Excerpt: I Am the New Black

That was how they sold it. I still think it's crazy. The Russians lived thousands of miles away, where it snowed and they drank vodka and ate potatoes and waited on line for toilet paper all day. They had their ideals, and Lenin and Marx were like their Biggie and Tupac, but I don't think those guys gave a f*** about Vietnam, or at least not nearly as much as we thought they did. It would be like New York and L.A. fighting over Ohio in the East Coast/West Coast rap wars. Can you see that happening? What the hell could either side want with Ohio? A parking lot for their Bentleys?

In the end, our government sent eight million of our young men—that's an entire generation—over to Southeast Asia to serve, and hundreds of thousands came back dead or wounded or too f***ed up to live right. We don't have much else to show for it, so if you ask me, everything about that war was just wrong. It wasn't the kind of war we could win because there wasn't anything really to fight for! You'd think that after that kind of a blow to America's self-esteem, presidents would be more careful about invading places with complicated histories. Apparently, dudes from Texas whose fathers were president don't learn lessons like that. Anyone who knows anything about Vietnam wouldn't have wasted our country's time and money and lives in Iraq because it's the same kind of war, just this time in a desert. Listen, I wasn't much of a student, but there's one thing I took away from U.S. history class: An army of stuffy British redcoats couldn't beat a bunch of hick farmers with holes in their boots because they were fighting in the farmers' own backyards! Was Bush not a baseball fan? Doesn't he know about the home-field advantage? You can't ignore that shit! Ask any cop who's tried to run down a crackhead in his own hood—nine out of ten times, the crackhead won't get caught. He's got the home/hood advantage.