Aw man, I love comments like these. I feel you though: the number one thing I want to see in my lifetime is the dismantling of imperialism, but my little brother—whom I love more than anyone else in the world—just joined the army out of a genuine desire to “serve his country.” In dealing with this, I’ve been reading war memoirs, and it’s struck me that they all show how immediate and insular life in combat is: that soldiers can only see the bravery or brutality of the individuals right around them, that there is no way to step back and frame the surrounding chaos of gore and destruction with purpose or justice. Dispatches (by Michael Herr) and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and The Things They Carried (both by Tim O’Brien) are great in that respect. Absolutely NOT giving nuance to shit like My Lai or Abu Ghraib or any other of the scores of atrocities committed by direct cruelty from boots on the ground, but I think it’s easy for us to hold every soldier up as equally conscious and complicit in the overall body count when there is much more going on than we initially comprehend.

Also just because it’s my favorite Vietnam book—Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg (the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers) is phenomenal because it’s a memoir from both the ground and from the top of command, and he documents how disillusionment on the ground turned into horror and outrage when he saw the real architecture of the war.