Angry Planet - A Classical View of the Afghan Collapse

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

This will be the last episode we do on Afghanistan for a bit. We wanted to give the final word to a U.S. Marine who served there.We’re now a year out from the fall of Kabul and what looks like the end of America’s uniformed involvement in Afghanistan. There are as many as 70,000 Afghans who helped the United States during the war who are still looking to get out.Elliot Ackerman, who served in the region as a Marine and as a CIA operative, was trying to help as the last flights were taking off from Kabul’s Airport.It was, as Ackerman saw it, the Fifth Act of the Afghan War.He’s joining us today to talk about both his war and his views of the fall. He’s the author of both novels and non-fiction, including Dark at the Crossing, Green on Blue, and Red Dress in Black and White. We’ll put the full list in the show notes. His latest book, looking at these final days is The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. Matthew Galt is in a small box somewhere. We're now a year out from the fall of Kabul and what looks like the end of America's uniformed involvement in Afghanistan. There are as many as 70,000 Afghans who helped the United States during the war who are still looking to get out. Elliot Ackerman, who served in the region as a Marine and as a CIA operative, was trying to help as the last flights were taking off from Kabul's airport. It was, as Ackerman saw it, the fifth act of the Afghan war. He's joining us today to talk about his war and his views of the fall.

He's the author of both novels in nonfiction, including Dark at the Crossing and Green on Blue and red dress in black and white. We'll put a full list in the show notes. His latest book, looking at these final days, is The Fifth Act, America's End in Afghanistan. Dan, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Jason. So as you saw America counting down to the end of the war, was there anything that came as a real surprise to you? Or did it play out kind of as you expected it to? I think the speed of Afghanistan's fall and how quickly the Taliban were able to march into Kabul was a surprise to me.

I would say the just sort of debacle we witnessed at the airport was a surprise to me. I frankly had never seen anything like it. So yeah, I was like many others, I was surprised. I after President Biden announced in April that all U.S. troops would be leaving Afghanistan, it certainly thought that did not vote well for the Afghan national government. This was a real vote of no confidence. So I think the war was certainly going to end. And I intuited it would probably end badly, but just the rapidity of the ending and our

our unpreparedness were definitely surprises. I think that the war had to end something like this? I mean, what's a good outcome in a situation like this, do you think? No, I don't think it necessarily had to end like this. And I sort of don't, don't buy into the talking point like, well, there's no good way to end a war. There are many other ways to end a war. Like you look, for instance, like the U.S. involvement in the Balkans, for instance,

We didn't see any type of a debacle there, even though we had a U.S. troop involvement there, as well as places like Iraq. I think that it also begs the question as what does it mean to end a war? So, you know, last September, President Biden said for the first time in 20 years, the United States, it's not a war. But, you know, we still have troops in Iraq, in Syria, and the Horn of Africa, in Yemen, Nigeria. I mean, these are troops that are drawing what in the military we call imminent danger, imminent danger pay. So if those troops are not at war, then why were the troops who are similarly stationed in Afghanistan at war? But if those troops are at war, then that means the United States is still a war, even though we've left Afghanistan. So you can just see there's sort of a game of semantics that gets played.

And that game of semantics has very real world policy consequences. And so for whatever reason, we in our national conscience that decided the war in Afghanistan could only be over when the last U.S. service member left Afghanistan. But when you look at like the height of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, there are about 150,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By 2017, 2018, before President Trump starts negotiating with the Taliban, we had pulled out 90 percent of our troops. We were down to around 15,000 U.S. troops that were taking really de minimis casualties. Most of the fighting at that point was being done by the Afghan National Army. And I'd say our decision to pull the plug led to an entire collapse. And I think you can certainly look at an alternate history and say, what if we'd have 10,000?

troops there, coalition troops are not all Americans, and had used that force to stabilize the country. I think there is an argument to make for that. Yeah, I think that's really interesting and something I've been wondering about, too. Just simply because that sounds like such a small number of troops, you know, not for them, I'm sure. People are individually there, but actually to have such control over a country of that size, I mean, Afghanistan, it's not a small place, right? No, and listen, and it's not like this isn't something we do. There are 60,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe.

