50th Anniversary Reunion 1st Battalion 70th Armor

 

Fifty years ago Brigade 76, 4th Brigade Mechanized, 4th Infantry Division, flew to West Germany. Four thousand soldiers left Fort Carson, Colorado, to establish an mechanized brigade on the former air base in Wiesbaden, West Germany. Two mechanized infantry battalions (one of the infantry battalions was from Fort Riley, Kansas), an armored battalion, an artillery battalion and a support battalion along with brigade headquarters moved en masse across the ocean. 

I was the commander of tank Bravo 13 in 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, the tank battalion. Within 48 hours of arriving, the brigade headed for the East-West border at Fulda.  Most of us were in Wiesbaden for two to three years training to fight the war that never happened between NATO and the Soviet Union.  

Beginning last Sunday about 20 veterans of 70th Armor returned to Fort Carson for a reunion on the 50th anniversary of our Cold War service.  

Sam Rushing, who took the lead in organizing nearly a dozen 70th Armor reunions between 2009 and this year put together an excellent event. 

We spent Monday on Fort Carson with:

A Fort Carson Museum tour

Hands-on experience in a Stryker (Armored Fight Vehicle) simulator, 

Lunch in a dining facility  

Presentations on the Stryker and weapons by a Stryker battalion.

After the day on Fort Carson we had dinner in The Airplane restaurant.  It is a 1950s vintage KC-97 refueling plane with booth seating replacing the interior of the airplane. The cockpit and the refueling boom area at the rear of the plane are intact.

On Tuesday we took the cog railway to the top of Pikes Peak.

The final event of was the reunion banquet. The speaker was Lt. Col. Jonathan Patten, commander of the Stryker battalion who hosted us on Fort Carson. Four soldiers from his unit were the honor guard for the event and joined us for dinner.  

After the dinner Sam Rushing read a letter from Col. Richard Goldsmith. He commanded 1-70th Armor for two years between 1977 and 1979. 

The next morning we left Colorado Springs on planes and in cars to destinations from Seattle, Washington, to Sturgis, South Dakota, to Kansas, Minnesota, Arkansas Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

My son Nigel and I were delighted with the event as was everyone I spoke to.

Thanks to Sam, Kirk Wood, Bill Betson and the other organizers for a great event.  

A Tale of Two Lovers: A Renaissance Humanist Before He Became Pope

 

A Tale of Two Lovers by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini is an unusual tale both for its content and because the author would later become Pope Pius II. Written in 1444 while Piccolomini was a diplomat and Renaissance humanist, the novella became one of the most popular love stories of the fifteenth century. After his election as pope in 1458, however, he distanced himself from the work.

The story belongs to the long tradition of medieval and Renaissance courtly romance that stretches from Chrétien de Troyes to the literature eventually satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Yet Piccolomini's lovers are more human than the idealized knights and ladies of earlier romances. They are driven not simply by chivalric devotion but by genuine physical desire.

What surprised me most was the novella's frank celebration of physical love. The lovers meet only twice, yet on both occasions they delight in one another passionately and immediately long for another meeting. Piccolomini presents their intimacy not as temptation but as an essential expression of their love. For a work written in the middle of the fifteenth century, the openness with which he portrays mutual physical affection feels remarkably modern. The story is, for much of its length, unabashedly in love with physical love itself.

In the end, however, the novella returns to convention. The lovers cannot escape the moral and social order surrounding them. The heroine dies in despair, while the knight ultimately marries a worthy bride, restoring the expected balance of virtue and duty. The conclusion is obligatory. The author recognized that his celebration of passion required a moral resolution acceptable to his audience.

A Tale of Two Lovers is not a great work of Renaissance literature, but it is a fascinating one. It stands between medieval romance and Renaissance humanism, revealing a writer more interested in the psychology of love than in the conventions of chivalry. Read today, it is made even more intriguing by the knowledge that its worldly, perceptive author would later become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. That remarkable transformation gives the novella an historical irony almost as memorable as the story itself.

