Adam Victor Brandizzi

Enlarge / The latest satellite measurements of ozone from May 14 show the "hole" that still exists over the South Pole. (credit: NASA Ozone Watch)

The Montreal Protocol—a 1987 international agreement to end production of ozone-destroying chemicals like freon—seems miraculous compared to the long struggle to achieve meaningful action on climate change. Even more astonishing is that the agreement has worked. Those chemicals (known as CFCs) take a long time to flush out of the atmosphere, but monitoring has shown that the flushing is proceeding largely according to plan.

That keeps the hole in the ozone layer on track to shrink over the coming decades. However, a new study shows that someone has been cheating in the last few years.

A group of researchers led by Stephen Montzka of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been tracking the progress of CFCs and noticed something off with CFC-11. This chemical has been used as a refrigerant, solvent, and propellant for aerosol spray cans, as well as in the production of styrofoam. As with the other CFCs, nations agreed to end production of CFC-11 entirely. While there may still be some older machines leaking CFC-11, these sources should gradually disappear over time, allowing the decline of its atmospheric concentration to accelerate.

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And just a reminder: I’ll be at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival this weekend. Here are the details on where I’ll be and when I’ll be there!

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Saturday Morning Block Chain is a go. You can get coins by buying stuff from my store and imagining you're getting coins.

“Dad, I want those Hot Wheels cars. Will you get them for me? You have money.”

A few months ago, Kate and I noticed that our young son Gus had started picking up on the fact that stuff isn’t free. He realized you need money to buy food, clothes, and yes, even Hot Wheels. When Gus started asking us to buy him toys when we were out shopping, we figured it was time to begin paying him an allowance.

Yet I had a lot of questions: Should his allowance be tied to doing chores? How much should we give him? Should we have him put his money in a real bank account? Giving an allowance is one of the first and best ways to teach kids about managing their money, and I really wanted to implement a method that would teach him sound budgeting and financial principles.

To figure out the answers to my questions and come up with best practices, I did a lot of research. Below I share what I’ve learned for you other dads out there looking to raise savvy money managers.

The Big Debate: Should You Tie Allowance to Chores or Not?

The big debate that you see on finance and parenting blogs is whether or not you should tie allowance to chores; that is, should your kid have to earn their allowance by doing certain household tasks?

Your kneejerk answer will likely be “Of course!” But it’s actually a surprisingly tough question to answer because each side has its pros and cons:

The Case for Tying Allowance To Chores

Most parents believe that an allowance should be connected to chores. In fact, a survey conducted by T. Rowe Price found that 86% of parents think kids should only get paid if they help out around the house. It definitely makes intuitive sense to tie allowance to chores because it teaches kids how money works in the real world — if you want to get paid, you have to work.

The parents in the allowance-for-chores camp argue that if you simply give your child money, they’ll become spoiled and entitled. If you want to teach your children a solid work ethic, the thinking goes, you need to show them that rewards only come to those who earn them.

The Case for Giving an Allowance Not Contingent on Chores

The parents and financial experts in the no-strings-attached allowance camp argue that the main focus of allowance shouldn’t be work, but rather teaching children about how to manage money and save for long-term goals. When parents tie allowance to chores, they often just focus on their children getting their tasks done, instead of on managing the money they get in return.

This side also argues that by tying allowance to chores, you’re teaching children that you only need to contribute to the family if you get money in exchange. Mom and dad don’t get paid for doing work around the home, so why should children?

Thus, this camp believes that by tying allowance to chores, you’re actually preventing kids from developing a healthy work ethic, rather than inculcating one. Instead of teaching kids to work hard and do good work for the sake of working hard and doing good work, you teach them that you should only make an effort if there’s money on the line.

What’s more, paying allowance for chores may even create a perverse incentive in your children not to do chores. Your kids may decide that it’s worth missing a few weeks of allowance to avoid taking out the trash, clearing the table after dinner, or cleaning their room. What are you supposed to do then to get them do their chores?

Compromise Between the Two Camps

I certainly want my kids to learn that in the real world, the way you make money is to exchange your work for it. At the same time, I want to make the focus of allowance about managing money and learning how to save for long-term goals. I also want to teach my kids that there are certain jobs you have to do simply because you’re a member of the family.

Fortunately, there are several ways to find a compromise between the two above philosophies. One way is to divide chores around the house into two groups: Citizen of the Household Chores and Pay for Work Chores. Citizen of the Household Chores are those that must be done simply because you live in the house. Allowance is not tied to them. If your children fail to perform these chores, you can dole out age-appropriate punishments like sending them to timeout or taking away their screentime. Pay for Work chores, on the other hand, are the chores children have to do to earn their allowance. If they don’t do them, they don’t get their dough.

This compromise helps avoid the problem of kids opting out of allowance to avoid certain chores, but still develops the connection between work and money.

Another compromise solution highlighted in The Opposite of Spoiled is to pay children a base allowance that they get no matter what — a kind of living stipend. The kid has to do basic chores for free, just like mom and dad, but you will pay Junior extra money if he recognizes a problem around the house and solves it. So if your kid notices that the car is dirty and offers to clean it, you can negotiate a rate and he’ll get paid for that job. Personally, I’m attracted to this compromise because I like how it encourages entrepreneurial thinking in kids.

Right now, Kate and I are paying Gus an allowance that isn’t tied to specific chores. He’s got stuff he has to help with around the house — like unloading the dishwasher and keeping his room and playroom clean — simply because he’s a member of our family. Our main goal with allowance is to teach Gus money management and patience with saving up for long-term goals. As he gets older and capable of doing more tasks, we’ll be adding in some bigger chores that are connected with money.

Make Your Kid a Money Genius – Listen to My Podcast With Beth Kobliner

When Should You Start Paying Kids an Allowance?

If your kiddo knows how to do some basic math and is starting to ask questions about how much things cost, then chances are she’s ready for an allowance.

When this awareness and skill will come “online” will vary from child to child. Gus is only four, but he’s always been precocious, and can already read, count money, and do double-digit math problems, so we felt he was ready.

Use your discernment in determining when your child is capable of handling an allowance. Keep in mind that they don’t need to be savvy money mangers right out of the gate; at first they’ll probably be excited and want to immediately blow their weekly allotment. Learning delayed gratification will take time and experimentation on their part as to how saving and spending works. It’s all part of the learning process.

How Much Allowance Should You Pay?

