The first blessing was that there was no specific time that I needed to be up, and so I woke early, turned over and went back to sleep, about nine hours in total and pretty much uninterrupted.

The second blessing was the kindled fire in the belly. I attacked the issues with brooms literal and metaphorical.

And a third: an episode of Home of the Brave I’d been saving, which turned out to be another one about what veterans go through. It featured an interview with Doug Peacock, taped in Ajo. Vietnam was his war. After he got home he lived with grizzlies, and became the prototype for the character of Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey.

He said this.

Everyone knows the the wars we’ve been in, and particularly the endless ones of the last twenty years, are pointless, wasteful, insane, and based on lies designed to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful.

Everyone covers up this knowledge through the mechanism of ‘thank-you-for-your-service’ culture.

Everyone should know, whether they do or not on any level, that TYFYS culture does nothing good for the ones who ‘served’.

Like my friend the other day, they have to live with the horrible things they were asked or ordered to do, for the rest of their lives.

Your pro-forma well-wishing is a thing you do for yourself, not a thing you do for them.

If your gratitude was meaningfully real, you’d be an anti-war activist.

So that their kids’ generation won’t be shipped off in the name of some fresh lie, only to suffer as they do.