Terror Suspect Abdulmutallab and Philip K. Dick's Minority Report

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On December 26, FBI Detroit released a statement on the Nigerian national charged with attempting to destroy a Northwest Airlines aircraft. Excerpts from the press release: 

A 23-year-old Nigerian man was charged in a federal criminal complaint today with attempting to destroy a Northwest Airlines aircraft on its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Christmas Day and with placing a destructive device on the aircraft.

According to an affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, a Nigerian national, boarded Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam, Netherlands on December 24, 2009 and had a device attached to his body. As the flight was approaching Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Abdulmutallab set off the device, which resulted in a fire and what appears to have been an explosion. Abdulmutallab was then subdued and restrained by the passengers and flight crew. The airplane landed shortly thereafter, and he was taken into custody by Customs and Border Patrol officers.

A preliminary FBI analysis found that the device contained PETN, also known as pentaerythritol, a high explosive. Further analysis is ongoing. In addition, FBI agents recovered what appear to be the remnants of the syringe from the vicinity of Abdulmutallab’s seat, believed to have been part of the device.

[…]

Abdulmutallab required medical treatment and was transported to the University of Michigan Medical Center after the plane landed. He will make his initial court appearance later today.  

Interviews of all of the passengers and crew of Flight 253 revealed that prior to the incident, Abdulmutallab went to the bathroom for approximately 20 minutes, according to the affidavit.  Upon returning to his seat, Abdulmutallab stated that his stomach was upset, and he pulled a blanket over himself.  Passengers then heard popping noises similar to firecrackers, smelled an odor, and some observed Abdulmutallab’s pants leg and the wall of the airplane on fire. Passengers and crew then subdued Abdulmutallab and used blankets and fire extinguishers to put out the flames. Passengers reported that Abdulmutallab was calm and lucid throughout. One flight attendant asked him what he had had in his pocket, and he replied “explosive device.” 

Read the whole thing here.

The father of this terror suspect apparently went to warn the US Embassy in Nigeria: U.S. government officials tell The Associated Press that the Nigerian man charged with trying to destroy a jetliner came to the attention of U.S. intelligence in November when his father went to the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, to express his concerns about his son.

The NYT reported that Mr. Abdulmutallab was issued a regular visitor’s visa by the United States Embassy in London in June 2008, the administration official said. There was no “derogatory information available” on him at the time he applied, and he was granted a two-year visa, which is still valid, the official said. He had traveled to the United States once before, to Houston in August 2008.

Via Laura Rozen of Politico: A TIDE record on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was created in November 2009; there was insufficient derogatory information available on the subject at that time to include him in the TSDB or its “no fly” or “selectee” lists. Thus, he was not “watchlisted” as of 25 December 2009.

This one from the TIDE Fact sheet:  The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) is the US Government’s (USG) central repository of information on international terrorist identities as established by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. TIDE supports the USG’s various terrorist screening systems or “watchlists” and the US Intelligence Community’s overall counterterrorism mission. The Terrorist Identities Group (TIG), located in NCTC’s Information Sharing & Knowledge Development Directorate (ISKD), is responsible for building and maintaining TIDE.

The TIDE database includes, to the extent permitted by law, all information the U.S. government possesses related to the identities of individuals known or appropriately suspected to be or have been involved in activities constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism, with the exception of Purely Domestic Terrorism information. A non-exclusive list of types of conduct that will warrant both entry into TIDE and terrorist screening nomination includes persons who:

• Commit international terrorist activity;

• Prepare or plan international terrorist activity;

• Gather information on potential targets for international terrorist activity;

• Solicit funds or other things of value for international terrorist activity or a terrorist organization;

• Solicit membership in an international terrorist organization;

• Provide material support, i.e. safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other material financial benefit, false documentation or identification, weapons, explosives, or training;

• Are members of or represent a foreign terrorist organization.

Federal agencies nominate individuals for inclusion in TIDE based on evaluations of intelligence and law enforcement terrorism information.

But what if the individual does not fall into any of these nomination categories? 

Truth to tell this kind of reminds me of the conundrum in Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report. What do you do with a culprit that has not yet committed a crime? Do you arrest him or her before he commits a future crime thereby protecting the public from all prospective harm?  How do you stop, even arrest an individual when “there is insufficient derogatory information available?”



