More than a thousand people gathered on the famous steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art today to support Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.
Veteran of four wars, four enlistments, four branches: Air Force, Army, Army Reserve, Army National Guard. I am both an AF (Air Force) veteran and as Veteran AF (As Fuck)
Sunday, February 25, 2024
March for Ukraine on Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia
Saturday, February 24, 2024
More than Two Thousand Mark the 2nd Anniversary of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine at the Lincoln Memorial
Today more than two thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on the Capital Mall in Washington DC to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The event celebrated the courage and tenacity of the people ofUkraine in their struggle against Russian invasion and atrocities.
It was clear from the signs, that while the majority of Americans, more than 70%, support Ukraine in its defense of its own nation, Trump and the cowards who worship him want to abandon Ukraine and all other American allies.
Monday, February 19, 2024
President's Day Standing with Ukraine at the Pennsylvania State Capital
On Saturday and Sunday this week, many of us will be in both Washington D.C. and Philadelphia at events marking the second anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Fetterman Backs Ukraine 100%! Ukraine Action Summit, Washington DC
On Monday and Tuesday, I was in Washington DC at the Ukraine Action Summit: more than 500 people and dozens of organizations in the US Capitol to support Ukraine. I was a member of the Pennsylvania delegation, more than twenty people from around the commonwealth advocating for Ukraine.
Senator John Fetterman was our last visit on Tuesday. He was the most full-throated in his support of Ukraine among all of the lawmakers we spoke with during the visit. He said he will support Ukraine in every way he can as long as he is in office. It was a very positive end to two days of meetings.
On the first day, I was part of the group that visited the office Congressman Scott Perry. We met with a member of his staff. Perry was not in the office. In 2009-10 Perry was my battalion commander in Iraq, where we deployed for a year. Perry is a Blackhawk pilot. I worked in his headquarters and flew on his aircraft. Perry is the head of the Freedom Caucus. We completely disagree on politics, including on aid for Ukraine, but he was a good commander. I wrote about him in 2010.
We met with a staff member in the office of Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan. She is very supportive of aid for Ukraine and behind Ukraine's fight against the Russian invasion. Houlahan's grandfather (then 4 years old) survived The Holocaust because he was hidden from the Nazis by a Ukrainian Catholic Priest in Lviv. Houlahan keeps her grandfather's teddy bear in a display case in her office.
Another delightful meeting was with Mike Kelly, the Congressman from the northeast corner of Pennsylvania. He said he will support all aid for Ukraine and was especially concerned about the children kidnapped from their families in Ukraine into Russia for re-education.
During the two days, there were wry comments from the representatives and their staffs about the how the House of Representatives was unable to do anything without a speaker. All of the legislation we hope will pass is frozen without a speaker. Then on Wednesday, the day after our meetings, the Republican party voted in a new speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
On the one hand, it is good to have a speaker so something can get done, but on the other hand, the new speaker has an F rating on support for Ukraine and was deeply involved in trying to overthrow the 2020 election.
The fight for support continues here in America while Ukrainians give their lives every day to defend their homes and nation.
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Tanks Devour Fuel, Ammo and Spare Parts: Ukraine will be training tank crews, mechanics, and supply crews
One long night in November of 1977, my tank crew was on our third week of training in the West German countryside near the East-West border. We needed fuel. The 375-gallon fuel tank in our M60A1 Patton tank was at half full. To be combat ready, we needed to refuel. Usually we refueled when the big M559 Goer fuel truck pulled up alongside us. Other nights we would pull out of the line and go to the Goer.
On this night, the Goers were gone. I never learned what happened, but our only option was carrying five-gallon cans of fuel 200 meters up the hill from a five-ton truck with a fuel pod. Two of us had to stay with the tank, while two of us carried the 40-pound jerrycans up and down the hill. We stopped at 100 gallons of fuel, 20 cans. Tanks drink fuel. We needed more fuel the next day; thankfully, the Goers were back.
I was thinking about walking uphill with eighty pounds of fuel when I heard the news about German Leopard 2 tanks going to Ukraine. The BBC news report was talking about NATO training crews for the tank. Ukraine will also be training soldiers to fix, to resupply fuel and ammo and follow close behind the tanks with everything that a 60-ton, 1,500-horsepower tracked vehicle consumes.
