25 Days of Ad-vent, Day 3: When Christmas meant sacrifice

Christmas during the war years was somber; with most families having loved ones in the line of fire overseas, not having many presents under the tree was the least thing to be concerned about. (By the way, don't you think her pose was supposed to bring to mind the famous Betty Grable pinup?) Nevertheless, one of the things that I think has been missing during the "War on Terror" has been this sense of shared sacrifice; it's hard to appreciate the gravity of the situation when the response to the enemy is not a call to sacrifice, that we're all in this fight together, but instead urging us to buy more, to show that the terrorists can't bring our economy down. There's something very wrong about that...

Flashback Friday: War as a metaphor for war

This extraordinary photo, of gas-mask-wearing soccer players (likely soldiers playing the game during some training or down time) accompanies Brian Phillips' equally-extraordinary account of soccer during World War I, "Soccer in Oblivion,"  at Grantland. For me, World War I has always held more fascination than any war other than our own Revolution, because the cultural implications are so distinct.

While it's important to acknowledge, as Spengler does in this Asia Times piece, that World War I wasn't necessarily any more horrific than other wars of the past, at least in pro-rated manpower, it's also true that the Great War inflicted a kind of cynical somberness that the world likely will never recover from.  The thought of God looking down on His creation, all of it, doing its damnedest to tear itself apart, is a sad one, perhaps one of the saddest that a religious person can imagine.

The money quote from Phillips' story, which should tell us everything we want to know about the war, and about ourselves, then and now:

Never such innocence again. But we still make the same mistakes, because we still understand war through analogy and our analogies still fail. Now we see it as a video game, or we see it as a component of the NFL’s set of minor paraphernalia, jet flyovers part of the same combo pack that includes beer commercials and classic-rock riffs. We’re still trying to make the metaphor work, only now we’re doing it in reverse, endlessly describing games in terms of who conquered/eviscerated/bombed/slaughtered whom. It’s the same old trick, though. It’s a way to hide the horror under one layer of spectacle and another layer of moral virtue — a way to pretend that war is like a game, that there are rules, that there is safety. A way not to look into oblivion. We missed the cruel irony in all those soccer balls that show up in World War I photos. Nothing is a metaphor for war. War is a metaphor for nothing.

Make no mistake - war, no matter how horrible, is sometimes necessary.  That should happen sparingly, and without celebration, though.  As the soldier (attributed to Robert E. Lee, perhaps apocryphally) once said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.”

Originally published August 11, 2014

Throwback Thursday: Choosing sides

Rod Dreher wonders why we always feel compelled to pick sides, this time in Ukraine:

Do you know who the good guys and the bad guys are in Ukraine? I do not. In Egypt, I was not sorry to see the Morsi government overthrown, but one should not be under any illusions that the Egyptian military are the good guys. Why do we have to pick a side? Are we sure we know enough about what’s going on there to do so? Some of us might; one of this blog’s readers is in Kiev, and he has clear and firmly held opinions about the Yanukovych government. I respect that, but it is clearer to me that America does not need to be picking sides in this fight than it is which side we should pick.

Well, the first thought that came to my mind is that we choose sides because we live in a culture today that forces us to choose sides.  The mentality is everywhere.  We love our sports, and we apply its terminology to everything.  Politics becomes a horserace, and it matters less whether a candidate can articulate an issue than it does that he’s scored points, he’s landed the knockout punch, he’s pulling away from the field or falling back into the pack.  Nobody wants to know about the substance of what’s discussed – they just want to know who wins and who loses.

ESPN’s motto on many of its shows is “embrace debate.”  Doesn’t matter what the issue is, there have to be two sides, and they have to be heard out – often at the top of their lungs.  Even if you don’t have a strong feeling one way or another, you take a side, because that’s what makes good television – and good entertainment.

Reality programming dominates television.  And what is it about reality shows that most often appeals to the viewers?  You have a winner and a loser.  And the viewer must take sides; no sane individual would watch a show like Survivor without developing a rooting interest for or against someone – for that’s the other side of the coin.  If you can’t find someone you like, someone to root for, find someone you hate, and root against them.  It’s just as much fun – try it.