In Dick’s literary world, in the interest of efficiency (crime down at 99.8%) and a mega-security complex, through a prophylactic Precrime structure, “men were seized and arrested accused not of crimes they have committed, but of crimes they will commit; asserting that these men, if allowed to remain free, will at some future time commit felonies.”

The Precrime technology, as far as I know, is still in the realm of science fiction, but if a regular guy was able to convinced our government that a TV channel transmits signals to Al Qaeda -- is it too far off to imagine that some creative soul can sell some similar preterror technology before too long?  My fear is for the real world, where Philip K. Dick’s world is no longer inevitable; not in the interest of lean management and efficiency but in an emotional knee jerk reaction out of fear of the prospect of real harm and havoc in our shores. Such dark thoughts to end the year ...

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• Governments React After Terror Attempt on Airplane (nytimes.com)


• US charges Nigerian with trying to blow up plane (seattletimes.nwsource.com)


• Airports intensify security after plane attack (cnn.com)


• Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab: US Knew Suspect May Have Terrorist Ties, AP Reports (huffingtonpost.com)

Quote: The Neglected Art of Diplomacy

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"An generation of American leaders has been brought up with a kind of Manicheanism: to some, bombs are the necessary catalysts to negotiation; to others, bombs are just evil. To only just a few traditionalists, it seems, dropping bombs represents a diplomatic failure, however necessary it may be as a last resort.

Such reductionism in foreign policy thinking is compounded by the periodic rivalries between the State and Defense Departments (and the White House), and the widespread but bizarre perception that negotiations (and “diplomacy” itself) are the weapons of the weak. Obama has rightly ridiculed the perception. But he will need to show some results for his critique to take hold. He won’t get those results if his diplomacy continues to be as tentative and under-managed as it has been to date."

Kenneth Weisbrode History News Network: The Neglected Art of DiplomacyDecember 7, 2009

Mr. Weisbrode is the author of The Atlantic Century: Four Generations of Extraordinary Diplomats who Forged America's Vital Alliance with Europe (Da Capo, Nov. 2009)

Book description (from Borders): Historian Kenneth Weisbrode reveals for the first time, warts and all the insider's story of such well-known figures as Dean Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, and Henry Kissinger. It is the story of how and why the State Department's Bureau of European Affairs (EUR)the "mother bureau" as it was called, the nerve center of the Atlanticists rose to become the U.S. government's preeminent foreign policy office.

In Afghanistan. We are the tourists.

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Air Force Reserve Major Richard C. Sater was activated for a one-year tour of duty in support of the war on terrorism in May 2003. He was initially assigned to 4th Air Force, March Air Reserve Base, California. In September 2003, he deployed to Afghanistan for seven months in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, assigned first to Combined Joint Task Force 180 at Bagram Air Base; and later to Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, Kabul. He kept a journal during the deployment, from which the following is extracted. On the civilian side, he has been a college professor of English and the arts and a classical music announcer for a National Public Radio affiliate station.

Notes from a JournalAfghanistan, 11 Sept 2003-7 Apr 2004 was published in War, Literature & the Arts Journal (public domain material). Richard C. Sater is currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

I know nothing about their calendar. But then, so much of the culture here remains absolutely foreign to me.

We are the tourists.

We employ local Afghan men to work on our posts and camps. Hundreds every day, skilled (carpenters, masons, electricians) and unskilled. They work always under guard, a bored junior-ranked soldier or airman seated close by to keep an eye out for sedition. But there is none. The men need work and, in exchange, endure our ignorance.

Bearded black, swarthy, as thin and hard as want, their utter commonness in Afghanistan still seems exotic to me. They wear the traditional loose-fitting robe called a khalat and equally loose-fitting trousers that match; a rolled felt hat, a pakol; a patterned square scarf, and a fringed wool blanket that serves as cloak and protection from dust and winter’s instructive cold.

I can’t even speak to them beyond “salaam,” which equals hello, and “tasha­kor,” approximating thanks. The men will return my gaze but rarely my smile.

I watch them; they regard me with similar curiosity. Sometimes, guilty, I will show them my camera and raise my eyebrows, a mute question. May I? They shrug, nod. My greedy machine snaps the images with more clarity than I can decipher when I view the pictures later, each worth a thousand untranslatable words.

