In honor of Memorial Day

For Memorial Day I have a reading recommendation for you: Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and their Families. It’s not an easy read, which is why I heartily commend it to you. 

It’s the result of a project by the NEA, sponsored by Boeing; Andrew Carroll is the editor. NEA sent writers (including Tom Clancy, Stephen Lang, Jeff Shaara andTobias Wolff) to teach writing workshops. The sessions were held in country, on Navy vessels and at various locations around the US. The result was thousands of pages of essays, short stories, poems, letters, journal entries and emails.

If you ever want to explore the nature of war from the most granular human level, this is your introduction. You get everything, from the banality and stultifying boredom to “pink mist” (someone who steps on a land mine and explodes in a shower of flesh and blood); the sand, snakes and spiders in your tents; and having to walk a thousand yards out to the latrine in the middle of the night over rocks and stuff you don’t want to think about. And;, of course, there’s the fighting and the destruction. You won’t get closer to it—without being in it—than reading these pieces.

The book starts with an account by a Navy captain at the Pentagon on 9/11 and moves on from there. It’s not precisely chronological, because the editor didn’t want to imply that the wars went to a certain point and stopped. As we know, mission is not accomplished.

One of the last was an essay by a Marine colonel who accompanied the body of a 21-year-old Marine killed in Iraq home to his funeral in Wyoming. From the staff at the mortuary at Dover AFB, Del., who prepare the body (including X-raying the coffin before opening—they found a live grenade in one) to the people at the various airports who treated the coffin with such respect—the same baggage handlers who think nothing of heaving your stuff around, but they took such care with this cargo—to the funeral held in the gym of the local high school, that if you can read it without crying then you’re way tougher than I.

One of the early entries is from a doctor on a Navy hospital ship, 27 March 2003, waiting for casualties. I loved this comment: “Mike from Massachusetts thinks an attack on our ship is a near given, with a 50 percent chance of success. However, he is a proctologist and Red Sox fan and naturally pessimistic.”

There was another account by a Guardsman returning on a charter flight after his tour in Iraq. Their plane developed mechanical problems in Germany and they had to wait for the next flight, which wasn’t until the next day. Here’s what he relates:

“Thirty-six hours after our scheduled arrival, we landed in Bangor, Maine. It was 3 a.m. We were tired, hungry, and as desperate as were to get to Colorado, our excitement was tainted with bitterness. While we were originally told our National Guard deployment would be mere months, here we were—369 days later—frustrated and angry.

“As I walked off the plane, I was taken aback; in the small, dimly lit airport, a group of elder veterans were there waiting for us, lined up one by one to shake our hands. Some were standing, others were confined to wheelchairs, and all of them wore their uniform hats. Their now-feeble right hands stiffened in salutes, their left hands holding coffee, snacks, and cell phones for us.

“As I made my way through the line, each man thanking me for my service, I choked back tears. Here we were, returning from one year in Iraq where we had portable DVD players, three square meals, and phones, being honored by men who had crawled through mud for years with little more than the occasional letter from home. A few of them appeared to be veterans of the war in Vietnam, and I couldn’t help but think of how they were treated when they came back to the U.S., and yet here they were to support us.

“These soldiers—many of whom had lost limbs and comrades—shook our hands proudly, as if our service could somehow rival their own.

“We later learned that this VFW group had waited for more than a day in the airport for our arrival.

“…Looking back on my year in Iraq, I can honestly say that my perception of the experience was changed; not so much by the soldiers with whom I served—though I consider them my saving grace—but by the soldiers who welcomed us home. For it is those men who reminded me what serving my country is truly about.”

The saddest thing about this book is that the people who sent these men and women into harm’s way without a strategy, without adequate tools and without a clue will never read it. The man who stopped news photos of coffins arriving at Dover, who doesn’t read newspapers and whose idea of wartime sacrifice is giving up golf has neither the courage nor the compassion to look into the reality of the consequences of his decisions.

But you should read it. Really.

Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, & the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops & their Families
Andrew Carroll, ed.
Random House, 2006

More pits than palms

A story in today’s Washington Post travel section caught my eye. Well it actually stopped me in my tracks.

Twentynine Palms as a destination. Of all the places in California—even of all the places in the California desert—Twentynine Palms… Color me gobsmacked.

