Soldier Pictures And Quotes

The library was home away from home to my mom, and my family. We had spent every Sunday afternoon there since I was a little boy, wandering around the stacks, pulling out every book with a picture of a pirate ship, a knight, a soldier, or an astronaut. My mom used to say, "This is my church, Ethan. This is how we keep the Sabbath holy in our family.

What exists beneath the sea? I’d always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton. But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, the salem witches who wouldn’t float, stars and stripes, missing vessels, windup toys, the souls of Romeo and Juliet, peaches, cream, pistons, screams, cages of ribs and birds, tunnels, nutcracker soldiers, satin bows, drugstore signs, Pandora box ripped open at its hinges.

The queen is head. Long live the queen...me." The platoon of renegade soldiers cheered. Redd kicked The Cat where he lay on the floor, tongue lolling in his mouth, the picture of death. "Get up! You still have seven more lives." The Cat's eyes fluttered open. Find Alyss and kill her." With a wave of her hand, the looking glass was once again whole. The Cate jumped through, in prosuit of the only living Heart besides Redd.

I couldn’t even picture Mavis’s face anymore. It was sad. She was being erased. I wanted to put my finger on her forehead, but there was nothing there.

I struggled for something to cling to, the way soldiers in foxholes picture their families, or a flag. My car, I thought crazily. This fucker crashed the Wongmobile. And for that, he must taste death.

Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.

Now comes the picture of mass defeat, the most awesome spectacle of the war. It is in the bent bodies of old women who poke among ruins seeking some miserable object that will link their lives with the old days. It is in the shamed darting eyes of the defeated. It is in the faces of the little boys who regard our triumphant columns with fear and fascination. And above all it is in the thousands of beaten, dusty soldiers who stream along the roads towards the stockades. Their feet clump wearily, mechanically, hopelessly on the still endless road of war. They move as haggard, gray masses, in which the individual had neither life nor meaning. It is impossible to see in these men the quality that made them stand up and fight like demons out of hell a few shorts months ago.

All right, he thought, okay; if thats the way it is; a savagery of anger in him now at the picture. They call them "pin-up girls" and think its cute how "our boys," now that they're drafted, love to hang them in their wall lockers. And then close up all the whorehouses, every place they can, so our young men will not be contaminated.

Soldiers went off to fight the Nazis with pictures of girls like you in their helmets.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.   Picture of a WW1 soldier whose jaw was shot

It was drizzling. As people rushed along, they began opening umbrellas over their heads, and all at once the streets were crowded, too. Arched umbrella roofs collided with one another. The men were courteous, and when passing Tereza they held their umbrellas high over their heads and gave her room to go by. But the women would not yield; each looked straight ahead, waiting for the other woman to acknowledge her inferiority and step aside. The meeting of the umbrellas was a test of strength. At first Tereza gave way, but when she realized her courtesy was not being reciprocated, she started clutching her umbrella like the other women and ramming it forcefully against the oncoming umbrellas. No one ever said "Sorry." For the most part no one said anything, though once or twice she did hear a "Fat cow!" or "Fuck you!" The women thus armed with umbrellas were both young and old, but the younger among them proved the more steeled warriors. Tereza recalled the days of the invasion and the girls in miniskirts carrying flags on long staffs. Theirs was a sexual vengeance: the Russian soldiers had been kept in enforced celibacy for several long years and must have felt they had landed on a planet invented by a science fiction writer, a planet of stunning women who paraded their scorn on beautiful long legs the likes of which had not been seen in Russia for the past five or six centuries. She had taken many pictures of those young women against a backdrop of tanks. How she had admired them! And now these same women were bumping into her, meanly and spitefully. Instead of flags, they held umbrellas, but they held them with the same pride. They were ready to fight as obstinately against a foreign army as against an umbrella that refused to move out of their way.

After ten months of infantry training, I realized my survival would depend on the men around me. Airborne troopers looked like I had always pictured a group of soldiers: hard, lean, bronzed, and tough. When they walked down the street, they appeared to be a proud and cocky bunch exhibiting a tolerant scorn for anyone who was not airborne.

The famous field altar came from the Jewish firm of Moritz Mahler in Vienna, which manufactured all kinds of accessories for mass as well as religious objects like rosaries and images of saints. The altar was made up of three parts, lberally provided with sham gilt like the whole glory of the Holy Church. It was not possible without considerable ingenuity to detect what the pictures painted on these three parts actually represented. What was certain was that it was an altar which could have been used equally well by heathens in Zambesi or by the Shamans of the Buriats and Mongols. Painted in screaming colors it appeared from a distance like a coloured chart intended for colour-blind railway workers. One figure stood out prominently - a naked man with a halo and a body which was turning green, like the parson's nose of a goose which has begun to rot and is already stinking. No one was doing anything to this saint. On the contrary, he had on both sides of him two winged creatures which were supposed to represent angels. But anyone looking at them had the impression that this holy naked man was shrieking with horror at the company around him, for the angels looked like fairy-tale monsters and were a cross between a winged wild cat and the beast of the apocalypse. Opposite this was a picture which was meant to represent the Holy Trinity. By and large the painter had been unable to ruin the dove. He had painted a kind of bird which could equally well have been a pigeon or a White Wyandotte. God the Father looked like a bandit from the Wild West served up to the public in an American film thriller. The Son of God on the other hand was a gay young man with a handsome stomach draped in something like bathing drawers. Altogether he looked a sporting type. The cross which he had in his hand he held as elegantly as if it had been a tennis racquet. Seen from afar however all these details ran into each other and gave the impression of a train going into a station.

How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told. Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years.

Dear, Missus, Mister - I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all at atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.' 'P.S.,' said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, 'If we all do this, we shall succeed.

And yet out of the thousands of pictures that Navidson took, there not exist a single frame without a person in it. Navidson never snapped scenery. People mattered most to him, whether soldiers, lepers, medics, or newlyweds eating dinner at a trattoria in Rome, or even a family of tailors swimming alone at some sandy cove north of Rio. Navidson religiously studied others. The world around only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy and degradation, even managed to triumph there.

Titanic orator. Drunk. Wit. Patriot. Imperialist. Visionary. Tank designer. Blunderer. Swashbuckler. Aristocrat. Prisoner. War hero. War criminal. Conqueror. Laughing stock. Bricklayer. Racehorse-owner. Soldier. Painter. Politician. Journalist. Nobel Prize-winning author. The list goes on and on, but each label, when taken alone, fails to do him justice; when taken together, they offer a challenge on a par with tossing twenty jigsaw puzzles together and expecting a single unified picture.

On a distant battlefield, somewhere in the Middle East, Sergeant Jackson is sick of this fucking war and stands up from behind the trench he’s hiding in, ignores the pleas of his squad mates to get down and starts to play the electric guitar he’s insisted he bring into battle with him. He plays a song: his father’s favourite. He’s spent years learning it and he thinks it’s beautiful. The first bullet kills him. Someone takes a picture as he falls. A dying soldier clutching his electric guitar.

If it is true that a picture paints a thousand words, then there was a Roman centurion who got a dictionary full. All he did was see Jesus suffer. He never heard him preach or saw him heal or followed him through the crowds. He never witnessed him still the wind; he only witnessed the way he died. But that was all it took to cause this weather-worn soldier to take a giant step in faith. “Surely this was a righteous man.”1 That says a lot, doesn’t it? It says the rubber of faith meets the road of reality under hardship. It says the trueness of one’s belief is revealed in pain. Genuineness and character are unveiled in misfortune. Faith is at its best, not in three-piece suits on Sunday mornings or at V.B.S. on summer days, but at hospital bedsides, cancer wards, and cemeteries. Maybe that’s what moved this old, crusty soldier. Serenity in suffering is a stirring testimony. Anybody can preach a sermon on a mount surrounded by daisies. But only one with a gut full of faith can live a sermon on a mountain of pain.

It feels like last week, but in fact we’re now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.

Be not ashamed to be helped; for it is thy business to do thy duty like a soldier in the assault on a town. How then, if being lame thou canst not mount up on the battlements alone, but with the help of another it is possible?

What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it. I remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting, waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at the top row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn't put that on the recruitment posters, did they? But that's what war is to me. And I don't care who we're fighting, I don't hate them enough to do something like that to them.

Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could.

The speaker was good, I liked what he had to say. I had expected a dry recitation on how women should change their gender if they expected to advance in a man's world, since I wasn't about to grow a cock and balls this man gave me hope and inspiration. Women dominated the audience, not surprising since the average African man wouldn’t support a speaker preaching gender equality. Africa was a continent with generational precedent for the alpha male, it was part of their culture, learned at an early age. This led to abuse on many levels. Women were expected to do the physical work, produce male babies and satisfy the sexual urgings of men. Urgings that in other societies would be called rape but in Africa were accepted as common practice. I understood this better than most. Pictures of the Kony boy-soldiers and their adult commander were burned into my memory.

