Today is the 4th of July and the passage of Trump’s “big “signature” legislative bill.
I am reminded of a brief story from Annie Jacobsen’s Surprise, Kill, Vanish. A U.S. commander was working in Afghanistan and was aghast at the state of the Afghan fighters. The “Good Guys”.
For years the U.S. military had no idea what to do with them, or the Taliban, as part of what they called the “Mystical Morality Zone” they existed in. Mostly that they had no qualms with raping each other, so much so nearly all the men were positive for Hepatitis B.
But that isn’t what really caught my attention.
One commander was trying to teach some of the younger Afghani soldiers distances and measurements. But scale was hard to convey. So, one night he led a group of men to an overlook of the Khurdish mountains and pointed to the moon.
“The moon is about 250,000 miles away. And, by the way, we landed a man there about 40 years ago,” said the commander.
The men laughed.
“That’s impossible,” said one of the fighters, laughing it off as a ridiculous claim. “Look how small the moon is. A man wouldn’t fit on it.”
The commander told Jacobsen, “See what we’re working with?”
