Realism and Policy

By Michael F. Duggan

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine devised a topical-analytical term of art—a specialized usage of a common word and its variations—to describe the bases of divisions that now threaten the domestic tranquility of our nation.  The term is incomprehension. His use of the word means an inability of ordinary Americans to understand each other or to communicate on the same wavelength or with similar perceptions and assumptions.

For instance, Democrats and progressives are unable to understand how anyone could fall for someone like Trump.  They regard MAGA supporters to be deluded—either a manifestation of mass psychosis or else a cult phenomenon—and unable to see through the illusion.  Trump supporters say that it is the liberals who are deluded, that they take him too literally out of hostility and cannot understand his greatness (as Salena Zito observed “The press takes [Trump] literally but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally).¹  Non-supporters comprehend him differently from supporters and their comprehension is incomprehensible to the other side, so they must be bad. The MAGA and Woke communities represent different universes that are fundametnally at odds with each other, work on different sets of assumptions, and are therefore Irreconcilable.   

Likewise, the populist right is dumbfounded by the progressive preoccupation with various social-sexual and gender issues.  To those on the right, the liberal focus on transgender issues and activities like drag shows, for instance, is eccentric, outlandish, baffling, and offensive to traditional values.  Other than what they regard to be a calculated attack on their moral beliefs, such causes are incomprehensible to them. These issues are as bewildering to the Right as QAnon conspiracy theories are to the Left. And from such a lack of mutual understanding and sympathy for the other side comes distrust, anger, and then hatred. 

But the incomprehension of our people goes beyond the ideologies of the culture wars.  It is also found in the interactions of daily life.  When white, working class Americans come face to face with newly-arrived immigrants from Latin America, both sides will likely experience incomprehension.  Although members of both groups may embrace variations of Christian faith and may occupy a similar economic space, there is a strong manifestation of cultural and linguistic incomprehension.   

For progressives, or anyone with sympathy for others, it is a difficult thing to admit, but the larger and more diverse a nation becomes, the less governable it becomes.  The smaller and more homogeneous a democracy is, the better its chances (think of a New England town hall meeting or a small country, like Denmark).  This is because the citizens of a small, uniform community or nation can comprehend their fellow citizens and understand and identify with their interests. 

By contrast, the larger and more diverse a nation becomes, the less democratic it becomes as individual rights give way to group rights, identification, interests, and social causes (name a nation as large or larger than the United States with a burgeoning, diverse population that is a showcase for liberal democracy).  Social democracy in a nation as large and varied as the U.S. in 2023 is probably a nonstarter.  As the late Tony Judt observed in 2010, “There may be something inherently selfish in the social service states of the mid-20^th century: blessed for a few decades with the good fortune of ethnic homogeneity and a small, educated, population where almost everyone could recognize themselves in everyone else.”²  The New Deal worked in large part because Americans could see themselves in the faces of the dispossessed.  They could comprehend their fellow citizens and their plight.   

I realize that all of this suggests something ugly about people, a hardwired propensity for tribalism and racism.  I don’t like this fact, and yet we must acknowledge it in order to address it. Rather than resorting to name-calling, it is better to try to understand what lies beneath bigoted attitudes and the foundations of incomprehension.  As the sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson notes,

“All things being equal (fortunately things are seldom equal, not exactly), people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak the same dialect, and hold the same beliefs.  An amplification of this evidently inborn predisposition leads with frightening ease to racism and religious bigotry.  Then, also with frightening ease, good people do bad things.  I know this truth from having grown up in the Deep South during the 1930s and 1940s.”³

 Although Wilson’s observation flies in the face of the idea that differences sometimes attract and that diversifying the gene pool is a good thing that might be reflected in social behavior, he appears to be right that, on balance, people prefer to be with others that they can comprehend, and that race, language, and beliefs are bases for comprehension.  Wilson’s observation also identifies the inborn propensity for the tribalism that underlies racism, and therefore embraces the idea that racism must be actively opposed.  There is no such thing as the benign neglect of bigotry, and the hope that if we don’t teach children to be bigots they won’t become bigots is a dangerous one.  We must teach and encourage the comprehension of others if we are to bridge the dangerous divides in our country.

