Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:10 - War Through the Lens of Grief

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

War leaves scars far beyond the battlefield. In this episode of Provoked, Scott and Darryl dive into the human side of conflict—how the pain we feel in our own lives mirrors the heartbreak endured daily in places like Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia—only compounded by violence and destruction. As Darryl puts it, “They’re feeling the same thing you would feel.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know, all right y'all welcome the show i'm scott horton from the libertarian institute and he is darrell cooper a k a martyr made the great historian and podcaster and this is our show provoked episode whatever number we're on how are you doing man oh i'm doing all right you know um missed last week you and dave did an awesome job um i would listen to you and dave a lot a lot more uh than i would listen to you and me but tell him not to tell tell that immigrant not to take my job you know And we'll keep him at arm's length here. His arm's length, which is a lot longer than mine.

Yeah. You know, yeah, I missed last week. Obviously, we had a death in the family. My father-in-law passed. And, you know, obviously my mind's been in other places. But as we were getting ready to start this morning, I was just thinking about, you know, like it's really easy for me. Maybe it's just a personality type.

but maybe a lot of us and maybe the internet culture in general that when we talk about war and when we oppose war, like the natural mood to get in is angry, you know, people are being just, it's unjust and, you know, and horrible, and the natural thing is to get angry. You know, we got the call that my father-in-law had passed very suddenly and unexpectedly. I mean, it was not at all, there's no preparation for he had a heart attack and, you know, his wife had gone up, my mother-in-law had gone upstairs to grab something. They were just hanging out downstairs on the couch and when she came back down, he was gone. And so nobody expected it. And it was, there was no time to kind of prepare people psychologically or emotionally for it.

And so we got the call at like midnight, 1130 at night or so. Like, that's when it happened. We're sleeping. And so I wake my wife up and I tell. her and um you know uh like my wife's a tough she's a tough chick but uh you know she wakes up and she gets this news and um you know hearing her like hearing her weep and just try to deal with the fact like over the phone with her mom who's also weeping it like her father is gone just like that you know with no chance to like say like a real goodbye or anything um and to hear her

you know just sort of repeat to herself she couldn't think of what else to say just you know like no no no and weeping and hearing i just ripped my soul out you know and it just got me thinking about the fact that you know when we talk about a lot of this stuff you know i think it's easy for a lot of people to uh to to see the stuff that we talk about you know whether it's in gaza or any of these places. And it kind of becomes like a TV show or a movie or a frontline documentary to people. Like, however it is that, you know,

it's sort of, it's content, you know, in a way. Content to respond to and to have a take on and all those things. Or to get angry at, which is perfectly righteous and justifiable. But there's also, I think, like, it's easy, you know, and this isn't just because, like, people look different or speak different languages, although that might add to it. But, like, you just, the fact that it, they're not us, you know, it's very easy to just sort of, like, lose side of the fact that, like,

you know, everybody out there, like, have you ever lost a parent? Have you ever lost a child? Have you ever lost a sibling? You remember what you felt, you know, when you got that call, you know, not, you know, there's, there's, I don't want to, no, I, I really don't want to, like, at all downplay the difficulty of this, because in some ways it's a lot worse. But, like, you know, when you see somebody decline over time and you're kind of preparing yourself and you know you're when it happens it's um it's it's expected and and you know it's very painful but i mean those ones who uh you know when you um you just get a phone call and uh you know your your husband your father whatever is dead in a car crash that's it he went to the store now he's dead

what you would feel something like that happened is what all of these people feel, man, you know, those people who are weeping and crying and screaming when they're carrying their bloody, you know, mangled four-year-old, like out of the rubble, they're feeling the same thing you would feel when, you know, when that happens. And it's just, you know, the sadness of it has really been like kind of front of mind for me, I guess, these last, this last week or so since that happened. And, yeah, it's how, you know, maybe it's harder. Like, you know, if want to stop this stuff, as you know, you've been in the game for a long time. Like, if you want this stuff to stop, you've got to fight it, you know, and sadness doesn't get you through

a fight. Anger gets you through a fight. And so it's easy to default to that. But, you know, sometimes I feel like when I do just rest with the sadness of it all and the tragedy of it all, it sort of recharges my batteries for the fight, even if I do have to get angry to go back into the fray, you know. Yeah. No, I totally understand what you mean. I remember when my Auntie died in like 2009 or something. She was very old and very sick and like it was her time and all of that. And still is the worst thing in the world, dude.

