Military Pilots Really Have "The Right Stuff"

Tammie Jo Shults, F-18 Fighter Pilot

Today I listened to the audio of pilot Tammie Jo Shults calmly speaking with Air Traffic Control in Philadelphia after the Number 1 engine exploded on her Southwest Boeing 737 aircraft.  Her voice had the kind of calm I have heard on headsets when I have been on military aircraft in serious trouble.  You would never know the danger from the voices of the pilots.

The Exploded Engine on Southwest Flight 1380

Shortly after I enlisted in 1972, I discovered that active duty soldiers could fly anywhere for $10. After I settled in to my first permanent duty station at Hill Air Force Base in Utah late that year, I decided to take a week’s leave and fly military from Utah to Boston and try out Space Available Flying.

I showed up flight operations at Hill the morning my leave began.  The first flight out was to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver.  It was an executive jet flying empty to pickup a general. I was a 19-year-old Airman First Class at the time.  They signed me up for the flight. I was the only passenger for the 500-mile trip over the Rocky Mountains.  It was glorious.  I had a drink and snacks served by the sergeant who was the steward on the plane.  I arrived in Denver thinking that flying “Space A” was about the coolest thing that ever happened to me. 

C-130 Hercules Transport Aircraft

I strolled to flight operations in Denver.  The next thing going anywhere east was a C-130 Hercules on its way to Atlanta, Georgia.  I think the plan was actually to go to Warner Robbins Air Force Base, but in the end, Atlanta was where we landed. Atlanta sounded good to me. I had never been to Georgia and I would be on the Atlantic Coast. 

The C-130E Hercules of that era cruised at 300 mph, less when fully loaded as we were today. After the one-hour trip across the Rockies, it would be more five hours inside the engine roar and wind noise of the four-engine Hercules.  The plane was fully loaded with palletized cargo under straps including what looked like Army mobile radar.  I walked up the tail ramp and past the cargo to the front of the plane.

Behind me, more than 50 high school ROTC cadets filed in for a trip to Georgia for a convention of some kind.  For some of these kids, it was their first flight.  In a C-130, everyone sits in fold-out seats made from nylon strapping material facing the middle of the plane.  The few windows were behind the heads of the cadets. Most of the cadets had their official USAF bag lunch as did I: two bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread, chips, a cookie, and a carton of milk.  Those lunches would keep me busy for much of our ill-fated flight. 

Before we took off, the loadmaster handed me a set of headphones and asked me to help with the cadets.  I said sure and started checking seat belts.  The loadmaster told the cadets not to look at the cargo while we were in flight and to keep their seatbelts on unless they had to get up.  If you have never been in a C-130 or other cargo plane with seats down the sides of the fuselage, it is great advice not to look at the cargo, but it’s pretty much impossible.  The shaking cargo in flight will shift even a good digestive system into reverse. 

The flight was smooth for the first hour.  Many of the cadets laughed and joked and ate their bologna and cheese sandwiches.  An hour later we hit turbulence.  I watched some those happy teenage faces go pale, then green.  I grabbed a stack of airsickness bags and passed them out, open and ready for use.  Then I collected them. 

The kids kept me busy for the next few hours. While I was helping one of the kids out of the toilet, I left my headphones hanging on the bulkhead.  As we sidestepped toward his seat, the plane shuddered. When the kid was safely buckled in, I went back and grabbed my headset.  I heard the pilot say, “No fuel to the right wing. Engines three and four inop. Feathering props.”

The plane was crabbing in the sky. With power only on the left wing, the plane would try to spin clockwise, then flip back when the counterforces built up.  So we oscillated as if there were an axle sticking up and down between the wings and we rotated on it.

The pilot had been talking to air traffic control. He came back on the intercom. “We’re 70 miles out. Runway at Hartsfield will be clear for us. Ten years ago in the ‘Nam I landed a model B with one engine and some big chunks of wing missing. We’ll be fine. Big bump, when we first touch down, then we’ll be fine.”

We slowly descended. Our slower airspeed made crabbing less violent. The loadmaster and I double-checked seatbelts and told all the kids everything was fine and we would land soon. We were lying with a smile.

Ten miles out I went up to the flight deck and looked ahead though the cockpit.  Red lights were everywhere on the airstrip. The pilots and the rest of the crew were perfectly calm, but it seemed like the rest of the world thought a plane with two dead engines was a problem. 

