It’s Memorial Day in the USA and I just had the extreme pleasure of being on the sidewalk waving and clapping at our annual neighborhood Memorial Day Parade with close friends of ours and their neighbors and everyone’s pet dogs. Fire trucks from the surrounding six suburbs, Police cars as well, local politicians, marching bands, boy scouts, martial arts clubs, tumbling clubs, grade schools… you know the drill. It was fabulous.

Turns out, that’s one of life’s most generous and rarest pleasures.

It struck me, watching the happy parade in our suburb that borders Chicago as an urban war of its own rages just inside the city limits and in other neighborhoods around ours, how Peace and Prosperity are always achieved. They are not the baseline from which matters deviate. Rather, they are the heights to which we as individuals and we as communities and we as societies may aspire. And it struck me right between the eyes this mistaken assumption (that Peace on Earth is a baseline state) is a root cause for many of our societal troubles. The baseline state is actually chaos and misery; that’s what everything descends into, if we’re not careful.

Yes, that is it! The wild-eyed folks on the side of the guns bloviate that arming ourselves to the teeth (“harden the grade schools!”) is going to somehow make us safer and more prosperous (they’ve never been in Afghanistan, obviously, where John Q Public owns an AK and frequently a rocket propelled grenade launcher), and the wild-eyed folks on the side of the oppressed and disenfranchised bloviate that it’s wrong to arrest or prosecute crime when it happens because the person was obviously oppressed and disenfranchised (which fact only makes the other side angrier and more convinced about the need for personal weaponry), and they’re all feeding off this grand assumption that the peace and prosperity which we do have, that this Memorial Day Parade in front of us, happens and continues to happen no matter how much they alter and degrade the system that produced it. Wrong. This peace and prosperity can be broken quite easily. And they’re both breaking it, each in their own ways.

I’ve no idea how to counter such notions other than to encourage everyone to look not to me –who am I, I am nobody– but to History for lessons. Let us learn the right lessons from those who’ve experimented with all of this before us. But what are the right lessons? Here are my thoughts:

I recently took a fascinating and extraordinarily disturbing trip through modern history in the version of a couple of biographies (listed below), a history on the Soviets’ daily lives (The Whisperers) and then capped it off with a three hour podcast on the unspeakably evil horrors of the post WWII Soviet state (Martyrmade podcast: episode 19 the Anti-humans –if you dive into anything I’m suggesting to dive into in this article, dive into this podcast episode).

Why did I go down this path? I needed to better understand the history we Westerners collectively lived through one generation ago (how quickly we forget), and, I suppose I needed to better understand the design and construction of the US government –particularly were the framers of our Constitution expressly intent on creating a nation where dictators in whatever form could not emerge or if they did, could not remain for long? Was avoiding a dictatorship the sine qua non for the framers of our Constitution? (I believe the answer to that is “yes.”)

The reason for this focus on that period of Western history should be obvious right now: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and an assortment of lesser dictators all focused on disrupting the primacy of the Western-led world order. It’s relatively peaceful here in the USA, for now, but agents are afoot….

My learning excursion began with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), who is better known by one of his pseudonyms, “Lenin,” founder of the Russian Communist Party (the Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917–24) of the Soviet State. It lead me from there to Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili otherwise known as “Josef Stalin” one of the most notorious killers in the history of the world.

Why them? Because as I mentioned I was wondering about our politics these days: the left-right polarization, the lack of a middle ground, the hysterics, the fascination with the sound of one’s own voice and of staking out one’s theoretical stance combined with the complete lack of interest in listening to anybody else’s… and I wanted to learn about the history of such polarized arguments. What are those who have learned the hardest, bitterest, brutalest of lessons, what are they –from the tomb– trying to tell us now?

As JFK put it so well, “Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought [Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962].” Or as my Mom used to tell me, “Two ears, one mouth;” in other words, listen first. We’re not listening.

Lenin was the perfect example of someone with an extreme political opinion (his happened to be on the Left; the Nazi’s next door would form an equal and opposite position on the Right) who absolutized the worldview of his chosen sect of society (“The worker,” although some say he’d hardly ever met one) and he doggedly used that new ideology as a lever, exploiting all to catapult himself into power, establish his agenda, and when that agenda failed (it was an untenable concept all along), he altered his ideas to set in place a reign of terror to at least maintain the power; he forced the ideology into functioning in reality and who paid the price for that? You guessed it: the worker! The very individual he had professed to support.