The reason those troops are in Europe is they secured the peace after the Second World War. And they still secure the peace, as we've seen in Ukraine. You know, those are the troops that were redeployed into Poland. We have 40,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula that have secured a peace there for decades. So this idea that the war only ends when every last. troop comes home, doesn't really hold up if you look historically. In fact, the only wars that end with every last U.S. service member returning home are the wars that we uncategorically lose. So the Vietnam War, like, yes, everybody came home. The war in Afghanistan now, everyone came home. In fact, like,

if you look, and I mentioned Iraq, you know, there's this irony that, you know, Iraq was always the bad war and Afghanistan was the good war because Afghanistan was the war from which the 9-11 attackers were plotting. So in Afghanistan, we have this unequivocal U.S. defeat, but in Iraq, we have sort of a more muddled outcome. Like, I wouldn't go so far as to say we won the Iraq war, but I also wouldn't go so far to say that we lost it. And so I think there's sort of a bitter irony there, and the U.S. troops are still in Iraq. So I think there's Afghanistan really, as it ends, I think it's worth pausing and asking you some of these sort of broader questions of what does it mean to win a war? What does it mean to even be at war in these countries? And sort of how is America

postured internationally vis-a-vis these military deployments. Yeah, it does seem like the era of the unconditional surrender is gone, right? I mean, when the Germans finally surrendered in World War II, it was unconditional. When they surrendered in World War I, it was unconditional. And that's the outcome I think people are hoping for in any war that we fight. I would argue the era of the unconditional surrender isn't over because we just basically unconditionally surrendered in Afghanistan. Painful when you say that, but yeah, okay.

I mean, that was about as much of it. That was about as categorical of a defeat as you can get. You sort of played a role in the last few days. You were in Italy. I know you've told the story a million times. And I know you're on a book tour, so that means you get to tell these stories a million more times. But can you talk about those last few weeks, days,

and what your involvement was like? Sure. It sort of gets to the title of the book, the Fifth Act. And so politically, the five acts of the book are the four presidencies that the wars fought under Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, the Fifth Act being the political endgame with the Taliban. But there are also the five acts of the book are five distinct evacuation cases that I was involved in a year ago.

And so as Kabul was falling in the last two weeks of August, I happened to be on a long plan. a holiday with my wife and our four kids in Italy, of all places, which was about as far away as you can be psychically from Afghanistan. But it felt important for me to sort of interspersed the book with scenes from Kabul and scenes of us in Italy to sort of, I think, show and give the reader an experience of the psychic dissonance that so many veterans were experiencing as the war was ending, because this war ended in a way that no other war has ever ended. When we left Saigon and abandoned our allies in Vietnam, for instance. And they didn't have a voice. They had no way to communicate really with the outside world. Here, through social media,

through WhatsApp, through just the way we were all connected in the world, these people absolutely had a voice. And you could hear them screaming for help as their country was descending into this abyss, which was Taliban rule. And so what came out of that because the U.S. government wasn't prepared for this evacuation was really crowdsourced efforts to try to, I mean, do everything from fly-in charter flights to Kabul in the two weeks before it was being handed over to the Taliban and get people out to networks of veterans and journalists who covered the war and humanitarian activists frantically working to get their Afghan allies who are now under threat from the Taliban out. And this sort of played out in these frenzied two weeks before the final August 31st withdrawal in the

book chronicles those two weeks. And the people you were trying to get out were not necessarily people you knew, right? I mean, this was not you trying to help out people who'd helped you. It started with one or two people who I knew with an old interpreter of mine, especially lives in the United States, but his family was in Afghanistan and we needed to get them out because they were under threat. But then it quickly, obviously, migrates out to other people who needed help. And we were, again, we had raised money to fly in charter flights to Kabul. We were making manifest for those flights a sort of, I never thought I would see in my life, this was a modern day's type of Schindler's list. I mean, just making these lists and

trying to get the people on the lists into airplanes. And then coordinating their passage through Kabul, which at that point was controlled by the Taliban. So difficult to actually get people through the Taliban checkpoints. And then once they were through the Taliban checkpoints, get them through the American military checkpoints and inside the airport. So this was sort of a whole network of people doing this. It had been called a digital Dunkirk, which I think is apt. And it played out over these days. And then I was one of many players involved in trying to get these folks out. And the stories I tell in the book, I mean, you know, some of them have a positive outcome, but some don't. And I thought it was also important to tell the stories of the evacuations that

didn't work so readers could learn why they didn't work. How would a particular just if there's one that sticks out in your mind, how would one rescue actually work? What could you do? What could the people you were working with do from remote locations? How do you reach into Afghanistan to get someone out? Well, caveat this would sort of each one of the cases that I write about in the book when they began, with the initiative to get these people out began, I'll be candid in the back of my mind, I was sort of thinking, this is never going to work. But we would kind of keep trying. And one of those cases was a friend of mine, I mean, this is how tenuous, this one connection was, a friend of mine's nephew's college roommate had served in the army and had an interpreter they needed to get out.

