Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond: Honoring Confederate War Dead without Flags and Racism

Pyramid honoring Confederate dead 

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va.

On this Memorial Day Weekend, my 51st as a soldier and veteran, I went to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, with my daughter Lauren. 

The cemetery is in a beautiful location overlooking the James River just where the falls end and the river becomes Navigable.  

The graves in this sprawling 135-acre cemetery opened in 1847. Thousands of people are interred on the rolling hills north of the James River. At the north end of the cemetery on a hillside is Confederate Avenue.  This section of the cemetery includes the pyramid built just after the war to honor the confederate dead and the graves of thousands of confederate soldiers.  

As we approached the pyramid, I was delighted to see no statues of leaders of the rebellion, no confederate flags.  For me, April  12, 1861, and January 6, 2021, are the worst days in American history: worse than December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, because on those days the murderous enemy was an enemy outside the country.

This cemetery quietly honors the service of the thousands and thousands who died for their country without glorifying the cause they fought for.  

An entire section of the cemetery has tombstones with death dates at the beginning of July, 1863. Thousands of Virginians died at Gettysburg, most of all on July 3 when Richmond-born Major General George Pickett led the ill-fated Picketts Charge that sealed the defeat of Confederate Army at the most historic battle of the Civil War.  

Pickett is entombed at the top of the hill in the same area.

We live in a country where confederate flags wave from public buildings and pickup trucks and until recently American military bases were named after confederate leaders.  America failed to erase the confederate cause and symbols from public life after the Civil War.  The result was another hundred years of racist laws in the Jim Crow South.  

Germany did a much better job after World War II. They outlawed Nazi flags and symbols. Students and soldiers in Germany visit Nazi death camps to learn how bad the Nazis were.  

There is a German Military Cemetery in Normandy. More than 20,000 German soldiers are buried there. Each has a simple marker with name, rank and unit.  There is one statue of an ordinary soldier and no flags.  The cemetery honors the service and sacrifice of the soldiers, not the cause. I cried when I visited there in 2017 thinking how different America might have been if the confederate cause was suppressed after the Civil War. 

Soldiers under any flag can do their duty honorably.  My favorite memoir by an ordinary soldier is about a 17-year-old who enlisted in the German Army in 1941 and served the entire war on the Eastern Front.

Just down the hill from Pickett's grave and west of the graves of confederate soldiers is a memorial to the cadets of John Marshall High School. Each of the markers has the names of cadets and their graduation year.  The majority of those named were killed during World War II. Those who lost their lives in other wars have the war noted next to their names.  

Throughout my service in four different enlistments, when I was on active duty, the majority of the soldiers I served with were from southern and inland western states.  In the spring of 1980 when I had just returned from three years as a tank commander in West Germany, I read an article that said almost half of the men graduating from Baylor University that year were in ROTC programs and beginning active service.  Of the 1,400 graduates of Harvard University that year, two were joining the military.  

I was happy to see American flags waving in the cemetery honoring service of soldiers during the past century.  

 

The German Military Cemetery in Normandy

The German Military Cemetery in Normandy sits beside the highway that connects Omaha Beach with the Airborne Museum in St. Mere Eglise to the west. The German and American cemeteries are both somber green spaces providing a final resting place for soldiers, but they are very different.

The American Cemetery has a huge memorial statue with tall battle maps show the defeat of Germany after the historic invasion on the beaches below and across Normandy. All of the American headstones face west, toward home, in neat rows.

The 21,000 soldiers interred in the German cemetery are in double rows facing each other marked with flat stones. They circle a central monument to the soldiers, honoring their bravery and sacrifice. The place quietly honors courage.

It may seem obvious, but there are no maps, no flags, no explanations of why these men fought.  There no statues of Hitler, Himmler or any of the Nazi leaders. That cemetery along with the Holocaust memorials I visited showed me how perverse it is that Americans from the South still wave battle flags from the racist war they lost and fight to keep statues of the men who, if they were successful, would have my sons and every other person of African descent in America in chains today.

