torture program sanctioned by the Bush a...
Against Obvious Racism
Let’s be honest about racism. It’s here. And it’s not going anywhere. But its prevalence is surprising, again, if we’re being honest: we’ve been under the mistaken impressio...
Peace in the Middle East (by Xmas 2014): Nukes
I have the solution to the full-blown crisis in the Middle East, and as usual, America is the only country that can do it right. Russia has the resources, but let’s face it – they&rsquo...
America and Iran: The Great Post-Persia Hangover
We never meant things to get out of hand the way they did in Iran. Let's agree about that to begin with, let's agree that the CIA's role in replacing a democratically elected ...
These Colors Don’t Run: Afghanistan Edition
It’s sad when you already know what people are going to say when you tell them that staying in Afghanistan today is as stupid and pointless now as it was in 2003, or 2009, or 2011. They’re going to...
The Wrath of Islam
I read a piece on Vox recently (compliments of former roommate and exceptional human being Damien Spleeters) the point of which was to disabuse readers of “myths” surrounding the Islami...
Fury: A Realistic but Stupid, Useless Film
Hollywood does not know how to make a film about war. This has been proven on so many different occasions, often averred on this blog, across the spectrum of time and experience, that I almost wond...
Suicide and the Military
There are two substantial issues facing the American military and veteran community today. The first, a logical and narratively unified reaction to years of hero-worship, is a backlash against the ...
Reaction to Helen Benedict’s “The Moral Confusion of Post-War America”
Thought experiment. Someone you know, and who knows you, but not very well, says in public that you have no integrity. Like this: “You have no integrity. Zero. None. That’s what I think. This is my...
Wil S. Hylton’s “Vanished”: a Review
Vanished, Wil S. Hylton’s book about the search to identify and return servicemembers’ remains to their families – no matter the obstacle – is a compelling read. It’s a non-fiction account, somethi...
Passive Aggressive: Understanding the Tenor of New War Literature
The suicide bomber came from the wrong direction. He drove a maroon Toyota Corolla into the middle of a group of Afghan police and militia – just an hour into a massive operation to help defeat th...
The Espionage Act and the Cult of Secrecy
The most important compromise that allowed for the passage of the U.S. Constitution was that there be included a series of amendments called the Bill of Rights, which guaranteed certain freedoms to...
Dr. King’s Final Dream
We recently witnessed the 50th anniversary celebration of the famous 1963 “March on Washington”, which was a peaceful gathering in the nation’s capital to advocate for Civil Right...
On Racism and Other Bigotries
Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, tribalism, nationalism, parochialism, xenophobia, jingoism, bigotry, intolerance, hatred. These are the topics to be discussed presently. I was inspired t...
Acronyms and 21st Century Conflict
Some useful acronyms by which to understand 21st century conflict: COIN: Counter Insurgency. Employed by ISAF in Afghanistan from 2003-2010. Broadly speaking, the strategy wherein a friendly force ...
A Veteran Relooks at War
We have collectively learned much in the last couple years about a secret and frightful new war machine — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, aka drones. That is a topic for another day, however. The n...