Cambridge American Military Cemetery: Remembering the Airmen Who Never Came Home

Last month I visited the Cambridge American Cemetery in the quiet English village of Coton, just west of Cambridge. Maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery is the resting place of 3,811 American servicemen and women who died during World War II. The Wall of the Missing bears the names of another 5,127 whose remains were never recovered or identified.

Walking among the rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David, I was struck by how many of those buried there were young airmen. The cemetery lies only a few miles from the airfields that housed the Eighth Air Force, whose heavy bombers flew daily missions over Germany and German-occupied Europe. Although the cemetery includes soldiers, sailors, and a small number of nurses, its character is unmistakably tied to the strategic air campaign.

The Eighth Air Force paid a terrible price for daylight precision bombing. A B-17 or B-24 carried a crew of ten men. On many missions, bombers returned to England riddled with flak and machine-gun fire, their crews nursing dead and wounded comrades. Others never returned at all, disappearing into the North Sea or crashing deep inside enemy territory. Walking through the cemetery, it was impossible not to imagine the stories behind the thousands of identical white markers—pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio operators, engineers, and gunners who climbed into their aircraft knowing that each mission might be their last.

The cemetery also contains the graves of Medal of Honor recipients and the remains of airmen whose sacrifice helped establish Allied air superiority before the Normandy invasion. Their efforts crippled German aircraft production, transportation networks, oil supplies, and industry, contributing significantly to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Cambridge American Cemetery is a place of extraordinary peace. Birds sing, the lawns are immaculate, and the surrounding English countryside seems untouched by war. Yet beneath that tranquility lies the memory of one of history's most costly air campaigns. It is a fitting memorial to the thousands of Americans who crossed an ocean to defend freedom and never made the journey home.

The Battle of Salamis: The Victory That Saved Greece

 

Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis is a well-written, readable account of one of the decisive battles of the ancient world. Drawing on Herodotus and other ancient sources while incorporating archaeological evidence and modern scholarship, Strauss reconstructs the naval battle of 480 B.C. with enough detail to make the confused and dangerous fighting vivid.

I was impressed by Strauss’s portrayal of the divisions within the leadership of both sides. We tend to look backward at famous victories and assume that the winning strategy must have been obvious. At Salamis, almost nothing was obvious. The Greek coalition was fragile, its commanders disagreed about where and even whether to fight, and individual city-states had different interests. The enormous Persian force under Xerxes suffered from its own divisions, conflicting advice, and difficulties of command.

At the center of Strauss’s account is Themistocles. Strauss gives him much of the credit for the Greek victory, and persuasively so. Themistocles understood that Athens could not defeat Persia on land and had spent years building the Athenian fleet. At Salamis he recognized that the narrow waters could neutralize the Persians’ numerical advantage. Perhaps most importantly, he possessed the political cunning necessary to hold the divided Greeks together and maneuver both allies and enemies into fighting the battle where he wanted it fought.

The result was a devastating Persian defeat. Salamis did not immediately end the Persian invasion, but it destroyed Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Greece by overwhelming force and helped preserve the independence of Athens and the other resisting Greek states.

Strauss is particularly good at reminding us that history is made amid uncertainty. The participants at Salamis did not know they were fighting one of history’s most consequential battles. They were frightened men making difficult decisions while their leaders argued about what to do next.

The Battle of Salamis succeeds as both military history and narrative history. It explains ships, tactics, geography, politics, and personalities without losing sight of the human drama. Above all, it restores Themistocles to the center of the story: a brilliant, difficult, sometimes manipulative leader whose preparation and judgment helped make an improbable Greek victory possible.

We: The Forgotten Beginning of the Dystopian Novel

 

I finally read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We at the urging of a friend, and I am glad I did.  As I was reading, I knew I had found the source that of the stream of dystopian novels I have loved. Written in 1920–21 during the earliest years of the emerging Soviet state, the novel was considered too dangerous to publish in Russia. It first appeared in English translation abroad in 1924 and was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, just before the Soviet system itself collapsed. That history alone makes We sadly typical of Soviet repression. It is one of the earliest warnings that a revolution promising perfect equality could end in brutal tyranny.