He was Godless and Communism is Godless, and why that is important hearkens back to the original issue I brought up of Peace on Earth: unless you put love and human values in the center of your ideology (notice I didn’t say “religion,” as those suffering under the Iranian Republican Guard Corps can likely attest), you will get a society that doesn’t care about individuals. And that’s exactly what the Communists got, and it’s what they still have. The lack of concern showed then in the way they murdered and destroyed tens and hundreds of millions of their own not to mention others; and it shows now, in the way the Tibetans have been wiped off the map and in the way the Uyghurs are being wiped off the map, and in the way civil rights in Hong Kong are wiped away…

After Lenin came Stalin, who many historians say was worse. Stalin needed Lenin, of course, to get the thing started. But he took off from there. Read this biography! Read “The Whisperers!!” Books / histories like these are essential to understanding where we’ve been, to understanding why we celebrate Memorial Day in the USA today! We MUST learn and understand what has gone on in the past, if the present is to make any sense at all.

I wonder about our current turmoil within the USA. No one is overtly attacking us at present but we are certainly attacking ourselves. Where did these insane times originate? How did the USA become as ungovernable as Beirut? Was it the gerrymandering throughout every state’s electoral map? The 100+ Cable news stations that have to make up “news” even when there isn’t any? Internet search-engine bubbles? Social Media’s machinery amplifying the impact of fringe idiots? Economic disparities more drastic than pre-revolutionary France? The loss of focus on Humanities in American high school and collegiate education?

It’s moments like these I wish I had been a History major.

Back to Lenin: the context of Lenin’s rise was the lingering reign of the Tzarist Russian monarchy (the Romanovs and Tzar Nicholas II), and the faltering of that entire system of governance. The wealth gap in Russia at the time was astounding, the secret police (the Okhrana) highly intrusive and dangerous, the middle class was more or less nonexistent and categorically blocked from progress, anyway. Further context is Lenin’s father being laid off of work, and his brother being hung for being a revolutionary against the Tzar. The Industrial Revolution was raging through Europe, and Russia was behind them already, and getting further behind every day.

Lenin was a brilliant mind but he was a kook, an exiled wing-nut, a whack-job. We’ve seen it a thousand times how you can have a smart mind that is clever and effective but its fundamental assumptions are wrong, and therefore everything that the mind produces is wrong. And I’ll allege here, as I did a few paragraphs up, that what was wrong was Lenin ascribed no unique value to the individual and absolutized the state’s priorities alone. The Menshaviks were far more reasonable than the Bolsheviks, but somehow [read: ruthlessness] the Bolsheviks won out. Once again, how did an entire country fall for his bizarre ideology? And more to the point… will we in the USA fall prey to a similar kind of idiot, some day?

I tried to begin by looking at the beginning. Peter the Great in the 1600’s and Catherine the Great in the 1700’s… they tried to modernize Russia to be more like Europe. During the second half of the 19th century, a faction of so-called “Slavophiles” emerged in intellectual circles. These “Slavophiles” were convinced that Peter the Great made a mistake in trying to modernize / Westernize the country, and that Russia’s “salvation” lay in the rejection of Western ideas. The Slavophiles apparently believed that while the West polluted itself with science, atheism, materialism, and wealth, they should return to a simple peasant-based society centered on the Orthodox faith.

I went through the entirety of Napoleon’s attack of Russia a century earlier, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” prior to that. Fascinating book, by the way; I highly, highly, highly recommend it.

I tried to see what happened in the century between Napoleon’s invasion and the Bolshevik revolution. Best as I can tell, while Europe had its Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, and had the Enlightenment as a social development Russia reinforced the Middle ages in its Serfdom rule and became farther, and farther, and farther behind its neighbors to the West.

Ultimately the strain was too great and the Communist cataclysm was the result.

I wish for a solemn and meaningful Memorial Day for everyone, and please remember that the peace and prosperity we enjoy at the moment is no accident: it is the result of generations, centuries, even of countrymen and individuals working together –imperfectly, yes; very imperfectly working together– and sacrificing and holding a particular ideal above all others. And remember that whenever tempted to tinker too much with the formula and cultural norms that have gotten us this far, to think about it some more and try to put the great ideas we have at the moment into historical context and see if anyone has tried them before, and see where that got them, then. Maybe your great idea needs to be implemented in order for us to move forward? But maybe with respect to your great idea the experiment has already been run (in Soviet Russia, or Iran, or Afghanistan…) and it’s worth a second look before widespread implementation?

