From a letter in next month’s Harper’s by Jay A. Stout, a retired USMC Lt. Colonel, writ­ten in response to Ben Metcalf’s “Why I Pay My Taxes”:

Met­calf should con­sider what he writes more care­fully, and leave reflec­tion about taking lives to those of us who have actu­ally done it.

And why not aban­don civil­ian con­trol of the mil­i­tary while we’re at it?