"I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched." David Grossman
For the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve kept an increasingly fat folder labelled “Atrocities.” It contained reports of abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan so egregious that even the military couldn’t ignore them. I retitled it “A Few Bad Apples” when it became clear that those who got caught had to be portrayed as anomalies so as to avoid the central question of what the hell they’re doing there in the first place.
