In the summer of 2006, I participated in the evacuation of American citizens from Lebanon. Israel had invaded after Hezbollah abducted two of its soldiers in a cross-border raid. I was a Marine Corps officer, and our platoon was embarked on the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious ship, for a routine deployment in the Mediterranean. My unit, the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment—“1/8,” for short—had history in Lebanon.
Former President Donald Trump sparked near universal criticism last week when he said that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, was “much better” than the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor.
Election Day will mark nearly 20 years since my friend Dan Malcom was killed on a rooftop in Fallujah. Dan died trying to help my platoon. Friendly artillery had us pinned down on a roof. Hot shards of jagged shrapnel slapped against the side of our building. Dan had climbed into an exposed position to shift that artillery when a sniper’s bullet found him. He was 25 years old. When I finally came home from Iraq, I was 24, but I had as many dead friends as an 80-year-old.
It’s January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes.
America has two national holidays that honor those who have served, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The former is for the living; the latter is for the dead. How we remember, honor, and judge the dead was on my mind as I wrote Halcyon, a novel that imagines an alternate America in which a scientific breakthrough has allowed a few of those dead to again wander among us.
In 2016, two years after Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, I was invited to the Kyiv Suvorov Military School to present the Ukrainian edition of my novel set in Afghanistan. The auditorium was mostly filled with fresh-faced cadets and their instructors, some of whom had recently returned from fighting in the east. After an hour’s discussion, the cadets filed back to their barracks. Then, out of the dark recesses of the auditorium, three men in their mid-50s approached me.
Last weekend I was in Kyiv, where European, American, and Ukrainian officials were mingling with journalists and policy experts at the Yalta European Strategy conference. With Ukrainian troops liberating Izium, Balakliya, and other northeastern towns, the atmosphere was triumphant.
Very few Americans are allowing themselves to feel anything about Afghanistan anymore. A triple bombing in Kabul left 80 people, many of them schoolgirls, dead last week. In photographs, you see the physical devastation of the bombing—a crater, twisted metal, gouged walls—but the more visceral devastation is in the faces of family members, the contorted, grief-stricken expressions of mothers and fathers at the gates of the school as they search for their daughters.