Six Days of War: Three Wars Lost in Six Days

Israeli Sherman Tanks in the Sinai, Attacking Egypt

Ignorance Can be the greatest ally or the greatest enemy of an army at war.  In the book Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren explains in considerable detail how Arab ignorance and mistrust was the real key to the vastly outnumbered Israelis defeating three Arab armies in just six days. 

Oren shows how the Israelis called up all of their reserves and prepared for weeks to attack Egypt before Egypt attacked them, or to defend if Egypt attacked first. And yet the Israeli attack on June 5, 1967, came as a complete surprise to the commander of the Egyptian Army.

The reasons are complicated, but Oren makes a strong case that Field Marshall Abdel Hakim Amer, supreme commander of Egyptian forces, filled the upper ranks of the Egyptian military with cronies, shoving aside talented leaders preparing for a coup against his childhood friend President Gamel Abdel Nasser.

The Israelis put Moshe Dayan in charge of the military just months before the war, another signal to anyone paying attention that the war plans were for an attack.  Also, just months before the war, the Egyptians blockaded the Israeli port in Elat and all shipping. Time pressure pushed the Israelis to act, and yet, the Egyptians blustered and waited and did not prepare for an attack, let alone prepare for their own.  

On June 5, nearly the entire Israeli Air Force attacked air bases all across Egypt.  By the afternoon, more than 80% of the Egyptian Air Force was burning wreckage, most of it on the ground.  Cratering charges made the airfields useless.  At the same time, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rolled into Sinai in a multi-pronged attack that succeeded so fast and so well that the most optimistic Israeli leaders could not believe it.  

With so much of the IDF fighting on the ground and in the air in Sinai driving toward Egypt, if the Jordanian and Syrian armies had attacked, Israel would have to stop the attack and defend itself, at minimum pulling all air support away from Egypt.  

Both the Syrians and the Jordanians had sworn mutual aid in case of attack.   

But nothing happened.  Iraq also was to attack in support of Egypt.  It's forces sat in Jordan and Syria.  

On June 7, fighting started near Jerusalem. The Israelis had no plans to recapture Jerusalem, but the Jordanians fired on the IDF from the Mount Scopus and other heights in Jerusalem. the IDF attacked to take out the guns and by the night of June 9-10, retook Jerusalem and had the Jordanian army, including the vaunted Arab Legion in full retrat all across the West Bank of the Jordan River.

During this period, the Syrians shelled Israeli settlements.  The settlers on the frontier howled for help.  On June 10, the IDF attacked in the North toward Syria.  If the Syrians had attacked, the Israelis would have been obliged to stop their offensives in Jordan and Egypt. But the Syrians shelled civilians and stayed still.  Their army, like the other two Arab armies was in headlong retreat on June 11.  

In war, the mistakes of the enemy are often as important as the plans of the winners.  In this case, arrogance and mistrust among the Egyptian leaders was followed by a betrayal by their allies.  The end was Israel more than doubling in territory and smashing three Arab armies.  

Oren explains battles in great detail, especially retaking Jerusalem and the air attack that won the war on the first day. He also gives the reader a lot of detail about propaganda.  Egypt used its media to deny their losses and tell the world they were winning the war. Part of the hesitation of the Jordanians and Syrians to come to the aid of Egypt was the glowing reports Egypt was sending of their great victories.  

The other overwhelming impression the book gave me is of how ignorant the Egyptians were of what the Israelis were doing despite the evidence in front of them. The rest of the world was also largely ignorant of how bad the situation was on the ground and how fast everything changed.  It reminded me of how the world blundered into war in 1914.  

This book tells a complicated story very well. 

Visiting the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise

German Infantry Weapons on display in the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise

In June of this year I visited the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise on the western edge of the Normandy invasion. Thousands of paratroopers, jumped, floated in on gliders, and many gave their lives on the night of June 5-6, 1944.  

The museum gathered weapons, equipment, uniforms and aircraft used by the paratroopers and the Germans on the ground.