Their faces reflect the bewildering hard times they live in. They could be a hundred years old or a thousand, though many of those I see are probably younger than I. These are handsome men, dignified men, resigned to traveling a hard road. We have pledged something better. Schools, clinics, clean water, jobs, a stable and safe country, a viable national army that will protect it. The men mark the days—twenty-four hours by anyone’s calendar—and wait for us to keep the promise.

No amount of book-learning will fill the chasm between what I understand about this place and what truly is.

Quickie: One Nation Under Contract

On October 25, Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman who is now vice president of The Aspen Institute writes about Allison Stanger’s new book in the Boston Globe (One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy | Yale University, 256 pp):

In her new book, “One Nation Under Contract,’’ Stanger, director of the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College, documents in stunning detail the extent to which the United States has turned much of its most important work over to private contractors whose motivation is profit and level of public accountability near zero.[…]“For-profit foreign aid,’’ Stanger says, “is now a booming business, with billions of US government dollars flowing into sketchy projects.’’ She points to a 2005 congressional study that found that of 286 schools that were to be rebuilt by a private contractor with funds from the US Agency for International Development, “only 8 had been completed and . . . only 15 of 253 planned health clinics were operational.’’ With as many as five subcontractors on each job, “each charging a substantial fee’’ a school that could be built by Iraqis for $50,000 costs the American taxpayers five times that much.[...]There’s plenty of scandal, and she calls it such, plenty of concern about cost, lack of accountability, fiscal irresponsibility. But she also sees contracting out as a wave of the future, in large part probably because the elimination of the draft makes unavailable the large numbers of uniformed personnel to drive trucks, peel potatoes, build buildings, or do the laundry. Her concern is not with the idea of farming-out but with the mismanagement of it, the lack of transparency, the lack of effective monitoring and evaluating.

Read the whole thing here.

“Don’t want to send them home dirty.”

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Air Force Reserve Major Richard C. Sater was activated for a one-year tour of duty in support of the war on terrorism in May 2003. He was initially assigned to 4th Air Force, March Air Reserve Base, California. In September 2003, he deployed to Afghanistan for seven months in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, assigned first to Combined Joint Task Force 180 at Bagram Air Base; and later to Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, Kabul. He kept a journal during the deployment, from which the following is extracted. On the civilian side, he has been a college professor of English and the arts and a classical music announcer for a National Public Radio affiliate station.

Notes from a JournalAfghanistan, 11 Sept 2003-7 Apr 2004 was published in War, Literature & the Arts Journal (public domain material). Richard C. Sater is currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

28 Nov. 2003: SPIN BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan—

Usually I spend as little time as possible in the laundry room, stuffing things into two washers and then bolting for forty-five minutes. This night, as I mea­sure soap powder and wait for the tubs to fill, a gentleman comes in—tall, lanky, generously mustached, with sad eyes the color of hazelnuts—with three bags of laundry. Small ones, with little in them.

He wears a desert-tan flight suit, the two-piece kind, with no markings on it, identifying him by not identifying him as special-forces air crew. I introduce myself. He gives me a single name: Diz. I don’t ask for more, not wanting to put him in a position of not wanting to say more. His words colored with British, he says he is an MH-53 gunner. I extend my ignorant sympathies to him for the crash, and he shakes his head, disgusted.

“It was a re-supply mission,” he says. “Not even a combat sortie.” Had the crash occurred during a combat mission—even if the helicopter had been forced down by enemy fire—he would not be as troubled. One can make peace with such things under war. But such cost for an ordinary re-supply mission insults all who fly and fight.

Three colleagues lost. Friends, perhaps, at least brothers-in-arms. And somehow or other, the task has fallen to Diz of doing the laundry of these three, prior to sending their personal effects to their families. “Don’t want to send them home dirty,” he says.

I listen, since he seems to want someone to. He tells me a little about the deceased crew members. One was divorced, he says; one was a recent father and another had teenaged children. Through wash and rinse and spin and tumble dry, I stay with him, each of us sitting on the edge of a dryer, our feet hanging down. The air smells of fabric-softener sheets; the rhythmic click of buttons and the soft thud of damp clothes turning underneath us punctuate his story.[…]Carefully, he folds his three bags of clothing, mundane socks and undershirts, some gym shorts, uncommon only because they’re forced to bear the weight of wasted potential, of the price extracted for freedom to endure. Courteously, gravely, we shake hands. I would like to meet him again, I tell him before he departs, and he says the same. But we will not (one of the less remarkable costs of deployment, though such things will empty one’s pockets eventually).And he goes.