After you’ve decided to start paying your kiddo an allowance, you’ll need to decide how much green to dole out. If your main purpose of allowance is to teach kids the value of patience and delayed gratification, then you don’t want to give them so much money that they can buy pretty much whatever they want as soon as they get paid. You want them to have to scrimp and save up over time to get what they want.

A common recommendation that I came across from financial experts is to pay $1 each week per year of age. We do this rate with Gus, so he’s getting $4 a week. As your kids get older and into middle school, they may require more money if they’re paying for clothes and lunches.

Helping Kids Manage Their Money: Three Jars

As we’ve mentioned throughout this post, the primary purpose of allowance is to teach kids about managing money. That’s why when you start paying an allowance, you don’t just give them the money carte blanche. You need to set some rules and guidelines for spending and saving.

A great way to do this with younger children is to set up the Three Jar System. Go to the store and buy three big mason jars. With a Sharpie, label one jar “Spend,” another jar “Save,” and the third “Give.”

The day you decide to start paying allowance, bring the jars to your family meeting and explain to your kiddo that she’s going to start getting an allowance. But then explain that there are some conditional guidelines attached to the money. Before she can spend her money, she has to set aside some for saving and some for giving too — it’s never too early to start teaching children about being charitable.

How much they need to save and set aside for giving will vary from family to family. You could do percentages, but that’s pretty tricky for a little kid to understand. With Gus, we’ve told him that he needs to put aside — at a minimum — $.25 in his giving jar and $.75 in his savings. That’s roughly 7% for giving and 20% for savings.

The rest of the money he can spend on whatever he wants (within reason). If he wants something that costs more than the $3 he has left, he’ll need to save up until he has enough money for it.

It’s been interesting to see Gus grapple with short-term and long-term wants. Gus likes gum and mints, so that’s what he often spends his money on. Whenever he wants a pack of $2 gum, I’ll take time to show him the price label and walk through the math with him so he fully understands that he’ll only have $1 of spending money left until next week. If he’s been talking about a Lego set he wants, I’ll remind him that he won’t have enough money to buy that if he buys the gum now. You can see the gears grinding in his head as he tries to figure out if he wants the gum right now or if he’d be better off saving and buying his Legos later. Occasionally, he’s able to delay gratification, but usually he gives in and buys the pack of gum; his powers of delayed gratification are still nascent, but will hopefully develop over time as he gets a firmer and firmer grasp of how the world works.

When Gus starts whining about still wanting that Lego set, Kate and I remind him he’ll need to not buy gum next time and save more of his money. Life is hard for a suburban four-year-old.

When kids are young, the savings jar should be used for short-term goals. A four-year-old probably isn’t going to understand or appreciate the concept of saving for his retirement. A year seems like a decade away; seventy years probably seems like an eternity. So right now, the savings jar for Gus is for socking away money for toys he might want that cost more than $3. It will usually take a few weeks before he has enough for the thing he wants, so he learns the importance of setting goals and being patient.

As your kids get older, you might consider adding in long-term savings goals like college education and even retirement. You can even set up more elaborate savings systems. Some parents have a matching system similar to what some companies do with 401(K)s, in which they’ll match how much their kids put away up to a certain amount. That can be a great way to incentivize older children to save for important long-term goals.

The giving jar is to help teach your children the value and joy of giving your money to individuals and groups who need it. Where can the kids give the money? Well, if you belong to a church, they could put it in the collection basket. Or you could have your kid decide on a charity that he wants to give his money to and set a savings goal with him. Once he has the designated amount, you can write a check or make a donation on his behalf online with your debit or credit card.

Should You Use a Bank?

Financial experts generally agree that when kids are young, it’s better that they get paid in cash and keep their money in a physical container that they can see. Putting the money in a bank makes it too ethereal for tiny brains that are still working to understand abstractions. The jar full of cash is much easier for them to grasp than a digital number in some bank account. So until about age ten or eleven, keep your child’s money in the jars, but talk to him about how mom and dad keep their money in a bank. One of my weekly routines with Gus is to take him to the bank with me to deposit business checks. Every time we go I talk to him about why mom and dad keep their money in a bank and that one day he can do the same thing, too. He thinks that’s pretty cool.

When the kids are about twelve (or if they ask earlier on their own accord) open up that savings or checking account. From there, you can get more grown-up with how you dispense allowance. For example, you can transfer your children’s allowance into their checking account sort of like direct deposit. From there, it’s up to them to siphon money into its appropriate spend, save, or give accounts. There are also apps that you can use to help manage your child’s allowance. Allowance Manager and FamZoo allow you to assign chores to your kids. When they complete their chores, they accrue a balance online that can be used to make online purchases or that can be transferred to a checking account.

Stay Consistent

The key with allowance, as with anything when it comes to your children, is consistency. If you’re going to pay an allowance, make sure you do it every week. If your kid wants something that isn’t a basic life need, make them use their allowance money. If you deviate just once from that mandate, your kids will start picking up on the fact that mom and dad’s rules are malleable, and that if they whine enough, you’ll get them things they can’t afford themselves.

Allowance is a foundational tool for teaching your kids money management as well as delayed gratification and patience. As they get older, you can build off the lessons they learned with their allowance to teach more advanced financial principles.

How do you do allowance? Share your experience and tips in the comments!

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La fuente más citada en la wikipedia es un artículo científico. Citado 2 830 341 veces, sus tres autores, que lo publicaron en una revista de acceso abierto (open access) llamada Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, no se han enterado hasta hace unas semanas. Citado 2486 veces según el Web of Science de Thomson-Reuters y 4865 veces según Google Scholar, su artículo actualiza la aplicación de la clasificación de climas de Köppen-Geiger a los diferentes países de la Tierra. Las dos siguientes fuentes más citadas también son artículos científicos. El segundo, citado 21 350 veces, se publicó en Journal of Physical Chemistry, y el tercero, citado 20 247 veces, en Genome Research.

En la wikipedia en español, la fuente más citada es el libro de William N. Eschmeyer, “Catalog of Fishes,” Special Publication of the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information (ed. 1998), seguida de un diccionario de planetas, una enciclopedia de películas argentinas, una guía de campo de pájaros cantores de Sudamérica y un atlas de cultura popular de España. En la wikipedia en inglés las tres fuentes más citadas son sendos artículos científicos, seguidos por cinco libros. En mi opinión esto muestra que la wikipedia en inglés es más confiable para un científico que la wikipedia en español. Todos estos datos se extrajeron el 1 de marzo de 2018, para todas las wikipedias en diferentes idiomas, siendo el número total de fuentes citadas de 15 693 732 (las fuentes más citadas varían mucho de un idioma a otro).

