Cold War Manchester Tour from Ian Sanders, Host of the Cold War Conversations History Podcast

 

Ian Sanders, host and creator of the Cold War Conversations History Podcast

pointing out Manchester World War II history. An alarm to get the attention of fire watchers stationed atop buildings in Manchester.

I visited Manchester UK recently to meet Ian Sanders in person, after knowing him for several years as the creator and host of the Cold War Conversations History Podcast. He started the podcast in 2018 as a way to preserve the stories of the people who lived through the Cold War, served in the military in the Cold War, and had stories about their part in this long simmering worldwide conflict. 

The podcast is now in its 277th episode,  about "The Most Damaging Female Spy in Us History." The podcast has had more than two million downloads in the past half decade. 

The tour began with the picture above. Many buildings in Manchester had fire watchers during World War II. In December 1940 the Nazis fire bombed Manchester to devastating effect. More than 700 people were killed in two terrible nights of fire bombing.

Ian showed me a memorial to those who lost their lives. A metal tree with all of the names inscribed in the trunk.

We visited a memorial to the World War II code-breaker and computer innovator Alan Turing. He is from the Manchester area and took his own life near the city during the Cold War.  

We had lunch in the Manchester Art Museum: haddock sandwiches with mushy peas.

Then went upstairs to see a famous painting of the Battle of Balaclava--in the Crimean War.  The painting is the aftermath of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade in which the brave 600 who charged the Russian cannon were all but wiped out.  

We also saw a funny 19th Century "Union Jack" view of the world:

Almost four years ago, before the pandemic, Ian interviewed me for the podcast. In episodes 38 and 41 we talked about US Army tank training and serving on the Cold War border in Fulda, West Germany. the podcast is audio, but the recording of the second interview about Fulda has more than 7,000 downloads on YouTube.

As we walked toward the train station at the end of the visit, Ian showed me the entrance of a huge underground telecommunications facility built under Manchester during the Cold War. It is still in operation today. 

This was my first visit to Manchester. Now I know the city has much more than a famous football club!! 

"He's Got No Damn Common Sense" said Sergeants of Soldiers, But It's True of All of Us

By the time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775, 

the idea of common sense was already disappearing. 

"He's got no damn common sense," is a lament I heard all through my Cold War military career in the 1970s and 80s.  Frustrated sergeants, including me, lamented dealing with soldiers who knew nothing about wrenches or lieutenants who got lost on every field exercise.  

In Germany in 1977, I got a new replacement crewman named Brian. Every new tank crewman starts as a driver, which presumes some mechanical ability.  Brian had never owned a car and never used wrenches before joining my crew.  He became a legend (in the worst way) when I had to show him how to use an open-end wrench in a tight space.  

The head of an open-end wrench is slightly offset. You turn turn a bolt a few degrees, turn the wrench over and turn a few more.  It's slow, but you can remove or tighten a bolt in a tight or covered space by flipping the wrench.  This process mystified Brian.  He got it eventually, but his fellow crew members made merciless fun of him for not knowing how an open-end wrench worked.  

Knowing or catching on quickly to this kind of process is referred to as having common sense.  At the time, I was sure Brian lacked common sense.  

But in her most important philosophical book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt says that by the time Brian was accused of lacking common sense, the whole culture had lost what was common sense across the world.  

Arendt says that the rise of modern science, beginning with Galileo's invention of the telescope, showed we could no longer trust our senses.  

Common Sense took the experience of our five senses and gave them a unified frame of interpretation.  But Galileo showed us that what our senses can be completely wrong even when we simply look at the night sky.  In her book Being Wrong Kathryn Schulz explains how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Arendt says that when we cannot trust the most obvious perception of our sense, we eventually lose the common sense that still is valued in its absence a half millennia later. If physics on a cosmic scale says we are wrong when we perceive the sun circling east to west every day, it's worse at the atomic level.  Who can really believe an oak table is as much empty space as the night sky.  The solid hardwood of every oak plank at the atomic level protons, neutrons and electrons and a whole bunch of nothing. And those atoms are strung together held by charge with mostly empty space in every direction.  