The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to the brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised, When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected—yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: ‘We have won!’ At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: It is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The offer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man’s smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare.

I was going to write down my experiences during the assault, but what’s the point now? It’s all been written before, so many glorified accounts, soldiers, warriors, heroes. No matter how grim a picture I paint, there will always be those who have bright excited eyes, who think War is romantic, exciting, a beast to be tamed.

So we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix! Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best! He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

The author of IRR, who worshipped the King, said he had the valor of Hector, the magnanimity of Achilles, the liberality of Titus, the eloquence of Nestor, and the prudence of Ulysses; that he was the equal of Alexander and not inferior to Roland. But later historians tend to picture him rather as a remorseless, kindless villain. He was probably not a pleasant or a lovable character; none of the Plantagenets were. But a great soldier and a great commander he certainly was. He possessed that one quality without which nothing else in a commander counts: the determination to win. To this everything else—mercy, moderation, tact—was sacrificed. The avarice that so horrifies his critics was not simple greed: it was a quartermaster’s greed for his army. His massacre of the prisoners was not simple cruelty, but a deliberate reminder to Saladin to keep faith with the terms agreed to, which that great opponent understood and respected.

But even when the names of Black fighters did not survive, stories of their exploits did. Half a century later, José Antonio Aponte, a free Black carpenter and the grandson of one of the Black militiamen who defended Havana against the British, painted pictures precisely of scenes like this, of Black troops taking British men prisoner, of military encampments guarded by Black soldiers. Indeed, Aponte would use those pictures to recruit Black men to a major conspiracy against slavery.

In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon describes the scene of Romans fleeing the city of Nisibis in A.D. 363 after it was handed over to the Persians......Gibbon could have been describing a photograph from the 1994 genocide in Rawanda or the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. He could have been describing any number of forced migrations that have occurred all over the world in the last ten years, even the last five. The picture has not changed much since the fourth century.

Brutality is boring. Over and over, hell night after hell night, the same old dumb, tedious, bestial routine: making men crawl; making men groan, hanging men from the bars; shoving men; slapping men; freezing men in the showers; running men into walls; displaying shackled fathers to their sons and sons to their fathers. And if it turned out that you'd been given the wrong man, when you were done making his life unforgettably small and nasty, you allowed him to be your janitor and pick up the other prisoners' trash. There was always another prisoner, and another. Faceless men under hoods: you stripped them of their clothes, you stripped them of their pride. There wasn't much more you could take away from them, but people are inventive: one night some soldiers took a razor to one of Saddam's former general in Tier 1A and shaved off his eyebrows. He was an old man. "He looked like a grandfather and seemed like a nice guy," Sabrina Harman said, and she had tried to console him, telling him he looked younger and slipping him a few cigarettes. Then she had to make him stand at attention facing a boom box blasting the rapper Eminem, singing about raping his mother, or committing arson, or sneering at suicides, something like that⁠—these were some of the best-selling songs in American history. "Eminem is pretty much torture all in himself, and if one person's getting tortured, everybody is, because that music's horrible," Harman said. The general maintained his bearing against the onslaught of noise. "He looked so sad," Harman said. "I felt so bad for the guy." In fact, she said, "Out of everything I saw, that's the worst." This seems implausible, or at least illogical, until you think about it. The MI block was a place where a dead guy was just a dead guy. And a guy hanging from a window frame or a guy forced to drag his nakedness over a wet concrete floor⁠—well, how could you relate to that, except maybe to take a picture? But a man who kept his chin up while you blasted him with rape anthems, and old man shorn of his eyebrows whose very presence made you think of his grandkids--you could let that get to you, especially if you had to share in his punishment: "Slut, you think I won't choke no whore / til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more!..." or whatever the song was.

At 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, Grant died so gently that nobody was quite certain at first that his spirit had stolen away. His death reflected words he had once written to a bereaved widow during the Mexican War, saying that her husband had “died as a soldier dies, without fear and without a murmur.”142 Grant’s corpse weighed ninety pounds and lay under an oval picture of Abraham Lincoln. It was hard to believe this wizened form represented the earthly remains of the stouthearted general. “I think his book kept him alive several months,” Twain wrote upon hearing the news. “He was a very great man and superlatively good.

[O]ur segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tenets and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.

Grandma I’ve been writing in names that are missing, the ones I know, which is by no means all of them. That’s what happens, you see. First, there’s no need to write who they are, because everyone knows that’s Great-Aunt Sophia or Cousin Rudi, and then only some of us know, and already we’re asking, ‘Who’s that with Gertrude?’ and ‘I don’t remember this man with the little dog’, and you don’t realise how fast they’re disappearing from being remembered … Wilma It’s still an amazing thing to me, to know the faces of the dead! I can remember Grandpa Jakobovicz’s tobacco-stained whiskers, but his wife died giving birth to Poppa before there were photographs, so now no one knows what she looked like any more than if she’d been some kind of rumour. Grandma Everyone was mad to have a photograph when I was a girl, it was like a miracle and you had to go to a photographer’s to pose for him … wedding couples, soldiers in their first uniforms, children in front of painted scenery … and, always, women dressed up for the carnival ball, posing with a Greek pillar. Later, when we had a camera, there were too many pictures to keep in the album, holiday pictures with real scenery, swimming pictures, pictures of children in dirndl pinafores and lederhosen, like little Austrians. Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.

Tigris. A young soldier said, ‘I want to tell you a story.’ When he was ten years old, he said, the Americans invaded. Between his school and his home in Baghdad sprang up an American checkpoint. At first he was scared of them. But then he found they were friendly. Every day after classes he’d go there and spend two hours with the soldiers. They fed him, played with him, showed him pictures of their children. He taught them Arabic words, they taught him English words. He loved them. They loved him. Even now, he thought of them every day. I looked at him expectantly. ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘That’s my story.’ I asked whether he was glad America had come all those years ago. The stupidity of the question occurred to me only as it left my mouth. ‘No,’ he said, smiling.

When people read God’s Word with their hearts sincerely seeking to hear what the Spirit is saying, it becomes a living testament from Christ. Sometimes we get caught up in what Jesus looked like. We see pictures, and we begin to form our impression of His physical appearance. But is anyone exactly sure what color His eyes were? Or how tall He was, or how much He weighed? Does it even matter? The essence of Christ that changed the world was His Words. Soldiers were sent to arrest Jesus, and they came back saying, “Never [a] man spake like this man” (John 7: 46). It’s the Word that changed everything, and that Word is Christ. Moreover, Christ is eternity; thus the only book that will make a restful pillow when you’re dying is the Bible. Every other book will be like stone.

We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less intelligent nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of appreciating danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful abyss that separates this life from the life unknown. We were even almost persuaded that war would one day cease for lack of soldiers, that is to say, of men foolish enough or unhappy enough to risk the only absolute realities—health, physical comfort, an unimpaired body and, above all, life, the greatest of earthly possessions—for the sake of an ideal which, like all ideals, is more or less invisible.

there were solid gold and silver vessels and ornaments, crusted with gems, miles of jewel-sewn brocade, gorgeous pictures and statues that the troops just hacked and smashed, beautiful enamel and porcelain trampled underfoot, weapons and standards set with rubies and emeralds which were gouged and hammered from their settings—all this among the powder-smoke and blood, with native soldiers who’d never seen above ten rupees in their lives, and slum-ruffians from Glasgow and Liverpool, all staggering about drunk on plunder and killing and destruction. One thing I’m sure of: there was twice as much treasure destroyed as carried away, and we officers were too busy bagging our share to do anything about it. I daresay a philosopher would have made heavy speculation about that scene, if he’d had time to spare from filling his pockets. I

free.” On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight “that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist.II The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone. “I looked at his dog tags. The name read Martin V. Hersh. I wrote the name down in a small prayer book I carried, hoping someday I would meet someone who knew him. I never did.”34

BERLIN, September 27 A motorized division rolled through the city’s streets just at dusk this evening in the direction of the Czech frontier. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. The hour was undoubtedly chosen today to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious.

In the last week of April 2004, a handful of the Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on 60 minutes and published in The New Yorker, and within a couple of days they had been rebroadcast and republished pretty much everywhere on earth. Overnight, the human pyramid, the hooded man on the box, the young woman soldier with a prisoner on a leash, and the corpse packed in ice had become the defining images of the Iraq war...Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera...But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies' cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality. The staging was part of the reality they documented. And the grins, the thumbs-up, the arms crossed over puffed-out chests—all this unseemly swagger and self-regard was the height of amateurism. These soldier-photographers stood, at once, inside and outside the events they recorded, watching themselves take part in the spectacle, and their decision not to conceal but to reveal what they were doing indicated that they were not just amateur photographers, but amateur torturers. So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq War that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had held up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine—not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideals had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing.

