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.

Chinook Landing on a Roof in Afghanistan Honored in Original Art

On 10 November 2003 the crew of Chinook helicopter 

Yankee 2-6 made this landing on a cliff in Afghanistan.

Artist Larry Selman immortalized the event in a limited-edition print.

When I deployed to Iraq in 2009 with an Army helicopter brigade, nearly all the soldiers in our unit and every other unit were younger than me—a generation younger than me. But not the pilots.  Some were young, but many more were in their 40s and 50s.  Larry Murphy, a Chinook helicopter pilot, was one of the very few soldiers older than I was.  I was 56. He was 58. 

On Wednesday, 5 September 2019, Larry was honored with the unveiling of a painting commemorating an amazing bit of flying he and his crew did in Afghanistan in 2003.  Larry was deployed with a company of Chinooks and supporting equipment to Afghanistan. The tour was supposed to be a year and was extended to 16 months. The Chinook company was made up of soldiers from the Pennsylvania and Connecticut Army National Guard did not leave Afghanistan till 2004. They were in support of several companies of soldiers from the 10^th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, New York.

On 10 November 2003, Larry and the crew of Chinook helicopter Yankee 2-6 received an additional mission to pickup prisoners while they were on a resupply mission. These missions are a routine part of combat operations in Afghanistan.  But this mission was different. The prisoners had to be picked up from the side of a steep mountain at an elevation of 8,500 feet above sea level.  There was no place to land an aircraft with a 52-foot-long fuselage that is almost 100 feet long from tip to tip of its massive twin rotors. 

The pickup point was a shack on the side of a cliff.  Larry and the crew landed rear-wheels-only on the roof of the shack with the tail ramp lowered.  With the back of the helicopter on the shack roof, Larry and the other pilot, Paul Barnes, could not see the shack or any other close-in visual markers. From the cockpit, the pilots could see down the cliff to the valley 2,500-feet below.  The flight engineer James Duggan, crew chief Brian Kilburn and door gunner Margaret Haydock guided the pilots from the side and rear of the aircraft.  

Although technically a landing in the sense that the rear wheels were on the ground, the pilots were carefully keeping the full weight of the 25,000-pound (empty) helicopter from resting on shack, and keeping the front of the helicopter stable and level while the prisoners were brought aboard.

As soon as the prisoners were on board, the big helicopter returned to base. 

Five years ago, I was in a Chinook helicopter on Fort Indiantown Gap that landed rear-wheels-only on a cliff.  Twenty soldiers in full battle gear ran off the ramp and set up a security perimeter.  As the soldiers left the aircraft with their gear and heavy weapons, the weight of the aircraft dropped by 6,000 pounds, but the pilots held the helicopter level and steady.  I was looking out the door gunner’s window near the front of the aircraft. I saw nothing but sky above and rock-strewn valley hundreds of feet below.  I had heard about the roof landing since I joined the unit in 2007. It is amazing to see. It is more amazing to feel.

Larry Murphy signing prints at the Aviation Armory on 

Fort Indiantown, Pennsylvania  

The print by artist Larry Selman is available on his website.

In the years since the landing, the photo (above) has become an iconic image for Army Aviation, so much so that people question if the landing really happened.

Snopes.com answered the question: True. From their site:

I’m sure all of you have seen many choppers make some daring moves, but this one is spectacular. Hope you enjoy it. This attached shot was taken by a trooper in Afghanistan. Pilot is Larry Murphy, PA National Guard. Larry is a Keystone Helicopter Corp. EMS Pilot employee called to active duty. I must state that this is a “unique” landing operation. I understand that this particular military operation was to round up suspects.

We have some super reservists and National Guard folks out there in addition to our volunteer troops. God bless them all.

Attacking NATO Allies is Stupid and Dangerous

The Malmedy Massacre, 17 December 1944

Seventy years of peace and prosperity after centuries of nearly continuous war is an amazing treasure that no one should take for granted. Yet here we are with a fool in the White House who loves dictators and hates the the Allies who have kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II.

Yesterday, September 1, 2019, is the 80th Anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

Beginning 9am yesterday, I watched the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Belgium at the Spa Circuit that is located in the southeast corner of this small country that has suffered so many invasions. The track is just four miles from Malmedy where Nazi troops massacred 84 American prisoners on 17 December 1944. Spa is 35 miles from Bastogne where American soldiers were surrounded and held out in the last major Nazi attack of World War II.