If you’ve ever been through there you’d be hard pressed to find a reason to pause—except, as the article’s writer points out, to “replenish their liquids”, presumably petrol & water. Then you’d haul ass on out towards Death Valley or Palm Springs.

But there are a couple of things about this story that just crack me up:

For blathering about how the 18 murals constitute a raison de visite, it’s interesting that Randall neither describes in detail them nor photographs them, other than a single picture—with the alleged artwork hidden behind signs, scraggly bushes & about 50 yards of Highway 62. Not even a link to the Chamber of Commerce’s site, where they obviously reach for the stars.

(BTW—if you go to that site, you have to drill down a considerable distance before you find the “Oasis of Murals”, which web site, as you’ll notice, is grainy & for sale.)

In fact, it’s interesting that the article’s “photo gallery” consists of but two pix, a view of Joshua Tree National Park & the aforementioned bizarrely composed picture. That tells it all—unless you’re into pix of the seedy sort of establishment that tends to encapsulate any large military installation or you really like cacti, there’s just not much to shoot.

As it happens, I do enjoy taking photos of such ventures:

Twentynine Palms Culture, May 2007.

(To tell you the truth, Randall doesn’t appear to be much of a photographer—that Joshua Tree shot doesn’t give you any sense of the expanse of the park, which is worth a visit, or the stark beauty of the vegetation there. Perhaps she was in a hurry to get back to the Bowladium.)

That insistence on the silence is a hoot—at night, perhaps. During the day, it’s somewhat compromised by armor & air maneuvers at the Marine base. Which facility is probably the only reason Twentynine Palms hasn’t completely blown away in the second half of the 20^th century.

MCAGCC also accounts for the town’s culture. Randall refers to barbershops & furniture rental stores. How she could leave out the bars, the tattoo parlors, the fast food joints & the practitioners of the Oldest Profession I don’t know. Not too many tourists would care about haircuts & dinettes; but a tap beer's a tap beer the world over.

Even the aerospace engineer she quotes retired to Yucca Valley.

I’m not sure what possessed the Post’s travel editors to print this story. Can the travel section have a slow news day?

You just can't make this stuff up

'Kay, this is just too good to let lie.

From today’s Washington Post:

"President Bush said yesterday that he gave up golfing in 2003 'in solidarity' with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq, concluding that it was "just not worth it anymore" to play the sport in a time of war."

Further analysis at this site.

The guy who wouldn't speak with Cindy Sheehan for weeks while on vacation (weeks more, BTW, than the average American worker--not to mention the average GI--receives from his employer) is concerned that parents of soldiers might be upset if they saw him playing golf?

Words absolutely fail me.

And now for something completely different...

While you're waiting for my next pithy analysis of this 'n that, try taking the political compass test:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Frankly, I can't tell what my score means, but it's interesting that Robert Mugabe & Benedict XVI show up in the same quadrant on this graph:


I wonder what the locals would feed Mugabe if he came to town?

T5--Revenge of the Technology?

When British Airways announced early this year that the long-awaited Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport was about to open & would basically save civilization as we know it (or at least save BA), I thought they were tempting the gods.

Actually, I just knew they were inviting a catastrophe of monumental proportions. Anyone with any experience at all with systems implementation knows that things never, never go according to plan. Usually it’s only the C-level crowd who believe a projected launch date is sacrosanct. Especially if it was the Cs who set the date in the first place.

BA placed special emphasis on their “state-of-the-art” baggage handling system, which really was critical considering that in 2007 BA separated more than one million of its paying customers from their luggage. The Wall Street Journal’s 6 March story noted, “T5's baggage system was one of the first elements installed. BA and BAA [British Airports Authority] have run thousands of bags through it since August 2006 to test it.”

The Journal had a choice quote from Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, as he swaggered through a cavernous and empty baggage reclaim hall: “What we really have here is a baggage system with a terminal building built on top of it.”

Well, not so much, as it turned out.

According to a pre-launch MSNBC story, more than 90 bag-drop stations were supposed to “whisk [checked] bags onto 18 kilometers of moving tracks and belts. Bags zip along at up to 30 miles per hour on a system that updates prototypes used in Oslo, Hong Kong and Amsterdam airports.”

& yet by noon on opening day, 27 March, the architecturally stunning terminal looked like a displaced persons camp in 1946; the term chaos didn’t even seem to cover the situation.

