and when he talks to us about war and the military/industrial/congressional complex, and the costs, and the price, he does so as someone with direct, intimate, and immediate knowledge, it behooves us--and in particular those who do not have any direct knowledge of or experience with war and its attendant miseries--and in particular, their consequences on the body politic--to listen/read with due attention.
I particularly like this passage, in reference to a recent discussion about the meaning of 'service', and the perspective it imparts. About his first book he writes:

"... I was explicit not only about the significant number of white supremacists in Special Operations but how the attitudes of these extremists connected with the less explicit white male supremacy of white patriarchal American society and defined, in some respects, the attitude taken by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti toward the Haitian population.

The resistance to this allegation was particularly fierce, and not merely from those inside the Special Operations “community,” whose outrage was more public-relations stagecraft than anything else. There was outrage from people who hadn’t a moment of actual experience in the military at all. This is an affront to something sacred in the public imaginary of a thoroughly militarized United States: that we are an international beacon of civilized virtue, and that our military is the masculine epitome of that virtue standing between our suburban security and the dark chaos of the Outside. Questioning the mystique of the armed forces is tantamount to lunacy at best and treason at worst.

This is the reason bad-apple-ism has been the predominant meme of the media and the Pentagon when they are compelled to discuss the stories of torture, rape and murder in Iraq and Afghanistan. “A few bad apples” committed torture. “A few bad apples” raped prisoners, fellow female soldiers, and civilians in their homes. The massacre was not descriptive of the Marine Corps, but the work of “a few bad apples.” Anyone who wants to be the skunk at this prevarication party need only ask, “How do these bad apples all seem to aggregate into the same units?”

In a funny way, the continuous pattern of USer aggression seems to be a way of saying "we KNOW we have a small national willy! If you don't shut up about it, we'll kill you!"

Susan Faludi's new book makes a rather startling claim in that respect: that Murka's obsession with military might is a kind of national reaction formation/compensation behavior against the period in our history when citizens really were pretty much at the mercies of just about any marauders who came their way. The "State" was just about powerless to 'protect' citizens at all, until after the continental genocides had worked their way west, and 'civilization' was established.