The South fought to defend the ugliest form of slavery in history, slavery for life with no way to buy yourself out and no hope of release. Greek and Roman forms of slavery in the ancient world were more humane. America was also the last western country to free the slaves, then quickly formed an apartheid region of America.  Since the apartheid state lasted for a hundred years after the slave owners lost their war, its creeping racism still infects American life.

The South not only segregated housing and water fountains, they segregated healthcare. One reason our healthcare system is so complicated compared to European countries is that any federal plan for healthcare in the 20th Century had to allow for hospitals and healthcare plans that were separate and quite unequal in the South.

The soldiers who fought for the South deserve honor as brave men who died for the rebellion they supported. But the Southern cause glorifies racism. In Germany you can't honor Nazism and Hitler. In Serbia there are no pickup trucks with Slobodon Milosovic's name stenciled on them. Nobody publicly honors ethnic cleansing.

Nobody should publicly honor the fight to keep other Americans in chains.

An American Nazi and a Russian Nazi

Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Prison

In almost twenty years of service over more than forty years, I met some of the best people it has ever been my good fortune to meet, and some of the worst.

In the fall, I took a class in contemporary Russian literature. One of the books we read was a memoir by the Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky titled “My Fellow Prisoners.” The short book was a series of sketches about men he met serving a ten-year sentence from 2003-2013. Khodorkovsky was the first and richest billionaire that Vladimir Putin jailed as he consolidated his power during his first term as President. 

As soon as the discussion started, it was clear that neither the professor nor the other students knew any Nazis. Certainly none of them had ever knowingly spent time with a Nazi. 

Alexander, the 19-year-old Nazi in a Russian prison was “a real-life Nazi—that’s to say a member of one of Russia’s numerous National-Socialist groups.  Alexander is no fool; he got through his secondary school exams (in prison), is interested in philosophy and politics, wants to teach later on.”

Khodorkovsky wants know why Alexander is a Nazi, “I’ve never been able to understand how Nazism could be a phenomenon in a country where so many people lost their lives fighting it.” They can talk and get along because they have a common enemy in the guard and a common purpose in someday walking out of prison.

Reading Khodorkovsky reminded me of a Nazi I served with. He was my platoon sergeant in an Army Reserve tank company in the early 80s.  Within a few years he would be promoted to Command Sergeant Major and be activated for Operation Desert Storm. Sergeant First Class Michael Wittmann* was competent, thorough, took care of his men, knew his equipment, and did not believe The Holocaust happened, or it wasn’t as bad as the Jewish propaganda said it was.  He collected German memorabilia, had reworked an Wehrmacht MG 42 machinegun to fire the NATO ammo our tanks used, and some of the soldiers in the unit said he had a picture of himself in dress uniform with a swastika.

For Mike, I was a good tank commander with active duty experience. He got me promoted to staff sergeant and made me a section leader, in charge of two tanks. We had a common enemy, the Soviet horde that was going to invade Western Europe, and  a common mission to train for that fight.   

Mike knew America defeated the Nazis, but he also knew that defeating Japan was what got America into World War II. Defeating Germany, in his view, was about protecting our allies England and France. He could celebrate America’s victory in World War II and still admire Nazi ideology. "America First" was active in America and supporting Nazis right up until the time America declared war on Germany.

With a similar selective perception, Alexander, Khodorkovsky’s Nazi, could deny the horrors of The Holocaust that in some cases happened on the soil of the Russia itself and many former Soviet states. He knew the Russian armies defeated the invading German army, but Alexander could still admire the invader’s ideology.

Mike enlisted during the Vietnam War. He knew that the mostly teenage soldiers who defeated Hitler’s armies were not fighting for ideology, they were fighting beside their buddies against the enemy in front of them.  Only civilians believe soldiers fight for great causes.

In an irony I should have pursued further, Mike’s family and neighbors may have known my Jewish father.  My Dad was the Commandant of the Afrika Korps prison camp in Reading, Pennsylvania, on what is now the Reading Airport. The six hundred prisoners were allowed to work on local farms and paid ten cents a day by the farmers, many of whom were German immigrants in the previous century. 