We descended. As we neared the ground the pilot pulled the nose up hard.  When we touched, the plane took one big bounce, skidded right for a couple of seconds, then settled down and stopped quickly. 

I waited until all the kids had filed out before I grabbed my duffel bag and walked down the ramp.  Fire trucks and ambulances ringed the area. I couldn’t count all of the emergency vehicles that were waiting for that big bounce to turn into something worse.  I sat on my duffel bag and waited for the crew to come out of the plane.  When the pilots and the flight engineer came down the ramp, they were talking like nothing had happened.  The loadmaster came over and shook my hand. He thanked me for helping out with the kids. 

A couple of decades later I would read Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” and know that the “Cool” those astronauts brought to the Mercury space program came from learning to fly in the military.  Alan Shepard, John Glenn and the other astronauts, the heroes of my Cold War youth, are now pilots like Tammie Jo Shults and Chesley Sullenberger, military pilots, masters of the complex skill of flying and who remain calm and competent when engines fail.

   

Empathy: The Tyrant’s Key to Manipulating Fools

In a perfect world, empathy would always be good. It would describe our capacity to identify with the suffering of others. We would use empathy to experience the humanity we all share and that experience would lead us to love. 

But the world is not perfect, and in a tyrant’s world, empathy can be easily used to stir fear and hatred. The same empathy that led Mother Teresa of Calcutta to lift lepers out of gutters in Calcutta can reinforce the anti-immigrant hatred in Fox News viewers.  I recently tuned to the Fox News Channel several times in a week to look for weaponized empathy.  It showed up immediately and forcefully.

Laura Ingraham (before she went on “vacation”) showed a report of an illegal immigrant escaping custody while being deported and another report of an illegal immigrant robbing a store.  The intent of these reports on the anti-immigrant network is to fan fear and hatred among their viewers.  Ingraham is manipulating empathy to stoke fear. 

On Fox News, criminals have brown skin.  Fox News never referred to the Parkland mass murderer as a terrorist, despite killing seventeen people. Fox never showed a picture of the shooter in a #MAGA hat. The shooter in Las Vegas who killed 58 and wounded 500 was not labeled a terrorist. These killers are white, so they are labeled as mentally ill. Even with 500 people dead and dying, the white shooter is not labeled a terrorist.  Every Muslim killer is a terrorist on Fox News as in White House tweets.  The President never labels white mass murderers terrorists. 

Every tyrant perverts empathy in this way to fan hatred in his people against “others.” The Russian Tsars labeled Jews as “others” and caused more than a million Jews to be killed in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century in Russia.  Hitler screeched about German victims of Jewish crimes on his way to setting up the Holocaust.  Putin of Russia, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Rouhani of Iran, Asad of Syria and the other tyrants in charge of a fourth of the world’s governments all use empathy to define enemies of the people and unify hate to reinforce their tyranny. 

In his book “Against Empathy,” Paul Bloom warns of that most of us see our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness.  

“Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it,” he says.

Bloom, in sharp contrast, says empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.

In a talk at Franklin and Marshall College recently, Bloom told the audience that in psychological evaluations, that scoring low score on tests of empathy predicts nothing about behavior. Psychopaths score low on empathy, but so do those who have Asperger’s Syndrome. There is no correlation between low empathy and aggression. 

The best predictor of aggression:

--History of violence

--Lack of impulse control

--Need for stimulation

He joked with the audience that he would feel no danger if those in the front row scored low on empathy tests. But if those in the front row had a history of violence, lacked impulse control and looked bored, he would exit the stage.

After the talk, I thought about another word that seems to define a virtue, but can lead to tragedy in the wrong circumstances:  Loyalty.  I am currently reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow.  Among the many reasons 700,000 Americans died in that most murderous of all of America’s wars is misplaced loyalty. Every one of the senior commanders in the Southern Army had sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Lee, Longstreet, Stuart, Early and all the rest of those generals decided their loyalty lay elsewhere in defending their state or defending their right to keep other men in bondage. 

Misplaced loyalty led to unparalleled slaughter and misery. 

Honorable men of the German Wehrmacht followed their perverse and murderous leader into war that left a stain on their nation that can never be fully erased. 