El artículo en cuestión es M. C. Peel, B. L. Finlayson, T. A. McMahon, “Updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification,” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 11: 1633–1644 (2007), doi: 10.5194/hess-11-1633-2007. Los otros dos son Arup K. Ghose, Vellarkad N. Viswanadhan, John J. Wendoloski, “Prediction of Hydrophobic (Lipophilic) Properties of Small Organic Molecules Using Fragmental Methods:  An Analysis of ALOGP and CLOGP Methods,” J. Phys. Chem. A 102: 3762–3772 (1998), doi: 10.1021/jp980230o, y The MGC Project Team, “The Status, Quality, and Expansion of the NIH Full-Length cDNA Project: The Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC),” Genome Res. 14: 2121-2127 (2004), doi: 10.1101/gr.2596504.

Me he enterado gracias a Melissa Davey, “Wikipedia: the most cited authors revealed to be three Australian scientists,” The Guardian, 07 May 2018, que cita a Louise Matsakis, “The most-cited authors on wikipedia had no idea,” Wired.com, 01 May 2018, que a su vez citan a Miriam Redi, Dario Taraborelli, …, Ben Vershbow, “What are the ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data,” Wikipedia, Medium, 05 Apr 2018.

Cuando sus autores enviaron este artículo, la revista Hydrology and Earth System Sciences estaba entre Q1 (en un área) y Q2 (en otra área). Sin embargo, a partir de su publicación la revista se ha mantenido como Q1 en ambas áreas, subiendo su índice de impacto de forma sostenida desde entonces. Sin lugar a dudas, este artículo ha sido una de las claves para ello.

Por cierto, el sistema de clasificación climática de Köppen fue publicado por el climatólogo Wladimir Köppen en 1884, habiendo sido actualizado en varias ocasiones en los últimos lustros. Peel, Finlayson y McMahon publicaron una actualización que se ha usado mucho en la literatura científica en muchas áreas, desde climatología a geología, sociología y salud pública (quizás de ahí su éxito en la wikipedia). En rigor, no hay nada nuevo desde el punto de vista científico en su actualización, sin embargo, debido a los efectos del cambio climático cada cierto tiempo se debe actualizar la asignación de zonas climáticas a los diferentes países del globo terráqueo. Según uno de los autores, el de mayor edad, Finlayson, “la razón por la que este artículo ha sido muy citado es porque es útil”.

La entrada El artículo científico más citado en la wikipedia fue escrita en La Ciencia de la Mula Francis.

Cartazes para o Dia de Santo Isidoro (padroeiro de Madri) de 2018. Lindos! Via  Nacho Padilla @ Twitter. Mais sobre os cartazes aqui.

The other day at work I needed to edit 200 files at once. I wanted to do something pretty simple: basically, I had files that looked like this:

foo:
  - bar
  - baz
  - bananas

and I wanted to insert an extra line after the baz line that said elephant

foo:
  - bar
  - baz
  - elephant
  - bananas

I had one extra weird requirement which was that some of the lines were indented with 2 spaces, and some with 4 spaces. The - elephant line needed to have the same indentation as the previous line.

I didn’t feel like writing a program to do this (perl would be perfect, but I don’t really remember perl at all), so I wanted to use a command line tool! A vim macro could do it, but how do you save a vim macro to a file again? I forget! I couldn’t think of how to do it with sed at the time, though in retrospect you could do something like s/(.+)- baz/\1- baz\n\1- elephant.

In a surprising turn of events, I ended up using the ed editor to do this task, and it was really easy and simple to do! In this blog post I’ll make the case that if you have something you might normally accomplish with a Vim macro, you might conceivably want to use Ed for it!

what’s ‘ed’?

ed is this sort of terrifying text editor. A typical interaction with ed for me in the past has gone something like this:

$ ed
help
?
h
?
asdfasdfasdfsadf
?
<close terminal in frustration>

Basically if you do something wrong, ed will just print out a single, unhelpful, ?. So I’d basically dismissed ed as an old arcane Unix tool that had no practical use today.

vi is a successor to ed, except with a visual interface instead of this ?

surprise: Ed is actually sort of cool and fun

So if Ed is a terrifying thing that only prints ? at you, why am I writing a blog post about it? WELL!!!!

On April 1 this year, Michael W Lucas published a new short book called Ed Mastery. I like his writing, and even though it was sort of an april fool’s joke, it was ALSO a legitimate actual real book, and so I bought it and read it to see if his claims that Ed is actually interesting were true.

And it was so cool!!!! I found out:

• how to get Ed to give you better error messages than just ?
• that the name of the grep command comes from ed syntax (g/re/p)
• the basics of how to navigate and edit files using ed

All of that was a cool Unix history lesson, but did not make me want to actually use Ed in real life. But!!!

The other neat thing about Ed (that did make me want to use it!) is that any Ed session corresponds to a script that you can replay! So if I know Ed, then I can use Ed basically as a way to easily apply vim-macro-like programs to my files.

how I solved my problem with ed

So! we have a file like this:

foo:
  - bar
  - baz
  - bananas

and we want to add a line after - baz that says - elephant. Let’s do it!!

With Vim, I’d do it by:

1. search for baz
2. copy that line and paste it
3. s/baz/elephant
4. save & quit

We can translate that into an Ed script in a really pretty straightforward way!!

/baz                 # search for `baz`
.t.                  # copy that line and paste it on the next line
s/baz/elephants      # on the second, pasted, line replace `baz` with `elephants`
w                    # save
q                    # quit

ed doesn’t actually have comments, so if you wanted to actually run this ed script you’ll have to remove the # things

Most of this is very similar to what you’d do in Vim – the .t. part of this is the most inscrutable bit, but I figured it out through some judicious use of Stack Overflow.

using the ed script

Applying the ed script to the file I want to edit is easy! Here’s how;

cat my-script.ed | ed file-to-edit.txt

(or you could write ed file-to-edit.txt < my-script.ed, but I always use cat and pipe in practice :) )

Ed is at least a little bit useful!!!!

It was super surprising and delightful to me to find a practical use for Ed! To me the most compelling thing about Ed is that I use simple Vim macros a lot, and it’s a pretty direct way to translate a Vim macro into a way to batch edit a bunch of files.