And so he pings me and says, this interpreter needs to get out. His name is Shaw. I write about him in the book. And we're trying to get him out. But he's been told by a contact of his in the Afghan royal family that if he goes up to the Marines at the checkpoint, point at the airport and says this secret password, they'll bring him into the airport. Elliot, does that sound like it makes sense to you? And I said, I said my friend said, no, that does not sound like it makes sense to me. I don't think there's some secret password that the Afghan royal family has that if he says it, the Marines are just going to wave him in. Like, I don't think that's, I don't think that's a good plan. And he says, what do you think we should do? And we started trying to work out a plan. And just by coincidence, there were two Marine infantry battalions at the

airport. Battalion is about 1,000 Marines. And one of them was my old infantry battalion that I fought in in Iraq back in 2004. And it just so happened. The colonel who was commanding that battalion had been a classmate of mine in Quantico almost 20 years ago when we were young, 20-year-old attendants together. And I called another friend of mine, got his cell phone number and called him and he picked up. I said, hey, I hear you're at the airport. He's like, I am at the airport. And can you, I was like, could you, I've got a few people we're trying to get out. Could you help? He's like, sure, here's the gate that our Marines own. If you send them to this gate and send me photos of them, I will work this with you. And long story short, I documented in the book. We were able to get Shaw

and his pregnant wife actually through, navigate them into the airport and link them up with this lieutenant colonel and Lieutenant Colonel and Chris Richard Lowe, got them out. But that was sort of what it took to know someone on the inside of the airport. That really is just so nuts to me. it sounds like something that should have been handled by policy, right? I mean, here's the group that should be taken out. There should be some higher authority in the government helping to arrange this. And there just wasn't anything like that, huh? I say this too.

It's in no way, like, diminish the efforts of like the Marines and soldiers and, like, consular officers in the State Department at the airport who were, I mean, doing absolutely a heroic effort in incredibly difficult conditions. But what should have happened was before, like there should have been some effective process in place for an evacuation so that a person like a Shah or others could provide their bona fides and get processed very quickly into the airport, evacuated to a place. And many people were saying this before the evacuation, like Guam, just fly them to Guam and then sort everything out from there. And then if they qualify to come to the U.S., fly them onto the U.S. If it doesn't,

if it's something fishy and none of this makes sense and they're not who they say they are, then you send them back. But none of those arrangements had been made. The administration had not prepared for that type of an evacuation. It had made the decision not to prepare for that type of evacuation because many people between the announcement of the withdrawal and the withdrawal itself were pleading with them to make those types of arrangements, but they were not made, and the result was what happened to the airport.

All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, angry planet listeners, thank you for sticking around. You are back on. We are talking to Elliot Ackerman about Afghanistan. I just wonder what the powers that be

thought was going to happen. I'm not unsympathetic to their strategic decision-making. I understand the decisions they were making. They were just, they were wrong. So there, I think their decision-making was all predicated on their being a deal, what we call a decent interval. It's a term Nixon coined in Vietnam. So from the moment, the decent interval in Vietnam was in 1972, the U.S. military pulled out of Vietnam, and Saigon falls in 1975. So there was a three-year decent interval in which the United States could say it didn't happen on our watch. We wash our hands of this. The Biden administration was banking on, you know, we're going to pull out the last U.S.

service member at first. It was September 11th, 2021, 20-year anniversary. And there'll be some decent interval. Maybe it'd be two years, a year, maybe six months, maybe three months. It sort of didn't matter. There would just be some interval of time so we could say we left and then it collapsed, but it didn't happen on our watch. When they didn't get the decent interval and we were still there when Kabul collapsed,

Well, that was it. It was a fait accompli. They were toast. And I think they didn't want to evacuate beforehand, because in their estimation, if we announced the withdrawal in April and we started evacuating people between April and August 31st for September 11th, that that would precipitate the collapse. And there's not, there is a logic to that. They were just, they were wrong. The thing I would fault them with is, you know, maybe you don't begin the evacuation because you're worried about precipitating the collapse, but you should have a contingency plan in case in case the collapse happens before you can get all the troops out. And that is what happened. There was no contingency plan for it. I wonder if those talks with the Taliban that were going on outside of Afghanistan.