The prisoners knew the camp Commandant was Jewish and a former middleweight boxer. When one of their officers made a remark in German about the new Commandant being a Jew, my father knocked him out. My father grew up speaking Yiddish at home so he could understand German. Mike would have heard stories about the German POWs working on the farms during the war.  My father told me some of the prisoners stayed in the United States after the war.

I met up with Mike early in 2016. He is retired and a big supporter of Trump.  We spoke a little about the old days, but it was pretty clear we were not going to be friends.  We no longer had a common purpose, and if we were not openly enemies, we certainly represented what each of us thought was killing America. 

When we served together, I could look at Mike as I looked at all racists, as dinosaurs. I just had to wait for them to go extinct.  I was wrong about that.  Nazis and white supremacists have come out in the open with a champion in the White House. 

In the 80s I saw the Nazi I served with as just another racist in an Army that was dealing with integration better than the rest of the country. I never imagined then that the racial divides of the 50s that were getting better in the 80s would come roaring back in the 21^st Century. 

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*Michael Wittmann is not his real name, but the name of WWII German tank commander of considerable reputation. Wittmann is buried in the German Cemetery in Normandy I visited.

Soldiers Under Any Flag Can Be Great Warriors: The Forgotten Soldier

 A 17-Year-Old draftee 

on the Eastern Front

for the entire war. 

I just started re-reading "The Forgotten Soldier." First published in English in 1971, the book is a memoir by a 17-year-old French boy drafted into the German Army in 1942.  The book is 600 pages of wrenching details about the life of a German soldier on the Eastern Front for nearly the entire war.

Though he had no choice about serving, Guy Sajer was scorned when he tried to go home after the war.  He suffered cold and every sort of misery and finally defeat, then came home to rejection by family and friends.  At the end of World War II, Guy Sajer was just 21 years old and a veteran of nearly four years of continuous combat with a losing army. He was on his way to the front when news reached his convoy of the Russian victory over the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.

I read this book in 1977 when I was a 24-year-old tank commander in West Germany, waiting for a million-man Soviet Army to invade Western Europe starting in Fulda and leaving me and and everyone in 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division dead on the field just west of the Fulda Gap.

Reading this book helped me to understand how the southern men I served with could venerate soldiers who fought to keep other men enslaved.  It was clear from this memoir, that a soldier can be a hero in a bad cause.

In 2017 when I visited the German Military Cemetery at Normandy, I thought of Guy Sajer--a kid drafted into a losing cause who serves with honor and heroism until the end.  I honor him as a man while knowing the flag that he served under is a symbol of hatred.

After the war, Sajer became a comics artist, creating comics under his own name and pen names.  He is 94 years old and lives in Paris.

I will be writing more about specific parts of the book.  Anyone interested in the life of a soldier in combat, especially the life of a soldier in a losing cause, this book is a haunting reminder of how terrible war is.

“What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...” 
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

And about how war can tear up our souls:

“Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.”
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

Hannah Arendt Center Summer Social: Preview of Fall Conference on Friendship and Politics

This week I went to the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center on the campus of Bard College.  The campus is set in rolling wooded hills on the east bank of the Hudson River between Albany and New York City. I arrived just after a short downpour so the weather was cool and cloudy. Tables had been set up for dinner outside, but the wet tables meant the event was indoors.

Christine Gonzalez Stanton, 

Executive Director, Hannah Arendt Center

As soon as I entered the large old dwelling that houses the HAC I was greeted by Christine Gonzalez Stanton, Executive Director of the HAC and the kind of enthusiastic person every organization would love to have in charge of operations.  She signed me up for the book raffle and pointed me toward the appetizers and drinks in the kitchen. 

As soon as I entered the kitchen I met Ken Landauer in person.  We had been in one of the smaller Zoom groups discussing Hannah Arendt's lectures on Kant.  Ken makes zero-waste furniture in a nearby town.  The website of his company FN Furniture lists Ken as "Chairperson" of the business noted for making things to sit on. In person he is even more dryly funny as he is on Zoom.

