A Gorgeous Porcelain Tiger

This story is very, very long. I suggest you print out and read it before bed.

Satisfaction is guaranteed.

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders — the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded.
This was exactly what the…