Belgium is at the center of the European Union and the headquarters of NATO, the treaty organization at the center of peace across Europe since the end of World War II in 1945.

As I watched the race, I was more aware than usual that a French driver in an Italian car is leading a British driver in a German car. Drivers from Germany, Finland, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Poland, Holland, Russia, Australia, Spain follow the leaders. The series is now owned by Americans, though there is currently no American driver.

The 21 races are held in 21 countries on five continents. Ten of the races are in NATO member countries. Part of the reason these races and every other world sport can exist is more than 70 years of peace under NATO.

NATO held the line against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I served in both the Air Force and the Army off and on since 1972. The Cold War is the only clear victory in my years of service.

When I hear, see and read the President trashing NATO, I get ill. Europe has never been safer and more peaceful than the last seven decades and the foolish, shallow, friend of dictators in the White House is squandering this achievement.

Massive Fire Bombing of Stalingrad

On 23 August 1942, Nazis dropped thousands of bombs and thousands more incendiary bombs on Stalingrad at the opening of their attack.

The horror of fire bombing cities, slaughtering civilians in terrible infernos, was how the Nazi army began its attack on the city of Stalingrad.  The Luftwaffe flew 1,600 sorties on Sunday, 23 August 1942, dropping 1,000 tons of bombs and incendiary devices on the ill-fated city.

The dense black cloud from the fires rose more than two miles into the air above the ill-fated city. The fire could be seen to the horizon in every direction.

I just read a long account of the raid and its aftermath in the novel Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman.  A reporter and correspondent throughout the war, Grossman arrived in Stalingrad the day after the massive raid. He spoke to witnesses and saw the aftermath of the bombing.

I love the book and have written about it other parts of it here.  Stalingrad is Volume I of a two-part, 1,800 page novel about the central battle of the war in Russia. It is the War and Peace of the 20th Century.

I read Volume II Life and Fate three years ago. Volume I was not available in English until this year. For those interested in the war from the Soviet perspective, it's a great book.

Ironman 5th Anniversary

Today is five years since the longest exercise day in my life. On August 24, 2014, my wife and I started the Ironman event in Louisville, Kentucky at 7:20 a.m.  We jumped off a pier in a boat channel together, and I did not see her again until I finished at 11:54 p.m., an hour after she finished. 

The 2,600 entrants ran off three piers and started swimming. It took 40 minutes to get everyone in the water.  We were in about 1,300th place when we jumped off the pier together at the start of the 2.4-mile swim in the Ohio River.  At the end of her swim, Annalisa was in 1,000th place having passed 300 swimmers in the water. I finished in 2,595th place with a lifeguard kayak next to me. I lost 1,295 places in the water. 

When I started the 112-mile bike I was so far back I saw only three cyclists in the first 20 miles. Eventually I passed a thousand more racers on the bike, but a couple of hundred of them passed me during the marathon that ends the event and I finished nearly last among the 1,800 who finished the full 104.6-mile distance.

At 11:54 pm, I crossed the finish line.  I slowly walked and wobbled to the car. Annalisa and I drove to the hotel. We had leftover pasta from dinner the night before. Annalisa ate hers cold. I put mine in the microwave. I started to eat the pasta, but the effort of lifting the fork was too much. I went to bed. 

The next day we got up and drove back to Pennsylvania. 

It turns out that Ironman event was the last running race I will ever do. Five months ago I had my left knee replaced.  The surgeon said if I run it will be damaged, maybe need repair.  No more running. 

Annalisa leads a running group and could swim an Ironman distance tomorrow. She would have to train for the bike.  So she could do another Ironman. The whole thing was her idea. And we finished a year ahead of the initial plan.

Also, no more Tough Mudder competitions.  This post has reports of my Tough Mudder and Ironman events.

Can Faith Wield Power and Remain Faith?

Captain Jack Aubrey from the movie 

"Master and Commander: Far Side of the World" 

leading a boarding party.

Should Chaplains be part of the military? The question brings up the larger question of what place religion has in a state.

