The natural way of war is to strike by surprise, and to retreat stealthily back into the wilderness to safety with as few casualties as possible. Primitive people do not “stand and fight”; they hide and kill. Their method of warfare is the ambush: “bushwhacking,” as it was called during pro- and anti-slavery fighting in Kansas before the Civil War, far from being “dishonorable,” is the traditional way of fighting, as is “terror,” in the sense of sudden and unexpected assassinations and horrendous threats of violence designed to break the enemy’s will. The introduction of efficient lethal weapons manufactured to a standard design and furnished by the state, and of such huge advancements in organized warfare as marching in step and of moving in lines or columns, of formalized ranks, uniforms and discipline, produced in the growing national empires of the ancient world—Egypt, Babylon, Greece—the equivalent of professional armies intended to carry out the state’s policy.

These national armies waged long campaigns, necessitating supply lines and the birth of “logistics,” and were intended for the specific purpose of fighting great, decisive battles and inflicting the largest possible number of enemy casualties. They set a high premium on “honor,” and of iron discipline, the one often being confused with the other. (Until very recently, the penalty in all serious armies for disobeying an order in combat or for cowardice was death—death sentences for “cowardice in the face of the enemy” were not uncommon in the British Army in World War I, and the last American soldier to be shot for cowardice was Private Slovick, whose execution was confirmed by General Eisenhower in December 1944.)

By contrast in the “natural” warfare as it was practiced throughout most of human history, running away when the enemy was in superior numbers was the sensible thing to do—the aim was to kill the enemy when he was off his guard, to cut his throat when he was sleeping, not to display courage by advancing in the open in large numbers, but to fight from concealment whenever possible.

The fundamental question before President Obama and his team persists. How to ensure U.S. national security is not undermined as we “responsibly” draw down? After spending almost three years in Afghanistan (mainly in Khost and Helmand), I am convinced a baseline troop presence is necessary ... for a long time. Think decades, not years. Think Korea or Germany.

SEALs and drones will not be enough in this high-stakes game, though a seductive image from Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a mirage. Talk of zero troops in Afghanistan might be a short-term and perhaps effective negotiating ploy. A sustained message from the White House along these lines, however, would amount to national security malfeasance. I can hear the late, great Richard Holbrooke lecturing from beyond the grave, thundering with conviction and cause:

Where did it all go wrong? Unraveling the decade of America’s wars since 9/11 is already a historical cottage industry. Multiple memoirs, at least three serious efforts at historical reconstruction, half a dozen narrative accounts, a rising pile of combat memories transmuted into novels. It’s an outpouring utterly different from the stunned silence that followed Vietnam, and America is the healthier for it.

Fred Kaplan’s new book goes over this war-torn terrain from a different perspective. Just over 20 years ago, Kaplan produced The Wizards of Armageddon, chronicling the evolution of America’s nuclear weapons strategy after Hiroshima. There is no lack of tomes on this topic, but Kaplan’s account remains essential reading because he reconstructed a debate as a narrative driven by the lives and views of the participants. In The Insurgents, Kaplan does the same for Iraq and Afghanistan—using personal narratives to explore, as his subtitle says, “David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War." Kaplan’s subject is the counterinsurgency strategy midwifed by Petraeus: its creation, adoption, and what Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed about its limitations. For anyone interested in figuring out what went wrong, Kaplan is essential reading.  

Forty years on, the passions of Vietnam have faded into history. Yet they’re seminal in the story Kaplan reconstructs. For the U.S. Army, Vietnam was so traumatic—such a humiliation—that, in its aftermath, the Army leadership of the time drew one overarching lesson: Never Again.   The Army’s job was to prepare for the Big One: the armored showdown against the Soviets on the plains of central Europe. That war, thankfully, never came. But Desert Storm, the expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in 1991, was essentially a dry run: the divisions and air wings came to Saudi Arabia from Europe; the tactics were those of “AirLand Battle,” the fighting doctrine devised for Europe. Afterward, as the collapse of the Soviet Empire brought defense budget cuts to shrink the U.S. Army, the officers retained were those who had done well in that comfortably conventional conflict.

