We know that psychology is tremendously important in war. It is a field unlimited in extent, to which every conscientious soldier should give much time and study. Yet it cannot be learned as one learns mathematics. It must be sensed. Unfortunately we...
What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes ...
Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the cam...
Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded ...
But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the...
When she spread her wings and leaped screeching into the air she had not the slightest doubt that every hand below her would stretch to catch her. And if one could leap from a height with no fear of falling, could one not be said to possess the secre...
She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving ...
She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had...
Since that day there is nothing anyone could ever say to convince me that one person cannot change a nation. One person can do unbelievable things. All it takes is that one person who's willing to risk everything to make it happen.
For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make t...
Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth.
One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the th...
In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.
In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none...
Peace surfaced here. Hard to imagine a person finding peace through war, but no one finds peace in war—peace finds you. It crawls into your sleeping bag and helps you fall asleep, nudges your arm, tells you to turn over, think about home.
The Iraqi sun quickly heated the air to an unbearable one hundred twenty three degree’s, causing an unquenchable thirst to boil up in him. Thomas then dropped his rifle under his right arm, where it hung beneath his pit by a strap called a fast sli...
Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn’t matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war.
If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few un...
Walk into any mosque, temple, church, or synagogue and you will find differing examples, different ways of interpreting God. The One True God is hard to find when a mishmash of human traits is constantly being projected.
Is our rational and self-reliant generation really supposed to accept the idea that God the Almighty not only created the universe but, interestingly enough, also has a stake in our lives?
Saying, “I don’t agree with you,” or going so far as to say, “I think your belief structure is childish,” does not amount to persecution. Insensitivity is not the same as harassment or oppression.