Everything is personal.  You either agree with me, or else.  Whether it’s politics, religion, sports, restaurant cuisine: if you disagree with me, it invalidates not only your opinion on that issue, but on everything else as well.  See it on Facebook, read it on Twitter, it doesn’t matter if it’s your battle or not – the important thing is to choose a side, and make sure everyone else knows which side you’re on.  And if they’re on the other side, judge them for that.

Given all this, is it any wonder that we feel compelled to take sides?  Armed conflict is, for us, another form of entertainment.  War is a spectator sport, to be viewed on television in-between highlights of the Olympics and scenes from the most recent argument on Capitol Hill.  We take sides on those, why not on war as well?  It’s a zero-sum game; there has to be a winner and a loser, and Americans love a winner.

Remarkably, for a culture that seems reluctant to view morality in terms of black-and-white, we seem to have no qualms about doing just that when it comes to choosing sides.  It’s hard for us to believe that both sides in a conflict can be “the bad guys.”  The Egyptian rebels fighting to bring down Mubarak must be right; after all, isn’t Mubarak supposed to be a dictator?  So let’s support them, and the fact that there are some pretty bad dudes among them – well, we’ll look the other way on that.

We abhor a vacuum.  Even in a situation such as Vietnam, where antiwar sentiment was rampant, it’s not as if people refused to join sides.  Many of the antiwar activists were openly rooting for the Vietcong, and the conflict between pro- and antiwar sides became as much of a battle as the war itself.  Not choosing a side – there’s just something un-American about it.

We lead with our hearts, not our heads.  We’ve Oprahfied the way we look at foreign policy every bit as much as we have everything else in our world.  Who’s the scrappy underdog, which side has the most malnourished refugees, let’s cheer on the plucky rebels raging against the big bad machine.

You see how absurd this all is?  So when Rod asks this question – and I think it’s a very good one, a very telling one – why should we be surprised at what the answer is?  It is, after all, the world we created for ourselves. And after all - it's just entertainment, isn't it?

Originally published February 21, 2014

Desmond Doss: WWII conscientious objector, Medal of Honor winner

DESMOND DOSS IS PRESENTED WITH THE MEDAL OF HONOR BY PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

To end this week, when there has been so much talk about Muhammad Ali and his place in history, I thought it might be nice to spend a few minutes on Desmond Doss, a man who ought to be known far more than he is. Perhaps he is; I was not familiar with him before today, when I read that Mel Gibson was directing a movie about him, and I consider myself a fairly well-read man, but maybe most people have heard of him and I've had my head in a hole or something.

Pfc Desmond Doss served as a medic in World War II. He was a conscientious objector, due to his Seventh-Day Adventist beliefs, but he did not refuse induction, nor did he spend the war behind a desk. In 1945, he was involved in the battle for Okinawa, one of the most brutal actions in the Pacific Theater. By the time it was all over, Doss had earned two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts, as well as the Congressional Medal of Honor - the first time the Medal of Honor had ever been awarded to a conscientious objector. At this point, I think it's helpful to look at the citation that accompanied the award:

He was a company aid man when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them 1 by 1 to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2 days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards of enemy forces in a cave's mouth, where he dressed his comrades' wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a grenade. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he cared for his own injuries and waited 5 hours before litter bearers reached him and started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter; and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other man. Awaiting the litter bearers' return, he was again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of 1 arm. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station. Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc. Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.

Incredible, isn't it? Doss was discharged from the Army in 1946 and spent five years undergoing medical treatment for those injuries.

What this shows? Two things: first, Desmond Doss was a true hero, one who acted selflessly and with great courage. It's not reasonable to assume there are very many like him, or else everyone who served in the military would have the Medal of Honor. Second, You don't need to take up a weapon to be a hero. You don't need to kill your enemy to demonstrate your bravery. You don't have to shun military service altogether to be true to your beliefs.

So as you read the countless articles and listen to all the words spilled out in praise of Muhammad Ali, I thought it might be nice to remember men like Desmond Doss as well. Conscientious objector, Medal of Honor awardee, American hero.