Instead McChrystal devotes his memoir to telling the story of an often-secret war against al Qaeda and other terrorists. He tells the story with surprising flair. The general provides visceral details, such as his description of how the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, bled from his nose and ears after a 500-pound bomb exploded the house where he was staying. In other parts of the book, McChrystal explains the origins of the CIA’s post-9/11 relationship with Special Operations Forces.

It turns out that McChrystal actually encountered al Qaeda very early in his career, but he did not quite know it at the time. The year was 1987, and McChrystal was working for a Ranger battalion as part of the once-every-two-year joint military exercise known as Exercise Bright Star with Egypt. As part of the preparations, McChrystal worked with Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed, a special-operations command sergeant who served as an interpreter. “Ali Mohammed was effective, but the atmosphere with the Egyptians was uncomfortably cool, and it was difficult to determine why,” McChrystal wrote. On their walk back to their tent that evening, the Egyptian-born sergeant explained that he had been a major in the Egyptian commandos. Then the next day he was gone. “I never saw him after that,” McChrystal wrote. “Only years later did I hear of his membership in al Qaeda, his September 1998 arrest in Egypt after being subpoenaed in conjunction with the August 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and his public discussions about al Qaeda as an organization.”

Much of McChrystal’s book is devoted to his hunt for Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist who lead al Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq. McChrystal discloses in the book that the Joint Special Operations Command almost captured Iraqi master terrorist Zarqawi in February 2004, more than two years before McChrystal’s team did finally find and kill him. A team of Delta Force soldiers had a tip that Zarqawi was visiting a townhouse in the Askari neighborhood of Fallujah that evening. But by the time the Special Operations team got to the townhouse, Zarqawi had already escaped. McChrystal speculates that he may have leapt from a two-story building. McChrystal writes, “On that dusty night in February 2004, while we were disappointed to have missed him, the bloody consequences of our failure were not immediately apparent. On that night, he was not yet Iraq’s bane.”

A recent report has provided follow-up information on a small placebo-controlled trial that commenced years ago when 20 patients were randomized to MDMA (12 patients) or placebo (8 patients). In the original study, a suggestive but not statistically significant improvement was seen. (12 of 20 responders with MDMA versus 2 of 8 receiving placebo: p=0.17, statistical shorthand for saying that the likelihood that the result was due to the drug was 83% and to random chance, 17%. For any medical publication, a “p value” of 0.05 reflecting 95% likelihood that the drug caused the change is necessary to pass muster. An 83% score is not even glanced at twice.) In the new dispatch, evidence for durable improvement was noted. The same sort of interesting but not significant finding was reported by a Swiss group that also studied a small number of patients.

If confirmed by larger trials, this finding would be welcomed. But the hunger for something – anything – that portends good news for sufferers of PTSD should not prevent us from bringing the same yardstick to these studies as we might to any drug-based therapy. And from this perspective, there is very little here here. Or worse yet, there is lots here – lots of conflict of interest: as the authors state at the article’s end, “Our sponsor [a non-profit called The Multidsciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)] played a role in the study design, data analysis and writing of the report… Three authors…are employed by the sponsor. [Two lead researchers] received payment from the sponsor for conducting this research.” Like any non-profit, MAPS probably needs good news and promising findings to keep donors interested.

The MAPS team clearly believes in what they are doing. There is no money to be made here; the scientists seem moved by the plight of the soldiers with PTSD. And so they are trying to push a pet theory forward – always a gigantic problem in science where affection distorts and absolute affection distorts absolutely. Indeed almost all of the literature on MDMA to treat PTSD and other conditions comes from this group of researchers, one a shrink in private practice in South Carolina and another running central HQ in Santa Cruz California. But though their fervor and good intentions cannot be questioned, their objectivity surely can and must be. Were this Big Pharma funding salaried Pharma people to release a statistically insignificant happy-time story about soldiers, accusations would fly that they were just squeezing the Department of Defense for even more tax-payer dollars in another amazingly audacious display of high finance chutzpah. There may be more enthusiasm in the press for MDMA as a wonder drug than among patients who theoretically might benefit. 

The 89-year-old veteran had died three months earlier in a Yuba City nursing home.

“My father was a very proud person,” Alderson’s son, Kale, said. “Whenever I saw him, he would ask if I’d heard from the V.A. and whether his money would hold up. It really took a toll on him.”

