June 6, 1944

Let me first acknowledge that 10,000 brave men lost their lives on this date in 1944 assaulting the Normandy Coast by sea and air.  I grew up playing Army and wanting to be the kind of man who was brave and strong enough to take part in a great and worthy enterprise like freeing Europe from Nazi domination.  

Today is the first day of Army Annual Training for my unit.  At morning formation our first sergeant reminded us of this 70th anniversary of D-Day.  

History is one of the huge gaps between me and the young soldiers I serve with today.  I grew up reading books about World War II.  I also saw movies, but it was the books that gave me the specifics that I still have in my mind.  The dates, the numbers of men, the generals, the weapons, the weather, the time of year, the vehicles, the terrain, the buildings, the food--I was a sponge for the specifics of the war in Europe.  

Since I learned about war from books and not from video games, I was aware of logistics.  I knew that the real issue deciding many battles was which army could get their troops to the weak point in the enemy line, or to reinforce the weak point in their own line.  When I was in an armor unit, war games were mostly moving our tanks and support vehicles from wherever they happened to be to where they were needed.  

Soldiers stuffed into troops ships, landing craft, transport planes, gliders, jeeps, trucks, armored cars, and anything else with wings, keels and wheels determine the outcome of battles.  

D-Day reminds me of the great tradition I share with everyone who served then and now.  And it reminds me of how much the reality of war is logisitics, moving soldiers, ammo, fuel and food to the fight.

May God Bless all those who are still with us who fought on this day 70 years ago.

Tough Mudder vs. Ironman, Part 2

Both times I did the Tough Mudder, this was the obstacle that showed me Tough Mudder is a team sport.  At each event I ran as hard as I could toward this curved wall three times.  Twice I slid back down.  The third time I reached up.  Two strong men at the top of the wall dragged me over the top.  Strong guys hang out on the top of the wall and pull the rest of us up.  If Tough Mudder was a pure solo event, this obstacle would be a fail for me--unless I brought a ladder.  All through both Tough Mudders people were helping and encouraging me.  I helped them when I could.  If I ever do another, I will get together a group of three or more.  Tough Mudder is a dirt-covered party.

On the other hand, with 74 days left until the Kentucky Ironman, I am withdrawing more and more into the solo world of Ironman training.  This past Thursday I swam 3000 yards, rode 80 miles in rain and a headwind to Philadelphia then took the train home.  On Friday, I was going to ride with my friends, but then I took a train to Philadelphia and rode back to Lancaster, another 80 miles.  There was no rain, but the wind reversed and was stronger than the day before.

To be ready for the Ironman, I have all but stopped bicycle racing and mostly ride alone.  Even though my wife and I are training for the same event, we might as well be training for two different events.  She is much faster than I am in the water and is running about 100 miles a month.  I am not running now because of knee trouble and plan to cram the run training into the last five weeks.  We can't run together.

On the bike our training speeds and riding styles are so different we only occasionally ride together.  I plan on surviving the swim and run and making as much time as possible on the bike. My wife will crush the swim, post a good time on the run and survive the bike.  In the 17 hours of the event, we will be together when I pass her on the bike and when she passes me on the run.

The current issue of Christianity Today includes a feature article on a guy who did the Tough Mudder as part of self-administered therapy for a mid-life crisis (I would include the link but it is subscribers only).  The author was right to pick a Tough Mudder instead of an Ironman.  At the Tough Mudder, you suffer together and laugh about it.  The Ironman means more and more time alone until the event wrings everything out of each participant.  A very tough friend and I rode to and from the Tough Mudder together on single-speed bikes--35 miles total.  If you can run a half marathon and do 50 pushups you can finish a Tough Mudder.  The Ironman is the toughest thing I have ever done that I planned to do.  Recovering from a broken neck was tougher, but I did not plan that.


Tough Mudder vs. Ironman, Part 3

Tough Mudder vs. Ironman is Here

Second Tough Mudder Report

First Tough Mudder Finish

First Tough Mudder Photos

First Tough Mudder Entry

Ironman Plans

Ironman Training

Ironman Bucket List

Ironman Idea

Ironman Danger

Ironman Friendship

A Tough Life Goes On

My first crew chief in the Air Force was a short, quiet guy named Randy with very thick glasses.  They weren't quite as bad as the ones in the picture, but so thick his blue eyes sort of swam if you looked straight into the lenses.

Randy retired less than a year after I enlisted.  He came to Hill Air Force Base after the "final tour" before 20 years, the rotten assignment most airmen get just before 20 when there is now way they will turn it down.  Randy's rotten assignment was a listening post near Mount Ararat in Turkey.  Randy worked 12 hours on 12 off keeping the listening equipment operational so we could listen to Soviet radio traffic across the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine. Twelve months in a place more remote than Bum Fuck Egypt had Randy ready to leave the Air Force.