25 Days of Ad-vent, Day 3: when Christmas meant sacrifice

Christmas during the war years was somber; with most families having loved ones in the line of fire overseas, not having many presents under the tree was the least thing to be concerned about.  Nevertheless, one of the things that I think has been missing during the "War on Terror" has been this sense of shared sacrifice; it's hard to appreciate the gravity of the situation when the response to the enemy is not a call to sacrifice, that we're all in this fight together, but instead urging us to buy more, to show that the terrorists can't bring our economy down. There's something very wrong about that...

Flashback Friday: Why do we choose sides?

Rod Dreher wonders why we feel compelled to pick a side in Ukraine:

Do you know who the good guys and the bad guys are in Ukraine? I do not. In Egypt, I was not sorry to see the Morsi government overthrown, but one should not be under any illusions that the Egyptian military are the good guys. Why do we have to pick a side? Are we sure we know enough about what’s going on there to do so? Some of us might; one of this blog’s readers is in Kiev, and he has clear and firmly held opinions about the Yanukovych government. I respect that, but it is clearer to me that America does not need to be picking sides in this fight than it is which side we should pick.

Well, the first thought that came to my mind is that we choose sides because we live in a culture today that forces us to choose sides.  The mentality is everywhere.  We love our sports, and we apply its terminology to everything.  Politics becomes a horserace, and it matters less whether a candidate can articulate an issue than it does that he’s scored points, he’s landed the knockout punch, he’s pulling away from the field or falling back into the pack.  Nobody wants to know about the substance of what’s discussed – they just want to know who wins and who loses.

ESPN’s motto on many of its shows is “embrace debate.”  Doesn’t matter what the issue is, there have to be two sides, and they have to be heard out – often at the top of their lungs.  Even if you don’t have a strong feeling one way or another, you take a side, because that’s what makes good television – and good entertainment.

Reality programming dominates television.  And what is it about reality shows that most often appeals to the viewers?  You have a winner and a loser.  And the viewer must take sides; no sane individual would watch a show like Survivor without developing a rooting interest for or against someone – for that’s the other side of the coin.  If you can’t find someone you like, someone to root for, find someone you hate, and root against them.  It’s just as much fun – try it.

Everything is personal.  You either agree with me, or else.  Whether it’s politics, religion, sports, restaurant cuisine: if you disagree with me, it invalidates not only your opinion on that issue, but on everything else as well.  See it on Facebook, read it on Twitter, it doesn’t matter if it’s your battle or not – the important thing is to choose a side, and make sure everyone else knows which side you’re on.  And if they’re on the other side, judge them for that.

Given all this, is it any wonder that we feel compelled to take sides?  Armed conflict is, for us, another form of entertainment.  War is a spectator sport, to be viewed on television in-between highlights of the Olympics and scenes from the most recent argument on Capitol Hill.  We take sides on those, why not on war as well?  It’s a zero-sum game; there has to be a winner and a loser, and Americans love a winner.

Remarkably, for a culture that seems reluctant to view morality in terms of black-and-white, we seem to have no qualms about doing just that when it comes to choosing sides.  It’s hard for us to believe that both sides in a conflict can be “the bad guys.”  The Egyptian rebels fighting to bring down Mubarak must be right; after all, isn’t Mubarak supposed to be a dictator?  So let’s support them, and the fact that there are some pretty bad dudes among them – well, we’ll look the other way on that.

We abhor a vacuum.  Even in a situation such as Vietnam, where antiwar sentiment was rampant, it’s not as if people refused to join sides.  Many of the antiwar activists were openly rooting for the Vietcong, and the conflict between pro- and antiwar sides became as much of a battle as the war itself.  Not choosing a side – there’s just something un-American about it.

We lead with our hearts, not our heads.  We’ve Oprahfied the way we look at foreign policy every bit as much as we have everything else in our world.  Who’s the scrappy underdog, which side has the most malnourished refugees, let’s cheer on the plucky rebels raging against the big bad machine.

You see how absurd this all is?  So when Rod asks this question – and I think it’s a very good one, a very telling one – why should we be surprised at what the answer is?  It is, after all, the world we created for ourselves. And after all - it's just entertainment, isn't it?