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the power she was carrying some sort of project about World War II—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some poignant music, out is in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the poster board chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the poster she was carrying, some sort of project about World War Two—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration-camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Dex squinted at the palace. “Their queen is a white-haired lady, right? I think I saw some pictures of her when I was researching about the cameras.” “Yeah, Queen Elizabeth,” Sophie said. “I don’t know much about her. Just that she likes little dogs and wears a lot of hats. And I think that flag means she’s actually here right now.” She pointed to the red, gold, and blue standard flying from a pole in the center of the palace, instead of the British Union Jack. “Same with the fact that there are four of those guys instead of two.” She nudged her chin toward the four members of the queen’s guard, standing stolid and motionless in what appeared to be narrow blue houses. The soldier’s faces looked blank, but Sophie had no doubt their eyes were seeing everything, and it made her hope the obscurer was keeping them hidden—especially when she noticed their guns. “So wait—the dorky guys in the red coats with the big furry hats are important?” Dex asked, covering his mouth to block a giggle. “And you had the nerve to complain about our Foxfire uniforms!” “Hey—I never had to wear anything like that. That’s strictly a British soldier thing!” “Soldier?” Dex repeated, frowning at the guards. “So… is that uniform supposed to be intimidating? Because I feel like if a dude marched up to an army of ogres wearing that, he’d mostly get laughed at.” “Goblins definitely wouldn’t be able to suppress their snickers,” Sandor noted, his lips twitching with a smile.

An inch?” Minh held his fingers apart trying to judge the unfamiliar measurement. Shake took his hand and squeezed the fingers closer together.           “By such small amounts...we win or lose.”           “Nobody won in that fight, Minh. We both lost.”           “The dreams...”           “Yes. I have them too...and you are always there.”           “Where is all the hate?”           “Gone. It always goes...when you realize your enemy is just another man...just another soldier trying to do his duty.”           “That’s how you think of me?”           “It is now. Before this you were the black-eyed monster of my nightmares.”           “And you were the green-eyed monster...”           They smiled and studied the glow of the candle.           “You stayed in your Marine Corps...”           “Yes. I had nothing in common with civilians. Didn’t like them much. I was comfortable as a Marine...among others who understand me.”           “I understand you...”           “I believe you do, Minh.”           “Did you marry? Have children?”           “I was married but that is finished now. This is my daughter...my only child.”Shake reached for his wallet and pulled out Stacey’s high school graduation picture in cap and gown.           “A scholar. She is very beautiful.”           “Yes...she is everything to me.”           “And if I had killed you that night up on those walls, she would never have been born.”Minh handed the photo back and nodded. “I wish I had known this. It makes me feel better.

After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.   As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a memebr of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood In War Time (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.

There, at the top of the stairs, was the world: acres and miles of open land, an arc of the planet, curving off and lighted in the distance under the morning sky. The building we had just passed through was, it turned out, only the entrance to an open dig, where Chinese archaeologists were in the years-long process of excavating a buried army of life-sized clay soldiers. I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and neck. Everything was the same color, the terra-cotta earth and the people: the color of plant pots. Seeing the broad earth under the open sky, and a patch of it sliced into deep corridors from which bodies emerge, surprises many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity. I seemed long dead and looking down. For it is in our lifetimes alone that people can witness the unearthing of the deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin—the seven thousand or the ten thousand soldiers, their real crossbows and swords, their horses and chariots, bared to the light for the first time in 2,200 years. “In the pictures of the old masters,” Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, “people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves.

Oh, vote for me, my noble and intelligent electors, and send our party into power, and the world shall be a new place, and there shall be no sin or sorrow any more! And each free and independent voter shall have a brand new Utopia made on purpose for him, according to his own ideas, with a good-sized, extra-unpleasant purgatory attached, to which he can send everybody he does not like. Oh! do not miss this chance!” Oh! listen to my philosophy, it is the best and deepest. Oh! hear my songs, they are the sweetest. Oh! buy my pictures, they alone are true art. Oh! read my books, they are the finest. Oh! I am the greatest cheesemonger, I am the greatest soldier, I am the greatest statesman, I am the greatest poet, I am the greatest showman, I am the greatest mountebank, I am the greatest editor, and I am the greatest patriot. We are the greatest nation. We are the only good people. Ours is the only true religion. Bah! how we all yell! How we all brag and bounce, and beat the drum and shout; and nobody believes a word we utter; and the people ask one another, saying: “How can we tell who is the greatest and the cleverest among all these shrieking braggarts?” And they answer: “There is none great or clever. The great and clever men are not here; there is no place for them in this pandemonium of charlatans and quacks. The men you see here are crowing cocks. We suppose the greatest and the best of them are they who crow the loudest and the longest; that is the only test of their merits.” Therefore, what is left for us to do, but to crow? And the best and greatest of us all, is he who crows the loudest and the longest on this little dunghill that we call our world!

We can dismiss any notion that the Nazi regime murdered Jews in order to gratify German public opinion. It took elaborate precautions to hide these actions from the German people and from foreign observers. In official documents the responsible authorities referred to the killings with euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (“special handling”), and undertook major operations to eliminate all traces of them, at a time when men and materiel could hardly be spared from the fighting. At the same time, there was no particular effort to keep the secret from German troops on the eastern front, many of whom were regularly assigned to participate. Some soldiers and officials photographed the mass executions and sent pictures home to their families and girlfriends.57 Many thousands of soldiers, civil administrators, and technicians stationed in the eastern occupied territories were eyewitnesses to mass killings. Many more thousands heard about them from participants. The knowledge inside Germany that dreadful things were being done to Jews in the east was “fairly widespread.” As long as disorderly destruction such as the shop-front smashings, beatings, and murders of Kristallnacht did not take place under their windows, most of them let distance, indifference, fear of denunciation, and their own sufferings under Allied bombing stifle any objections. In the end, radicalized Nazism lost even its nationalist moorings. As he prepared to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, Hitler wanted to pull the German nation down with him in a final frenzy. This was partly a sign of his character—a compromise peace was as unthinkable for Hitler as it was for the Allies. But it also had a basis within the nature of the regime: not to push forward was to perish. Anything was better than softness.59

The Jewel in Her Crown, which showed the old Queen (whose image the children now no doubt confused with the person of Miss Crane) surrounded by representative figures of her Indian Empire: princes, landowners, merchants, moneylenders, sepoys, farmers, servants, children, mothers, and remarkably clean and tidy beggars. The Queen was sitting on a golden throne, under a crimson canopy, attended by her temporal and spiritual aides: soldiers, statesmen and clergy. The canopied throne was apparently in the open air because there were palm trees and a sky showing a radiant sun bursting out of bulgy clouds such as, in India, heralded the wet monsoon. Above the clouds flew the prayerful figures of the angels who were the benevolent spectators of the scene below. Among the statesmen who stood behind the throne one was painted in the likeness of Mr. Disraeli holding up a parchment map of India to which he pointed with obvious pride but tactful humility. An Indian prince, attended by native servants, was approaching the throne bearing a velvet cushion on which he offered a large and sparkling gem. The children in the school thought that this gem was the jewel referred to in the title. Miss Crane had been bound to explain that the gem was simply representative of tribute, and that the jewel of the title was India herself, which had been transferred from the rule of the British East India Company to the rule of the British Crown in 1858, the year after the Mutiny when the sepoys in the service of the Company (that first set foot in India in the seventeenth century) had risen in rebellion, and attempts had been made to declare an old Moghul prince king in Delhi, and that the picture had been painted after 1877, the year in which Victoria was persuaded by Mr. Disraeli to adopt the title Empress of India.