A Leopard 2 can fire on the move at up to 50 mph with its advanced electronic sights and gun stabilization computers. It can fire a dozen cannon rounds per minute. But a Leopard only carries 42 120mm cannon rounds. At a dozen rounds per minute, it would be out of ammo in four minutes. To reload, the tank has to leave the battle area and go back a supply depot.
At the supply point, each round is handed from a platform beside the tank or up from the ground. Each round is then handed through the loader's hatch and stowed in racks in the turret and hull of the tank. Even the fastest crew will take ten minutes or more to stow 42 rounds inside the tank.
In a battle, a single tank can burn more than one hundred gallons of fuel, more than one hundred rounds of cannon ammunition and upwards of 5,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition.
A battalion of 50 tanks and fifty more support vehicles burns more than 100 gallons per mile of fuel. In a sustained attack it will fire 5,000 rounds of cannon ammo and a half-million rounds of machine gun ammo. If the attack covers 20 miles, the battalion will consume upwards of 100 tons of ammo and fuel in a day. All that fuel and ammo has to follow the tanks to the edge of the battle.
Logistics win wars, said every general from Napoleon to now. The Russians have shown themselves to be terrible at logistical support. With these new tanks, Ukraine will get another chance to show how much better they are than the Russians, both fighting with the tanks and keeping the hungry beasts supplied.
Saturday, December 3, 2022
The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy Book 42 of 2022
The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah. Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel. One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.
I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, But this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal. At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.
Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter. Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches. Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate. He seems to have succeeded. I did not. Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism.
Which brings up another aspect of Judaism which Levy makes so simple and beautiful. We Jews, at our best, are committed to Justice, to repairing the world.
Until this year, I was ambivalent about Ukraine as was Levy. From the beginning of the war, I have volunteered for Ukraine, sometimes three or four days a week making combat medical kits. Levy made a documentary backing the fight to keep Ukraine free.
When the Russians invaded, Ukraine needed all free people to rally to her defense. Whatever problems I had with Ukraine before February 24 are insignificant compared to the unjust attack on an innocent country.
Glory to Ukraine.
The book is a celebration of Jewish history and life and is beautifully written.
First 41 Books of 2022:
C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis
Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard
The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil
Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin
Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz
Essential Elements by Matt Tweed
Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud
The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Cochrane by David Cordingly
QED by Richard Feynman
Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis
Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis
The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer
The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton
If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut
The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss.
Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins
Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
First Principles by Thomas Ricks
Political Tribes by Amy Chua
Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson
1776 by David McCullough
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche
Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Ukraine is My Country--Zelenskyy Showed Me Why
Wednesday, August 24, 2022
Today is Ukraine Independence Day, and Six Months Since the Start of the Russian Invasion
Today is the 31st anniversary of Ukraine's Independence, the day it broke free of the Soviet Union and became an independent nation.
Sadly, it is also the 6-month anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine--a vile and illegal and unprovoked attack. Russia was one of the countries, along with the U.S. and the U.K. who guaranteed Ukraine's national borders and security in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal. The agreement was the Budapest Memorandum, singed in 1994.
Since 2014, Russia has broken its word, broken the agreement, and should not just be sanctioned but be defeated by the U.S., the U.K. and the United Nations. The U.N. charter provides for taking action against member countries who invade other countries.
I know the dangers of escalation, but I also know the dangers of allowing a ruthless bully like Vladimir Putin to act with impunity.
The countries who guaranteed Ukraine's borders should join the fight and smash Russian forces in Ukraine and sink Russia's Black Sea fleet: all of it.
I will continue to do what I can as a volunteer, but my hope for Ukraine is full restoration of its territory along with utter and ignominious defeat for Russia.
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Ukrainian Family in a German Monastery
When Cliff and I returned to Darmstadt from Denmark we met a family of refugees from Ukraine who are staying in a guesthouse at the monastery. Sergey and Maria and their seven children between six months and thirteen years old are living in a house at the edge of the property.
While we drank coffee together on the patio, the seven kids popped in and out of the house. The oldest girl brought the baby out to see mom, then the oldest boy scooped the baby up and disappeared into the house.