I’m definitely not going to go telling everyone they should be using ed (it’s certainly not very user friendly!), but I think it’s neat. If you’re interested, I’d really recommend buying Ed Mastery – it’s quite short, I learned some neat Unix history from it, and now I have a new tool to use very occasionally!!

Return of Psychiatristman!

VanCAF this weekend!
I’m looking forward to the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival coming up on May 19-20. Want to find me there? Here are the details!

I was told about coffee and cheese. The mayo on pizza is something I witnessed with my own, horrified eyes.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Olá, leitores! Outro dia, em minhas andanças fotográficas à procura de alguma nova decoração de fachada para meus arquivos, descobri no bairro do Catete, para minha felicidade, um pequenino ornamento para lá de interessante. Repousa a pequena escultura em argamassa no interior do frontão de um sobrado novecentista da Rua Tavares Bastos, número 10, hoje pintado num extravagante amarelo com detalhes em rosa.

Analisando a foto acima vemos a representação quase trivial de dois santos bastantes conhecidos nossos: Cosme e Damião. Mas reparemos que, à direita deles e vestida exatamente como eles, há uma terceira figura, em menor tamanho. Quem será?

Acertou quem pensou Doum.

Sobre os irmãos Cosme e Damião já sabemos, por Jorge Campos Tavares, que “eram dois irmãos gêmeos de origem árabe que exerciam medicina gratuitamente na intenção de divulgar a Fé de Cristo. Teriam sido martirizados em 287 no tempo de Diocleciano. São padroeiros dos médicos, dos cirurgiões, dos farmacêuticos, dos barbeiros e dos herbanários. Iconograficamente, apresentam-se vestidos de doutores, com vestes forradas de peles, chapéu ou barrete de doutor e têm como atributos um estojo de cirurgião, um vaso de farmácia, uma caixa de unguentos, uma lanceta ou uma espátula para preparar pomadas e bálsamos, ou um urinol (frasco de vidro para examinar urina, exame muito importante na medicina antiga).”[1] Como mártires que são, carregam a palma da ressurreição. No Brasil, sua festa é comemorada no dia 27 de setembro.[2]

Nas religiões de origem africana, como o Candomblé e a Umbanda, o sincretismo religioso os associou a Ibeji, orixá protetor dos gêmeos. Para saber mais sobre o assunto, clique aqui.

Mas e Doum, afinal?

O Candomblé e a Umbanda acreditam que, a cada dupla de gêmeos nascidos, um terceiro não encarna nesse mundo. Esse terceiro, “aquele que não veio”, é Doum (ou Idowu), entidade que personifica as crianças e é seu protetor. Para saber mais sobre Doum, clique aqui.

O tema é espinhoso, e portanto paro por aqui. Meu interesse foi apenas o de registrar a ocorrência de tão interessante ornamento numa fachada carioca – ainda que extemporâneo, a meu ver, à construção do sobrado.

[1] Tavares, Jorge Campos. Dicionário de Santos. Porto: Lello e Irmão Editores, 1990.

[2] Não custa lembrar que no município pernambucano de Igarassu está, segundo o IPHAN, a mais antiga igreja católica do Brasil, iniciada em 1535. Trata-se da Igreja Matriz de São Cosme e São Damião.

Originally published in the November 1984 issue

I last saw Hiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam. He was nineteen then--my wonderfully skilled and maddeningly insubordinate radio operator. For months we were seldom more than three feet apart. Then one day he went home, and fifteen years passed before we met by accident last winter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. A few months later I visited Hiers and his wife. Susan, in Vermont, where they run a bed-and -breakfast place. The first morning we were up at dawn trying to save five newborn rabbits. Hiers built a nest of rabbit fur and straw in his barn and positioned a lamp to provide warmth against the bitter cold.

"What people can't understand," Hiers said, gently picking up each tiny rabbit and placing it in the nest, "is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I can't tell anybody."

Hiers loved war. And as I drove back from Vermont in a blizzard, my children asleep in the back of the car, I had to admit that for all these years I also had loved it, and more than I knew. I hated war, too. Ask me, ask any man who has been to war about his experience, and chances are we'll say we don't want to talk about it--implying that we hated it so much, it was so terrible, that we would rather leave it buried. And it is no mystery why men hate war. War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. And how do you explain that to your wife, your children, your parents, or your friends?

That's why men in their sixties and seventies sit in their dens and recreation rooms around America and know that nothing in their life will equal the day they parachuted into St. Lo or charged the bunker on Okinawa. That's why veterans' reunions are invariably filled with boozy awkwardness, forced camaraderie ending in sadness and tears: you are together again, these are the men who were your brothers, but it's not the same, can never be the same. That's why when we returned from Vietnam we moped around, listless, not interested in anything or anyone. Something had gone out of our lives forever, and our behavior on returning was inexplicable except as the behavior of men who had lost a great perhaps the great-love of their lives, and had no way to tell anyone about it.

In part we couldn't describe our feelings because the language failed us: the civilian-issue adjectives and nouns, verbs and adverbs, seemed made for a different universe. There were no metaphors that connected the war to everyday life. But we were also mute, I suspect, out of shame. Nothing in the way we are raised admits the possibility of loving war. It is at best a necessary evil, a patriotic duty to be discharged and then put behind us. To love war is to mock the very values we supposedly fight for. It is to be insensitive, reactionary, a brute.

But it may be more dangerous, both for men and nations, to suppress the reasons men love war than to admit them. In Apocalypse Now, Robert Duvall, playing a brigade commander, surveys a particularly horrific combat scene and says, with great sadness, "You know, someday this war's gonna be over. " He is clearly meant to be a psychopath, decorating enemy bodies with playing cards, riding to war with Wagner blaring. We laugh at him--Hey! nobody's like that! And last year in Grenada American boys charged into battle playing Wagner, a new generation aping the movies of Vietnam the way we aped the movies of World War 11, learning nothing, remembering nothing.

Alfred Kazin wrote that war is the enduring condition of twentieth-century man. He was only partly right. War is the enduring condition of man, period. Men have gone to war over everything from Helen of Troy to Jenkins's ear. Two million Frenchmen and Englishmen died in muddy trenches in World War I because a student shot an archduke. The truth is, the reasons don't matter. There is a reason for every war and a war for every reason.

For centuries men have hoped that with history would come progress, and with progress, peace. But progress has simply given man the means to make war even more horrible; no wars in our savage past can begin to match the brutality of the wars spawned in this century, in the beautifully ordered, civilized landscape of Europe, where everyone is literate and classical music plays in every village cafe. War is not all aberration; it is part of the family. the crazy uncle we try--in vain--to keep locked in the basement.