American infantry uniforms

C-47 Transport Aircraft

American infantry weapons

This photo and the two below recreate one of the iconic episodes of the paratroop landing on D-Day. Here is the story from Wikipedia:

On the night before D-Day (June 5–6, 1944), American soldiers of the 82nd Airborne parachuted into the area west of Sainte-Mère-Église in successive waves. The town had been the target of an aerial attack and a stray incendiary bomb had set fire to a house east of the town square. The church bell was rung to alert the town of the emergency and townspeople turned out in large numbers to form a bucket brigade supervised by members of the German garrison. By 0100 hours, the town square was well lit and filled with German soldiers and villagers when two sticks (planeloads of paratroopers) from the 1st and 2nd battalions were dropped in error directly over the village.

The paratroopers were easy targets, and Steele was one of only a few non-casualties. His parachute was caught in one of the pinnacles of the church tower, causing the suspension lines of his parachute to stretch to their full length, leaving him hanging on the side of the church. The wounded paratrooper hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. He later escaped from the Germans and rejoined his division when US troops of the 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment attacked the village capturing thirty Germans and killing another eleven. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart for being wounded in combat.

 

Just across the road from the Airborne Museum is a Tour de France themed barn

Visiting the Base Where I was a Tank Commander from 1976-79 in Wiesbaden, Germany

When I visited Wiesbaden Air Base this summer, the tank in the photo above was the only tank on the base.  When I arrived the first time in October 1976, the 54 tanks of 1st Battalion, 70th Armor were combat loaded with 63 rounds of cannon ammo. We were on the East-West border within 48 hours after we landed at Rhein-Main Air Base.  

The building above was post headquarters for 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division as soon as we took over the base.  It still serves as headquarters, now for the reserve forces in Europe, commanded by Major General John Gronski, my division commander in Pennsylvania before he took over this new command in Europe.  

This building was my barracks in 1976-77, before I moved off post.  It is offices now. Bravo Company was mostly on the second floor.  The barracks were carpeted and had relatively luxurious living spaces.  I shared a room with three other sergeants.  Enlisted men were eight to a room.  Sergeant Daniel Rosera was the first one to buy 300 Watts of stereo to play Peter Frampton Comes Alive out his barracks window.  Her also bought a mic so he could belch at 300 Watts.  He could belch short sentences.  A man of considerable talents.

Across this fences is a few dozen trucks and a dozen more Blackhawk helicopters.  The tanks are gone and aircraft sit where M109 howitzers and their support vehicles were parked 40 years ago.

I rode up to Wiesbaden Air Base from Darmstadt and visited John and Berti Gronski. They live in the housing area. Gronski and his wife still ride. I didn't find out until this visit that they were really serious riders.  When Gronski left active duty as a lieutenant in 1981, he and Berti rode home from Washington state to Mossic, Pa. on bicycles! John towed a trailer carrying their 15-month-old son.  

The unit motto of the 28th Division, Pa. National Guard, is "Roll On!"  Gronski would say that at formations and public ceremonies. I had no idea in 2012 - 14 when he was division commander that he took "Roll On" so literally. He and Berti rolled on for 3,000 miles across the country.  

The Flag of Israel, A White Falcon, Beeping Horns and Real Pride

On Sunday, June 11, 1967, in mid-afternoon, a small parade of cars drove north on Oak Street in Stoneham, Massachusetts, past my house.  I happened to be in the yard. I went to the street to see what was going on. The first car of the six or seven in line was a white 1962 Ford Falcon convertible with a tattered Israeli flag tied to its antenna.  It seemed like a dozen men and women in their 20s or so were sitting on the doors and the trunk and standing on the seats, waving and yelling.

"Israel won! Israel beat the Arabs! Israel!" They also yelled in Hebrew.  Most of them were wearing something blue or white or both.  The lead car was the only convertible. The rest of the cars were sedans with people sitting on the doors or hanging out the windows also waving and yelling.

Israel won!

