Home coming ...

What happens to the men and women we send to meaningless wars that end badly? The question hung over the country in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war. Civilians were all too happy to forget. Broken veterans were designated patients -- the surviving crazy, not heroes emerging from brutal suffering. All that was left was the performative patriotism of the POW-MIA myth and a military that knew it would have to become professional and never again depend on draftees to fight.

Now we're living in the aftermath of our terrible, meaningless War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. Elliot Ackerman is writer, a former Marine Corps Special Operations Team Leader, and one of the most thoughtful chroniclers of the long morass. He discusses our ignominious exit from Afghanistan and the implications of the divide between civilians and the military in a wide ranging podcast with Charlie Sykes of the Bulwark.  It's absolutely worth listening to in full.

Sykes asked whether we need fear that some part of a disgruntled military might be drawn into our domestic political struggles. 

Ackerman looks at the country that sent him and his comrades to war and worries:

I'm really not trying to be alarmist, but we have such high levels of dysfunction domestically, and every time we kind of set up these scenarios where we're asking our military to play a role in domestic politics, we're really tempting the fates.

The analogy I use is that these contested elections remind me of a drunk driver.

A drunk driver will go to the bar, right, and they will get completely hammered drunk, and they'll drive home.

And, probably the first time they do that, like, they make it home, and they do it and they make it home the second time, the third time.

And then on the fourth or fifth time, they get hammered drunk and try to drive home.

That's when they wrap their car around a telephone pole.

 When I look at our contested elections, it's like we're doing the equivalent as a nation of going to the bar getting just hammered drunk, and we try to drive home.

We've done it twice now, and we have sort of managed to make it home, but one of these days, if we keep doing this, we are going to wrap our proverbial car around a telephone pole.

Soldiers who have seen their buddies killed for no purpose have historically been very dangerous to democracy. The German military rolled over for Hitler in part because they'd clung for a couple of decades to their Big Lie that civilians had betrayed their valiant fight in what we call World War I.

General Douglas MacArthur was called home by President Truman for resisting civilian leadership in the faltering Korean war

This country has had generals with right leaning political aspirations come home before.

Might our soldiers respond to the futile waste that was the War on Terror by being attracted to fascism?

Under Donald Trump, the professional military resisted being used for the lawless purposes of the aspiring Orange King. But the military does seem to produce some nutcases, of whom General Michael Flynn is the prize specimen.

Ackerman thinks and talks knowledgeably about all this.