Consider my own example. I am not a violent person. I have not been in a fight since grade school. Aside from being a fairly happy-go-lucky carnivore, I have no lust for blood, nor do I enjoy killing animals, fish, or even insects. My days are passed in reasonable contentment, filled with the details of work and everyday life. I am also a father now, and a male who has helped create life is war's natural enemy. I have seen what war does to children, makes them killers or victims, robs them of their parents, their homes, and their innocence--steals their childhood and leaves them marked in body, mind, and spirit.

I spent most of my combat tour in Vietnam trudging through its jungles and rice paddies without incident, but I have seen enough of war to know that I never want to fight again, and that I would do everything in my power to keep my son from fighting. Then why, at the oddest times--when I am in a meeting or running errands, or on beautiful summer evenings, with the light fading and children playing around me--do my thoughts turn back fifteen years to a war I didn't believe in and never wanted to fight? Why do I miss it?

I miss it because I loved it, loved it in strange and troubling ways. When I talk about loving war I don't mean the romantic notion of war that once mesmerized generations raised on Walter Scott. What little was left of that was ground into the mud at Verdun and Passchendaele: honor and glory do not survive the machine gun. And it's not the mindless bliss of martyrdom that sends Iranian teenagers armed with sticks against Iraqi tanks. Nor do I mean the sort of hysteria that can grip a whole country, the way during the Falklands war the English press inflamed the lust that lurks beneath the cool exterior of Britain. That is vicarious war, the thrill of participation without risk, the lust of the audience for blood. It is easily fanned, that lust; even the invasion of a tiny island like Grenada can do it. Like all lust, for as long as it lasts it dominates everything else; a nation's other problems are seared away, a phenomenon exploited by kings, dictators, and presidents since civilization began.

And I don't mean war as an addiction, the constant rush that war junkies get, the crazies mailing ears home to their girlfriends, the zoomies who couldn't get an erection unless they were cutting in the afterburners on their F-4s. And, finally, I'm not talking about how some men my age feel today, men who didn't go to war but now have a sort of nostalgic longing for something they missed, some classic male experience, the way some women who didn't have children worry they missed something basic about being a woman, something they didn't value when they could have done it.

I'm talking about why thoughtful, loving men can love war even while knowing and hating it. Like any love, the love of war is built on a complex of often contradictory reasons. Some of them are fairly painless to discuss; others go almost too deep, stir the caldron too much. I'll give the more respectable reasons first.

Part of the love of war stems from its being an experience of great intensity; its lure is the fundamental human passion to witness, to see things, what the Bible calls the lust of the eye and the Marines in Vietnam called eye fucking. War stops time, intensifies experience to the point of a terrible ecstasy. It is the dark opposite of that moment of passion caught in "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd/ For ever panting, and forever young. " War offers endless exotic experiences, enough "I couldn't fucking believe it! "'s to last a lifetime.

Most people fear freedom; war removes that fear. And like a stem father, it provides with its order and discipline both security and an irresistible urge to rebel against it, a constant yearning to fly over the cuckoo's nest. The midnight requisition is an honored example. I remember one elaborately planned and meticulously executed raid on our principal enemy--the U.S. Army, not the North Vietnamese--to get lightweight blankets and cleaning fluid for our rifles repeated later in my tour, as a mark of my changed status, to obtain a refrigerator and an air conditioner for our office. To escape the Vietnamese police we tied sheets together and let ourselves down from the top floor of whorehouses, and on one memorable occasion a friend who is now a respectable member of our diplomatic corps hid himself inside a rolled-up Oriental rug while the rest of us careered off in the truck. leaving him to make his way back stark naked to our base six miles away. War, since it steals our youth, offers a sanction to play boys' games.

War replaces the difficult gray areas daily life with an eerie, serene clarity. In war you usually know who is your enemy and who is your friend, and are given means of dealing with both. (That was, incidentally, one of the great problems with Vietnam: it was hard to tell friend from foe--it was too much like ordinary Life.)

War is an escape from the everyday into a special world where the bonds that hold us to our duties in daily life--the bonds of family, community, work, disappear. In war, all bets are off. It's the frontier beyond the last settlement, it's Las Vegas. The men who do well in peace do not necessarily do well at war, while those who were misfits and failures may find themselves touched with fire. U. S. Grant, selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis and then four years later commanding the Union armies, is the best example, although I knew many Marines who were great warriors but whose ability to adapt to civilian life was minimal.

I remember Kirby, a skinny kid with JUST YOU AND ME LORD tattooed on his shoulder. Kirby had extended his tour in Vietnam twice. He had long since ended his attachment to any known organization and lived alone out in the most dangerous areas, where he wandered about night and day, dressed only in his battered fatigue trousers with a .45 automatic tucked into the waistband, his skinny shoulders and arms as dark as a Montagnard's.

One day while out on patrol we found him on the floor of a hut, being tended by a girl in black pajamas, a bullet wound in his arm.

He asked me for a cigarette, then eyed me, deciding if I was worth telling his story to. "I stopped in for a mango, broad daylight, and there bigger'n hell were three NVA officers, real pretty tan uniforms. They got this map spread out oil a table, just eyeballin' it, makin' themselves right at home. They looked at me. I looked at them. Then they went for their nine millimeters and I went for my .45. "

"Yeah?"I answered. "So what happened

"I wasted 'em," he said, then puffed on his cigarette. Just another day at work, killing three men on the way to eat a mango.

How are you ever going to go back to the world?" I asked him. (He didn't. A few months later a ten-year-old Vietcong girl blew him up with a command-detonated booby trap.

War is a brutal, deadly game, but a game, the best there is. And men love games. You can come back from war broken in mind or body, or not come back at all. But if you come back whole you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted. Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit tactics of Vietnam. No sport I had ever played brought me to such deep awareness of my physical and emotional limits.

One night not long after I had arrived in Vietnam, one of my platoon's observation on posts heard enemy movement. I immediately lost all saliva in my mouth. I could not talk; not a sound would pass my lips. My brain erased as if the plug had been pulled--I felt only a dull hum throughout my body, a low-grade current coursing through me like electricity through a power line. After a minute I could at least grunt, which I did as Hiers gave orders to the squad leaders, called in artillery and air support, and threw back the probe. I was terrified. I was ashamed, and I couldn't wait for it to happen again.

