Sublime

consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Nothing Emerson wrote was ever truer of America, but that was not the only reason I underlined his words once, twice, thrice. What had smitten me then, and strikes me now, was that the same thing could be said of our motherland, where we are nothing if not inconsistent.

I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

The actions described here are about the elite of the elite desperately fighting for their lives and the lives of their teammates as vastly, numerically superior enemy forces closed in on them, and in many cases, killed them and left their mutilated bodies behind for the animals and jungle to consume. Any North Vietnamese soldier who killed a SOG