Continuing my 2017 Trip Across Israel and Europe

This map is posted on the former East-West German border 

where I served as a tank commander 40 years ago.

If all goes well, I will ride the length of Israel.

On October 22, I am going to resume my 2017 trip across Eastern Europe and Israel.  My last trip began in Eastern Europe followed by the World War II battlefields of Normandy. Then I went to Israel and finally a side trip to the oldest Formula 1 race track, the street circuit in Monaco.

This trip I will begin with World War II battlefields and a Formula 1 racetrack, then go to Israel and finish the trip in Eastern Europe, places I did not get to on the last trip.

A long time ago in 2013 when Donald Trump was just a Birther and a failing reality TV personality, I started learning Russian and planned a bicycle trip across Russia to retrace the route my grandfather used to escape the Tsar's Army in 1914. Grandpa walked from Odessa on the south coast of Russia to Helsinki on the Baltic Sea between August 1914 and the spring of 1915.  I was going to ride north across Russia, about 1,300 miles sometime after I retired.

Then Trump got elected. Steve Bannon had an office in the White House and America was looking bleak.  I changed the trip to ride across Eastern Europe visiting the worst of the Holocaust sites and then visit Israel. I had never been there.

I managed to visit 20 countries on that trip, but I could not ride as much as I hoped (I was on the way to knee replacement which happened six months ago) and did not make it to the Baltic States or Russia.  On that trip I had not planned to visit World War II battlefields, but took a day to do that in the middle of the trip.

So this time I will visit more battlefields, spend more time in Israel, and visit the countries I missed on the first trip, particularly the Baltic Sea states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and end the trip in St. Petersburg, Russia.

I want to see the countries where the Holocaust was the worst and learn more about them. I want to know their path of recovery from such horror.  And I want to see more of Israel. A vibrant Jewish state is so important in the global fight against anti-Semitism. 

Railroad cars on a siding between Auschwitz and Buchenwald

Concentration Camps where Jews were delivered from 

across Europe. As they left the cars they were sorted into

groups of those who were slave labor and those who were killed.

Bernard-Henri Levi said if it were not for The Holocaust, there would be 50 million Jews living in the world now instead of 15 million. Two years ago, Nazis marched openly in Charlottesville and the President refused to condemn them. Anti-Semitism is a plague that is not going away and, for me, learning about how The Holocaust happened is part of making sure it never happens again.

Kill a Commie for Mommy: Hating the Enemy During the Cold War and Before

On the rifle range in Basic Training in 1972 our drill sergeant 

yelled, "Kill a Commie for Mommy." 

Wars we lose have a lot in common.  One thing that America's lost or losing wars have in common is very restrictive Rules of Engagement: ROE.  In World War II there were no rules of engagement: see the enemy, kill the enemy.

But in the late stages of the Vietnam War, and throughout the Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and other conflicts in the War on Terror, there are rules about who, what, when and where American soldiers can fire at the enemy.

My job in the Air Force was live-fire testing of missiles from the Sidewinder all the way to the Minuteman.  We made sure those missiles were ready to shoot down a MiG or obliterate a city.

In the Army, I trained my tank crew to make one-shot kills of Soviet tanks at up to a mile distance.  There was no ROE. If the Soviets crossed the border we were to kill them. They were the enemy, the identifiable, uniformed enemy who was going to kill us if we did not kill them.

When we had an enemy, we had a goal: Defeat the enemy.

I wrote on the New York Times "At War" blog about how having an enemy, or not, affects marching songs.  In the 1970s when we marched, we sang about killing Commies. They were the enemy.  The current marching songs have no enemy.  Current marching songs also have no sex. For those of us who marched in the 70s and before, the idea of marching songs scrubbed of sex is as strange as those without enemies.

All through my professional life, in or out of the military, my best work was when I had a goal--and a leader with a clear idea of what winning looked like.

The wars we won--World War II and the Cold War--had an enemy and a goal: Victory.

The current wars are a mess because the goal is murky.  When the American military goes to war, we should be fighting to win.

In War and in Life, Love and Loss are Never Far Apart

I wrote about this soldier ten years ago, September 2009, when I was deployed to Iraq for year with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade.  I re-read this post and decided it says something I never want to forget.  

The deepest love must face the possibility of loss. The alternative is to avoid love, which is the greatest loss of all:

One of the administrative sergeants I run into once in a while was a Marine for 10 years before joining the Army National Guard. He is aloof and old enough that no one bothers him very much. He mostly keeps to himself, but will occasionally burst into a lecture about safety, security, the political situation in Iraq or how this war should be fought. His outbursts, like the lid sliding off a boiling pot, show that the heat has been building for a long time and finally he explodes. An early commentator on the Iliad wrote about Achilles saying, "An angry man never thinks he has spoken enough" and this sergeant proves it.

Today I was waiting for some other soldiers and had some time to sit and listen to this sergeant talk about his last deployment. It turns out the reason he keeps his distance and thinks about security issues goes back to his deployment three years ago. He was also on a large base then, but worked with people who went on convoys. For the most part he did not eat dinner, but one of the guys on convoy was a particular friend, another ex-Marine, so he would always change his schedule and eat dinner when his buddy was on base.

One day the aloof sergeant got the word that his dinner buddy got killed in a mortar attack. As he described it they were great friends, "And I decided I was not going to let that happen again. I'll talk to people but I don't want to care that much have them taken away. I still think about all the plans he had for his family, to travel--all gone."

The alternative to love is self-protection, keeping others at a distance so they won't hurt you by leaving. It's a choice we all make to some degree, to risk love or draw back.