And so, yeah, compare that to finding out that somebody dropped a bomb on your family member, Torum Lim from Lim and like the worst kind of violence beyond like any horror movie, whatever you can imagine. And like, it's true, I have been off of Twitter. I had to stop doing Twitter as I can finish the academy. I'm almost done.

I'm doing my last record. my last sections on for the Cold War course today um so i i've had to stay off of twitter but i got on there just because i had to tweet out my lex friedman podcast thing that i did and so then i was on there for i swear just a couple of minutes and i saw so many dead kids i couldn't believe i saw you know the double tap on the hospital where they killed all the journalists and everything i didn't i hadn't read that that was right on camera you can see them all standing right there on that little fire escape or whatever it is what's left of that little staircase they're on when they all get bombed and then page down a little bit and here's some guy uh dragging his dead

seven-year-old out of the rubble and all of this and like i've said this to my audience over the years on the radio they're like you know any little kids all right just think for just a minute like i wouldn't even ask you to really indulge in this but just for a moment imagine somebody did this to a little kid that you care about for god's sake man it's worth being angry about and it ought to be real easy to understand you know the no-fly zone bombings in iraq in the 1990s where bill clinton bombed iraq on average every other day for eight years straight and continuing what i call a rock war one and a half during that time helping to provoke the september 11th attack against us and everything well jeremy schahill went over there

and he interviewed this lady whose son had been killed and she's just beside herself with grief as much or more than any lady ever mourned for her son, right? And this is just a one-off. This is nothing in what Americans consider peacetime. Like, that was, we're all watching Seinfeld and not caring about things. Norm MacDonald was still on Saturday Night Live and everything was right with the world. What do you mean that Bill Clinton just destroyed this woman as bad or worse than he destroyed her little boy? You know?

And that's just, it's, um, it's important to do that, you know, to zoom in on, on the individual examples. You know what I mean? So like, if that's Bill Clinton's measly stinking little Iraq War one and a half, and what was Iraq War II really like for those people when W. Bush came and turned it all the way up and, and all of the rest of this, Afghanistan too. And, you know, I like talking about Somalia and yet I never get a chance to. And then when it's up to me, I put it off. And it, it's part of it is because it's a little bit outside of the usual chain of events i usually try to teach the stories like one thing cause the other cause the other cause the other and somalia is sort of a side show to all that but the same time like my god the amount of grief that the u.s government

has put somalia through and then i'm sorry let me get the number right because david de camp has a story about today on antiwar dot com about uh donald trump's now beat obama's record for air strikes in Somalia and I'm sorry I always forget that guy Sebastian Gorka he's in charge of this you know that's who they hired to kill these guys so it's um it's 68 air strikes in Somalia America's longest war since 2001 68 air strikes so far this year and this is a war that we know on the record that Donald Trump wanted to end his first year in office in his first term in 2017 he said he wanted to end the war in Somalia and now he's told them do what you got to do and continue as he did then and let this continue and we're supposed to think what like i don't know they're too

far away and they're too black to care about or whatever but it's just as easy to imagine they're suffering you know what i mean and including they had CIA tortured dungeons there and everything i mean the worst so yeah you know um i i i i I think about how, like, some of the things I experienced in the military, and this is not being a frontline combat soldier by any means. I was in the Navy. And then I was a contractor with the DoD who was usually deployed with the Navy when I was out there. And so not one of the people who has to deal with this kind of thing like with like the kind of real intensity that war can put on you. And yet even still, like, you know, we've talked before.

four about one of the things that really kind of just drove me to to stop working for the DoD eventually is when the war and the real war in Yemen was going on when Saudis and UAE were with U.S. support, you know, I mean, hundreds of thousands. It sounds like we're dead. God knows how many children tens, hundreds of thousands of children dying of like dysentery, you know, basically dehydration from diarrhea, just things that could be cured like at a, country doctor's office in the middle of nowhere, you know, in the U.S. And water will do it, you know, for even cholera. They don't even need antibiotics.