Ian rested his hands behind his head. “I’m already picturing myself in the Sterling luxury suite at Soldier Field, right above the fifty-yard line.” Both the lawyer and pragmatic woman in Brooke felt the need to manage her CEO’s expectations. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself here, Ian. In fact, I think you just lapped yourself.” “A man can dream, Brooke.” She chuckled. “Who are you kidding? You barely use our suites at Wrigley Field and the United Center.” He waved this off. “Yeah, but football’s different. If we get this deal with the Bears, you better believe my butt will be at Soldier Field for every home game.” He saw her fighting back a grin. “What?” “I just wonder what it is about men and football,” Brooke said. Sure, because of her job she could hold her own when it came to talking sports, but—wow—had her eyes been opened when she’d been down in Dallas, negotiating the Cowboys deal. Those men didn’t just love football, they lived football. “Is it a warrior-metaphor kind of thing? The idea that the strongest, toughest men of the region strap on their armor and step onto the battlefield to face off against the strongest, toughest opponents?” “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what it is.” “I see. And remind me: in what century did it become customary for one’s army to be attended at the battle ground by hot girls with spanky pants and pom-poms? Was that a tradition Napoleon started?” Brooke pretended to muse. “Or maybe it was Genghis Khan.” “You scoff at America’s sport. I have fired people for less.” Brooke threw Ian a get-real look. “No, you haven’t. You don’t fire anyone without trotting down to my office and asking me first whether you’ll get sued. And then I’m always the one that has to fire them, anyway.” “Because you do it with such charm,” Ian said with a grin

I turn to see what she’s looking at, and it’s a red convertible Mustang driving down our street, top down--with John McClaren at the wheel. My jaw drops at the sight of him. He is in full uniform: tan dress shirt with tan tie, tan slacks, tan belt and hat. His hair is parted to the side. He looks dashing, like a real soldier. He grins at me and waves. “Whoa,” I breathe. “Whoa is right,” Ms. Rothschild says, googly-eyed beside me. Daddy and his Ken Burns DVD are forgotten; we are all staring at John in this uniform, in this car. It’s like I dreamed him up. He parks the car in front of the house, and all of us rush up to it. “Whose car is this?” Kitty demands. “It’s my dad’s,” John says. “I borrowed it. I had to promise to park really far away from any other car, though, so I hope your shoes are comfortable, Lara Jean--” He breaks off and looks me up and down. “Wow. You look amazing.” He gestures at my cinnamon bun. “I mean, your hair looks so…real.” “It is real!” I touch it gingerly, I’m suddenly feeling self-conscious about my cinnamon-bun head and red lipstick. “I know--I mean, it looks authentic.” “So do you,” I say. “Can I sit in it?” Kitty butts in, her hand on the passenger-side door. “Sure,” John says. He climbs out of the car. “But don’t you want to get in the driver’s seat?” Kitty nods quickly. Ms. Rothschild gets in too, and Daddy takes a picture of them together. Kitty poses with one arm casually draped over the steering wheel. John and I stand off to the side, and I ask him, “Where did you ever get that uniform?” “I ordered it off of eBay.” He frowns. “Am I wearing the hat right? Do you think it’s too small for my head?” “No way. I think it looks exactly the way it’s supposed to look.” I’m touched that he went to the trouble of ordering a uniform for this. I can’t think of many boys who would do that. “Stormy is going to flip out when she sees you.” He studies my face. “What about you? Do you like it?” I flush. “I do. I think you look…super.

I was headed into the final fitting of my leg. I’d gone through the test socket phase and my leg was finally ready. I was so excited! I walked into the physical therapy lab and shouted, “Man, I cannot wait to put this leg on and walk!” My physical therapist, Bob, and the prosthetist exchanged nervous glances. My right leg was still pretty weak and by all normal standards, I should not be able to walk right away. But then, of course, I never like to be like everyone else. They had me wheel over to the parallel bars to attach my new leg. “We’re just going to have you stand for now,” said Bob. “Nah, I’m walking.” I offered up my best shit-eating grin. “Let’s just see how it feels,” Bob replied with some firmness. I stood up and said, “I feel good. I feel really good.” Bob relented and they let me try to walk. They put a belt around me so that Bob could hold on to me as I walked the parallel bars. Most guys can use the parallel bars for support. I only have one arm so that only helped me so much. Good thing I didn’t really need them. I started walking without faltering right away. “Yeah, this feels good. I feel good. You can back up,” I told them. They backed up and I started walking by myself, holding on with one hand. Then, feeling bolder, I lifted my hand off the bar. I took a step. And then another step. I was walking without any help. I walked up and down those parallel bars the very first day I put on my leg. I did all this with an audience. Dad and Uncle Johnny were right there with me, watching and cheering me on. They were so excited. Uncle Johnny snapped a picture and sent it to my mom back home in Alabama. And as any proud mom would do, she sent that picture to everyone she knew. That picture went the pre-viral version of viral! It was a triumphant snapshot. I was walking again. And not only that, I was wearing those shiny new New Balance shoes the nice ladies had given me. As the picture made the rounds through my mom’s friends and friends of her friends and friends of friends of friends, somehow it ended up with people at New Balance. They reached out to my mom to ask what sizes of shoe Colston and I wore. She told them and then soon after that, Colston and I had matching sneakers.

When we left, we were told it would be another month before the winner was announced. Then I felt really discouraged. Friends were telling me that my injuries and my fitness level guaranteed me the cover. I felt the opposite. I didn’t feel I was as fit as the others and I felt like the war was too controversial a topic for the magazine to want to feature a wounded veteran. I had completely talked myself out of even the slightest possibility of winning by the time I was back on a plane to New York a month later to find out the results. My family didn’t believe that I didn’t know already. They thought I’d been told and kept asking me about it. But I really didn’t know. The winner was being announced live on NBC’s Today show. I had made my peace with not winning and Jamie and I were just excited to go to New York and be on Today. We had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and when we landed there I had a voice mail from my friend Billy. His message: “I thought we had to wait to see who won? It’s already out!” I clicked onto my Facebook app and saw that Billy had posted a picture of him and some of his buddies at a truck stop in Kentucky posing with a Men’s Health magazine--and I was on the cover! I was shocked. But even then I was convinced this wasn’t real. Maybe the editors had decided to give the cover to all three of us and we each had a different region of the country. It felt incredible to see myself on the cover of that magazine but I just wasn’t convinced I was the outright winner. Jamie and I got to our hotel room late. I called my contact at Men’s Health, Nora, and said, “I’ve already seen the magazine.” There was a beat on the other end of the line before she flatly said, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” So Jamie and I went to bed. The next morning we met up with Finny and Kavan and headed over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the Today show. I didn’t say a word about what I’d seen. When we arrived, Nora was at the door. I waited for the others to go in before I said to her, “So we’re not going to talk about what we’re not going to talk about?” I was smirking a little but quickly wiped the grin off my face when I saw the look on Nora’s. “You’re not the only person in this competition, Noah. Not everyone knows.” Roger that. I wouldn’t say another word.

I woke in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. It was the third time I’d had this nightmare: reliving that horrible feeling of falling, out of control, toward the ground. I was now on month two of just lying there prone, supposedly recovering. But I wasn’t getting any better. In fact, if anything, my back felt worse. I couldn’t move and was getting angrier and angrier inside. Angry at myself; angry at everything. I was angry because I was shit-scared. My plans, my dreams for the future hung in shreds. Nothing was certain any more. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stay with the SAS. I didn’t even know if I’d recover at all. Lying unable to move, sweating with frustration, my way of escaping was in my mind. I still had so much that I dreamt of doing. I looked around my bedroom, and the old picture I had of Mount Everest seemed to peer down. Dad’s and my crazy dream. It had become what so many dreams become--just that--nothing more, nothing less. Covered in dust. Never a reality. And Everest felt further beyond the realms of possibility than ever. Weeks later, and still in my brace, I struggled over to the picture and took it down. People often say to me that I must have been so positive to recover from a broken back, but that would be a lie. It was the darkest, most horrible time I can remember. I had lost my sparkle and spirit, and that is so much of who I am. And once you lost that spirit, it is hard to recover. And once you lose that spirit, it is hard to recover. I didn’t even know whether I would be strong enough to walk again--let alone climb or soldier again. And as to the big question of the rest of my life? That was looking messy from where I was. Instead, all my bottomless, young confidence was gone. I had no idea how much I was going to be able to do physically--and that was so hard. So much of my identity was in the physical. Now I just felt exposed and vulnerable. Not being able to bend down to tie your shoelaces or twist to clean your backside without acute and severe pain leaves you feeling hopeless. In the SAS I had both purpose and comrades. Alone in my room at home, I felt like I had neither. That can be the hardest battle we ever fight. It is more commonly called despair. That recovery was going to be just as big a mountain to climb as the physical one. What I didn’t realize was that it would be a mountain, the mountain, that would be at the heart of my recovery. Everest: the biggest, baddest mountain in the world.

