Good Men and the NRA

I really don't want to like guns. I was raised in a pacifist household -- we protested the Vietnam War and worshiped Ghandi. So why do I find war so gripping? My dad, who was a leader in the American Friends Service Committee for many years, is also a Civil War buff. He read us Michael Shaara's "Killer Angels" (the fictional account of the battle of Gettysburg) out loud. When I was old enough, I re-read it -- studying the infantry maps of Little Round Top, where Colonel Chamberlain and the 20th Maine changed the course of American history.

As part of the Good Men Project, I have become close with Michael Kamber, war photographer for The New York Times. We often exchange emails; while I'm sitting in my suburban Brookline home, he's getting shot at in some god-awful war zone in Iraq or Afghanistan. He tells me that there is a time to use guns. The wars may be foolhardy, and the press reports scripted by the military, but the men on the front lines have a job to do, and no choice but to do it to the best of their ability.

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