They just need clean water. But nope, we bomb that. Sorry, kid. And that it's not bad enough that we're supporting, like, the blockade and the assault that's causing all that. But I would be sitting on a $2 billion destroyer, you know, guided missile, high tech, just the baddest ship in the world, you know, that we built for $2 billion. to send it to sit off the coast of Yemen to make sure no food or medicine gets in while that was

going on. And watching good boys, good American boys, and, you know, on the visit board Search and Caesar squad, which I used to be a part of when I was in the Navy, we didn't really ever do much at the time. But, you know, board the little Dow's, some little Dow that looks like it was thrown together with spare parts from like the junkyard at Mos Isley or something, you know. And like these guys like trying to make it across literally from like Balochistan to freaking Yemen, knowing we're out there, knowing there's all kinds of things out there that, you know, that want to stop them and we'll kill them to do it, just to bring some food and medicine into this place. And we would stop them and board their boat and put them all in handcuffs and put them all on their knees,

sometimes blindfold them. And we would search the whole place. And if we found any contraband, which included freaking children's Tylenol, into the ocean it went we threw it all into the fucking ocean pardon me and like um you know just to to really have it hit you that like there's a there's a fucking child on the other end of that trip you know what i mean there's a sick child on the other end of that trip uh that was what you know that that that was waiting for that children's Tylenol that might have saved their lives you know and like um it really so so just that like really kind of pushed me and um and i wonder

sometimes like how the people who are pulling triggers and you know thank god like americans you know american pilots maybe have to deal with this but like um american frontline soldiers not quite as often um because at least these days we're a little more disciplined and you know we have rules of engagement that most other countries would find ridiculous but um and that's good thing You know, I think about, like, my uncle, right? My uncle's, like, from the time he was a little kid, he's a hunter, he's a fisherman, he's an outdoorsman. Like, he would have made a great, a great green beret. Like, he was just, he's just that dude, you know what I mean?

Like, Tom Selleck mustache, just grizzled construction worker with forearms this big. He's just, he's a man, you know, tough guy. Like, you never see him emotion, never anything. And one time he was driving back home from work, and he was just coming around a corner in a neighborhood. So he's going very slowly. He's like at a stop sign. He, like, edges around a corner. And this little girl on her bike just comes out.

And he, like, bumps her and, like, knocks her off her bike. And she was okay. She was crying. She skinned her knee and, like, her front tire of her bike got, you know, banter or whatever. Years later, you couldn't bring that up around my local. Hey, guys. So the expat money summit is coming up again this October 10th through 12th.

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And then I forgot if I was supposed to say slash something. Tell him Scott sent you. I think about like my uncle, right? My uncle's like from the time he was a little kid. He's a hunter. He's a fisherman. man, he's an outdoors man. Like, he would have made a great, a great green beret.

Like, he was just, he's just that dude. You know what I mean? Like, Tom Selleck mustache, just grizzled construction worker with forearms this big. He's just, he's a man, you know, tough guy. Like, you never see him emotion, never anything. And one time he was driving back home from work, and he was just coming around a corner in a neighborhood. So he's going very slowly.

He's like at a stop sign, and he, like, edges around a corner. And this little girl on her bike just comes out. and he like bumps her and like knocks her off her bike and um she was okay she was crying she skinned her knee and like her front tire of her bike got uh you know bent or whatever years later you couldn't bring that up around my uncle like it he was it just traumatized him so much he was so devastated by what almost happened there you know and nothing happened really like nothing permanent you know and he's a and he's a tough dude man and like uh you know i think about what a person like the mental state the like you know the things you have to tell yourself and

teach yourself to just over and over again and condition yourself to believe and think about the world to be able to do that on a daily basis except back over her a few times to make sure she's dead and do that and still be able not only to go to sleep at night but to go to sleep thinking that you know you had a good day's work that you were out there doing what you had to do for your country or whatever it is like you know we forget how much like when you have to do something like that you're really twisting your own soul out of shape in in really important powerful ways and so we tell people go over there do these things because this is a good thing this is what your country wants of you it's everybody's going to be proud and so you go do it but there's still i don't care

unless you're like a complete psychopath there's still this part of you that you got to shut down if you're going to be able to you know i may have mentioned this on a previous episode but i was talking to one of my buddies who was a multiple tour Iraq guy. And now he works for like a private intel company, very connected dude. And very smart. He's got a PhD in international relations from NYU, but he was like a staff sergeant. He's just, he's badass dude who thinks about this stuff a lot more than like maybe your average soldier. And he was telling me just maybe a month or two ago when he passed through and we were visiting that among all the different job ratings and things that the military,

that our military had over in Iraq. One of the ones with just the highest rate of PTSD of any of the jobs were not like frontline combat soldiers or any of these things. They were truck drivers. And it was because Al-Qaeda and Iraq, they knew that Americans, American truck drivers don't want to run over a crowd of kids. And so they would put a crowd of kids in the road and set an ambush. And if you stopped, you were dead.