I miss Diana more than I can express. The world seems a colder place without her luminous presence. To had had Diana’s friendship, to have known her personally, has been a gift beyond comparison. She brought joy and pride and a touch of glamour to my life for years. I loved and admired her without reservation. When Patrick recognized her picture on magazine covers, I thought how incredible it was that we actually knew the beautiful, famous Diana. Best of all, we knew she was even lovelier inside. I read her letters, feeling deeply touched that she continued to care for us. Seeing her in person--warm, unpretentious, and radiant--was a thrill that lasted a long, long time. It truly was, “like being brushed by angels’ wings,” as my friend at the funeral had said. Whoever would have thought when I called for a nanny so many years ago, that magic would enter my life. My family and I watched her dazzling progress from a shy teenager to a multi-faceted and charismatic woman. She fulfilled her many roles so beautifully. Yet to me, Diana was a beloved friend, not the world-famous Princess of Wales. Behind the glamour, I saw the qualities I’d always admired in her--kindness, integrity, and grace in all she did. Above all, Diana was born to be a mother. Showing affection was as natural to her as breathing. I saw her tender care for my young son. I know she was an utterly devoted mother to her own boys, giving them unconditional love and deriving her greatest joy in life from them. I’ve wished so often that her life had been a fairytale, that Diana had been spared the pain and loneliness she suffered. But without the despair, she might not have developed the strength and humanity that reached out to people everywhere. Diana instinctively looked beyond her own problems to ease the pain and distress of others. She touched so many people in her short lifetime. I never thought it would end this way--that she would die so young. I will always remember, as the last hymn faded into silence at her funeral, the solemn tread of the soldiers’ boots--so haunting, so final--as they carried her casket through the Abbey. I couldn’t bear that she was leaving forever. For months now, I’ve searched for some solace in this tragedy. I hope that Diana’s untimely death and the worldwide mourning for her have silenced forever those who belittled her values and doubted her appeal. She rests peacefully now beyond reproach--young and beautiful. Diana, you were greater than we realized. We will never, never forget you.

If Kartr had an instant picture of what it meant to dangle so precariously over the edge of a sheer drop he did not betray himself.

If I were a magician who could make things possible, then pictures could talk while we painted them. If I were a magaician who could make things possible, then houses could keep their promises. And they would have to promise not to lose their roofs or go up in flames. If I were a magician who could make things possible, the scars made in them by bullet holes would close up again over the years.

But the poor and indigent who earn scarcely enough to keep themselves alive and who also have to pay tribute to the petty officials, clerks, and soldiers, that they may be allowed to live in peace, sleep not so tranquilly as gentle poets who have perhaps not felt the pinches of want would have us believe. The poor are sad and thoughtful, for on that night, if they have not recited many prayers, yet they have prayed much—with pain in their eyes and tears in their hearts. They have not the novenas, nor do they know the responsories, versicles, and prayers which the friars have composed for those who lack original ideas and feelings, nor do they understand them. They pray in the language of their misery: their souls weep for them and for those dead beings whose love was their wealth. Their lips may proffer the salutations, but their minds cry out complaints, charged with lamentations. Wilt Thou be satisfied, O Thou who blessedst poverty, and you, O suffering souls, with the simple prayers of the poor, offered before a rude picture in the light of a dim wick, or do you perhaps desire wax tapers before bleeding Christs and Virgins with small mouths and crystal eyes, and masses in Latin recited mechanically by priests? And thou, Religion preached for suffering humanity, hast thou forgotten thy mission of consoling the oppressed in their misery and of humiliating the powerful in their pride? Hast thou now promises only for the rich, for those who, can pay thee?

At Abu Ghraib, several prisoners mixed it up with guards on October 18, 2003, led by a detainee with a smuggled pistol. A few of the MPs chose their own countermeasure, not unlike the 1-8 Infantry soldiers at the Tigris River. That night, five enlisted MPs pulled twelve Iraqi prisoners from their cells. They stripped the captives naked and then piled them in sexually humiliating positions. A week or so later, the same guards put a hooded man on a box with fake electrodes clipped on his fingers; the prisoner was told the wires were real, and if he stepped off the box, he’d be electrocuted. Three days later, the same MPs again stripped prisoners and put them in sexually embarrassing poses. This incident also involved K-9 police dogs. A trio of military intelligence soldiers participated. These abuses were not linked to any interrogation. The soldiers later explained that they were teaching the Iraqis a lesson, the same reason offered by the soldiers in 1-8 Infantry. The MPs, however, took a lot of pictures.

Dom knew very little about Arik Yacoby’s past: only that he was Israeli, an émigré to India, and he had once been a member of the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. Dom had no trouble picturing Arik as an elite soldier; his fitness and discipline and the confident and determined glint in his steely eyes announced this fact to anyone who knew what to look for. Dom had come here to India to train with the man for six weeks. Yacoby held a fourth-degree black belt in Krav Maga, a martial art developed for the Israeli military. Dom’s hand-to-hand training with Arik had been intense in and of itself, but these additional nighttime PT sessions had added another facet to the grueling experience.

If you have the power—if you are the editor of a series of textbooks to be read by millions of young people—you can so constrict the language or so distort it as to ensure that thought-crime does not occur. You can, for instance, make sure that pictures of soldiers are female, and pictures of hair stylists are male. You can studiously avoid the words “mother” and “father.” You can avoid all reference to such virtues as womanliness and manliness. You can excise all stories of masculine honor and camaraderie. You can excise all stories of feminine gentleness and their care for children. You want them not to have the very tools they need to form the idea of a virtuous man or a virtuous woman. You couch everything in an unnatural language, such as Newspeak.

A wealthy man and his son loved to collect works of art. They had in their collection works ranging from Picasso to Raphael and Rembrandt. When the Vietnam War broke out, the son was drafted and sent to fight in ’Nam. He was very courageous and died in battle. The father was notified and grieved deeply for his only son. About a month later, a young lad appeared at the door to his house and said, “Sir, you don’t know me, but I am the soldier for whom your son gave his life that fateful day. He was carrying me to safety when a bullet struck him in the heart. He died instantly. He used to often talk about you and your love for art. Here’s something for you,” he added, holding out a package. “It is something that I drew. I know I am not much of an artist, but I wanted you to have this from me as a small measure of memory and thanks.” It was a portrait of his son, painted by the young man. It captured the personality of his son. The father’s eyes welled up with tears as he thanked the young man for the painting. He offered to pay for the picture, but the man replied, “Oh! No, sir. I could never repay what your son did for me. It is my gift to you.” The father hung the portrait over his mantel and showed it proudly to all his visitors along with all of the great works of art he possessed. Some time later, the old man died. As decreed in his will, his paintings were all to be auctioned. Many influential and rich people gathered together, excited over the prospect of owning one of the masterpieces. On a platform nearby also sat the painting of his son. The auctioneer pounded his gavel. “Let’s start the bidding with the picture of his son. Who will bid for this picture?” There was silence. A voice shouted from the back, “Let’s skip this one. We want the famous masters.” But the auctioneer persisted. “Ten dollars, twenty dollars, what do I hear?” Another voice came back angrily, “We didn’t come here for this. Let’s have the Picassos, the Matisses, the van Goghs.” Still the auctioneer persisted. “The son. Anyone for the son? Who’ll take the son?” Finally a quavering voice came from the back. It was the longtime gardener of the house. “I’ll take the son for ten dollars. I am sorry, but that’s all I have.” “Ten dollars once, ten dollars twice, anybody for twenty dollars? Sold for ten dollars.” “Now let’s get on with the auction,” said a wealthy art aficionado sitting in the front row. The auctioneer laid down his gavel and spoke. “I am sorry, but the auction is over.” “But what about the other paintings? The masters?” “The auction is over,” said the auctioneer. “I was asked to conduct the auction with a stipulation, a secret stipulation that said that only the painting of the son would be auctioned. Whoever bought that painting would inherit the entire estate, paintings and all. The one who took the son gets everything.

Study the gospel — not like a seminarian studies doctrine to prepare for an exam, but the way you would study a sunset that has left you speechless, or the way a soldier longing for his fiancée studies her picture.

When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.

Machine learning also has a growing role on the battlefield. Learners can help dissipate the fog of war, sifting through reconnaissance imagery, processing after-action reports, and piecing together a picture of the situation for the commander. Learning powers the brains of military robots, helping them keep their bearings, adapt to the terrain, distinguish enemy vehicles from civilian ones, and home in on their targets. DARPA’s AlphaDog carries soldiers’ gear for them. Drones can fly autonomously with the help of learning algorithms; although they are still partly controlled by human pilots, the trend is for one pilot to oversee larger and larger swarms. In the army of the future, learners will greatly outnumber soldiers, saving countless lives.

Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won’t be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier’s life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else. Are you getting the picture?’ ‘So

The most pathetic element in the Chinese military picture was the Chinese soldiers themselves, for whom being wounded or being killed in action ended the same way, the difference being either a quick death or a slow one. Foreign visitors reported their shock at seeing wounded soldiers by the roadsides, their eyes blank with hopelessness as their wounds went unattended, as if they were street beggars ignored by the passing throng. The dead and wounded were replaced by conscripts dragged unwillingly from their homes, underfed men sometimes literally roped together.