Lastly, although above I’m primarily focused upon our fight against post WW-II Totalitarianism and the meaning behind all those who gave their lives opposing Communism whether in Korea, Viet Nam, or elsewhere, let us not fail to honor all those who have given the last full measure in the war against Terrorism whether Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or elsewhere. None of these conflicts have been unalloyed or perfect or beyond criticism but that’s not my point: today is the day to honor those who have given their lives in the intent to make a better peace for the rest of us. Today’s Memorial Day Parade is their gift to us, and what joy we feel in and through it, is for them.

It seems egotistical and obnoxious, writing your own memoir.  And a self-portrait on the cover?!?  C’mon, really?

Reasonable as those sentiments may be, and believe me I’ve experienced them over this, there are reasons behind the project which I hope will expiate me.  The project was borne out of necessity, and from there it evolved.

At first I simply kept a journal.  I was in country, in the war, and many nights before I could sleep I sat on my haunches in a chair in our tent and typed away for all I was worth. I had to record what this was, what had happened there, what they’d done, what we’d done.  I didn’t know else what to do with it all.  I’d jog five or six miles in the desert almost every day, I’d talk with my company mates who became so dear to me it’s indescribable, but it wasn’t enough.  You absorb this energy and it’s got to go somewhere.  I had to place it somewhere.

And then when I got home I went back to writing.  More thoughts would pop into my head in the day and at night, like faeries, and before I forgot them all I had to capture them in print. I had to remember them.  Then once I remembered everything I had to work it through, arrange, rearrange, get it right or as best as I could.  And then I had to recognize all the people involved as best as I could before they all dissipated from memory too, like ghosts at dawn. Once I’d done all that it was probably two years down the road from returning.

Afghanistan 2009-2010 was stressful and intense and during that time I took every spare moment –and being “Medical” there were spare moments to be had– to write a story called “The End.”  My father had always intended to write a book but he died before he ever got the chance so during that deployment although I didn’t really expect I’d be killed I figured to be safe I’d better get something down for my kids to have just in case.  Was it melodramatic of me to feel that way?  yes, as only a few doctors have died in these conflicts, but not zero doctors.  Plus on a practical note when would I ever get that kind of time again?

After I got back I went to a writer’s conference in San Francisco regarding “The End” and aside from that book I was urged to work more on collecting those other notes from the war into a book of it’s own. After finishing work on “The End” I asked my editor (Ralph Scott), who was not a p’s and q’s guy, (he is a person who could read the whole thing, digest it, ask what it was I needed to communicate, and figure out the best way to communicate it) about the idea of a memoir on Afghanistan. He liked the idea and I gave him my first draft.  He was a coach and a tough one at that.  And halfway through the first draft he wrote me that he couldn’t read any more of it. It was that bad.

I got that kind of time again during the second tour to Afghanistan which came a couple of years later. During the interim between I’d spent a thousand hours writing and re-writing notes on the first deployment, and sent them back to Ralph.  This time we had it right, and we moved forward from there.  Another six or ten complete re-writes and we were done.

Earlier this month we had our 10-year (pushed back x2 years because of covid) 2nd MEB reunion, held in Quantico Virginia. The 2nd MEB received a Presidential Unit Citation hence the colors of the lanyards around our necks.  That’s where having written the memoir, for the first time, really felt like it was worth all the effort.  “Medical” is usually a black box:  you send your troop, your best friend, your son in there fresh from the battlefield, something happens you don’t know what, and then you live with the results for the rest of your life.  The memoir clarified for the Marines there, their families, and all the other concerned individuals what went on in “Medical.”  I really felt that at the time, and across the entire reunion.  “Citizen Surgeon” was about us; I had to be its protagonist as every book needs one, but it’s really about us as a group, doing our best to “negotiate the price for freedom.”

The most lasting memory of the reunion for me will be sitting amongst the Gold Star families at the Marine Corps parade at the 8th & I Barracks, and when the Star Spangled Banner was played by the Marine Corps Band, hearing hearing their voices as they sang along.  What an incredible, amazing, patriotic, and giving group of people.  I shall never forget them. 