Joseph T. Cox: Second Tour

The night before Thanksgiving

my son told me he’s going back to Iraq,

again. The first cost him his two best friends

and his CO’s legs. He doesn’t talk about it much.

This time he has go to Fort Riley

for two or three months first.

I told him that after that shit hole,

Iraq might even look good.

His grandfather went to Germany,

got shot twice, came back an angry,

sullen man, still picking shrapnel out of his legs

as he fought the middle-aged battle of the bulge.

I had my time in Vietnam, never shot,

but came back different, or so my

first wife told me before she left.

Every soldier’s war is unique, every minute,

every step, every square foot, even for those

in the same country at the very same time.

My only wish is that my son will find peace,

but I honestly don’t know how to tell him that,

and when I try, it sounds like just one more lie.

Reprinted from War, Literature & the Arts | Volume 20:1&2 | 296

A frequent contributor to WLA, Joseph T. Cox is headmaster of the Haverford School and author of the poetry collection Garden’s Close.

You have no rank, whatsoever ...

Yeah, right.

I was reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, first published in 1979 (and more recently published by Picador in 2008) about the test pilots and astronauts at the dawn of the space age. Wolfe wrote that his "book grew out of some ordinary curiosity" about what "makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle… and wait for someone to light the fuse."

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The book is an engrossing read; frankly, reading Chuck Yeager flying the NF-104 is more exciting than watching any teenage-driven demographic movies that populate the cinema these days. The book is also about the wives and the unwritten rules and standards they lived by as they supported their husbands' careers. This was out of the 40’s and 50’s, where wives generally stayed home, and where trailing husbands as a specie, were still unheard of except in the celestial wormholes of Jupiter.I came to page 218 of the book and I had to pause to laugh out loud:

A commander designated to give the wives an orientation lecture says: “First, would you ladies please rearrange yourselves by rank, with the highest ranking wives sitting in the first row and so on the back to the rear: It takes about fifteen minutes for the women to sort themselves out and change their seats, since very few of them know one another. Once the process has been completed, the commander fixes a stern glare upon them and says: “Ladies, I want you to know that I have just witnessed the most ridiculous performance I have ever seen in my entire military career. Allow me to inform you that no matter who your husbands are, you have no rank whatsoever. You are all equals, and you should kindly remember to conduct yourselves as such in all dealings with one another.” That was not the end of the story, however. The wives stared back at their instructor with looks of utter bemusement and, as if with a single mind, said to themselves: “Who is this idiot and what planet has he been stationed on?” For the inexpressible provisions of the Military Wife’s Compact were well known to all. A military officer’s wife rose in rank with her husband and immediately took on all the honors and perquisites pertaining thereto, and only a fool or the sort of simple-minded jerk who was assigned to give orientation lectures to wives could fail to comprehend this.

Despite the absence of a similar Diplomatic Wife’s Compact, the Foreign Service is not altogether different from this. It’s not cultural, mind you. It’s just part of organizational life and the need for the neat ordering of the hierarchy. The next time you are tempted to give an orientation to incoming diplomatic spouses whether here or at post, remember this. And please, for the love of god and gin -- don’t tell them “you have no rank, whatsoever.”They will know the truth soon enough.

Things to Pack When You’re Bound for Baghdad

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Below is an excerpt from a personal essay by Major Jason Armagost, a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and the University of Colorado. This was published in 2006 in the War, Literature & the Arts |An International Journal of the Humanities. Full text here. WLA was founded in 1989 and is published by the Department of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. The journal is indexed in the American Humanities Index, Literary Criticism Register, The MLA American Periodical Verse, and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. WLA is published using government funds; the material published is in "public domain." The Journal’s current and back issues can be accessed here.

Literature is history with the truth left in. —Ralph Peters

Missouri—19 March 2003 | The clock is punched for war in Mesopotamia. Six hours until midnight, the day before the sudden flourish of air combat. I am suited, armed, and briefed for a 20,000 mile flight. The middle 208 seconds of the journey will be over Baghdad. Tomorrow’s strikes will compose the first salvos of “shock and awe.”