April 14 MORNING “All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head.” — Psalm 22:7 MOCKERY was a great ingredient in our Lord’s woe. Judas mocked Him in the garden; the chief priests and scribes laughed Him to scorn; Herod set Him at nought; the servants and the soldiers jeered at Him, and brutally insulted Him; Pilate and his guards ridiculed His royalty; and on the tree all sorts of horrid jests and hideous taunts were hurled at Him. Ridicule is always hard to bear, but when we are in intense pain it is so heartless, so cruel, that it cuts us to the quick. Imagine the Saviour crucified, racked with anguish far beyond all mortal guess, and then picture that motley multitude, all wagging their heads or thrusting out the lip in bitterest contempt of one poor suffering victim! Surely there must have been something more in the crucified One than they could see, or else such a great and mingled crowd would not unanimously have honoured Him with such contempt. Was it not evil confessing, in the very moment of its greatest apparent triumph, that after all it could do no more than mock at that victorious goodness which was then reigning on the cross? O Jesus, “despised and rejected of men,” how couldst Thou die for men who treated Thee so ill? Herein is love amazing, love divine, yea, love beyond degree. We, too, have despised Thee in the days of our unregeneracy, and even since our new birth we have set the world on high in our hearts, and yet Thou bleedest to heal our wounds, and diest to give us life. O that we could set Thee on a glorious high throne in all men’s hearts! We would ring out Thy praises over land and sea till men should as universally adore as once they did unanimously reject. “Thy creatures wrong Thee, O Thou sovereign Good! Thou art not loved, because not understood: This grieves me most, that vain pursuits beguile Ungrateful men, regardless of Thy smile.

How to describe Lord Wellington? How can such a thing be necessary or even possible? His face is everywhere one looks – a cheap print upon the wall of the coaching inn – a much more elaborate one, embellished with flags and drums, at the top of the Assembly-room staircase. Nowadays no young lady of average romantic feeling will reach the age of seventeen without purchasing at least one picture of him. She will think a long, aquiline nose infinitely preferable to a short, stubby one and consider it the worst misfortune of her life that he is married already. To make up for it she fully intends to name her first-born son, Arthur. Nor is she alone in her devotion. Her younger brothers and sisters are every bit as fanatical. The handsomest toy soldier in an English nursery is always called Wellington and has more adventures than the rest of the toy box put together. Every schoolboy impersonates Wellington at least once a week, and so do his younger sisters. Wellington embodies every English virtue. He is Englishness carried to perfection. If the French carry Napoleon in their bellies (which apparently they do), then we carry Wellington in our hearts.

When I was reading at Tombstone the other day in the_the museum and saw the picture of Geronimo^And many of you might think that Geronimo was a renegade. To me he was a genuine American. He was only fighting for that which was right that God had give him a land, and a nation, and a place to live. I don’t blame him. And when those white soldiers come in there and by force taken over the land and killing them out like a bunch of flies^And there was the original picture of Geronimo’s medical headquarters or his hospital. It was two or three blankets over a piece of mesquite. And them wounded, real, genuine American Indians fighting for their God-given rights^And there, Geronimo with a baby of his own on the hips, standing there looking upon his own

February 25: Mr. and Mrs. Rupe write to Marilyn about their son’s reaction to her Korean trip. They quote his letter to them: “When she appeared on the stage, there was just a sort of gasp from the audience—a single gasp multiplied by the 12,000 soldiers present, was quite a gasp. . . . She is certainly making a lot of friends here . . . unlike the other entertainers . . . after the show she autographed, chatted, and posed for pictures. Then thru all the trucks and jeeps she rode perched on top of the seat of her jeep, smiling and waving. . . . She came to the divisions that have been so long on the line, and by-passed the easy duty in Seoul, Inchon, and the sunshine cities.” One of the soldier’s parents adds, “You are a real soldier. I know what the trip cost you. But you didn’t disappoint those boys.

The date was November 23, 1965. One company was in contact. Machinegun fire rattled in the distance. Tom McEnry took pictures of artillery firing support for soldiers in the field. Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, McEnry complained about his light meter. “I can’t get a reading,” he said, shaking the small black instrument in front of him, banging it against his hand. At the same time, field commanders called in on their radios that something strange was happening. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ one officer called, ‘but it’s weird. It’s really gettin, uh, kinda eerie out here.’ The air became still. Insects went quiet. The artillery stopped firing. Radios were silent. The temperature, which had been about eighty-five degrees, dropped to around seventy or seventy-five. The light dimmed, though there were no clouds. The North Vietnamese broke contact. The war stopped. Someone said, ‘Look at the sun!’ Everyone looked up. A thin black disc appeared at the side of the white-yellow sun, obscuring part of it, blocking the light. ‘Far fucking out,’ a soldier said. ‘Would you believe it?’ said another. ‘A fucking ee-clipse? In fucking Veetnam?’ ‘I bet the VC think we done it,’ a GI said. ‘That’s why they took off.’ ‘Shee-it.’ Several minutes passed in near silence. The hand of an unseen presence seemed to move across the tropical savanna. No one spoke. Then the light brightened. The temperature warmed. Insects screeched. A few gunshots cracked. Field radios came alive with chatter and hiss. Artillery boomed. Helicopter blades whacked the air. The war, having skipped a beat, resumed as if nothing had happened.

Robopaths are afflicting our world in two ways: 1) autistic worshipers of scientism have ruined the academic world and turned it into a dull factory mass-producing narrow-minded, ultra-specialized drones and drudges that can barely communicate, and never understand the big picture, and 2) conservative, tradition-directed right wingers that robotically carry out the commands of the elites, like Abraham carrying out the order of the ultimate psychopathic elitist, Jehovah. In the West, it’s always right wing cops, soldiers and “patriots” that gun people down and mindlessly and slavishly obey orders. They are “Milgram” humans, totally obedient to right wing authority figures. “God” – the cosmic authoritarian Father Archetype – is the supreme right wing wet dream.

Picture a small South American dictatorship, weakened by economic stresses and a popular demand for more freedom, resulting from the existence of a laissez-faire society nearby. What would the dictator of such a country do if faced by a large and powerful insurance company and its defense service (or even a coalition of such companies) demanding that he remove all taxes, trade restrictions, and other economic aggressions from, say, a mining firm protected by the insurance company? If the dictator refuses the demand, he faces an armed confrontation which will surely oust him from his comfortable position of rule. His own people are restless and ready to revolt at any excuse. Other nations have their hands full with similar problems and are not eager to invite more trouble by supporting his little dictatorship. Besides this, the insurance company, which doesn’t recognize the validity of governments, has declared that in the event of aggression against its insured it will demand reparations payments, not from the country as a whole, but from every individual directly responsible for directing and carrying out the aggression. The dictator hesitates to take such an awful chance, and he knows that his officers and soldiers will be very reluctant to carry out his order. Even worse, he can’t arouse the populace against the insurance company by urging them to defend themselves—the insurance company poses no threat to them. A dictator in such a precarious position would be strongly tempted to give in to the insurance company’s demands in order to salvage what he could (as the managers of the insurance company were sure he would before they undertook the contract with the mining firm). But even giving in will not save the dictator’s government for long As soon as the insurance company can enforce noninterference with the mining company, it has created an enclave of free territory within the dictatorship. When it becomes evident that the insurance company can make good its offer of protection from the government, numerous businesses and individuals, both those from the laissez-faire society and citizens of the dictatorship, will rush to buy similar protection (a lucrative spurt of sales foreseen by the insurance company when it took its original action). At this point, it is only a matter of time until the government crumbles from lack of money and support, and the whole country becomes a free area. In this manner, the original laissez-faire society, as soon as its insurance companies and defense agencies became strong enough, would generate new laissez-faire societies in locations all over the world. These new free areas, as free trade made them economically stronger, would give liberty a tremendously broadened base from which to operate and would help prevent the possibility that freedom could be wiped out by a successful sneak attack against the original laissez-faire society. As the world-wide, interconnected free market thus formed became stronger and the governments of the world became more tyrannical and chaotic, it would be possible for insurance companies and defense agencies to create free enclaves within more and more nations, a sales opportunity which they would be quick to take advantage of.

As the New Adam, Jesus confronts the curses laid on Adam that have plagued the human family ever since the Fall. Like Adam, Jesus, on the night before He died, enters a garden-the Garden of Gethsemane-where He is tested (Mt 26:36-46). There, He takes on Adam's sweat as He experiences sweat-like drops of blood falling from His face. On Good Friday, Jesus symbolically takes on the curse of Adam's thorns as He is handed over to the Roman soldiers, who place a crown of thorns on His head (Mt 27:29). Finally, Jesus even takes on the curse of Adam's death as He goes to a tree-the wood of the cross-and dies on Calvary. And, like Adam, Jesus is placed in the cursed ground, where He is buried in a tomb. It is precisely from the darkness of that tomb in the cursed ground that Jesus, the Light of the World, rises victoriously from the dead on Easter Sunday to shine the light of salvation at the dawn of the new creation.

