War, All of the Time
Battle in Berlin, houses of cards, and forgotten defeats in the racket of war
Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: war in all its forms.
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Ingredient List
🎵 : Been listening to the new MJ Lenderman album, which is a good mix of all things Magnolia Electric Company, Steven Malkmus, and Pinegrove.
Also, just because this happened: On the flight into Germany last week, I was listening to a playlist with random songs on it, one that I’ve listened to way too many times because it’s the only downloaded playlist I have that can be played in airplane mode. But at the moment we touched down, Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know The End” came on, and the first line from that song is: “Somewhere in Germany but I can’t place it.” So simple, but those are some of my favorite moments in life, the same as pulling into a driveway at the moment a great song ends.
And now, onto dinner service.
Course 1
A Word of Gratitude: German Soft Pretzels
As some of you probably know, this past weekend I ran the Berlin Marathon as part of a work trip with Believe in the Run, which was also why I missed last week’s newsletter drop. My sincerest apologies. It was a very busy week full of events with a couple Adidas shoe launches and a group run with a couple hundred friends from all over the world.
Some of you may be reading this now, and I have to say, thank you. It never ceases to blow my mind when I meet people who either listen to our podcast or watch our YouTube reviews, and then tell us they’re from Bahrain or Indonesia or Ireland or Argentina or Australia (all from this trip alone).
Same with this Substack. I know there’s people from all over the world who read this, and if that’s you, just know I appreciate you. With so many things vying for our attention and time, the fact that you would carve out a notch to hold these words each week means so much to me.
In terms of the Berlin Marathon, it was my fourth marathon major (out of six), and it was the perfect day in terms of weather. It also turned out to be the perfect day in terms of running, as I executed the perfect race, the one I had envisioned over the past three months of training.
It’s hard to describe that feeling, but I try my best to do it in a piece I wrote for The Drop, the weekly email for Believe in the Run. I think it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written about running and I found that it’s so much more than running.
I hope you’ll read that here.
Anyway, I finished the race strong and healthy and feeling good. It turns out I’m still getting better.
And for that, I am grateful.
Course 2
Appetizer: War Rations
Lately, my kids have been very into the card game War. You most likely know how to play this game, as it is the easiest card game to master since it requires zero skill. Helen Keller could beat Neil DeGrasse Tyson in this game, sans Braille cards, assuming he were honest and not a highly competitive astrophysicist looking for some card game clout. Imagine though, if he did beat her through deception– what a scandal.
As simple as the game is, there is a reason it’s so fun to play– it’s the idea that no matter how far you’re down, as long as you have an ace in your hand, or the possibility of procuring an ace through the act of war– you have not lost.
Speaking of aces, I’d like to give a quick shout-out here to whatever cardmaker threw Peanuts characters on the deck of cards that we own, with Snoopy sitting on his red doghouse, fully decked out in his flying ace getup, on– you guessed it– the ace card. In the same way, I have a deck of Asics playing cards and the ace card is just an “Ace”-ics logo. Clever. AC/DC, you need to jump on this highway to hell and cash in on your name.
The idea of the almighty comeback is what drives the game, the thing that counterbalances the sheer stupidity and simplicity of counting “1-2-3, war” over and over again. We will do this for hours, our lizard brains looking for that quick dopamine hit in the hope that we will hit a tie, which will then lead to a war, the short suspense of “what-if” superseding all other life goals at the moment.
In the case of kids, who have no real stakes in anything reality based, the act of losing a war (especially one stocked with aces or– god forbid– a joker) elicits the loudest groans and competitive shouting matches that you’ve ever heard since earlier that morning when you asked them to practice their piano for ten minutes. If you listen real hard, on days with clear blue skies, you can hear the same sounds coming from the situation room inside of the White House.
It would be good if those adults were reminded from time to time that defeat comes when you least expect it, that an arbitrary event in a random deck of cards can remove kings and queens from their positions of power while the deuces and treys are just collateral damage. That all of this we built is an illusion of strength, a house of cards that can turn to dust on a coin flip. And in that moment, not even Snoopy can save you.
Such is the nature of war.
Course 3
The Main: Belgian Waffle with Berries and Cream
In a few months, my oldest son will be halfway to military age, to voting, to buying a pack of cigarettes. The age when Uncle Sam could send him a letter and say “we need you,” throw an M4 Carbine in his hands, and send him into some foreign land to defeat the latest pet project of the United States government.
With all the saber-rattling going on in the world right now, it’s hard for me not to think about it.
I thought about it even more this past week when I was flying into Germany for the Berlin Marathon, a place with a history that still feels heavy, as if a lead blanket remained over its chest, always ready for an X-ray to show the bones inside. Throw a rock in any direction and you will hit a house of Nazi horrors, ride a bike west or east in Berlin and you will inevitably run into the remnants of a wall that kept mothers and children apart for half a lifetime.
As I sat in my Delta Airlines seat sipping my Coke Zero and listening to Phoebe Bridgers on my Bose headphones, I thought about how my own grandfather came into this country for the first time too, in such different circumstances.