I believe it is the conservative political thinker, Peter Viereck (who now reads like a cautious progressive) who observes that when fundamental change comes too quickly, the result is instability and eventually violence.  I would offer that the cause of that instability and violence is a situation in which comprehension does not keep pace with change.  Therefore we must educate all sides about the humanity and rationale of those they oppose, those who they do not comprehend.  We cannot change the nation in fundamental ways and hope that attitudes will just catch up with new social realities.  We must make sure that social change and education about such things are on the same timetable and that the change is wanted and considered to be desirable by a sizable majority. Of course there is no guarantee, or even likelihood that a greater comprehension of both sides by both sides will be welcomed by either side. My sense is that the divides are already too deep to be bridged.     

Notes
1). Selena Zito, “Taking Trump Seriously, not Literally, The Atlantic, Sept. 23, 2016.
2). Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, 2010. 70. 
3) Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, 31.

By Michael F. Duggan

After months of discussion and speculation, the Ukrainian offensive has begun. I don’t know how an army is supposed to launch an effective breaching attack along a fixed line when virtually everybody has called attention to it for so long. Such talk has not helped the Ukrainian war effort. I will not repeat anything here that one cannot access on any number of public sites.

What appears to be happening are battalion to brigade-size operations in front the Russian lines to the south and east of the city of Zaporizhia. There are also attacks in Donetsk around Bakhmut and further to the north. The media, parroting each other, are delighted to have discovered the military term “shaping” to describe these attacks. Although the Ukrainians are certainly trying to shape the emerging battlefields, they are also preforming reconnaissance-in-force attacks, or the use of battalions, regiments, and brigades to probe the Russian defenses in search for weak points and to determine enemy strength generally. These units would then be robust enough to exploit holes in the enemy lines and perhaps act as spearheads for brigades of the main force behind them.

At this point, there appear to be several possible outcomes for the operations already underway.
First, if Western-trained and equipped probing units reveal that the Russian lines are too strong to be breached, the offensive could be called off, allowing for a new strategy to be formulated. This could be the beginning of the frozen war of which some commentators have spoken, although the Russians might see an abandoned attack as an opportunity to launch their a counteroffensive (as with the American Civil War, the Western Front in the First World War, and the Eastern Front in the Second, counterpunches might be effectively used in this war).

Second, the Ukrainians could proceed with the offensive and commit the main body of attacking units. If reports are correct that Russian forces have created a defense in depth—successive lines with pre-sighted kill zones between them—the Ukrainians could be facing a strategic disaster that could shift the course and nature of the war. This is because of the inherent advantage of the defensive mode of warfare and the fact that the Russians have had months to dig in. Without significant advantages in heavy artillery and air superiority, it is doubtful that any combined arms campaign could succeed against such a well-entrenched foe.

The front in eastern Ukraine is often compared to the stalemate, the “trenchlock,” of the Western Front in the First World War. Throughout most of WWI, both sides believed that a single exploited breakthrough would rupture the equlibrium and could win the war. In fact the final victory in that war was the result of a general collapse of the German lines due to exhaustion vis-a-vis the arrival of 2 million American troops. It seems possible that even a dynamic breakthrough will not end this war either, so long as both armies have the capacity to fight. The end may come as a general collapse of the line.

Third, the Ukrainian forces break through to Mariupol or Melitopol or some other point or points on the Sea of Azov. If so the Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine would be cut in half, and the “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea would be severed. The Ukrainian forces would then have to immediately turn their focus to the south with a holding action to the north. If not they would find themselves in a narrow corridor facing attacks from two sides (like the allied Arnhem campaign of September 1944). This scenario seems unlikely, and were the Ukrainian forces to push through to the Azov, one can only wonder what would happen next.

