I’ll never forget the exhilaration in a battalion briefing room as forward-deployed Drug Enforcement Agency operatives crowed about their latest opium raid and burning of poppy fields. And it took a while for these memories to hark back to triumphant newspaper headlines or TV news segments of police swoops on Mojave meth labs. The juxtaposition of the Palms and the Helmand is not a perfect fit. Discerning the continuities at all is not something that came easily to me. Too many received wisdoms got in the way, especially the dichotomies among them: jargony distinctions like “schoolhouse” and “the fleet,” predeployment and deployment, or stateside and “in country” (originally “Indian Country”). Also more widely recognized ideological divides between domestic and foreign, national and global that have always, in turn, been attended by the tacit distinctions between civilization and chaos, enlightenment and areas of darkness. I had been trained my entire life not to connect what, in the course of a slow and painful unlearning — an unlearning of which this essay is very much a part — I am now so insistent must connect. The gated perimeters, violent diversions, and rent faces in the background are not just over there, in the theater of war. They have come home, or were part of our home to begin with, exported and imported a thousand times over, across the earth. They are borderless, even ubiquitous.