Ken Landauer in one of his chairs

I have been a member of the HAC for several years and attended three annual conferences in person. Since 2018, I have joined weekly meetings of the Virtual Reading Group of the HAC.  As many as 200 people participate in these 90-minute calls on Friday afternoons year-round with seasonal breaks.  At the the Summer Social and the Annual Conference I have met many people who were only faces on Zoom.  

The VRG format is a 20-30 minute introduction of the reading followed by a discussion. The discussion leader is the Founder and Academic Director of the HAC Roger Berkowitz.  I sometimes stay on line for the discussions, but I always listen to Roger's introductions of the reading.  Here is a short clip of Roger welcoming us to the social:

After the introduction, we walked through the woods up a small hill to the Bard College Cemetery. Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blucher are buried there and have small markers next to each other.  

Hannah Arendt's grave in the Bard College Cemetery. 

We all placed stones on Arendt's grave. As with so many things in Arendt's life and work, her death was controversial. She wanted to be cremated, not a usual practice in 1975 for Jews. Her wishes were carried despite resistance from a relative. Her ashes are interred in the Bard Cemetery.  

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After the walk to the cemetery, we went to the library. Arendt's personal library is in a special collection in the Bard Library.  Four scholars connected to the Bard and the HAC made short presentations about their work.  

Jana Mader, with some of the books 

from Arendt's library.

First was Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. She will present at the HAC fall conference on the friendship between Arendt and the poet W.H. Auden.  Arendt credits Auden with teaching her English and helping to edit the works she wrote in English. The poet Robert Lowell was also a friend of Arendt. Mader put books with inscriptions to greetings to her by the poets on display. 

Born in Germany, Mader teaches literature at Bard and is a writer and artist.  She just had a book published that made me wish (again) that I could read German fluently. Her book Natur und Nation cooperatively analyzes 19th century literature inspired by the Hudson River with texts inspired by the Rhine River. In October her curated walks to women's history in New York City will be published, this one in English.

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Next Nicholas Dunn spoke about Hannah Arendt's lectures and writing about Emmauel Kant.  He talked about a conference he is hosting on June 20 with the author of the book Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner.  

Nicholas Dunn, postdoctoral fellow at HAC

Dunn talked about the way unique Arendt looked at Kant's thought and some of the response to her views.  Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He will also teach courses in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Studies and for the Bard Prison Initiative. 

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Jana Bacevic is a visiting scholar at the HAC. She led a conference at the HAC earlier this month on the Social Life of the Mind.  She explained Arendt's reading of and view of the The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Dilas, a Yugoslav intellectual. As with the Kant volume, Arendt had a unique perspective on Dilas and his work.  Dilas was jailed when the book was published in 1958 because he sent it to western countries for review.  Foreign Affairs magazine published a one-paragraph review of the book in 1958 that said: 

The manuscript of this book was sent abroad for publication and the author is now in prison as a consequence. It is important both for the quality of its thought and for the fact that it is a root-and-branch criticism of Communism, including Titoism, from within the Party itself. Since he was formerly one of the ranking Party leaders in Jugoslavia, his picture of the Communist monopoly of power is particularly telling, and the indictment is made with a typically Montenegrin lack of restraint. 

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Thomas Bartscherer, the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in Humanities, was the final speaker.  He announced that his volume in the series Hannah Arendt--Complete Works. Critical Edition will be published this year. He was so happy about the firm publication date that he had the audience chant a call and response of 

"When?"  
"This year!"

He told us each volume of the critical edition includes images of works in Arendt's library that she used for reference in her works.  Underlines, notes, starred items, are all included in the published book along with the text itself. His volume is on Arendt's The Life of the Mind, her last and uncompleted work. She died on the week she was to begin the third volume on judgement.   

Bartscherer talked about some of the complexities of finding and compiling annotations.  Arendt had five copies of Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics: two in Greek, two in English, one in German. She made notes and underlined passages in all of them, on different passages in each book.

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After the library we went back to the HAC building and ate dinner together, a buffet meal set up in the kitchen.  During the dinner I met more people who read and admire Hannah Arendt.  I am very much looking forward to returning for the conference on Friendship and Politics in the fall and possibly the event on Kants lectures next month.  