BA was apparently shocked & horrified to discover that its vaunted systems—from parking lot security to baggage handling—collapsed like a subprime mortgage scheme. Before the day was out, BA was cancelling dozens of flights (cancellations continued into the next month); of those that did take off the airline refused to check any bags—passengers were given the choice of flying with only carry-on luggage (& the airline didn’t publicize where they were supposed to leave their large bags while the planes took off with empty holds) or getting a refund & rebooking another day.

Not much of a choice if you’re there with the spouse, the kids & four huge suitcases heading for two weeks at Disney World, or a systems implementation consultant packed for a three-month stint managing a project in Kuala Lumpur. One news story showed a woman who’d had to jam her wedding dress into her carry-on bag. She was not a happy bunny.

As for Wille, instead of accepting the accolades of thousands of fare-paying passengers, as he’d obviously anticipated, he was reduced to issuing a watery apology, along the lines of “mistakes were made” (always by unnamed & untraceable individuals): “We are working hard to tackle the difficulties we have had with the terminal’s baggage system. From time to time problems have developed that were not encountered during the extensive trials.”

(I loved the characterization of massive systems failure, thousands of very unhappy customers telling their sad stories to the world press & BA shares dropping like bungee jumpers as “difficulties”. I’m guessing that if the debacle had occurred to a rival airline, he’d have used an entirely different class of noun.)

Walsh also conceded that the opening didn’t represent BA’s “finest hour”. Interesting that he invoked the phrase associated with the embattled RAF holding off the Luftwaffe & saving civilization as they knew it. Probably not the best of comparisons.

(Now, I don’t know this for sure, but somewhere in the nether reaches of T5 there may be a flight suit & a “Mission Accomplished” banner stuffed in a bin.)

Because T5 is a government project, there were Questions in Parliament. Aviation minister Jim Fitzpatrick averred that the ministry had had “no reason to believe” that everything wouldn’t be copacetic. “We were confident in that regard and sure that the matter of the terminal's operation would be effective.” He described the government as “very disappointed” with the situation & conceded it had dented Britain’s national pride.

But in an immediate recurrence of unfounded optimism, Fitzgerald went on to assure the nation that the problems will be resolved & the terminal will be a success: “We believe BA and BAA will be able to show off (Terminal 5) to the world in very short order.”

In typical senior management style, he put no actual, you know, time stamp on the deliverable.

The furor has died down somewhat; passengers aren’t slugging it out with one another or airline staff quite as frequently as at the end of March. God only knows where their luggage is, however.

Two director-level BA execs have fallen on their swords. In April BA announced that Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations (who was quoted on opening day as saying, “We always knew the first day would represent a unique challenge because of the size and complexity of the move into Terminal 5. We are working extremely hard on solutions to these short-term difficulties.” These guys do love the understatement—after the fact.), & David Noyes, director of customer services, would be leaving the company. No comment on whether they jumped or were pushed.

So far Walsh is hanging on to his job (FY 2007 compensation: £611,000)—it’s harder to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to boot a CEO, no matter how public his failure. Stockholders must be in a permanent coma.

There will be Official Inquiries, Questions Will Be Asked in the House of Commons, there will be Reports. & the British flying public will continue booking on BA, because that’s what they’ve always done. Which is probably what the airline was counting on all along.

& there are lessons to be taken from this event. I’ll comment on them from a product management perspective in a later post.

Meanwhile, there has been one analysis that may reveal the true underlying problem: persons with delusions of becoming air passengers had the effrontery to show up at the airport with luggage that they expected to take with them on their travels.

If Willie hadn’t thought of this explanation before now, he may still haul it out for the next general stockholder meeting.

Loaves & Fishes?

A couple of weeks ago the Pope came to town—anyway, to several towns on the East Coast. Apparently, when he wasn’t holding Mass at various venues, meeting with victims of priestly abuse or talking Iraq with the President he was eating.

The wine columnists in the Wall Street Journal wrote a story about one of the banquets in New York. The headline for the article was "What to Serve the Pope". My first thought was Popesicles, but it turns out I wasn’t anywhere near the mark.

