"Looking at War Across 2,500 Years" Topic

"In few areas of human activity is there such a discrepancy between perception and reality as there is with war. There tends to be a huge difference between what people think war is and what it really is, a thought that returned to me repeatedly as I read a stack of new books.

The gap between expectation and reality drives a bitter new memoir by a former United States Army lieutenant. Erik Edstrom went to war in Afghanistan in 2009 pretty much as a true believer, fresh out of West Point, where, at his graduation, he gratefully shook Dick Cheney's hand. After a year of what he saw as pointless combat in the southern Afghanistan desert, he came to believe that "America is neither good nor great." The result is his boiling mad UN-AMERICAN: A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War (Bloomsbury, 304 pp., $28 USD). It amounts to a kind of "Pilgrim's Progress" in reverse, an account of how he lost his faith in his country.

"The war on terror strip-mined my soul," Edstrom writes. "It strained my relationships, destroyed my notion of patriotism, eroded my support for American foreign policy, dissolved whatever faith I may have once had in religion or God, and made me deeply sad." There have been several excellent memoirs by veterans of our current wars, but this is the first one that reminded me of the disillusioned writings of British veterans after World War I, grounded in a deep new distrust of the nation that sent them to war and in the officers who led them in combat…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Agenda "journalism" in a discredited rag.

Glup!….

Amicalement
Armand

With a circulation (print and digital) of over 3,000,000 I don't think this "discredited rag" is on the way out.

LT