His thick glasses were not the result of eyestrain from fixing listening equipment on top of Mount Ararat.  He joined the Air Force in the early 50s with normal eyesight and a lot of confidence.  In the mid-50s he volunteered for a program that would test the limits of G-Force a human could withstand.  Randy volunteered to ride a rocket sled that hit 7 Gs accelerating and 8 Gs slowing down.

Randy told us they had an eye doctor among several doctors at the test site during sled runs.  On one of the runs, Randy's eyes popped out of their sockets.  Randy said the doctor popped his eyes back in--with some considerable pain--but Randy's eyesight was never the same.

Randy retired.  He was not blind, or an amputee.  His service in the Vietnam War was uneventful.  But he gave up a lot for his country.  It may not have been the ultimate sacrifice, but he helped to make the space program possible.  By the way, one G is a change in speed of 20 mph in one second.  That rocket sled accelerated to nearly 400 mph in about 3 seconds and slowed a little faster than that.  Thanks Randy.

Recruiting Souls and Soldiers, Sadly Similar: Faith in the Military, Part 15

In His brief ministry on Earth, Our Lord was a lousy recruiter and an utter failure at marketing.  In all of the Gospel accounts, Jesus gathers huge crowds then, just when he should be signing them up for The Lord's Army, he sends them away.

The crowds were attracted by healing, by food, by His words.  He had them.  Then he told them that following Him would lead to suffering and loss and the crowds left.  Jesus was the opposite of a recruiter or a marketer.  The Lord wanted committed people willing to suffer and die, people who knew what they were facing before they decided to follow Him.

Inside the military, becoming a believer actually meant some suffering.  Believers serving in the military back in the 70s were sure to be hassled.  And tempted.  A believer who was living his faith in the Army had to take a lot of shit from fellow soldiers.  While his friends were getting high and getting laid, he (there were no women in combat units in the 70s) had to live in some semblance of Biblical morality:  certainly no drugs, no booze, no women.  the other five men in the typical six-man room were sure to be making fun of the guy who was reading his Bible, praying and not partying.

When I got back to the civilian world, Church recruiting was a lot more like marketing than Jesus telling followers to "count the cost."  Mega Churches became "Seeker Friendly."  Instead of presenting a life of denying this world to gain the Kingdom of God, preachers are following marketers, finding out what people want in a Church and modifying the Church to suit the converts.

So standards for entering the Church became more flexible.  Divorce, drinking, dancing and other devilish Ds became acceptable.  Not encouraged, but some former sins clearly became less sinful than others.

The Army did this during the worst days of the Iraq War.  I would not be serving in the Army now if Congress did not raise the enlistment age by seven years in 2006.  The Army took back a 54-year-old after 23 years as a civilian because they needed bodies.  Two years into the recession with the Iraq War winding down, the enlistment age dropped back again and recruitment standards went up.

All of the military is now in the process of cutting its numbers of troops.  As in the 1990s, the cuts will be aimed at mid-career NCOs and Officers, both the save money and to make room for new younger leaders in a smaller Army.  The way this will happen, as in the 1990s, is primarily through tightening fitness standards.  In the 1990s a marketing firm determined that mid-career technically competent soldiers dislike the PT standards above everything else in the military.

So the new smaller force will literally be smaller.

Will the Church ever tighten its standards the way the military did?  Yes, but not from the inside.  The Church will gets smaller and stronger when it is persecuted.  People who want to be a success in this world want to be members of popular Churches where the Lord is promising riches to the faithful.

Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Pat Robertson and the dozens of televangelists promising health and wealth to their flock will disappear when their bank accounts are at risk as will their followers.





The Church will become smaller the same way.  In every Church through history that has come under persecution, the faithful stay with the Church, even becoming martyrs.  Those who were brought in under Seeker Friendly conditions will melt away like butter in the Mojave Desert.

Faith in the Military: Continuing with C.S. Lewis

While I learned about the true, the good and the beautiful in a secular university and the weird, the bad and the ugly in Christian pop culture, I kept reading and re-reading C.S. Lewis.  Here was the one person I knew for sure that had his feet planted firmly in that tiny part of the world where Christianity and culture and history were at peace.  

Mere Christianity made clear that every Church put the same roof over believers and people who had some other reason to be inside the building.  But that was just the beginning of a life-long habit or obsession with reading Lewis.  

Once Lewis showed me that a believer could have a brain, he started showing me the intellectual world is much more vast than the material world.  

Then I went underground, or at least into the underworld.  Next of Lewis' 39 books was The Screwtape Letters.  In each of the 31 missives, Uncle Screwtape, a mid-level bureaucrat in Hell writes a letter of advice to his nephew who is a field agent trying to tempt a patient into Hell.  

Letter #4 changed my life.  It defined humor from Hell's perspective.  I decided after reading this letter to never watch a sitcom again after M*A*S*H went of the air.  Since 1983, I have not watched a sitcom or a comedy movie.  

