In 2004 Keyser was attached to the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment, part of 3rd Marine Division of III Marine Expeditionary Force. During the Second Battle of Fallujah, it was Keyser’s job to put Marines back together, as best he could, while under fire. . . .

It was his work with civilians, his memories of that time in his life, that drew him to This War of Mine, an upcoming game by 11 bit. The game aims to tell the story of war from the perspective of the innocents trapped inside it. It is a narrative adventure survival game unlike any other, where players shepherd a ragtag group of strangers and, with luck, help them to survive.

The game appealed to Keyser right away, because it was the first time he had seen his experiences shown in the hobby he loves. Shortly after he learned of the game the former corpsman volunteered to help 11 bit playtest it, free of charge. He’s been helping tweak the game for months, a task that at times has been hard for him.

“I was diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder in 2007 when I was discharged,” Keyser said. “It’s definitely manifested over the past few years. I’ve been married twice. I’m an alcoholic. There are lots of not-great things that have occurred for me mentally.

“[This War of Mine] is definitely very affecting. My mind automatically goes back. I played a build one time and I was kind of taking notes and I kind of had to say, !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;Okay. I’m not going to do this again for a couple of days.'”

Keyser believes that the message the game conveys is important for Americans to hear — especially veterans. Part of the goal of the work Keyser is doing for 11 bit is making sure this game is worth a veteran’s time.

“From my perspective,” Keyser said, “it’s effective as a game. I am certain there are vets — probably a lot of my buddies out there — that will have a hard time sitting down to play this kind of thing. And that’s what I think of too; is this game meaningful enough that other veterans might sit down and, regardless of how it makes them feel mentally, still push through? Is that going to happen? Will they still do it, even if it makes them feel a certain way?”

The kind of empathy games can bring about, Keyser said, can create a kind of experience that veterans might not otherwise get from modern games.

“I’ve been thinking that a game like this needs to be made for quite some time now,” Keyser said. “Especially in the gaming climate with Call of Duty and things like that are really popular, this is kind of something that needs to be done.

“Every few seconds I’m thinking of how this place looked like a building that I’ve seen … I’m automatically thinking specifically about Fallujah, about people who may have had to [take shelter where I was fighting], and my mind goes right there. We had to sleep in some of those ruined buildings as well.”

–Charlie Hall, Meet the Iraq veteran helping to make an unconventional game about war
Polygon (4 September 2014)

Hey, remember back when we elected that progressive President who was going to close Guantanamo, get rid of warrantless wiretapping and end the war in Iraq? Boy howdy, that was a time.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama has been pleading with Congress to never, ever let the PATRIOT Act’s surveillance powers lapse, even for a day. Heaven forbid:

President Obama on Friday made a last-minute push to urge Congress to renew key provisions of the Patriot Act before a Sunday deadline, arguing that failing to do so could put the nation at greater risk of terrorist threats.

The president called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to pass a bipartisan reform bill approved in a 338-88 House vote.

"Heaven forbid we've got a problem where we could have prevented a terrorist attack or apprehended someone who was engaged in dangerous activity but we didn't do so simply because of inaction in the Senate," Obama said in the Oval Office alongside Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Senators will return to Washington for a rare Sunday session to try and break the impasse over a series of measures, including language authorizing the National Security Agency's controversial bulk phone records collection program.

The Senate failed to move forward with the House bill late last week when a procedural motion won only 57 votes — three short of the number needed to proceed.

"We've only got a few days," Obama said. "Authorities expire Sunday at midnight and I don't want us to be in a situation where for a certain period of time those authorities go away. … I've indicated to Leader McConnell and other senators, I expect them to take action and take action swiftly."

–Jordan Fabian, Obama pleads that Senate act on NSA reform
The Hill (29 May 2015)

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the U.S. government is sinking another 500-1,000 soldiers into the Third Iraq War. Oh, but they’re Just Military Advisors, natch:

Washington (CNN) — President Barack Obama’s administration is planning to train Sunni tribes’ fighters as part of its move to send up to 450 additional U.S. forces to Iraq, the White House said Wednesday.

The United States is also sending weapons to Sunni tribes, as well as the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, who are operating under Iraqi command, in order to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

. . . The additional U.S. military personnel will train and advise Iraqi and tribal troops at the Taqaddum military base in eastern Anbar province.

