the empire is fixated on invading any country that doesn't do as they're told, and here some of the price is revealed;

A sad article in the New York Times this week entitled “He Died at War. The Pandemic Gave Me Time to Grieve” by a young woman named Kelsey Baker is a testament to the success of the U.S. national-security establishment in indoctrinating soldiers and, well, lots of civilians as well.

The article details Baker’s deep grief over the loss of her boyfriend, 34-year-old Diego Pongo, a U.S. Marine gunnery sergeant from California who was recently killed in a firefight with ISIS insurgents in some isolated part of northern Iraq.

The couple met at a gym a couple of years ago and immediately hit it off. At the time, Baker herself was in the Marines and was preparing to deploy to Iraq. Soon after she returned, the military sent him to Iraq. Obviously wracked by grief, Baker writes:

“Before his final mission, Diego called me from his team site to tell me he loved me, just in case anything happened. We had been arguing more frequently, and he wanted to remind me that despite the friction he still loved me. I told him the same and teased that if anything happened, I would find a way to bring him back to earth because I wasn’t finished with him yet.”..........read more.........