Category: Uncategorized

NOTE: This World War II story was written by my ninety-seven-year old friend, Roger Isaacs, who is remembering his Army training and action in France with the 87th Division. I put this up onMemorial Day 2023 in honor of Roger and all the other American men who fought in the European and Pacific theaters.   I begin Roger’s story when he is transferred from  Madison, Wisconsin to Ft., Georgia.

Fort Benning was another world.  It was staffed by older, hardened regular army men who’d been in service since the 30’s.  They made my “tough” physics professor seem like the soul of sweetness.

Now we went from dream dorms to bare barracks: Orders: “All you little $$#@%s getup, it’s 3:00 in the morning!  Scrub them floors!”  Not good enough.  5:00 a.m. you did it all over again.

Marches for miles in the scorching Georgia heat.  Push ups, sit ups rope climbing up walls, crawl on your belly under live fire, “Get your f—-ing fat faces down!”  Firing range with many kinds of weapons.  Every muscle in still soft bodies aching.  Back to barracks.  Scrub them again. Up at 4:00.  Repeat the day. Gradually we toughened. We couldn’t wait to get out of this hellhole and back to school! 

But near the end of Basic an order came from on high.  The ASTP program with its 110,000 students was to be closed due to the need for men overseas.  In an instant, instead of going back to school at Madison, we were sent to Fort Jackson in Columbia South Carolina to join the 87^th Infantry Division.  (Shades of my physics prof!)

I also wasn’t a kid any more.  I quickly grasped that you either learned “the army way,” or life could be pretty rough.  If you didn’t cross the non-coms who were over you things went fairly smoothly.  You were treated like a man, and if you didn’t act like one woe be to you!  The “F” word became an integral part of vocabulary and if not utilized on a regular basis you were immediately suspect. (To this day, when I get really angry those choice wartime words come tumbling  out.)

Most of our days were taken up with the same activities we practiced at Benning with added duties such as KP (kitchen police), i.e. peeling potatoes, washing dishes, mopping floors, etc.  In addition, KP was used as punishment for recalcitrant soldiers.  I always felt it was also part of the unarticulated process of slowly wearing away any feeling of importance or individuality.  This would continue on a downhill slope throughout my active stay in the army.

One day we were on the firing range for rifle practice.  We were alternating between using the mostly employed M1 rifle and its big brother, the lethal ancestor from World War 1, the Browning Automatic Rifle, the BAR. It was a particularly hot day and sweat was pouring down my face over my army issue steel rimmed glasses.  I was using the BAR, firing away through the befogged spectacles when the sergeant in charge came up to me and said, “Private, do you know you hit the bullseye every time?  You’re going to be our BAR man!”  Oh boy!  Just great!  At the time I was still growing, so let’s say I was 5’8 or 9 of the almost 5’ll I was eventually to reach and probably weighed 128 or 129 lbs.  Now the BAR loaded, with a loaded bandolier came to almost 40 pounds.  (The M1 loaded same way came to about 25 lbs.)  If you were marching with the weapon and full field pack, I’m told you were lugging 98.69 pounds.

The basic makeup of a rifle squad was supposed to be 9 to 12 men, a squad leader, grenadiers, riflemen and 2 BAR men.  In ours I was the sole BAR man.  Because of its weight, the BAR was to be passed down the line every 15 minutes or so on a march to relieve the BAR man.  This never happened.  I carried it, and once in a while someone would take it for a few minutes.

So we were “married,” the BAR and I, until almost death did us part.  I had to know how to break it down and reassemble it in minutes, keep it sparkling clean inside and out, and otherwise just live with it.

We continued the interminable training for almost a year, and finally orders came to prepare to go overseas.

We left Fort Jackson and went to a harbor in New York City to board the Queen Elizabeth, largest ocean liner in the world, for our “vacation” to we knew not where!  

No longer a luxury liner, the Elizabeth was outfitted to carry a total of 17,000 “passengers” and crew.  Most men were  assigned to specified quarters on the ship and ordered to stay there.  Most men didn’t want to move from their bunks anyway.  They were too sick.  

