Thirty miles west of Manhattan on Long Island is the Museum of American Armor. This collection of mostly World War II armor and equipment is occasionally rolled out for convoys. Museum patrons can ride in halftracks, scout cars and other armored vehicles across fields in Long Island.
Click on the web site above and you can learn about every vehicle in their collection.
The book tracks the pain and tragedy of eternal life, outlasting husbands, wives, lovers, kids: everybody. It's a wonderful book. Read it yourself to find out how Jews from ancient Jerusalem get along in modern America, and every major culture in between.
Eternal life is also the underlying theme of a series of books I read near the end of my active-duty service in West Germany. Before leaving the Army to go to college in 1980, I made several flights back and forth from West Germany to Pennsylvania on Air Force transport planes. On several of those flights, I passed the time reading Casca: The Eternal Mercenary.
Casca is a soldier in the squad in the Roman Legion in Jerusalem in 33A.D. assigned to crucify Jesus. Casca stabs Jesus with a spear while he hangs in the cross. A drop of blood runs down the spear and Casca cannot die. He has eternal life, but in the Army. Lots of armies. Every major army from Gaul to Vietnam. I may have read a dozen of them. I started college in January 1980. All my reading was assigned and I forgot about Casca until reading Horn.
The writer of the Casca series is Barry Sadler. He is a novelist and a song writer and served as a Green Beret soldier in the Vietnam War. His biggest hit was The Ballad of the Green Berets. The link goes to the YouTube version.
In another irony of life, I started a project recently looking at the Vietnam War as the beginning of many of the deep divides that currently plague life in America. The divide could not be deeper between Sadler's song and "War" by Edwin Starr.
Horn and Sadler have little in common, but in both books eternal life is eternal suffering. This year I reached the age consider a full life by the Psalmist in the Hebrew Bible:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, Yet is their strength labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10
Eternal life should not be in this life says Horn, Sadler and the Psalmist.
Since 2016, I have read a lot of books and articles about The Holocaust, visited nine Nazi death camps and many Holocaust memorials. Last year I met Nina Wolff at a history of science conference in Brussels. She was doing research for another book and told me a book she wrote about her father's escape from the Holocaust followed by service in the U.S. Army during World War II. But the first thing we talked about was Axl Rose. That story is here.
Someday You Will Understand: My Father's Private World War II is the story of Walter Wolff, Nina's father. He and his family escaped Nazi Germany, Belgium and France and made a harrowing journey on a terrible cargo ship finally getting to America in late 1940. Walter was 17 years old when he arrived in America.
In 1943 Walter enlisted in the U.S. Army. His fluency in four languages and competence in more eventually led him to Military Intelligence. He became one of the "Ritchie Boys" named for Fort Ritchie, Maryland where multi-lingual men were trained for intelligence service in the war.
By the time Walter finished his training the war was near its end. He arrived in Europe during the negotiation of the final surrender of Nazi Germany. In the rubble of post-war Europe Walter helped to find Nazis among prisoners of war and in the population of Germany and Austria. He also helped Jews in DP (Displaced Persons) camps organizing delivery of hundreds of packages of life-saving supplies from America.
At the end of his tour he was able to find and recover many of the possessions his family left behind in Belgium during their escape. The story is told primarily in the hundreds of brilliant, witty letters Walter sent to his family in America. Walter gave those letters to Nina near the end of his life.
After reading so much about the millions of lives erased and crushed by the Holocaust, it made me happy to read about a teenage boy who eluded the Nazis across Europe, escaped to America, and then went back Europe before his 21st birthday to help bring the Nazis to justice.
In grand histories, the defeat of the Nazis can seem like the work of great leaders: Presidents, Prime Ministers, Admirals and Generals. But at the very tip of the spears thrown by great leaders are teenagers, careless of danger, risking their lives for a great cause.
Walter volunteered for war at a time when the outcome was anything but certain after a series of harrowing escapes from death including sharing a crater with a dud bomb. He joined the Army and went back to the countries who wanted him dead. He was one in spirit with teenage RAF Spitfire pilots who defended Britain during the Blitz; with teenage soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy, with resistance fighters across Europe and the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto who fought back against the Nazis in a hopeless battle.
Old people get us into wars.Young people like Walter win them.
Last week I got a comment from "Deplorable Joe Voter." He was commenting on a post I wrote in 2015 about an Ancient Greek phrase that has become a mantra for gun lovers who believe themselves to be soldiers of freedom.
That phrase is Μολων Λαβε--attributed to King Leonidas leader of the 300 Spartans who faced 100,000 Greeks at Thermopylae. The claim is rubbish. I wrote about the phrase and its right-wing popularity here in 2015.
The post has had more than 1,700 views, one of the more popular posts I have written. Deplorable Joe Voter commented:
It's interesting that you feel the need to prove to the world that you're a moron. Job well done.
Since Joe self labelled with "deplorable" I looked it up:
Deplorable comes from the French word déplorer meaning "to give up as hopeless," meaning something is so bad, there is no hope of improvement.
That would be my view of anyone who would worship Trump. But it is surprising that someone would own a label bestowed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 nearly a decade later.
In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said,
“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Reza Shah Pahlavi, Nazi devotee In 1935, Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty felt the winds of history blowing across the world. He wa...