Reading We today, however, requires adjusting one's expectations. If I had read it before reading George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, I might have stopped reading. Instead, I often found it strange, dreamlike, and structurally uneven. The plot is weaker than the novels it inspired, and at times the symbolism overwhelms the story. George Orwell reached much the same conclusion in his 1946 review, praising the book's originality while acknowledging that it was not entirely successful as a novel.

Yet dismissing We because of its shortcomings would be a mistake. Its historical importance and flashes of brilliance more than justify reading it.

The novel follows D-503, the chief engineer of the spaceship Integral, who lives in the mathematically ordered One State. Citizens have numbers instead of names. Glass buildings eliminate privacy. Daily life is governed by precise schedules. Individual freedom has been sacrificed for collective happiness. D-503 begins as a loyal servant of the state, convinced that reason has solved every human problem. His orderly existence begins to unravel after he meets the mysterious I-330, whose unpredictability introduces him to imagination, passion, and rebellion. 

[Aside on names: In the novel men are consonants, women are vowels. Their apartment number and name are the same. In translation, this caused a small difficulty because the first-person narrator is "I" in English. His lover is also "I" short for I-330 and confusing to an English reader.  In Russian the narrator uses Я to refer to himself.  His lover is И-330 or И for short.  The work of translation is endlessly complex.]

The central conflict is not merely political but philosophical. Can human beings ever be completely happy if they are not free? Can reason eliminate the irrational parts of human nature without destroying humanity itself?

One of the novel's finest moments comes during D-503's conversation with I-330 about revolution. D-503 assumes that history can eventually reach perfection, a final state beyond which no further change is necessary. I-330 calmly dismantles this assumption. Revolution, she argues, is never finished because there can never be a final number. Just as there is no largest number, there can be no final revolution. Every system claiming perfection eventually becomes another system needing to be overthrown. It is a remarkable passage because it transcends its Soviet setting and becomes a meditation on every ideology that promises permanent political perfection.

The dialogue:

D-503:  Do you realize what you are suggesting is revolution?

I-330: Of course it's revolution. Why not?

D: Because there can't be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.

I: My dear, you're a mathematician: tell me, what is the last number?

D: What do you mean the last number?

I: Well, then, the biggest number?

D: But that's absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can't be a last one.

I: Then why do you talk about the last revolution?

-----------

Reading We, it quickly becomes apparent how deeply it influenced later dystopian fiction. Orwell's debt is unmistakable. The surveillance state, suppression of individuality, manipulation of language, and psychological control all anticipate 1984. Huxley borrowed different elements. The sacrifice of individuality for social stability, the management of desire, and the preference for engineered happiness over freedom all echo through Brave New World. 

Margaret Atwood, who wrote the introduction to my edition translated by Bela Shayevich, rightly places We among the foundational works of modern science fiction. Without Zamyatin, it is difficult to imagine the dystopian literature that followed throughout the twentieth century.

Even the newest entries in the genre continue to explore questions Zamyatin first raised. Vince Gilligan's Pluribus imagines a world transformed by an alien phenomenon that leaves almost everyone peaceful, cooperative, and genuinely happy—but at the cost of individual identity and independent will. Unlike Orwell's nightmare of oppression, or Huxley's world of engineered pleasure, Pluribus asks whether humanity might willingly surrender its individuality for universal harmony. The question is strikingly similar to the one at the heart of We: If freedom disappears but conflict, hatred, and war disappear with it, have we created paradise—or simply another prison? 

I kept reading not because of the plot itself but the atmosphere of uncertainty. Throughout the novel I remained genuinely unsure who would betray whom. Loyalties constantly shift. D-503 cannot even trust his own thoughts as his awakening consciousness places him increasingly at odds with the One State. That suspense carried me through passages that otherwise felt obscure or overly symbolic.
In the end, We is probably more important than it is enjoyable. Its influence far exceeds its literary polish. Orwell and Huxley would write more disciplined novels with stronger narratives, Atwood would bring dystopian fiction into the modern era through the experiences of women, and Gilligan has carried many of the same philosophical questions into the twenty-first century. Yet all of them owe a debt to Zamyatin's astonishing act of imagination.