And so we told our guys, you can't stop. And so they didn't stop. The ones who stopped got killed. And so they didn't stop. And they got that in their brain now for the rest of their lives. And it's like there's the angle of, you know, look what we're doing to these other people, you know, who weren't coming here to the United States to hurt us. We went there to hurt them for rationalizations that we came up with. But then I think of those trucker.

And I'm like, man, like, look at what we're doing to them. Like, look at the position we're putting this guy from freaking Topeka or Des Moines. You know what I mean? Like, we're taking this dude who's just a guy with a family probably or whatever. And we're putting him in this position. We're like, okay, now you've killed six children. You watched them, like, go under the hood of the truck you were driving. And you felt the bumps as your tires went over him.

And now you get to have nightmares about that for the rest of your life, you know? And it's like, look, I'm not a pacifist. Sometimes you got to fight, but God damn it. Like, can we, like, it's just you better have such a good reason if you're going to put your people in a position to do those kind of things to other people. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to that there's always a form of war porn in American entertainment media that says that, oh, man, this war was so hard on us, the terrible things that we had to do. Which course are true, but then it still makes the Iraqis or the Vietnamese or wherever extras in our movie where, yeah, you think running over a kid is bad. Try being the dad of a kid that got ran over and you weren't there to be able to protect them or whatever because the Americans already rounded you up the day before or whatever and living through that or being the kid that got maimed and crushed but not all the way killed or whatever.

That's a hell of a lot worse. And so then you have people really kind of criticize that whole genre of American like war veteran inspired art there as being so like self-serving and self-important or whatever. But then at the same time like, no, man, like that's really all we got. That's the best we've got is let Darrell say those things where would be recruits can hear him that like, yeah, man, they, on the TV ads during the football game, they make it look. like a lot of fun, man. It's not a lot of fun, man. You know, you're going to be, you know, there's a book like this about the interrogators in Iraq. It's called None of Us Were Like This Before. It's like you're saying, these are good kids from wherever. They're out there serving their country. I don't know. The job is in your imagination when you join up, I know it is because

I never did join up, but it was my same imagination as a kid growing up, is you're going to fight the Germans out in the field somewhere where everybody you're shooting, deserves it and it's okay and and you're the heroes fighting the villains nobody's told you're going to be patrolin in pactica killing local poshtuns for daring to resist you trespassing on their property or doing night raids in philuja or whatever it is to these innocent people they don't sell it like that at all that's not what any of these people think they're getting into here this guy knows something beat it out of them and like oh sir yes sir um and they're all still responsible for their actions, that is the position that they're being put in despite the mythology. And so they do

need to hear that kind of stuff up front from the likes of you and whatever. And even if it is self-important, after all, we are the Americans, not the Iraqis. So it's just like, I just did an interview with Adam Heyman about the new movie warfare, which is about a bunch of guys hold up in, I think, Ramadi, in a house where they just bring all the trouble onto them. And they portray them as very likable and and um relatable characters and it was funny because me and adam were debating about is this an anti-war movie or not i think it's like you know it's a rorschach test for you these guys were there they show in the end credits how they helped direct and show here's what happened and how to mimic us doing it and it was all based on a true story and and all the individual

guys portrayed in the film were real you know characters real men and so if it's you or me the moral of the stories what in the hell are these guys doing holing up in this house in the middle of this neighborhood bringing on all this heat like what's the purpose of any of this it's so completely crazy whereas there's another point of view on it which is just wow what an adventure what a bunch of stuff that happened and whatever they were doing there that's like above your pay grade when you're a soldier right you don't worry about that that's somebody else's job and ultimately it's the elected president's job to decide and so your job is just working to keep jimmy and bobby alive and and Enrique and whoever you're out there with

and trying not to get killed no matter what neighborhood they plopped you in the middle of and so I could totally see the war through that soda straw as Robert Gates would say too where you know you're you're living in a in a very a quick moment at a time and looking through a very narrow lens