Visiting Dachau with My Friend Cliff

Never Again on the wall at the Dachau Concentration Camp.

Cliff and I have been friends since the late 1970s when we were roommates in the Wiesbaden Military Community. We were two of the 250,000 American soldiers defending Europe as part of NATO.  We both left active duty in 1979. Cliff and his family have a long and interesting military history dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Cliff stayed in Germany and eventually became Bruder Timotheus. We have stayed in touch, talking every month or two since 1979.  We had occasional visits before I retired, either when he was in the US to visit family or I was in Europe on business. 

Since I retired, we have been able to travel together. Dachau is the third concentration camp we have visited together. We visited Buchenwald last year and the Osthofen Concentration Camp in Rhineland-Palatinate in 2017.  Last month we spent a week in Israel together. We have both been to Yad Vashem, but not together. 

For Cliff and me, faith and spiritual life has always been the center of our conversations.  Since 2016, Cliff has helped me to navigate the spiritual crisis in my life that began with the election of Donald Trump and became a full-on disaster after Nazis marched at Charlottesville. Trump became the first President since the rise of Hitler who was unable to condemn Nazis and even suggested they are “fine people.”  Cliff suggested I listen to two rabbis with a podcast from Israel who just spoke about the Nazi rally in Charlottesville. We have been talking ever since in ways only two old friends, and two old soldiers can.

Here are some thoughts from Dachau. I will be posting much more about the trip in the coming weeks.

Dachau was among the first of the concentration camps, founded in 1933. It was the very first extermination camp adding a crematorium early in its terrible history. 

Dachau was also very much a slave labor camp. The main camp had 36 satellite camps at various times. Inmates were sent to these camps to work in the arms industry and other industries.

We walked toward the rail station from the camp itself. The route has a series of 11 signs showing where the camp guards lived and the training grounds for the SS troops assigned to Dachau. 

Dachau was a terrible revolving door for SS troops. Before the war, elite SS troops trained in Dachau. The best of these troops led the invasion of the Soviet Union, a war that began in June of 1941 and was supposed to end in victory by October.  Victory never came. That long defeat was best told through the eyes of a man who enlisted at 17 and served through the whole war: Guy Sajer, the Forgotten Soldier.

As the war dragged on and defeat followed defeat, wounded SS troops no longer able to serve on the front lines returned to Dachau to serve as camp guards.  The guards they replaced were sent to the fight the Russians, some of them returning wounded, unfit for frontline duty. 

Dachau, like many concentration camps, sits right in the town.  Housing for the SS officers and men was right outside the camp and part of the community.  Public records show marriages between local women and SS men and many other legal documents such as deeds and police records that show the camp was part of the community.  

On the day we visited we followed a very casual formation of German soldiers touring the camp.  The soldiers wore different several different hats, most were in camouflage coats, but some of the group were in civilian clothes and not all wore jackets. My friend Cliff and I were walking behind the group together, two old Cold War soldiers looking at the young men and women serving in the military today.

I smiled looking at the 30-odd soldiers and said to Cliff, “What a Cluster Fuck!” Cliff smiled back and told me about walking with a friend from the German Army (Bundeswehr) in Israel in 2017. They were near the Wailing Wall in Old City Jerusalem when they saw a group of Israeli soldiers touring the area.  The Israeli soldiers were also walking casually, not marching or in any sort of formation. Cliff’s friend from the Bundeswehr said, “We would never look like that in public in uniform.” 

I asked Cliff if he was going to tell his friend about the Bundeswehr group we saw. He said, “Not sure. You have to be careful about messing with other people’s gods.”

Dachau was one of the last camps liberated by the armies invading Germany from east and west. American troops, including 20^th Armored Division, liberated the Dachau camp on April 29, 1945. The war ended the following week, but the fighting was bitter and costly right to the end of the war. 