Joe sat on the couch, his long legs sprawled in front of him, and listened to the latest report of soldiers dead. The walls blinked and his face, too, went black, white, black, white, as the pictures crossed the television screen.

We are like prison soldiers committed to an idea. The hills slant upwards tall and unmoving, like giant watchful things if we were not rushing and moving so intently it would be nice to stop and appreciate their own silent ancient beauty.

Perhaps one of us should talk to him?” Eugene suggested. “If we find out his story, there might be nothing to fear.” “Our young apprentice has a point,” Sebastian said with enough surprise in his voice to draw a scowl from the younger man. “It’s upsetting to have a tiger about and not know if it’s hungry. Go speak to him, Eugene.” “No thank you. I had the idea.” “Well I certainly can’t,” Sebastian said. “I’m far too talkative. It’s a trait that has often led to problems. We don’t want to provoke the man unnecessarily. What about you, Samuel?” “Are you insane? You don’t send a lamb to question a tiger. The soldier should go. He has nothing to be afraid of. Even a murderer would think twice before challenging a man with two swords.” They all looked at Hadrian. “What do you want to know?” “His name,” Sebastian suggested. “Where he’s from. What he does-” “If he’s the murderer-” Vivian burst in. “I’m not so sure you’ll want to lead with that,” Samuel said. “But isn’t that what we all want to know?” “Yes, but who would admit to such a thing? Better to get enough information to build a picture and then infer the truth from that.” “But if you ask straight out, that will serve as a warning that we’re wise to him and on our guard. Any plans he might have will be spoiled and abandoned.” “How about I just see how things go,” Hadrian said, rising.

While she was gone, since I was already sending her letters every day, I ordered envelopes that had her address on them and little stickers that had my return address that I’d stick on the envelopes. I didn’t stop there. I also ordered some stamps that were a picture of her and me. Even though I sent the letters every day, some days she would get several at a time. Each letter I wrote was several pages long, so I’d take one page and I’d glue one stick of gum in the middle and fold it up. So she could have the gum they weren’t allowed. She said she would chew on it at night in bed. I had experienced enough of that world to know those little things mattered. I knew exactly what her days were like and how hard they were. She was getting so much mail that when they called out names to pass out the mail, they’d just toss Jamie’s on the ground and she’d have to pick it up. And they made fun of the envelopes with the stamps I’d had made. But she got all her mail. She was at Fort Leonard Wood for six months--from October until March. I made sure she got tons of mail the whole time. But this also meant she would be there on Valentine’s Day. I made sure that she felt loved on that day. I bought her a Valentine’s Day card and enclosed a chocolate bar in that letter. The card read: Jamie, we can’t be together for Valentine’s Day, so I came up with a way to at least show you how much you are loved. Valentine’s Day is twenty-four hours long. So expect twenty-four separate packages with a card and chocolate. I’m so proud of you. Love always and forever, Noah.

On February 23, 1945, one of the most famous photographs in American history was taken atop Mount Suribachi, as five American soldiers began to raise an American flag. The picture, which most Americans are instantly familiar with, has come to symbolize the strength and sacrifice of America’s armed forces,

That was close,” I whispered to Telys as we all walked down the path to the heart of the city. “For a while, I was afraid I’d have to use this.” I patted the familiar weight on my left hip. I had my sword at my waist again, hidden beneath my cloak. “You sound more regretful than relieved, Telys joked. “If that man had challenged us, you’d have given him a fight to remember.” “I did not want to fight my way out,” I said vehemently. But in truth, this wasn’t how I’d pictured my escape from the citadel. In my more fanciful moments, I’d imagined the clash of swords, the shouts of soldiers, the rumble of running feet, maybe even the reek of smoke and the crackle of fire.

The wise ones called council. We cannot remain passive. The whites must be driven out. Now is the right time, while they are at war amongst themselves. Their soldiers are away. They’re defenseless. The People must strike.” Red Buffalo’s sobbing quieted. “But Hunter, that is exactly what you feared might happen. What about survival through peace?” “It’s too late for that.” A heavy ache centered itself in Hunter’s chest. “I am a dreamer, Red Buffalo. The land is like a single bone between a pair of starving dogs. There is enough for only one. Peace will never come, never. You were right all along, and I was too blind to see it.” “But your woman! She’s a tosi. You speak of driving them out. What of her?” Hunter started to speak, couldn’t. He took another deep breath and tried again, his voice strained. “I will protect her as best I can. The others have agreed not to attack her wooden walls. A messenger has already left to tell some other bands of today’s attack and our decision to make war. He will also pass the word about my tosi woman.” “You aren’t going to get her? She’s your wife. Her place is beside you.” “A man cannot own a woman, cousin. He can only…” Hunter’s words trailed off. A picture of Loretta’s face flashed in his mind. “He can only love her. The blood of the tosi tivo will flow bridle high. To force her to stay with us while we slaughter her people would be torture. Before this is over, my name will be a curse upon her lips.

Acclimatizing to its customs and particular brand of bustle, he’d gotten a sense of Wewoka. Without the lens of a fever-induced vision, it proved to be a dense, vertical city of narrow, terraced streets with expansive walkways. Largely devoid of motor traffic, any point could be reached by foot in fifteen minutes. Pictures painted on the sidewalks provided a colorful trail. With a central street lined with shops bustling with commerce, the noise and smell were different from what he was used to. Wewoka had none of the overworked smokestacks from innumerable factories; much of the city was made up by parks. The air had a hint of ozone to it. A collection of buildings sprouted at the heart of the city. Gleaming green and metallic spires in the distance, the sun reflected from their solar panels. A mushroom-like structure drew in sewer water from its “roots” and funneled it to its dome. Solar energy evaporated the water, which was then collected and released throughout the streets, watering the surrounding green spaces. Photovoltaic panels lined solar drop towers. Titanium dioxide reacted with ultraviolet rays and smog, filtering and dissipating them. They had developed similar technology in Jamaica. Vertical gardens and vegetation covered the steep towers of housing units and work offices. The exterior vertical gardens filtered the rain, which was reused with liquid wastes for farming needs. A deep calm reverberated through the city, quiet preserved like a commodity. Desmond

At one point they passed a newly abandoned Rebel encampment, and Captain Bowers was surprised to see that it looked just like one of their own. “In every respect it was as good a camp as any we have had. . . .” (Rummaging through this campsite, men of the 2nd Maine came upon a packet of photographs of Federal soldiers. Someone recognized a name on one of them as a man in their brigade, and before long Sergeant Walter Carter, 22nd Massachusetts, was handed the pictures he had lost on the Fredericksburg battlefield five months earlier. And scavengers in the 83rd Pennsylvania recovered some of the fancy French knapsacks they had lost at Gaines’s Mill the previous June.)

Then he turned to Rosemary Barr. “Meanwhile we’ll put you somewhere safe,” he told her. “Your tutorials will start as soon as the soldier is buried.” The outer western suburbs were bedroom communities for people who worked in the city, so the traffic stayed bad all the way out. The houses were much grander than in the east. They were all two-story, all varied, all well maintained. They all had big lots and pools and ambitious evergreen landscaping. With the last of the sunset behind them they looked like pictures in a brochure. “Tight-ass middle class,” Reacher said. “What we all aspire to,” Yanni said. “They won’t want to talk,” Reacher said. “Not their style.” “They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks to me.” They drove past the Archer place slowly. There was a cast-metal sign on thin chains under the mailbox: Ted and Oline Archer. Beyond it, across a broad open lawn, the house looked closed-up and dark and silent. It was a big Tudor place. Dull brown beams, cream stucco. Three-car garage. Nobody home, Reacher thought. The neighbor they were looking for lived across the street and one lot to the north. Hers was a place about the same size as the Archers’ but done in an Italianate style. Stone accents, little crenellated towers, dark green sun awnings on the south-facing ground-floor windows. The evening light was fading away to darkness and lamps were coming on behind draped windows. The whole street looked warm and rested and quiet and very satisfied with itself. Reacher said, “They sleep safely in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm.” “You know George Orwell?” Yanni asked. “I went to college,” Reacher said. “West Point is technically a college.” Yanni said, “The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.” “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it,” Reacher said. “I’m sure these are perfectly nice people,” Helen said. “But will they talk to us?” “They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks.” Helen pulled into a long limestone driveway and parked about twenty feet behind an imported SUV that had big chrome wheels. The front door of the house was made of ancient gray weathered oak with iron banding that had nail heads as big as golf balls. It felt like you could step through it straight into the Renaissance. “Property is theft,” Reacher said. “Proudhon,” Yanni said. “Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world.” “Abraham Lincoln,” Reacher said. “In his first State of the Union.” There was an iron knocker shaped like

I remember when we went into Kezar Stadium on the march (April 15, 1967, San Francisco) playing that song—I felt like I was part of some surrealistic dream. We were riding along in this truck. The band was playing. It was like a misty kind of rain. It was early in the morning. The streets were lined with people hanging out of windows and everything. And we were going up the street. I was just stoned out of my head on LSD, everything kind of like vibrating and I was looking around and you could see soldiers and people sneering and you see pictures of napalmed children and signs saying “End the War” and we were playing this joyous incredible music and people were dancing all around the truck just dancing and throwing flowers up in the air and everything and we were singing, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!” And it was like we were sort of heading off to these beautiful pastoral gas chambers, we were all going to parade ourselves into these gas chambers and then they were going to wipe us out… I mean, if you gotta go, you might as well go out dancing and singing.

