Book Review: Ayn Rand Explained (2013) by Merrill/Enright

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This book was originally written by the late Ronald E. Merrill under the title The Ideas of Ayn Rand (1991).  In 2013 Marsha Familaro Enright revised and updated it under the present title. 

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Rand was one of my earliest philosophical teachers, waking me up to the awareness of rigorous rationality as an all-important human virtue and to a new respect for science (for this poetic mind).  I had already been a radical individualist, contemptuous of coercion against any peaceful pursuits of happiness, and from early on I have been an extreme advocate of equal freedom for all, as well as a lover of heroic esthetics (e.g., Zorro, Robin Hood, etc.), so those parts of me were only reinforced by her similar tastes and her writings. 

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I still am fond of reading about Rand’s life and the cultural movement created in her trail.  Since I have read most of her primary published works, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a lot of the secondary literature of Objectivism and its history, her heritage is one of my main specialties on both philosophical systems and in the study of mass movements. 

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Objectivism has had its cultic, true believer aspects right from the start – but that contradicts the very heart of ‘objectivism’ as a standard of sovereign individual judgment and intellectual honesty, doesn’t it?  Rand herself is not above criticism here, as she helped create that culture of ideological ‘conformity’ sometimes seen within this movement of ‘individualists’.  Merrill/Enright sees this and doesn’t brush it aside, but they instead balance their portrait of praise and blame rather well – rather ‘objectively’, I think.  No one will agree with everything they say – and I certainly don’t – but the book is a good read for anyone curious about Rand or already knowledgeable about her ideas. 

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Spoiler Alert!  Merrill/Enright gives away important plot details from Rand’s fiction, so if you haven’t already read her major fiction you might put reading this book on hold until you do. 

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The book’s chapters are:  The Controversial Ayn Rand; Who Was Ayn Rand?; Ayn Rand in Person; The Young Nietzschean; Scourge of the Second-Handers; The Book that Changed the World; Rand the Philosopher; Rand’s Politics; and Ayn Rand’s Revolution. 

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I stalled out at ‘Rand the Philosopher’.  I had already read and digested so much of this in my youth – and, since technical philosophical arguments and logical entanglements are not my favorite part of the discipline, they often bore me to death.  (Yet the chapter is very well done.)  I got distracted and read other things before returning to the book.  I must read this book again to savor the parts I liked most and the information that I’d never heard before.  I may revise parts of this review later. 

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-Zenwind.

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Book Review: Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (3rd century AD)

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I just finished reading a book that I started browsing randomly over 40 years ago.  Diogenes Laertius lived in the early 3^rd century AD and wrote in Greek, drawing his biographies of the Greek philosophers from an immense number of sources available to him but of which a vast amount are no longer extant.  He is one of the few sources we have about many of these thinkers. 

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Reading Diogenes Laertius, I get the sense of the huge irreplaceable loss of most of the writings of the ancient Greeks.  He catalogues extensive lists of the books that they wrote and that we will never see, and he also quotes or makes reference to numerous other (lost) ancient biographies of these philosophers.  But what really knocked me over was that, while we see him as a rare ancient voice from the distant ages, he looked at many of his own biographical subjects as ancients, with many of their works lost to his own times!  Apparently, even parts of this very book of Diogenes Laertius are lost, as evidence suggests that he wrote about many more thinkers not included in the received book.  How fragile the transmission of human knowledge is. 

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Diogenes Laertius may not have been the greatest biographer or philosopher.  He often seems gossipy and a recorder of trivialities.  He also provides little verses of his own about several of these thinkers, often dealing with their tragic-comic moments of death.  These ditties are a bit trite, but they reinforce in me the sense that he wrote as much for entertainment as for philosophic enlightenment.

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But I really like his treatment of the philosopher’s life in its full biographical sweep, recording them as mortal men, through their lives and including their troubles, illnesses, and last days.  He gives us the texts of many of the wills and letters of the old philosophers. He provides three long important letters of Epicurus, of which the third is my favorite.  I often see – especially in his accounts of the Epicurean predecessors and then Epicurus and his later school, and of the Stoics, the Cynics, and Skeptics – a familiar primacy of achieving “tranquility” that reminds me of the Buddha’s early teachings. 

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Montaigne (1533-1592) said it well for me:  “I am very sorry we have not a dozen Diogenes Laertius, or that he was not further extended; for I am equally curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the world, as to know the diversities of their doctrines and opinions” (Essays, book X, “On Books”). 

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I read this work in a textually corrupted eBook version of the 1853 translation by Charles Duke Yonge.  I’m not sure where I downloaded it from, but I will look for another eBook version that is formatted better for my Kindle. 

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I will look for the classic 1925 translation by Robert Drew Hicks (Loeb Classical Library, with the slightly shorter title, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers), originally in a two-volume bound edition (with English and Greek texts), which is said to be now in the public domain.   I will look for the Hicks version because it was one of my favorite books to browse in the old Warren Public Library when I was a young crazed Dionysian recently dumped from war into civilian life.  It eased my sorry soul. 

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-Zenwind.

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Barbara Branden, R.I.P. (1929-2013)

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I never met Barbara Branden face to face, but I was an occasional online acquaintance and correspondent of hers some years ago on Objectivist e-list discussion groups first hosted by Jimmy Wales (later of Wikipedia fame).  Barbara was always gracious and generous, sometimes answering my questions off-list.  She died 11 December 2013 at age 84. 