Like loyalty, empathy needs rational thought as a guide. Empathy can lead a surgeon who could make a million dollars a year to go to a refugee camp with “Doctors without Borders,” and serve the most wretched among us.  It can also thousands of fearful fools at Trump Rally to chant “Build a Wall – Kill them all.” (NY Times August 3, 2016)

Empathy, like loyalty, can make our lives richer, but neither loyalty nor empathy can be an end in itself. Both must be kept in check by clear, rational thought. 

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Every Week in Cold War West Germany, Gas Mask Drills

Every week during my three years in Cold War West Germany, 

the Tankers of 1-70th Armor had a MOPP drill. Gene Pierce, Abel Lopez and Don Spears

are in the motor pool celebrating MOPP Level 1. 

With Russian Nerve Agent VX in the news, I remembered donning a mask and occasionally putting on full protective gear every week when I was stationed in Wiesbaden in Cold War, West Germany in the late 70s.  An alarm would sound and we would mask wherever we were and continue to work.  

Most days, if we were on post we were in the motor pool.  If we were tightening end-connector bolts or checking ammo racks, we masked and continued with the task in hand.  I had taught classes, including Chemical, Biological, Radiation classes when the alarm sounded and had the odd experience of seeing a room full of men stand and mask, then resume their seat.  It is difficult to be understood wearing a mask, so I dismissed the class.

It really sucked for those who had been waiting for food in the huge consolidated mess chow line then were not able to eat it.  

We did not often go to full MOPP gear (Military Oriented Protective Posture) because they were controlled items and had to be signed for.  Of course, when the drill was going to be full MOPP we knew it because it had to be issued in advance and carried everywhere: charcoal-lined suit, boots, gloves, everything.  

The Soviets had millions of pounds of VX gas they manufactured before they had a nuclear bomb and kept making for years after.  I wrote about the leader of the VX program in the Soviet Union recently, a man named Boris Libman who shows just how bad life can be for a hero of the Soviet Union.

With Soviet nerve gas back in the news, the Cold War is back in our lives.    

My First Military Haircut, February 1, 1972

The night before my Basic Training haircut.

When I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base on February 1, 1972, among the first order of business was the haircut.  For me and many other recruits, this was a matter of no small delight for the three barbers shearing our shoulder-length locks down to military crew cuts.  We paid for the haircut, twenty-five cents if I remember correctly. When it was my turn, the thin, grinning guy with several teeth missing said, “Lookie here fellas, another pretty one.” 

My wavy, shoulder-length hair fell to the floor joining a pile that could have been a couch cushion.  As my hair hit the floor, the third barber took a break and started sweeping the curls and waves into a waste bin in the corner. 

Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” was released more than two years before in September of 1969.  The barber was humming while my hair floated to the floor.  I had not heard “Okie from Muskogee” at that point in my life.  I would hear the song in Denver after basic training when country music would become part of the background sound of my barracks life. 

Whether the humming hair harvester was serenading me with Haggard’s Hippie-Hating Hymn of some other country call to arms, he enjoyed sending my transient tresses to the floor. 

With shoulder-length hair and head-to-toe discomfort, the barber knew I was a Yankee.  Because I was at Air Force basic training in February he could assume I was a Liberal, but not rich enough to buy my way out of the draft and took the safer route of the service in which about one percent were in the line of fire and 99 percent were on big bases protected by the Army.  

He would not have guessed that the skinny recruit he was shearing was the son of two enthusiastic Goldwater Republicans, my uncle was on his third tour flying F4s over Viet Nam and that I had, in fact, enlisted before my draft number was published.  Two months later, my sister would send me that draft number, 269, written on a small poster she sent in a large, brown envelope, much to the amusement of my fellow basic trainees.

The Topless Shoeshine Parlor: The Draft-Era Military Really was Different

After Basic Training, the Air Force sent me to a technical school at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado.  The base is now a community college, a golf course, and a museum of the many missile and weapons technicians trained there during Cold War. 

In 1972, Airmen with free time could take a bus or walk the 108 blocks west to downtown Denver.  The first time I went to Denver was in April. The weather was nice so ‘Bama (my basic training bunkmate) and I walked to the city.  A few blocks east of the base on Colfax was proof positive we were serving in a draft-era military composed of mostly 19-year-old single men.

We walked east past taco stands, pawn shops, pool halls, stripper bars, bars without strippers, tattoo parlors, burger joints, military surplus stores, camera shops, and other stores of interest to young men easily parted from their meager incomes.  At about the 9300 block of East Colfax Avenue, ‘Bama stopped and said, “Lookie here Gussman. Son. Of. A. Bitch.”