Was it wise to put so much pressure on the Ukrainians by suggesting that the entire course of the war was riding on the outcome of a single offensive (I have even read that the entire “rule-based international order” of the world is hanging in the balance)? Over the past week, a number of media outlets have been trying to manage expectations by walking back statements on the either/or importance of the offensive. There now appears to be a failure of confidence among the pundits, or else a partial return to caution after so much blather and hype. Did talk help drive events? A video with exquisite production quality released a few days before the offensive showed a sequence of Ukrainian fighting men sushing the viewer not to talk about the offensive. Good advice. But it was too late for that. The element of surprise was blown months ago, if it ever existed, and now efforts to tamp-down speculation about the offensive and expectations are just another part of the story.

Initial reports are that Ukrainian units on the offensive are encountering considerable resistance. A push to the north of Bakhmut near the village of Berkhivka appears to have gained ground, but elsewhere the Russian lines have not been breached. There are now stories and grainy images from the battlefield of destroyed Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a Leopard 2 tank, although at this point in the campaign, such images do not mean much.

By Michael F. Duggan

Like so much in a war that makes little sense, the blowing up of the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam  upriver from Kherson is baffling.  It appears to have been either a mutually destructive act of desperation by one side or the other, or else an accident.   

Why would the Russians blow up the Dam?  Consider:

• The Western media would likely blame Russia in any event, thus giving rise to greater sympathy for Ukraine just as support for the war is flagging in the NATO nations and as Russian dominance on the battlefield appears to be consolidating.
• A major prong of Russian strategy has been to systematically destroy/degrade Ukrainian infrastructure.  Given this, why would Russia so vehemently deny culpability in this particular instance?
• The Russian defensive positions on the bottomland of the “Left Bank” of the Dnieper are lower than the adjacent shore, the Ukrainian-controlled side of the river.  Why would the Russians flood their own positions before pulling back their forces and defenses?
• Why would the Russians turn off the water to Crimea, including the Crimea Canal?
• Why would Russia turn off the water to a nuclear power plant under their control?    
• Taking out the “Kakhovka Sea”—a Great Salt Lake-size reservoir 150 miles long and 14 miles wide at points (and an impressive defensive barrier)—increases the length of front line significantly between Kherson and Zaporizhia.  Once the mud dries, the Dniepro will presumably be easier to cross in this area.  The Russians will now have a considerably longer defensive line to defend.  This will have the practical effect of drawing Russian forces and resources off of other parts of the line (although in the event of a Russian offensive, all of these observations could be applied to the Ukrainians).
• Could Russia have blown the dam in order to thwart an impending cross-river attack on the Russian-controlled portion of the Kherson Oblast?

Why would the Ukrainians blow up the Dam? 

• Why would the Ukrainians intentionally flood large areas of Kherson, a city they fought so hard to retake, as well as dozens of smaller towns?
• Why would they cut off the water to the agricultural areas of southern Ukraine under their control?
• Why would they inflict such a distraction onto themselves immediately before launching the much-discussed spring offensive?    
• The idea that the Ukrainians blew the dam might make sense as an act of extreme desperation to win greater sympathy from Europe and to flood Russian forces on the eastern bank of the lower Dnieper.  It could also be useful as a justification if the spring offensive fails.   

All of the reasons for either side blowing the dame seem thin and/or counterproductive.  Both sides will suffer from the lost irrigation water and from the environmental damage done to the region, the Black Sea, and its fisheries. Perhaps it was an accident of the kind so common in war, a fuckup. Sometimes the least dramatic answer is the real one. The dam had been shelled by the Ukrainians and it is possible that the Russian occupiers let the water behind the dam rise to an unsafe level during and after the winter rains.  

By Michael F. Duggan

In a time when so much of the news ranges from the merely bad to the pre-Apocalyptic, the news out of Brazil was mixed this week. On the one hand, the bossa nova singer, Astrud “The Girl from Impanema” Gilberto, died at 83. On the other hand, Brazilian president, Lula de Silva declared an ambitious plan to stop all illegal cutting in the Amazon basin by 2030. If he succeeds, it will be an important victory for the environment.