Our war-birds are carbon-fiber and titanium Stealth Bombers. They idle, topped with fuel, pre-flight crews tending aircraft systems on the rain-damp tarmac of Whiteman Air Force Base. In the course of the next two days, I will stiffen my backbone against exhaustion and battle with Air Force-issued amphetamines, a half-case of canned espresso drinks, and 40,000 pounds of steel and high-explosive. And books.

The Northrop Grumman B-2A “Spirit” is a flying wing—a 60-year old concept writ lethal in composites and computers. In profile, it is racy—a falcon stooping on distant prey. From the front—a menacing winged whale; from overhead—a wedge-shaped Euclidean study in parallel form. The plane carries aloft a crew of two pilots with the necessary life-support systems—oxygen, heating, air-conditioning, and cockpit pressurization. The pilots sit next to each other in twin ejection seats.

The running joke is that the seats don’t work because you’d rather be dead than face an accident board having crashed a $2,140,000,000.00 national asset.

Satiny charcoal in composition with a smooth, blended body, the B-2 is simultaneously rounded and angular. The skin is exotic and TOP-SECRET. Wing span is 172’, two-and-a-half times the length of 69’ nose-to-tail. It is rare— only 21 were built—but not endangered. It threads the 3-D envelopes of missile defense networks. Stealth has the same effect on defenses as speed, rendering reactions ineffective because they are too little, too late, if at all. This plane will bring us home.

The payload consists of 16 weapons mounted on two, eight-position, rotating launchers in each of the three aircraft of our flight. My primary weapons are 13 one-ton penetrator bombs for hardened targets and runways. The three remaining launcher stations carry the 4617 pound GBU-37 “Bunker Buster.” These two-and-a half ton monstrosities are targeted against deeply buried, steel-reinforced, concrete command centers in a planned effort to “decapitate” Iraq’s leadership.

In the lingo of combat aviators, these bombs will “prosecute” targets. Rarely—unless talking about Saddam or his sons—is killing mentioned. We are distanced. We make “inputs” into a network of flying computers. I manage the ghost in the machine. Our enemies label us the “Great Satan”—moral descendants of the Paladins of Charlemagne, Protector of the One Church. I don’t know if those we aim to liberate call us anything at all. We are armed to strike from the air, over the land, between the two rivers.

I have brought a bag of books and journals to pass the hours of tedium. I am bound for desert places.

[…]

I have supplemented the standard equipment with my own essentials stashed throughout the seven pockets of my flight suit:

3 tubes of Chap Stick, medicated

Toothbrush, floss, and travel toothpaste

1 oz. tin of Bag Balm—cow-udder salve for dry hands

Nail clippers

Aspirin, Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen, Vitamin C, Multi-vitamin,

Immodium, Iodine, Band-Aids, Saline Nasal Spray, Eye-drops

Baby wipes in a plastic sandwich bag

Sunglasses

Swiss Army knife

Duct tape

In a stained and ratty helmet bag I have a small library of books and personal journals:

Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America

—David Petersen

The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, and Just Before

Dark: Collected Nonfiction—Jim Harrison

Winter Morning Walks—Ted Kooser

Nine Horses: Poems—Billy Collins

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997—Wendell Berry

West with the Night—Beryl Markham

Fire Road, and Aftermath: An Anthology of Post-Vietnam Fiction

—Donald Anderson

The Things They Carried—Tim O’Brien

Winter: Notes from Montana—Rick Bass

Burning the Days: Recollection and Dusk and Other Stories

—James Salter

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

—Cormac McCarthy

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories

—Edited by Tobias Wolff

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness—Edward Abbey

The Art of Living and Other Stories—John Gardner

Hunting the Osage Bow—Dean Torges

The Norton Book of Classical Literature—Edited by Bernard Knox

Don Quixote—Cervantes, Starkie translation

Gilgamesh—Translated by Herbert Mason

Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot—Jim Stockdale

Wind, Sand, and Stars—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, and Keep the Change

—Thomas McGuane

The Nick Adams Stories—Hemingway

Gray’s Sporting Journal—Aug 2001 & Nov/Dec 2002

The Iliad and The Odyssey—Homer. Robert Fagles translations

Beowulf—Seamus Heaney translation

Four leather-bound journals in various states of wear. At the bottom of the bag, amongst the books:

Stainless-steel Colt 1911A1, .45 ACP with custom night-sights and four loaded magazines—in a nylon chest holster

Four pairs of wool socks, black silk long-johns, three brown undershirts, two pairs of flannel boxer shorts

Blue, fitted-wool, logo baseball cap “YALE—Lux et Veritas”

Black & white photo of my wife, son, and daughter

These things, these books, are a measure of security. A redoubt in war. They bring me comfort in their many ways. The books have all been read. That is the point. In the middle of the Atlantic I won’t be interested in the cheap plot-twists of the latest bestseller. I’m in need of art—recklessness, patience, wisdom, passion, and largess. I rifle through the titles, grab five, and return to the seat. We are over Ohio. Me, my books, and the colonel.

[…]

Walking into the local market in my uniform, I avert my eyes from those I suspect will acknowledge me for service to the country. “Thank you for what you do” is difficult to hear. I am confounded by their innocence. I smile and nod—no words.

I am embarrassed because troops are dying and I am here, buying fresh asparagus, wine, and apples. These people are kind and gracious, but I can’t tell them what I have done because I don’t know what’s buried in the bunkers of an ex-tyrant’s palace. I know I left over 36 tons of high-explosive and weapons-grade steel in Iraq. Buildings destroyed, bunkers mangled beyond recognition, airfields once bombed to submission—now in use by our own forces. It is conceivable that I killed no one. It is, however, very unlikely.

I turn back to the words. Words I would like the people in local markets to read and own. Own and live. I read and write and read. Hemingway wrote, “There are worse things than war and all of them come with defeat.” I believe that—but just because one thing is worse than another, it doesn’t make the lesser good. Just less bad.

Once more to Heraclitus, 2600 years ago:

War, as father

of all things, and king,

names few to serve as gods,

and of the rest makes

these men slaves, those free.

Even the free then, are subjects to war, and dying for freedom is easy, at least for the dead.

This is no boast. Killing’s something apart.

I sit on an overturned canoe amongst budding wild rose bushes on the bank of a mountain lake that is named on no map. My son and daughter are fishing for trout and throwing pinecones at mallards. My wife is seven months pregnant. She sleeps on a couch in our small cabin with our youngest daughter. They are warmed by the late-morning sun piercing a picture window. I look up from Victor Davis Hanson’s Ripples of Battle. My daughter beckons me to untangle a snag in her fishing line. I grab my fly rod and stride down the thorny bank to help her. The last paragraph I read before placing the opened book on the boat says:

So battle is a great leveler of human aspiration when it most surely should not be. Stray bullets kill brave men and miss cowards. They tear open great doctors-to-be and yet merely nick soldiers who have a criminal past, pulverizing flesh when there is nothing to be gained and passing harmlessly by when the fate of whole nations is at stake. And that confusion, inexplicability, and deadliness have a tendency to rob us of the talented, inflate the mediocre, and ruin r improve the survivors—but always at least making young men who survive not forget what they have been through.

* * *

A well-read man, one who can also write well, and above all a thoughtful warrior, able to look inward. I don't think we want mindless robots fighting our wars. As I read this essay, I kept thinking of that story from Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran where an Iraqi American interpreter offered to loan a senior CPA staffer a copy of Hanna Natatu’s The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, a seminal work of regional history, the staffer declined. The CPA staffer told the interpreter that everything he needed was in a small book on his desk. The book turned out to be a tourist guide to Iraq written in the 1970’s (Green Zone, Scene VI). Jason Armagost, now Lt Col Jason R. Armagost, USAF is the Commander of the 13Th Bomb Squadron. He has served as an officer, fighter pilot, and bomber pilot in the active branch of the U.S. Air Force since May of 1992. In 1999, he was competitively selected to fly the USAF's premier B-2 Stealth Bomber. Lt Col Armagost flew the lead aircraft over Baghdad in the opening salvos of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.

He holds a Master of Arts degree in counseling psychology from the University of Colorado and a Bachelor of Science degree in English from the United States Air Force Academy. This piece is one of the 13 essays included in the University of Iowa collection When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers' Accounts From the Civil War to Iraq (edited by Donald Anderson).

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