Just before the Americans arrived, the SS marched 7,000 prisoners out of Dachau to try to get them to other camps. Most died. The prisoners also attempted to take over the camp before the American troops arrived. They failed. Most were executed. The 20^th Armored identifies themselves as the Liberators on their official division patch. The 20th is one of three American divisions identified as Liberators.

As I write this, I am in the cafeteria at the Dachau Memorial.  On either side of me are long tables with German high school students laughing and talking and looking at their phones and eating snacks. These students, like the students we saw at the East-West border outpost at Fulda, Germany, are letting off steam after listening solemnly to their teachers talk about the atrocities of the last century. Their teachers are off in the far corner eating real food and talking quietly. 

As with every other camp I have been to, life goes on both in the camp and around the camp.  The site is preserved like a cemetery, but as with cemeteries, houses, highways, hotels, Hondas, Hyundais, and haberdasheries fill the spaces around the consecrated space. Nature abhors a vacuum. Around scenes of atrocity and horror, life grows, adapts and changes, and moves on.

Communities adapt to the environment they find themselves in.  In the 1930s and 40s under Nazi terror, Dachau became one of the centers of enslavement and death in the Nazi empire.  Today, Dachau is a town with restaurants, laundries, stores, repair ships, buses, trains, and ice cream.

Visiting German Historic Sites with Two Coptic Christians from Cairo

The Altar at the Cathedral in Worms where Martin Luther 

was tried for heresy nearly 500 years ago.

When Cliff and I visited the first Concentration Camp, the Cathedral at Worms and the Jewish Cemetery, a young couple from Cairo joined us. Mariam and Sameh are Coptic Christians. Sameh is a gastric surgeon. Mariam is pursuing a Ph.D in math education. They were staying in a guest house at Canaan also. Mariam had visited Canaan several times before, but this was Sameh's first visit.

The Cathedral in Worms.

On the long drive to Worms Mariam told us about their life in Cairo, their Church community and the work they do. They love their home and their community, but the longer they talked the more thankful I was to hear that they have skills that transfer well to other cultures, up-to-date passports and no kids.  They said things that eerily reminded me of things I read about victims of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing who could not quite believe the worst could happen to them, and that their neighbors could be complicit.

After a while I asked, "Do you worry about living under an Islamic dictator in a country that is home to the Muslim Brotherhood?" Mariam said she tried to put the danger out of her mind and continue her work and studies, but that the recent bombing of a Church not far from theirs she could not ignore. A very close friend lost her mother in the blast and many friends.

As we walked around the city near the cathedral, Sameh told me about how he came to specialize in gastric surgery. Mariam was quite animated about her future work teaching math. I was happy to hear they saw the future so brightly, but I could not shake the foreboding I felt thinking about their future in Egypt.

They left Canaan two days later, the morning Cliff and Dmitri and I went to visit the former East-West German border in Fulda. At one point I was telling Cliff and Dmitri about my admiration for Ariel Sharon as a tank commander in the '73 Arab-Israeli War. Cliff said, "It's a good thing we didn't come here with Mariam and Sameh. They have a different view of that war than you do." Of course, he was right. They are Egyptians. They are real patriots, working to make their country better, so they think the '73 War was a tragedy in the same way I see it as a great victory.

In "Survival in Auschwitz" Primo Levi describes an inmate who earned the Iron Cross for gallantry under fire in World War I, but was killed in Auschwitz. He was a patriot. I so hope I am wrong and Mariam and Sameh have a wonderful life in the city they love. In a way, I will be like the families of soldiers back home. Families who saw a bombing in Mosul on the news were worried their soldier was injured, even if the soldier they love was hundreds of miles away. When terror against Coptic Christians is in the news, I will be thinking of Sameh and Mariam.

Knee Works Well Enough to Walk: Boarding in an Hour

Last night, I thought the sudden, painful swelling of my titanium knee could be the end of my trip.  I am still not sure how much I will be able to ride, but I can walk well enough to navigate train stations and Newark Airport.  In an hour I should be on the way to Paris to begin the trip.

I also wondered if carrying a backpack would be a problem, but so far, no problem at all.  While riding on the trains today, I have been making alternate plans of what I can see and if my bicycle riding is severely limited. Since I have only seen Jerusalem and nearby towns in all of Israel, there will be plenty to see.