Stoneham is a suburb nine miles north of Boston. When I was 14 years old in 1967, the population was 12,000 and growing.  But the Jewish population was in the hundreds. Most of the town was divided between old families that went back to the Revolution or further. Stoneham was incorporated in 1636. The other half was Irish and Italian Catholic families.  It seemed like the entire Jewish population of Stoneham was in those cars, at least those between 18 and 25 years old.  I am technically not Jewish, my father is Jewish, not my mother so I am not Jewish by Israel's official definition.

But on this day, for the first time I can remember, I was really proud to be Jewish.  Israel beat Egypt, Jordan and Syria in just six days.  The victory was crushing. Israel was outnumbered 100 to 1 and sent all three armies fleeing. Until that day, when I thought about being Jewish, I thought about being a victim. I did not know much about my heritage or the Holocaust, but I know that millions were killed by the Nazis.

The Six-Day War changed that for me. Israel could fight and win against impossible odds.  Israelis were not victims, they were warriors.  I just finished reading Six Days of War by Michael Oren. This book brought together all of the details of a war I knew from news reports at the time. Oren makes clear the cascade of errors and arrogance by the Arab leaders that led to such a quick and crushing defeat.  He also details how many of the victories were last-minute decisions in the moment that could have gone another way. Taking Jerusalem, for example, was not a plan. There was an opportunity. Israel took it.

Reading this book was also a counterbalance for me to my visits to Holocaust sites and memorials this summer.  I spent the summer being reminded of how dangerous Nazi and white supremacist ideology really is.  Oren's book reminded me that Israel is ready to fight any enemy of the Jewish people.

Eight Years Ago Matt Jones Was My Mentor, and the Same Age as My Kids

From Left: Me, Matt Jones, Dale Shade and Andy Mehler

Ten years ago this month I moved from Echo Company to Task Force Diablo HQ. My new mission was to write about as many soldiers as I could and take hundreds of pictures.  

The last time I took photos professionally was in the 70s. Cameras had film. I needed help.  At Brigade Headquarters there were two Public Affairs sergeants, but only one had been to the Defense Information School. The sergeant who handed me a digital camera and showed me how to use it was Matt Jones.  Of course he was less than half my age, everybody was. But this young, quiet sergeant who was about the same age as my oldest daughter was also my mentor. He showed me how to use the new camera, how to frame shots, how to care for the camera in sandstorms and prop wash from helicopters, and how the Army does public relations.  

I had more than 20 years experience in public relations, but the Army is a much more controlled environment than the civilian world. Matt guided me through the virtual land mines of Army approvals. He is also an excellent line editor and made several of my stories better and more focused. 

Although we occasionally worked in the same office and we were both in the same Brigade, Matt's work environment was sadly different than mine. The people I worked for in Task Force headquarters gave me everything I needed within their power to help me do my job. Matt worked for a headquarters with a troubled commander and the infighting that always happens in that kind of situation. While I got praise and encouragement, Matt got criticism and disdain.  

Matt is now just another old guy, over 30!, with kids and a career. Ten years ago, he helped me to succeed while he handled his own set of difficulties.  

Thanks again Matt. 

The Army is Progressive When the Country is Divided

When I enlisted in 1972, racial integration was a fact in the American Army, but was an on-going mess outside the gates of every base. At that time, the very few women in the military were very separate and no one could be openly Gay, but the Army was ahead of the civilian world in racial integration.

Part of the success of integration in the Army was shared suffering.  Everyone in Basic Training of whatever background had a common enemy in the Drill Sergeant. After Basic, soldiers of every color had a real enemy in Vietnam. Rifle squads live by trusting each other.

During my first enlistment between 1972 and 1984, I lived in an Army that changed from a draft to a volunteer Army.  By 1977, one of the Volunteer Army infantry battalions in the armored brigade I served in was majority minority--Blacks and Hispanics were almost 70 percent of the soldiers in the unit.

By the way, in the 70s the ranks of Black Drill Sergeants grew rapidly. It was still difficult for minority soldiers to achieve officer ranks, but Drill Sergeant was open to every career sergeant who mastered all the essential soldier skills. And that meant soldiers of every background were taking orders from a Black man from the first day of their service.