Although Lula is committed to environment, I will believe it when I see it. As we all know from the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian presidential politics can turn on a 10 Centavos piece, and even the best efforts can be undone in short order. Lula still has three and a half years to begin implementing this noble plan. In an increasingly dark time, it is a singular glimmer of light.

By Michael F. Duggan

Robert F. Kennedy, who died 55 years ago today, represents the last gasp of the vital American liberalism that died along with so much else of the promise of the 1960s in 1968.  What many Americans do not know, is that for much of his life, Bobby Kennedy was suspicious of liberals. 

Bobby had been Jack’s pit bull, his “ruthless” fixer, and there was a hard, pragmatic edge to him that is so conspicuously missing in many progressive politicians from Adlai Stevenson to the present day.  Writing about himself in the third person, Norman Mailer observes “Of course [Mailer] had been partisan to Bobby Kennedy, excited precisely by his admixture of idealism plus willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overlords of corruption.”  In spite the depth and soulfulness of his final years and his steady drift to the left, Kennedy had long been skeptical about “professional liberals.”  He once observed that, “They like it much better to have a cause than a course of action that’s been successful.”¹  

Was RFK right?  Do some American liberals prefer to talk about their outrage rather than realistically solve problems?  Could this in part be why conservatives have been more successful than liberals in recent decades and why hard-nosed, unapoligetic progressivism is more or less dead in the United States?  Some of the liberals whose posts I read on social media are happy to express indignation, but do liberals really prefer to be right than successful?  They seem to like pushing back against rhetoric with rhetoric of their own rather than trying to solve the root cause of the serious and not-so-serious problems so conspicuously manifested in the sound and fury of the culture wars.  

For instance, many of progressives I read tend to focus on the outward symptoms of the perspectives that offend them, whether it is racism, sexism, homophobia, and related gender bigotry.  Cleverness appears to be a surrogate for effective action. Their opponents are simply stupid or else bad and without motive beyond a kind of unthinking, unfeeling malice existing in an ahistorical, causal vacuum.  Progressives also seem to take a solemn, righteous joy in the discomfort their positions on gender instill in opponents who embrace traditional morality, and then are quick to resort to name-calling rather than trying to understand the opposing positions and bridge the gap.

They consider their fellow Americans on the populist right to be beyond redemption and seem to have little curiosity about the longstanding issues of economics, bad governance, and national decline that led to such attitudes.  Every day they are disappointed, disbelieving, or righteously indignant over the bigoted or insensitive attitudes of those who oppose them, and who are not sufficiently evolved in their thinking to agree with the moral purity and patent common sense their own enlightened positions.

As long as we address only the symptoms of our national divide, we will never find a way to bridge it. And while we must sometimes treat the symptoms of an illness in order to save a patient, such an approach will never stem a general outbreak.  Americans are an unhistorical people; we prefer to react to what offends us, reinforcing what we already believe, rather than looking at longstanding historical causes and pedigrees behind the attitudes.  As Bertrand Russel observes, “it is pleasant to think of ourselves as virtuous and our enemies wicked,” but we must go beyond appearances and get to the root causes of our differences if we are to bridge them.²  I hope that no reader of mine will think that my criticism is only reserved for the Left. I am far more critical of the extremism of the Right.  But I believe that we must look below the surface of people’s positions in good faith and empathy if we are to effectively address the divides that threaten our nation.

Notes
1. Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 372.
2. Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian, 50.

By Michael F. Duggan

For several months, I had been rolling my eyes at the artificial debt ceiling crisis forced by House Republicans.  Then, a couple of weeks ago, as the June 1 deadline loomed in the near distance, a friend of mine asked me if I thought the whole episode smelled like a red herring.  His rationale for calling it a phony crisis is that Big Finance and other powerful economic special interests would never allow far-right, populist extremists in the House to spoil their gig.  At a certain point, they would pressure their representatives in the GOP, and if necessary, some Democrats, to avert a national default and the disastrous downgrading of the U.S. credit rating that would follow. Now, Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, has pushed back the date of default to June 5 (phew!).  

