Nam by Mark Baker
“I get into this survivor head sometimes, and I’ll say to people, ‘But you don’t understand. You don’t understand what you’re doing to other people when you fuck up like that. You don’t understand that this stupidity of yours, this self-conscious and deliberate stupidity, this distortion of the truth, this deliberate dishonesty of yours, hurts. I’m not even going to bother to talk to you about how it hurts you. I know you’re not ready for that. But let me count the ways that you are hurting somebody else. Let me try to make you understand that when you behave that way you jeopardise other people’s lives, Asshole. I don’t care if we both have M-16s in our hands and it’s on the front, or if we both have chequebooks in our hands and it’s back home. It’s the same God damn thing.’ It’s a miracle we all survive from day to day, the world is so filled with assholes. I do asshole things too, but I don’t do them deliberately anymore. I get so angry when I realise that people are doing bad things with awareness. That’s the ruthless side of me. The assholes of the world do need to be ruthlessly weeded out. Because they endanger other people’s very lives.”
—Unknown Veteran
