Reviews's blog

"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.

Ray Kroc was initially boggled by the Egg McMuffin. It was served, he wrote in Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's, his 1987 autobiography, "open-face on a toasted and buttered English muffin ... But then I tasted it, and I was sold. Wow! I wanted to put this item into all of our stores immediately."

It's been 36 years since the Egg McMuffin came about, and most Americans don't remember when it didn't exist. It changed how this country ate breakfast.

In the 1950s, an egg sandwich was served on white bread, or perhaps toast, or if you were especially adventuresome, whole wheat bread. If it was dressed, it was likely dressed with ketchup or maybe Miracle Whip. Otherwise, it was just seasoned with salt and pepper.

And it was a good, cheap, sandwich, tasty and nourishing. It still is, for that matter. Aldi's has eggs for 99c a dozen, which figures out to 66c a pound - about the cheapest protein you can buy. At 8c for the egg, plus another 12c for bread, oil to scramble the egg, and ketchup, if you're not a careful shopper, you'll pay about as much for the zipper bag you package it in, as for the sandwich itself.

Egg sandwiches, though, weren't for breakfast. They were for lunch, or sometimes for supper.

Herb Petersen died Tuesday. No relation to the fat guy in Cheers; Norm Wendt played Norm Peterson, not Petersen. And the catalog guy in Seinfeld played by John O'Hurley was J. Peterman. Herb Petersen invented the Egg McMuffin.

There was a Gahan Wilson cartoon published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about 40 years ago, in which everybody sitting in a diner is frantically cooking, serving, or eating their food. Right in the middle, though, there's one exception - a man placidly dining on his repast. The character next to him exhorts him: Hey man, this is a fast food joint. Do your part! Bolt your food!

I thought of that cartoon when I heard that Herb Petersen died peacefully at his Santa Barbara home Tuesday morning. He was peacefully dying, while millions of commuters were driving with one hand, bolting down an Egg McMuffin with the other, hoping against all reasonable hope that they wouldn't be late.

I don't want to knock Petersen's invention. He scrambled the egg in a teflon ring so it'd be perfectly circular. He added a circular slice of canadian bacon (and no, I've never figured out what Canadian pigs must look like), and the same slice of cheese that graces virtually every other McDonald's sandwich, and served it on an english muffin.

Tasty. While it's high in salt, it's the lowest-calorie sandwich McDonald's offers. Your mother would tell you to eat a good breakfast; it's the most important meal of the day. And while eggs are high in cholesterol, they're also high in egg lecithin, and all that lecithin might actually drive your blood levels of cholesterol down

The All Things Considered story eulogizing Mr. Petersen says that the Egg McMuffin is a variation of Eggs Benedict. It uses a slice of melted cheese, instead of runny Hollandaise sauce, they say.

It does? I've never noticed that the cheese was melted. Soft, perhaps, but it's always still slicey. And I've never noticed the similarity. Eggs Benedict without the Hollandaise sauce is sorta like a Whopper without the beef. It might be good, but it's lost its identity.

My trophy wife came home for the day at 11:30 this morning. Her client was sick. I wanted to go to Costco for some Cape Cod Chicken Salad and some bottled water and she went with me, suggesting that we could eat out together.

We ended up at Friendly's, where we divided up an Intelligencer-Journal, and talked about the news of the day, and ...stuff. She thought the ring in the JCPenney flyer was particularly attractive; I don't think she's set foot in a Penney's in the ten years I've known her, and I've refused to shop there since they screwed over my first wife on her wedding gown. but I admitted it was fetching. I shared the Funky Winkerbean cartoon with her; the folks at the pizza parlor were talking about the many couple that'd fallen in love there, waiting for their food.

She hates comics, but she read it, and grasped my hand and squeezed. "We've got something most couples don't," she said. "We don't need slow food in order to talk together."

She looked at the breakfast menu. "I'm going to come here for breakfast tomorrow," she said. "This looks good." I commented on an editorial page item, making fun of Hillary dodging bullets that weren't there. My wife is a Hillary fan. "I don't know why she did that. That was so dumb." I wanted to tell her that it was indicative of Hillary's character, which I find exceptionally unappealing. My wife, I'd vote for for President. Hillary, never. Showing wisdom I rarely exhibit, I kept my mouth shut.

