Book List 2019

I read thirteen books this year.  Many were about the run-up to World War I, because I believe as the world currently re-arms and separates into warring camps, history is repeating itself a century later.  I read several World War II histories, all battle histories, because I went to Normandy this year to visit the five D-Day beaches, perhaps the greatest military enterprise that was successfully (albeit with a frightenly slender margin for success) in world history.  It literally changed world history.  I believe that the short era of peace between the two world wars was merely an interregnum in a greater clash between governmental models, authoritative or liberal, and really, World War II was merely a continuation and the conclusion to World War I; and perhaps later history, if mankind survives this century, will treat the two great wars as one continuing worldwide war, sort of like the Hundred Years  or the Thirty Years War.

Other than bellicose books pointing us towards our perhaps immediate future, I read a novel (literature), a play, and a antebellum civil war book--all had a political bent that point towards American peculiarities that have forged us as a world power, racism (slavery) and the power of propaganda and misspeak.  Plus a couple of other books of interest to me.

Here are the top ten books I read this year in my estimation, in the order of how much they caused me to contemplate, deeply or otherwise.  Several were scintillating to me (page turners) and others were a slog to get through.

1.  The Fires of Jubilee--Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion by Stephen Oates (1975). Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?

2.  Castles of Steel--Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert Massie (2003). This I considered to be a scintillating book (832 pages), especially the you-are-there lerngthy description of the Battle of Jutland, describing naval gunfire practically salvo by salvo.

3.  Animal Farm by George Orwell (1946). Who could ever forget the image of stalwart, loyal Boxer being sent off to the glue factory by Napoleon when his usefulness was over as the other "free" animals watched helplessly in despair?

4.  Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (1955). The Scopes Trial in play-form (see: American racism).

5.  Dreadnought--Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert Massie (1991).  The steady drumbeat to a great war--especially chronicling the incompetent egotistical boob that was the Kaiser; the quoted foreign embassy dispatches often describe what a ridiculous strutting cock he was, shallow and a complete hindrance to old-style statesmanship and steady progress towards peaceful solutions--remind you of anyone constantly in the headlines currently?

6.  Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (2010). The Louis Zamperini story of perseverance, survival and redemption, a true story set amidst the destruction and cruelty of World War II.

7.  D-Day, the Battle for Normandy by Anthony Beever (2009).  Apparently there are a few inaccuracies in this book but it provides an overview of the Allied assault upon Hitler's Fortress Europa and the 3-month slugging match between the Wehrmact and the Americans, British and Canadian forces before breakout in the Coentin Peninsula that followed the lodgment effected on June 6, 1944.

8.  The Wehrmact's Last Stand--The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 by Robert M. Citino (2017).  Like the Lost Cause, tough men fanatically defending a reprehensible regime.

9.  Power at Sea--The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918 by Like A. Rose (2008). Two empires decline (France and Britain), several empires are vanquished (Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the German Empire for two decades), an empire is spawned (Japan), and an empire emerges (America).

10.  The First World War by Hew Strachan (2003, 2013).  World War I is an introduction to World War II and a presage to current times.

Ruminations of a sad man

We moved into 42 Boulevard in Westerleigh, Staten Island, NY in 1964 where in the attic of this 3-story house, left behind by the former owners, was a treasure trove of American history, which I as a 12-year-old happily delved into.  Many an idle hour was spent by me in that dusty old attic going through boxes there. 

Jim Lovett was a WWI vet who had left behind his experience Over There in those boxes (maybe he was dead by then and nobody in his family thought there was anything of value in those boxes of books and clothes).  There were several WWI battle books, all with brittle pages that crumbled as I turned the pages through acid leaching, because then paper was processed with no regard to posterity. I remember one title called Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, and several books on WWI arial combat.  

I also secured a campaign DI hat, and a German sawtooth 18 inch bayonet in a sheath that was straight out of Erich Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front.  I had that bayonet, truly a war trophy, till I gave it to my middle child, Johnny, when he was 12. because he was the most like me in growing up, fascinated by the wartime experiences of men at arms.

Don't you know that the German bayonet commanded center-stage in a hearing in my quarter million dollar divorce from my, in my opinion, covert narcissistic wife because their point was that this showed how unfit I was to be a father.  After almost twenty years of not seeing any of my children through the extrajudicial but real process of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), this post reflects on my middle child Johnny, a most somber and sober child who would have turned his parents in to the Gestapo if they were reading banned books.