I wonder, we've had someone on the show who actually was one of the diplomats who had conversations with the Taliban and got to know them a bit. And he didn't trust the for a second. I just wonder if there was some thought that, well, we've talked to them. Maybe they'll give us that decent interval. I mean, what made them think that? I mean, you've got to be pretty naive to think that the Taliban have got some soft spot in their heart for the Afghan government of the Americans. The Taliban have been fighting a 20-year war and they're about to win it. So I don't, I don't think they're in the concessions mode. And there was always a saying in Afghanistan, which was sort of one of the truism. It was the Americans have got the watches, but the Taliban

have the time. And that was true. I mean, we had all of the equipment, all the technology, all those proverbial watches, but we didn't have the type of operational patients the Taliban seemed to have. Even though we stayed there for 20 years, yes, we stayed there for 20 years, but we stayed there for 20 years with a very short-term psychology. And so much as anywhere along that 20-year timeline, we were between 18 to 24 months from a massive troop withdrawal that would hopefully lead us to having zero troops in Afghanistan.

And we were very open about this. And so ironically, our short-term thinking leads us, or our short-term psychology leads us to fight a very long-term 20-year war, the longest in U.S. history. And I think the Taliban had our number on that for a long time. I think maybe the most important question I'm going to ask you today is, what was your cell phone bill like trying to get everybody out? Actually, much more reasoned by it. I was primarily using apps like Signal and actually exclusively using Signal and WhatsApp. So it was not an unusual cell phone bill. All right.

I think that's important to actually just make sure people understand in case they're helping to get allies out of another country. Yes. Signal and WhatsApp are very useful for that. Okay. That makes total sense to me. I'm going to give you a chance to sum up the Afghan war. Why not? I mean, I'm sure you feel like you're in a perfect position to do that. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? What's your view?

It's very difficult to sum up a 20-year war. One of the things that's interesting, you know, when you study war and you think about war is in so many ways, it's the story of human beings just repeating their foibles, their folly over and over again in different ways. And you can see all of the parallels between the wars. We can talk about. parallels that exist between Afghanistan and Vietnam. We can talk about World War II narratives that were inappropriately applied in Afghanistan. We can talk about all of that. But I do think there is sort of one lesson that comes out of Afghanistan that is somewhat unique in America's history of war. If there's one lesson I would like to put up on a billboard and lights as we step away from this and say, let's take this one forward as a nation is, you know, if you look at the history of the United States, It's every war that we fought has had to be fought with a construct to sustain it.

And to sustain it, broadly speaking, in two terms. In terms of blood, who's going to fight the war and treasure, how are we going to pay for it? So you know, you look at our history like the American Civil War. The American Civil War is fought the blood. Well, the first ever draft that we ever have is a nation comes out of the American Civil War and treasure. The first ever income tax in U.S. history is a result of the U.S. Civil War. The Second World War, that construct, a national mobilization, war bond drives.

You look at the Vietnam War, a very unpopular draft, which ultimately leads to an anti-war movement that ends the war. So the September 11th attacks happen. The global war on terror begins. We have to create a construct as a nation to go fight these wars. And the construct becomes the blood will come from our all-volunteer military, and the treasure will come from our deficit. We put this on the national credit card. There's never a war tax in America. There still hasn't been won.