She held her fingers to her forehead, and stretched the skin from side to side. "Do you see any gray hair?" Of course I didn't. She's a blonde, with dark roots, not light. "Of course not," I said. "Do you think I'd want to be seen in public with a gray-haired biddy? I'm proud to be seen with my trophy wife." We had our usual disagreement, she claiming not to be a trophy wife, me pointing out that she's not only beautiful, but intelligent, kind, hard-working, manipulative, and she didn't yell at me about the trash. The "manipulative" is a running joke. Her job, as therapeutic support staff, is to help emotionally- or mentally-challenged clients live better lives. She does it, I point out, by manipulating them into achieving small successes, and learning how to achieve greater ones.

Then I asked, "Do I get points for staring at your forehead instead of your chest?" She laughed. I think it was her laugh that made me marry her. It was her 1000-watt smile that attracted me in the first place, but her laugh that sealed the deal. "First funny thing you've said in days!" I can barely go three minutes without sarcasm or cracking wise; she complains that it disrupts our conversation. But I accepted the compliment as it was intended.

She phoned me at 9 AM, while driving to work, telling me this was trash day, and I needed to get the trash and the recyclables to the curb. I said OK, turned the phone off, and went back to sleep. When she got home at 11:30, she yelled up the stairs to wake me up, telling me that the trash truck hadn't yet come. The recyclables truck had, but we didn't have many recyclables this week. I put our recyclables in a trash bag, and put it with the other trash on the curb. The trash truck was a block away, and someone was driving my van away from the curb. But alternate Thursdays are street sweeping, no parking from 11:30 to 3:00. Oh, well, if someone steals it, at least I won't get a ticket. But it had been Blondie behind the wheel.

"I don't yell at you about trash," she said, "because it doesn't do any good." She took a drink of coffee. "And it'd just make you mad if I did. I'm too good at being manipulative than to do something stupid like that." See what I mean? That's trophy wife material.

The divorce rate has grown from 2.1 per year per 10,000 marriages in 1950 to 4.9 today. I blame it on the Egg McMuffin. People don't sit down together for breakfast and talk any more. My trophy wife calls me an idiot, and points out that the Egg McMuffin wasn't invented until 1972, when the rate had already risen to about 3.1, and that it had already risen from 0.38 in 1900.

She thinks it has to do with the liberalization of divorce laws in the 1950s. Well, maybe. Although, I must point out in defense of my theory, in 1900, people lived shorter lives. Many more women died in childbirth, many men died in industrial accidents, and many died of diseases. There's no need to get an expensive divorce, if he's going to be dead in six months of tuberculosis anyway, right?

And that's the topic we argue about most. She fears that she will outlive me, and I'm dead certain she will abandon me, preferring to sleep alone in a casket. Don't you remember? I ask her. When we wrote our wedding vows, I insisted on leaving out the "til death do we part" line? That was on purpose. You're not allowed to die." She counters that she's certain I am going to up and die on her.

You think you're going to get a nice cozy casket? I challenge her. Well, you're not. When you die, I'm just going to bag you and set you out on the curb on trash day.

Except that there's a 50 pound limit on the trash bags. I suppose I'm going to have to cut her up and put her in several bags. She laughs.

You could always get some hydrofluoric acid and dissolve me in the bathtub, she said. She was referring to the "Breaking Bad" series on AMC. A chemistry teacher with terminal cancer teams with a former student, a slacker druggie, to cook crystal meth. He wants to make a bundle quickly, so there's money to care for his disabled son after he's gone. A drug deal goes bad, and there's a body to get rid of. He tells the kid to buy some polypropylene containers to put the body in, and provides several gallons of hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the body. The kid can't find anything big enough, so he gets the bright idea to just dissolve the body in the bathtub upstairs. Unfortunately, hydrofluoric acid will eat through a bathtub - and he only finds this out when everything falls through the bathroom floor to the room below.

I don't like gore. I don't like violence. But I find myself drawn to this black comedy.

Mr. White, the chemistry teacher, keeps running into problems, and his solutions keep getting him deeper and deeper involved in situations he doesn't want to be involved in. It's sorta like the home-improvement projects I used to do. I'd try to replace the clogged shower head, and the pipe would bend, so I would end up replacing the valve, only to find myself replacing the plumbing back to the water heater, only to end up replacing the water heater, only to end up replacing the wiring back to the fuse box, only to replace it with a breaker box of greater capacity, only to end up rewiring the pump as well, only to, well, you get the idea. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.

But in the end, I got to be pretty good at sweating a soldered joint on copper plumbing. And these days, I'm pretty good at remembering that I need to have someone else do the job, someone who's insured and bonded. We get too soon old, and too late smart.