Nationalism is the opposite of patriotism--French President Macron

"It is autumn. There are not many of the old hands left. ... He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come." Erich Maria Remarque.

"Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. ... You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun." Dalton Trumbo.

One hundred years ago today, at the eleventh hour, the guns fell silent in the greatest war in history till then. The European hegemony was over. But past was prelude and the worst was yet to come, due to economic disparity, isolationism, imperialism and nationalism giving rise to a whole class of people left feeling hopeless, ready to take an insane gamble on lying demagogues such as Hitler and Mussolini who with reckless promises of a return to greatness, transformed the displaced into cultists. Thus the mindless, chanting masses became fervent fascists thanks to the control of information by the state, whereas the real press became the enemy of the people.

President Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to lay a wreath at the Aisne-Marne American cemetery of fallen Marines and soldiers 50 miles from Paris yesterday due to some rain, and instead spent six hours of free time at his suite doing nothing. Meanwhile world leaders Macron, Merkel and Trudeau made trips to cemeteries and battlefields a similar distance away to pay respect to their fallen soldiers.

Cherry Blossom 2018

It's Cherry Blossom Festival time in DC this week.  Earlier in the week I perambulated the Tidal Basin, but the petals weren't really out yet.

This morning I went back to the Mall and the Dogwood blossoms were out.  They always precede the Cherry Blossoms by a week or two.

Around the Tidal Basin, the Cherry Blossoms were promising but not yet fully bloomed.  The crowds were ever present and will only get worse as the week to come progresses.

A tree here or there had bloomed for the most part.  Blossoms and buds, side by side.

The Tidal Basin has a slew of attractions, well worth a perambulation.  Like the FDR Memorial.

Also the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial is there, the newest addition.  Dr. King's stern visage gazes in impenetrable reflection at the Jefferson Memorial across the way.

One of my favorite monuments, the World War I Memorial. lies across the street on the backside of the MLK Memorial.  This year is the centennial mark of the end of that useless and costly war.

There's more close by the Tidal Basin.  Today was the kite festival by the Washington Monument, and there'll be more to speak about and show in a subsequent post.

Trees

I think that I shall never see   
A poem lovely as a tree.


A tree whose hungry mouth is prest   
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;


A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;


A tree that may in summer wear   
A nest of robins in her hair;


Upon whose bosom snow has lain;   
Who intimately lives with rain.


Poems are made by fools like me,   
But only God can make a tree.  Joyce Kilmer 1914.

Reading a Little

In accord with the chaotic year just past, I only read 8 books in 2017.  I am currently reading three other books simultaneously but I am bogged down in all three, although one has become more informative and interesting near the end (I have ten more dense pages to go on a study by an academic on Japan's rush to war with the U.S. in 1941), another book I'll eventually struggle through because it is classic literature by Virginia Woolf but I'm not getting its point yet, and the last one is a tedious survey of the last 500 years of community histories following the Columbian Exchange.  I expect you'll read about these books next year here.

The best book I read was Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, copyright 2009 & 2017, a detailed study of detailed American and Japanese war plans in 1945 for the Americans' final assault on the Japanese Empire's home islands in 1945 (on Kyushu) and 1946 (on Hokkaido).  It would have been hell, with a million casualties on the American side and ten million or more on the Japanese side, with tactical use of nuclear bombs by the Americans on the battlefield, over which the American infantrymen would traverse because of the immature realization at the time of radioactive aftereffects.  It was gruesome if laborious reading to me because my Dad was a combat Marine in the theatre, with two horrific battles already engaged in (Peleliu and Okinawa), and he almost certainly would have been killed at age 21 in the bloody assault.  Perhaps you can already guess how I feel about the use of two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities (which induced Japan to surrender) and whether its use in Asia was "racist" or not (these bombs would certainly have been used on Germany when available if that country hadn't already been overcome).  Japan had over 15,000 radar-evading wooden-framed kamikaze planes hidden away in hardened, hidden hangars for the final battle (three times as many as the American planners reckoned on), thousands of similarly radar-invisible wooden high speed suicide boats collected for use against the Allied armada, and many combat-hardened divisions brought over from China dug in at and behind all the invasion beaches (they knew by deduction exactly where the Allies would land), just waiting for the ultimate Gotterdammerung.