We were staring in the front window of the only Topless Shoeshine Parlor I have ever seen before or since. My 19^th birthday was still a few days away, so as far as I knew I was still the only 18-year-old virgin in the United States Air Force, or maybe in the world.    

‘Bama, being a man of the world, insisted it was a rip-off and we should just keep walking.  I took his advice, but as we walked away, I was twisting my neck farther than normal anatomy allows to look at the hypnotic motion that occurs when a woman wearing just a skirt rhythmically rubs a shine cloth on a boot.

Topless shoeshine parlors were a 1970s phenomenon. They were also part of the culture around military bases that began to disappear with the all-volunteer Army. From its beginnings with the end of the draft in 1973, the volunteer army recruited more and more married soldiers. With the bad economy of the 70s, especially after the oil crisis, the Army recruited men who needed medical care for their wives and kids.  All through the late 70s, the replacement soldiers who came to our unit fit this profile: 19-21 years old, married, one child, wife is pregnant. Like most soldiers, that young man was from the south or the west.

With more married soldiers, wives had more influence on the culture on and off the base. The stripper bars and other family unfriendly businesses moved away from the gate of the base.  It’s not like the soldiers stopped going to strip clubs, topless shoeshine parlors or pool halls, but with so many wives going on and off base, they went to strip joints away from the gate. 

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Who Fights Our Wars? "Doc" Dreher, Blackhawk Pilot

Darren "Doc" and Kate Dreher at the Aviation Ball

Through Facebook, I just saw that a friend I deployed with in 2009-10 is off to another overseas adventure. 

Darren “Doc” Dreher is a Blackhawk pilot. We first met during training for deployment to Iraq. We were at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, getting ready to fly to Kuwait and meet up with our helicopters and equipment. Then we went into Iraq. 

Like nearly everyone in the 28^th Combat Aviation Brigade, Pennsylvania Army National Guard, Doc is from the mid state, not the city.  He lives in vast 570 area code that, together with 814 covers the majority of the population of the Keystone State.

When Doc and I first started talking it was because one of the other pilots let him know there was an old sergeant who was a liberal in Echo Company.  We started arguing about whether the TEA Party were just the nicest, cleanest most well-behaved people who ever graced the National Mall with their presence, or they were out-of-the-closet racists trumpeting Birther and other conspiracies inflamed by idiots like Glenn Beck. That was the starting point for several discussions.

Believe it or not, we kept talking.  We could clear a room with soldiers rolling their eyes about more political bullshit, but they could also see we were having fun.  Doc is smart and quick and won most of our discussions.  In fact, it was pretty clear after a while that he continued the arguments for his own amusement. He would smile just a little before announcing the latest outrage by President Obama. 

But Doc is not just razor wit and a pretty face (there were many jokes about which of us was better looking), he was by every indication I could see an amazing pilot. It seemed everyone wanted to fly with him, both other flight crew members and the soldiers we carried on missions.  One time I flew with Doc was up to Camp Garry Owen on the Iran-Iraq border.  On the flight was Colonel Peter Newell, commander of the 4^th Brigade, 1^st Armored, the unit that provided security for our main base at Camp Adder.  Newell put his unit patch on the nose of Doc’s Blackhawk helicopter.  So when Newell went to the border to oversee anti-smuggling operations or some other mission, Doc was often his pilot.

"Doc" Dreher flying over the Ziggurat of Ur

Another time I got to fly with Doc was for a video camera crew visiting Camp Adder. I think it was a British crew, but it may have been a British cameraman working for an American network.  The camera crew wanted to get a flyover shot of the Ziggurat of Ur, a huge monument to the prophet Abraham that was close to our base.  The wind howled out of the west most days. Doc hovered a hundred feet above the Ziggurat and a few miles west with the aircraft perpendicular to the wind. When the cameraman was ready to roll film, Doc trimmed the rotor blades and we flew sideways at 30 knots with the doors fully open.  It was spooky and exciting to be moving only sideways. I had taken some weird twists and turns flying in Army helicopters, but flying completely sideways was new to me.

After Iraq, I saw Doc only occasionally, if I happened to be on flight when he was on duty, or at the annual Aviation Ball with his wife Kate. He first introduced me to Kate as his “favorite liberal.”  Wherever he is, I hope Doc finds another liberal to argue with. Defending myself from Doc’s wit and encyclopedic knowledge made me a better liberal.  Thanks Doc! 

