[This post first ran in July but, reading it over recently, I felt E.B. Sledge’s thoughts were particularly pertinent again, as close-combat wars continue to proliferate. See if you agree.] E.B. Sledge was a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa in WWII. His first-person memoir, With The Old Breed (which he reconstructed from notes scribbled in a New Testament he carried with him throughout the fighting) stands with the very best combat narratives not just from World War II, but from any war in history. Ken Burns (who drew extensively from Sledge’s text for his celebrated PBS documentary, The War)…

He sensed Mary didn’t like him. Something about the way she moved. Her actions were paired with loud, passive-aggressive noises. She didn’t bang the ice tray in the sink to loosen ice cubes for her drink. A cool Cola wasn’t on her mind. And then she came out with it and told her husband’s guest, Kurt Vonnegut:

“What can you do with a general when he stops being a general?” —White Christmas The refrain from the White Christmas song, “What Can You Do With A General” has been running random laps through my mind for the past few decades.

“Halloween in Korea: bobbing for shrapnel. —Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H television series There’s a scene in the novel M*A*S*H, when a Congressman’s son is wounded. The father does what it takes to find the best chest-cutter in Korea—enter Dr. John “Trapper John” F.X. McIntyre. The pilot sent to pick up the doc finds him on a makeshift golf course with his partner in crime Hawkeye. A few funny back-and-forth lines fly between the pilot and the two docs, and then the three hop in the chopper, golf clubs in tow.

In Parts One and Two we have learned—from Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, translated by Walter Miller—of Panthea, the most beautiful woman in Asia, who was captured by Cyrus the Great but treated with such exemplary honor that she volunteered to bring her husband, the chariot commander Abradatas, over to Cyrus’s cause. Indeed Abradatus, out of gratitude to Cyrus for the noble restraint he displayed toward Panthea, has joined forces with Cyrus and been granted a post of honor in the great battle with Croesus of Sardis. Fighting in the forefront, Abradatas has been slain. Cyrus, as we pick up the…

[In Part One from last week, we learned—from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, translated by Walter Miller—how Cyrus the Great had captured the beautiful Panthea but refused to violate her honor. Out of gratitude for Cyrus’s nobility, Panthea proposed to bring her husband Abradatas over from the enemy and enlist him and his thousand charioteers in Cyrus’s cause. Abadatas gladly acceded to this and was welcomed warmly by Cyrus. Now the day of the Great Battle has come. Abradatas has been granted a post of honor in the forefront of Cyrus’s army … ] And when Abradatas was armed in his panoply he…

The following romance (in three parts) comes from one of my all-time favorite books, Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus a.k.a. the Cyropaedia. Xenophon was an extraordinary character—an Athenian aristocrat and devotee of Socrates, who became a great friend to Sparta and died an exile from his native land. The March of the Ten Thousand, also known as The Anabasis, is probably his most famous work (see my earlier post “The Sea, The Sea!”). Xenophon’s Reflections on Socrates, while it pales alongside Plato’s dialogues, is still extremely illuminating, and his wonderful short works, On Hunting (meaning the pursuit of boars and hares, using hounds),…

[“War Stories” is taking a break this week. Here to hold down the fort till next Monday is my own favorite from a few months ago:] The Peloponnesian War was the clash between Athens and Sparta that lasted, as the oracle had foretold, “thrice nine years,” and ended in the defeat of Athens and the destruction of the Golden Age of her democracy. Students today run screaming when they’re assigned to read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. They shouldn’t. It’s a great book. It’d be one of five I’d take with me to a desert island. Why was the…

In 1991 after Saddam Hussein had invaded and occupied Kuwait, he started raining Scud missiles on his enemies. This was serious business, as the Scuds were being fired from truck-borne launchers that could “shoot and scoot”—hard to find and even harder to knock out. Saddam’s most worrisome target was Israel. The Iraqi dictator was hoping to provoke a military response from the Jewish state, which he could then leverage into a wider war. His aim was to bring in other Arab nations on his side, thus furthering his own ambitions of becoming a second Gamal Abdel Nasser, i.e. the supreme…

One of the nutty joys of research is that you get to read the most obscure, nerdy books in existence. I’m talking about tomes so arcane that not even the author’s mother could get past Page Six. I love these books. When I find one on alibris.com (or in the deep stacks of the research library), I whisk it home like an addict packing a gram of the latest black-tar smack. I can never in good conscience recommend these books to friends because who in their right mind, besides me, would be interested in this geeky stuff? And yet the…