Poor Brian could blame every physicist from Galileo Gallilei to Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman to Roger Penrose for proving that nothing that his senses experience is as it appears. 

The Cold War sergeants' lament that "none of my soldiers has a lick of common sense" was more true than he knew.  The sad thing is, that old sergeant did not have much common sense in the traditional sense either. 

Formosa Betrayed--A Chronicle of a Cold War Failure

Formosa Betrayed by George H. Kerr

 The book Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr, traces the history of the island nation that has been in dispute among nations vying for control of the South China Sea for more than a century. Taiwan came under Japanese control in 1895. At the end of World War II, Taiwan was neglected and betrayed by America and other allied governments. 

I am barely a tenth of the way through the book but already feeling the same deep sadness I felt when an utterly corrupt American President sold out the Kurds to the Turks to protect his hotel in Istanbul. Just after the betrayal, I heard an Israeli Rabbi saying, “Trump could betray us just as quickly.” 

As a Jew, I already felt connected to the struggle of Taiwan to maintain identity and independence when vastly outnumbered. In an echo of current politics, the U.S. ambassador to China near the end of World War II was forced out by an arrogant, incompetent Republican general who used his military rank and connections to circumvent the state department. 

The rogue general Patrick Hurley was eventually pushed out, but Republicans backed by Christian missionary organizations started lobbying to give power over Taiwan to General Chiang. Chiang was corrupt and a timid military leader but was favorable to the missionary groups. So, a cabal of Republicans and Christians worked against the best interests of Taiwan and its people.  Soong Mei-ling, the wife of General Chiang, spoke fluent English and was educated in Methodist schools. She used her Christian connections to hide the rampant corruption of her husband.

The ugly effects of conservative Republicans and conservative Christians working together is something that seems to crop up everywhere on the underside of American domestic and foreign policy.

I'll be writing more as I learn more.

Digging Up My Cold War Past: Moving Day Soon

We are moving to a new house next month. Our six kids are in or through college so six bedrooms is more than we need.  As we cleaned the garage, I found this in a corner. My now grown sons used it to play in the yard more than a decade ago.

In the 70s when I first enlisted, this basic issue.  All of my time in the Cold War Army, I was an Armor Crewman, so I never actually carried my entrenching tool in the field.  But it was fun to look at this old pick/shovel and think this simple, effective tool was part of my life from soon after I graduated from high school.

Cold War Barracks Roommate Visits for 37 Hours

At Philadelphia Airport at 6am 

During the first months of 1979, my roommate in the barracks of the Wiesbaden Military Community was Air Force Sergeant Cliff Almes. On May 2, of that year, Cliff was discharged from the USAF in West Germany. I drove him 20 miles to the place that has been home for him ever since, a monastery in Darmstadt.  

Cliff got a new uniform he is still wearing. He is now Bruder Timotheus of the Land of Kanaan. We have talked on the phone ever since I left Germany in 1979 to go to college.  I visited Cliff in Germany a few times in the last 40 years. In 2017 I spent a week with Cliff at Kanaan that included a visit to Point Alpha on the former East-West border in Fulda. 

Cliff is here in the U.S. for a family wedding in Houston this coming weekend. He flew to Virginia, visited his brother, then visited me, then flew to Mexico to visit his sister before flying to Houston. Next week he'll be back in Darmstadt. 

On this visit, Cliff met my wife and several of my friends here in Lancaster. On the long visit to Kanaan in 2017, I met some of the Brothers in Cliff's community and other people who visit the monastery. Dmitri, for example, visited Point Alpha with Cliff and I. And I visited German historic sites with Cliff and a Coptic Christian couple from Cairo.

Cliff is a military brat. His connections to the US Military go back to the Revolutionary War. Some of that story is here. Cliff's schedule did not allow for a historic site visit, but we did drive past all of the sites on Independence Mall in Philadelphia along the way to the airport.  Maybe we can go inside on some future visit. 