As commissioned officers, chaplains represent their faith, but they also represent a state claim to spiritual power, a power that the state wants on its side, on the state’s terms.

When I read Captain Aubrey’s musings on Chaplains in the Royal Navy (more below) in the “Master and Commander” books, I thought, ‘Yes! This is what bothers me about faith and power.’   

Specifically, I believe faith in the service of power is always evil.  Always.

But Aubrey does not think in universals, he simply does not like Chaplains on his ship. He believes they are bad luck. He sees the contradiction of having services on board the ship.  Aubrey drills and trains his gun crews to “smash enemy ships to splinters.” 

When necessary, Aubrey loads his guns with grape shot—a shotgun blast from a cannon with hundreds of pieces of metal and chain—and slaughters the enemy crew while they are on deck manning the guns and the rigging.  He has watched blood pour off the deck scuttles (drains) from the slaughter of a dozen cannons firing grape shot. 

When Aubrey leads his men on a boarding party, they carry pikes and axes and swords and pistols. They kill everyone in front of them as they swing from their ship to the enemy ship, firing, cutting and stabbing.

In a moment of reflection, Aubrey thinks about the deep contradiction when he has a Chaplain on board. On long voyages, a Chaplain will give weekly sermons, exhorting the men to love their neighbor, love their enemy, and any number of things that Captain Aubrey has trained out of his men.  They can’t really love their neighbor in the French frigate and pound his wooden ship to splinters with 24-pound cannonballs, then jump onto the enemy ship as they crash together and impale his neighbor on an 8-foot-long pike or split his skull with an axe. 

Which brings me back to this issue of faith and power.  In defending their own Holy Lands, a Muslim or a Jew split an enemy’s skull or run them through with a pike. Islam and Judaism have a territorial imperative.

But Christianity can never take power and be true to itself. Jesus had every opportunity for money, power and glory and pushed it away.  Based on the words of Jesus, no one could raise an army, conquer a foreign land, kill an enemy or run a government, which means having exclusive control of the means of violence.  The horrors of the Crusades, the conquest of the New World, African Slavery, the Hundred Years War, and every conflict waged with a Christian label is simply wrong.  There has never been a Christian nation based on the words of Jesus. It is always Moses, twisted into theological pretzel.

As an officer in what he considers a Christian nation, Captain Aubrey is fine with religion away from his ship and nods his hat to Christian morality as he sees it, but he is clear-eyed enough to know that his duty for that Christian nation is a flat contradiction of what a Chaplain tells his men. 

In another passage I quoted at length, Aubrey’s great friend Dr. Maturin muses on how power corrupts the men who pursue it. 

Jews ached for and prayed to return to Israel for two millennia until seventy years ago when a Jewish state came into being in 1948: including Jerusalem, the spiritual center of the Land of Israel and Judaism. Even before they had a state, Jews developed a pioneer army that became one of the toughest of all the armies on earth.  Protecting Israel means fighting when necessary.

Islam has holy sites and the promise of a Caliphate. The Koran describes the sites and the land. Conquest and holding an empire is consistent with Islam.

Buddhism, from what I have learned about it, has a very uneasy relationship with this world, power, territory and all that makes a state.  A Buddhist state seems to me to have the same inherent contradiction is a Christian state. Buddha, like Jesus, said nothing that could be construed as encouraging the taking and wielding of power.

Christianity goes completely wrong every time and in every way when it takes power.  The concept of a Christian nation is so foreign to the words of Jesus, that it seems to me as crazy as a Vegan hog butcher.  Every institution with a Christian label that takes power contradicts Jesus. Every one. And the hypocrisy is evident to those inside and outside the Church. Every Church that has become a state Church has thrown away the Gospel in pursuit of power.

Ever since I first believed, after being a vaguely agnostic nominally Jewish teenager, I have thought power was antithetical to faith. The Jewish state must protect itself so it can only exist by wielding power. But the dangers of the pursuit of power are just as real for those who rise through the ranks of the Israeli Army as any other Army.

There is no territorial imperative in Christianity.  There are no words of Jesus say take earthly power, hold earthly territory, and conquer in His name.  Nothing.

I truly believe that Christianity plus power equals evil.  Always.