and not able to see what's really happening at all you know until I think any movie or book or story that portrays war realistically is almost inevitably an anti-war film you know and that movie did a good job of it i mean it was a movie that basically had no story at all like it was just these guys are in this place now they're under attack and here's what it was like and it was not pretty and it was not enjoyable and it wasn't heroic like it was not you know um but you see what i mean we're like you could project onto it well they were there for no reason or you could project onto it well

they must have been there for some good reason and i'm like you want to mean You know, the thing is, like, what you said about, sir, yes, sir, like, is this above my pay grade, the president, the elected president, the elected representatives of the country that I, that I serve have told me to go here and do this. That's, I mean, you have to have an army that works like that. Go ask, like, you know, the Spanish Republicans during the civil war, how it is when, like, a, you know, a private can raise his hand at any time and object to something a general says, you know, right there in ranks. It doesn't work. So this is how you need it to work. But in order for that to happen, you've got to be able to trust the decisions that the people up there are making. And when it's just become clear over and over and over that, you know, like when you talk about Bill Clinton, like, you know, imagine being the pilot who carried out that air strike or, you know, that series of airstrikes.

And, okay, you find out that there were, you know, there was collateral. damage or there was this or that and you know this is something that you've prepared for since you know officer candidate school or whatever but then to realize and to understand and really know i mean because we have a pretty good you know a lot of information on stuff that bill clinton made that decision like casually you know it was just kind of like it was there wasn't like a group of general sitting around a table for days discussing like look you know we have to do this and debating it out like you know is this like you know the collateral damage it's going to happen is this just something we have to accept because this is so important or what they didn't do any of that and

they never do they're just like huh what is somebody maybe yeah okay blow it up and that's like it sounds i mean you know again i'll give us more credit than certainly than i would give clinton in the 90s or the Israelis today when we were in iraq or afghanistan we took a lot greater care honestly than probably any military in the history of the world's ever taken but i think my point and you know whenever I say that to people and bring up all of the steps that went into our rules of engagement. We wanted, you know, you had like two independent not talking to each other, lawyers, like in the food chain, like the decision tree, you know, to make a lot of these strikes happen. There's just a lot of layers, even if they were rubber stamp layers for the

most part. And I don't know that they were. But my point in like even bringing that up to people is it like, even then, you know, even when, we're taking steps that nobody's taking. Vladimir Putin is not taking in Ukraine. You know, the Israelis are not taking. Even then, kids are just dropping like flies. You know, innocent fathers and mothers and

everything else are just dropping like flies when we're doing these things in Iraq, you know? And that's, so that's like the best case scenario is that like you've got a bunch of adults over in another country and they're just killing a bunch of kids and women and dads and stuff. And like,

yeah, it's just you know when you guys when you brought me on to the jaco show that was how he opened the show and here's a guy who fought in romadi right and i know he fought in east bagdad and he's saying oh yeah when we go to war we kill children they are what can you say they're in the middle of it man they're caught up in it it's absolutely unavoidable so don't talk to me about killing the enemy without talking to me about how many innocent children you're willing to accept also being killed too because that's how it goes and non-negotiable dude that's reality you know and um and enough already i cite this guy amos fox who's a colonel who writes a lot about all different stuff i quote

him i think and provoked about some russia stuff too but in in enough already he um i talk about how he had written this paper where he coined the phrase precision paradox where he talks about when we bomb raka we're so careful we'll even bomb like just one corner of the house and not only that but we'll make sure that we fire the rocket in the right from the right direction to make sure that the explosive blast is going to go this way and not that way toward the child's room and this kind of thing and they're so careful the way they do it and then huh at the end they've destroyed all of rocket and killed everybody there's thousands of people dead everywhere and they very carefully one corner of a building at a time destroyed every building in the city and they leveled the place. They just did it very, very carefully. And then by rationalizing that they're taking that much care to do it, then there's no limit on

how much they can do, as long as they're being careful. And then, so he's the one who coined the phrase, a active duty U.S. Army colonel strategist, wrote about this and whatever War College Journal, I forget exactly. I'm talking about how they absolutely just destroyed Raka. They completely destroyed it.