The invention of the internet is something as profound for humanity as Prometheus’ discovery of fire, and over time will be just as transformative. It’s a worldwide neural network, a communal brain for the globe, and more importantly a psyche for the entire globe.

What is that? what exactly is a “psyche” and how could it be one for the entire globe?

In medical school we learn Neuroanatomy, and learn that the lumpy brain (see above) (https://www.neurosurgicalatlas.com/neuroanatomy/lateral-view-of-the-lateral-cerebral-surface-showing-the-sulci-and-gyri) has dedicated areas for every last neural function we creatures have got. There’s a dedicated area for every function except one: the psyche. There’s no anatomic place for it. That thing exists in a neural cloud spreading across the surface of the brain: it’s everywhere and nowhere at once.

One could argue that the psyche is sourced out of the amygdala (a limbic system structure deep in the central brain mediating emotion and memory), but others might argue it’s somewhere in the frontal lobes (that moderate and govern mood, behavior, and social judgment). But no one –unless I am much mistaken and please comment if I am– has ever identified or proven the psyche has an actual, discreet, single locus within the human brain. Yet, metaphysical as it is, the psyche undeniably exists and exerts tremendous influence –or, rather than merely influence, it may be the deep source of who we really are… (whatever that means, “who we are”) and perhaps all that we ever do is really an expression of that psyche.

Anatomic events, such as strokes, dementia, tumors, and trauma (bifrontal hematomas, for example, after a bike crash with no helmet) can change a person’s psyche. Life events, such as loneliness, bereavement, changes in wealth (for better or worse) do the same. The psyche can be built up, and the psyche can break. But it’s not something you can physically touch. Nor can you view or image the psyche directly, not with CT, MRI, or even SPECT scanners. You cannot operate on a psyche the way you can with a rupturing appendix or a meningioma. But it’s there and it matters, nevertheless.

And if all the world is one collective organism, and if the universities and theaters and city halls and financial institutions, for example, constitute its neural network, then the internet is its psyche.

(1) Individual psyche: If you’re religious you might refer to a “psyche” as a manifestation of your “soul;” if you’re secular, you might say it’s your “mind.” If you look up the definition it will refer you first to Sigmund Freud (Id, Ego, and Superego) and next to ancient Greece (Psyche marries Eros). In other words, for something as central to our existences as whatever it is that constitutes the essence of our very selves, there’s not a whole hell of a lot to either localize or define it, clinically speaking.

Personally, I don’t go with the religious or the secular definitions. As for the religious, I believe a soul is more than a psyche: it existed before “me” and will exist after my body is dead, and if I develop schizophrenia for example and my psyche becomes deranged, does that similarly impugn my soul? Of course not. And as for the secular, I think the psyche is more than a clearing-house for the collective impulses of the human mind and body; it’s not some higher-level algorithm who’s function it is to assimilate dis-cohesive data and produce survival benefit for the species. It’s not simply a computer.

I take a more mystical view. The psyche is some magical thing: it’s an entity, all right, but not one like the others. Maybe it’s the interface between soul and mind? It’s fluid, and its boundaries are not distinct (my wife’s psyche and my own, for example, intersect like two colors in a rainbow), but it’s got a center and it’s got a periphery, it exerts influence in everything I do, and it’s likewise affected by everything i do. I have some element of control regarding what goes into it, but not complete.

(2) Collective psyche: We as individuals are separate creatures than we are in groups; so separate, it seems, as to be completely different organisms (ref: Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas). A single bacterium will operate and behave along a completely different set of rules and objectives than it will follow when in a group or colony; a domesticated dog will be equally different than the same dog in a pack; humans in one-on-one can be unrecognizable in comparison to their public manifestations or mob mentalities. The group “psyche” is a different psyche. The internet psyche is a different psyche.

So here’s my final point, and there main point of the whole post: just as a individual brain has a gyri, sulci and corpus callosum (the corpus callosum is a large bundle of more than 200 million myelinated nerve fibers that connect the two brain hemispheres, permitting communication between the right and left sides of the brain), and these impact and govern the human being, and just as the human brain has this metaphysical “psyche” existing above and beyond all that, which, you might say, comprises “the real me”… collectively we’ve got the same thing: a metaphysical psyche spanning across all the members of the human species; and now that nearly every human on the planet is connected more or less directly to every other human on the planet through the internet, we’ve got a collective psyche like it or not, and that point is critically important to understand if we’re to make sense of its influence upon us, and if we’re to influence it back.