The enduring emotion of war, when everything else has faded, is comradeship. A comrade in war is a man you can trust with anything, because you trust him with your life. "It is," Philip Caputo wrote in A Rumor of War "unlike marriage, a bond I that cannot be broken by a word, by boredom or divorce, or by anything other than death." Despite its extreme right-wing image, war is the only utopian experience most of us ever have. Individual possessions and advantage count for nothing: the group is everything What you have is shared with your friends. It isn't a particularly selective process, but a love that needs no reasons, that transcends race and personality and education--all those things that would make a difference in peace. It is, simply, brotherly love.

What made this love so intense was that it had no limits, not even death. John Wheeler in Touched with Fire quotes the Congressional Medal of Honor citation of Hector Santiago-Colon: "Due to the heavy volume of enemy fire and exploding grenades around them, a North Vietnamese soldier was able to crawl, undetected, to their position. Suddenly, the enemy soldier lobbed a hand grenade into Sp4c. Santiago-Colon's foxhole. Realizing that there was no time to throw the grenade out of his position, Sp4c., Santiago-Colon retrieved the grenade, tucked it into his stomach, and turning away from his comrades, and absorbed the full impact of the blast. " This is classic heroism, the final evidence of how much comrades can depend on each other. What went through Santiago- Colon's mini for that split second when he could just a easily have dived to safety? It had to be this: my comrades are more important than my most valuable possession--my own life.

Isolation is the greatest fear in war. The military historian S.L.A. Marshall con ducted intensive studies of combat incidents during World War 11 and Korea and discovered that, at most, only 25 percent of the men who were under fire actually fired their own weapons. The rest cowered behind cover, terrified and helpless--all systems off. Invariably, those men had felt alone, and to feel alone in combat is to cease to function; it is the terrifying prelude to the final loneliness of death. The only men who kept their heads felt connected to other men, a part of something as if comradeship were some sort of collective life-force, the power to face death and stay conscious. But when those men cam home from war, that fear of isolation stayed with many of them, a tiny mustard seed fallen on fertile soil.

When I came back from Vietnam I tried to keep up with my buddies. We wrote letters, made plans to meet, but something always came up and we never seemed to get together. For a few year we exchanged Christmas cards, then nothing . The special world that had sustain our intense comradeship was gone. Everyday life--our work, family, friends--reclaimed us, and we grew up.

But there was something not right about that. In Vietnam I had been closer to Hiers, for example, than to anyone before or since. We were connected by the radio, our lives depended on it, and on eachother. We ate, slept, laughed, and we terrified together. When I first arrived in Vietnam I tried to get Hiers to salute me, but he simply wouldn't do it, mustering at most a "Howdy, Lieutenant, how's it hanging" as we passed. For every time that I didn't salute I told him he would have to fill a hundred sandbags.

We'd reached several thousand sandbags when Hiers took me aside and said "Look, Lieutenant, I'll be happy to salute you, really. But if I get in the habit back here in the rear I may salute you when we're out in the bush. And those gooks a just waiting for us to salute, tell 'em who the lieutenant is. You'd be the first one blown away." We forgot the sandbags and the salutes. Months later, when Hiers left the platoon to go home, he turned to me as I stood on our hilltop position, and gave me the smartest salute I'd ever seen. I shot him the finger, and that was the last I saw of him for fifteen years. When we met by accident at the Vietnam memorial it was like a sign; enough time had passed-we were old enough to say goodbye to who we had been and become friends as who we had become.

For us and for thousands of veterans the memorial was special ground. War is theater, and Vietnam had been fought without a third act. It was a set that hadn't been struck; its characters were lost there, with no way to get off and no more lines to say. And so when we came to the Vietnam memorial in Washington we wrote our own endings as we stared at the names on the wall, reached out and touched them, washed them with our tears, said goodbye. We are older now, some of us grandfathers, some quite successful, but the memorial touched some part of us that is still out there, under fire, alone. When we came to that wait and met the memories of our buddies and gave them their due, pulled them tip from their buried places and laid our love to rest, we were home at last.

For all these reasons, men love war. But these are the easy reasons, the first circle the ones we can talk about without risk of disapproval, without plunging too far into the truth or ourselves. But there are other, more troubling reasons why men love war. The love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being between sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death. War may be the only way in which most men touch the mythic domains in our soul. It is, for men, at some terrible level, the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death. It is like lifting off the corner of the universe and looking at what's underneath. To see war is to see into the dark heart of things, that no-man's-land between life and death, or even beyond.

And that explains a central fact about the stories men tell about war. Every good war story is, in at least some of its crucial elements, false. The better the war story, the less of it is likely to be true. Robert Graves wrote that his main legacy from World War I was "a difficulty in telling tile truth. " I have never once heard a grunt tell a reporter a war story that wasn't a lie, just as some of the stories that I tell about the war are lies. Not that even the lies aren't true, on a certain level. They have a moral, even a mythic, truth, rather than a literal one. They reach out and remind the tellers and listeners of their place in the world. They are the primitive stories told around the fire in smoky teepees after the pipe has been passed. They are all, at bottom, the same.

Some of the best war stories out Of Vietnam are in Michael Heir's Dispatches One of Heir's most quoted stories goes like this: "But what a story he told me, as one pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard. It took me a year to understand it: "'Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell its What happened.'

" I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time telling stories to anyone as dumb as I was."

It is a great story, a combat haiku, all negative space and darkness humming with portent. It seems rich, unique to Vietnam. But listen, now, to this:

"We all went up to Gettysburg, the summer of '63: and some of us came back from there: and that's all except the details. " That is the account of Gettysburg by one Praxiteles Swan, onetime captain of the Confederate States Army. The language is different, but it is the same story. And it is a story that I would imagine has been told for as long as men have gone to war. Its purpose is not to enlighten but to exclude; its message is riot its content but putting the listener in his place. I suffered, I was there. You were not. Only those facts matter. Everything else is beyond words to tell. As was said after the worst tragedies in Vietnam: "Don't mean nothin'." Which meant, "It means everything it means too much." Language overload.

War stories inhabit the realm of myth because every war story is about death. And one of the most troubling reasons men love war is the love of destruction, the thrill of killing. In his superb book on World War II, The Warriors,J. Glenn Gray wrote that "thousands of youths who never suspect the presence of such an impulse in themselves have learned in military life the mad excitement of destroying." It's what Hemingway meant when he wrote, "Admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed it it some time whether they lie about it or not."