For readers who have already experienced 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, and now Pluribus, We is not simply another dystopian novel. It is the spring from which much of modern dystopian fiction flows. Despite its uneven plot and occasional obscurity, it deserves to be read for its originality, its courage, and the remarkable prescience of its warning. Reading it more than a century after it was written, and decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union that once suppressed it, I admire how clearly Zamyatin saw the dangers that lay ahead.

David Hockney at the Serpentine: Peace in a Place Built for War

 

On a recent visit to London I discovered that the setting of an exhibition can become part of the experience. That was certainly true of David Hockney's exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery in Kensington Gardens. Much of the exhibition is devoted to the landscapes Hockney painted during his years in Normandy, images filled with quiet country roads, blossoming trees, changing seasons, and the gentle rhythms of rural life. Yet these peaceful scenes are displayed inside a former World War II ammunition bunker.

The irony is striking. Visitors descend into a structure built to support war and find themselves surrounded by paintings celebrating peace. The contrast is made even richer by Hockney's choice of subject. Normandy is remembered throughout the world for the D-Day landings and the fierce battles that followed in the summer of 1944. Yet Hockney largely ignores that history. His Normandy is a place of orchards, hedgerows, sunlight, and renewal. The same countryside that once echoed with artillery now becomes a celebration of color and life.

Five years ago I visited Hockney's exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where his landscapes from Normandy also dominated the galleries. Seeing this newer exhibition reminded me how deeply the French countryside has become part of his artistic imagination. Rather than chasing novelty late in life, Hockney has continued to explore familiar landscapes with undiminished curiosity, finding endless variation in changing light, weather, and the cycle of the seasons.

What continues to distinguish Hockney's work is his extraordinary delight in seeing. His paintings are less concerned with photographic realism than with communicating the experience of looking closely. Trees seem almost to pulse with energy, colors become more vivid than nature itself, and ordinary country lanes invite the viewer to slow down and pay attention. His landscapes radiate optimism without becoming sentimental.

The exhibition also demonstrates Hockney's willingness to embrace new technologies while remaining faithful to traditional artistic concerns. Whether working with oil paint, acrylic, or digital media, he is ultimately pursuing the same question: how can an artist represent the experience of seeing the world?

Leaving the gallery, I found myself reflecting once again on the remarkable irony of the exhibition. A wartime bunker had become a sanctuary for paintings celebrating peace, while landscapes forever associated with one of history's greatest battles had become images of serenity and renewal. It was a fitting reminder that places marked by conflict can, with time, become places where beauty once again flourishes.

War and Power: Logistics, Industry, and the Reality Behind Victory

Phillips Payson O'Brien's War and Power is one of the most thought-provoking books on military history I have read in recent years. It complements Graham Allison's Destined for War in an unexpected way. Allison asks why great powers find themselves on a path toward conflict. O'Brien asks a different question: once war begins, what actually determines who wins?

His answer challenges many of our assumptions. O'Brien argues that we have been captivated by the myth of the decisive battle. History remembers names such as El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, Midway, and the Somme because they are dramatic moments with enormous casualties and unforgettable stories. Yet he contends that these battles were often symptoms rather than causes of victory. The real decisions had already been made elsewhere—in factories, shipyards, railroads, ports, oil fields, and supply depots.

The book repeatedly demonstrates that armies do not lose because they suddenly fail on the battlefield. They lose because they can no longer replace men, tanks, aircraft, ammunition, fuel, and food. By the time many famous battles occurred, one side had already exhausted its ability to sustain the war. The battlefield merely revealed a defeat that logistics and industrial production had already made inevitable.

