Wednesday, February 8, 2017

One Last Haircut: World War II Vet Shares a Story After Forty Years


Elias King learned to cut hair while serving as a gunner’s mate on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II.  When I met him in 1982, he was planning to retire and sell his barbershop.  After getting my hair cut a couple of times in his shop, I could not believe Elias would ever retire. In the days before talk radio, he was the local source for the true conservatives that were the core clientele of his shop. 

He was loud and funny and had opinions that the John Birch Society might think were too far right.  He did not think women should work outside the home unless they were widows and their families abandoned them.  For Elias, the Soviet Union was the enemy, forever. America needed to stop them everywhere. 

I got a hair cut there once a month just before my Army Reserve weekends.  I was close to thirty years old at the time, and by age, any of the customers and barbers could have been my Dad.  Elias liked me because I served during the Vietnam War, then Cold War West Germany and was a tank commander in the Army Reserve. “Too many young cowards won’t serve the country anymore,” he said.

King was against divorce and sex outside marriage in any way, especially any gay way.  He was against welfare, government programs, government regulations, and he knew the federal income tax would destroy the country.  But he was also self-deprecating and funny when he stepped off his conservative soapbox. 

In May 1984, I came in for a haircut just before the shop closed.  I told Elias it would be my last haircut for a while because I was leaving the Army Reserve.  I did not tell him I was going to grow a beard and let my hair grow out. He was about to close up, which he did promptly at six because, “Mother (his wife) has dinner ready.” But he stayed to give me the haircut.

He told the other barber he could go. It was just Elias and me. Before he started cutting my hair he turned the barber chair so it faced away from the mirror instead of toward it. He was talking, but I could not see his face. He had never talked about the war before, but today he started talking about fighting off air attacks at Leyte Gulf and what it was like when his ship got hit.  But then he abruptly switched to talking about a long Pacific cruise to visit liberated allied ports just after the end of the war.

“I do believe the things I say about marriage,” he said. “But that cruise was, it was, well, the best days of my life.”

He said they stopped at Singapore and “Mamasan was waiting at the bottom of the gangway. She had a baby on her back and would suck your dick for four bits (50 cents).” He described wild sex with women across Asia. “I love the wife, but even when she was young, she was not…” he stopped talking. The scissors stopped.  “I never strayed once, young fella,” he said.  “Near forty years, I still think about that cruise.”

After he finished my haircut he started sweeping up. I took out my wallet. He waved me off. I thanked him. It was years before I saw him again. He was retired by then. I saw him outside the shop. I stopped and said hello, but am not quite sure he recognized me.  I liked Elias King.  He died a few years ago. There was a big obituary about him in his local paper. It mentioned his war service and the victory cruise after the war. “…the best days of my life,” said the young gunner’s mate who learned how to cut hair.


[Elias King is a pseudonym]

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

"...No Time for That, Gussman:" Book Report 2016, Fiction


Lt. Col. Scott Perry, Blackhawk Pilot, Battalion Commander, in Iraq, 2009

In December of 2009 Scott Perry, my battalion commander, burst into my office in his headquarters.  He was sending me on a mission the next day. When he finished the instructions he gave me, he looked down and saw a copy of "Aeneid" on my desk. We had a brief exchange that shows why fiction dropped from its high place in the world to its niche place in the busy, media-saturated world of the 21st Century.

"I've got no time for that Gussman," Perry said. "I've got so much to read, I just don't read fiction."

I knew that night the officers were having a movie night. So I asked him, "Which documentary are you watching tonight?"

"Documentary?" he said. "What are you talking about. We're watching Godfather, Part 2."

"You mean you watch fiction, you just don't read it."

"Shut up Gussman. Be on the ramp tomorrow at Zero Seven."

Most people stop reading fiction with the last book they were assigned in school, whether that was high school or college.  Fifty or more years ago, fiction writing provided entertainment for many people, but it movies, TV and digital games are eating away at the place of fiction in the world of entertainment.

But not on my booklist.  The category I will comment on for this post includes 15 of the 50 books I read last year. Although, 14 of the 15 books I listed in the "War" category are fiction and 3 of the 6 "Faith" books are fiction.  So really, 32 of 50 books, or 2 out of 3, are fiction.

Just to stay with the numbers, 10 of the 15 in this category were written in Russian or by a Russian-born author in English, so I have lately been more than a little obsessed with Russia and Russian literature.

My favorite story on this list "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy should have been on the Faith list, at least for its effect on me.

This wrenching story begins with the announcement "Ivan Ilych is dead" then moves back to the time just before Ilych becomes fatally ill. As fiction the story is wonderfully told. As faith literature, it says a life devoted to material gain is pathetic. But many stories say that. The real beauty is in the character of Ivan Ilych's servant Gerasim. The good man Gerasim cares for his master while Ivan's wife and daughter go on with their lives and Ivan's friends go on with theirs.  Then there is the final agony Ivan suffers going from this life to the next.  From the first time I read this, I felt I could understand how suffering could be used for good and why we humans are never allowed to see beyond this life.

