Canthook

"I only have one good eye, but I can see that my Marines are OK." Heidi had drawn in her breath when she saw what was under his eyelid. A thin, dark stem of tissue protruded from the gaping empty socket.

The back cover of Dr. Heidi Squier Kraft's book, Rule Number Two calls it the M*A*S*H of the war in Iraq, but if so, it's the M*A*S*H of the movie, brutal to watch, not the television M*A*S*H you could comfortably watch while eating supper.

Rule Number One, Henry told Hawkeye, is that young men die. Rule number two, of the rules of war, is that doctors can't change rule number one. Rule number one, Heidi points out, would be slightly different today. With modern body armor, Rule Number One might now state that war damages people. Rule Number Two, of course, would be unchanged. Heidi discovered something, though, that Henry didn't mention. War damages doctors, too. They are damaged by Rule Number Two.

Heidi Kraft was a Naval Flight Psychologist who was sent to Iraq in 2004 to treat Marines fighting in Iraq. Her book is brutally frank. I raced through it, trying to get to that page where Bobby is taking a shower, and we find out that the entire season was a bad dream. We find plenty of bad dreams in the book - but Victoria Principal never opens the shower door. It's real, and while Heidi is in Iraq, her twin babies are growing up without her. The book Rule Number Two, it turns out, is damaging to readers as well, socking them right in the gut.

At one point, Heidi is in the Expectant Room. Triage is the act of classifying medical cases into three groups - those that will survive on their own, those that will survive only if they immediately receive critical care, and those who will die no matter what is done. The expectant room is where they send troops who are expected to die, to provide fluids, pain management, and comfort in their last moments of life.

Corporal Dunham was the first of 14 to enter the SST from the Black Hawk, and Jess, a pediatric cardiologist worked rapidly on him, with his team of corpsmen. There were two obvious entrance wounds to the frontal lobes of his brain. There was no meaningful movement, and Dunham was moved to the Expectant Room.

We told him, Heidi writes, that we were proud of him, and the Marine Corps was proud of him. They waited for his breathing to become labored and his heartbeat to become irregular, but neither had happened. Many minutes passed. Heidi moved his arm; it looked uncomfortable. She continued to hold his hand, and she felt him squeeze. If you can hear me, she said, squeeze again. He did.

Five physicians - all the company had - arrived in about one minute flat. The corporal left by medevac. The chaplin wandered back in, looking confused. "I told him, laughing, that I thought this young man might need a different prayer." But nine days later, Corporal Dunham died at Naval Medical Center Bethesda.

It turned out that Dunham had thrown his helmet over a live grenade, and tucked it under his body. Jason L. Dunham was the first Medal of Honor winner in over a decade.

Deb Dunham, Jason's mom, got a phone call that he was in critical condition, and she prayed for his survival for a while, but in the middle of the night, she started praying that he not be alone or afraid. In Deb's opinion, Heidi appeared to have answered that prayer.

There are other stories, about "Mr. Oda", an Iraqi who is suicidal because he has fingered a relative as an insurgent, and about a Marine who's trying to quit smoking. He managed to get himself down to two packs a day before asking Heidi to use hypnosis to cure his habit. What do you call a Marine in a combat zone, one of her patients asks, who is worried that two packs a day will someday give him lung cancer? An optimist.

Five of her group of six motivated smokers became smoke-free during her deployment. Only one Marine left treatment, explaining that after trying, he became convinced that people need to start smoking in Iraq, not stop.

In the end, we see everyone getting excellent care, except, perhaps, the psychs giving it.

Sometimes the Black Hawks bring in a patient that isn't a Marine, Sailor, or Soldier - at least the kind we normally think of. Sometimes, the patient is a dog. The beautiful, sinewy German Shepards are "treated like royalty, with guaranteed air-conditioned spaces and terrific food." Wearing a fur coat in the heat of the Iraqi desert, air-conditioning would not be optional for those dogs. And sometimes, they need treatment.

Sometimes, the dogs provide treatment, as well. A female sergeant in the Marine Corps, afraid she would let herself and her unit down as the only woman, found caring for a dog cured her depression.

Both the movie and the television version of M*A*S*H tended to be laugh-a-minute entertainment, but the theme song is called "Suicide is Painless", because in the movie, the dentist decides to kill himself. The television series has a painful moment in the episode where Henry finally gets to go home - only to be aboard a plane that spirals into the sea.

There's a little of both in this book as well, but it tends towards the latter. When we read "Band of Brothers", it's about a war over before the Boomer generation was born. Korea happened when many boomers were too young to remember. Vietnam touched our lives, claiming the lives of our classmates. Iraq is killing our children and our grandchildren. There's nothing funny about that, nothing at all.

And yet....

Thank you, Heidi, and thank you to the soldiers you cared for.

Alan Dershowitz has never struck me as a particularly likeable sort. I kinda figured a lot of it was because of the settings in which I saw him in. But he's sorta short, and his hair is wiry, and he doesn't have a particularly friendly face.