O'Brien applies this argument particularly well to the world wars. His discussion of the First World War is especially illuminating. The conflict is often remembered as a succession of horrific battles with staggering casualties but little territorial gain. O'Brien shifts the focus away from individual offensives to the broader industrial struggle. By 1918, the Allies had achieved overwhelming superiority in the production of artillery, aircraft, tanks, trucks, ships, and munitions. Germany's armies continued fighting bravely, but the nation itself was running out of the means to wage war. Retreat at the front and revolution at home were the consequences of an economic defeat that had been developing for years.

His treatment of the Second World War follows the same pattern. El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Kursk remain immensely important, but O'Brien argues that they should be understood within larger campaigns in which logistics, industrial capacity, and strategic resources had already shifted the balance. Empty fuel depots, broken transportation networks, and factories unable to replace losses mattered as much as battlefield tactics.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its willingness to challenge familiar narratives without diminishing the courage of the soldiers who fought. O'Brien never suggests that battles were unimportant or that individual acts of leadership and bravery did not matter. Rather, he places them within the larger systems that made victory or defeat possible. Soldiers fight battles; nations fight wars.

War and Power is a superb work of military history because it changes the questions we ask. Instead of focusing exclusively on generals and battlefields, O'Brien reminds us to look at the factories, railroads, merchant fleets, oil supplies, and industrial workers who sustained the armies. His arguments are persuasive, clearly written, and supported by an impressive command of historical evidence.

After finishing this book, I found myself looking back at both world wars with a different perspective. We remember the great battles because they are dramatic. O'Brien reminds us that wars are often decided long before the decisive battle begins. It is a compelling reinterpretation, and one that has encouraged me to read more of his work.

 

Destined for War: Ancient Greece and the Shadow Over the Twenty-First Century

 

A friend with deep connections in China recommended Graham Allison's Destined for War after President Xi Jinping warned President Trump that the United States and China were falling into the "Thucydides Trap." Xi spoke confidently about a Greek historian who died twenty-four centuries ago. Trump appeared unfamiliar with both the history and the warning. Watching him respond to Xi, Trump seemed to be willing to dive into the Thucydides Trap rather than just fall into it. That exchange vividly displayed that ideas born in ancient Athens still shape the diplomacy of the twenty-first century.

Destined for War asks a question that has haunted statesmen for nearly 2,500 years: What happens when a rising power challenges an established one? Drawing on the insight of the Greek historian Thucydides, Allison argues that such moments create enormous structural pressures that can make war more likely—not inevitable, but dangerously plausible. His book is both a work of history and a warning directed at the relationship between the United States and China. If you follow the link above you will see Allison's Thucydides Trap project at Harvard.

The concept at the heart of the book is the "Thucydides Trap," named for Thucydides' explanation of the Peloponnesian War. Writing about the conflict between Athens and Sparta, he observed that it was "the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Allison examines sixteen historical cases in which a rising power confronted an established one, showing that many ended in war while others escaped it through exceptional diplomacy, restraint, or luck.

I read The History of the Peloponnesian War in translation and studied portions of it in the original Greek. I found Allison's treatment of Thucydides both thorough and engaging. He avoids reducing the ancient historian to a slogan. Instead, he demonstrates how Thucydides analyzed fear, honor, ambition, miscalculation, and political leadership—forces that remain as relevant today as they were in the fifth century B.C.

When Destined for War was published in 2017, the United States still largely understood itself as the defender of the liberal international order. Allison's analysis therefore assumed a strategic competition between an established democratic superpower and an increasingly powerful authoritarian China. Reading the book today, however, reminds me how much the world has changed. The international landscape has shifted, and so has American politics. The structural rivalry Allison describes remains, but the political assumptions underlying his analysis are very different than when the book was published. Trump admires dictators and undermines democracy at home and in foreign policy.  

The book's greatest strength is its insistence that history is not destiny. The Thucydides Trap is a warning, not a prophecy. Structural pressures matter, but leaders still make choices. Misjudgment, arrogance, fear, and nationalism can accelerate conflict; prudence, communication, and strategic imagination can help avoid it.

What makes the book unsettling is not that Allison predicts war, but that he demonstrates how intelligent leaders throughout history have stumbled into wars they neither wanted nor expected. Thucydides understood that nations often drift toward catastrophe through a series of decisions that seem reasonable at the time.