Another view of the spiritual life was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.  This fast moving story follows the main character from the day he defied his father, denied his fortune and struck out on his own, through many adventures, poverty, riches, deep love, self loathing and finally throwing off materialism.  I could have put this book in the Faith category also, but it was more of an adventure that happened to be concerned with the spiritual, than a spiritual journey that was an adventure--as was Narcissus and Goldmund.

Early in the year I read Lolita. I had never read a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, only essays.  The story is obsession from beginning to end, played out in kidnapping, murder and a wretched end for the protagonist.  It is beautifully written and in its own way as creepy as a horror novel.

Hamlet is my Shakespeare for 2016.  I can't remember how many times I have read, seen and listened to this play.  Ophelia's death hurts every time; the slaughter at the end never bothers me the same way.  But my favorite scene is the speech to the skull, "...alas poor Yurick...."

Turning to Russia, is the beautiful novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, which is where I will begin next post.

.......

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Band of Brothers: Book and Video


One of my favorite memories from the 1-70th Armor barracks in Wiesbaden, West Germany, was the night we watched "The Green Beret" starring John Wayne on the dayroom TV.  We hooted, hollered, and threw rolled up socks and popcorn at the TV for most of the two hours. The "Green Berets" may be the worst war movie ever made. As a rule, soldiers make fun of war movies or angrily say, "That shit is wrong...." then explain why.

But not the HBO series "Band of Brothers." Soldiers I knew who thought "Saving Private Ryan" was bullshit after the first 15 minutes or who were shushed making smart-ass comments during the "Hurt Locker" had not one bad thing to say about "Band of Brothers."  In the nine years I served in the Army National Guard between 2007 and 2016, I never heard anyone disparage the 10-part series about Easy Company 2-506th Airborne.

I saw the video several times. I finally read the book. I finished it today. The book is well-written and tells the story accurately, filling in details that could not be easily included in the fast-moving video--like Dick Winters decades-long anger about a trip to America General Taylor (101st Airborne Commander) took during the Battle of the Bulge.  Although the book is very good, the video series is better.

The video follows the book faithfully, but the actors add a dimension the book cannot.  They can give life to the relationships among the men that author Stephen Ambrose can only report.  There is a terrible beauty in the video that only the finest fiction can portray in print.

Usually if there is a book and a movie/video, my recommendation would be read the book first. But in this case, I would recommend seeing the video series first, then read the book to fill in details.

Then watch the video again, which is what I am going to do.

Friday, January 27, 2017

Blood and Money: The NATO Alliance



NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been in the news for months. For the first time since the organization was created, an American President has questioned the value of NATO and accused member nations of not paying their fair share.

No one in the world is less able to make that accusation than the current President. Whatever the state of their monetary payments, most of the 28 member nations of NATO have fought in America's wars. And their men, some of them draftees, have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Our Draft-Dodger-in-Chief, who avoided the Vietnam War, feels free to attack allies who sent men to die in wars we started.

The issue with NATO should be blood as well as many.  The NATO charter includes a mutual defense clause, what is essentially a "Three Musketeers" clause:  All for One and One for All. The ONLY time that clause was invoked was on September 11, 2001, when NATO nations came to our defense.

An honorable man would know that when men serve and die for you, you owe a debt of honor. Only a coward would reduce that debt to money.  Character is Destiny, said Aristotle 2,500 years ago. He is still correct.  Only a man who let another man serve in his place could see NATO as another "Let's Make a Deal" transaction.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Of Course I am Happy! I Know Who the Enemy Is!


In October 1976, I was on patrol on the East-West German border at Fulda. I saw Soviet tanks on the other side of the border.  We had arrived from Colorado less than 48 hours before and had a full combat load of 63 cannon shells on board our M60A1 tanks.

I was scared. But I was also happy. I knew who the enemy was, where the enemy was, and what I was supposed to do if the enemy attacked.  

This morning, a good friend asked me about how I was handling the news since Friday. I told her about going to the march in Philadelphia on Saturday and to the "Tuesdays with Toomey" protest in Philadelphia yesterday. I told her about some of the stuff I had been posting on social media.  She thought I looked happy, a lot happier than she expected.

I said, "Of course. I'm a soldier. I know who the enemy is. I am happy."

It's true. The hypotheticals are over.  Trump is not a candidate or a president-elect.  He is a Birther who discredited President Obama for five years every chance he had.  He has given the head of Breitbart News an office in the White House.  Our President, not some guy, is whining about crowd size at his inaugural and instructing his press secretary to lie.

This is not a drill.  I am a citizen. I am a patriot who actually served in our nation's wars. I am ready to fight.

And I am happier than I have been for months!

Have a nice day!

