excerpt for the day

I found this while revisiting one of my Best American Short Story compilations I've gotten every year since "91. This one, form 2005 edited by Michael Chabon, was written by Tom Bissell and is named "Death Defier". It is a short fiction about a war journalist in Afghanistan, including a misadventure with some newly elected "generals" in the remote parts of Central Asia, and his growing emotional withdrawal from all that he reports. I loved this excerpt:

" 'There really were, Donk thought, and thought again now, 'two kinds of people in the world; Chaos People and Order People. '
For Donk this was not a bit of cynical, Kiplingish-wisdom to be doled out among fellow journalists in barren intercontinental barrooms. It was not meant in a condescending way....Chaos People, Order People. Anyone who doubted this had never tried to wait in line, board a place, or get off a bus among Chaos People. The next necessary division of the world's people took place along the lines of whether they actually knew what they were. The Japanese were Order People and knew it. Americans and English were Chaos People who thought they were Order People. The French were the worst thing to be: Order People who thought they were Chaos People. But Afghans, like Africans and Russians and the Irish, were Chaos People who knew they were Chaos People, and while this lent the people themselves a good amount of charm, it made their countries go berserk, insane. Countries did indeed go insane. Sometimes they went insane and stayed insane. Chaos People's countries tended to stay insane.
Donk miserably pulled off his do-rag, the bloody glue that held the fabric to his skin tearing from his ruined eyebrow ....
'So tell me, Ahktar. What are we supposed to do here?'"

Thank you, Mr. Bissell, for your little nugget of great fiction writing from one journalism student to a real-life war journalist who actually went to Central Asia and reported first hand his own experiences in Men's Journal.