He was 26 when his feet touched German soil as part of the 103rd Medical Battalion in the U.S. Army. Just a few months earlier, they had landed in Normandy after the initial invasion, before making their way through France. His infantry division was the first in Paris after its liberation, and he walked down the Champs-Élysées in a showy military parade; almost 80 years to the day, I would stand in the same spot during the Paris Olympic Games, a disparity of fortune that is not lost on me.
The war was shifting, Hitler was being pushed back, but it was not over. Eventually my grandfather made his way to the border of Germany where his division was called in as a replacement in the Battle of Hürtgen forest. In terms of notoriety, it is often overshadowed by the Battle of the Bulge, but in terms of tragedy, it was one of the worst in U.S. military history. For that reason, it’s often forgotten, as victors write their own narrative.
The second-longest battle ever fought by the U.S. Army, it was a botched military offensive by all accounts and a statistical defeat, as round after round of soldiers were sent into the trench warfare in the dense forests of West Germany. Often referred to as a “meat grinder,” some soldiers who fought both on D-Day and in Hürtgen described it as a bloodier battle than Omaha Beach. The defeat was so bad that most military personnel refused to even acknowledge it after the war, allowing it to slip out of the mainstream narrative, a whole chapter of forgotten soldiers who died for nothing. Upper estimates put the number of dead and injured at 55,000 on the American side, and 28,000 on the German side, with no ground gained on either end. On that German side, the pool of soldiers was a mix of any living thing the Germans had left. It was 1945 and Hitler was running out of resources. As such, he called upon anything that had functioning limbs to fight against the Allied Forces. That meant old men. And young boys.
Some of those boys were undoubtedly part of the Hitler Youth, the youth organization of the Nazi Party that was a de facto propaganda program aimed at brainwashing and molding young boys into becoming fanatical nationalists. In short, the perfect soldier. As the war drew to a close, Hitler became desperate, sending kids on actual suicide missions, especially against the Soviets who rolled over them with zero empathy. If the children refused to go to war, they would be executed.
And so, boys fought boys on the front lines of battle, bodies traded back and forth until one side ran out. The horrors they endured can almost not be fathomed today, just two generations removed. Mortars and tree bursts, soil awash in blood, mired in wet trenches in the bitter cold of winter.
As a medic with one Silver Star, I can’t imagine what my own grandfather saw. I never had the chance to ask him, as he died when I was only six years old, succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver after decades of hard drinking. He gave me my first haircut in the barbershop that he ran out the basement of his house; I was a little boy not much younger than the older boys who he kept looking good before they went out to the slaughter.
This past week, I slept in a bed in a posh hotel that was in the same building once used as the national headquarters for the Hitler Youth, a building that was once a Jewish department store even before that. I slept peacefully knowing that the biggest task ahead of me was to run a marathon in the streets of Berlin. The most frightening thing in my life, at that moment, was forgetting to set my alarm for race morning. My alarm went off, of course, and at 7 a.m. on the dot a kind German woman delivered yogurt and granola and a waffle with berries and cream to my door.
I’ve been so lucky that my boyhood and adulthood was never marred by the call of duty. I eternally respect those that have volunteered their lives for that call, but I hope the day comes where nobody has to answer it, for any side.
Because I don’t want my boys begging “why” to me or God or their friends in some dark alley or trench or battleship on the other side of the globe. I don’t want that for anyone’s boys, whether German, American, Russian, Ukrainian, Gazan, or Israeli. I fear the day when my boys, or anyone’s boys, could be called to war, a decision made not by them or me, but by narcissistic ideologues in positions of power. I fear that the two decades I spent nurturing and tending to a beautiful flower could be droned to bits by some guy sitting behind a computer in a nondescript strip mall.
I don’t know how I could ever come back from that, how anyone could.
I’m going to end by sharing a long excerpt from “War is a Racket,” a speech and a short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. The book was written almost 100 years ago, and yet every word of it rings true and accurate today. After reading it, you will realize that nothing has changed, human nature remains, and the blood of warmongering is endless and eternal.
But this part sticks with me and haunts me and I think about it all the time, and think you should too. Especially as we enter an election season. If you’d like to read the full speech, you can do so here.
“Now—you MOTHERS, particularly: The only way you can resist all this war hysteria and beating tomtoms is by hanging onto the love you bear your boys. When you listen to some well-worded, well-delivered war speech, just remember that it’s nothing but Sound. It’s your boy that matters. And no amount of sound can make up to you for the loss of your boy.
After you’ve heard one of these speeches and your blood is all hot and you want to go and hit someone like Hitler—go upstairs where your boy is asleep. Go into his bedroom. You’ll find him lying there, pillows all messed up, covers all tangled, sleeping away so hard. Look at him. Put your hand on that spot at the back of his neck, the place you used to love to kiss when he was a baby. Just stroke it a little. You won’t wake him up, he knows it’s you. Just look at this strong, fine, young body—because only the BEST boys are chosen for war. Look at this splendid young creature who’s part of yourself. You brought him into the world. You cared for him. That boy relies on you. You taught him to do that, didn’t you?