The contrived crisis has some curious aspects that lead to rather obvious questions.  Why, for instance, are the Republicans doing this now?  The answer to this one is especially self-evident: as with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Republicans have adopted an attitude of “what is mine is mine and what is yours is negotiable.”  Thus, in their estimation it was fine to increase the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration (adding an additional $7.8 trillion to the national debt), but it is also sound strategy to hold the largest economy in the world hostage and to threaten national ruin under a Democratic presidency. 

This is not especially surprising; U.S. politics these days is rife with “red button” wedge issues, and propagandistic interpretations of the dustups and skirmishes of the culture wars by both sides. These are designed to keep people mad at each other and to consolidate the bases of the parties. Division is as good for politics as it is for business.

The next question is: why would President Biden negotiate with hostage-takers, given the dismal record of budgetary brinksmanship on the part of those who initiate these bogus crises? The answer to this question is less clear.  Delaying or threatening to withhold routine budgetary functions is an occasional Republican tactic, even though it hasn’t work out happily for the hostage-takers in the past, yet here we are, again (what is it Einstein says about people who keep repeating a failed course of action?). One can only wonder what Biden can gain from negotiations and what he might give away. 

This kind of artificial crisis falls under a historical category that Daniel J. Boorstin calls a “pseudo-event.” ¹ The danger of fake or unnecessary crises is that they can trigger real debacles.  Never underestimate human fallibility and our capacity to blunder and miscalculate.  Punctuating this tenet of historical realism is the observation that this “crisis” feels different. As smug and self-righteous as Newt Gingrich and later budgetary extortionists were, one sensed that beyond the cynicism was a current of self-preserving sanity or cynicism (and presumably they were under some control of the party establishment).  A cynical political hack can be bargained with. A true believer cannot.  Thus the danger of the present crisis. 

The $31.4 trillion national debt is an existential threat to the United States.  When it balloons even further, it may become apparent that the U.S. will never pay it off, and that our economy has become something like a Ponzi scheme, a great machine that exhales more than it inhales.  At that point, it is possible that the Chinese Yuan will supplant the Dollar as the world reserve currency in a global monetary system that is already being de-dollarized as the result of sanctions on Russia.  But averting an eventual economic collapse by threatening an immediate one is not a rational means for solving the problem.  It is theater that could lead to disaster.   

I suspect that a deal will be reached sometime within the coming days or week and the government will agree to pay its bills.  Perhaps some Democrats will be enlisted to push it through the House. 

Note
1), See generally, Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Random House, 1961).   

Postscript, May 28, 2023
Hours after I wrote yesterdays posting, President Biden and Speaker McCarthy reached an agreement on raising the budget ceiling. I am still at a loss to explain why Biden agreed to negotiations in the first place. Perhaps it is a part of a strategy to minimize the extreme right in the House by making cuts that he and the Republican establishment agree upon (thus taking some of the wind out of charges of Democratic budgetary irresponsibility).

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am in favor of crisis diplomacy and negotiations. But the crisis has to be real, and both sides must be acting on good faith. What Biden has taught the other side is that hostage-taking gets you a seat at the table. It also gets you some of your demands. I suspect that we will see more of this kind of bad behavior in the future.  

By Michael F. Duggan

It was my own damned fault. Last night I watched the 2000 film Thirteen Days. When the world looks hopeless, I sometimes watch it or else pick up a biography of Franklin Roosevelt or George Marshall to remind myself that there was a time when there were good leaders in this nation and reasons for hope. I usually come away from Thirteen Days in a bittersweet mood reflecting on the promise and the loss of the Kennedy years and how a nuclear war was averted through crisis diplomacy.

