Fiction | October 21, 2016

I can’t tell what I would think about the Iraq war, now, if I hadn’t long ago slept with a man who happened to go on to be a Navy SEAL.

That’s not right. He didn’t happen to go on to be a Navy SEAL, any more than any of us happen to go on to be anything. Seth is a member of the armed forces. Character determines incident; incident reveals character: Henry James wrote that. What is supposed to be my real work involves such quotations. What is Seth’s real work involves killing people and avoiding being killed.

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