And if you actually look at our deficit today, about a third to a quarter of it is the bill from our wars on terror. And the last year, the United States actually passed a balanced budget was 2001. So what's the result of that construct? The result is that the American people are anesthetized to these wars. Like, you know, unless you're serving in the military or knows someone who is, you like you don't feel them. It's not sure a bad citizen. It's just they've been constructed that way. You know, sort of the old saw like America was, the U.S. military was a war. war, but America was at the mall. And the result of that is a 20-year war. That is why these wars have gone on for so long. Like, if you look at the wars that I just mentioned, like Second World War

or the Civil War, like those were, there was a national mobilization in both of those wars. We couldn't have fought those wars for 20 years. People who wouldn't stood for it. In the case of Vietnam, where there was a national draft, that war went on for seven years because people just wouldn't abide it anymore. But because we construct the wars this way, and nest ourselves to them, we wind up with a 20-year war. And as we go forward, like, that's something to be very aware of because there will be some future date where America is again going to war and there will be a construct. And if we look for it, we'll see how our politicians are selling us the war, what we're supposed to do to support it. And if the contract is don't do

anything, well, watch out. This country is going to wind up fighting a very, very long war. That makes such a sense. And if you compare it, you mentioned World War II, which is the only war I think I know anything about. Their mobilization was something on the order of 14 million U.S. men and some women were in the military by the end of the war. If you can imagine, the population also was much smaller. I mean, that's a mobilization. I mean, that's everybody involved. So you've been talking a bit about bringing back the draft, and I'm wondering how seriously you mean it. And I think we've already talked a little bit. bit about what good you think it might do, which is to bring people back into their own,

what our country is actually doing. But I mean, is that something you think we should be considering seriously? Well, let me start with. I think what we should be considering really seriously is how Americans have skin in the game when it comes to going to war. Like, we shouldn't fight wars where everyone doesn't have skin in the game. If it's, if the war doesn't hit the threshold of like, we need to do this with everyone having skin in the game, then we shouldn't fight the war. We just shouldn't. So if anyone has a better idea of how to get Americans having skin in the game around war, I'm certainly all ears. But one way to do it is certainly a draft. Now, many of the objections to the draft, which I'm sympathetic to are, you know, we have a very

effective all-volunteer military that's professional, pretty high morale, though actually right now you're seeing a real problem in recruitment in the military. So we'll see if that persists that high morale. But, you know, at the moment, that certainly characterizes the U.S. military. and there's a concern if you were introduced conscription that it could erode at that high morale if you have people in uniform who don't necessarily want to be in uniform. I think something to be mindful of is the draft has never been like 100% of the people in uniform are drafted. In the Vietnam War, it was like 25% of the people who fought in Vietnam were drafted, the rest of all volunteers.

So what if we had a draft in this nation that was 5% of the U.S. military? What if in this country every man and woman knew when they turned 18, they had a 1 in 20 or a 1 in 50 chance of serving in the U.S. military. You know, it becomes less the draft that moves the conversations of war and peace to the center of America's consciousness, or at least closer to the center of America's consciousness, but the specter of the draft. If you knew that your child had, again, those types of odds of serving in uniform, you know, you'd probably be interested in the debate of, are we going to deploy troops to Ukraine or to Iraq? And if we do, it better be worth it because it could be my kid. So I think that that is.

a proposal worth considering. I think also one of the things the military has always served as in this country is both, it's always been, it continues to be a great tool of social mobility. Anyone who's eligible can serve and join the U.S. military take advantage of the post-911 GI Bill, which is a very good deal and get a four-year degree, basically cost free. But one thing it's become less of, unfortunately, is a societal leveler. And it used to do that in the past. It was a place where Americans went and we all mixed together. And we've lost that. And what we've seen is as American life is atomized in so many ways. And we see this from our news channels to our culture. The idea of sort of an American monoculture is really eroded. Now we just sort of have all of our little subcultures. The American military has become a subculture. And it's become a subculture that too many Americans don't engage with. And that isn't healthy in a democracy. And one of the things that this evacuation from Afghanistan really put in a stark relief for me, as my whole network, was lighting up. It was this network of people who were all, we all either knew one another or were very pretty closely connected by one or two degrees of separation. And you had this just palpable sense. It's like, wow, like this war's ending and all of us involved in, we all know each other, but nobody knows us. And that this was just some, some catastrophe that was happening to a small subculture of America. And it put into stark relief how remote the wars had become all the years. And it's just, again, that in my estimation, is not healthy in a democracy.

How does it affect how soldiers see civilians, too? Again, I think this is one of those areas where it's not healthy because if soldiers see themselves as apart from the society that they serve, they become vulnerable to, again, to all sorts of types of political engagement that, again, are not healthy. I mean, listen, if you look at the dynamic right now in the United States, we have a very large standing military, and that is combined with extremely dysfunctional politics at home. And so if you look historically, I mean, from from Caesar's Rome to Napoleon's France, when you combine those two elements, they are highly combustible. And that is exactly what's going on in America right now. and it's going on in a context in which we move from contested election to contested election. So I would argue, like since 2016, each of our presidential elections has been contested. And the level of contestation has only increased.