For me, Destined for War was more than an exercise in strategic analysis. It was painful to read because Thucydides has long been one of my favorite historians. To see an ancient warning become part of the political vocabulary of our own age—and to watch leaders in both Washington and Beijing invoke it—is to recognize that under Trump we are a declining power because he ignores history in his arrogant ignorance. 

Allison cannot tell us whether the United States will avoid the Thucydides Trap. But he reminds us why understanding history matters. The first great historian still has something urgent to say to the twenty-first century, and we ignore him at our peril.

A Day at the Imperial War Museum Duxford

 

One of the highlights of my recent visit to England was a bicycle ride from Cambridge to the Imperial War Museum Duxford, one of the finest aviation museums I have ever visited. Housed on the historic airfield from which RAF fighter squadrons flew during the Battle of Britain, Duxford is much more than a museum. It is a living airfield where history still flies.

My visit began with an unexpected thrill. A beautifully restored Bristol Blenheim taxied past, its twin Bristol Mercury radial engines producing a sound that transported me back to newsreels of the early years of World War II. Soon afterward, a Supermarine Spitfire taxied onto the runway, accelerated, and lifted gracefully into the sky. Seeing a Spitfire fly from an active wartime airfield was one of those rare experiences that no photograph or film can truly capture. It was easy to imagine the young RAF pilots who once took off from the same runway to defend Britain.

I spent the remainder of the day exploring Duxford's five major exhibition halls, each offering a different chapter in aviation history. Together they present an extraordinary survey of British aviation, from the fragile aircraft of the First World War through the Battle of Britain, the jet age, and the Cold War.

As impressive as the British collection is, I was equally surprised by the museum's remarkable display of American aircraft. Few museums outside the United States possess such a comprehensive collection. The American Air Museum houses iconic aircraft spanning nearly the entire twentieth century, including fighters, bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cargo planes, helicopters, and Cold War strategic aircraft. Walking beneath these machines provides a vivid reminder of the enormous industrial and technological effort that shaped the outcome of World War II and the decades that followed.

Unlike many museums where aircraft are displayed as isolated exhibits, Duxford presents them within the broader story of military aviation. The exhibits explain not only how airplanes evolved but also how they transformed warfare, strategy, and the lives of the men and women who flew and maintained them. Restoration workshops visible to visitors further emphasize that preserving aviation history is an ongoing craft rather than simply displaying artifacts behind ropes.

Perhaps what impressed me most was the atmosphere of the place. Because Duxford remains an operating airfield, the museum never feels static. The sound of aircraft engines, the sight of airplanes moving across the taxiways, and the possibility that a historic aircraft might suddenly take flight create an experience unlike any conventional museum.

For anyone interested in military history, engineering, or aviation, the Imperial War Museum Duxford is an extraordinary destination. It combines the history of the Royal Air Force, the remarkable contribution of American air power, and the excitement of seeing historic aircraft still alive and flying. For me, the ride from Cambridge and the day spent at Duxford became one of the most memorable experiences of my visit to England.

Reading Robert Alter: The Psalms and the Wisdom Books

 

Over the past year I have read two of Robert Alter's remarkable translations of the Hebrew Bible: The Book of Psalms and, more recently, The Wisdom Books. Together they have reinforced my conviction that the best biblical translations are usually the work of a single gifted scholar rather than a committee.

Committee translations inevitably smooth away differences. Their goal is broad acceptance, which often means compromise. A single translator, by contrast, can preserve a coherent literary vision. Whether one agrees with every choice or not, the reader encounters a distinct mind wrestling with an ancient text. Robert Alter is such a translator.

Alter approaches the Hebrew Bible first as literature. His translations are attentive to rhythm, repetition, wordplay, and imagery, qualities that are often flattened in more familiar English versions. Reading his Psalms reminded me that these are not simply devotional texts but poems of extraordinary beauty, emotional range, and literary craftsmanship. Joy, despair, thanksgiving, anger, hope, and doubt all find expression in language that feels both ancient and surprisingly fresh.

