Joe, it’s the same bloody circus, isn’t it? Only the headliners change, while the carnies keep spinning the same deadly routines. Once upon a time, it was choppers slicing the humid air over rice paddies, napalm signatures scrawled across the jungle like obscene graffiti. Now it’s sleek drones circling high above the desert, quiet as vultures, feeding off some Pentagon algorithm written in a basement by men who never saw a battlefield. And the boots on the ground? Brown faces. Always brown faces. Hired guns with local dialects, trained to pull triggers on people who look just like them.

No Viet Cong ever called me gringo, Joe, but plenty of suits in Washington would. That’s the thing, isn’t it? The empire always finds new cogs for the machine—proxy wars painted in the moral shades of liberation, while the gears chew through whatever patch of land we’ve deemed strategic. Back then, they sold it with dominos and democracy. Now, it’s lithium, oil, and the “stability of the region.” Same hustle, different pitch.

But here’s the kicker: we’ve outsourced not just the killing but the dying. Used to be American boys in body bags, flag-draped for prime-time sadness. Now it’s brown kids with boots and borrowed M4s, ground into dust in places that don’t even make the evening news. We’re still calling the shots, Joe, but we’ve handed them the guns. And if they won’t fire, hell, we’ll let the drones do it for them.

It’s a slow apocalypse, choreographed for profit. And somewhere, in some air-conditioned think tank, a man in a suit is patting himself on the back for devising a “sustainable intervention model.” Sustainable for whom, Joe? Not for the kid buried in the sand with shrapnel in his chest. Not for the village bombed into the Stone Age so we could “win hearts and minds.” But the stock prices? Oh, those are soaring.

We used to fight our wars with muscle, now we fight them with middlemen. Brown on brown violence bought and paid for in greenbacks, delivered with the precision of an Amazon package. And when it’s all over, Joe, when the dust settles and the last bullet is fired, we’ll blame them for the mess we made. Call them savages. Call them failed states. Call them anything but victims of a system we engineered.

No Viet Cong ever called me gringo, Joe, but plenty of them learned the hard way what that word really means. It means you’re expendable. It means you’re a pawn. It means you’re the collateral damage in someone else’s war. And God help you if you ever try to rise above your station.