Free post in The Book Cafe - Medium

Five-Year-Old Suspected of Leaking Classified Documents Arrested in the Sandbox by Amy Sea

So $5 / month for a subscription to Medium, you too can be receiving such hard-hitting journalism as this:

“I mostly feel bad for my fans,” Taxipoopoo said. “I was really going to solidify my patriotism and gun brand during graduation. I had big plans to rip apart America Elementary.” from Amy Sea’s article.

You simply won’t find this on Fox News—nor George Soros’s website for that matter.

This one will count against your 3 free Medium pieces.

Evans’ Rag

Vol 5 Issue 4

The blog is all about the book this month, about to go live. The book blurb is here: KIll Devil Come the Storm

If not obvious from this month’s Medium article, Reluctant Empire, I am not a pacifist. During the Vietnam War, in ‘69 when I had fewer pounds and longer hair, I was thinking hard about whether to file as a conscientious objector or head to Canada.

The French—broken after two world wars—persuaded Eisenhower to lend them the weapons to reclaim a piece of their empire, got their asses kicked at Dien Bien Phu and left the mess for the United States. We got taken. That part of the story I did not know in ’68 when I was still a pup.

What was clear enough to this puppy was that half the Vietnamese were fighting the other half. What we’d taken on was another country’s civil war. I would have been a hypocrite to claim I was a pacifist, unless there was a category for objecting to that war. Yet I couldn’t disrespect my classmates who were training to become officers.

I escaped by a high draft number thanks to Nixon’s lottery.

The Catholic Church of my youth insisted there was something called a ‘just war’. By that standard, perhaps Afghanistan was one, though we failed to see it through, mainly on account of Iraq. And Iraq didn’t threaten the United States by any measure —even if Hussein was villainous enough to be beheaded.

The Medium article is about Robert Kagan’s new book, The Ghost at the Feast, an excellent account of American history from 1900 to 1941.