The Wisdom Books extends that accomplishment. Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes emerge not merely as religious documents but as sustained reflections on how human beings should live in a world that is often perplexing and unjust. Alter allows each work to retain its own distinctive voice. Proverbs celebrates practical wisdom and disciplined living. Job confronts undeserved suffering with relentless honesty. Ecclesiastes questions almost every human certainty while continuing the search for meaning. Reading them together reveals not a single philosophy but an ongoing conversation about the human condition.

For me, one of the greatest pleasures of Alter's work lies in the extensive footnotes. They are not interruptions but companions to the text. His commentary illuminates linguistic subtleties, historical background, literary structure, and alternative translations without overwhelming the reader. Again and again, I found myself learning something new—not only about ancient Hebrew but about why a particular phrase has echoed through centuries of Jewish and Christian interpretation.

These books are far more than translations. They are invitations to read the Hebrew Scriptures as great literature while respecting their religious significance. Alter combines the skills of a philologist, literary critic, historian, and teacher, producing editions that reward slow, careful reading.

For readers willing to linger over both the biblical text and Alter's insightful annotations, The Book of Psalms and The Wisdom Books offer a richer encounter with Scripture than almost any modern translation I have read. They remind us that the Bible is not only a sacred text but one of the foundational works of world literature.

America's 250th Anniversary vs. the Bicentennial

 

My tank, Bad Bitch, on a tank trail on Fort Carson, Colorado, July 1976.

On July 4th 1976 I was in a tank in the desert training area on Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  Our unit, 1st Battalion/70th Armor, just began two months of field training before we deployed with our entire brigade to Wiesbaden, West Germany.  

When we drove the tanks on roads, many of us clipped 13-star colonial flags on our radio antennas. Many of our 54 tanks and one-hundred-plus support vehicles flew the flags celebrating our bicentennial.  

I was 23 years old and excited at the prospect of living in another country.  More than that, our alert area was in Fulda on the East-West border between the two Germanys.  We were being sent as a full mechanized combat brigade of 4,000 soldiers to show America was still committed to NATO and Europe despite our recent troubles.  

Those alive during America's bicentennial will remember a nation beset by riots and terror bombings.  In 1974 President Nixon resigned in  disgrace.  In 1975, we abandoned Saigon and lost our ill-fated war in Vietnam, abandoning our allies.  Our economy was a mess with high inflation and gas shortages.  

Yet, we survived and thrived. Today we are in another series of crises with leaders far more corrupt and foolish.  We just lost another war we started (much quicker this time) but I am planning to celebrate our nation just as I did 50 years ago.

The Declaration of Independence remains the greatest and most influential political document in history.  

Happy 250th America!!

Nazi Death Camps and C.S. Lewis

Emily, Me and Cliff

Since 2017, I have visited sixteen different Nazi death camps in Germany, Poland, Czechia and France.  A few of them twice.  I have also visited Holocaust memorials including Yad Vashem and the Deportation Memorial in Paris on the same island as Notre Dame Cathedral.  Since 1977, I have read all the works of C.S. Lewis, many of them several times.  When I visited death camps, it is with a mind very much formed by Lewis’s view of the world.  Lewis did not write about the camps or the Holocaust, but he has given me the ability to tour the camps and learn the details of the torture and murder committed in these places and maintain my sanity. 

The three books in particular are in the back of my mind if not in conscious thought when I visit Nazi death camps. They are The Four Loves, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. The first death camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In 2017, I rode a bicycle to the city of Oswiecim from Belgrade the continued on to Lviv, Ukraine. I learned from reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder that Auschwitz was the center of industrial murder of Jews. Lviv was the place where the Nazis did almost nothing. Residents of the city raped, robbed and murdered all the Jews in the city and disposed of the bodies.  My intention was to see the worst sites of the Holocaust. Then I flew to Israel and visited Yad Vashem.  I returned to Europe and spent a week with my best friend. He and I were roommates in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in the Cold War US military in the late 1970s.  I left the Army and went to college. Sgt Cliff Almes upon discharge joined the land of Kanaan Lutheran monastery in Darmstadt and became Bruder Timotheus. 