A close second as the best book I read last year is The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, a novel published in 1938.  Using exquisite language and spellbinding descriptions, Faulkner deals head-on with the racial problem in America, focusing on the racist South where racism was casual and non-controversial, a white author using the N-word liberally and casually.  Because, like it or not, that's the way it actually was back then, whether you want to deny it and ban it or not.  I loved this book, about the family majordomo, Granny, who keeps the family together during the waning days of the Civil War when the menfolk are away fighting.  With the help of her teen grandson's companion slave, a very clever boy the same age as her kin and raised in the household with him, she bilks the invading Yankees out of much livestock (which she distributes to the needy) and scores of contraband (liberated) slaves (whom she sent back to their "homes," where else did they have to go?) who represented a drag upon the bluecoats' offensive impetus.  This matriarch's death at the hands of a band of renegade Rebel deserters in one last sham transaction leads to a tale of devastating southern vengeance.

The other half-dozen books I read were interesting (like Last to Die (2015) by Stephen Harding, about the last U.S. airman to die in the air on a photo reconnaissance mission over Japan two days after the Japanese acceptance of the Allies' surrender terms, at the hands of fanatical Japanese fighter pilots who refused to accede to the Emperor's surrender dictum) or not (like Operation Barbarossa (2011) by Christian Hartman, a formulaic short account of Hitler's dreary war in Russia which doomed his Third Reich practically from the outset of this onslaught).  Here are the remainder of the books I read last year in addition to those already mentioned:  Monty's Men (2013) by John Buckley, an account of the British and Canadian armies under the command of British General Bernard Montgomery in northwest Europe after D-Day; Lincoln and His Generals (1952) by T. Harry Williams, any description of the Young Napoleon, General George McClellan who prolonged the war by years due to his megalomania and indecisiveness, is always interesting; The First World War (1998) by John Keegan, an insightful and pithy exposition of the run-up to the conflict and an insightful and pithy exposition of its aftereffects sandwiched around 400 pages of dreary recounting of large armies on the move; and Sinai Victory by S.L.A. Marshall (1956) about the abortive but successful Israeli military takeover of the Sinai peninsula in 1956 on a shoestring basis, sort of a precursor to the 1967 war which forged the modern Middle East.

The World War One run

Last week a friend and I did a noontime run on the Mall in commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of America's entrance into WWI on April 6, 1917.  We started by chatting up another friend of mine outside my former workplace, who related to us the interesting story that he had a great-grandfather who won an Iron Cross as a German soldier in the Great War, and whose country showed its appreciation for his sacrifices by killing him and his family at a concentration camp during the next war due to his religion.  (Black Jack)

We ran by the Capitol where President Woodrow Wilson asked for and received from Congress a declaration of war against Germany, mere months after he won re-election largely on the slogan, He Kept Us Out of The War.  We stopped in at the Navy Memorial where I pulled up from its database the entry of my grandfather, a sailor in the Great War.  (An engine of the Great War)

We ran through Pershing Park downtown and stopped at General Pershing's statue there, depicting him at the Western Front as leader of the American Expeditionary Force.  Then we ran to the Ellipse, where we viewed the memorial honoring the 2d Division's service in the war, its men participating in the 3d Battle of the Aisne, Belleau Wood, the Chateau-Thierry campaign, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the Aisne-Marne offensive and the occupation of the Rhine.  (The Indianhead Division)

Running past the World War II Memorial, we gave it a nod as that worldwide cataclysm was a direct result of the harsh peace imposed at the Treaty of Versailles which ended the War To End All Wars, with its unsustainable war reparations and its festering War Guilt clause imposed by the victors upon the vanquished.  Finally we ended our four-mile jaunt at the World War I Memorial on the Mall, honoring the District residents who served in World War One.  (Over There)

World War One

A hundred years ago yesterday, the U.S. declared war on the Kaiser's Germany and entered the Great War, later known as World War I, which had already raged for three bloody years.  German U-boats had unleashed unrestricted warfare on worldwide commercial shipping bound for the war zone, in a final desperate effort to starve England out of the war, and this violated one of President Wilson's grand Fourteen Points, Freedom of the Seas.  (Over There.)