Originally published February 21, 2014

Throwback Thursday: Why do we choose sides?

Rod Dreher wonders why we feel compelled to pick a side in Ukraine:

Do you know who the good guys and the bad guys are in Ukraine? I do not. In Egypt, I was not sorry to see the Morsi government overthrown, but one should not be under any illusions that the Egyptian military are the good guys. Why do we have to pick a side? Are we sure we know enough about what’s going on there to do so? Some of us might; one of this blog’s readers is in Kiev, and he has clear and firmly held opinions about the Yanukovych government. I respect that, but it is clearer to me that America does not need to be picking sides in this fight than it is which side we should pick.

Well, the first thought that came to my mind is that we choose sides because we live in a culture today that forces us to choose sides.  The mentality is everywhere.  We love our sports, and we apply its terminology to everything.  Politics becomes a horserace, and it matters less whether a candidate can articulate an issue than it does that he’s scored points, he’s landed the knockout punch, he’s pulling away from the field or falling back into the pack.  Nobody wants to know about the substance of what’s discussed – they just want to know who wins and who loses.

ESPN’s motto on many of its shows is “embrace debate.”  Doesn’t matter what the issue is, there have to be two sides, and they have to be heard out – often at the top of their lungs.  Even if you don’t have a strong feeling one way or another, you take a side, because that’s what makes good television – and good entertainment.

Reality programming dominates television.  And what is it about reality shows that most often appeals to the viewers?  You have a winner and a loser.  And the viewer must take sides; no sane individual would watch a show like Survivor without developing a rooting interest for or against someone – for that’s the other side of the coin.  If you can’t find someone you like, someone to root for, find someone you hate, and root against them.  It’s just as much fun – try it.

Everything is personal.  You either agree with me, or else.  Whether it’s politics, religion, sports, restaurant cuisine: if you disagree with me, it invalidates not only your opinion on that issue, but on everything else as well.  See it on Facebook, read it on Twitter, it doesn’t matter if it’s your battle or not – the important thing is to choose a side, and make sure everyone else knows which side you’re on.  And if they’re on the other side, judge them for that.

Given all this, is it any wonder that we feel compelled to take sides?  Armed conflict is, for us, another form of entertainment.  War is a spectator sport, to be viewed on television in-between highlights of the Olympics and scenes from the most recent argument on Capitol Hill.  We take sides on those, why not on war as well?  It’s a zero-sum game; there has to be a winner and a loser, and Americans love a winner.

Remarkably, for a culture that seems reluctant to view morality in terms of black-and-white, we seem to have no qualms about doing just that when it comes to choosing sides.  It’s hard for us to believe that both sides in a conflict can be “the bad guys.”  The Egyptian rebels fighting to bring down Mubarak must be right; after all, isn’t Mubarak supposed to be a dictator?  So let’s support them, and the fact that there are some pretty bad dudes among them – well, we’ll look the other way on that.

We abhor a vacuum.  Even in a situation such as Vietnam, where antiwar sentiment was rampant, it’s not as if people refused to join sides.  Many of the antiwar activists were openly rooting for the Vietcong, and the conflict between pro- and antiwar sides became as much of a battle as the war itself.  Not choosing a side – there’s just something un-American about it.

We lead with our hearts, not our heads.  We’ve Oprahfied the way we look at foreign policy every bit as much as we have everything else in our world.  Who’s the scrappy underdog, which side has the most malnourished refugees, let’s cheer on the plucky rebels raging against the big bad machine.

You see how absurd this all is?  So when Rod asks this question – and I think it’s a very good one, a very telling one – why should we be surprised at what the answer is?  It is, after all, the world we created for ourselves. And after all - it's just entertainment, isn't it?


Originally published February 21, 2014

War as a metaphor for war

This extraordinary photo, of gas-mask-wearing soccer players (likely soldiers playing the game during some training or down time) accompanies Brian Phillips' equally-extraordinary account of soccer during World War I, "Soccer in Oblivion,"  at Grantland. For me, World War I has always held more fascination than any war other than our own Revolution, because the cultural implications are so distinct.

