Robert Bruce Adolph

I sat in the dust between a surging sea of angry Somalis and a jumpy Yemeni garrison, gambling that a seated man looks less like a threat and that luck would buy enough time to keep everyone breathing.

Unregulated capitalism, blessed by the Reagan Revolution and cemented by Citizens United, has turned our democracy into an auction for the highest bidder while the American dream withers.

We won the battles in Afghanistan and still lost the war because Washington pursued an unsuitable, unfeasible, and unacceptable project to remake a tribal society while Congress abdicated and our generals saluted.

We became the heirs of liberty who preached equality while conquering, cleansing, and corralling a people we called “savages,” and the question still hangs in the air: will we learn from that betrayal—or repeat it?

On that summer afternoon by the Rhine, I realized with chilling clarity how deeply the lies of a dictator could root themselves in a human soul, surviving long after his empire lay in ruins.

If we continue down this path of political hatred and violence, the greatest danger to America will not come from abroad, but from within our own divided house.

Donald Trump has shown, through both incompetence and a profound lack of empathy, that he is fundamentally incapable of providing the leadership our Armed Forces and nation deserve.

I climbed the stairs with my heart hammering, every step a reminder that being unarmed in a gunfight is a special kind of helpless.

America’s elites dodge war’s costs while embracing endless militarism, leaving ordinary families to bear the burden of sacrifice.

I came home from Bucha with the faces of the dead fixed in my mind and a single, stubborn question riding shotgun: how do we make Putin and his enablers answer for what they did?

I warned them it was only a matter of time before we were attacked—but nobody listened, and twenty-two people paid the price.

Having walked the dusty camps of Gaza and the corridors of Israeli power alike, one can conclude that this conflict isn’t about religion—it’s about land, politics, and the human cost of indifference.