No, seems that everyone’s idea was to feed Benedict XVI something…Italian. In DC a local restaurateur wrote about the honour of laying on a lunch for His Holiness. Just an intimate affair, you understand, only 24. The menu:

• Imported Puglia mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, black cured olive bread
• Zucchini blossom truffle tagliolini, fava beans, artichoke ragout, Pecorino cheese
• Braised veal cheeks, baby spring vegetables, purple mashed potato
• Ricotta cheese, orange fallen truffle, strawberry sorbet

There was also an ornate papal birthday cake, a replica of St. Peter’s Square, complete with image of Benedict.

In New York, the arrangements were somewhat more elaborate. PBS’s madonna of cucina, Lidia Bastianich, prepared no fewer than three all-out meals for Benedict, menus here:

According to Dorothy L. Gaiter and John Brecher, the WSJ’s wine columnists, the NY meals included these wines—all Italian:

• Bastianich Tocai Friulano 2006, $15
• Bastianich Vespa Bianco 2006, $30
• La Mozza Aragone 2005, $35
• Bastianich Calabrone 2003, $75
• Bastianich Perlidia Plus Passito 2003, $75/half bottle

Now all of this got me thinking.

First of all—what’s with all this Italian food and drink? 1) The guy is German. 2) He lives in, you know, Rome. Do we not think he could get all the Italian chow he wants back home? If someone from Des Moines went to Siena or Lille or Munich expecting to be served a T-bone steak and a baked potato he’d be branded as the quintessential Ugly American and a buffoon on top of it. Why go to some foreign place and eat only what you could get at the local Sizzler?

And if that holds for Mr. Des Moines, why should the Pope get a dispensation from the cookery curia?

So why didn’t someone treat the Bishop of Rome to some Memphis style barbecue? Or Tex-Mex menudo, tamales plus a sixer of Tecate? Or California fusion cuisine with some wines from Temecula or Paso Robles?

Or, shoot—going back to point number 1) above, if you want to give him comfort food, why not some brats, potato salad and brewskis from Wisconsin?

Poor guy schleps 5000 miles to get here and all he gets to eat is variations on what he was eating before he got on the plane? Who thought that was a stellar idea?

The other question to arise from these feasts is more troubling. I understand he’s the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and as such probably has to maintain a certain level of, oh, status. But I’m wondering what these meals cost? Sure, it’s an honour to be chosen to serve dinner for the Pope, and of course you want to put out your best dishes, polish the crystal and check the tablecloth for ketchup stains.

But in the same time that the media are full of stories of the global food shortage, when people are rioting over access to basic sustenance as close to us as Haiti and even Costco is rationing its 50-lb sacks of rice to one per customer, what kind of message about caring for his flock is the Vicar of Christ sending by settling down to banquets with 50 of his closest colleagues night after night and putting away several thousands of dollars worth of Wagyu-beef, aged Pecorino, and asparagus? Not to mention $70 bottles of wine?

BTW, this doesn’t count the non-state dinner the White House threw in the Pope’s honor, which Benedict didn’t attend. Apparently he doesn’t do these sorts of things, but that doesn’t stop various heads of state from throwing the parties anyhow.

I can’t figure out whether it’s hubris or oblivion to engage in these ancient régime behaviors. Either way, it leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth. I’d wash it out with a glass of La Mozza Aragone 2005, if I could afford $35 for a bottle of wine.

Reading the Holocaust

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, the Wall Street Journal asked Robert Rozett, director of the Yad Vashem Library in Jerusalem, to pick “five best” books on the Holocaust.

In case the link doesn’t work, Rozett lists:

·         Nazi Germany and the Jews; Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins, 1997, 2007

·         Ordinary Men; Christopher R. Browning, HarperCollins 1992

·         The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943; Ysrael Gutman, Indiana University, 1982

·         If this Is [a] Man; Primo Levi, Orion Press, 1959

·         The Lost; Daniel Mendelsohn, HarperCollins, 2006

It’s hard to argue with the director of Yad Vashem’s library, but I didn’t get that expensive liberal arts education for nothing. So a few thoughts:

Perhaps the difficulty is in the restriction to only five (WSJ’s weekly snapshot into literature and culture). Interesting that he left out Elie Wiesel’s Night; but perhaps he decided to limit the experiences at Auschwitz to Levi’s memoir. That may also account for the omission of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Yet, as powerful as Night and If this Is a Man are, Frankl’s study of why some inmates in the death camps lived and others didn’t helps us understand the works of those who did survive. It can also help us make sense of and find a path through our own chaotic world. (and no, I am not comparing corporate America with Treblinka; Natzweiler, maybe.)