Now I ask you: Are you going to run out on him? Are you going to let someone beat a drum or blow a bugle and make him chase after it and be killed or crippled on a foreign land? Are the Mothers of America ashamed to make this fight to stay out of this European War on the ground of their love for their sons—for what better ground could there be?
Have you ever been in one of those huge Veterans Hospitals it has been necessary to build to take care of the thousands of helpless and maimed cripples still with us from the last war? If you have, you will not need a reminder of what war can do to your boy, how it can render his life useless and broken at twenty, and yet keep him cruelly alive for the whole span of it. If you have not, I advise you to go and see one of them, for nothing could bring home to you more clearly or tragically the fact that in the last analysis it is your boy who is going to pay the piper.
Few there are who come back entirely unscathed, and some come back in such a way that you would find yourself praying for their release from pain. Those withered, elderly, spiritless men who lie and sit so patiently in their wards day after day in those hospitals, waiting for the end, as they have waited since they got there twenty years ago, were the flower of our boys in their time. It is not age that has brought them to this pass, for their average age is a little over forty, it is WAR.
Like the Unknown Soldier who was one of them, they too had mothers and fathers who felt toward them as you do about your boy. Thank God, this is a democracy, and by your voice and by your vote you can save your boy. You are the bosses of this country—you mothers, you fathers. And that brings up another point: If you let this country go into a European war, you will lose this democracy, don’t forget that. As you stand by your boy in bed, he is safe, but here is another picture. It may help you to build up resistance against all this propaganda which will almost drown you.
Somewhere in a muddy trench, thousands of miles away from you and your home, your boy, the same one that is sleeping so sweetly and safely in his bed with you on his side, is waiting to “go over the top.” Just before dawn. Drizzling rain. Dark and dismal. Face caked with mud and tears. So homesick and longing for you and home. Thinks of you on your knees praying for him. He is frightened to death, but still more scared the boy next to him will discover his terror. That’s your boy. Stomach as big as an egg. I know, I’ve had that sensation many times.
Do you want him to be the next Unknown Soldier? The Unknown Soldier had a mother, you know, and a father. He didn’t just appear out of the air. Do you want your boy, tangled in the barbed wire, or struggling for a last gasp of breath in a stinking trench somewhere abroad, do you want him to cry out: “Mother, Father, why did you let them do it?”
Think it over, my dear fellow Americans. Can’t we be satisfied with defending our own homes, our own women, our own children? Right here in America? There are only two reasons why you should ever be asked to give your youngsters. One is defense of our homes. The other is the defense of our Bill of Rights and particularly the right to worship God as we see fit. Every other reason advanced for the murder of young men is a racket, pure and simple.”
Course 4
Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week
As you probably read, the past two weeks have mostly been about traveling to and from Germany for the Berlin Marathon. That was my first time in Germany, and while I didn’t get to explore as much as I’d like to since I was trying to keep it light and easy before the race, it was still enough to see some cool things and get the vibe of the place.
Running through a city is always a great way to see things you’d otherwise miss, so we had a couple runs with no direction or route that allowed us to go behind the scenes. Of course, there was the actual marathon which mostly was just me looking at my feet, hoping not to trip and fall.
Overall, it was an incredibly memorable and special experience.
Then we came home and I headed out with the family to the first Orioles playoff game which was just an absolute travesty of epic proportions. They lost that game 1-0 and the next one 2-1, a tortuous elimination that placed a tombstone on a slowly dying last half of the season. I was almost glad for it to be over. Here’s hoping to a better year in 2025.
As for the rest of this week, I’ve just enjoyed not running for a little bit. But I will be back in Chicago on Sunday to run the Chicago Marathon, where I’ll be leading a group of almost 80 runners in trying to get them under the 4-hour marathon mark. Let’s get trashy.
Other things I’ve written or edited this past week:
I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.
I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this past week’s episode here, where we give a full recap of the Berlin Marathon.
Postcards for Paids
I’ve been creating and sending postcards to my paid subscribers, made from vintage postcards with custom artwork courtesy of the weed packaging I find on the ground in Baltimore. It’s been a busy last couple weeks so I’m a little behind on the next batch, but I promise they will be coming once things settle down! I think this one went to John in Ohio, so thanks for your support, dude!
END OF MENU
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.
Robbe - you're a great writer, but this might be the most touching thing you've written. At least that I've read. Especially about your boys, and everyone's boys. I too have the utmost respect for those veterans who gave so much so that we can sit on our couches and not worry about our own freedom. We are indeed lucky. I have 2 grandfathers that served in WW2 and I'm lucky enough to still have one of them still around. Please keep up the great writing, I'm a huge fan and I appreciate you sharing with us.
Phenomenal edition, Robbe. Really loved this one. The Butler speech made me want to hug my boys. Anytime my love for running collides with my love for war history, a feat that, to the best of my knowledge, has only previously happened in the book "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand, I get sucked in for the whole ride.