White Evangelical America will collapse under the weight of its lust for power just as every nation that has conquered in the name of Jesus in the last 1,500 years. And every expression of Christianity that aligns with the pathetic pandering of the Evangelical majority will be tarred with the same brush as the Crusaders and post-Reformation wars of religion.

In the 1970s, I remember a prominent Baptist talking about sending missionaries to the “spiritual wasteland” of Europe.  Well there was a project that failed.  He confidently said secularism and 19^th Century philosophy had made Europe secular and resistant to faith. 

He never once mentioned that the churches in Germany expelled Jews who were confessing members in 1935, just two years after Hitler took power. Nearly all of those believers were killed in the Holocaust. Churches of every kind across Europe embraced or fell in line with Nazi rule. In his history of the Holocaust “Black Earth” Timothy Snyder said that churches across Europe utterly failed as protectors of the weak and persecuted.  And now the American Evangelical Church is following that well-worn path of pandering for power.  In his book “The Immoral Majority” Ben Howe says 68% of Evangelical Christians in America believe they have no responsibility for refugees. The people who are supposed to show God’s love to the world are the worst group in America for “caring for the least of these.”

Captain Aubrey is a man of action, not philosophy. Soon after his deep reflections on the paradox of power and faith, he joined the boarding party on a ship on which he was a passenger. With his injured right arm tied to his side, he swung a cutlass left handed and led a party of men jumping onto the enemy ship, fighting hand to hand. 

But the conflict in his mind will not leave my mind.  Real faith and pursuit of power will always be in conflict and deep contradiction. 

Chemical Weapons and Other WMDs in Pop Culture

NEIL GUSSMAN

Chemical Reactions

Nerve gas and other unconventional weapons.

Nerve gas is becoming the weapon of choice for tv doomsday scenarios. In last year's season of 24, for example, Russian terrorists steal twenty canisters of a made-for-tv nerve gas and threaten to kill tens of thousands of people. They do manage to kill about 100 people, despite the best efforts of series hero Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland).

Watching season five of 24 makes it clear why we should be afraid of gas, particularly nerve gas, although this terrifying weapon was cleaned up and tamed for tv. The "Weaponized Centox" featured on 24 kills its victims with the lethal efficiency of real-world nerve gas—vx, Tabun, Sarin, and so on—but unlike other actual nerve gases, Centox then conveniently disappears.1 Real nerve gas poses a huge decontamination problem. It sticks to walls and wings, cars and computers, and it is just as deadly on the skin as in the air. When the tv nerve gas Centox is released within CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) headquarters in Los Angeles, the gas quickly kills nearly half of the staff, but those who make it to sealed rooms and survive simply return to their workstations and resume the high-tech fight against determined terrorists inside and outside the government.

Personally, I would not want to be tapping on a keyboard and drinking coffee in a room that had held a lethal dose of nerve gas just a few minutes before. But if TV gets the details wrong, it gets the terror right. Closed, crowded places make tempting targets for terrorists. The 24 terrorists attack a mall, offices, and attempt to attack thousands of homes through the natural gas system.

If you are interested in the history of the most deadly class of chemicals used in warfare, War of Nerves by Jonathan B. Tucker recounts many tales of developing, producing, and deploying chemical weapons, with a particular focus—as the title suggests—on nerve gas. The author of previous books on smallpox and leukemia and editor of a volume on chemical and biological warfare, Tucker takes the reader from the German laboratory where the first nerve agent was developed right up to the present.

So absorbing is Tucker's chronicle that you may lose track of time while learning how an errant U.S. Army test of vx nerve gas killed thousands of sheep in Utah in the 1960s. Lest you think this is exaggeration, I asked my 15-year-old daughter, Lisa, to read chapter 16 while we were on a rather long drive to a mall. When we arrived, she had two pages left and wanted to finish the chapter rather than run straight in to Abercrombie & Fitch. Chapter 16 describes the life of the man responsible for the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack that left twelve dead and hundreds injured. Most histories of chemical warfare would not slow a teenager on the way to a clothes store.