While it's important to acknowledge, as Spengler does in this Asia Times piece, that World War I wasn't necessarily any more horrific than other wars of the past, at least in pro-rated manpower, it's also true that the Great War inflicted a kind of cynical somberness that the world likely will never recover from.  The thought of God looking down on His creation, all of it, doing its damnedest to tear itself apart, is a sad one, perhaps one of the saddest that a religious person can imagine.

The money quote from Phillips' story, which should tell us everything we want to know about the war, and about ourselves, then and now:

Never such innocence again. But we still make the same mistakes, because we still understand war through analogy and our analogies still fail. Now we see it as a video game, or we see it as a component of the NFL’s set of minor paraphernalia, jet flyovers part of the same combo pack that includes beer commercials and classic-rock riffs. We’re still trying to make the metaphor work, only now we’re doing it in reverse, endlessly describing games in terms of who conquered/eviscerated/bombed/slaughtered whom. It’s the same old trick, though. It’s a way to hide the horror under one layer of spectacle and another layer of moral virtue — a way to pretend that war is like a game, that there are rules, that there is safety. A way not to look into oblivion. We missed the cruel irony in all those soccer balls that show up in World War I photos. Nothing is a metaphor for war. War is a metaphor for nothing.

Make no mistake - war, no matter how horrible, is sometimes necessary.  That should happen sparingly, and without celebration, though.  As the soldier (attributed to Robert E. Lee, perhaps apocryphally) once said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.”

Why do we choose sides?

Rod Dreher wonders why we feel compelled to pick a side in Ukraine:

Do you know who the good guys and the bad guys are in Ukraine? I do not. In Egypt, I was not sorry to see the Morsi government overthrown, but one should not be under any illusions that the Egyptian military are the good guys. Why do we have to pick a side? Are we sure we know enough about what’s going on there to do so? Some of us might; one of this blog’s readers is in Kiev, and he has clear and firmly held opinions about the Yanukovych government. I respect that, but it is clearer to me that America does not need to be picking sides in this fight than it is which side we should pick.

Well, the first thought that came to my mind is that we choose sides because we live in a culture today that forces us to choose sides.  The mentality is everywhere.  We love our sports, and we apply its terminology to everything.  Politics becomes a horserace, and it matters less whether a candidate can articulate an issue than it does that he’s scored points, he’s landed the knockout punch, he’s pulling away from the field or falling back into the pack.  Nobody wants to know about the substance of what’s discussed – they just want to know who wins and who loses.

ESPN’s motto on many of its shows is “embrace debate.”  Doesn’t matter what the issue is, there have to be two sides, and they have to be heard out – often at the top of their lungs.  Even if you don’t have a strong feeling one way or another, you take a side, because that’s what makes good television – and good entertainment.

Reality programming dominates television.  And what is it about reality shows that most often appeals to the viewers?  You have a winner and a loser.  And the viewer must take sides; no sane individual would watch a show like Survivor without developing a rooting interest for or against someone – for that’s the other side of the coin.  If you can’t find someone you like, someone to root for, find someone you hate, and root against them.  It’s just as much fun – try it.

Everything is personal.  You either agree with me, or else.  Whether it’s politics, religion, sports, restaurant cuisine: if you disagree with me, it invalidates not only your opinion on that issue, but on everything else as well.  See it on Facebook, read it on Twitter, it doesn’t matter if it’s your battle or not – the important thing is to choose a side, and make sure everyone else knows which side you’re on.  And if they’re on the other side, judge them for that.

Given all this, is it any wonder that we feel compelled to take sides?  Armed conflict is, for us, another form of entertainment.  War is a spectator sport, to be viewed on television in-between highlights of the Olympics and scenes from the most recent argument on Capitol Hill.  We take sides on those, why not on war as well?  It’s a zero-sum game; there has to be a winner and a loser, and Americans love a winner.

Remarkably, for a culture that seems reluctant to view morality in terms of black-and-white, we seem to have no qualms about doing just that when it comes to choosing sides.  It’s hard for us to believe that both sides in a conflict can be “the bad guys.”  The Egyptian rebels fighting to bring down Mubarak must be right; after all, isn’t Mubarak supposed to be a dictator?  So let’s support them, and the fact that there are some pretty bad dudes among them – well, we’ll look the other way on that.