MY DEAR WORMWOOD...I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy.
You will see the [Joy] among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday...
Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us....it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field...The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction...it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame...
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.
Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.
If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.
It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.
Your affectionate uncle, SCREWTAPE

Faith in the Military: Civilian Life is a Feast of Learning and a Spiritual Famine

Recently I read an article about the explosive growth in Christian colleges recently.  For many Christian kids, the choice they have is Christian college or no college.  Inside the Christian community, the secular college and university is supposed to be a place where the kids will lose their faith, led astray by unbelieving professors.  

But my first year after the military was just the opposite.  My college courses at Penn State were opening new vistas of faith and beauty beyond anything I could have imagined.  In the same course that introduced me to Dante and Machiavelli, I read Utopia by Sir Thomas More in the Norton Critical Edition. We were assigned several critical essays in addition to the text.  One was by C.S. Lewis.  It was the first time I read Lewis in his "Day Job" as a Cambridge professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature.  Lewis' essay made sense of Utopia.  Many other commenters simply wanted to claim More for their position.  

The following summer, I had a Russian literature course taught by a chain-smoking Serbian, who had escaped communism.  He taught us Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol.  I have read an re-read Russian works ever since, particularly Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych which I have read five times and just bought in a new translation.  More on the Russians later.  

At the same time Dostoevsky showed me how central suffering is to the living the Gospel, I was trying to navigate a Christian culture that went out of its collective mind during my time in Germany.  In my first year back, I fell for an Amway pitch from a very nice couple at Church.  I went to one of the big meetings with a thousand people cheering success.  The main guy on stage had made millions.  He was wearing what I would later learn was a $3,000 suit.  He was driving a 7 Series BMW.  He lived in mansion that, as he was describing it, I could only imagine had "one long staircase just going up, and one even longer coming down, and one more leading nowhere just for show. . ."

My Christian brother was telling me that what I should do was forget college, go into business, make a fortune and then I could bless many people.  Wow!!!

He really believed that.  And he thought it was the best thing for me.

But then I thought of Cliff entering the monastery in Darmstadt, Abel fasting for two weeks to find his ministry, and the life of The Lord Himself which did end in health and wealth.

The Liberals were showing me eternity.  The Conservatives were showing me self interest and greed.  Life was weird.

Jerry Falwell Made Me a Democrat: Faith in the Military, Part 12

Among the many contradictions in my life, I am a Democrat.  That might not seem surprising for someone who grew up in Stoneham, Massachusetts, just seven miles from Harvard and eleven miles from Boston.  But both of my parents were Barry Goldwater Republicans.  My father served in World War 2.  My favorite uncle flew three combat tours and had three additional short tours in Viet Nam.  And I enlisted in 1972, less than a year after I graduated from High School.

Then, I became a believer.  Since I started my faith journey in a Baptist Church, I accepted what my Church taught until I had a reason to believe otherwise.  If there is one thing that is clear in a Baptist Church, it is that we are all sinners who need to repent.  Every week, every Baptist Church I ever attended has an Invitation to know Jesus.  Everyone who answers that invitation is told to repent of their sins.

In Germany, we had one channel of American TV, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and Armed Forces Radio.  We got TV programs more than a year late.  The culture in America was remote and in the years I was gone, the American Evangelical view of politics and political action changed radically--at least it seemed so to me.

Among the gifts I received as a new believer was a subscription to the weekly Sword of Lord newspaper.  Before I left for Germany, Baptists tried to Evangelize Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics and almost anyone else who was not a Bible-believing American.

When I came back from Germany, I read Machiavelli and got a very good primer on how politics worked.  Reading Dante, Aquinas and Sir Thomas More made me quite sure Catholics were part of the community of believers.

When I left for Germany, Evangelical Christians stayed out of politics.  Their hope was focused on the next life not on amassing power in this life.  Jerry Falwell changed that in 1979.  He decided that Christians needed political power and founded the Moral Majority.  The name itself is a flat contradiction of Baptist doctrine.  You can't make a Moral Majority out of sinners.

No reading of the New Testament can show Jesus either taking or recommending political power.  The Church would have power from on high, not from politics.  Dante's Hell is full of Popes and high officials of the Church.  They are not there because they are Catholic, they are there because they used pursued political power.  Falwell dismissed the lessons of the Reformation and two millenia of Church history when he decided to grasp the levers of politics.

Once it was clear to me that the Evangelical Church was going to sell out for power, I decided I would vote for the other party.  And in every election since that is how I voted.  The record of the right wing Church in politics is one of betrayal on both sides, but that's what any reader of Machiavelli would expect.

Although Falwell denied Original Sin to enter politics, he never ceased to call out the sins of others.  He blamed the attacks on America on 9-11 on gays.  Until his death, Falwell reminded me of why Christians risk their own soul when they grasp for political power and they certainly bring the Church into disrepute.  If someone tries to write a new Inferno in this century, Falwell, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, James Dobson and many others will be roasting in the flames of that 21st century Gehenna.

"When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world."

-CS Lewis