In his dramatic style, Tucker occasionally reaches beyond knowable facts to get inside the mind of his subjects. He says that Dr. Gerhard Schrader, in his lab at I.G. Farben, "[a]s always, felt a pleasant tingle of anticipation as a new substance emerged from the synthetic process." At the time, December 23, 1936, Dr. Schrader was working in a lab decorated with "a large framed photograph of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in heroic profile." A man in these circumstances could have experienced a tingle for any number of reasons: chemistry, Christmas, or Hitler's portrait. But Tucker doesn't hesitate to read minds.

Aside from this quibble, the stories Tucker finds of ordinary people are both delightful and chilling. Delightful because they are well told and give the reader some insight into the kind of person who would develop or mass-produce weapons of mass destruction. Chilling because his subjects focus on the problem at hand—making thousands of tons of nerve gas, for example—with no apparent qualm. It's the job. They do it.

My favorite of Tucker's tales is the story of Boris Libman, a native of Latvia who could have walked straight out of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Born in 1922, Libman was just 18 when the invading Russians confiscated his family's land and property and drafted him into the Soviet Army. He was seriously wounded early in the war, returned to duty after a long recovery, and was again badly wounded, the second time left for dead. He survived the war and applied to study at the Moscow Institute for Chemistry tuition-free as an honorably discharged disabled veteran. Libman was turned down because he was officially dead. He managed to prove he was alive, attended university, and became quite a talented chemical engineer. He supervised production of thousands of tons of nerve gas on impossible schedules for many years. In trying to do his best for the Soviet Union, he made an error with a containment pond for toxic wastes. A storm caused a flood, the pond burst its dike, and tons of toxic waste poured into the Volga River. Months later the delayed effects of the spill killed millions of fish for 50 miles downriver. Libman was blamed and sent to a labor camp to appease an outraged public. But as it turned out, no one else could run the nerve gas plant, and Libman was quietly released and returned to work after one year.

Fear of toxic gas and wild exaggeration of its dangers have their American roots in the debate over chemical warfare after World War I. In Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (first published by Princeton University Press in 1968 and now reissued by Transaction with a new introduction by Jeanne Guillemin), Frederic J. Brown recalls the terror of gas during the years between the world wars. "Propagandists were totally irresponsible in their exaggerations of new weapons developments," Brown writes. He quotes H. G. Wells on the aftermath of a fictional chemical attack by aircraft using the Centox of the 1930s, what Wells called "Permanent Death Gas":

[the area attacked] was found to be littered with the remains not only of the human beings, cattle and dogs that strayed into it, but with the skeletons and scraps of skin and feathers of millions of mice, rats, birds and such like small creatures. In some places they lay nearly a metre deep.

Not quite "blood as deep as horses' bridles," but still a vision to warm the heart of apocalypse addicts.

Brown—Lieutenant General, retired, U.S. Army; he was a junior officer when he wrote the book—carefully recounts the military history of the use and, more significantly, the non-use of chemicals as weapons in both world wars and the period in between. Thorough and well documented, his book also captures the policy decisions and leaders' attitudes that kept chemical weapons, for the most part, off World War II battlefields.

Brown's book has the fat footnotes that have long been out of style even in scholarly publishing, but these footnotes are a delight for the reader who wants details. On page 18 is a three-paragraph, nearly full-page, small-type footnote describing President Woodrow Wilson's attitude toward gas warfare, with references to his biography and a meeting with the French commander at the battle of Ypres.

Sometimes the footnotes illuminate and enliven a rather dull passage. In a section on civil defense Brown says, "Since it has to be assumed that an enemy would use the most destructive mixture of weapons available, gas shelters had to be bomb- and fireproof as well as gasproof." Why is this true? Note 48 at the bottom of the page explains: "High explosives to penetrate collective shelters and homes, incendiaries to drive the population into the streets, gas to kill in the streets." Brown tends to the passive voice in the text but can be vivid in the notes.