The Elizabeth took only 5 days to cross the ocean in a zig zag fashion, so fast, I was told, it didn’t need armed escort ships for protection.

We entered port at Gourock Scotland on October 22, 1944, one day short of my 19^th birthday.  Then on to a little town, Stone, in England.  The officers were put up in an old mansion, and we tented on its grounds, which were soaked with rain and covered with mud.

Not all bad.  Passes to London to see the sights, which by now were terribly scarred by the results of constant German bombing.  Learned to know the sound of the unmanned German V-1 or buzz bombs flying overhead.  As long as you heard their weird sound it was ok, but when the sound suddenly stopped, it meant they were ready to drop and do their terrible destruction.  The Londoners took it all in stride and, depending on the danger, either made for bomb shelters or went about their daily routines as well as possible.

Time came to cross the English channel for France.  There we boarded “Forty and Eights.”  These were old boxcars so named because they held either 40 men or eight horses.  Chugged slowly along the French countryside with signs of previous battles all the way.  We debarked from the train and marched some miles to the area of Metz.  It was then I learned to sleep while marching.

Quoting from the 87^th Division History “On 5 December the Division began its movement to the combat area in the vicinity of Metz where the 345^th  Regimental Combat Team was committed to preliminary action …to assist in the reduction of the remaining fortresses surrounding that city.”  We were quartered at Fort Driant, the largest of the enormous fortresses, surrounding Metz that had finally surrendered after months of fruitless battles by U.S. forces.  Here we learned we were now part of General George Patton’s 3^rd Army.  These forts were massive structures built by the Germans in the early part of the 20^th century, constructed of concrete and steel and extending to tunnels deep underground.  One of these was Fort Jeanne d’arc.  It had not yet been captured and was busy lobbing shells at us in Driant. At night we were sent out on scouting parties to send back reports on anything we might see.  One night I was on one led by a very green, young lieutenant.  He spotted a cat coming out of the dark and evidently concluded that it represented the entire German army.  He completely lost his cool and fired at it.  He was successful in killing the “enemy” cat and also bringing down a barrage of fire from the real enemy at Jeanne de arc.  We managed to get back to the safety of our fort, but I never knew if there were suggestions from above as to what to do with that courageous cat killer.

Fort Jeanne d’arc was taken, and we moved out from Metz and into the Saar Region, which at the time was held by Germany.  By now it was freezing cold and snow and rain were constant. We were outside all the time. Keeping warm was impossible.  We kept our socks warm by alternately tucking them in our shirts against our skin and putting them back on for short periods.  Foxholes were dug, and we would lie two by two to try to keep warm in the little time there was to try to get some sleep.  Rations were short, finally down to chocolate bars, which were so concentrated you could only eat a piece at a time without getting sick.  Equipment was also in short supply, so, instead of the more protective combat boots, we were issued lightweight rubber galoshes, causing almost everyone to get trench foot. (Much later, when I finally got back behind the combat zone, I noted the men in Headquarters companies jauntily sporting the combat boots.) 

On December 17, 1944 we were moving through a woods, ostensibly to take a town beyond it.  We were firing against light counter fire when suddenly “all hell broke loose.”  We were facing every kind of weaponry you could imagine. We were being shelled by the pinpoint accuracy of the 88mm guns of the German Tiger tanks, small arms fire and, I later learned, even from our own misaimed artillery from behind our own lines.  Hard to believe, but I remember the noise of the exploding shells was so earsplitting it affected the olfactory nerves and you could smell it. 

I was moving forward, firing the BAR when all of a sudden a 2 by 4 board hit me as hard as it could, and I went down and out.  Well, it felt like a 2 by 4, but was actually a bullet going through my right shoulder.  In the chaos someone, maybe a medic, came along and strapped a makeshift tourniquet on my arm to stop the bleeding, helped me up and back toward our lines.  The tourniquet worked itself off three times, three times I passed out and three times someone strapped it on and got me going again.  

What was happening was the company was in full retreat from the terrific German attack.  Adding to the noise from the shelling were the terrible screams of men being killed or wounded.

