William Astore: Tough Truths Are Desperately Needed About America’s Lost Wars
Americans may already be lying themselves out of what little remains of their democracy.
Rebecca Gordon: It’s Almost Twenty Years Since 9/11
Perhaps the horrors of 2020—the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19—can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us—or indeed the world—any safer.
W. D. Ehrhart: Paul Fussell — A Remembrance
While Fussell wrote on a wide variety of subjects over his long life—ranging from Augustan humanism, Samuel Johnson, and Kingsley Amis to the 2nd Amendment, the Indianapolis 500, and travel in between-the-wars Europe—war, the irony of war, the suffering and lunacy and permanent damage of war, the unfairness of war, lay at the heart of his writing and of his being.
Sarah Gordon: Threshold
You see them there
their arms weary with
holding the guns
withholding their fire
You see them in the light
Andrea Mazzarino: Bearing Witness to the Costs of War
I’m a scholar of the war on terror’s civilian casualties, as well as a military spouse. Until the suffering ends, all of us should bear witness to the costs of war.
Roberta Hatcher: By Yellow Lamplight
But what of the happiness they wrought?
Laughter around a table, flavor of onions
and mustard and salt, music to drown the sound
of his weeping. All the gods are fallen.
Jon Tribble: War
Red maple, sweetgum slashed and torn out by the roots so we could build a jungle underneath the pines, so our camouflage would blend us with crows’ panic, with honeysuckle … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: After the War
. After the war, some of us had to have answers. Who were these people we’d had a war with? Where did they come from? Where did they learn to … Continue reading
Siegfried Sassoon: “Finished with the War — A Soldier’s Declaration”
In July of 1917, mid-World War I, following a period of convalescent leave during which he had decided to make a stand by not returning to duty, celebrated poet Siegfried … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Letter
Deer hunters half whose energy is spent not shooting one another in these little scraps of east coast woods I see you going out before dawn in your camo even … Continue reading
Video: War and Human Nature
John Green talks about whether humanity is naturally warlike, hard-wired to kill, or if perhaps war is a cultural construct. John explains the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate, the effects that … Continue reading
