America is living in the blowback years. What goes around comes around. Unforeseen consequences, or consequences foreseen but discounted. Unleash the mujahedeen on the Soviets in Afghanistan, and you get Osama bin Laden. Blowback usually comes as a shock, because the art of politics is to separate actions from consequences.

A nation always on the warpath means a nation always under arms, a nation to which war is always coming home. A minority of the homecomers arrive in the form of psychically maimed people, violence-prone drunks, domestic abusers, drug addicts, basket cases.

This summer, before Muhammad and Malvo embarked on their lethal jaunts, the whole issue of Wars Coming Home had turned red hot with the murders and suicides in North Carolina's Fort Bragg, a vast military base and home to the elite Special Forces.

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