We didn’t know it at the time, but on December 16, 1944 the Germans launched a huge attack all the way from where we were to Belgium.  It was to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge.”  It resulted in the largest number of casualties in WWII.  Figures vary, but roughly almost 20,000 were killed, 47,000 wounded and 23,000 were captured or missing.  It was to last from that day until January 25, 1945.  As I was later to understand most of our Company E men were either killed or wounded that first day.  This included our Company Commander and First Sergeant, wounded, and my buddy Charlie Titone, killed.  

When I was finally taken behind the lines, I was put down along with others who were waiting for ambulances.  It was night now, very dark.  Several of us were loaded into an ambulance, and we took off in that deep dark.  For just a few minutes.  Not being able to see (headlights out for  safety), the ambulance went off the snow covered road and tilted halfway over.  I have no idea how it was righted, but we eventually got under way and on to a miniscule field hospital not far behind the lines.  As I remember, it was there a preliminary closing of the wound was done.

I do know it was in an area of immediate danger and that I will never forget the incomparable courage of the nurses, risking their lives to tend to  the wounded that terrible night.

Next move was to a hospital in the town of Bar le duc, France.  There it was determined the bullet had split the artery and vein in my shoulder causing an aneurism, and it had hit the nerves paralyzing my entire right arm and hand.  I also had shrapnel in my back. It was obvious to the surgeons that much more had to be done. 

It was at the hospital at Bar le duc that PFC Isaacs became a General, or, at least was treated like one.  In conversation with the wonderful army nurses there I learned that the entire nursing staff was from Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.  That’s where my father was head of the Department of Hematology!  He was a revered physician at Reese, particularly loved by the nurses.  When I told them I was his son, I was not only treated like a General, but complete reports regarding my wounds, initial treatments, condition, etc. were sent on to Dad.

One annoyance at the Bar le duc was  “Bedcheck Charlie.”  This was a little single engine German plane that flew over the hospital at night occasionally, always with the possibility that it would drop a bomb.   At those times we were all ordered to run for cover.  As I remember, that meant getting under our beds.  It never happened while I was there.

Because of the injuries to the nerves in my arm I was put in the neurological ward with men who had similar problems. Next bed to me was a soldier with a head wound that somehow caused complete amnesia.  Every day he managed to remember a little more of the past, but his attempts to recapture his memory caused him such anxiety that he would lie there and cry.  I did try my best to calm him, but doubt I was much help.  His problem went on the entire time I was there and gave me great respect for the mysterious workings of the brain.

Leaving Bar le duc we went across the channel to England.  On that trip I had the first glass of milk in months.  Talk about nectar of the gods!  On to a hospital ship, a converted single deck cargo ship, through winter storms to a short stop at a hospital in New York.  Finally to Mayo General Army Hospital in Galesburg, Illinois where there were specialists in neurological surgery.  Once again I became a “General.”One of the surgeons who did my final operation was also from Michael Reese Hospital as were the nurses at Bar le duc, so Dad was again able to get detailed information as to my progress from this kind doctor.

It was necessary for me to wait for collateral circulation to replace that in the arteries and veins rendered useless from the bullet.  Meanwhile, I had daily rehab to get some strength in the arm.  Nine months later (during which I read every book written by Sinclair Lewis plus many more from the hospital library) the final operation was done successfully.

At exactly the right time to enter college in the fall I was released from the hospital and discharged from the army.

It was made abundantly clear from my brilliant, highly educated mother that what I had just experienced was past history, and I was to get on with my education NOW.  Today I guess they call that tough love.

Through the lucky happenstance of having cousins who were attending, I was introduced to a little school in upstate New York, Bard College, which turned out to be a perfect place for a returned veteran to “get on with my education.”  A quiet, welcome change from the crowded, Spartan existence of the past years, a world class collection of teachers.  Most of my class was made up of veterans, totally different in their level of maturity compared to the few non vet freshmen also entering.  I don’t remember any conversations about the war, our experiences, or any residual problems we might have had attendant to it.  We were there on the GI Bill, which was paying our tuition, and we were all anxious to get in, get out, and get on with our lives.  Money was scarce.  We had to earn a living.  No excuses!  