The same is true in the Baltic States later in the trip.

This trip, like the one in 2017, is both a bike ride and a chance to visit Holocaust sites and memorials. In the Baltic countries, like Ukraine and Poland, the Jews were almost completely wiped out both by the Nazis and by their neighbors who killed Jews and took their property.  As with Rwanda and Bosnia, the genocide was personal and horrible.

I know I will be surprised by things I see and discover.  On the last trip, one of the saddest places I visited was the German Military Cemetery at Normandy. While there, I swung back and forth between sadness and anger, because this cemetery is how America should have treated the Civil War. The Germans started a racist war and lost. They memorialize the dead soldiers, but not the leaders or the cause.  America should have done that.

Almost 75 years after the end of World War II, Germany is a civilized country.  More than 150 years after the Civil War, we elected a guy who says Nazis are fine people.

Who Fights Our Wars? CSM Donald C. Cubbison, 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division

In the fall of 1977, 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division got a new Command Sergeant's Major.  Donald C. Cubbison, veteran of the Vietnam War with 23 years of service became the top enlisted man of the 4,000-soldier mechanized brigade where I was a tank commander.

Like most career soldiers, he hated journalists, especially Army journalists.  But he gave me the chance to be an Army journalist, then a civilian journalist.  More on that soon.

When Cubbison came to our base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, we had a weekly brigade run, sometimes more than two thousand soldiers formed up by company and battalion and ran the perimeter of the former airfield, now a parking lot for tanks and other tracked vehicles.

At the time I was 24 years old.  When we heard about this new hard-ass CSM coming to the base, everyone was saying he was 52 years old, even older than our Korean-War veteran First Sergeant, Robert V. Baker.  So we expected this ancient sergeant's major would just watch his troops run the airstrip.  We were wrong. First run he grabbed the brigade flag and led the formation.  Anyone who dropped out of that formation caught Hell.  "You can't keep up with a guy who's THAT old!!"

Clearly, Cubbison was not one of those people who everyone says looks young for their age.  A week ago, I found a brief article about Cubbison and an obituary.  He was 42 years old, not 52 when he became sergeant's major of 4th Brigade.

After he made clear that the fitness program would be continuing with him at the front, Cubbison had an NCO meeting in the base theater just before Christmas.  He told the nearly one thousand sergeants in the brigade his priorities.  The Tennessee native talked about leadership, readiness and other topics on the NCO to-do list.

Then at the end he said he wanted a Combat Arms sergeant to volunteer to get his brigade into the newspapers. He wanted us in Stars and Stripes, in the Air-Force run base newspaper, "and every place else that writes about soldiers." Then he repeated the volunteer has to be infantry, armor or artillery. "I don't want a raggedy-ass Army journalist that doesn't know one end of his rifle from the other."

With that he dismissed us.  I saw that he wrote with a blue marker pen on yellow pads.  I went straight to the PX, bought the pen and paper he preferred, then ran to the airstrip.  There was a German and an American squad practicing together to be the honor guard at a friendship event on Christmas Eve.

I wrote the story and went to Cubbison's office in Brigade Headquarters an hour after the NCO meeting ended.  The other sergeants who auditioned for the job showed up later in the day or the next day.

I got the job.  By the first week in January, I was re-assigned to Brigade and on my way to becoming a journalist.  I got 4th Brigade in the base newspaper almost every week and in the Stars and Stripes enough that Cubbison told me, quite proudly, that Col. John Riscassi, the brigade commander, got a call from Division HQ asking, "Why the Hell is it always 4th Brigade I'm seeing in the newspaper."

In 1979, Cubbison went on to be the top sergeant of 3rd Infantry Division, then the sergeant's major of a rapid reaction force formed within US Army Europe. He passed away in 2015 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

When Cubbison moved up, I moved out. I left active duty in 1979 and went to college. While I studied, I had a part-time job as a newswriter at the Elizabethtown (Pa.) Chronicle.  Cubbison made my new career possible.