As if the war in Ukraine is not worrisome enough, when I turned off the DVD player last night, I caught a news story about the two drones that were shot down over the Kremlin. It was like waking from an anxious dream in which disaster was avoided and into a nightmare where the threat of global catastrophe persists.

If the story of the drones is not keeping you up at night, you’re not paying close enough attention.

By Michael F. Duggan

A former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer has estimated that Ukrainian combat deaths to date might be 300,000 or more. He also observed that in this war of position—a war with an intensity beyond what most Americans can imagine, and which is reminiscent of the Western Front in WWI—the best of Ukrainian manhood is dying.  They have fought magnificently with courage, skill, and tenacity beyond all expectation.  The fact that they have gone toe-to-toe with Russia in a vicious conventional conflict is striking. But through no fault of their own, the balance of numbers and resources are against them. It is time to end this war.

From the start, there have been only four possibilities of how the war could end: 1). A Ukrainian defeat. 2). A stalemate—a frozen, festering war, an ossified war of position, that settles into a hot demilitarized zone that could reignite at any time. 3). A Russian or Western defeat after direct NATO intervention, followed by a nuclear war. 4). A settled peace.  No matter how unsatisfactory it might sound, the fourth possibility is the only sane option.

As things stand, the situation is only a few rounds of escalation short of a wider war, and Russia is moving nuclear weapons to Belarus.

By Michael F. Duggan

Yes, I know, it’s not really over.

Unlike popular wars, there are no parades and celebrations after pandemics. The COVID-19 virus is still among us; a couple hundred Americans still die from it every day, give or take, and the number of new infections is diminishing. The emergence of another killer strain of the disease sometime in the indefinite future is a possibility. But the worst of the great visitation is perhaps a year or more behind us. Gone are the days of refrigerator trucks serving as temporary morgues outside of large urban hospitals, and a mostly maskless status quo has quietly and unselfconsciously crept back. After so many months, “COVID fatigue” had set in, and it was to be expected.

The country is different now, altered by the disease. The pandemic drove the trend of working from home by orders of magnitude, and the number of Americans who no longer go to the office every day is at a level that would have taken decades to reach in more ordinary times. High school girls now attend class in pajamas and bedroom slippers. It is possible that the suit and tie (and the jacket and tie) is dead in all but the highest levels of professional life, and outside of the most special of occasions. On its face, this accelerated casualness looks like a chronic lack of effort. How are we to expect people to return to greater rigor after three years where solitude and diminished standards were the norm?

And then there are the casualties. There are young people who feel cheated out of milestone high school and college experiences, and we can only wonder what the long-term impact of the pandemic will be on those who were three to six years old at the height of the crisis, and were just becoming aware of the world and social interactions. There are the “long haulers” whose health may be permanently damaged by a virus whose symptoms ranged from none at all to a slow gasping death alone in tent-like hospital wards.

And of course there are the dead, 1,121,819 Americans by the latest court, and the real number might be much higher. That number is almost twice as great as the one for all of the U.S. combat deaths in all of our wars, given as 666, 441. In the same way that the country quickly forgot the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 and got on with the 1920s, or how we have never faced the Vietnam War with complete frankness, we are not acting like a country that has been through a world and national-historical tragedy of the largest proportions. We are not acting like a country that has just lost more than a million of our neighbors.

I suspect that there will be important histories written about the COVID-19 pandemic over the coming years and decades. But then, how many Americans really read history?

By Michael F. Duggan

Eulogy delivered at Arlington National Cemetery, April 24, 2023

I want to thank you all for being here.

I am glad that the weather has cooperated so magnificently. Outdoor events in the spring are always dicey matters.

There is a story about how President Eisenhower was asked to be the commencement speaker at Penn State in 1955.  His brother, Milton, was president of the university, and it was to be an outdoor graduation.  And as is so often the case in these latitudes in May, storm clouds were moving in from the west. The event planners were not sure what to do, and Milton asked his brother, the president, if he thought the ceremony should be moved indoors.

