For Christmas this year my awesome parents got me a Kindle Fire, which I didn't even know I needed until I had one. Parents, if you want to get your boys to read this just might be the ticket. The Fire is one of the cheapest tablet on the market, and my one and only gripe is the lack of an integrated GPS receiver. It's my radio at home, video game system on the road (I found a F-14 & F/A-18 flight sim with an astoundingly realistic flight model for 2 bucks), I use it at work for work stuff, I don't know how I got along without it. It's also great as an audiobook player. Most major public libraries now offer a service called OverDrive, and it's just about the best thing ever. You can download ebooks and audiobooks right to your computer or mobile device. So now I might still be stuck in traffic two hours a day, but the part of my brain not required for driving is not stuck on the interstate but twisting through the skies in a dogfight over the South China Sea, or on the trail of a deadly assassin, or wherever my favorite authors want to take my mind.
But up until two weeks ago, I still hadn't used it for it's intended purpose: as an e-reader.
So my first e-book experience was pretty good, though much can be attributed to the author, Eric Greitens. The Heart and the Fist is an autobiographical tale of Greiten's seemingly contradictory life, detailing his journey from humanitarian volunteer to Oxford scholar to Navy SEAL commando.
Part of me feels like this book should be required reading for American high school students. Greitens might as well be the physical embodiment of not so much what this country is but what it aspires to be. He never mentions it directly, but often alludes to the Arthurian ideal of "might for right", but thankfully at the same time doesn't shy away from the reality of how messy that exercise often is in the real world. He talks of aiding refugees from the genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda, and being confronted with the accusations of "your country could have stopped this" that eventually drove him to become a warrior, but also the maddening Pentagon bureaucracy the damages months of relation-building in Kenya by not moving a stranded forklift. In our hyper-partisan times, he might be the ultimate contradiction, a bleeding-heart egghead liberal...who makes terrorists bleed out.
On one hand, it's too bad Grietens left the Navy after his tour was over, as warriors like him - educated, worldy, and an innate knowledge of how building metaphorical bridges with people will make it easier to stop people who want to blow up physical ones - are far and away the most formidable weapons in America's arsenal. He describes how he watched a Marine who shed his rifle to pick up a shovel and spent an afternoon helping poor Iraqi farmers dig an irrigation ditch yielded more intelligence and goodwill than millions of dollars worth of spy satellites and Pentagon propaganda ever could. On the other hand, he's put his time back in the civilian world to good use. He's the founder of The Mission Continues, a program to help place post-9/11 veterans in leadership and service positions in their communities. A visit with several wounded servicemen made him realize that, while all of the charities that were helping veterans were well-intentioned, what these men and women really wanted to hear was "your country still needs you", even if they were too badly injured to continue their military career. I can personally attest the loss of purpose is the often the hardest part of transitioning to civilian life, though thankfully I found a way to regain it with the Coast Guard Auxiliary and later on with the animal rescue work my wife and I became involved in. The Mission Continues is a great idea and I hope more groups like this start to pop up.
Not only is the book gripping, but it's also well written and very well paced. It's a quick, good read that I heartily recommend.
So check out The Heart and the Fist, and while you're at it, head over to http://missioncontinues.org/home and learn more about The Mission Continues and how you can help.
-Mike, Out.
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