My oldest called me the other day, and learning that I was in fact rendering my opinions locally, warned me that it might be risky, that someone might shoot me, and asked: “would that be worth it?”
I said yes, it would be worth it. Somebody has to have the balls to speak the obvious, no matter what the mob is screaming, no matter how terrifying and unified they may be trying to seem.
We ask our warriors to fight, to kill, to suffer, and sometimes to die for our country. They take up guns then intentionally go into the middle of places where people are trying to kill them.
Should I keep my mouth shut because maybe, just maybe, some nutjob might decide the world will be better without me? No, not me. I’m the old guy in the Avengers movie who refused to take a knee to Loki. Yes, kill me, but don’t ask me not to spit in your eye. That’s not how I am wired. I’m not suicidal, and I’m not going out of my way to antagonize people. but you know what? Life ends for all of us. And the good parts of life end when you give in to fear.
Many of our warriors have been killed in our many wars. Many have been maimed, psychologically and physically. All suffered severe stress while fighting. They missed their homes and families. They were scared all the time. They saw sights no one should ever see.
And as Phillip Corso pointed out to that sorry SOB John McCain, we left a lot of POW’s behind in Korea. There is little doubt we left many in Vietnam as well.
Those people suffered for America, because America asked them to.
If you find yourself lacking in the will to withstand the stresses being placed on us, adopt one of these people, in your imagination–someone dead, or someone MIA–and carry on in their name. Carry on the fight.
The most obvious one for me is a guy named Josh Hagar. Josh is the only person I know who died in the wars we have been fighting for the last twenty years. He was, and I had to look this up, a Ranger qualified infantryman with the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division out of Fort Carson, Colorado.
He was very proud of being a Ranger, as he should have been.
I met him at my first CrossFit Certification, I think in 2005. It was the last 3 day certification, and the last one, I think, done at the old location in Santa Cruz. A whole lot of very interesting folks were there. A list of CrossFit luminaries was there. Greg himself taught, of course, but Mark Rippetoe was there, Mike Burgener, Robb Wolf. Eva, Annie and Nicole were all there. (I’m indulging myself, since most won’t know who I am talking about.). John Hackelman was even there, with his black painted toe fingernails, to teach basic punching and kicking. Tony Blauer was there as a student, with his wife, who is a pistol
I had a SEAL Commander in my flight of about 8 people, which I found out later. The first words I heard him say the whole time was when he saw me do reasonably good handstand pushups, at a bodyweight of 240, that that was the first impressive thing he had seen. Later still I realized that the Marine that was always with him, and always scowling at me, was his bodyguard. He must have been.
But my main compadres were Josh, a guy named Billy, and a guy named Robert. Robert was a medic with the 75th Rangers, and Billy, as Josh told me on the side had “killed more people than Ted Bundy”. Billy looked to be about 25, and had a babyface, and would not have scared most people in the least. I remember Billy telling me a story how as a junior NCO he was yelling at his men to take cover, after they took fire from the upper windows in the buildings on the street they were patrolling, watching them do it, then realizing he himself was still standing in the middle of the fucking street. That sort of thing happens to everyone, I suspect. You don’t get smarter, necessarily, in combat, and we all do stupid things in ordinary days.
When the Cert was done we all went drinking in Santa Cruz with a couple of Canadian Mounties. They were both pleasant amiable people, as in my experience most Canadians are.
I’ve never seen any of them since.
Josh was killed by an IED on Feb. 22nd, 2007, in Ramadi. He has a workout named after him, which is a tough workout. It is OHS with 95lb (for men) and pullups. 21 OHS/42PU/15OHS/30PU/9OHS/18PU. For time, as usual.
I corresponded a bit with his father, who was of course very upset.
Later I had a dream about him, where he volunteered to donate his brain for a medical experiment.
That is such a horrific idea, isn’t it? Who would be willing to give their brain or their heart–their life–for research? We don’t ask people to do that. It would be horrible.
But what is asking someone to die in wartime? He didn’t just donate his brain, he donated his whole body. And why? Well, I’m sure it was a complex mixture of motivations. He loved the guys he was with most likely, and I think he really enjoyed the profession of soldiering.
But at the end of the day, do you not think the single most important motivation was belief in America? A belief that he was defending freedom? A belief that his sacrifices and hard work and sheer long term misery could and would lead to something better for people he would never meet? This is a love that needs recognition and respect, in my view.
At another CrossFit cert. a retired SEAL who had become a cop confessed to me, implicitly, that he was very bitter. He endured his deployments, being away from his children while they were growing up, because he really, really thought he was making the world safer and better for his children. But he had grown to doubt that, grown to doubt that most of what our soldiers and sailor and airmen and Marines are being asked to do for their country is really NECESSARY. We have enemies. But we always fight them in indecisive ways.
As I think about it, could it not be argued we are fighting terrorism in much the way we are fighting COVID-19? In such a desultory, ineffective way that the parts we crush we reignite as blowback elsewhere?
It needs to be seriously considered that America as a whole has been used as a toy, as a piggy bank, as a powerful nation manipulable in any direction a power elite wants, and that we have been like this for many decades.
For all we know, the Cold War, too, was fought like COVID-19: in an ineffective, stupid, desultory way. We could and should have demolished the Chinese Communists in the Korean War, and freed the whole Korean Peninsula. We could and should have demolished North Vietnam in a matter of months. And having won that war, we should have protected it. But we didn’t. We won, then retreated. This is something almost unknown in human history, absent patent treason.
The fog we are enduring today is merely thicker than it has been for the last fifty years. It is not new. What is new is the internet, and the ability of individual agents to report information that in any other time would have been suppressed.
We need to give careful thought to the idea, which is obvious when you think about it, that we are in fact controlled by the same people who control the Fed. The bankers always win, in every war, in every depression, in every boom. No matter what happens, the big banks win. Most of the wealth in this and most other nations is held, in fact, by banks. They hold the public debt. They own your house and your car. They pay for your vacation, and in exchange you pay them for your vacation plus 20%.
It is past time we rethink all of this. The whole system. Soup to nuts. Find the traitors and pull them out of the system, if we don’t shoot them outright.