Thanks for sharing your difficult situation with your son. For what it's worth, my wife and I are in a similar situation: a brilliant young man from another country we worked in, whom we've sponsored for graduate study in the US and whom we care very deeply for, can't get it through his thick head that there are more important things for him to do than join the US military. Naturally, he also doesn't want to do anything that would actually put his advanced education to work, he insists on going combat arms. It isn't the same, I know, because he isn't my son ... but he's the closest thing I have to it.

So, I think I have a sense, at least, of where you're coming from.

Obviously, we come from different places on this, because while I respect the view of people who see no value in military service, just as I respect the views of those who are pacifists, and would prefer that more, even most people held these views (as opposed to rolling over slavering and turning bloodthirsty at the provocation of the government, for instance), I don't personally hold them ... I can't deny my own experience of the sources of all the things I value, any more than you can. All I can do is try to see value and legitimacy on the other side of that line. I hope that you can see that this does not entail glorifying the military, or (what is a very different thing), endorsing US military policy.

And, I can keep your son in mind and hope and pray that he comes home safe and intact. Which I will.

The two words that leapt out of that Amy Goodman segment were "John Rendon".

You'll have to google The Rendon Group on your own, because I am too busy wiping the spittle off my screen. Most people have heard of the Lincoln Group because they tried to plant all the psyop feel-good news in the Iraqi media; but TLG were subcontractors, incubated by the Rendon Group, who has been doing the same thing for a much longer time, elsewhere in the world. My own experience of them was in Afghanistan, where they tried to do the same thing. It was worse there, because we really did have a burgeoning professional media, trying to do the right thing, and along comes TRG with fistfuls of cash and a bunch of stupid ideas.

The irony of hearing John Rendon talk about the Pentagon 'coming close' to 'violating the law' about propogandizing the American public is really too much.

and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice

This is the part, in whole, that you should have bolded (the first part you bolded just fine)

(And BTW, you aren't the first person to call me a communist. Whatever. I could suggest some other obsolete-but-historically-interesting labels, if you're interested)

Sorry, read a little more closely (it's late), and I see that it was Gardiner, not Rendon, speaking of the Pentagon's violating the law. Normalcy restored, irony dissipated.

You're right, they *did* violate the law, pretty plainly, and in my fantasy world where Bushco are in the dock at the Hague, Torie Clarke is right there alongside them.

A story: post-military, I ran a consulting group for an enterprise software company. I got (in)famous amongst the sales force for a certain high-risk maneuver. Inevitably, I would get called in near the end of the sales cycle to talk about what my group could do. In the preceding months, the sales guys had inevitably spun a bunch of tales about what was or was not possible. The prospective clients knew that half of what they were hearing was bullshit, but not *which* half, or whether it was 75%, etc.

I'd go into my meeting, pick one or two of the things I was hearing (I usually could guess which ones in advance, even without reviewing the docs beforehand), and at the appropriate dramatic moment, say with gravity, "That's never going to happen". I could then go on to assign probabilities to the other points, but no one was really listening any more. A great sigh would go through the room; eventually we would get the contract. The sales exec would need CPR.

Point of the parable was, in the sales dynamic there were always people with an incentive to lie and obfuscate, and everyone knew it. Once someone, from whichever side of the fence, introduced some speck of reality into the discussion, there was a way forward.

Pushing the metaphor: I wonder who was supposed to perform in this for us, when the salesmen were pushing their war?