I hope my favorite conservative has a safe deployment. And Congratulations on your promotion to Chief Warrant Officer 5.

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Boris Libman: The Terrible Life of a Soviet Hero

The phrase "No good deed goes unpunished" is of uncertain origin, but certainly applies to the Soviet soldier and chemist Boris Libman.

Libman was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Latvia in the brief period between the World Wars. 

Libman was just 18 years old in 1940 when the Russians invaded and made his country into a Soviet state.  During the occupation, the invaders confiscated his family’s property and possessions and drafted Boris into the Soviet Army.  

He was seriously wounded in combat twice; the second time he was left for dead.  He survived, but (as we shall see) his paperwork was not so healthy.  After the war Libman applied to study at the Moscow Institute for Chemistry tuition-free as an honorably discharged disabled veteran.  He was turned down because according to Army records he was dead.  With months of work, he was able to prove he was in fact alive and not trying to steal a dead man’s benefits. 

In 1949 he earned a master’s degree and went to work in Stalingrad to develop a production facility for Sarin--nerve gas.  Despite his treatment by the Soviets, Libman believed in communism and wanted to help with what he saw as the defense of his nation.  Libman worked on lab studies and on setting up a pilot plant.  The main source of information of the Soviet team was captured German scientists who were less than fully cooperative.  Libman was not only a talented chemical engineer, but was fluent in German—a fact he kept from the captured scientists.  Libman listened as the Germans spoke among themselves and was able to get information that the Germans were hiding from their captors. 

Most of the hardware for the Sarin plant was confiscated from a German wartime production facility.  For the new parts, Libman had to work with Soviet producers, and so the projected ground to a halt several times.  In the centrally planned Soviet economy, production was measured by the weight of delivered machinery.  So the small, specialized parts Libman ordered for completing the Sarin plant were of low priority and often poor quality.  It was a full decade before the Sarin plant at Stalingrad was in full production.  The year before, in 1958, Boris Libman was named chief engineer at the Stalingrad plant.  In 1961 he led development of a new facility to produce Soman nerve agent.  Again poor quality parts slowed development of the plant.  By 1963, Soviet plans for war against NATO called for a surprise attack with overwhelming use of chemical agents, including nerve gas.  Libman was under considerable political pressure to get the Soman line in production.

So he cut corners.  In particular, the Stalingrad plant had a containment pond with toxic breakdown products of nerve agents in concentrations 100 times acceptable levels.  In February 1965, snow melt caused flooding throughout the region.  The containment pond overflowed its dikes and spilled into the Volga River.  In less than two days the dike was repaired and no immediate problems were evident. 

But on June 15 tens of thousands of sturgeon floated belly up in the Volga, making the river white with dead fish for 50 miles downstream from Stalingrad.  Experts determined that it took four months for the toxins to build up to deadly levels.  Outrage swept down the river and across the region.  The government needed a scapegoat.  On March 9, 1966, Boris Libman was stripped of the Lenin prize he earned in building the Stalingrad plant, fined two years pay, and sentenced to two years at a labor camp. 

Unlike so many others, Libman’s tale does not end in a Soviet labor camp.  After just a year he was released: the Soman plant was so complicated that the Soviets could find no one else who could run it.  Boris returned to the land of the living once again.

In 1999 he left the Russian Federation and came to America. He lived in Philadelphia until his death a decade ago. 

Some of the mess created by chemical weapons was eventually cleaned up by French chemists, including Armand Lattes.

MRE vs. C-Rations: for me, the 21st Century MRE is the Winner!

When I first enlisted in 1972, C-Rations, or more properly the MCI--Meal, Combat, Individual--was breakfast, lunch and dinner in the field if there was no hot chow until I left the Army Reserves in 1984.

In 2007 when I re-enlisted MRE--Meal Ready to Eat--was the field food.  MREs are delicious compared to MCIs. In fact, when I was in the field and the 20-year-olds complained about MREs, I would wish they could be given cold ham and eggs in an olive drab can until they were begging the First Sergeant to give their MREs back!

In 2010, after I returned from Iraq, I made a video comparing the two.  This week it went over 100,000 views on YouTube when a soldier who went to Basic Training in 2007 commented on the video.

