Happy birthday, US Army!

On Saturday, the US Army will celebrate its 250th anniversary. It is a year older than the country it defends. In all honesty, I didn't enjoy my two years and a day of active duty in what was formally known as the Army of the United States -- the draftee army, as opposed to the Regular Army. But shockingly -- to me, anyhow -- it was one of the most important things I ever did, because most of my writing life has been about the military, or anyhow about war.

I entered as a Private E-1 on January 6, 1956, and exited as a Specialist E-4 on January 6, 1958. (1956 was a Leap Year, so my two-year hitch lasted 731 days. I spent about two months in Infantry Basic at Fort Dix, NJ, followed by seven months at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, NC, followed by fifteen months at Headquarters, US Army Communications Zone, in Orleans, France.

Orleans was good duty. The US was in recession in 1958, and I was enthralled by Europe, so I took my discharge at Orleans and went to work a couple days later at the Overseas Weekly in Frankfurt, Germany, a newspaper selling to American GIs in Germany, France, and Italy. So in many ways that was a continuation of my Army career. I came home that October, and never held another full-time job.

I was with the US military in Vietnam for a few months in 1964, at which time I predicted we'd still be there in ten years, which was more or less correct. (We pulled out US ground forces in 1973 and Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975.) By the time we invaded Iraq, I was feeling rather out of the loop, so I signed up for a master's "programme" in War in the Modern World at King's College London. One of our assignments was to start a blog -- this blog. I'm still at it. Never really a soldier but still fascinated by soldiering.

"Why don't you say thank you!"

Our hillbilly elegist scolded the president of Ukraine for his lack of gratitude for US aid (which Messrs Trump and Vance have stopped). It's time now for Mr Vance to thank Mr Zelensky for Ukraine's incredible feat of arms on Sunday, launching drones on Russian strategic bombers all the way to Siberia. Whether it's 41 bombers damaged or destroyed, or merely 13 as a pro-Kremlin blogger claims, what other nation save possibly Israel could have smuggled 117 drones into Russia and triggered them remotely, each by its operator back in Ukraine? Indeed, like Israel's exploding pagers in Lebanon in last September, Operation Spiderweb will be taught in military classrooms for years to come.

And delighting me every time I think of it. Thank you, Volodymyr, thank you!

Veritas

In the curious way he has, our 46th president turned my mind toward Harvard's 384th commencement (assuming there were no years without at least one graduate) the other day. The ceremony has been wonderfully reported by Richard Rodgers, editor of the Harvard Salient who, with conservative tongue in cheek, explains that the Chaplain of the Day opened the exercises with thanks not to God or the eponymous Puritan clergyman but to the Native American tribe upon whose land the graduates were presumed to be standing. And the day was similarly closed by the Rev Matthew Potts, who "as typical throughout the week, ended the proceedings by giving a benediction without once invoking God."

Yes, the Salient is a conservative publication with offices at 8 Eliot Street "in the heart of Harvard Square" in Cambridge MA. An email subscription is free, but donations of course are welcome, and anything north of $150 gets you the year's print copies in the mail.

Book of the year!

2025 isn't half over, but I doubt it will bring us another book as compelling as On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. It was written in haste, so we have the terrorists coming in on "hand gliders", monsters that "pray" upon their victims, several sentences repeated, and some that seem to make no sense on first reading. No matter. It will be a best-seller, and it should be.

Douglas Murray was English-born and -educated, and he published his first book in his second year at Oxford. (However, he identifies himself as a New Yorker in this one.) He flew to Israel on October 8, 2023, the day after the atrocities in kibbutzim on Israel's border with Gaza, when some two thousand people were shot, stabbed, raped, and burned alive by Hamas soldiers and Gazan civilians who gleefully posted the videos online, using the victims' phones and social media accounts. The glee of the assassins was too often echoed by college professors and students in the US and Europe, even before Israel retaliated on Gaza, a war that Murray (and I) believe is perfectly justified. I downloaded the Kindle edition at ten o'clock in the morning and finished the book before I went to bed. It's hypnotic. Read it!

When will Trump realize he's being played for a fool?

Donald Trump cut off military aid to Ukraine, scolded the Ukrainian president like an errant schoolboy, and kissed Vladimir Putin's ass, to borrow a metaphor the American president used recently in another context. Trump proposes a 30-day cease-fire. Putin yawns, proclaims his own three-day cease-fire in hopes Uktaine will refrain from dropping explosive drones on Moscow during his chest-pounding Victory Day parade -- then violates the cease-fire himself! Turkey's president-for-life offers Istanbul for peace discussions. Zelensky accepts; Putin yawns and sends his junior-varsity team instead of his own important self.

What does it take for Trump to understand? Putin has accepted Trump's offerings without a blink of his rattlesnake eyes, as if waiting for the American president to offer better terms. Ease up on those sanctions, Donald! And while you're at it, put some pressure on France and Germany and those pesky Baltic nations to stop sending munitions to Ukraine! Then maybe I'll talk about a cease-fire.

The US hasn't humiliated itself like this since it fled from Kabul and left Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban.

NATO troops in Ukraine? The horror!

Really, Putin's spokesman has a future on Saturday Night Live. Talking to ABC yesterday, Dmitry Peskov "rejected the idea of deploying European peacekeepers in Ukraine," explaining with a straight face that "We cannot allow NATO's military infrastructure to get that close to our borders."

Really? In 2022, when Putin first began to encroach on Ukraine's territory, the only NATO countries on Russia's borders were Estonia and Latvia, with a tiny bit of Norway in the far north. Add the colony of Kalingrad, a German exclave that Stalin grabbed in 1945, and Lithuania and Poland are also neighbors. And now? Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted Finland to join NATO, more than doubling Russia's border with the military alliance. And the Finns are tough: when Stalin invaded Finland in the Winter War of 1939-1940, the Red Army was humiliated, much as it was when it tried to reach Kyiv in February 2022.

Making Stalin great again

Not content with nearly obliterating the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, the Russians have now graced it with a bust of Stalin inscribed "To the organizer and inspirer of the victory of the Soviet people over the Nazi invaders, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, from grateful descendants." This was timed to celebrate Putin's (and Stalin's) bogus Victory Day of May 9.

To set the record straight: German forces surrendered to the Allies during the day on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, with the formal document signed in a French schoolhouse just after 11 p.m. that evening. It was 10 p.m. in London, 5 p.m. on the US east coast, and 2 p.m. on the west coast where the embryonic United Nations was organizing itself in the San Francisco opera house.

And it was one minute past midnight in Moscow, giving Stalin the opportunity to proclaim Victory Over Fascism Day on May 9, as if he and the Red Army alone had done the job. Putin of course keeps up the pretense, as he rebuilds the Russian and and Soviet empires of the past.

Along the same line, Putin recently renamed Volgograd airport as Stalingrad International, honoring both his murderous predecessor and the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. Volgograd bore the dictator's name from 1925 to 1961, and perhaps in a few years will be called Putingrad.

Leo XIV and the vernacular Mass

An American pope, how amazing! I wonder what Trump will make of him -- and vice versa! But mostly I wonder, as the agnostic son of two Irish Catholics, what language he'll use while saying Mass. I assume he knows Latin, though he was born after the church adopted the vernacular Mass, and he must be fluent in Spanish since he went to Peru as a young missionary and more recently served as a bishop there. Pope Francis brought him to Rome two years ago, so he likely speaks Italian as well. Truly, a man for our age!