Plausible Deniability
Robert Gilbert
Piscataqua Press
paperback: $16.99
KIndle: $4.99. Free with Kindle Unlimited

Plausible Deniability is a novel for our time—a time of corporate corruption and a widespread loss of personal integrity.  Author Robert Gilbert presents us with Pete Wendell, a man verging on middle age who trades a respectable job as a reporter at The Wall Street Bulletin (aka Wall Street Journal) for public relations work. But the move also entails trading his integrity for a $140,000 a year salary.

Pete has grown up in New Canaan, Connecticut, a wealthy New York suburb in a family with a cold father and an alcoholic mother subject to fits of depression. His father was CEO of a major oil corporation and unfaithful to his wife, whose death apparently leaves father and son unmoved. Pete has grown up without his father’s approval and is disinherited at the instigation of his step-mother. Nothing he does, no matter what he achieves, can win his father’s approval.

Early on,” Pete tells the reader, “I stopped trying to meet the expectations of my father, whose management training taught him that withholding praise increases employees’ performance, if not a son’s. Yet he retained one unbroken grip on my ambitions. I coveted his lifestyle and adopted his basis for happiness—acquire more.”

That is a strong motive for returning to New Canaan, a town he doesn’t seem to have cared for, and buying a house with Libby, his wife, whom he met at the Bulletin. Pete is now in corporate communications at the country’s largest computer manufacturer. His wife tells him he’s writing puff pieces, propaganda. He tells her he’s not being dishonest, to which she replies, “You’re being dishonest with yourself.”

His boss asks him how to deal with a reporter at the Bulletin over a a potentially hazardous product that was recalled for giving some users electrical shocks. The boss fudges the truth and a possible nightmare is averted. Pete’s reaction is between “elation and shame.”

With skillful narration, Gilbert lays the ground for the heart of the novel. First, Pete’s wife is killed by a hit and run driver, and a bit later, he is fired. Then he’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s and afterwards lands communications work with a firm that dispenses how-to wisdom to corporate managers who know what their fate will be if company shares fall. We’re now into the heart of the book, which gives us relentlessly aggressive characters lacking moral compass and conscience.  As Pete becomes enmeshed in their world, he continues to compromise himself. Still mourning over his wife’s death, struggling to pay his mortgage, and still carrying the burden of his father’s indifference, he drinks heavily and comes to work hungover while his self-respect sinks lower.

His job calls for him to fudge or distort or twist the truth just enough to b.s. the journalist or whomever he’s b.s.ing. Hence the title: Plausible Deniability.

Pete’s passage through hell is believable and painful. Yes, there is a turnaround for this character, or at least we think he may have finally gotten a grip on himself, but Gilbert promises nothing.

This is the kind of novel you can’t write unless you’ve been there.

A sermon by one of the saved is always a treat and an opportunity for me to amend my ways and hopefully avoid hell fire. But I especially enjoy fundamentalist discussions, which always drill down to the heart of a matter. Let us say that Pastor Joe and his fellow theologians are sitting around on living room sofas with a fire blazing in the background. The pattern of discussion is always the same.

Whatever comment Pastor Joe makes about this or that book of the Bible, or whatever judgement he makes on whatever topic, the others in the round table will say, “Right on, brother Joe” or “Amen! Praise Jesus!” It doesn’t matter if Pastor Joe has just done a line of coke and blown the words out of his backside, the response is always, “Amen, brother.” At which point the other theologians will add their own examples to bolster Pastor Joe’s point.

A week ago I listened to four Christian fundamentalists discussing the End Times. This topic has elicited excitement among evangelicals for hundreds of years but in recent decades it has gone full throttle. One of the preachers in this morning group brought up the covid-19 pandemic, an immensely significant sign from God, he said. The others nodded and gave assent.

But the preacher went further and said God sent this virus , this plague, to awaken lost souls and bring them to Jesus. The rest of the round table agreed with him. “Amen, brother!”

Here are four very sick, mentally disturbed men claiming that God has brought enormous pain to nearly four million people worldwide and death to hundreds of thousands, including innocent children. He is doing this, they all agreed, so that others may see that Jesus is their lord and savior. Jesus, as God manifest, scarified himself on the cross for us, but is now killing hundreds of thousands because he needs followers. I believe that this is the heart and soul of American fundamentalism: cruel and stupid.