My platoon and I went through Vietnam burning hooches (note how language liberated US--we didn't burn houses and shoot people: we burned hooches and shot gooks), killing dogs and pigs and chickens, destroying, because, as my friend Hiers put it, "We thought it was fun at the time." As anyone who has fired a bazooka or an M-60 machine gun knows, there is something to that power in your finger, the soft, seductive touch of the trigger. It's like the magic sword, a grunt's Excalibur: all you do is move that finger so imperceptibly just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and I poof in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust.

There is a connection between this thrill and the games we played as children, the endless games of cowboys and Indians and war, the games that ended with "Bang bang you're dead," and everyone who was "dead" got up and began another game. That's war as fantasy, and it's the same emotion that touches us in war movies and books, where death is something without consequence, and not something that ends with terrible finality as blood from our fatally fragile bodies flows out onto the mud. Boys aren't the only ones prone to this fantasy; it possesses the old men who have never been to war and who preside over our burials with the same tears they shed when soldiers die in the movies--tears of fantasy, cheap tears. The love of destruction and killing in war stems from that fantasy of war as a game, but it is the more seductive for being indulged at terrible risk. It is the game survivors play, after they have seen death up close and learned in their hearts how common, how ordinary, and how inescapable it is.

I don't know if I killed anyone in Vietnam but I tried as hard as I could. I fired at muzzle flashes in tile night, threw grenades during ambushes, ordered artillery and bombing where I thought tile enemy was. Whenever another platoon got a higher body count, I was disappointed: it was like suiting up for the football game and then not getting to play. After one ambush my men brought back the body of a North Vietnamese soldier. I later found the dead man propped against some C-ration boxes; he had on sunglasses, and a Playboy magazine lay open in his lap; a cigarette dangled jauntily from his mouth, and on his head was perched a large and perfectly formed piece of shit.

I pretended to be Outraged, since desecrating bodies was frowned on as un-American and counterproductive. But it wasn't outrage I felt. I kept my officer's face on, but inside I was... laughing. I laughed--I believe now--in part because of some subconscious appreciation of this obscene linkage of sex and excrement and 'death; and in part because of the exultant realization that he--whoever he had been--was dead and I--special, unique I me--was alive. He was my brother, but I knew him not. The line between life and death is gossamer thin; there is joy. true joy, in being alive when so many around you are not. And from the joy of being alive in death's presence to the joy of causing death is, unfortunately, not that great a step.

A lieutenant colonel I knew, a true intellectual, was put in charge of civil affairs, the work we did helping the Vietnamese grow rice and otherwise improve their lives. He was a sensitive man who kept a journal and seemed far better equipped for winning hearts and minds than for combat command. But he got one, and I remember flying out to visit his fire base the night after it had been attacked by an NVA sapper unit. Most of the combat troops I had been out on an operation, so this colonel mustered a motley crew of clerks and cooks and drove the sappers off, chasing them across tile rice paddies and killing dozens of these elite enemy troops by the light of flares. That morning, as they were surveying what they had done and loading the dead NVA--all naked and covered with grease and mud so they could penetrate the barbed wire--on mechanical mules like so much garbage, there was a look of beatific contentment on tile colonel's face that I had not seen except in charismatic churches. It was the look of a person transported into ecstasy.

And I--what did I do, confronted with this beastly scene? I smiled back. 'as filled with bliss as he was. That was another of the times I stood on the edge of my humanity, looked into the pit, and loved what I saw there. I had surrendered to an aesthetic that was divorced from that crucial quality of empathy that lets us feel the sufferings of others. And I saw a terrible beauty there. War is not simply the spirit of ugliness, although it is certainly that, the devil's work. But to give the devil his due,it is also an affair of great and seductive beauty.

Art and war were for ages as linked as art and religion. Medieval and Renaissance artists gave us cathedrals, but they also gave us armor sculptures of war, swords and muskets and cannons of great beauty, art offered to the god of war as reverently as the carved altars were offered to the god of love. War was a public ritual of the highest order, as the beautifully decorated cannons in the Invalids in Paris and the chariots with their depict ions of the gods in the Metropolitan Museum of Art so eloquently attest Men love their weapons, not simply for helping to keep them alive, but for a deeper reason. They love their rifles and their knives for the same reason that the medieval warriors loved their armor and their swords: they are instruments of beauty.

War is beautiful. There is something about a firefight at night, something about the mechanical elegance of an M -60 machine gun. They are everything they should be, perfect examples of their form. When you are firing out at night, the red racers go out into tile blackness is if you were drawing with a light pen. Then little dots of light start winking back, and green tracers from the AK-47s begin to weave ill with the red to form brilliant patterns that seem, given their great speeds, oddly timeless, as if they had been etched on the night. And then perhaps the gunships called Spooky come in and fire their incredible guns like huge hoses washing down from the sky, like something God would do when He was really ticked off. And then the flares pop, casting eerie shadows as they float down on their little parachutes, swinging in the breeze, and anyone who moves, in their light seems a ghost escaped from hell.

Daytime offers nothing so spectacular, but it also has its charms. Many men loved napalm, loved its silent power, the way it could make tree lines or houses explode as if by spontaneous combustion. But I always thought napalm was greatly overrated, unless you enjoy watching tires burn. I preferred white phosphorus, which exploded with a fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in intense and billowing white smoke, throwing out glowing red comets trailing brilliant white plumes I loved it more--not less --because of its function: to destroy, to kill. The seduction of War is in its offering such intense beauty--divorced from I all civilized values, but beauty still.

Most men who have been to war, and most women who have been around it, remember that never in their lives did they have so heightened a sexuality. War is, in short. a turn-on. War cloaks men in a coat that conceals the limits and inadequacies of their separate natures. It gives them all aura, a collective power, an almost animal force. They aren't just Billy or Johnny or Bobby, they are soldiers! But there's a price for all that: the agonizing loneliness of war, the way a soldier is cut off from everything that defines him as an individual--he is the true rootless man.

The uniform did that, too, and all that heightened sexuality is not much solace late it night when the emptiness comes.

There were many men for whom this condition led to great decisions. I knew a Marine in Vietnam who was a great rarity, an Ivy League graduate. He also had an Ivy League wife, but lie managed to fall in love with a Vietnamese bar girl who could barely speak English. She was not particularly attractive, a peasant girl trying to support her family He spent all his time with her, he fell in love with her--awkwardly informally, but totally. At the end of his twelve months in Vietnam he went home, divorced his beautiful, intelligent, and socially correct wife and then went back to Vietnam and proposed to the bar girl, who accepted. It was a marriage across a vast divide of language, culture, race, and class that could only have been made in war. I am not sure that it lasted, but it would not surprise me if despite great difficulties, it did.