What just happened? How did it happen so fast? What did we do wrong? I’ll tell you what we did wrong, we didn’t think it through: You don’t get to leave; unless you lose. That should have been obvious from the start.

Post WW-II we’re still in Italy, Germany, Japan; post Korea we’re still in Korea; post Viet Nam we are out from there, but we’ll have to categorize that one as a “loss;” post Iraq we had to rush right back in, in 2016, to counter ISIS, and we’re still in Iraq today. And that, I suppose, is how it should be.

Afghanistan is and was important geopolitically, in terms of it existing in the center of Asia and as it happens in-between Iran and Pakistan; and culturally, in terms of bringing that group of 30+ million people into the modern family; not to mention the explicit reason for being there which was to prevent it being a privileged site for the harboring and nurturing of terrorist groups (now that we’re leaving, it will go right back to doing just that, I am quite sure).

But the instantaneous failure of our 20-year Afghan investment and the nightmare of its president skulking off before the war was even lost with truckloads of stolen cash in tow, this has given the whole world pause…

…so it should probably give every American pause, too… and we all together are asking the same question: “Is the USA the dominant influence across the globe any longer? If not, who is?”

Maybe we in the USA are too busy to think deeply about what just happened because we’re so mired in distracting, fatuous internal debates over whether vaccines actually work; or if the election, of which over the 245 years of our history we’ve done a bunch of times, was done right; or if the Earth is flat or not? This country of ours has become indulgent and foolish beyond description, we’ve lost our way, and it appears very likely that we are incapable of leadership maybe as the USA’s detractors allege… maybe we are too soft and weak and selfish to lead the world any longer?

We need to mature-up enough to stop our un-disciplined haggling in order to take-in what just happened. The catastrophe in Afghanistan isn’t just another news story in the 24/7/365 cycle of news stories. This is a national failure of epic proportion.

Afghanistan, my friends, was much more than a war. It wasn’t as if we just went there to blow up an enemy. This was a “Pygmalion” on a massive scale. We did take on enemies there and we did that part more or less brilliantly, but above and beyond that we also made a lot of promises to the 14 separate tribes comprising the Afghan people. Remember COIN (Counter-insurgency) Strategy? Clear, Hold, and Build? We built them a representative government. We built a lot of schools. We established a free press. We convinced them –some of them, at least– to believe in Western democracy and the institutions that make it viable. We built an Army and Air Force over there, one in our own image in fact, one that couldn’t function even for a single day without us or our contractors, in fact. What were we doing? We lost a lot of men and women over there and injured ten times more, and psychologically impacted even more than that. And that’s just on our side. We had many coalition partners. We had Afghan partners. We spent $2 trillion dollars. And then it lasted ten, eleven days after we pulled out? And we didn’t see that coming? How could that be? What did we do wrong?

Group think.

Was the plan to stay there forever? It might have been. It only makes sense that way. Hey, what WAS the plan, by the way. Oh yes, the Neo-cons: Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and the lot. A quick victory in Afghanistan, to be followed by a quick victory in Iraq, and at that point we’ve got both sides of Iran covered, and we can control the Middle East. Or it was something other than that?

What is the plan now?

The fact is, somebody has to be the leading culture and force on this planet; for a little while it was us. World War II was very much about that –who would it be? The Axis or the Allied powers?– as were the wars in Korea and Viet Nam: Communism versus Capitalism. The duel is playing out still, but in a more civilized way, with respect to China’s ascendent-power “Belt and Road” initiative. And like it or hate it, our “War on Terrorism” was an attempt to bring the stickiest places on the globe a step forward.

Marx had famously predicted with the rise of Industrialization that economic development would follow that logic and move from undeveloped country to undeveloped country until all of the cheap labor sites on the planet had been exhausted, and only then would the workers of the world have more of a say in their conditions and circumstances. You gotta hand it to the guy, he had that part correct.

The terrorist phenomenon introduced the same kind of logic, which was that troubled places, like the unindustrialized ones before them, needed to be brought up to date in order for the rest of the world to be able to live in a truly modern era. Failure or not in Afghanistan (and although we’ve pulled out, the final chapter on that place is definitely not written, just yet) the job continues on. And who is going to lead it, if not US?