The Triumph of the Irrational
The Irrational is now nothing less than a demonic force driving us individually and collectively. With Technique now its chiefest expression, self-destructive instruments proliferate. Consider agriculture. First, crop production, which relies upon pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. These are highly sophisticated techniques created initially to solve the problem of production. Pesticides and herbicides contain known carcinogens. For example, Dyfonate, used for root worm control, is not biodegradable, and its ingredients are the same as those used in biological and chemical warfare.

Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Round-up, is used to kill milkweed in roadside ditches and so contributes to the decline of the Monarch population. The Greenpeace website “Bees in Decline” cites studies demonstrating a link between insecticides and the decline of honey bees. Two of our most important pollinators are being decimated by industrial agriculture.

In the Midwest, hundreds of thousands of acres of corn and soybeans require millions of gallons of synthesized chemicals. When these chemicals were introduced, most farmers chose to abandon millennia of farming practices and embrace artificial methods promoted by the federal government, state universities, the Farm Bureau and, above all by the belief that Science can solve all problems.

Nitrogen fertilizer, which is applied to millions of acres of corn crops, runs off into the Mississippi River, which delivers the nitrogen and phosphorus to the Gulf of Mexico where it kills the algae, which in turn depletes the oxygen, which results in massive fish kills.

Now consider animal production. Faced with a demand for increased production, the rationalist’s solution was to create animal confinements into which thousands of chickens or turkeys are thrown together, almost on top of one another. In the case of hogs, hundreds are placed in individual cages within a shed containing a thousand total. Confinement operations increase the animal’s susceptibility to infectious disease. Technicians solved that problem by adding antibiotics to the feed. If the antibiotics are in the animal long enough, the targeted bacteria become resistant to the antibiotics and, if their meat is improperly cooked, make us ill. In short, the cure for production, rational in essence, is ultimately self-destructive.

The genetic engineering of plants and animals is another example of the Irrational posing as the Rational. The hubris of the project is mythical in its dimensions: man playing God with Nature by redesigning plants and animals.
Since monocultures dominate agriculture, corporations want their redesigned corn or salmon the only source of corn or salmon. Since they have decoded the DNA for a multitude of plants and animals, corrupt courts have allowed them to register patents on these works of Nature. Now the variety of this corn or rice or wheat is owned by corporation X, and the peasants who have grown this wheat or corn for millennia, and continue to d so, will be prosecuted.

The engineer says the animal can be redesigned for its own good. I heard this in a presentation at a conference on the ethical treatment of farm animals given at Johns Hopkins University by a geneticist and engineer who advocated applying CRISPR technology to chickens in confinement. CRISPR uses a protein to cut an unwanted strand of DNA from the double helix, or it could introduce a strand of DNA with a factor that the operator wants to introduce. In the case of chickens, the engineer suggested that a strand of DNA that would induce an opiate high could be inserted into chickens to make confinement life bearable. Not only is this engineering of Nature repugnant, it and similar uses of CRISPR would lead us down a very dark road where any and all organisms, animal and vegetable, would be subject to the whims of engineers and corporations.

In city design, given the irrational impulse is to cluster together as many businesses as possible, real estate prices rise, which means that office buildings will be as tall as possible, cramming as many people as possible onto floors and into rooms, working like trained monkeys in cubicles. Often these same people live in high rise apartments or condominium complexes, paying exorbitant sums for the privilege. The result is a further atomization of society—the alienation of people from one another, and from the earth. But this mode of working and living is considered rational, for it makes the best use of space, ignoring the fact that it runs counter to human needs, with the consequence that it promotes alienation, which in turn promotes aggression and anti-social behavior.