“You decide,” Eisenhower said, “the last time I worried about the weather was June 6, 1944.” The story is neither apocryphal nor is it fully true; he also worried about the weather in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

But it is a gorgeous day with no chance of storms, and I thank you for coming. My dad would have been honored to see this group assembled here today.

My father was a soldier, a combat infantry officer: West Point ’59, airborne, ranger, special forces.

He was born in the small hamlet of Paia on the island of Maui, Territory of Hawaii on August 20, 1936.  The son of teachers, his family moved to Oahu after the Pearl Harbor attacks—a formative event of his early life.  His father’s family is famine Irish by way of Ontario and North Dakota; his mother’s family, from Texas, goes back to Jamestown.

He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1954 and attended the University of Hawaii for a year before being selected for the United States Military Academy at West Point, his brother, _____, had gone off to the Naval Academy at Annapolis a couple of years before.  And so, after 19 years of perfect weather, crystal blue seas, and palm trees, I suspect that the Academy and the winters of the Hudson highlands were a rude awakening.

But he graduated in 1959 and was commissioned into the infantry.  After completing the Airborne and Ranger courses, he married _____ _____ in New York City the day after Christmas, 1959.  We moved around a lot, and I lived in 10 houses and apartments by the time I was 9—the life of an Army family. But it was a wonderful upbringing, we lived and traveled throughout the US and took trips to Austria, Germany, England, and Scotland, and so, in the words of Jimmy Doolittle, “I could never have been so lucky again” (by the way, Doolittle is over in Section 7A of the cemetery, which I believe is that way).

My dad had a full career as an Army officer with progressive assignments in airborne infantry units.  He served two combat tours in the Republic of Vietnam.  A master parachutist, he jumped out of an airplane 104 times and participated in approximately 150 helicopter combat missions. 

In the 1970s, he commanded a Basic Combat Training battalion at Ft. Jackson, SC.  His career also included an early overseas tour in South Korea and an assignment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, among others (he was the guy who briefed the Chairman of the JCS back when it was Creighton Abrams, namesake of the M-1 Abrams tank and the room that the reception will be in at Patton Hall).  He retired as a full “bird” colonel in 1985 after 25 years of service.

And his awards include the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars with V—”Valor”—device, a Purple Heart, and many others.

In terms of his professional life, there was a kind of military purity to him.  He was trained to be a career soldier at the tax-payers’ expense, he would tell me, and was skeptical about the “political guys.”   

After his military service, he began a second career as an Assistant and Deputy Director and lobbyist for the American Legion, where he prepared and presented testimony before House and Senate Armed Services Subcommittees in support of a variety of veterans’ issues.

One of these was the concurrent receipt of military retirement pay and veterans’ disability compensation which passed Congress in 2003-04. I think was his proudest post-Army accomplishment: he told me that they owed the veterans their retirement, and that the wounded had paid for their disability compensation with their blood.  He retired from The American Legion in 2007 with more than 20 years of service.

But as impressive as his service was—real accomplishments, involving great risk and sacrifice—all of this is also the stuff of resumes.  There is a saying that there are old soldiers who would rather show you their medals and those who prefer to show you their wounds. As it happens, he was perfectly happy to show you either or both.  He was proud of his service and made no secret about it.

And yet the outward signs, his medals, badges, and insignia, were not, I think, reflective of the biggest part of his character.

Shortly after he died, my mom began receiving sympathy cards and phone calls, some from relatives, friends, and classmates of course, but what was striking was that a number of them were from people she and I did not know—veterans and retired servicemen and servicewomen.  Some of the condolences were from veterans with PTSD, people who he had helped navigate the various veterans’ bureaucracies, and people he had helped get into programs, including twelve-step programs.

When I was cleaning out the trunk of his car, a man who I never met before, came up to me on the street and offered his heartfelt condolences and went on and on about how he had helped him. There were also the more recently-wounded veterans that he had met as a volunteer in wards at Walter Reed-Bethesda to whom he had spoken in a way that only someone who has been there can do.   