And it seems to only be increasing. And so, you know, the analogy I use, what's, you know, what seems to me like it's, it's sort of like a drunk driver, right? So we as a nation, we're like a drunk driver. Every presidential election, we go into the bar and we just start, pounding drinks. And we get drunker and drunker and drunker. And at the end of the evening, we try to drive home. And so usually like the first, with a drunk driver, they go to the bar, they get drunk once, get drunk the first time, the second time. And like, they managed to get their

car home. It's usually like the third, fourth, fifth, six time. That's the time they wrap their car around the telephone pole. And so we get to the end of these contested elections and sort of people shrug and say, well, we managed to survive. We'll be okay. Like now, watch out. It's the third. I don't know how it's going to happen. But we, we, we, we, we get to the end of we are in danger of wrapping our sort of proverbial car of democracy around a telephone pole. And again, you know, having a very large standing military that feels divorced from American society, it is at least one of the telephone polls kind of lining our way home. And I hope it's when we don't wrap our car around.

I think you could argue that Al Gore's greatest act of service was when he went partying and then disappeared. I don't know if you remember, but, you know, the, I mean, the, listen, the thing that separates us from every other incredibly dysfunctional banana republic out there is the stable and peaceful transition of power. And it seems like everything in American life is sort of coming under scrutiny, falling under question, all institutions are eroding their credibility. And it also seems to this one crucial part of American life, the ability to transfer power in a stable orderly process is now coming under threat. And that's it. I mean, if we don't have that, like, we cease having a country. And people are testing the limits there.

You use classical illusions. You just mentioned Rome. You end your book using the Aeneid, a quote from the Anid. What is it that draws you to the classics in that way? Oh, because everything is the same. I mean, if you read it, I mean, like everything in history changes except for like the one control variable that forces everything to the same, which is human beings. Like we, they fascinatingly the same throughout the ages. And war is this thing that we always engage in. We've always done it.

And so if you study war, you can kind of see the continued themes that kind of pop up again and again. I mean, you know, like one of those themes that I write about in the fifth. fact is this idea that's very prevalent in the U.S. military of leave no man behind. We've all sort of heard that. It's an ethos that's sort of central to the U.S. military culture, but it is an ethos that is as old as war. So if you look, for instance, at Homer, at the Iliad, the way the Iliad ends is Achilles, great warrior of the Greeks, kills Hector, the prince of the Trojans, and drags Hector's bloody body back to his camp. And Hector's dead body. And Hector's dead body.

body is lying in the Greek camp, and Priam, the king of the Trojan, sneaks into Achilles camp at night. And one of the final scenes of the Iliad is King Priam begging Achilles for the body of his son back, this idea of leave no man behind. And so we're sitting there watching the, I'm watching the end of Kabul and the evacuation and all of my colleagues and no one's sleeping and everyone's working as hard as they can, as frantically as they can because we know we have this hard deadline on August 31st, sort of ultimately, what is everyone trying to do? They're trying to in some way live up to this ethos of we're going to leave no one behind, even though you are going to leave people behind. And that idea of wanting

to do that, of feeling this need to do that, it's an idea that's as old as war and as old as humanity in many ways. And so that's why I find myself just reaching back to those old stories, because in war, too, you wind up telling the same stories over and over again. Like, I believe all war stories are derivative of basically two books. And I just alluded to one of them, Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odyssey. The Iliad is the story of going to war, and the Odyssey is the story of coming back. And all war stories are derivative of those two stories. I hope you had a happier homecoming than Odysseus did.

He had sort of a rough time of it. Well, thank you so much for joining me and talking through all of this. And I think if anybody doesn't buy your book, the fifth act, I think they're idiots. So there you go. Thank you. That's a great call. All right. Angry Planet listeners, that's all for this week.

As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, you can kick us a few bucks, get access, early access, to the mainline episodes that are commercial free, the bonus episodes we put out, the occasional post. angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com.

We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Jason and I may even be in the same room for that one. Stay safe. Until then.