Very carefully with their little pinprick strikes, you know, just like you're talking about. Yeah, and you just wish, I mean, like, you know, I don't know, I mean, maybe, like, maybe we're a little utopian, like, but the thing that people often bring up when you say these things is like, look, that's just the human condition, man, you know, like, go back thousands and thousands of years, probably millions of years, look at the animal kingdom, like, this is, this is just how the world works. And if you, you know, you're being soft because you can't accept it or whatever. And, like, you just have to, like, harden yourself up. like look reality square in the eye kind of thing you know like they're grizzled veterans from there the funny thing is you don't hear veterans talk like that very often that's the funny thing and if you do they're like uh you know rear echelon types or guys who are in the navy with me you don't hear a lot of jaco types ever talking that way you know and um especially guys who have you know who've lost their own uh but even ones who haven't like you just it's not often you hear him talk

that way. And anyway, it's like, okay, so yeah, Genghis Khan behaved this way. What is, I mean, you know what else is like natural is like massering the neighboring village and like raping all the women. That's, that's natural. That's how history works. That's like how the human condition, you know, has always, has always been. Like, so what? It's just a, it's just an excuse to behave like animals, you know, and the fact that we have to reach back to examples like that to justify our behavior today with everything that, all the lessons of history that we should have learned by now, you know, the fact that we still have to reach back to like the dark ages to, you know, to look for a comparison that we can like, you know, measure up to favorably in order

to justify our own actions today in 2025 is just insane man yeah it really is it is and it really sucks too i always look at it like you know never remind the neo-conservatives but the neoliberalism of like you know the very center left you know bill clintonism i guess you could call it or whatever um free markets and democracy as he would call it sort of like this fun house mirror sort of horror movie version of libertarianism where it's at the base there's a lot of free markets and private property and little d democracy self-government kind of themes all built into the thing but in large measure of course it's just an excuse to expand the american empire and force the dictates of Washington dc in terms of policy results on countries all across the world

overthrow their governments if they stand our way launch aggressive wars if we have to to do all of this stuff and it sucks because i think even their real half-ass bastard eyes you know understanding of free markets and democracy if they had just refrained from all these stupid wars and had even been spreading this horror movie you know bill clinton version of you know corrupt crony capitalism right and and rigged elections that man that would have been so much better uh for the world than what they decided to do that they did not have to decide to do, which was to wage a 35-year war in Iraq and, you know, everything else that has come with it and all this imperialism and completely destroyed it. And then to, and just think in the post-Cold War era, if it had just

been, you know, not utopia, but just a Ron Paulian government or even a Buchananite government, much more protectionist, but still not completely isolationist like they smear, you know. And just think of the example set that like we can have social cooperation with people who aren't anything like us and who and we don't have to like them like personally in any way but we can still do business and that's what helps us all get along is having interest in common and and working together on solvenom and as you said like oh we don't raid the next village yeah no we don't when it was the last time the austinites all went to elgin and raped and pillaged every whatever right so um not that i'm being trying to be too much of a statist here but no our security

forces don't allow for situations like that the national government has been able to keep the peace and and hell the people have been able to keep the peace between the states in this country you know since the civil war at least since they were done conquer in the west um we haven't had a major outbreak of violence in this country since then you know uh what 130 150 years so um Of course, it killed a lot of people around the world. But it just goes to show, though, that, yeah, no, we can just go on. The idea that there would be some permanent beef between Texas and Louisiana is unthinkable. It'll never happen.

It could never happen. So if that's true, then gang is caught nothing, right? So what, that there was a war? That's like saying, yeah, but there's always been slavery. Yeah? Well, there's always been people who said there shouldn't be. And finally, they won that argument, at least in the civilized world. So, what, we should just take that back and get it.

give up, like Barack Obama and Libya and just go ahead and re-legalize the thing? Yeah, I mean, it's a, yeah, we got to do a short show today. I got to get going. Yeah, it's a tragedy. And, like, you know, I just, yeah, I really like, especially talking to so many veterans that I, just my friends, you know, that I've known neither from my time or just with the DOD or just people I've met since. And seeing people, like seeing these guys, you know, tough guys,

trying to work through now, like trying to work through the, maybe grief is too strong a word, like they're not there yet, but work through the understanding, like the new understanding that all of these things that they did, you know, all of the things that their friends died for and lost limbs for and you know the things that that they themselves had to do um looking back and realizing that like they can't tell their kids about this stuff in that you know they can't tell their like their kids that here's why we did it and here's you know like uh you can't tell them like we went over because the germans were you know invading the world and we had to go over there and gosh darn it stop

