This book is an artifact that gives perfectly rational permission to fall into paranoid insanity. War and espionage blend with reality, forever smudging out lines that have always been arbitrary. There is a mythology here. Modern day berserkers and janissaries unleashed upon the world like Wotan’s wild hunt, slavering and bloodlusted. Again and again, Germanic and blazing white as bone but secret. Secret beyond all else, out in the desert or atop mountains, beyond any naive impotent gestures toward standard transparency. By the end of this book you will fear them. They will whisper to you from the margins and dark corners. They will manifest themselves between the anodyne filler words that only reveal themselves to be great spells of ancient power by their tendency to break down into persistent acronyms. JSOC. SOF. F3EAD. CIA. PTSD. GWOT. AQI. DEVGRU. SFOD-D. An amphetamine crazed stripping out of all but the skeletons of language. Like so many cell phones stripped for parts and turned into bombs; like countries robbed of democracy and agency and left fluttering in the wind—bed sheets hung on a web of wiretapped phone lines that lead nowhere, off into the clandestine abyss.
The U.S. military has, of course, been a cartel for about the last 100 years. Here’s Eisenhower talking about it in his farewell address, a coward’s complicit suicide note before a historical stool-kicking:
