“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Murder is the taking of another’s life. Whatever the weapon, the killer pulls the life from the victim’s body. What’s left is empty. The killer makes a zero where there had been a 1. Murder is both the annihilation of history and its engineer. It removes a person from what he or she would have done with the rest of a life. It makes future children, future wives and husbands, […]
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A convincing argument could be made that human beings are the species that tells itself lies to make it to the next day. Instead of Homo Sapien, Wise Man, perhaps we are instead the Lying Beast or Mendacium Bestia, a term that also dispenses with the patriarchal collective noun Man and perhaps better captures our true nature in many respects as well. In 1981 I went without any food for […]
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In the everlasting conflict between those who fight and those who spin, Herr saw how the grunts were used and the Vietnamese defiled, and how those in charge warped language to serve the first need of those in power which is to remain in power. Grunts could die at 300 per week in “combat without focus (23),” on search and destroy missions, invasions, pacifications, in the jungles, in the rice […]
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War opens up a disconnect between those who actually fight, the grunts, and those officials who try to spin that fighting into tales of domination and perpetual success. Herr illustrates better than anyone else I’ve read about Vietnam, the impossible gulf between those two realities. He strips away all romance about the seedy, corrupt demiworld behind the front lines: “Saigan and Danang were alive with Lurps, seals, recondos, Green Beret […]
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