The best account I have read of the confusing and senseless lengthy run-up to WWI is The Long Fuse by Laurence  Lafore.  The reverberations of the war lasted well into the last century, detailed well in Paul Fussell's book The Great War and Modern Memory; for instance think of the phrase going "over the top" (of your own trench in an assault).  (British troops go over the top at the Somme in 1916.)

WWI begat World War II twenty years after the Versailles Treaty, with its "war guilt" clause and its unsustainable, savage reparation payments requirements, that ended the Great War.  Nobody won that peace, as the follow-up war dwarfed the horrific casualties and devastation of the earlier war.  (A doughboy.)

My favorite novel of the war is One of Ours by Willa Cather, and the best popular history of the initiation of the war is The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, both of which won Pulitzer prizes.  As American missiles rain down on Syria, possibly striking some Russian or Iranian personnel, following a grisly gas attack by Syria on helpless civilians, I leave you with the close of the most popular novel of WWI, the ironically titled All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Remarque:

"He died in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long: his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come." (A soldier from the war, my grandfather.)

Books

I read only ten books last year, my lowest total in 35 years.  But on the positive side, I started reading classical literature after decades of reading mostly history books.  Here's how I would rank the half-score of books I read, in order of their importance to me.

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, published in serial form around 1861.

This is a fabulous book, all about Pip's coming of age and his ultimate change from an ungrateful and foppish dilettante into a worthwhile man.  Who could forget the aging yet frozen-in-time jilted bride, or the beautiful but cold and heartless Estella.  And there are two endings to choose from.

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, published in 1847.

The perfect love triangle, also a sort of ghost story, set on the unforgiving Scottish moors.  Heathcliff and Catherine are unforgettable and inseparable in both life and death.

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature.

The novel depicts New York City's upper-crust society in the 1870s, exposing its sycophantic, seething and unseemly nature, plus it is a great revenge piece.  Wharton's well-deserved prize made her the first female recipient.

• Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, published in 1954.

Cannery Row's sequel, this follow-up novel is a sweet rendition of the unforgettable new girl in town, Thursday.

• The Missing of the Somme by Jeffrey Dyer, published in 1994. 

A haunting evocation of the somber and reflective memories evinced by the many monuments and memorials populating the WWI battlefield at the Somme River, where in 1916 the flower of English manhood was slaughtered as it walked in straight lines into German guns.  An ethereal travel-guide.

• The Apostle: A Life of Paul by John Pollack written in 1972.

Everybody should know more about the life of St. Paul than the abridged version that is taught in bible class.  After all, he is at the center of Christian doctrine.

• The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 by Robert Citino, published in 2012.

The German will to carry on their barbaric war after it was obviously and irretrievably lost by 1943, and the tenacity and skill with which they did so, are astonishing.

• Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945 by Max Hastings, published in 2009.

This was a great man.  Utilizing his great oratory, he single-handedly propped up the British will and ability to resist.

• Hitler's War by Edwin Hoyt, published in 1988.

The Germans lost the war in this book too.

• Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899-1940 by Robert Citino, published in 2002.

Most people don't know anything about the series of post WWI Balkan Wars.  These conflicts were the petri dish where the form of war known as blitzkrieg, so successfully used by the Germans to conquer most of Europe by 1942, was developed.

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day...

On this Veterans Day I want to thank my father (Peleliu and Okinawa), brother (Beirut), uncles (Pacific naval battles; Philippines; North Africa), grandfather (Atlantic duty in WWI), other forebears (Andersonville; GAR duty) and veterans I knew or know (Battle of the Bulge; Normandy drop; Aleutian campaign; Normandy landings; Pacific Island campaigns; Korea; Vietnam; Cold War; 1st Gulf War; Iraq; Afghanistan) for their service and sacrifices on our behalf.  (Below is a Doughboy forever ascendant in Astoria, Oregon.)

Eleven Eleven Eleven.

