I considered not writing anything else after the barrage of criticism received in response to my first letter that was, I thought, more philosophical in tone than anything else; a meditation on war and peace. But then I wrote another letter because I was concerned that so many readers just didn’t get it.

I did forget, and have been harshly reminded about, what has taken place in our culture since I protested the war in Vietnam and learned the alternative values of the 1960s.

I continue to believe that humankind is dualistic in nature, containing the extremes of good and evil, and I am not different from any of us in that regard.

I think that issues like patriotism and nationalism, while survivalist in nature, are also divisive and destructive. But we do not learn. That is clear if you look at history.

It is a quiet rainy day, much like the one when I wrote my first letter, and today the guns of Fort Bragg are silent.

I believe that my detractors are convinced of the rightness of their views as I am of mine and, yes, it is the benefits of democracy that allow us to say what we think and, yes, people have died to preserve those rights.

I will say no more on this issue except to close with excerpts from a poem by the American poet Richard Eberhart, “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”:

“You would think the fury of aerial bombardment / Would rouse God to relent .../ You would feel that after so many centuries/ God would give man to repent .../ Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?/ Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?/ Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul/ Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?”

Bob Katrin