Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.
Samuel Johnson
‘Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.’
T. S. Eliot.
wiki Phil Klay
Phil Klay (/ˈklaɪ/; born 1983) is an American writer and United States Marine officer who won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree.
I doubt there is anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
Resilience is, of course necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn’t.
I don’t believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.
I don’t want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn’t. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer.
There is a tradition of public service in my family. I’m one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps.
I am not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.
It’s a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely.
