By the time the sound reached us, it had attenuated to where it was only as loud as a land mine going off in the next room. I dove under a table and found two younger people had beaten me there; so much for combat reflexes. A good place to be when the chandeliers are raining glass, though, and the girl I had landed on was agreeably soft.

Of course all the congratulatory speeches had to be rewritten with appropriate funereality, and I came to dread the cognitive dissonance that united them all in clumsiness. As if good things and bad things couldn’t happen at the same time. I suppose that if one is to stay sane as a soldier, that incongruent congruence always has to be there in some part of your mind: no matter how terrible are the things you have seen and done, in another country there is room for happiness and friendship, beauty and love.

American soldiers in their war against Vietnam had a bleak catchphrase for when the worst happened: “Don’t mean nothin’.” I heard about that when I was a teenaged soldier generations later, and knew exactly what it meant. Nihilism is the soldier’s ultimate armor.

Soldiering and the memory of Gehenna might have made it easier for me to accept the huge cataclysm of the Others’ revenge, easier not to surrender to anger. Don’t mean nothin’.

There was a huge amount of anger in the air, understandably, and frustration—a profoundly powerful enemy who is absolutely beyond reach, now and for any foreseeable future.

If the moon’s destruction had only deprived us of spaceflight, most people wouldn’t see it as a tragedy. For many people, space is just an expensive playground for scientists and the military. Keep that money and brainpower at home.

But modern civilization needs satellites. Most communication and entertainment goes by optical fiber, with the satellites a backup except in primitive countries. But GPS devices are in the heart of every car and plane. Big-city traffic, dependent on computer control, froze solid. Nonessential flights were grounded. Computers died.

Of course, we get some fallout from that. Even among the sophisticated government and news workers who are our daily companions, there is the undercurrent of blame, and it’s not undeserved, if someone does have to be blamed. We were the only people who could have done something, out where the Others live, and all we did was deliver the message, the lie, that precipitated this disaster.

The plain fact that we could have been the aggressors—the kamikaze option—is generally known and widely discussed. From one very understandable point of view, we should not have considered any other course of action.