3, 2, 1: Chance, Fate and Free Will

"Free Will" by Mark Balaguer: did I choose to buy it?

In the book “The Forgotten Soldier” Guy Sajer describes a moment when his rifle company is sheltering from Soviet artillery and guns in a concrete storage cellar. An order comes down to attack. The Top Sergeant tells the men to count off by threes. Sajer is a One.  The sergeant tells the Threes to get ready to attack.  In two minutes they run from the basement. In another ten minutes they are all dead or wounded.

The Twos are next. As they run into the hail of Soviet fire, Sajer thinks about what it means that the Threes went first.  Why them? Usually the Ones would go first and he would be dead.  His assault wave took the Soviet stronghold in the middle of the village.  After this brief victory, the Germans would continue the year-long retreat to Germany and utter defeat. 

Sajer survived that day and the war because he was a One on the day the Threes went first.  Not surprisingly, Sajer sees his life as dominated by fate rather than free will. As a soldier in a retreating Army, his life is a series of terrible moments. In another scene, he describes the relief of climbing into a truck after 20 miles of marching. The relief turns into terror when the convoy is attacked by Soviet fighter-bombers. Then there are all the horrors of his one leave to go home.

In the military, I have met more fatalists than in civilian life, or at least people who are more open about their belief.  The most usual expression of this belief was, “If a bullet has mine name on it, there’s nothing I can do about it.” I can understand this belief, but so much of the training we had was how to avoid the bullets, bombs and rockets that were aimed at us. 

For a year during my tour in West Germany in the 70s, I taught a monthly class in how to survive what are now called WMDs.  I shared the Army’s best advice on how to live if our position was hit with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.  If it is somehow possible to survive a nuke, can there really be just one bullet with NEIL on it? Or would it be my full name? When I was a tank commander, would it be an armor-piercing cannon shell with my name on it?

All my life, the question of Free Will versus Fate has been in the back of my mind. Early in my life, as well as I could understand the question, I would have said fate guided my life.  After I joined the military, life seemed to be a series of endless possibilities.  I went to college, picked a job I liked, had kids, became a late-life athlete, traveled to every inhabited continent, a paragon of choice.

Last year, I read a book titled “Free Will” by Mark Balaguer.  I bought the book in the MIT Bookstore when I was in Cambridge for the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. I had an hour so I went to the bookstore and bought the book on a whim.  Was it a whim? It is a subject that interested me all my life. I went to a bookstore that had only academic books. Was fate lurking in my mind?

Whether picking the book was fate or free well, Balaguer, helped me to see that the gap between Sajer and I, between those who believe an invisible fate controls their life and those who believe everything is free, is not so great as I thought. 

Balaguer looks at both sides of the question from a philosophical viewpoint, and then from a practical viewpoint.  How many choices can one person actually make in a day-week-month-life?  Not that many.  The human condition, circumstances, lifespan, and every previous choice we have made, combine to constrain all of our future choices. So real choice is relatively rare. 

Each time I have made a big choice, I have accepted a thousand small restraints. When I decided to re-enlist in the Army National Guard, one weekend a month was outside of my control. Then two weeks in the summer. Then a year in Iraq.  A lot of choices I might have had, I no longer had. Certainly in Iraq, I had no choice in what to wear, where to live, when to eat, and so many other things. 

I don’t know if there is an answer to the question of fate or free will, except in very specific circumstances.  But it is a question I seem fated to keep thinking about.

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The Forgotten Soldier: "Surely the war must end soon."

The Forgotten Soldier, a memoir of World War II

In the middle of Guy Sajer's story of war on the Eastern Front in World War II, he writes of his one-and-only leave during four years of fighting. In the spring of 1943, he was given 14 days leave that does not start until the railway station at Posnan, 200 miles east of Berlin. That's important because his journey began in Kharkov, more than 1000 miles further east.

Before, during and after the leave. People around Sajer from Russia to Berlin say, "Surely the war must end soon." "Surely the war can't go on like this." Of course, the war does go on, and on, until finally Nazi Germany is crushed between two massive Allied armies.

Sajer spends his first months of war in a transport unit trying to bring supplies to Stalingrad. The city fell before the snowbound trucks of Sajer's unit could reach Stalingrad.  In the way of all armies since the Roman Empire and before, the front line troops blamed the supply troops for their defeat.

Sajer volunteers to be a front-line infantryman with an elite division. Part of the offer by the officers asking for volunteers is a fourteen-day leave.  Sajer volunteers and gets his leave.

His goal is to go home and visit his family in Alsace, France, 500 miles west of Berlin. The train he is on west of Berlin is stopped when the town ahead of them is bombed by the allies. Sajer and everyone else on the train helps to clear the tracks. When they get to the station, Sajer is told his destination is too far from his unit and he has to go back.

He decides to return to Berlin. He visits the family of his best friend who was killed on the road to Stalingrad. While he is waiting to see his friend's parents, he meets Paula and falls deeply in love with her. They spend every moment they can together during the rest of Sajer's leave.

The most intense moments they share are during bombing raids. In a night raid that hits the neighborhood they are in, they hide in a shelter, then help to care for the wounded when the all-clear sirens sound. In the shelter, terrified mothers say,
"Surely the war must end soon."