I met some of my best friends during my military service during the Cold War.  They live as far away as Germany and San Diego now so it's nice when we can visit.  My former tank unit, 1-70th Armor, has reunions every other year. I've made it to a couple of those. There's one this fall I'm going to miss because of conflicting plans, but I'm hoping for 2021.

In the meantime, there is a possibility Cliff and I will be able to spend a few days seeing Jerusalem in the fall. He has been there several times and I am looking forward to seeing it through his eyes.  

Who Fights Our Wars: Sgt. 1st Class Thomas, Gospel Worship Leader, Tanker

In the 70s chaplains came to the Army with graduate degrees and credentials as Priests, Pastors, or Rabbis from their religions.  The chapel system tried to cover every spiritual need. But the chaplains also recognized their limits.  So in the Wiesbaden Military Community in the 1970s, the very proper Colonel in charge of the chaplains in the community authorized a Gospel service every Sunday night in the main chapel. 

The Pastor of the mostly Black congregation on Sunday night was Sergeant First Class Thomas (I can’t remember his first name). His Sunday night services were long, loud and a sharp contrast with the United Methodist morning services. 

The choir in the Gospel Service numbered more than fifty, singing, swaying, clapping and shimmering in blue robes. The service began and ended with music and prayers. In the middle was a sermon with deep lows, soaring highs and its own rhythm. 

In his office in battalion headquarters of 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, Thomas was the re-enlistment sergeant.  He enlisted in the early 60s, served two tours in the Vietnam War in infantry if I remember correctly. He switched to Armor later.

He filled out the endless paperwork required re-enlist. But the calm, detail-oriented man behind the retention desk was on fire in the pulpit.  He could deliver lines that were dire warnings in a way that would make me smile even while I felt the cold wind of condemnation blow in.

He would grab the pulpit with both hands.  He would hesitate, look directly at the congregation, then beginning in a low voice say, “Only your own faith will open the doors of Heaven. Sittin’ in a garage don’t make you a car, and sittin’ in this Church don’t make you a Christian! –at this point his volume was close to max – Only your own personal faith in Jesus will get you into Heaven.”

Another exhortation to personal faith delivered from low to crescendo ended with “We must be children of God. [Long Pause.] God don’t have any grandchildren.  Your grandma’s faith won’t get you to Heaven. And don’t you think you are foolin’ that faithful woman. She knows you need faith, and a whoopin’!”

After Wiesbaden, the next time I went to Black Church was in the summer of 2007.  I was in a neck and chest brace after a near-fatal bicycle accident. We went to an African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Lancaster City. My wife and I were two of the three white people among hundreds of people in the pews. It was a new and delightful experience for my wife. For me, it was just like the Wiesbaden Military Community.

A few months before our visit, I made the casual remark to my wife, quoting SFC Thomas, that 11 a.m. Sunday was the most segregated hour in America. Soon after, my wife started visiting Black and Latino and other Churches. They were very different the Presbyterian Church we attended. 

As was true in Wiesbaden, the Lancaster preacher illustrated his sermon with vivid metaphor. But the best and most memorable moment for us was when the minister called the children to the front of the Church to listen to a story.  He retold the story of the Good Samaritan as a man shot and left for dead in a side street right near the Church.  A preacher walked past the bleeding man, a star football player from the neighborhood walked past the man, and then there was a hush. The preacher told about a man who picked the wounded man up out of the gutter, took to the emergency room and paid his bill. 

Who was this man? 

The preacher boomed:  A man from Lititz! Yes, a man from Lititz saved him. The man from Lititz was truly a neighbor.

The kids clapped. The adults laughed. I thought I was going to re-break some of my cracked ribs I was laughing so hard.  Lititz is the whitest, richest suburb of the city of Lancaster.  A man from Lititz is the best replica of a Samaritan in that neighborhood.

When the adults calmed down the preacher asked the kids, “Who is this man’s neighbor?”

After a pause, a little girl said, “The football player.”

Now the preacher was laughing too.

I could imagine SFC Thomas loving that localized story of the Good Samaritan. 

