Whistling Past the Graveyard in the Hindu Kush

Steve Russell
4 min readAug 17, 2021
Photo by William Acosta License CC0 Public Domain

“The difference between genius and stupidity,” says an African proverb, “is that genius has limits.”

I’m a country boy with limited imagination, so I thought the 1975 pictures of Vietnamese on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon fighting over seats on the last helicopters out, clinging to the skids while being…

Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)