Afternoon Must-Read: David Drake: Newsletter #82

…Dad worked with his hands–he was an electrician–but he was anti-union and identified with the middle class rather than radical labor. Our family had middle-class values, read slick magazines rather than pulps, and voted Republican…. A lot of people raised the way I was think that Something Should Be Done about this or that world problem… Boko Haram’s kidnapping… the Lord’s Resistance Army… the Islamic State…. All of these organizations do horrific things by the standards of any civilized human being, myself included… [and] are demonstrably beyond the capacity of local governments to deal with…. If I hadn’t ridden a tank in SE Asia, I probably would have been on one or all of those bandwagons and on many others over the years. The thing is, I know what Doing Something means at the sharp end. I’ve helped to burn a village, I’ve watched a gutshot girl die (she’d been transporting rice for the NVA), and I was involved with a variety of other things that make me doubt the value to the ordinary people of Viet Nam and Cambodia of what we did there. Would it be different in Africa or the Middle East? Maybe, but I find wars have a logic of their own for the people in the mud and the dust and the insects. I think it would be good for folks who say, ‘We have to do something!’ to at least talk to some of us who’ve Done Something ourselves. Talk to us–or keep their mouths shut.