When the Army became "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the 90s, it was far ahead of a culture in which old people (voters) were against Gay Rights and young people (non-voters) were mostly in favor of Gay Rights.

The Iraq War saw the integration of women in the Army in a way they never had been before and later Gay soldiers were allowed to serve openly.  Last year Transgender soldiers joined the ranks. The President is issuing orders to ban Transgender soldiers, but he is fighting a trend that toward inclusion that is more than a half century old and will continue.

The military squeezes people into tanks, destroyers, Humvees, submarines, aircraft and holes in the ground. In those confined spaces, they learn to survive and thrive.

I wish there was a civilian equivalent of a bunker or a Stryker vehicle. We would have better world.

GRUNT by Mary Roach--Funny, Brilliant Book on Military Technology

I reviewed this delightful book for Distillations magazine. Here is the text:

Mary Roach. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. W. W. Norton, 2016. 288 pp. $27.

Mary Roach had me in the palm of her hand from the opening sentences of Grunt, her latest look at science’s stranger endeavors:

The chicken gun has a sixty-foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four-pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile, the intent is not to kill. On the contrary, the chicken gun is designed to keep people alive.

Roach loves detail and understands technology. These chickens are fired at military aircraft as “stunt doubles” for all the birds—ducks, pigeons, geese, gulls—that collide with jets. But chickens are denser than ducks and geese, so their carcasses slam into engines and canopies with different effect. “Nonetheless,” writes Roach, “the chicken was the standard ‘material’ approved by the U.S. Department of Defense for testing jet canopy windows. Not only are chickens easier to obtain and standardize, but they serve as a sort of worst-case scenario.”

Despite the almost cartoonish vision of a gun designed to shoot chickens, Roach’s opening—and the rest of Grunt—is about the work of researchers who find ways to keep soldiers alive and healthy through the many hazards of war and military life in general.

Almost 20 years of the past 44 years of my life have been spent in the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Army National Guard. In the 1970s I served in the United States and West Germany, then switched to the reserves. I left the military in 1984 only to re-enlist in 2007. I had one tour in Iraq and finally retired in 2015. After reading Roach’s rollicking review of sweat, diarrhea, hearing loss, penis repair and potential replacement, maggot medicine, and much more, I felt almost glad about my retirement. But her book did lead me to recall my time in Iraq and to think about what my fellow soldiers and I really worried about.

When I deployed in 2009, the army issued me four full duffel bags of gear. Some of it was important: the uniforms, boots, socks, and underwear that were my daily companions. Some of it was crazy. We all got cold-weather gear good to −60°F. I left that gear in my locker in Pennsylvania, where it stayed until I was discharged.

Of all the things I carried, what did I have with me on every flight and every mission? Joining my helmet, rifle, ammo, Kevlar body armor, and other requirements was an empty Gatorade bottle stashed in the right cargo pocket of my uniform. Many of my fellow soldiers carried a Gatorade bottle so they would have someplace to spit tobacco. I carried that bottle because a 56-year-old man in a Black Hawk helicopter might not make it to the next landing zone before needing to recycle his last cup of coffee. In the army a single mistake can follow a soldier through an entire career, and I did not want to be known as the old sergeant who pissed himself.

Roach devotes a whole chapter, “Leaky SEALS,” to the body’s exit ramps, though she focuses on diarrhea. She turns to Mark Riddle, who runs an army clinic devoted to the study of the subject, and in her delightful, snarky way quotes Riddle on his work as saying, “I live and breathe this stuff.”

In past centuries the statistics on diarrhea among soldiers were grim. Roach tells us that 95,000 soldiers died from diarrhea or dysentery during the American Civil War and quotes William “Father of Modern Medicine” Osler as saying, “Dysentery ‘has been more fatal to soldiers than powder and shot.’ ” Modern medicine has made diarrhea far less fatal, but a soldier with a failed digestive system is out of the fight and in the latrine. According to Roach, 54% of American combatants in Afghanistan and 77% in Iraq came down with diarrhea, with 40% of the cases serious enough to require medical help. Soldiers may not die from it these days, but I have heard them mutter “just shoot me” while curled into a fetal position in between sprints to the latrine.

While fear of intestinal disease varies among soldiers, a different type of fear trumps all others. But first a word about war movies and videos: if you want to give a soldier a reason to laugh, just give him or her a war movie. The great exception to that rule is the HBO series Band of Brothers, which I never heard a soldier criticize. Why’s that? In episode three there is a moment that perfectly illustrates the greatest fear every male soldier brings to war.

In the scene, First Sergeant Carwood Lipton is in a street directing his men. An explosion blows him back against a wall. He collapses. Another sergeant, Talbert, runs to Lipton and binds his injured arm. Then Talbert’s eyes follow Lipton’s down to the injured man’s crotch, which is bloody and getting worse. Talbert rips open Lipton’s pants and looks inside. “You’re OK, Lip. Everything’s right where it should be.” Lipton nods, relieved and grateful. The shrapnel that cut through his thigh and caused the bleeding is insignificant in comparison.

I remember many scenes from Band of Brothers, but few of them are clearer in my mind than the look on Lipton’s face before and after Talbert finds everything in place.

Roach followed a real soldier who was not so lucky and required several reconstructive surgeries; the book describes in detail how skin is removed from inside the cheek to rebuild the urethra. Skin tissue in the mouth has no hair and is tolerant of pee, she tells us. But the relatively small number of soldiers with this type of injury meant the military pushed such surgeries down the priority list: there were 18,000 amputations of limbs during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq versus 300 soldiers in need of reconstructive surgery “for their junk.” Despite the small number of affected soldiers, the psychological impact was huge: men who could adapt to the loss of both legs or both arms were devastated at the prospect of living their lives without their “short arm.” Army doctors had to be convinced that this surgery was vital to the well-being of soldiers, even if the numbers needing it were low.

For those soldiers too mutilated for reconstructive surgery, Roach introduces the prospect of transplants. Such transplants do not yet exist, but even the possibility of this radical surgery may brighten the future for the affected soldiers. As of 2015 Roach had found a French surgeon with one partial success and several failures. (As for women, given the way female anatomy is arranged, any significant damage to reproductive organs likely involves a fatal injury.)

In addition to pee, poop, and penises Roach introduces the reader to the latest research on, among other things, the use of horrible smells as weapons (a failed experiment Roach has fun reporting on) and sweat and heat injuries. In the desert it’s common for soldiers to wear more than 60 pounds of gear in 120°F heat; without frequent hydration soldiers can develop heat stroke, which the military now goes to great lengths to avoid. (In the past this problem wasn’t taken seriously.) While I was in Iraq, there were pallets of water bottles all around my air base, and sergeants constantly asked their soldiers when they last drank.

DM rev Grunt vr.jpg

U.S. Army soldiers training with a virtual-reality simulator in Grafenwöhr, Germany, December 2013. 

U.S. Army photo by Markus Rauchenberger

Many of the topics Roach covers, including roadside bombs, hearing loss, digestive failure, and the fear of being shot below the belt, are part of my lived and shared experiences in the army. Her discussions of the sea (and sharks) resonate less with me, though the chapter on submarines and sleep deprivation captures the corrosive culture of pride that both fuels much of the military and is one of its greatest threats. I have former “Nuke Boat” sailor friends who wore their sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. Yet, as Roach points out, sleep deprivation correlates with a decrease in mental ability. These confident, sleep-deprived sailors get progressively more error prone as the hours tick on. On a positive note I was surprised to find that the navy took sleep research seriously enough to make changes that address the problem. I can’t imagine the army doing the same thing.

Grunt is both entertaining and informative in the best tradition of science writing, and its author is well versed in the fine art of footnotes. Throughout the text she races from erudite explanations of how bacteria explode intestinal cells to what she learned by attending a bowling party for amputees. These relevant but parenthetical facts are kept on the page rather than hidden away in endnotes. In a chapter on foul smells Roach footnotes the difficulties of creating an odor that is universally sensed as vomit. International Flavors and Fragrances was asked to design such a smell and eventually gave up. The initial request came from a diet company that wanted to make certain foods repellent to dieters. The military investigated vomit and other smells as weapons to keep enemy soldiers away from certain areas. But, as Roach explains, few smells are universally repellent: some small percentage of people like what most people sense as the smell of vomit. Go figure.

In her introduction Roach writes, “Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man’s life.” This sentence is not a bad summary of the book. Roach tells us about the strange work of those who try to keep soldiers alive in a profession that routinely puts them in the way of death. In telling that story she offers many smiles and, in my case, some real laughs.

Ten Years Ago I Re-Enlisted at 54

Ten years ago this week I raised my right hand in front of the flag in the lobby of the Aviation Armory at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. and re-enlisted. I left the Army Reserve in June of 1984 and spent the intervening 23 years as a bearded civilian.

On the day, if I remember correctly, the officer administering the oath was Frank Tedeschi, an Apache Longbow pilot. Other witnesses were Chad Hummel, who was the Training NCO for the unit I was joining, and Miguel Ramirez, an admin NCO who was one of my roommates during pre-deployment training.

My wife, Annalisa, and my son, Nigel, were also there.  I had put off the enlistment day until two weeks after I got the neck brace off from the crash in May that left me with a smashed C7 and nine other broken bones.  Everything healed up and I was ready to be a soldier again.

As soon as I could, I called my friend from the 70s Army, Abel Lopez, and told him I actually did it. I re-enlisted. I was back in starting again as an enlisted man, a Specialist.  I also pointed out that General David Petraeus and I started our Army careers the same year and both of us were still serving. He said, "You and him are a lot alike Gussman, except he's a Four Star General and you're a Spec 4." Once an old friend made funny of me, I knew I was really back in. As it turned out, Petraeus did not stay in as long as I did.

From Trying to Convert Each Other to Wedding Invitation

In 1979 I lived in the military housing area in the Wiesbaden Military Community. One day, a Jehovah's Witness came to my door. Back then, military housing was open and Germans came into the housing area for many reasons. The top reason was dumpster diving. The Germans thought (they were right) Americans threw away perfectly good stuff!

And then there was Martin. He was an earnest, committed Jehovah's Witness. He spoke four languages and wanted to convert Americans to his faith.  Martin was in his late 20s, tall, thin and very serious. He had thinning hair which he wore short, but not military buzz cut short. He looked straight into your eyes with his ice blue eyes and radiated sincerity.

When Martin came to my door, he started with his practiced presentation then went off script when he found I had actually read the Bible through in two translations. He was even more delighted when he found out I was taking a correspondence course in New Testament Greek. Martin was studying Greek. After 90 minutes of talking about how best to parse irregular Greek verbs Martin said he had to go, but said he would be back the next week. We set a time to meet and he was off to tell the rest of the housing area about his faith.

Martin came back the next week and every week I was in town for several months until I went home at the end of my enlistment. Martin was getting married the month after my discharge. He invited me to the wedding. I was sad that I could not attend. We continued to disagree about matters of doctrine until the last time we met, but at the same time thought that there was no way to be serious about reading the Bible and read it in translation.

At the same time I was studying Greek with Martin, I was visiting my friend Cliff every week in Darmstadt where he was a novice in the Franciscan Brotherhood at Canaan. Cliff left the American military on May 2 of 1979 and started on the road to becoming Bruder Timotheus, which he is now at Canaan.

While I was in the Cold War Army, I met many people who were serious about their faith. When I re-enlisted in 2007, I expected to find the same kind of people, but the world and the Army had changed a lot between the 70s and the Iraq War.  The "Whatever" culture affects everything. In the 1970s, there was a guy in our unit who could have been "Bible" from the movie "Fury." I never met that guy in Iraq.

Coffee in Iraq--Fred Lameki and Green Beans

In Iraq, good coffee was on one of the few pleasures that was not banned by order of somebody.  Green Beans Coffee was the place I would meet friends, enjoy good coffee and talk to the men who made the coffee.  Green Beans was mostly staffed by men from Nepal, but Fred Lameki was one of the baristas at Camp Adder, Iraq.

Fred is from Kenya where he currently runs a video and photo business. He is on Facebook where we have been friends since Camp Adder. Fred is the kind of person who can sense when someone is down. He would make a point of saying something to cheer me up when I looked down.  We also talked about public relations and photography.

He acted on what we spoke about, starting a communications company in Kenya.

It is one of the amazing things about Facebook and other social media that I can continue to follow Fred as his career goes forward and his life goes on. And if I ever get the chance to travel to Africa, the trip will definitely include a visit to Kenya and Fred Lameki.

First Sergeant Francke and My Return to Army Life

First Sergeant Francke with SFC Wentzell

When I first re-enlisted in the Army in 2007, culture shock can't even begin to describe what I felt joining an Army maintenance company after almost 25 years as a civilian. I remembered many of the basics, but I was painfully out of practice.

Among the many people who guided me back into the world of camouflage and military discipline was First Sergeant Rich Francke. At my first drill, formation was at 0745 hours behind the Aviation Armory. I fell in with the rest of the company. One of the Staff Sergeant squad leaders ran up to the formation, took his place at the head of his file and then he was on the ground knocking out pushups after Francke said, "25."

With Top Francke, you were already late if the second hand on his old school analog watch was sweeping up toward formation time. I did those pushups the next month. All through the training for deployment in 2009, Top Francke made sure we knew the standards and he held me and everyone else to them. He was also funny. When I re-enlisted the National Guard was still using "Deuce and a Half" trucks for hauling soldiers and cargo. When we climbed in the back of one to go to range, Top said, "These vehicles are older than Gussman, if you can believe that."

I had assumed--hoped--he would be our First Sergeant in Iraq, but five years before he was on a deployment that stretched from a year to beyond a year and a half, so he decided to retire rather than deploy again. But he was with us up to the day we left and made sure we were as ready as we could be before we boarded the planes that would take us to Camp Adder, Iraq.

Back in Touch with My Cold War Motorhead

1968 Renault 16TS, 4-speed on the column.

The second car I owned while stationed in West Germany, 1976-79

My 20-country tour across Europe with a side trip to Israel got me back in touch with my inner motorhead.  I grew up addicted to cars. In graduate school, I had an autobiography seminar. One of the papers was a 15-page autobiography. I wrote that paper with December 19, 1969, at the exact center of the middle page: the day I got my license.  As I saw it in 1983, my whole life before that date had been getting ready to get my license; my life after that had been dominated by cars, trucks, motorcycles and tanks. By that year I had owned 27 cars, trucks and motorcycles. By 1993 I had owned 37 of the 41 vehicles I have owned or driven long term.

2001 Chevy Express 3500, the ultimate bicycle hauling machine,

Not the ultimate driving machine.

In a coincidence of time, age and interest, I got hooked on bicycle riding in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down. By 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union, I sold the last of the dozen motorcycles I owned. From that point on, the cars I drove were bicycle and kid haulers. I bought a Chevy Monte Carlo in 1996 specifically because it seated six and the back seat folded down. My kids and I could ride in the front, with the bike in the back. In 2001, I bought a 16-passenger van, because I could put five bikes and spare wheels inside the van along with six people and a dog. Since the end of the Cold War, I have ridden more and driven less.  Right now we own one 16-year-old Prius and nine bicycles.

2001 Toyota Prius--currently our only car 

My visit to Eastern Europe on what was supposed to be a bike and train trip re-awakened my love of cars.

1964 Opel Kadett Wagon, My Third Car

In the nearly 50 years since I got my license I have driven cars as small as a 1964 Opel and as large as an M60A1 Patton tank. One of my favorite cars was a 1968 Renault 16TS I owned during the last year I was stationed in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1979. This little car had a 4-speed shifter on the steering column. It was nimble, quick and a lot of fun to drive on the narrow roads of Germany.

M60A1 Patton Tank, not the best on narrow roads

During my recent trip to Eastern Europe, I rented a car three different times for a day or two to get places I could not get on a train or a bike in the time I had. The first car I rented was a Toyota Auris. I rented it in Belgrade for 48 hours. In that 48 hours, I drove to Croatia and Bosnia. In both countries, I stopped near the border and rode my bike to see some of the local country. Then next day I drove to Macedonia, arrived two hours before dark and rode to the Kosovo border. The next day I drove to Thessaloniki, Greece, then Sofia, Bulgaria and back to Belgrade and returned the car.

Toyota Auris--125 mph on the highway from Belgrade south to Macedonia

Three weeks later I was in France. I had two days before I flew to Israel, so I rented another Car, as Spanish Ibiza, and drove to Normandy as far as St. Mere Eglise from Paris.

Ibiza: from Paris to Normandy and back

When I got back from Israel, I had a couple of days before flying home. I had thought about seeing the Tour de France which was in southwest France during those days, but I am much more a fan of Formula 1 car racing than I am of bicycle racing. So I made a 48-hour 2000-kilometer loop from Paris to Cannes, then I went to Monaco, the oldest and most famous race in the World Championship, then through Torino, Italy and under the longest tunnel in the world in Mont Blanc. Then to Geneva for the night and back to Paris in time for the flight. The car for this trip was a six-speed stick shift diesel Citroen.

Citroen C3 Diesel, six-speed manual through the Alps

from Monaco to Torino to Geneva through Mont Blanc

Three cars from three countries and more than two thousand miles in a total of five days. I love driving in Europe on narrow streets and hundreds of miles of mountain roads.  Even after 150,000 miles of bicycling in the last 20 years, I am still a motorhead.

Trek Madone 9.2, my main ride in America

Visiting the Jewish Museum in Belgrade

I visited the Jewish Museum in Belgrade, just before leaving the Serbian capitol for Croatia.  The museum is on a narrow, steep street.  Just a door and a sign face the street.  Inside you climb up three flights of stairs to an upper floor.  The museum winds through hundreds of years of Jewish history in the Balkans. According to the staff, this is the only Jewish museum anywhere in the Balkan states. 

Most of the collection is artifacts and photos from the mid 19th Century to World War II.  There was a vibrant Jewish community then, several synagogues with very different architecture. During the 1930s as anti-Semitism became fashionable, the Jewish community diminished.  When the Nazis conquered the Balkans during World War II, the Jewish community was wiped out. After the war, a few Jews came back, but in 1950s the last synagogue was demolished.

At this point, the collection stops.  If I understood the guide correctly, the few remaining Jews left permanently or at least for a while in the 1990s when Slobodan Milosevic was murdering Muslims and Croats.  Jews were not a particular target, but the Holocaust was less than 50 years before, so leaving seems a lot smarter than waiting for the guys with guns to start killing Jews.

After leaving the museum, I walked back to the hotel to get my bike and get ready to leave Belgrade.  As I walked along the bustling sidewalks beside constant traffic, I was looking at the people on the street who were middle aged and older.  The slaughter in the Balkans was just two decades ago. Was I walking past a supporter of ethnic cleansing? A killer?  I had the same creepy feeling during my first visit to the city of Wiesbaden after arriving in West Germany with Brigade 76.  World War II ended just 30 years before. Were the people I passed Nazis? Were they Hitler supporters? Were they killers of Jews? 

The history of Germany and Serbia make chillingly clear the vast difference between Patriotism and Nationalism:

Nationalism says our country is the Best and inflames the worst instincts of its citizens. Draft dodgers and other cowards with loud voices can be Nationalists. Grievance and anger are the only prerequisites. Not courage.

Patriotism means service. Patriots make sacrifices. They risk, and sometimes they lose their lives to protect their country and make it greater.  Patriots fought to save the world from Nazi tyranny, then they brought democracy to Germany, Japan, Italy and other countries under tyranny.  Patriotism tears down walls. Tyrants build them.

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C.S. Lewis says, "Without courage there can be no virtue."

Patriotism begins with courage. Nationalism begins with fear.