He also worked with the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs helping those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries—the signature wounds of those conflicts.  But he knew this stuff and was happy to help, both in a professional capacity and on his own time as a volunteer.

Many of us fly the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.  Some people put “I support the troops” bumper-stickers on their cars.  But how many of us actually volunteer at veterans’ hospitals?  (I know that _____’s father volunteered at Bethesda and so did my sister when she was a teenager).  My dad did as well, as a kind of third act.  So, after a year in the Maryland V.A., he transferred to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda to work as a Red Cross volunteer, again, with veterans suffering from PTSD and TBI.

He was himself combat wounded, and if you have not been wounded, it is a community—a siblinghood—to which you can never belong.  I think that for a veteran, volunteering in a hospital ward of the combat wounded—as he did—it is a two-way street of healing, and I know that he especially valued this service and his Red Cross vest.   

But except for his vest, he gave little indication of his help to others.  My sense is that he saw it as a duty and it was probably too personal to mention. Medals and ribbons are conspicuous and there is a certain anonymity to the wearing them—they are symbols whose general meaning is inferred. They do not quite tell the full story.  But volunteering in a ward of the wounded is a quiet and personal duty.  

A few weeks before he died, he said that he admired my sister, _____, and that she tried harder than most people. Effort counted a lot with him, and it was sheer doggedness that had gotten him through West Point.  And he said that my mom was the love of his life.

Like all of us, he was full of ironies and contradictions: a soldier who had served two combat tours, he always seemed a little too concerned about his health.  He jumped out of airplanes for a living, and yet I could never coax him into go parasailing with me at Ocean City.  He also had a sense of humor that could be downright silly. For instance his favorite marching cadence at West Point had the sardonic refrain: “For it’s GI beans and GI gravy… gee I wish I joined the Navy.”

He was a soldier who loved Peter, Paul, and Mary, and tested my sister’s patience by playing Elton John CDs while driving to the beach.  Apparently Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a particular favorite.

One of my earliest memories is of him standing in the doorway of our apartment in Queens New York one morning when I was three.  It was 1966 and he was leaving for Vietnam for the first time.  He told me in words I can hear now that I was “the man of the house.” 

But even at the age of three, I had no illusions. It was my mom who was the real CEO and the person who managed the finances, scheduled interstate moves every 10 to 12 months, took me and my sister to Rockaway Beach with my cousins, the _____, as well as to the American Museum of Natural History, Mets games, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, and the movies, just to name a few things.  She magnificently ran the show day in and day out.  She also taught us how to be comfortable in any and all company.    

His favorite film was From Here to Eternity.  Set in Hawaii, it came out the year he graduated from high school.  As a young man, he looked a little like Montgomery Clift, and he internalized some of the film’s themes, like boxing.  He would go on to box at West Point, and taught me how to throw a punch and a football.  He ran three miles a day in combat jump boots—Corcorans—well into his 50s.  

He embraced the easily spoken but hard-lived values of duty, honor, and service, and the services he rendered, but about which he never spoke, of are in some ways the most admirable.  And there is something poetic about an old warrior who dies in peace after helping others as a second and third act. Ambulatory to the end, you could say he died with his Corcorans on.

He was away a lot when I was young. But he instilled in me a love of history, literature, and the outdoors.  It is because of him that I voluntarily chose to attend a military high school. It is no doubt because of him that I got my doctorate in US History; when he returned from Vietnam for the second time in the fall of 1969, he brought with him The Golden Book of the American Revolution (a book that is still on my shelf) and then, for my next birthday, I received the accompanying volume on the Civil War.  And so, at the age of six, I was hooked. 

He emphasized the importance of education and service to others, and was unendingly generous.  He had an abiding love of his family, the Hawaiian Islands (and Hawaiian shirts), West Point, Army football, grilled steaks, gardening, and old rock and roll music.

So aloha, Dad, and thanks for everything.  We love you.  “Well done, be thou at peace.”