Two weeks after pictures of the massacre appeared in his newspaper in America, soldiers arrived at his door to escort him to the airport. They told him that His Excellency did not want in his country any newspaperman who made up fake stories—doing so meant that Austin was His Excellency’s enemy, and thus the enemy of his people. Austin would have been glad to tell me more that night, I could see, but I knew I would meet him again, so I didn’t ask if that meant he could never return to our country again.

A Union soldier recalled the Confederate dead along Cemetery Ridge: No words can depict the ghastly picture…the men lay in heaps, the wounded wriggling and groaning under the weight of the dead among whom they were entangled….I could not long endure the gory, ghastly spectacle. I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight. For months the specter haunted my dreams…

The shift in the political waters has its own riptide. The fracture on the right, the extremism, will find its voice or voices, and will roll in; then, like a rip current, it will pull away from shore, sucking, and drowning those voices as it does—they will be lost at sea. And while it may appear that we, the party, are lost at sea, the sea level itself will be rising, and the tidal wave, initially imperceptible, will build and slowly roll in. There will be a seamless transition unfolding in the corridors of power, a slow turn to the right that no one sees coming. In the name of what it means to be an American, we will spearhead the development, within the military, and outside it, of separatist soldiers, who believe that they are following the true wishes of their leaders culminating in the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of protection. This combined with the withering of local law enforcement, economic setbacks, and failing infrastructure will become part of a picture that coincides with a period of economic, social, and political unrest; the stabilization in this country will give rise to rogue non-politicians.

Classification and then reduction, the mind’s strongest weapon against conscience, if it wants to relieve your conscience to kill innocents, it would classify them within a group and include with them those who deserve death in its view, then reduce all the small details into generalities, and ignore them. As it will not fail a trick, to make the killing of children and women an inevitable necessity, towards a higher goal and a better world. Thus began the story of Baibars himself, nearly twenty years ago, when the extremist organization decided to classify the entire American people as one group, ignoring that the number of Muslims killed by Muslims themselves was many times greater than those killed because of American policies in the Middle East, and then decided that the destruction of their opponents in the Middle East. The destruction of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Their minds reduced all the details; a child playing in his father’s office, a girl waiting for her mother’s return, a wife on the plane eager to meet her husband, their conscience did not hesitate for a moment to kill thousands of innocent people, for the sake of their ultimate goal. And so did America itself, when it decided to avenge its murderers, categorized, reduced, and shot everyone. Its pilots saw neither the children nor the families in the homes they were about to demolish over their heads. So did Hitler, Napoleon, Hulagu, and every serial killer known to mankind. It makes you like a pilot driving a plane, throwing a bomb over the houses, not seeing the trace of what it did on the ground, and if he carried it with his hand and walked in the streets, and watched the children, women, the innocent, who would fall dead from this bomb, he would not detonate it, but he only sees houses that look like matchboxes from the sky, general picture, no details. Satan’s most powerful weapon for controlling the mind, or the most powerful weapon of the mind to control us, and at some point, it masters it, to the point where it no longer needs to justify, reduce, or categorize anything, kill your opponents, and all their offspring, destroy them, burn them, leave none of them. Since many minds are tools in the hands of Satan, it can manipulate them as it wants. Since its working mechanisms have become known to him, Baibars decided, why not? Why do not we make them tools for good. He used Satan’s own style, manipulated everyone, and at times, reduced, but according to his laws, do not reduce the innocent. He is not afraid, he made his decision in the war, and whoever made this decision must bear the consequences of it. He wished time would go back a thousand or two thousand years and freeze there, where the wars between human beings were fought with swords and arrows, at that time, not many innocents fell, only soldiers who made their decision in advance to war, to kill, knowing that they might die. Everyone had the time and the ability to think, make decisions, and even escape. While today, most of the victims of wars do not make a decision, they pay with their lives without anyone asking them if they want to be part of this war at all. Cities are bombed and destroyed over the heads of their inhabitants, and most of them reject this war from the beginning. When someone detonates a bomb in a mall, he does not ask the victims of his bombing about their political stances, their religion, and even if they want to be part of this war, and so do the planes, they do not ask, and their victims have no opportunity to make a decision. As for him, Baibars, he made up his mind It is to fight in defense of those who did not have the opportunity to take it.

The sign had the picture of a castle on a red background and read, The United States Army Corps of Engineers. We sincerely hope you have enjoyed your journey on the road of death. 62nd Engineer Battalion Malleis Milito - I soldier with a hammer.

I remember how I felt in those days. The fear didn’t set in for a long time: for almost a month everyone was on tenterhooks, waiting for them to announce that, under the leadership of the Communist Party, our scientists, our heroic firemen, our soldiers have once again conquered the elements. They have won an unprecedented victory, they have driven the cosmic fire back into a test tube. The fear took a while to set in. For a long time, we kept it out. Yes, that was it. Absolutely! As I now realize, we could not make the mental connection between fear and peaceful nuclear energy. From all the textbooks and other books we’d read, in our minds we pictured the world as follows: military nuclear power was a sinister mushroom cloud billowing up into the sky, like at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating people instantly; whereas peaceful nuclear energy was a harmless light bulb. We had a childish image of the world; we were living life as depicted in children’s stories.

Where would we be without smokes?' He said happily. 'Doesn't bear thinkin' about, it would be like a world without women, fuckin' horrible,' Williams said lazily. 'Be worse if there was no tea,' Ed said. 'Bloody hell,' Williams gasped, 'don't even joke about it. I can't imagine a world without a good brew. Can you picture it? It's what separates us from the animals.' 'If the generals all came round tomorrow and said that we'd ran out of tea in France the country would be empty of soldiers the next day. Can't fight a war without a bine and a cup of cha,' Ed said. 'Wouldn't be anythin' to fight for would there?

The War demonstrates the extent to which man is the key to the outcome of war,” wrote Michael Herzog. “The training and skill of the soldier, his motivation, the quality of the chain of command, initiative, courage and perseverance all underlie the War’s result far more than any weapons. Even in the era of technology, man still stands at the center of the picture.”50

For example, I learned that it was my right under international law to be told why I was being arrested, but the night the military took me from my home, I wasn’t told why. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel also ratified in 1991, says that all persons, including children, should be given reasons for their arrest at the time of their arrest. Another violation occurred when the soldiers posed with me, a minor, while taking my picture before leading me into the police station. They had no right to humiliate me like that, nor to film my arrest and publish the video without my parents’ permission. And then there was the interrogation. Banning my parents and my lawyer from being with me and putting me in a room alone with men and no female officers were all clear violations. The way the interrogators shouted at me, threatened me, and sexually harassed me by commenting on my appearance in order to coerce a confession were all breaches of the Convention Against Torture. The fact that I was held so long in pretrial detention was another violation.

A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.

In my head I’d pictured her (Queenie) as tall, like Gloria, with a warm, smiley face. Being Sukie’s penpal, she was bound to be the fun-loving, lipstick-wearing, jitterbugging type, who’d be friendly and welcoming toward us. It was bewildering that no one in the group fitted her description. These women didn’t even smile. They were pointing at us evacuees – discussing us – like they were choosing what cake to have for tea. ‘I’m looking for help with milking my Jerseys,’ said a woman with large front teeth. ‘Someone who’s not shy of getting up at dawn.’ The older kids seemed to think this a right lark, especially the boys, most of whom had probably never been near a live cow before. Within moments, they were falling over themselves to volunteer. ‘Don’t take all the best ones, Poll,’ another woman complained, which started them off bickering over who’d get the strongest boys. It wasn’t exactly fun, hovering like a spare part while everyone else got picked. There was no sign of anyone who might be Queenie, either. I grew anxious again, wondering how much longer we’d have to wait. Cliff leaned his head sleepily on my soldier.