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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The War We Won, In a Podcast

In 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Cold War ended. There was only one Superpower left in the world. China was still communist, but a hybrid kind of communism with a free market.

Whether the Soviet Union collapsed from corruption or a bad economy or the its war in Afghanistan, the Cold War ended when its fourteen member nations and satellite nations became self governing, many of them voting in democratic governments.

The new podcast on the Cold War by wondery ends at this moment in history.  It's six episodes begin at the end of World War II and trace the history of the conflict that never happened. The perspective is inside America.  It looks at the Cold War from the perspective of Americans going about their lives, which we all were before and after our service in the Cold War.

I loved the podcast. I hope you enjoy it too. Listen here or on iTunes.

Cold War Hero Who Served After 1991

Armand Lattes, Professor Emeritus of the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the world faced a plethora of problems. In retrospect, the world did not handle the demise very well. Russia and the other former Soviet states were broke and in collapse and armed with uncountable Weapons of Mass Destruction.  

In the 1940s and 50s, before the Soviets had nuclear weapons, their counter weapon to American and European nukes was nerve gas and other chemical weapons.  The Soviets manufactured thousands and thousands of tons of chemical weapons and stored them for the Doomsday attack.

In 1992 these un-dropped bombs and un-fired shells were rusting and leaking in storage across the former empire that had no money.  If these chemicals leaked into waterways and into the air, illness and death would spread through and out of the former Soviet Union. 

The answer to the problem was a massive, long-term decontamination program.  One of the chemists who volunteered for this dangerous work was Professor Armand Lattes of the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. Every September from 1992 until I met him in 2006, Lattes flew to secret sites in the former Soviet Union and worked with international volunteers to neutralize this terrible stockpile of weapons.  Lattes continued his unheralded work for several years after we met until his  retirement.  

I kept in touch with Armand in the years since and still hope to visit him and his wife Isabelle at their home in Toulouse. I almost made it to Toulouse on my trip around Europe last summer, but never got to that part of France.  

When we hear of the latest terrorist attack on the news, we know that dozens more attacks were foiled by law enforcement working secretly to disrupt the terrorists.  Armand and the men and women he worked with saved countless lives and the world itself from the disaster of chemical weapons leaking into the air and water or being stolen and used by terrorists.  

Armand did his part to keep the weapons of the Cold War from killing after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Back in Touch with My Cold War Motorhead

1968 Renault 16TS, 4-speed on the column.

The second car I owned while stationed in West Germany, 1976-79

My 20-country tour across Europe with a side trip to Israel got me back in touch with my inner motorhead.  I grew up addicted to cars. In graduate school, I had an autobiography seminar. One of the papers was a 15-page autobiography. I wrote that paper with December 19, 1969, at the exact center of the middle page: the day I got my license.  As I saw it in 1983, my whole life before that date had been getting ready to get my license; my life after that had been dominated by cars, trucks, motorcycles and tanks. By that year I had owned 27 cars, trucks and motorcycles. By 1993 I had owned 37 of the 41 vehicles I have owned or driven long term.

2001 Chevy Express 3500, the ultimate bicycle hauling machine,

Not the ultimate driving machine.

In a coincidence of time, age and interest, I got hooked on bicycle riding in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down. By 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union, I sold the last of the dozen motorcycles I owned. From that point on, the cars I drove were bicycle and kid haulers. I bought a Chevy Monte Carlo in 1996 specifically because it seated six and the back seat folded down. My kids and I could ride in the front, with the bike in the back. In 2001, I bought a 16-passenger van, because I could put five bikes and spare wheels inside the van along with six people and a dog. Since the end of the Cold War, I have ridden more and driven less.  Right now we own one 16-year-old Prius and nine bicycles.

2001 Toyota Prius--currently our only car 

My visit to Eastern Europe on what was supposed to be a bike and train trip re-awakened my love of cars.

