training grounds of the Colombian Army (ostensibly in drug interdiction), to a semester as a West Point lecturer, to Mogadishu at the time of the operation immortalized in Black Hawk Down. Unlike the typical soldier’s memoir, Goff does not in machismo or heart-searching. He draws lessons from his past, lessons about foreign policy, lessons about the police-actions designed to create stable environments for US corporations in the Western Hemisphere, lessons about how the days of the American Imperium are numbered. The books covers such subjects as: the slow collapse in Armed Forces morale due to the ongoing reductions in health and pension benefits; the continual overestimation of the ability of technology to work in hostile terrain; the moral in the story of Odoacer, the Germanic mercenary who turned against his Roman employers and sacked Rome in AD 476; new American Empire ignorance of the lessons of history; the failure of "intelligence" as a result of racist stereotyping of countries unwilling to submit to US hegemony.

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