Of course. for every such story there are hundreds. thousands, of stories of passing contacts, a man and a woman holding each other tight for one moment, finding in sex some escape from the terrible reality of tile war. The intensity that war brings to sex, the "let us love now because there may be no tomorrow," is based on death. No matter what our weapons on the battlefield, love is finally our only weapon against death. Sex is the weapon of life, the shooting sperm sent like an army of guerrillas to penetrate the egg's defenses is the only victory that really matters. War thrusts you into the well of loneliness, death breathing in your ear. Sex is a grappling hook that pulls you out, ends your isolation, makes you one with life again.

Not that such thoughts were anywhere near conscious. I remember going off to war with a copy of War and Peace and The Charterhouse of Parma stuffed into my pack. They were soon replaced with The Story of 0. War heightens all appetites. I cannot describe the ache for candy, for taste: I wanted a Mars bar more than I wanted anything in my life And that hunger paled beside the force that pushed it, et toward women, any women: women we would not even have looked at in peace floated into our fantasies and lodged there. Too often we made our fantasies real, always to be disappointed, our hunger only greater. The ugliest prostitutes specialized in group affairs, passed among several men or even whole squads, in communion almost, a sharing more than sexual. In sex even more than in killing I could see the beast, crouched drooling on its haunches, could see it mocking me for my frailties, knowing I hated myself for them but that I could not get enough, that I would keep coming back again and again.

After I ended my tour in combat I came back to work at division headquarters and volunteered one night a week teaching English to Vietnamese adults. One of my students was a beautiful girl whose parents had been killed in Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968. She had fallen in love with an American civilian who worked at the consulate in Da Nang. He had left for his next duty station and promised he would send for her. She never heard from him again. She had a seductive sadness about her. I found myself seeing her after class, then I was sneaking into the motor pool and commandeering a deuce-and-a-half truck and driving into Da Nang at night to visit her. She lived in a small house near the consulate with her grandparents and brothers and sisters. It had one room divided by a curtain. When I arrived, the rest of the family would retire behind the curtain. Amid their hushed voices and the smells of cooking oil and rotted fish we would talk and fumble toward each other, my need greater than hers.

I wanted her desperately. But her tenderness and vulnerability, the torn flower of her beauty, frustrated my death-obsessed lust. I didn't see her as one Vietnamese, I saw her as all Vietnamese. She was the suffering soul of war, and I was the soldier who had wounded it but would make it whole. My loneliness was pulling me into the same strong current that had swallowed my friend who married the bar girl. I could see it happening, but I seemed powerless to stop it. I wrote her long poems, made inquiries about staying on in Da Nang, built a fantasy future for the two of us. I wasn't going to betray her the way the other American had, the way all Americans had, the way all men betrayed the women who helped them through the war. I wasn't like that. But then I received orders sending me home two weeks early. I drove into Da Nang to talk to her, and to make definite plans. Halfway there, I turned back.

At the airport I threw the poems into a trash can. When the wheels of the plane lifted off the soil of Vietnam, I cheered like everyone else. And as I pressed my face against the window and watched Vietnam shrink to a distant green blur and finally disappear, I felt sad and guilty--for her, for my comrades who had been killed and wounded, for everything. But that feeling was overwhelmed by my vast sense of relief. I had survived. And I was going home. I would be myself again, or so I thought.

But some fifteen years later she and the war are still on my mind, all those memories, each with its secret passages and cutbacks, hundreds of labyrinths, all leading back to a truth not safe but essential. It is about why we can love and hate, why we can bring forth Fe and snuff it out why each of us is a battleground where good and evil are always at war for our souls.

The power of war, like the power of love, springs from man's heart. The one yields death, the other life. But life without death has no meaning; nor, at its deepest level, does love without war. Without war we could not know from what depths love rises, or what power it must have to overcome such evil and redeem us. It is no accident that men love war, as love and war are at the core of man. It is not only that we must love one another or die. We must love one another and die. War, like death, is always with us, a constant companion, a secret sharer. To deny its seduction, to overcome death, our love for peace, for life itself, must be greater than we think possible, greater even than we can imagine.

Hiers and I were skiing down a mountain in Vermont, flying effortlessly over a world cloaked in white, beautiful, innocent, peaceful. On the ski lift up we had been talking about a different world, hot, green, smelling of decay and death, where each step out of the mud took all our strength. We stopped and looked back, the air pure and cold, our breath coming in puffs of vapor. Our children were following us down the hill, bent over, little balls of life racing on the edge of danger.

Hiers turned to me with a smile and said, "It's a long way from Nam isn't it?"

Yes.

And no.

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The new movie might have a different take on this. Happy Star Wars Day! May the 4th Be With You!

theartofanimation:

James Firnhaber  -  http://www.jamesfirnhaber.com  -  https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-firnhaber-a04571130  -  https://www.instagram.com/jamesfirnhaber  -  https://echoes-of-freckles.tumblr.com

sisterofiris:

Ancient Greek: As a young lion, venturing for the first time out of the den, drawn to the brightness of Helios and the rustle of leaves, is caught unaware by hunters and runs for his life, bounding over stones with ragged breath, so the late student, suckling of wisdom, hurried to the gymnasium.

Hittite: For the ritual of the late apprentice. When a scribal apprentice is continually late to work, I prepare the following: 3 sour breads, 1 bowl of water, 1 cu[p of … ] a little bit of red string, blue string, a stylus, a snail (?), a piglet, clay models of hands, 2 jugs of beer, a palm frond, fingernail clippings from the apprentice’s master, watercress (?), a stool… (continue for 15 lines)

Akkadian: If a scribal apprentice is accused of being late to work and the accuser produces three witnesses, the scribal apprentice shall have his hands cut off. If the apprentice is accused again, he shall be put to death. But if the accuser cannot produce three witnesses, then he shall be put to death.

Sumerian: The apprentice roams the city during the day. The apprentice always roams the city [during the day. The appre]ntice, the ungrateful (`?) child, always roams the city during the day. When the master asks [ … ] late. The clay is not patted into a tablet. The holy (or shining, or lapis lazuli?) stylus is not taken up. The master [ … ] drinking beer.¹

¹See Attinger who interprets this text not as a schoolmaster’s complaint but as a metaphor for sacred marriage.