1964 Opel Kadett Wagon, My Third Car

In the nearly 50 years since I got my license I have driven cars as small as a 1964 Opel and as large as an M60A1 Patton tank. One of my favorite cars was a 1968 Renault 16TS I owned during the last year I was stationed in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1979. This little car had a 4-speed shifter on the steering column. It was nimble, quick and a lot of fun to drive on the narrow roads of Germany.

M60A1 Patton Tank, not the best on narrow roads

During my recent trip to Eastern Europe, I rented a car three different times for a day or two to get places I could not get on a train or a bike in the time I had. The first car I rented was a Toyota Auris. I rented it in Belgrade for 48 hours. In that 48 hours, I drove to Croatia and Bosnia. In both countries, I stopped near the border and rode my bike to see some of the local country. Then next day I drove to Macedonia, arrived two hours before dark and rode to the Kosovo border. The next day I drove to Thessaloniki, Greece, then Sofia, Bulgaria and back to Belgrade and returned the car.

Toyota Auris--125 mph on the highway from Belgrade south to Macedonia

Three weeks later I was in France. I had two days before I flew to Israel, so I rented another Car, as Spanish Ibiza, and drove to Normandy as far as St. Mere Eglise from Paris.

Ibiza: from Paris to Normandy and back

When I got back from Israel, I had a couple of days before flying home. I had thought about seeing the Tour de France which was in southwest France during those days, but I am much more a fan of Formula 1 car racing than I am of bicycle racing. So I made a 48-hour 2000-kilometer loop from Paris to Cannes, then I went to Monaco, the oldest and most famous race in the World Championship, then through Torino, Italy and under the longest tunnel in the world in Mont Blanc. Then to Geneva for the night and back to Paris in time for the flight. The car for this trip was a six-speed stick shift diesel Citroen.

Citroen C3 Diesel, six-speed manual through the Alps

from Monaco to Torino to Geneva through Mont Blanc

Three cars from three countries and more than two thousand miles in a total of five days. I love driving in Europe on narrow streets and hundreds of miles of mountain roads.  Even after 150,000 miles of bicycling in the last 20 years, I am still a motorhead.

Trek Madone 9.2, my main ride in America

Cold War Soldier Visits Eastern Europe

Forty years after I looked across the East-West German border from the turret of an M60A1 tank. Now I am visiting the Warsaw Pact countries that sent soldiers to the other side of that border.  Every country I have been to is better off than the 1970s, at least for ordinary citizens.  It was relatively better to be a leader in a Soviet, or Soviet-dominated country, but the well-stocked stores and bright-colored clothes everywhere say life is much better now.

But in the former Yugoslavia I had the same feeling of being haunted by ghosts that I had when I first walked the streets of Wiesbaden in the 1970s. When I first walked around Cold War West Germany, I passed people in the streets who were old enough to have been adults during World War II, I thought `Were you a Nazi, were you part of the Holocaust, did you know?'  The beautiful city surrounded by a lush countryside stood in contrast to the horrors of its recent history.

I had that same kind of moment hit me in Bosnia. I was riding my bicycle just over the border from Croatia. I came to a roundabout and pulled off the road halfway around. The first road I passed had a sign pointing to Banja-Luka, the second to Tuzla. I remembered these names as sites of massacres of Bosnians by Serbs.  That was two decades ago.  Everyone middle-aged and older was either a perpetrator or the relative of a victim.  That feeling stayed with me until I left the Balkans and was in Slovakia.

When we waited for war on the East-West border, most of the men on the other side were not there by choice. I wonder how many of them wished Patton had kept going and pushed the Soviet empire back out of Eastern Europe.

Certainly, the victims of the slaughter in the Balkans would have wanted the Russians to leave Yugoslavia with their guns instead of leaving the weapons with Serbs and death to the neighbors they hated.

I understood the hatred in Tito's wake only too well.  In 1980, the year after I left the Army, I took a Russian Lit. course at Penn State with a gruff, chain-smoking Serbian named Prof. Djorjevic. He escaped Yugoslavia in 1956 and end up in Central Pennsylvania. At the end of the course, the Prof. invited us to his house for dinner. I remember his mantelpiece over the fireplace vividly. He displayed two 8X10 black and white pictures. One was of a Serbian officer on a white horse, his grandfather. the picture was from the late 1800s. The other was of two Croatians with Nazi armbands sawing a Serbian woodsman in half with his own saw.  If Prof. Djorjevic could have killed a Croat and died doing it, he would have died happy.