. . . The Associated Press was the first to report earlier Tuesday that the administration was considering sending up to 1,000 U.S. forces to the country.

. . . There are currently 3,050 U.S. forces in Iraq — with 2,250 of them devoted to supporting Iraqi security forces, 800 protecting U.S. personnel and facilities, 450 training Iraqi troops and 200 in advising and assisting roles.

–Eric Bradner, Barbara Starr and Jim Acosta. White House authorizes up to 450 additional troops in Iraq
CNN (10 June 2015)

#EndTheWar #USOut #AbolishTheNSA #AbolishThePATRIOTAct #AbolishThePresidency

. . . In June, I deployed several hundred American servicemembers to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi security forces. Now that those teams have completed their work — and Iraq has formed a government — we will send an additional 475 servicemembers to Iraq. As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission — we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. We’ll also support Iraq’s efforts to stand up National Guard Units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL’s control.

—Barack Obama, Remarks on ISIL/ISIS and war on Syria and Iraq, 10 September 2014

This is a promise that is foolish to make. Maybe he’s right that the proxy wars on the ground and the U.S. war in the air won’t end up dragging U.S. forces deeper into a quagmire on the ground. But there is no way he can confidently promise this. War is not a weapon that you can aim, not even if you are President of the United States, and expect that you’ll hit exactly what you hoped to, with no complications or unexpected results. Modern wars are always conducted on the basis of classified information, secret strategic interests that are not disclosed to the public, half-accurate information and politically-filtered intelligence. They operate away from any possibility of informed consent by ordinary people, who don’t have access to the information government keeps secret, and indeed even away from the possibility of informed decisions by that government, which finds itself blundering through the fog of its own secrecy, errors, self-deception and political rationales. Wars develop a logic of their own and they always involve both deception of the public about the likely outcomes, and also consequences unintended or unforeseen even by their architects. It wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. military advisors got drawn into a land war in Asia. It wouldn’t even be the first time that U.S. build-up was really only a prelude to a wider war in Iraq.

Certainly, it has already proven a prelude to bringing the U.S. war power into a wider regional war.

The pacifist is roundly scolded for refusing to face the facts, and for retiring into his own world of sentimental desire. But is the realist, who refuses to challenge or to criticise facts, entitled to any more credit than that which comes from following the line of least resistance? The realist thinks he at least can control events by linking himself to the forces that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it is a question of controlling war, it is difficult to see how the child on the back of a mad elephant is to be any more effective in stopping the beast than is the child who tries to stop him from the ground.

The ex-humanitarian, turned realist, sneers at the snobbish neutrality, colossal conceit, crooked thinking, dazed sensibilities, of those who are still unable to find any balm of consolation for this war. We manufacture consolations here in America while there are probably not a dozen men fighting in Europe who did not long ago give up every reason for their being there except that nobody knew how to get them away.

–Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals ¶ 12
Seven Arts (June, 1917).

End all war, immediately, completely, and forever.

In the middle of the last decade, political scientist Marc Hetherington wrote about the declining public trust in government. . . . And such [media] portrayals contribute to a remarkable problem: not ideological hostility to government . . . but diminished expectations—in the public and in the press—about what government can accomplish. . . .

–Greg Marx, How the Press Erodes Our Belief [sic] in Government in The Nation (April 9, 2012)

. . . The same government that accomplished the killing of over 180,000 people in Iraq, in the pursuit of a transparent lie and an ever-shifting set of the flimsiest possible rationalizations?

. . . The same government that accomplished the ongoing, decade-long state of perpetual siege in Baghdad?

. . . The same government that accomplished the displacement of 3,000,000 war refugees?

To-day is the tenth anniversary of the U.S. government’s invasion of Iraq. It’s a day when, even more than most days, the same government? should be the question immediately asked by anyone who has an ounce of respect for peace, compassion, human life or human decency. There is nothing that should turn you against government as much as simply watching what it can accomplish when it is let loose.

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

Every time they have another Democratic or Republican National Convention, some comfortable man in an expensive suit gets up on the podium and says more or less exactly this, in more or less exactly these words, and in tones of the blandest self-assurance. Every time some politician says this, I want to cry.