You have to be pretty unpopular to need the Bill of Rights. If everybody loves you, you can pretty much do whatever you want to do. If you're a bunch of nazis trying to hold a parade in Skokie, people get upset - and that's when Alan Dershowitz ends up on CNN, explaining to us all that free speech is free only if unpopular speech is free. And pretty consistantly, Alan Dershowitz shows up at those times. He's a liberal, and I'm a conservative, but doggonit, the Bill of Rights isn't partisan, it's bedrock values for our nation, so if he's defending the Constitution, he's a hero to me.

Even if I wouldn't want him over to supper. I don't want anyone without a friendly face to supper.

Finding Jefferson is an odd book, in a way. Dershowitz spends the first half of the book explaining how he found this lost letter written by Jefferson, and the second half explaining how Jefferson is wrong.

Long story short? He found the letter because he walked into a bookstore where he is known, and they offered to sell the letter to him. Oh, wow. You need to spend 96 pages on that?

And it turns out that the letter wasn't really lost. Back before they had xerox machines, or even carbon paper, they made copies of correspondence by dampening a sheet of very thin paper, and placing it atop the original, then pressing the two together. A certain amount of ink would offset to the very thin paper, and by shining a light through the paper, you could read the words from the other side. A copy of the letter existed; it was only the original that was missing.

Dershowitz spends a lot of time arguing with Jefferson. Jefferson says an expressed opinion can never constitute an overt act? Dershowitz says that inciting to riot is an overt act.

Jefferson says if conscience is the umpire, then each judge's conscience will govern. Dershowitz says that job of a judge is to judge.

Jefferson says we have nothing to fear from the demoralizing reasonings of some, if others are left free to demonstrate their errors. Dershowitz argues that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. (He credits Winston Churchill for that observation, although Mark Twain said the same thing decades earlier.)

Jefferson says the law stands ready to punish the first criminal act produced by the false reasoning. Dershowitz argues that since speechifying is an act, it's hard to decide which act is the first one punishable. He points out that some crimes, such as treason, are only punishable if they fail, for if treason succeeds, the new administration is going to call it an act of patriotism to the new government, not an act against the overthrown government. Similarly, it is difficult to punish a suicide bomber, because he's already dead.

In the end, I found this book rather dissatisfying. The tag line on the cover is "A Lost Letter, A Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of Terrorism". The letter was never lost, the discovery was not particularly remarkable, and terrorism existed long before the first amendment was enacted.

I remember, when I was in school, tests in which I was asked to write a 1250 word essay on a subjects about which I knew next to nothing. The essays were, of necessity, the written equivalent of hemming and hawing. This book reminds me of those essays. Dershowitz has enough matter here to justify a letter to the editor of 250 words, or perhaps a short op-ed piece of 800 words. The rest of the book is sawdust, filler, fluff.

When Kennedy was assassinated, experts said that if someone was willing to trade his life for the president's and was sufficiently determined, the secret service couldn't prevent it from happening. It occurs to me that the same rule applies to nations. If someone is sufficiently determined, they can kill numerous people, and there's not much we can do about it. Are we safe from another bombing like Timothy McVeigh pulled off? Not in the slightest.

While it's more difficult today to obtain the materials for an ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate, Fuel Oil) bomb, there are other easily-obtainable explosives. Apartment buildings have been accidentally blown up as flour dust goes down the disposal chute; an aerosol of almost any dust is explosive. You can sabotage bridges, poison drinking water systems, set fire to occupied buildings. The football stadium in Columbus has 80,000 seats. What if you contaminated the water supply, right before the SRO Ohio State - Michigan game, so that anyone who drank a Coke ended up with cholera or meningitis?

The late John W. Campbell suggested that the Old West was, of necessity, a more polite society, because when everybody was wearing a revolver on his belt, rudeness was highly dangerous. Well, not everybody is armed today, but enough of them are. It would be wise for the United States to dust off Herbert Hoover's Good Neighbor Policy, and start treating other countries and their citizens as if they were deserving of respect. After all, they're god's children, too - and they're armed.

I note that the used copies of this book are selling for almost as much as new copies. You could buy a copy of the book, read it at your leisure, then resell it to recoup almost all that you paid.

It wasn't exactly The Wizard of Oz. When Sitting Bull was murdered by an Army sergeant, L. Frank Baum wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, "what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them." Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, should totally annihilate the few remaining Indians. Many fled the reservations, believing that the cavalry was intent on genocide. Fifteen days later, the Army surrounded 450 of them encamped at Wounded Knee, and butchered 180 of them, leaving their bodied to freeze in a blizzard, finally throwing them into a mass grave. It was the last major armed encounter between Indians and the whites in North America.