Preparing to Survive a Nuclear War, Or Not

In 1977, one of my additional duties as a tank commander in West Germany was CBR NCO. I was the Chemical, Biological, Radiation Weapons Sergeant for our unit.  Each month I gave and hour-long class in a different weapon of mass destruction and how to survive if the Soviets attacked using them.  Although we tank soldiers had a better chance of surviving than ground troops, everyone knew that in a war with nerve gas and nukes and weaponized bugs, we were going to die. 

At the end of each class I would yell, "On your feet!"  The room stood up and I presented the doomsday scenario of the month.  For instance, what should we do if a nuclear weapon detonates directly over or on our position? 

The soldiers answered in unison, "Sergeant Gussman, we will put our heads firmly between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye!" 

We walked out laughing, but no one thought these weapons were anything but terrifying. They still are.
If we knew the nuclear bomb or nerve gas was coming, the main defensive action was to move the unit to safety, if a safe place was available.  

Forty years later, the rest of the world is waking up to what Cold War soldiers assumed could or would be their future, or the end of their future.  

Neil’s Best and Worst Books of 2017: Update With Full List

  

Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

I had a few people who read this post ask me about the rest of the list, so I am going to add the additional titles with only an occasional comment. They will be in my arbitrary categories.

The list below represents the best and the worst of the 52 books I read in 2017. Only two of the books were published this year. The majority of the authors are alive and I went to readings by two of them.  I am an obsessive reader; both in wanting to read and in trying to read everything by an author I love.  In that regard, 2017 was a wonderful year because Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in literature. I started reading him four years ago and in a few days will have read all of his novels and stories. The last book, The Unconsoled will be on next year’s list. All the links are to the author's page or a page about the author. I picked a book or two in each of the categories I sorted them into.  

The recommendations are brief. Each of those books I believe are worth reading for anyone interested in that kind of book. I wanted to write only enough to say, "This is great!" But the last review, the book I did not like, goes on for a thousand words. If you have not read the book, it will be dull since it refers to specific disagreements I had with the author's assertions, and I do not present his side of the argument.  Enjoy! Except the last one.

Poetry

My largest category this year by number of books was poetry at 13 books.  The best book in this category is, for me, the completely predictable choice of Inferno by Dante Alighieri.  This is my eighth time reading this first book of the Divine Comedy but the eighth different translator, this time the Lombardo translation.  It is good, but I still like the Pinsky translation best.  This time, because I was in a class studying Dante, I read aloud and listened to Roberto Benigni read all of the cantos. I never read the Italian before.  I recommend it, just for the sound.

After Dante, the next best was Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky. An émigré communist Jew writing on the theme of the incarnation was not just a one-time crazy idea, Brodsky returned to the theme of nativity throughout his career. A lovely collection.

The rest of the poetry list:
I also read Brodsky's Selected Poems and two other volumes titled Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak.
Staying with Russians, I read Veronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam and a collection titled Four of Us with poems by Mandelstam, Pasternak, Anna Akmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva.

The Bad-Tempered Man a comedy by Menander

How We Must Have Looked to the Stars by Alysia Nicole Harris

Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics by C.S. Lewis
Some Ether by Nick Flynn, which is a memoir in poems

Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

In Flanders Field poems about World War I by several poets.

Fiction

The best of eleven works of fiction I read was Identity by Milan Kundera, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I read a week later.  I had never read Kundera so seeing the world through the eyes of his obsessive, alienated characters was lovely.  These two books also represent two phases of his life. Unbearable Lightness was written when he lived in Prague in what is now the Czech Republic. Identity was written in Paris after he left the Eastern Bloc for the west. I was in Prague and Paris this summer so the two books helped bring back these two lovely cities in my mind. 

Also wonderful: Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. If you only saw the movie, read the book. It is so beautifully told and the poetry in the novel was so good, I next read a volume of Pasternak’s poems.

In addition to Identity,  I read two other books originally written in French:
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant
And two books in French
D'Artagnan by Alexandre Dumas, an abridged version for middle/high school
Il Etait Une Fois three Once Upon a Time stories
Two novels about the Vietnam War by Tim O'Brien:
If I Die in a Combat Zone
The Things They Carried

I read a funny book titled Greek and Roman Comedy by Shawn O'Bryhim

Another Russian novel The Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin, a book that is dark and funny and violent and so entertaining.

Finally How I Learned to Drive a play by Paula Vogel.  A strange and compelling play. I could not put it down.

