Letters & Opinions

As I reflect on the recent news of leaving Afghanistan, it reminds me of the evacuation I participated in as a junior enlisted marine in Beirut, Lebanon in 1984. Despite both the differences and similarities between these two operations, the main thing to remember is, as Marines, soldiers, or whatever branch of service, we receive our orders from the top. Our orders descend from the commander-in-chief to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, through the chain of command, all the way down through the lowly private standing next to you. We go and we accomplish the mission, trusting in the decisions of our superiors and absent of politics. Or so we thought!

One thing that I had always admired about America was its sense of right and wrong. That’s what made us culturally superior. We were the good guys, who always had the high principles, always favored following one’s conscience, and always took the right actions. We always fought the just wars, even if we ended up losing one or two, and we always stood for the rights of the downtrodden. A superpower with moral high ground, that’s what defined America, as I have said before. We were willing to go to any length to see that justice was carried out.

NOTE: The letter to the editor shown below was originally sent to the Editor of the New York Times on August 30, 2021 in response to the opinion piece "Let's Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew from Afghanistan Was the Problem" by Ezra Klein, published in the issue of August 26, 2021. Both the opinion piece and the letter to the Editor were first published in the New York Times. You can find the opinion piece at the top of this page.

In all the discussions of vaccines to get immunity (of a sort) from COVID, there is a big blind spot surrounding natural immunity. Studies have shown that natural immunity, the kind one gets from surviving a bout of the actual disease, is superior to the immunity the vaccines may create. The obvious question is “Why are they ignoring natural immunity?” but for some reason, the question is not directly answered. I have a few theories.

We’ve written about Biden checking his watch while he was at Dover yesterday watching the transfer of those who died in Kabul from the airplane to the hearses that will drive them to their final resting places. He also failed to understand that, as Commander-in-Chief, he should have saluted the coffins as they were carried past him, rather than putting his hand on his heart, and, as the picture below shows, he stood at “parade rest” rather than attention (although that may have been old bones protesting). It was all a telling breach of protocol and it turns out that Biden was just as tone-deaf in his dealings with the families of those who died.