Yes. Yes, I really would. Not to make this all about me, but to really understand where I’m coming from, it will help you to know two things about me: 1) My father was a Green Beret who served in the early 60s. He personally killed over thirty other human beings, some with his hands, and was shot three times and stabbed in the neck with a machete by drugged up Congolese rebels intent on eating him. For reals. As you might imagine, these experiences really messed my dad up and he spent the rest of his life dealing with the consequences of his actions. All of which, I should add, were completely legal and in service of the nation. But still deeply traumatizing. 2) I’m the first man in ten generations of my family to not enter the military. I spent most of my life seriously planning to become a police officer and eventually a detective, but after graduating college I couldn’t go though with it. Because I am absolutely terrified of having to kill someone. I have seen what it does to a man to carry that burden, and I don’t want to carry it. So I became a writer and now I write stories about men who carry that burden and the nobility of being willing and able to carry that burden in defense of what is right.


But I have nothing but contempt for the other kind of man, the kind of man who forces good men like my dad to carry that burden. The battle where my dad took a machete to the neck? He was trying to hold out a guardpost at a civilian airport in order to give the planes time to evacuate hundreds of Belgians who were trying to flee the Congo. The rebels had won, and those people were just civilians who wanted to go home. They did not deserve to get chopped into pieces by a bunch of drug-fueled psychopaths. If my dad had been injured in that battle, but been on the other side, I wouldn’t be suggesting that he’s a hero for putting his life on the line to give those civilians time to escape. I’d be saying he was a monster.


None of this is to say that things are ever black and white, but there is good and there is evil, and sometimes good people have to do evil things to counteract the evil things evil people do, but we should never make the mistake of thinking that just because the line between right and wrong, between the good guys and the bad guys, is often blurry that there isn’t right and wrong, and that it doesn’t matter which side you are fighting on.