As Robin Williams once pointed out, the army is a lot like the Boy Scouts, only with lots of guns and cooler merit badges. Instead of patches sewn onto a sash, the army gave us shiny medals with silk ribbons. They gave me a few medals. I got one for showing up, one for going […]

Philip Caputo, a Marine officer in Viet Nam, recounts this exchange: “Sir,” said a lance corporal, “if we pull out now, then all our efforts up to now would have been in vain.” “In other words, because we’ve already wasted thousands of lives, we should waste a few thousand more,” I said. “Well, if you […]

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, Introduction by Irving Wardle. he struck me then as a revolutionary idealist looking around for a guillotine. One of Johnstone’s plays is about an impotent old recluse, the master of a desolate castle, who has had the foresight to stock his deep-freeze with sperm. There is a […]

So I’m still thinking and reading about Berkeley and the Marines. While walking around the protests the other day, many people with Move America Forward said Berkeley was infringing on the Marines’ right to free speech. Oh those crazy pro-war folk. Anthony Swofford’s searing memoir Jarhead includes this instructional piece of dialogue: “Staff sergeant Siek […]

Two weeks ago, the Berkeley City Council wrote a letter to the Marines recruiting in town asking them to leave. The letter went on to say that if they didn’t leave, they should consider themselves unwelcome intruders in the city. This letter has caused quite a bit of anger. And now the council talks about […]

Lorrie Moore wrote an amazing story that appeared in The New Yorker in 2006. “Paper Losses.” An excerpt: Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.” “They look happy,” Kit said. Sam studied her with a […]

It’s been made popular by 24. The ticking bomb scenario. The idea that a nuclear bomb is tucked away somewhere in Los Angeles and Kiefer Sutherland must beat some no-good terrorist into telling him where it is. It’s exciting television. It’s shitty law. But a Supreme Court Justice, a fucking Supreme Court Justice, has cited […]

I thought we won in Afghanistan. Everything was cleared up, made like new. Right? Democracy and freedom and all that? Then why are they still killing journalists? “The journalist, 23-year-old Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, was sentenced to death last week by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif for distributing a report he printed […]

Oh. My. Fucking. God. I can’t stand this anymore. Blackwater, in May, 2005, dropped CS gas grenades on American soldiers and Iraqi civilians (SF Gate). CS gas, better known as tear gas, is apparently, highly controlled. Soldiers have to get permission from the President of the United States to employ it. Soldiers, always imperiled by […]