Today at 11:00 am, the WWI Memorial on the National Mall honoring the 499 DC residents killed in World War One will be re-dedicated after being restored (it literally lay in the weeds and brush unnoticed for decades). Almost a century ago The Greatest War ended, presaging an even greater war the sons of its participants fought which would catapult America out of the depression and usher in a half-century of American dominance. Paul Fussell's great 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory, describes how World War I still resonates today. My grandfather fought in that conflict. (Left: The DC WWI Memorial.)

The greatest novel of the First World War is All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (the basis for the 1930 Academy Award winning film by Lewis Milestone) and the greatest film is Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick (based upon Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel). The greatest explanation of the complex run-up to the war is Laurence Lafore's The Long Fuse (1971), the greatest military history is B.H. Liddell Hart's The Real War (1930), the greatest short work is A Short History of World War I (1981) by James Stokesbury and the greatest battle depiction is The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (1962) by Alastair Horne. The greatest anti-war novel is Johnny Got His Gun (1939) by Dalton Trumbo. (Right: Grandfather Lamberton.)

Some fine also-rans, reflective of the Great War's relegation to mere second place disaster of the 20th Century by the Second World War, are One of Ours (novel) by Willa Cather, winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, The Blue Max (1966 film), The Guns of August (also called August 1914, Pulitzer Prize winner for 1963) by Barbara Tuchman, The Great War (1959) by Cyril Falls, A Concise History of World War I (1964) by Ernest Esposito, In Flanders Field: Passchendaele 1917 (1958) by Leon Wolff and The Good Soldier Schweik (1930) by Jaroslav Hasek.

As an aside, Ladislas Farago's 1963 biography of World War Two's old blood and guts general, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, has a great section on this legendary warrior's baptism in battle in World War One. Also great at showing how the impersonal nature of war destroys individuality are Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms and its 1932 film adaptation starring Gary Cooper.

There's a lot to learn about and from The War to End All Wars. As British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey said on the eve of the destructive European self-conflagration, "The lamps are going out all over Europe and I doubt we shall see them lit again in our lifetime." England was the world's premier economic power in 1914, by 1918 London had been replaced as the world's financial center by New York, where the tail still wags the dog.

The opening stanza of John McCrae's 1915 poem In Flanders Field is portentous:

In Flanders Field the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month.

Veterans Day. Really it's Armistice Day. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, they ended the incredible slaughter of World War One.

How orderly. The Germans had already consented to the terms of their defeat, having suffered their "Black Day" after their nerve cracked on August 8, 1918, when the Allies (bolstered by the newly arriving American doughboys--Over There--) launched their counterattacks that would end The War To End All Wars.

Unbeknownst to anyone, in the mix was a Bavarian corporal on the front lines who was almost orgasmic in his love of the destruction of war. (This would be Adolph Hitler. If you didn't know this, you really need to get off the Internet and go spend some time in the library.)

People died on the front lines while waiting for the eleventh whatever to arrive. I think that's the point of the famous Erich Remarque book, "All Quiet on the Western Front." Here's the ending page. (The protagonist was the last schoolboy left out of a number of students who had marched proudly off to war in 1914.)

"He died in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long: his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

The Academy Award winning movie had the protagonist being shot down by a sniper when he tried to cup a butterfly that had alighted atop the German trench line.

I have three sons. These young adults so love their Mother, who immediately conscripted them while they were minors to be front line soldiers in our divorce, that they haven't communicated with me for years. (They have, however, taken every single dollar I have ever sent to them without a single word of acknowledgement.)

I sent the above quote to each of them when he turned 18. I worry about them. They could be drafted for the ill-defined and apparently interminable war on terror if the draft was ever resurrected, and maimed or killed. For what?

But let me pay tribute to some real men on this special day. Thank you Uncle Harry, for your service during WW2 aboard the Cruiser Vincennes, and for your heroic actions in earning a Bronze Star as you protected your men, and us. And thank you, Dad, for doing your duty at Peleliu and Okinawa, horrifying ordeals you underwent while protecting our way of life that 99% of the persons reading this blog will never have the remotest clue about. (I miss you.)

(Below: Here's a real warrior from The Great War, my Grandfather, "Jack," from Winona, Minnesota. He served in the U.S. Navy from 5/1917 to 2/1919, patrolling aboard a Destroyer in the North Atlantic and around the British Isles.)

An early Memorial Day run.

