EPILOGUE THE INTERIOR CONTINENT

On late winter nights a lively group of young men and women gather round the tables at the High Noon Saloon and Brewery in Leavenworth, Kansas, escaping from the snowdrifts and ransacking prairie wind. Green Berets, Army FAOs (foreign area officers), and others spending their required year or two of study at nearby Fort Leavenworth talk loud above the karaoke music in the adjoining room. They swap stories about intrepid French tourists in Cambodia, tensions on the Saudi-Qatari border, the Maoist rebellion in Nepal, training missions that might one day materialize in Libya, getting sick in Afghanistan, chewing ghat in Somalia, and the awful Korean winters—worse than those in Kansas. I recall a young married couple, both Army majors, he a graduate of the Citadel, she of West Point, both from service families—her mother had been a nurse in Vietnam. They would be moving to European Command in Stuttgart, they told me. They could help arrange travel in their AOR, which included the Sahel countries of Africa.

The outside streets, lined with brick warehouses, are named for the North American Indian tribes with which the U.S. Army negotiated truces—Cheyenne, Pawnee, Seneca, Dakota, Choctaw… Two hundred years earlier Lewis and Clark camped nearby. From here the first white settlers moved into Indian Country. Fort Leavenworth, where the tallgrass prairie meets the short grass of the Great Plains, was the starting point for Manifest Destiny.

But nobody at the High Noon Saloon talks about “Are we an empire or not?” Rather, people talk about which indigenous armies are better than others, how successful the Marine training mission in the Caucasus was, tensions between the Army and the Air Force in East Asia, and so on.

Here, as at Fort Bragg, Camp Lejeune, and Camp Pendleton, places where people wear BDUs rather than dress greens, the talk is about application rather than conceptualization. Here you find out what is really going on in the world, where a traveler should be headed next, and who could help him get there. Here, in the interior continent, western Iraq seems closer than western Kansas during the Indian wars.

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