Ironically, Reason demands predictability. We plug a cord into an outlet and expect a vacuum cleaner to turn on or an iron to heat. We flip a switch and a light goes on. We expect that predictability and efficiency with the internet, and so all of our systems and major institutions—banking and finance, energy, the Defense Department, all major retailers, hospitals, universities, manufacturers, and more—store all their information on it.. We have allowed ourselves to become entirely dependent on the internet, which is the central nervous system of our economic body. Should the internet collapse, so would the economy and all life systems. Our energy grid, for example, is vulnerable to foreign government hacking. Shut down the energy grid and all else collapses. In the meantime, we are dealing with hackers who penetrate company and government computer systems and steal data. We do not know how much Defense Department data has been stolen (we know some has) but we all know that hackers have stolen customers’ social security numbers and banking information from large retail chains.

Reason Begot Technique
Technique, the child of Reason, has released the demonic from the modern psyche, thereby unleashing unbelievable violence upon the world. The causes for this are many, but one is surely the elimination of most meaningful work, with the result that men and women who once had vocations are now working at servile jobs—tending machines, selling insurance, selling goods, working a cash register. This is work to which no one is called. Dominated in so many other ways by omni-present Technique, the mass of people are just that—a mass, a collection. No longer living in community, and alienated from their fellows, deprived of meaningful work, and knowing that they are mere things, their anger boils up. Is it any wonder then that reports of mass killings fill the news almost weekly? It is time that we realized that an individual deprived of meaningful work, locked inside a pressure cooker, will inevitably explode.

Anger and fear of government inspires men and women to stockpile arms and ammunition. White cops murder unarmed black men and women. One black man is shot sixteen times in the back. A young black woman, babysitting her cousin, is shot by a white cop through a window.

Skinheads spray paint swastikas on synagogues. Confederate flags wave at rallies. The Klan rises again. The urge to kill bubbles up.

In a meaningless universe, one is compelled to commit acts of violence and greed just to feel alive. Greed ratchets up. Bankers commit massive fraud, sending tens of thousands of people onto the streets. America’s biggest banks stagger, but the president bails them out and not one banker goes to jail. Knowing themselves to be immune from prosecution, Welles Fargo later sets up thousands of phony accounts and bilks people for the charges. When discovered, Welles Fargo is fined, but again, no one goes to jail. But if caught, there is no shame, no shame is being convicted of a felony, no shame in going to prison, only regret at having been caught.

In a world where Power dictates Right, the morally unfit are appointed to the Supreme Court and a mentally ill and morally depraved man is elected chief executive of the United States.

Right wing foundations fund global warming denial. And while the polar ice caps melt billions are spent on a space program to capture footage of planets, stars, asteroids, galaxies. Technicians anticipate the day we will plant colonies on Mars because Earth has become uninhabitable.

Forty-one million Americans, including 13 million children, struggled with hunger in 2016, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Our sins against humanity multiply.

Our sins against Nature multiply. The Government agency charged with protecting the environment strikes two regulations off the books for every one it enacts. Two hundred species, more or less, go extinct each day around the globe.

Hydraulic fracturing poisons drinking water in Wyoming, California and Pennsylvania.

Since Nature is simply a stockpile of goods, the tops of Appalachian mountains are leveled for coal and the sides of Rocky mountains are sheered in half, top to bottom, for their minerals.

The Elimination of the Human Presence
Now we have artificial intelligence and robots that replace assembly line workers; today we need only supervisors to supervise the robots.

Robots are omni-present. They speak to us when we call a company and have questions about products and services.

We have driverless cars and a stock market where massive trading occurs in nanoseconds on the command of an algorithm. The purposive human being is fast becoming an irrelevance.

Why? Because the individual is a cipher, merely a thing that keeps the economy moving. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are things. The enemy combatant and the suspected enemy combatant are things, therefore we will do with them whatever we want: feed a “lunch tray” of pureed pasta and hummus into their rectums, water board them, do anything we want. We label these acts “renditions” and “enhanced interrogations,” never torture. And we continue to torture even though we know it produces lies. We enjoy it.

***

Sartre was wrong: there is an exit. Most will not take it: disengagement from the values and treasures of the Mass, including the core beliefs of rationalists. So long as the active intellect is in charge, there is no exit. The glimmers of an exit lie in discovering access to what Meister Eckhart called the passive intellect. But this calls for surrender, which in turn calls for humility.

But what is the passive intellect?

See my related essay: “Gods of the Modern World”: