Via Scott Johnson at powerlineblog.com.
This past Saturday I met Aaron MacLean, host of the School of War podcast. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Before that, he worked on Capitol Hill as senior foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Senator Tom Cotton and served on active duty as a U.S. Marine for seven years, deploying to Afghanistan as an infantry officer in 2009–2010. Following his time in the operating forces, he was assigned to the faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was the 2013 recipient of the Apgar Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Few have a more informed perspective on the realities of war–especially those wars of the last half-century– than United States Marine Infantry Officers who’ve served in active combat.
It’s incredibly helpful to have a few stepping up and speaking out in ways that will make a difference.
I follow several “military history” podcasts (telling the stories from the ancient Greeks and before and after) because (perhaps unusually for a woman) I find them interesting and because I appreciate the point of view of men who’ve served and fought. In modern terms, I especially enjoy the perspectives of men (like my dad, and many others I’ve known) whose time in combat informed their later lives and which reinforced their determination to stay the course and defend, in non-military ways, Western Civilization. Loyalty to–and staying the course in–their countries. To their families. To their creeds. To their values.
Others, unfortunately, find different ways to validate themselves and their service. By running away to the other side of the world and becoming part of the (apparently ever-increasing) “sexpat” and “passport bro”** communities from which they celebrate their sybaritic self-involvement by denigrating the country for which they fought. By abandoning their families (sometimes more than once). By pretending to a “morality” that their own life clearly finds wanting in its insistence on marital fidelity. By insulting those who hold different opinions, at the same time as they claim to have fought for the right of others to express them.
Any and all those approaches depend on a “shouting” and a grievance-mongering that men like my dad never engaged in. And yet, I’ve come across a few of those other kind, too, weak men in whom the never-ending search for narcissistic supply and sycophantic adoration trumps all else. I might have been fooled once. Never again.
TBC, and as I’ve said before more than once, the fact that such men–given their obvious inability to act/think clearly and on behalf of interests other than their own mostly sexual urges, particularly with regard to third-world women–once held important military decisions and the fates of hundreds of their subordinates in thrall is very worrying. No wonder they feel guilty about certain things. They should, especially when it comes to their own part in the mess they created.
If you–like me–actually want none of that self-involved nonsense cluttering up your perspective, please check out, follow, and rate, the School of War podcast.
You won’t be sorry.
**Passport Bro? GMAB. Read description after description about what this means, and–perhaps if you’re daft–you’ll believe that these men seek out compliant third-world women for their pseudo-Christian, submissive, loyal, traditional family oriented charms. Why, it’s almost as if these men are looking for–in Western terms–grandma!
But a bit more exploration will reveal that none of these men are interested in traditional, Christian, monogamous relationships. And you’ll see–if you pursue the matter a bit longer–that they’re only interested in transactional sex, and that they’re terrified of rejection from Western women when they seek the only sort of pleasurable release they know, when the other partner might be smarter than they are. So they end up in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, whatever. Lord help those poor ladies. For their own sakes, I hope the “elderly Western gentlemen” they engage with are humane and loyal. Experience (and recounted stories) tells me otherwise. But still–for their sakes–I can hope. As for you Western ladies who’ve been burned, Bless.
Crimenutely.
Sad.