Memoir

I read eight memoirs this year, but the one that spread into my soul and will not let go is Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.  I read this book a couple of months before visiting Auschwitz and seven other concentration camps and Holocaust memorials. When a book conjures a nightmare, no two readers will have exactly the same terror.  In my case, the most vivid and painful of all the stories was the man who had earned the Iron Cross for gallantry under fire in World War I and thought his bravery proved his patriotism.  Even though he earned the equivalent of the American Congressional Medal of Honor, he was a Jew; he went to the gas chamber.  Since Trump’s election, I have had several people tell me that I have nothing to worry about because I am a veteran.  But the men who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” would kill any Jew, veteran or not. 

I also read three memoirs by Nick Flynn.  The best was a short collection of poems called Some Ether. The other two by Flynn were Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and Reenactments a memoir about making a movie about the other memoir.  I listened to Flynn speak and met him after his reading.  He is about my age and grew up near where I grew up. It is funny he is a memoir writer.  His books and presence reminded me of being beaten up by Irish kids when I was in grade school. 

Gamelife by Michael Clune
The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Why I am so Clever a funny little book by Friedrich Nietzsche
My Fellow Prisoners by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This last one is a prison memoir in character sketches of fellow prisoners written by the first billionaire Putin jailed, way back in 2003. He got 10 years.

History

Six Days of War by Michael Oren topped the short list of four history books I read this year. It is the story of the stunning victory of Israel over Egypt, Jordan and Syria in that order. Israel was outnumbered 100 to 1 and beat three bordering Arab nations in sequence in roughly two days each.  The book shows how the blindness of arrogance can lead armies with overwhelming numbers in men and equipment to ignominious defeat.  If you wonder how a small army can defeat a huge one, this book shows every step in how Egypt took every advantage they possessed and threw it away. It also shows how reluctant allies can be almost as bad as enemies.  Syria especially held back in a way that assured the defeat of Egypt and Jordan. 

I began the year reading the book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose. The book is the basis of the HBO series of the same name, which is my favorite video production on war. The book is good, but there is nothing better than the HBO series.
Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick. The last days of the Soviet Empire.
Histories by Herodotus, Book V partly in Greek, partly in English.

Politics

I was going to highlight On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder as my top politics book for 2017.  But I am going to re-read it in 2018 along with The Prince by Machiavelli.  Both books in their own way are handbooks on how politics really works. Machiavelli advises the prospective leader on how to take and keep power, Snyder tells the rest of us what to do when a tyrant is taking control. If Robert Mueller is fired in 2018, Snyder will be the top of my list next year, assuming ordinary citizens are allowed free use of the Internet. 

With Snyder pushed to next year, I will turn to American Vertigo, one of two books I read this year by Bernard-Henri Levy, French Philosopher who travels the most dangerous corners of the world writing and producing movies about cultures in conflict.  He has written about Libya, Syria and much of the Arab world with insight and empathy rare in any writer, but all the more in Jew born in the rubble of France after World War II.  In American Vertigo Levy reprises the journey of Alexis de Tocqueville took in 1831. Tocqueville planned to write about prisons in America, which he did, but then wrote arguably one of the top political works ever, one still quoted by Americans of every political affiliation.  Levy begins in Rikers and winds across our continent to Alcatraz and loops back through the South.  It really is a delightful view of America, by a visitor clearly delighted with America.

I read another book by Levy, which is the best book in my last category.

How to Cure a Fanatic by Amos Oz
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Science

This year I read some of the best science books I have read in years, maybe ever! The Gene: An Intimate Story by Siddhartha Mukherjee wove together the entire history of the gene with Mukherjee’s family history and the cultures he inhabits.  Improbable Destinies by Jonathan Losos gave me the clearest explanation of the interaction between natural selection and chance. I also read Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel which is a social science or psychology book.

But by far the best was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri.  The last time I was this delighted with a history of science book was Guns, Germs and Steel the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Jared Diamond.  Sapiens recounts the full history of the rise of Homo Sapiens from somewhere in Africa to literal world domination. The early bloodthirsty success of our species is fascinating.  Unlike other human species, we could cooperate in groups as large as 500 to trap and slaughter large species. We wiped out mastodons, saber-tooth tigers and many other large species across the globe and in a bit of multitasking, wiped out Neanderthals and every other humanoid species.  After explaining our proficiency in communication and killing, Hariri contends our hunter-gatherer life was much better than the lives most sapiens lived after the rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago. When agriculture arose, a few benefitted, but many had shorter, more brutal lives of servitude and disease.  From there he takes us right to the present with the rise of culture and shows why tribalism persists.  I am reading this book again next year.