Later they are near Templehof Airport on a lovely spring day, when the airport itself is the target of a daylight bombing raid. There are no shelters nearby and they hide in a fold in the ground as Eighth Air Force bombers reduce Templehof to rubble.  As they help the wounded after they raid, they tell each other, "Surely the war must end soon."

It doesn't. The war drags on and on until crippled Berlin is fully destroyed and the Nazi army retreats all the way from Russia back to Germany. Sajer goes back to his unit. The lovers write to each other, but never see each other again.

Sajer records all of the deep emotion he feels, and the reaction when the older soldiers in his unit find out he fell in love on leave.  They needle him and tell him he has a thousand miles to travel back to the front lines and he can fall in love on the way. 

Sajer conveys very well the hope that wells up inside people who have suffered. "Surely we have suffered enough," They say. "Surely this will end." But it does not. The suffering of individual men and women and children is never a priority of the leaders who want victory.  A year later, after a victory in which they hold the advancing Soviet Armies, young soldiers like Sajer--he is then 19--start to talk about how the war must end soon and they will all go home.

I read all this book 42 years ago as a 24-year-old tank commander in Germany on the East-West Border. I did not remember the leave from forty years ago. I remembered much of the book, but not the leave.  This time reading, mid-tour leave was part of my experience, part of my year in Iraq.  It struck me how different it was to come home to a completely peaceful country.

The other deep irony of the leave was the way that Paula's parents and the people Sajer stayed with were worried the young couple was moving too quickly.  They were worried about the young couple doing the "right thing."

By the time of the leave in 1943, Nazi armies had already deported and slaughtered millions of Jews. They had killed millions more civilians in pitiless air raids on civilian targets and armored warfare.

It is painful for me to read how people could be concerned with moral questions while German soldiers and German policemen drafted into military service had already shot more than two million Jews and thrown them into pits and were sending others to death camps for slaughter on an industrial scale.

But tradition has always blinded people in this very way. So the Berliners could be concerned about what a Good German would do at the same time German soldiers were machine gunning children.

In America, the people who owned slaves went to Church and told their children to behave even while they, just like the Nazis, believed people who lived among them were less than human and could be tortured and denied freedom for their entire lives, and the lives of their children.  The American segregation in the Jim Crow South that followed the end of slavery was Hitler's model of making an underclass of Jews. Hitler started that segregation immediately, and quickly went past oppression to slavery and murder.

The Church in Germany, like the Church in America, was complicit in the terrible plans. The American Church twisted the Bible into saying Black people were less than human.  The German Church, Evangelical and Catholic, expelled Jewish convert pastors and then Jewish Church members within the first two years of Hitler taking power. The German Church, like the slavery Evangelical Church in the South, supported the racism of their governments.

This time re-reading Guy Sajer, the most painful passages are not about the war, but about what was happening "back home." 

Boston Traffic: Rules Made Up on the Spot

My Home Town, Boston

Boston traffic is now the worst in the nation, maybe worst in the world according to a new survey.  It's not simply the volume of traffic. It's the roads: the diabolical design of the roads that makes chaos that sometimes can only be unravelled by making up rules on the spot.

My father was a truck driver and a warehouse worker. Born before World War I, he liked to say he began as a Teamster shoveling shit when Beantown still used horse-drawn wagons.  The cobblestone roads only slowly gave way to pavement, so by the time I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s many key road junctions were still paved for horses.

My Dad worked at a grocery warehouse next to the former Hood Milk plant in what is now Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown. To drive a truck north from the warehouse meant driving around the cobblestone rotary at Sullivan Square. To go south meant passing through cobbled City Square rotary then turning a tractor-trailer into an alley that was the only access to the bridge to the Southeast Expressway.

One Friday in the summer of 1961, my Dad had to take a refrigerated load south to Taunton.  His company had just upgraded from 32-foot to 40-foot refrigerated trailers.  I had gone to work with my Dad, so when he got the assignment, I got to ride in the cab.  Ahhh, the days before liability lawyers decided everything.

We rumbled around the cobblestone rotary at 5 mph.  When Dad turned into the alley, he misjudged the new trailer. It was his first time pulling a 40-footer.  He clipped the rear fender of a new Chevy Belair parked illegally right on the corner and pushed the shiny, blue sedan into an iron street lamp pole.  The car was crunched at both ends.

My Dad got down from the cab. A thousand horns honked at the brightly painted tractor trailer blocking the alley.  As my Dad wrote his information on a piece of paper, an enormous, red-faced Boston Cop strode through the stalled traffic yelling at my Dad to get moving.

My Dad started to protest that the car was illegally parked. I hung out the window wondering if my Dad would be arrested.  The Big Cop grabbed the paper and tore it up.  "Get moving. Get out of here," he yelled. "That drunk son-of-a-bitch parks there every Friday and fucks everything up. Fuck him. Get going."

My Dad thanked him, swung into the cab and with one more move, rumbled down the alley toward Taunton.

Whoever decided it was a good idea to funnel the major route from the north side of Boston through a cobblestone rotary and an alley is just one of the idiots who made driving in Boston such an adventure when I was a kid.

I have no doubt Boston traffic is currently the worst in the world. I wonder who else ever held the title.