Friday, January 20, 2017

The Rommel Effect


On social media and in news commentary, there is near universal agreement that making General James Mattis Secretary of Defense if a great thing for America and the Trump Regime. Not only is Mattis arguably the best living general in America, maybe in the world, but he is also seen as willing to stand up for what is right.

But the meteoric rise and fall of the World War II German General Erwin Rommel shows that great generals can make ultimate defeat worse. And it shows that soldiers are lousy conspirators.

The common view of the first year of World War II is that the British and French armies were routed and defeated in six weeks by a superior German armored force using Blitzkrieg tactics. The truth is, the invading Germans were outnumbered and outgunned by the defenders of France. They won because Erwin Rommel commanded 7th Panzer Division at the front of the invading German Army carrying out a brilliant invasion plan.

The British and French had a combined 3,000 tanks, all of which had cannons capable of destroying any of the German medium tanks in the invasion force.  The Germans had 2,000 tanks, hundreds of them armed with just machine guns.  But the Germans concentrated nearly all their armor on a 20-mile invasion front, while the British and French spread their tanks from the Swiss border to the English Channel.  Rommel punched through the allied lines. He personally waded into rivers when his engineers were making bridges for his tanks.  Rommel broke through the allied lines and captured huge formations.

Without Rommel carrying out a brilliant invasion plan by General Heinz Guderian, the allied army could have stopped or slowed the German advance and dragged out the war in France. The great early success of Rommel, Guderian and the German Army led Hitler to invade Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Four years later when Allied armies were back in France after D-Day and Soviet armor was in Poland headed for Germany, Rommel joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. Rommel took his own life after being caught.  Honorable soldiers are lousy conspirators.

General Mattis could be great for America. His job is to make the American military the best weapon possible. He could make the American military an even better fighting force. But Trump, not Mattis decides who that weapon will be pointed at, just as Rommel fought where Hitler told him to.

Generals decide HOW to fight, not WHO to fight.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Book Report 2016, Part 6, Politics

Of the fifty books I read in 2016, just four are in the category Politics, but every book about war is to some extent about the politics that leads one nation to fight with another.

The first book I read on politics was New Czar: Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin by Steven Lee Myers.  This long, thorough book traces the entire life of Putin and the improbable path to his present place at the among the top world leaders.  He has been on top of Russian politics for all of this century, all the more amazing because he was truly as another biography calls him The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen. Masha Gessen's book is on my list for 2017.

Boris Yeltsin picked Putin for leadership in 1999 partly because Putin was the only man in Yeltsin's government who was not on the take. The year before, Putin's house burned down. While it was burning Putin ran back in the house to get a briefcase with 5,000 rubles in it.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many top government officials were taking millions from the failing economy for themselves. If Putin would risk his life for just 5,000 rubles, he could not have millions stashed in Switzerland.  But the corruptions of power corrupted Putin as power corrupts everyone. And now Russia is ruled by an authoritarian government keeping some appearance of democracy.  Putin now is reputed to have more than $30 billion stashed in overseas accounts.

In the spring I re-read The Prince by Machiavelli.  I just got a new translation and will be writing about that later in the context of military leadership. I use the Prince to keep score on the leadership of Presidents.  In a few months it will be interesting to compare Presidents Obama and Trump on how they followed (or not) Machiavelli's council.

In the Fall as it began to look as if Trump had a chance to win, I re-read Why I Write by George Orwell.  In the main essay of this short book, Orwell says that everything he writes will be to bring about Democratic Socialism in Great Britain. Orwell lived only a few years after this essay was published in 1946, and his dream never came pass.  At the end of this volume is "Politics and the English Language" Orwell's most famous essay describing the language used by "Big Brother" in Orwell's book 1984. The whole text of the essay is here.  In the past 30 years since I first read the essay, I heard echoes of Newspeak in many political statements.  But now, the time of Newspeak has fully arrived.

Which brings me to A World Split Apart, the dual-language edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's address at Harvard in 1978.  Solzhenitsyn had recently come to America, exiled from the Soviet Union for his books chronicling the horrors of Soviet life.  Yet his address is not a grateful refugee basking in freedom after a decade in a Soviet GULAG after heroic service in World War II.  Solzhenitsyn says the west has sold its soul for materialism and crushing its own soul for comfort and wealth.  He lived in seclusion in Vermont for almost 20 years, then returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

This year, I will be reading Machiavelli and a biography of Putin as I noted above.  I will also be reading about the years leading up to The Holocaust. Every genocide begins when some minority is declared non-persons by the majority.  All through history mass murder and deportation begin with revoking rights, then revoking citizenship. I will be looking for that in 2017, because that is where the next war will follow.


Not So Supreme: A Conference about the Constitution, the Courts and Justice

Hannah Arendt At the end of the first week in March, I went to a conference at Bard College titled: Between Power and Authority: Arendt on t...