In the years since my first visits in 2017,  Cliff and I visited death camps together.  It was wrenching to go alone, but with Cliff, we could discuss what we saw afterwards.  In The Four Loves Lewis says the posture of friendship is side-by-side, sharing the same journey.  Cliff and I went to a dozen death camps together and also spent a week in Israel. Lewis says facing a hard task together is much better than facing it alone. (He also says shirking is best done with companions.) On our most recent journey Cliff and I were joined by a mutual friend who was deployed to Poland and got a four-day pass to join us.  I taught ESL with Emily a decade ago in Lancaster. She visited Kanaan in 2019. In 2020 she joined the Army and became a combat medic. She was running a medic team in Poland.  The three of us went to the Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek death camps.  A pair of friends can always be joined by another.

Every death camp different. Many people asked me why go to so many death camps? Because each death camp is unique. While the ultimate goal was death to the Jewish people and all deemed unfit to live by the Nazis, each camp was run differently.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau more than a million Jews from all over Europe were murdered: gassed or worked to death. It was also a huge slave labor camp.  Some inmates lived more than a year and survived their terrible confinement. Treblinka, by contrast, was death machine.  Trains ran back and forth from Warsaw to Treblinka.  Those on the train were murdered on arrival, and another train rolled in. More than 800,000 were murdered in just two years. Another contrast in these camps: Treblinka was hidden from view in a remote forest.  Auschwitz is right in the city of Oswiecim. One of the strangest things about visiting Auschwitz is hearing the church bells.  The Catholic Church is adjacent to the camp.

The camps were all run by human beings.  As I see the barracks, the gas chambers, the cremation ovens, the kitchens, the latrines, the guard towers, the work rooms, I see places that were run by men and women who had eternal souls.  The people who ran the camps were not another species of evil beings, they were no different from us in substance, just different in the way they chose to live their lives.  I am aware that choice is limited in a totalitarian regime, but there was resistance.  German police were mobilized in thousands to murder Jews with gunshots and shove them into mass graves.  Some few refused. They were allowed other duties. Lewis made clear there are no ordinary persons. We are all eternal. Including murderers of innocents. Someday they will join the queue for the tour bus.  If they board they will travel to the edge of Heaven and a victim of their crimes will make the long journey to offer them forgiveness.  How many will heed that offer?

Which brings me to the bespeckled embodiment of Nazi evil. A failed Austrian salesman with a talent for logistics who joined the Nazi Party in Germany soon after Adolph Hitler took power because he needed a job.  Adolph Eichmann became a Nazi official and by 1935 was organizing the deportation of Jews from the Reich. In an irony of obeying orders, Eichmann saved the lives of thousands of Jews by deporting them.  Many Jews wanted to leave but could not navigate the approvals necessary. Eichmann organized a large arena where all the agencies were under one roof, completing all the paperwork in a day or two.  The Jews he processed lost all their property but escaped with their lives. 

 When the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann was on hold for two years from late 1939 until early 1942 when the Final Solution became Nazi policy.  The same Eichmann who got Jews out of the Reich used his same logistic skill to round up Jews and send them to death camps. Eichmann took three million Jews from their homes and sent them to death camps.  He was efficient and thoughtless.  Screwtape, the mid-level bureaucrat in the lowerarchy of Hell does what his Father Below orders.  As I visit camps, I look at the rail sidings, the offices, the barracks, and feel the presence of clerks doing their jobs. Reading and rereading The Screwtape Letters I was amused by the wit that assembled these advice letters to Wormwood.  But the evil hovers there.  Eichmann was a small and vain man. When he did his job well he bragged and expected praise.  He would fit perfectly within Screwtape’s world. 

My friends Bruder Timotheus and Sergeant Emily Burgett are with me at Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald and all the other camps helping me to navigate the near-infinite evil of these camps. And C.S. Lewis is there also.