Killing and the Messenger

“I’ve had a hand in killing around six people. Maybe seven. I don’t know if one man bled out on the side of the road or was taken to a doctor. I think about him often … We had grown up on the nostalgia of World War II, then done something we were supposed to be proud of. Instead, what we got from our politicians and generals were evasions and lies. Our commanders could never articulate how our deployments, and all the violence we committed and the losses we suffered, made anyone safer in the United States. We were left to figure everything out on our own while they landed lucrative jobs at defense companies and collected big fees on speaking circuits. For some people, it was too much to handle.” Thomas Gibbons-Neff in the NYT (Gift Article) with a timely article about another war. (I suppose these kinds of articles are almost always timely.) Why I Sought Out a Taliban Commander I Had Fought. “First as a Marine and then as a journalist, I spent years tied to Afghanistan. I returned one last time to speak to a former enemy in search of answers, and perhaps closure.”