The United States has hit Caracas some hours ago. It’s all over the news which, of course, is never truly informative after the first 24 hours and sometimes as long as 72 hours. I simply saw it as inevitable, and far enough away that it shouldn’t blow my windows in.

I looked out at the moon last night before I slept and thought, “That moon would be a great operations moon.” This morning, over a cup of coffee as I sat outside, I found out through international media channels. I sit about 384 miles away from there. That’s not very far away at all if you’ve lived on a continent and drove on it.

The local press will of course be teaming with reports on it largely echoed by the international media I keep track of. The local populace has been quite vocal for or against. It’s been coming for a while, and it didn’t surprise me.

So far, I’m right.

I’m sure people died. I’m sure there was collateral damage, hopefully at least minimized. I’m sure that there will be speculation about wild speculation as the locally uninformed go on wildly tangential narratives. Roll the die.

I remember when 9/11 happened. I heard about it on the radio while driving, and I turned around to go back to see my father. I told him about the news. He said something uncharacteristically simple, to the point, and never spoke of it again:

A lot of people have died, and now a lot more will die around the world.

He was the same age I am now when he said that, only 4 years from his death, and it stuck. And oddly, despite our many differences, that’s a perfect line about this sort of thing.

The world is changing. Some will say for better or worse, riding someone else’s narratives. Some who think for themselves will create their own narratives. It doesn’t matter much who is right or wrong; anxiety about the future is generally useless because by the time we run out of future, we no longer need it.

I hope that this is the end of the violence in Venezuela. I don’t expect that it is, but I do hope so. I also expect that other hot spots around the world will become more hot because of it. I expect that more people will die as the global political tectonics shift.

As nations that think they’re sovereign realize that they only have limited agency, limited by their own capability that they have or have not built with the economies that they could build with. I saw it in the Caribbean lately where everyone was talking about sovereignty in the context of the armada of shipmates I have out there. The world doesn’t work the way some people think.

There’s a part of me that’s quite proud of the Navy and Marine Corps. I expect that there are low casualties, if any, which means less work for Corpsmen. Through thick or thin, those people are still my people. They were given a mission, and it seems like they delivered. That’s my veteran perspective. Unless you’ve been in the military, I expect you won’t understand that, and you should expect that too. When you’re in, you’re given a job – and yes, you make sure that the orders are lawful.

The flip side, where I sometimes have conflict with fellow veterans, is that I didn’t agree with the mission. I have that luxury as a civilian now whereas those on active duty do not. I didn’t agree with the invasion of Iraq, and the many misadventures in the Middle East that were dressed up as foreign policy in the last decades. I said my piece and moved on.

The world doesn’t have an undo option.