But 22 years later, the Army fought Indians again - at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Carlisle Indian School was founded in 1879 by Henry Pratt, a civil war cavalryman who wanted to "kill the Indian and save the man" by turning Indians into white men. The students wore white clothes, got a white education, spoke the white language, and played the white games of basketball, baseball, and football.

The Carlisle football team was good. It was coached by "Pop" Warner, and the team included Jim Thorpe. Warner had applied to be a West Point graduate, himself, but was turned down.

Many Indians didn't want to send their kids to Carlisle and similar schools, fearing they would lose their identity as Indians. Hiram Thorpe was the grandson of Black Hawk, the legendary chief of the Sac and Fox, and the Office of Indian Affairs considered the Sac and Fox to be among the most resistant to assimilation, but Hiram Thorpe was half Irish, and insisted that his children - he had at least nineteen of them, by five wives - get a white education. When Jim kept running away from local schools, Hiram sent him to Carlisle.

Dwight David Eisenhower, our 34th President, was in his second year at West Point in 1912. He had come from Abilene, the town of Wild Bill Hickock, and Ike Eisenhower was born only 19 years after Hickock was relieved of his duties.

Ike was a promising back on the West Point team, but his body was 5'10" tall, and he weighed but 180 pounds. Jim Thorpe was small and speedy - and only a few months earlier, he'd proven himself an Olympic athlete in Stockholm.

Before the game, Pop Warner reminded his team that they were playing the Army, who had killed their fathers and grandfathers, and raped their mothers and grandmothers. Remember this on every play, he advised them.

A Cadet would become famous, the Army players believed, if he knocked Thorpe cold, out of the game - and Eisenhower fully expected to be the one to do it.

Thorpe scored a 92-yard touchdown, but it was nullified by a penalty called on a teammate. No matter; he scored a 97-yard touchdown on the very next play. Eisenhower suffered an injury to his knee when he tried to stop Thorpe, an injury that ended his football career when he continued to play on it. Carlisle finished the season 12-1-1, outscoring their opponents 504-114.

In the end, though, Carlisle lost; the school was closed in 1918. In a further insult, it has been the home of the US Army War College since 1951. Today, the Carlisle Indians have the best winning percentage (.647) of any defunct college football team.

And Eisenhower won. When he returned to Abilene a few months later, people said he was different. He had an air about him; he was on the path to greatness.

Is it any wonder that Lars Anderson calls this football's greatest battle? In addition to writing this book, he's a writer for Sports Illustrated.

This book is not really about a football game. It's about a world we left behind, not so very many years ago, about racial identity, and people whose names are familiar to all, but whose lives are largely masked. If you don't care about Jim Thorpe, and Ike Eisenhower, and Pop Warner, read it to learn about your grandparents and your great-grandparents.

If you don't think of Pittsburgh as a center for Grammy award-winning jazz, you're not alone. Bill Strickland is a visionary who's fighting poverty with pottery - and gourmet food, orchids, and job training.

When Pittsburgh went from an energetic center of the industrial belt to a sad outpost on the rust belt, Bill Strickland was growing up in Manchester. It probably would have gone from a working class neighborhood to a slum anyway, given the city's fortunes, but when they put an elevated interstate highway through the center of Manchester, dividing it in half, that pretty well sealed its fate.

If Bill hadn't heard jazz music while wandering through the school, he might have been one of the statistics. Instead, he discovered a teacher throwing clay pots. He developed a passion for pottery, and for jazz music, and became a successful potter, then worked his way through school, becoming a history teacher.

He only found his success when he started teaching other kids to throw pottery - and exposing them to the same jazz music that had initially attracted him. When the kids learning pottery didn't get into trouble the same way other neighborhood kids did, he found support for his program. He ended up taking over another institution, a construction jobs training program rife with corruption.

When he found IBM was having difficulty selling their new Selectric typewriters, he equipped his training facility with Selectrics, and got IBM to grant him funds to teach workers to get full advantage of those Selectrics. He approached other industries, not asking for a handout, but offering to help them solve their problems. In a period when charities were having difficulties getting funds, Strickland's Manchester Bidwell was finding corporations eager to let Strickland help them solve their training problems.

Today, he's teaching the art of raising orchids and gourmet cooking. He takes photography students, plops an expensive camera in their hands, and trusts them with it. He loses some cameras, he says, but many of the students, being trusted for the first time, excel. His facility is not only filled with beautiful flowers and the smells of beautiful food, but there's a jazz hall, supported by subscriptions. The CDs produced of Manchester Bidwell performances have won Grammys, year after year.

This is a non-fiction book that you'll want to devour in one sitting, then sit down and read again and again. This guy is performing miracles, and you'll want to know how he's doing it. There's got to be more to it than simply inspiring passion in his students, and building corporate support by producing something of concrete value to those corporations - but after three readings, I can't find anything else.

There are books you want to read, books you want to own, and books you can pass on. I think this belongs in the second category. You'll want to read this book again and again over the years, for inspiration.