Briefly put, Frankl concluded: “If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life - an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.”

One prisoner painstakingly reconstructed his interrupted doctoral thesis in his mind; another stayed alive through the hope and expectation that he would reunite with his fiancée and build a future. Where everything else was equal—malnutrition, brutal guards, backbreaking forced labor—those who focused on a reason to live, survived; those who didn’t, died. It’s that old forest-trees thing, and it’s entirely within our individual capability.

If you don’t want the experience of 1933-1945 to be nothing more than a testimony to the capacity of men to commit evil in multiple permutations, I highly recommend Man’s Search for Meaning.

To further round out Rozett’s list, a few titles:

Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. It’s essentially the same subject matter as the Browning book recommended by Rozett. In case you ever think that Einsatzgruppen are a uniquely Nazi phenomenon, read either of these books. Frankly, I think Goldhagen carries on long after his point was made, but he’s an academic, so what are you going to do?

Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi War; Lynn H. Nicholas; and Witnesses of War, Nicholas Stargardt. Both on the same subject. Not strictly Holocaust, but children (especially Jewish and Slavic) were targets of Nazi policies in ways that are difficult to understand. Neither of these is an easy read in terms of subject matter; I wouldn’t do what I did, which was read them one after the other.

Some of these childhood experiences are captured in Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust, Thomas Geve; and …I Never Saw another Butterfly… The former was in the bibliography of Nicholas’s book; the latter I discovered when working at the Children’s Room of the Pasadena Public Library in high school. Guns & Barbed Wire is Geve’s illustrated memoir of life at Auschwitz; he was 13 years old when he arrived there. Butterfly is a collection of drawings and poems from children at the Terezín camp, most of whom died at Terezín or were murdered at Auschwitz.

Terezín was the Nazis’ Potemkin lager—a transit camp-cum-ghetto for Jews removed first from Prague, then from other areas of the Reich. Built on the old Hapsburg town of Theresienstadt (pre-war population around 5000), it housed tens of thousands in ghetto conditions, although it was considered posh enough to show to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of benign treatment of Jews. Of those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or brutality at Terezín, most were killed at Auschwitz.

There are other books to emerge from this camp; two I recommend:

Terezín Requiem, Josef Bor; out of print, but may be available at your library. There was a high proportion of creative professionals at Terezín. A young conductor, Raphael Schacter, decided to put on a performance of Verdi’s Requiem, not the easiest of works to perform under any circumstances. Schacter had to contend with the arrival and disappearance of performers, both musicians and singers, as he ran through rehearsals. Everyone was acutely aware of the symbolism of Jewish performers under a death sentence singing a Catholic mass for the dead. An added irony: Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, was a featured guest at the performance. You won’t be able to listen to the Requiem in the same way after reading this. 

In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin, Cara De Silva. A collection of recipes from the starving women at Terezín, it represents how these women reconstructed their lives, using the metaphor of cookery, which was a major component of their pre-war world. The recipes connected them to the comfort of plenty (even if only relatively speaking), when food was available; there was fuel for cooking; dishes, linen and cutlery had been handed down through the family. The recipes also connected them to the occasions of meals—Shabbats, visiting guests, birthdays, Seders; when families congregated to celebrate and the whole truly was more than the sum of the parts.

It may occur to us that writing down instructions for meals impossible to produce in the circumstances for people no longer around was the ultimate in building castles in the air, but it’s not about culinary accuracy or even reality. It’s about the capacity—the charge—to transcend circumstances.

One more item for Holocaust remembrance: Paper Clips, video/DVD. Related book, Six Million Paper Clips: The Making of a Children’s Holocaust Memorial, Peter W. Schroeder. A rural, predominantly white Protestant middle school in Whitwell, Tenn., was studying the intolerance; their principal used the Holocaust as the ultimate example of the concept. The kids were having a hard time grasping the magnitude of the numbers involved: how much is six million? They decided to collect six million paper clips, to put a comprehensible bracket around the number. The project takes years and involves participants from around the world. 

Requiem, Memory’s Kitchen and Paper Clips all embody what Frankl speaks about—it is in trying to understand our world, to find sense in our experiences, that we transcend the hells we find (and make) here.

When we remember the Holocaust, we should also hold onto this.