We abhor a vacuum.  Even in a situation such as Vietnam, where antiwar sentiment was rampant, it’s not as if people refused to join sides.  Many of the antiwar activists were openly rooting for the Vietcong, and the conflict between pro- and antiwar sides became as much of a battle as the war itself.  Not choosing a side – there’s just something un-American about it.

We lead with our hearts, not our heads.  We’ve Oprahfied the way we look at foreign policy every bit as much as we have everything else in our world.  Who’s the scrappy underdog, which side has the most malnourished refugees, let’s cheer on the plucky rebels raging against the big bad machine.

You see how absurd this all is?  So when Rod asks this question – and I think it’s a very good one, a very telling one – why should we be surprised at what the answer is?  It is, after all, the world we created for ourselves. And after all - it's just entertainment, isn't it?  ◙

There Be Dragons

A film ostensibly about the early life up until his 30s of St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, who was canonized in 2002 by Blessed John Paul II. There are only tangential references in the film to the lay apostolate founded by the saint in 1928, designed for Catholics to learn to sanctify themselves through their secular work. And not much about St. Josemaria’s early life and education. Today, Opus Dei has 90,000 members around the world with 2,000 priests, most of them deemed to be quite well educated and very influential in the Catholic Church.

The film tells the complex story of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) when hundreds of thousands of people in Spain were killed in a fraternal war between the conservative Nationalists backed by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and the socialist and communist Republicans, backed by the Soviet Union (and lots of intellectuals and kindred souls from the U.S. and other European countries, motivated by the ravages of the Great Depression and the ensuing enthusiasm for revolution). During that war, when thousands of priests, nuns and other religious were singled out and killed, St. Josemaria’s role seemed to be somewhat fictionalized to help tell the complex story. But it’s an interesting story if you’re a history geek like me.

It’s a hard story to tell, but I thought that the Director, Roland Joffé, well know for his films, “The Mission” and “The Killing Fields”, did a great job on this complex film featuring love, faith, jealousy, revenge, civil war, family relationships, reconciliation and death. The cinematography and especially the combat scenes I thought were particularly good.

I’ve never known much about the Spanish Civil War, the practice event for World War II. The Germans tested their flying and bombing skills there to great effect. Picasso’s “Guernica” painting is world famous for depicting an early aerial bombing raid of an undefended city. The Russians tried to do that but at the same time, Stalin was purging most of the General Staff of the Soviet armed forces on manufactured grounds of treason. So it didn’t do them much good. Thus, the Spanish nationalists, under General Francisco Franco, ultimately defeated the Republicans supported by Stalin.

When I enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1964, one of the last things I had to do before I took an oath of loyalty to the United States and its Army, was to sign a disclosure sheet stating that I was not then nor ever had been a member of a list of a 100 or so organizations that I had never heard of. Anxious to avoid the draft and combat duty, I diligently plodded my way through the list, pondering each name and checking “no” and then moving on to the next. About halfway through the list, the officer in charge just said to us all, “You haven’t been in those groups, just check ‘no’ and give me the sheets!”. The only two names that I do recall from the list were, the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade”, later that I found out was the most significant American unit in the Spanish Civil War, and the “Chopin Cultural Society.” I never did find out what that was all about. But they both dated to the time of the Spanish Civil War. I passed, and did my four years.

Go see it. It’s good! The film probably won’t be around for long. I attended the 4:45 showing this afternoon and as I left, the cleanup crew seemed to be larger than the number of us who paid to see it. (I missed out on the free tickets that were floating around). ◙

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Retro TV Special

A Methodist minister (Rev. Tanimoto) in Hiroshima met the pilot of the Enola Gay in 1955. Enough said.

Go here for the entire story. ◙

The Sounds of War

By Drew

Terry Teachout links to a truly remarkable sound clip: a recording of a World War I British gas-shell bombardment. The purpose of the recording was "to preserve the sounds of war before the coming armistice caused them to vanish forever from the face of the earth."

Would that it were so. . .