The V.A.’s inability to pay benefits to veterans before they die is increasingly common, according to data obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The data reveals, for the first time, that long wait times are contributing to tens of thousands of veterans being approved for disability benefits and pensions only after it is too late for the money to help them.

I'm going to live in such a manner in my own country, the land of the free, the home of the brave? We’re all going to carry so we can be the armed sheep dogs waiting for the next attack? We’re going to turn the malls into OK Corrals waiting to happen? Maybe we should all carry and use what we have learned from weaponized robots, like drones with Hellfires.

We have the technology to arm surveillance cameras. We could put an aim dot on the lens, just like the .50-caliber-machine-gun mounts on the armored trucks driven around Afghanistan, and mount rifles on the side of the cameras. Somebody could monitor from a secure room and pan over the crowd looking for the wolf. Are we really going to turn our public spaces into shooting galleries?

As an individual, I say no.

Irregular Army begins by focusing on the prevalence of white supremacists and former gang members, groups that have had an increasingly easy time slipping through the military application process. “I get into fights myself twice a month because I’m a Nazi … I’m completely open about it,” one subject admitted to Kennard. Forrest Fogarty served in Iraq as a military police officer in 2004 and 2005, and had previously been associated with the National Alliance, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country founded by The Turner Diaries author William Pierce. Fogarty is also the lead singer in the neo-Nazi hardcore band Attack, whose album Survival featured a photo of Fogarty in uniform and on duty in Iraq.

Many white-supremacist groups informally encourage people to enlist, not necessarily because of love for the government, but in order to gain weapons and combat training for the inevitable racial holy war, or RaHoWa. After the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, a heavily armed group of National Socialist Movement members patrolled the streets anticipating retaliatory attacks on white people. The group has also sent volunteers with camouflage uniforms and assault rifles to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. In a 2009 report to the Department of Homeland Security, analyst Daryl Johnson focused on these groups, writing that the “greatest fear is that domestic extremists … [carry] out a mass-casualty attack.”

Kennard cites a number of U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command cases where neo-Nazi accusations were barely taken seriously. One soldier at Fort Hood was found to be posting on a prominent neo-Nazi message board, but no further action was taken because the investigator couldn’t find him for an interview. Another investigation in San Antonio found that a soldier had provided an Improvised Munitions Handbook to a leader in the supremacist group the Celtic Knights, which planned to attack five different methamphetamine labs around the city. The suspect was interviewed only once, and after the group failed to get explosives, the investigation was dropped in 2006. When Fogarty enlisted, his girlfriend at the time sent pictures of him at neo-Nazi rallies to his superiors. Fogarty was called before a committee and offered only one defense: his girlfriend was a “spiteful bitch.” The committee let him serve.

He enlisted shortly after graduation and achieved his goal, getting deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and earning a Bronze Star. He had been in the Navy for 10 years and a SEAL for almost as long when he and his team made the pilgrimage to the site where jihadist attackers murdered thousands of innocents and triggered a war on terror that continues more than a decade later.

Nearing 30, he was about the age of many SEALs who had visited the site in the past. But a new generation was joining the team and many of the SEALs who came with him were younger. One was just 21, but had those same SEAL qualities of intense awareness and self-control, right down to the rate of their breathing.

“Focus,” says someone close to the team.

Although all the men in the unit came home alive, many came home changed. Within five years, one in four had been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Today one in two of them carries debilitating psychic wounds, according to an estimate by the men. They are jobless, homeless, disposed to drugs and alcohol, divorced from their spouses, and cut off from their former selves. One made love to his girlfriend, the mother of his twin daughters, then immediately drowned her in a warm bath. If you ask the military and mental-health establishment what happened to the men of Fox Company, the answer is simple: they lived through “events that involved actual or threatened death,” felt “intense fear,” and like the 300,000 other service members who share this narrow official path to PTSD, they were badly shaken by it.

But as clergy and good clinicians have listened to more stories like these, they have heard a new narrative, one that signals changes to the brain along with what in less spiritually challenged times might be called a shadow on the soul. It is the tale of disintegrating vets, but also of seemingly squared-away former soldiers and spit-shined generals shuttling between two worlds: ours, where thou shalt not kill is chiseled into everyday life, and another, where thou better kill, be killed, or suffer the shame of not trying. There is no more hellish commute.