Sergey is Ukrainian, from Kyiv. Maria is Russian, from Moscow. Sergey speaks Ukrainian and Russian. Maria speaks Russian, English, and Ukrainian. They marked their 15th wedding anniversary on March 31st with their whole family in a car driving toward the border to seek asylum in the west. Maria and Sergey lived in Sevastopol in Crimea, so they have been in an area of Russian occupation since 2014.
When the Russians invaded, the fighting was not near their home, but missiles fired from Russian ships blasted over their city. Maria talked about trying to tell the kids it would be okay, but after a month, they decided to leave. After a long journey, they made it to Darmstadt and the Land of Kanaan monastery.
Several times over the past five years, I have stayed in the guesthouse where Sergey and Maria and their family are now staying. It was built for several men, usually visiting volunteers. There are several small rooms, a kitchen and a common room and two bathrooms with showers. It was always so quiet. It was funny and delightful to see kids zooming in and out, running and riding bikes.
I am very glad to see another family safe from the war Russia inflicted on Ukraine and the democratic world.
Friday, June 10, 2022
Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family
I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937. The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner."
The sign on fence (above) says
The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.
Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door. She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha. She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.
He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.
Saturday, May 21, 2022
Flying to Kyiv from New York on February 24--The Flight Ended in Warsaw
Today at #RazomforUkriane, I worked with a Nikita. He is a 36-year-old project manager for a U.S.-based utility company. As we assembled IFAKs (Individual First Aid Kits) he told me that on February 24 (The day the Russian Army invaded Ukraine) he was on a flight from New York to Kyiv. As the plane neared Ukraine it was diverted and landed in Warsaw.
"I was going to Kiev on Feb 24 to see Louis CK stand up concert which was supposed to be on February 25," he said. "I also do stand up comedy when I get a chance in my personal life and since war started we had a charity concert to raise funds which we sent to Ukraine." He has I also donated funds directly to people I know in Ukraine and other organizations.
Nikita spent the next week in Poland helping the refugees who began crossing the border into Poland within hours of the start of the war. At one point he rented a car and drove refugees from the border to where they knew someone or wherever they wanted to go. He helped with food and supplies, then returned to America and his job.
He is 36 years old. He emigrated to America from the Russian Federation in 2000 with his family when he was 14. "I am from Russia, but my heart is with Ukraine," he said. "I have lots of friends in Ukraine and I love that country with all my heart and I don't support Russia in any way and I am 100% with the Ukraine."
Nikita makes Instagram videos in English and in Russian under the name: forced2disagree.
"The videos are titled "Less is More" and are they are about people around the world," he said. "I tell a short story about a person that I personally met or know. And I can't wait to go to Ukraine and document many stories there and help in other ways as well."
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Talking Musicals, Radio, War Movies and Tanks at #RazomforUkraine
I arrived late for my shift at Razom today. PA Route 222 stopped for miles outside of Ephrata. I slithered off the highway in the breakdown lane and got to the PA Turnpike by a half-dozen back roads I know.
Several of us will be back tomorrow. Part of a larger crew. The biggest crew is always on Saturday.
Monday, May 9, 2022
Making Jokes While Packing Medical Supplies for Ukraine
I laughed and said I was there enough to know where everything is. Which led to a the question, "What superpower would you want? Pick one."
We then got into a discussion of the social downside of having super powers: other people get envious; you lose friends; your family starts to wonder why you are so special....
On Friday at the end of the day we were setting up three lines for assembling IFAKs. As we lined up the supplies and boxes on the pallets, we started talking about the lines competing about who is fastest. I was telling one of the guys that if this were the Army, the lines would definitely compete with each other and start insulting each other--saying their line was the best. We started making up things the lines would say to each other.
On Saturday, one of the volunteers who I have worked with for weeks saw me opening boxes of cloth tape and asked if I was qualified for that job. I told him that in the 1970s when the Army first got Photocopiers, I had to attend a three-hour class to be a qualified photocopier operator. Once I had done that, I was definitely qualified to open rolls of tape.
Each day I volunteer, I leave the warehouse tired and happy to be part of doing to help Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invaders. And most days, I am smiling about how much fun it is to be part of a team with a mission doing good.
Advocating for Ukraine in Washington DC, Part 1
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