Except for the Yugoslav mess, NATO has helped to keep the peace in Europe for 70 years. That has not happened for a millennia before that. Every place I visited in the former Yugoslavia is at peace now.  May it stay that way!

Cold War Draft Army: Best Army I Served In

Cold War Training Exercise

Since my first enlistment in 1972, I served in three different armies.  I first enlisted during the draft near the end of the Vietnam War and the height of the Cold War. When I re-enlisted in 1975, I was in the new Volunteer Army, VOLAR was the acronym at the time.  After eleven years of active duty and reserve service ending in 1984, I re-enlisted in 2007 in the Post 9-11 Army National Guard.

When I climbed into my bunk in basic training in 1972, the other 39 soldiers sharing my room were men between 18 and 20 years old.  None of us were married.  We were from nearly 30 states, from both coasts, mostly from the American South and West, but "Jersey"and I were actually from the Northeast--very rare in the active military. 

No one planned to make a career of the military.  We were all going to "do our time" and get out.  Half of us were planning to use the Vietnam War GI Bill to pay for college, although the reality then and now is fewer than one in ten actually would use their education benefits.  At our active duty stations, we all referred to anyone who re-enlisted as a LIFER: Lazy Inefficient Fuckup Expecting Retirement.  More than 80% of draft-era soldiers served one enlistment and left the military.  We shined our shoes, ironed our starched uniforms, told extravagant lies, and had a common enemy in the sergeants in charge of us.

Five years later in 1977, I was a tank commander in Germany.  The draft effectively ended in 1973, and formally ended in 1975, ushering in the era of the Volunteer Army.  In 1973, new soldiers joining a unit were 19-year-old single males on short enlistments, usually 2 or 3 years.

From 1975 on, when a new soldier joined our tank unit, that soldier was between 19 and 21 years old.  He was married, had one child and his wife was pregnant again.  That was the reason many of these guys had enlisted.  Most had enlisted for four years because the longer enlistment in Combat Arms had a $2,500 bonus.  So my new crewman was married, poor and a father.

The great increase in the number of married soldiers between the early and late 70s meant a lot of soldiers were living off base in poverty in Germany because Base Housing went by rank.  And if their young wives were not in country for their two-year tour, there would eventually be a night when the soldier received a Dear John letter.  Later he would be blind drunk on 80-cent per bottle Mad Dog, MD 20-20.  (Actually the MD stood for Mogen David.  MD 20-20 was the cheapest drunk possible and it always made me smile that the mostly southern boys swilling the stuff were getting drunk on Jewish wine.)

By this time I was a sergeant, I had re-enlisted so I was a LIFER.  They still called us LIFERS, but with more married soldiers, more of them were re-enlisting.  By the late 70s, LIFER had little of the sting it had during the Vietnam War.  The Army was a job.  The Vietnam War was over and until the Gulf War, the military was a pretty safe job.

Then I re-enlisted into yet another Army in 2007.  No one made fun of LIFERs.  I could not find anyone under 40 who had ever heard the acronym.  In 2007 I enlisted in the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, Pennsylvania Army National Guard.  The unit had more than 100 pilots and several hundred mechanics and flight crew.  More than half of the 2,000 soldiers in the brigade were at least considering a career in the Army, if they were not already committed to Army life.

The current Army, including active, reserve and National Guard, is a professional army.  The Army of World War II really represented a huge cross-section of America. Every family either had a soldier in their family or a soldier next door.  After World War II, for the first time in U.S. history, the wartime Army was not demobilized.  Most of the soldiers went home, but the draft continued and a sizable force remained ready for war as well as occupying the countries of former enemies.

