The New York Review of Books: On War.

Chris Hedges reviews Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright and The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson. Many excellent thoughts and observations, and this moment of lucidity taken from Generation Kill:

One of the Marines in the book returns to California and is invited to be the guest of honor in a gated community in Malibu, a place where he could never afford to live. The residents want to toast him as a war hero.

« I’m not a hero, » he tells the guests. « Guys like me are just a necessary part of things. To maintain this way of life in a fine community like this, you need psychos like us to go out and drop a bomb on somebody’s house.

I don’t know if I’ll ever read the books, but the review itself is worth 5 minutes of your time.

[Via MeFi.]