Memorial Day came early for me this year. At noon yesterday M and I took a run down the Mall in honor of the sacrifices others have made for us all.

We left the Federal Triangle and ran west down Constitution Avenue. Soon we were running by the Ellipse in front of the White House where there's a memorial to the Second Infantry Division. It honors the service in WWI of the AEF (Allied Expeditionary Force) sent "Over There" to help reeling Britain and France defeat exhausted Germany in that bloodletting. More than 50,000 doughboys didn't return. The Indianhead Division also engaged in combat in WWII from D-Day to VE day and served in Korea.

A little further on we walked by the Vietnam Wall, with its stark reminder of the terrible price of war. Over 58,000 names lie silent and immobile on its polished ebony face, a roll call of slain youths in the order they departed from us.

After running by the head of the reflecting pool, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his I Have A Dream speech a few years before his death in the Civil Rights struggle, and past the Lincoln Memorial, honoring the president who lost his life in overseeing the shockingly costly internecine war that extirpated the stain of slavery from our land, we walked by the Korean War Memorial. It depicts a group of wary soldiers moving forward or backward in that back-and-forth war that established the furthest reaches of our Cold War influence and crystalized our strategy of containment.

Next we walked through the glen containing the District of Colmbia WWI Memorial. Although hidden away and largely unknown, it is a tall, handsome marble memorial with the names of the DC residents who served in that conflict written across its base.

A short while later we walked through the imposing WWII Memorial. We stopped by the Pacific fountain at one end of this polarized memorial and paused at the names written into its base of the two horrific battles my father took part in, Peleliu and Okinawa.

Advancing to the Atlantic granite column, I silently reflected on the service done by a friend's father with whom I had recently spoken. He had modestly told me about his participation in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge as part of a tank destroyer unit. Both of these great battles were etched in stone on this side of the memorial. "From Long Island to Gay Paree, leaving broken French hearts in my wake everywhere," he laughingly said. Have you spoken meaningfully with a WWII veteran about his or her service recently? Better hurry.

Next we ran by the Washington Monument, the towering obelisk honoring the man who sacrificed for years in holding together the rag-tag Continental Army which eventually defeated the mighty British in the Revolutionary War and which was the midwife assisting our nation's birth.

As we ran, M and I talked about what we knew of the service of our forbears in WWII . I related the little I knew about my father's service in his two terrible battles in the Pacific.

I have an uncle who was a shipboard Marine directing AA fire, and he earned a bronze star for his service during his day of hell on earth. After a fast-carrier fleet strike on Tokyo, the fleet retired to safety out of range of land based Japanese planes during the following night. They left behind a disabled carrier, escorted by my uncle's ship and one other light cruiser as it limped away at a few knots an hour. At daylight, the crews of these three ships grimly commenced upon their terrifying day of sacrifice for us as all day long they fought off Japanese planes roaring in at treetop level to strafe and bomb the three beleagured ships.

I had another uncle who saw service with the Army in the Philippines during combat operations there. I had yet another uncle who flew a B-25 bomber in the Mediterranean Theater during the war. My children's Grandmother had a brother who was in the Coast Guard on June 6, 1944, running troops to shore in an LST on that that harrowing day in Normandy. According to her, death strode easily into his boat on D-Day and seized a machine-gunner, who was shot to death right next to her brother. God bless. No war ends until the last mother dies who had a child killed in that conflict.

M had some interesting stories to share. While his mother is American, his father is German. His American grandfather was too old to be in the service. His German grandfather was older as well but he was drafted late in the war and assigned to garrison duty in Greece. When the war ended, he attempted to make his own way back to Germany. He was captured in Italy by the Italians and held as a POW for several years on an island near Sicily. It apparently wasn't too bad for him because he often went back to Italy on vacation after that.

M's German grandfather had a brother who was a Luftwaffe fighter pilot on the Eastern front until one foggy day he flew his plane into the side of a mountain while flying over the Carpathians. M's father remembers being in bomb shelters as a child while American bombers plastered the rural German town he lived in which had a munitions plant.

Forty-two minutes, 3.8 miles, eleven-minute miles including our respectful walking tours. It was a non-stop, reflective homage to the sacrifice of others, compressed into a scant noon hour. This is what running in DC can give to you.