you can't tell them anything like that you know you just have to tell them that well the government told me to go over and go to this place. that hadn't attacked us that had talked some shit but like and we went over there and just destroyed the country and killed a ton of people and um you know in firefights like um you tell your seven year old daughter by the way sweet you know i actually killed a seven year old girl when i was there and watched her father uh you know pick up a gun out of anger and killed him too and that's what i did you know and just that's a i'm making that example of none of my friends did that but like um you know but people did you know or you know they they uh just yeah

did things that they can't talk to their kids that they're never going to be able to tell their kids about you know because they um they're just because they're they be they're afraid of how their children would look at them and for good reason because it's how they're starting to look at themselves a lot a lot of times and um and that's upsetting you know because these are good guys I mean, like, the thing is, like, when, you know, it's like when Chris Kyle, when American sniper came out and there was this, like, very brief, like, week-long freak out in the media and on social media about what a, you know, it was like it was just sort of a quick hit of, like, baby killer, like, redux stuff from Vietnam, you know, where he's just terrible guy in the Iraq War's awful and he was a murderer because he was fighting in Iraq, all these other kind of things. and it's like I mean I think one of the one of the big ones he's a racist because he called in his book he called the iraqi savages or whatever and it's like um you know man like look he's a freaking he was a like a good old boy from texas who's you know 9-11 happened and he joined the military because his entire social system from his parents when he was born to his teachers to everybody every piece of media content basically he's ever consumed just the entire cultural system that's built around them told them that this is a good thing to do. And if you go do this, you're you're doing something that is really like self-sacrificing. You know, you're doing this

like not for yourself, for other people. And that's what the lesson is, that's what we're all unculcated with. And the thing is, you have to be able, in a healthy country, you have to be able to inculcate your population with that mentality. You have to be able to put in their heads really deeply in their hearts that if we ask you to go somewhere and do something, then you're the good guy you know no matter what happens over there like um you know like we're doing this because we have no choice or because the outcome otherwise would be so horrible uh that we have to put you you're the man we're going to send to go do this job you have to be able to tell your people that you know and we just can't anymore and there's no even you know and it's so awful too

because you talk about like just what a you know using a being that city on a hill like that shining beacon of good influence out there. And like, the craziest part about the post-Cold War period is that we had in 1989 and 1991 just like a perfect, pitch-perfect example of like how that works and how perfectly it can work. You know, we didn't invade Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. They just got their blue jeans and rock and roll and underground mixtapes and stuff. And they wanted to, they didn't want that anymore, you know.

And if you go back and look at the, Arab world, like pre-1967 or 73, they, you know, the Americans were very popular. Go back to like the King Crane Commission right after the First World War when we sent a commission over to Greater Syria in general, but focused on Palestine to just interview the people and talk to them about like, you know, what do you want to happen like after this? What's like, and just overwhelmingly, they said, well, we want the Americans. If it's going to be like a mandate system or some kind of thing where there's going to be like an overseer which um you know uh it was going to happen they said we want it to be the americans we don't want anybody else we want the americans and if not the

americans and yeah maybe the british and we don't want the french that was like their you know that was their position kind of but like they all wanted the americans and they all had a positive view of the americans they thought we were the people who fought for you know we fought a revolution against a against the british and all that kind of stuff and we're those guys you know and like um the idea that we would be going over there and forcing like you know essentially being the enforcement arm of like a global colonial empire like this is like a pretty new thing that people saw america this way and it could have gone a different direction and it's almost it almost makes me think that like you know you talk about like uh you know whether neoconservatism

or neoliberalism it's like unless there's like something that you know you're attacked and your defending yourself um you know you're in a hard alliance you know somebody invades britain or something and we're just in a hundred year long hard alliance with them or whatever and we're going to go to help defend just whatever these the things that like 98% of the uh everybody but a pacifist basically would accept as like a just a just war um you know it's like uh if you if you yeah i lost my train of thought there a little bit sorry it's all right because you're going to miss your plane So we've got to be going. That's probably where my brain is right now.

But look, everybody, I will be back on my game next week. I've been, I haven't been pulling my weight. And I almost got myself replaced by a migrant worker last week. Mass. Mass migration changing our culture, man. Damn, Brooklyn Nines. Listen, I got to do a little bit of business here because business is business. moon dose coffee just go scotthornton.org slash coffee or scotthorton.org and look in the right hand margin there

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