By the time the draft ended almost 30 years later, the Army represented the south and west much more than the northeast.  But it was still not a professional Army. When I re-enlisted in 2007, I was the only soldier that many of my co-workers actually knew.  The museum where I worked had a staff of 55 and had been in business for more than a quarter century.  I was the third veteran who had ever worked there.  When I deployed they had to write a policy for National Guard service.  They never had a serving guardsman before.  My co-workers, to use the southern expression, had more degrees than a thermometer: more than two degrees per person on average including the maintenance staff.  People from cities in the northeast mostly don't even think about military service.

The result is an Army that does not represent America.  It is an Army that is easier to send to war because the people who make the decisions never served and the soldiers who go to war will not come from every city, town, village and neighborhood.

A draft Army is much tougher for politicians to send to war, and the soldiers want to go home when the war is over.  That, to me, is a better Army for the soldiers and for the nation.

My Love-Hate Relationship with Russia and Ukraine

A Map of the Former Soviet Union. 

Ukraine is the yellow country on the far west.

The kind of person we are inside shows itself both in what we do and how we react.  I had a soul-revealing moment when I heard the news in 2014 of Russia invading Eastern Ukraine and taking Crimea. The summary of the thought that raced through my mind:  “You Go Vladimir (Putin)!”

Cheering for Russia in a military dispute with Ukraine is like cheering for the New York Yankees against a high school team.  Nevertheless I had a vivid moment, not of loving Russia, but hating Ukraine.

The face that came into my mind was my grandmother.  She and my grandfather escaped Ukraine, then part of Russia, at the turn of the 20th century when more than a million Jews were slaughtered in Ukraine in a series of attacks called pogroms. My grandparents had the double good fortune of making it all the way to America.  Many other Russian Jews fled to Eastern Europe.  Those who fled to Eastern Europe and their children were killed by the Nazis 40 years later.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

My grandparents would have described themselves as Russian Jews, not Ukrainian Jews.  For the last thousand years Ukraine has been Russia a lot more than it has been an independent country.  Mark Schauss covers the sad history of Ukraine and Russia in The Russian Rulers History Podcast, available on iTunes. 

While Russia, Poland and much of Eastern Europe has a long history of hating Jews, Ukraine is the most anti-semitic country in a very nasty region. 

Next August, when I ride across what my grandparents called Russia, my trip will begin in Odessa, Ukraine. I won’t be in Ukraine long, but I expect to have the same experience arriving in Odessa that I had when I first set foot in Germany:  “Can this beautiful place really be home to those who slaughtered so many of my people?”

I am re-reading Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” a haunting book that is “War and Peace” set in World War II, particularly in Stalingrad.  Currently I am reading the letter a Jewish mother in Ukraine is writing to her son in the Russian Army.  The Germans just took over her town.  The Jews are being rounded up, robbed and will soon be killed.  Most of the neighbors are happy and cheer the Germans on, taking the possessions and houses of the Jews.  The mother writing the letter describes women who were friendly for 50 years suddenly turning on her with venom. The neighbor thinks the Jews are getting what they deserve. 

My love-hate relationship with Ukraine and Russia extends through my whole life.  My first military job was live-fire testing of the US Air Force missile inventory, everything from the Sidewinder wing rocket to the Minuteman multi-stage nuclear missile, the main weapon delivery system in the US Cold War arsenal.  Then I was a tank commander on the East-West German Border waiting for World War III to start. 

When I went to college after the Army, the literature of Russia and the literature of Florence, Italy, became lifelong passions.  Chekov, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and later Solzhenitsyn wrote the books I loved most, along with C.S. Lewis, Dante and Machiavelli.  Now I am studying the Russian language so I can read the authors I love most in their language.  Russia is currently home to many brilliant authors, but who knows when they will be forced underground. 

From my grandparents persecution, to my Cold War childhood and military life, through finding the beauty of Russian literature in college, to my current plans to travel across Russia and neighboring countries, I continue to intensify my love-hate relationship with Russia and all of its sad and brilliant history.  At this age, my love-hate relationship with Russia and Ukraine is a permanent part of my life.