Faith

My last category is Faith.  For someone like me with a believer’s turn of mind, every book has a faith dimension of some sort. The Divine Comedy is a poem, but is also a map of the Catholic view of the universe, physically and spiritually. Every memoir implies life has meaning and value and significance. 

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.  I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, but this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.  Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Overall, the book left me wondering about my identity as a Jew. The book helped me to decide that I could reconnect with the Jewish part of me in a positive and growing way, a process that began last spring and is still going on as the New Year begins. 

From the well of hope that Levy opened for me, I will now turn to the dry, barren waste of Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option.  

When you want to say the nation is going to Hell, you first need a villain. Then you need to say how that villain is going to ruin everyone’s lives. The central theme of The Benedict Option is Dreher predicting the end of Christian culture in America through gay rights and the gay agenda. Dreher is sure that Christian hegemony in America is over. The only option is to withdraw from life in corrupt America into intentional communities of those committed to real goodness. 

The first question I have is, ‘Why will the gay agenda ruin our nation after it flourished with a long history of slavery, Jim Crow and betrayal of Native Americans?’ Is a nation really blessed by slavery and genocide and cursed by gay marriage?

America perpetrated the worst slavery in the history of the world on Africans. They were kidnapped and brought here in chains to be slaves until death for generation after generation. America had slavery with no hope of buying oneself out or getting free. The center of that slavery was the New Orleans slave market.

Dreher grew up in Louisiana and returned there to withdraw from life in big cities.  He is in a state and a region with a horrible history of slavery, followed by 100 years of apartheid called Jim Crow. What could be worse than men who would buy and sell human beings, fight a war to keep their slaves, and then oppress their victims openly for a century after losing the war?

Every confederate battle flag represents unrepentant racism, slavery and murder.  And yet, Dreher says, it is gay rights that will kill Christian faith in a way that Pride, Murder, Rape and Greed could not. Dreher says at the end of the book historians will wonder how a 3% minority killed a great nation like ours.

If America can perpetuate slavery longer than every civilized nation, break uncountable treaties, slaughter Native-Americans, allow Jim Crow laws in the south for a century, and then put a racist sexual predator in the White House with the support of 81% of "Christian" America, can the Gay agenda really trump everything else we have done? Dreher has his enemy.

Dreher begins the book saying he was led to the idea of withdrawal from culture by thinking of his son’s future from the moment he was born.  The book has many instances of Dreher and other Christian parents making what he calls sacrifices for their children.  Dreher writes as if parenting were the central Christian ministry.  As a father of six, I would say parenting is one of the central delights and urges and vanities of the Human Condition.  Can any parent really say that spending their time and money toward the success of their children is a sacrifice?  Does working toward the success of my own children make me the equal of Mother Teresa caring for the poorest outcasts in a Calcutta gutter?  No, it doesn’t. My bright, successful, funny children are a delight, they are not a ministry.  And they in no way set me apart from the world.

I heard many idiots in focus groups and on the news say one proof that Trump was obviously a good guy because he is a good father whose children love him.  Saddam Hussein loved Uday and Qusay. The worst Roman emperors were the beloved, spoiled children of previous emperors.  Trump is, by his own words a racist who is willing to grab other people’s children by the pussy. Parenting does not excuse pandering.

Dreher should know well that nothing ties a person to the world like having children.  No actual Benedictine has kids.  The withdrawal from the world with kids that Dreher posits is not a new monastic movement, but a gated community with spiritual decorations on the iron fence. 

Compared to, say, Coptic Christians in Cairo and other believers facing danger and death, the Benedict Option like a military video game, allowing the out-of-shape, pale player to pretend he is a combat soldier while in the comfort of mom’s basement away from the blood and bullets of battle.

I would have called it the book the Benedict Fiction.

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A category I did not list was language. I don't expect these books to jump on anyone's 2018 list.

Language Learning

Между Нами a Russian textbook.
English Grammar for Students of Russian by Edwina Cruise (no relation to Tom Cruise)
Introduction to Greek by C.W. Shelmerdine

That's the Whole List! 

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