While the combatants of World War I expected gas warfare in future conflicts, none of the combatants in World War II attacked each other with gas with the exception of limited use in China. The aversion to gas warfare stands in stark contrast to the other two weapons introduced in World War I: the tank and the bomber. When World War II began in September of 1939, the German tanks backed by bombers made short work of Poland. The following spring the same German juggernaut ripped through France, Belgium, and Holland and defeated every major allied combatant except the United Kingdom. In the Pacific, the Japanese showed how effective ship-based bombers could be, winning many victories against neighboring countries in the early years of the war and eventually bringing the U.S. into the war with the carrier-based bomber attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

The bomber and the tank became indispensable weapons for the major combatants of World War II, but gas warfare did not. Brown says the first reason was revulsion by military professionals. A small group of senior officers strove to make chemical warfare integral to the plans of the U.S. military, but most professional officers wanted no part of warfare they saw variously as inhumane, cowardly, and out of their control. Gas is also more complicated to use than conventional weapons. Gas warfare creates a logistics burden all its own: using gas means providing protective equipment for all friendly soldiers operating in the area affected by gas. Gas munitions displace conventional rounds. The more gas rounds fired, the fewer explosive rounds that can be fired by the same gun. In the fast-moving battles of World War II, persistent gas would slow the successful attacker, forcing his soldiers to operate in an area they contaminated. And in the case of naval use of gas, there is a potential disaster in any ship having a magazine loaded with gas rounds. Any leak of toxic gas inside a ship leaves the entire crew in a contaminated container with little prospect of escape.

Brown shows how politics pushed the warring nations further away from the use of gas. First use by one army meant retaliation by the other. Germany and England bombed each other throughout most of the war. Even when one country was clearly winning, the other was able to retaliate. If one side used gas, the other would be sending gas back across the Channel in short order. Neither of these particularly vulnerable countries wanted to provoke gas warfare, nor did they want any of their allies to add gas to the mix of weapons. Also, the men at the head of the largest armies in the war were for their own reasons strongly opposed to gas warfare. Hitler was gassed during World War I and Brown shows that the German leader did not seriously consider using gas until the final days of the war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was opposed to gas as a "barbarous and inhumane" weapon; he stated to the world in 1943 that the United States would not initiate gas warfare but would retaliate in kind if necessary.

Brown's main narrative closes at the end of World War II. He shows that gas was never seriously considered as an alternative to the use of the atomic bomb or invasion of the Japanese mainland. In his conclusion Brown judges that the circumstances which prevented the use of chemical warfare in World War II still obtained in 1968. The professional military was largely opposed to the use of chemical warfare, and the main antagonists of the postwar period—the United States and the Soviet Union— both had many allies who would not want gas or nuclear weapons used on their soil.

Quite rightly, Brown took a measure of comfort in reflecting that the restraints which existed in World War II continued in the Cold War era. Alas, this modest reassurance does not carry over to our own day. Terrorists are not soldiers. As their name suggests, their purpose is to inflict terror on the civilian population, while at the same time they can trust traditional Western reticence not to respond with indiscriminate murder in retaliation.

For readers who would like to see Brown's book come to life, at least in fiction, I recommend Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. This 20-year-old best seller describes a conventional war in Western Europe in the late 20th century in which neither side uses chemical or nuclear weapons. The reasons could have been lifted straight from Chemical Warfare. The soldiers on both sides of the conflict share the attitude toward gas and nuclear weapons that Brown describes. And in a prescient prologue, Clancy's World War III begins with Arab terrorists blowing up a Soviet refinery, causing a crippling fuel shortage.

If I found the hopeful note in Brown's conclusion tied closely to the circumstances of the Cold War, I found some practical hope in Tucker's book. His long descriptions of the problems encountered by Saddam's chemists in the Iran-Iraq war—along with the troubles encountered by the cult that attacked the Tokyo subway—show how difficult it is to make nerve gas. The ingredients are corrosive and dangerous. The equipment required to make it is specialized and difficult to obtain. Even the most talented chemists and chemical engineers Tucker introduces in the book faced huge difficulties producing nerve gas—and in many cases failed partially or completely. Even for those with millions and millions of dollars to spend, nerve gas synthesis is very, very difficult. Luckily for us, no weapon in the real world is as easy to use or works quite as well as its fictional counterpart.

Neil Gussman writes a column on the history of chemistry for Chemical Engineering Progress magazine.

1. "Weaponized" means put in a bomb, artillery shell, mine, or other system for use. In 24, the nerve agent was loaded into pressurized cylinders that were intended for release in ventilation systems. Why the U.S. government would weaponize nerve gas in a form most useful for theft and use by terrorists rather than for the battlefield is a question only the show's writers can answer.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.