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I first encountered the writings of Barbara Branden and her then-husband, Nathaniel Branden, in the late 1960s as colleagues of the great novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982).  I discovered the world of Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism as a 17-year-old, and it was a clarion call for me to knock off my kid shit and get some integrity.  It is a philosophy advocating rationality, ruthless intellectual honesty, passionate vision, individualism, liberty, and love of life. 

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Rand was the solid star of Objectivism, and Barbara and Nathaniel were the major planets in her orbit.  Rand’s work is on record; but Barbara’s was not as well known to many outside the movement.  Barbara wrote Who Is Ayn Rand (1962), the biographical lead essay in the volume by that name.  This was greatly enlarged upon later in her fine biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986). 

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When I was in Vietnam in 1969, I asked my mother to send me books.  I specifically asked for Randian periodicals, and she ordered and sent to me back copies of The Objectivist Newsletter and its successor The Objectivist.  In these back issues I read many of Barbara’s essays, movie and book reviews, and other writings on philosophy and culture along with those of Rand and others. They recommended other philosophers' books, and thus started my wider philosophical education. 

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Barbara was associated closely with Rand from 1950 until 1968, the year she (and Nathaniel) was disassociated completely from Rand due to (as Nietzsche would say) “human, all too human” personal complications, natural in retrospect.  Philosophically, they were all in the same camp; they were all just a bit high-strung.  Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism would never have grown into such a well-articulated movement without the Brandens. 

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At the dawn of the 1970s, the newly born American libertarian movement was influenced as much by Rand as anyone else, and the Brandens were in there personally on its early development.  Libertarians that I know from online contact and who knew Barbara for many years testify as to what a fine lady and intellectual she was. 

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I first ran into Barbara online around 1998 or so on Jimmy Wales’s e-list, “Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy,” or its successor Objectivist e-lists that he hosted on his servers and that were moderated and run by his friends.  We all had questions about the early days of the philosophy’s development, and Barbara was the one with the details and grand overview.  It was wonderful to have her in the forum. 

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On these online forums I once defended Barbara from an extremely crazy series of attacks from a weird female who called herself an Objectivist and who ranted and raved against men, against certain kinds of libertarians, and against Jews (and Barbara, like Rand, was of Jewish lineage).  This same bitch has often appeared and disappeared in Objectivist circles with equal nuttiness.  She ranted against male circumcision and talked about feminist street fighters kicking the shit out of men – or some such raving.  She was entertaining and irritating at the same time, but her savaging and idiotic insults of everyone on the list got tiring.  And when she focused personal attacks on Barbara, on her writing, and on her Jewish lineage, I got righteously pissed off.  I’m ugly when I’m angry.  I have a mean streak you don't want to see. 

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This was in winter of 2001 or 2002, and it was a Saturday afternoon.  My back was killing me from shoveling snow, so I opened a bottle of whisky and did my internet browsing between schoolwork tasks.  Throughout the day I worked off and on writing a post to answer that obnoxious bitch and to defend Barbara.  As the day went on (and the bottle got emptier) I fashioned a reply, editing, re-editing, and cutting it down to two short paragraphs of sheer poetic rant.  I wish I still had a copy of that completed post, because it was one of the best I’ve ever written – a gem:  rude, crude, mean, sarcastic, and with a nasty personal aim, straight for the jugular. 

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All I can remember about the gist of my rant was that it was a mocking pseudo-veneration of the bitch, ending with something like:  “Oh, Bitch! Enlighten us as we kneel at thy feet, oh, thou dominatrix goddess!  Oh!  Favor us with lashes from thy whip!”  (Or something close to that, but much, much cruder.)  I immediately got a private email from Jimmy, who complimented me with:  “LOL.  I haven’t seen a Grade-A rant like that in years!”  I became a bit of a hero on the list for mocking the bitch so savagely.  She became a laughingstock and soon faded away.  Good riddance. 

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So my main acquaintance with Barbara Branden was to defend her from a bully by my own crude, inebriated online rant.  I’m selfish about my friends.  She never mentioned that rant of mine, but she was always exceptionally friendly to me in both on- and off-list conversations from then on.  I believe she appreciated it even though it wasn’t in her style. 

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Barbara kept tabs on many of us, even on those like me who were marginal in her life.  I was surprised and very touched when I received a personal email from her in 2006.  It was immediately after the Thai military overthrew the government here in a coup, with tanks on the streets, and front-page headlines throughout the world.  She remembered that I had moved here and she asked me with urgent concern if I was okay.  That is the way I will remember her – thoughtful, humane, and loyal. 

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Many of us were surprised at her sudden passing.  She had just sent out (on November 30) a mass email to those on her huge contacts list, announcing that her book The Passion of Ayn Rand was now available as an eBook.  As a long-time dedicated Kindle user, she was excited, happy, and proud. 

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Rest in Peace, Barbara.  You helped inspire a generation. 

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-Zenwind.

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Halloween Readings of Horror Classics on Kindle

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I joined another Bangkok meet-up Book group, a new one that I won’t be able to attend much in person.  But the October book pick was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde.  I downloaded it to my Kindle and thoroughly enjoyed it. 

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To stay in the holiday spirit of Halloween and all things ghastly, I immediately downloaded and read Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  Wonderful! 

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Next I downloaded that masterpiece, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker.  It was longer than I remembered, and I’m now sure that I had never finished reading the entire book all those decades ago.  It is definitely a classic of horror that I couldn’t put down. 

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One beautiful thing about the Kindle is that it is well suited for older books that are out of copyright, hence they are free.  Another thing is that Kindle has a dictionary where you can highlight a word and a definition pops up -- this being especially helpful when reading old books with unfamiliar archaic English usages, as in the three books above from the 19th Century.  

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-Zenwind.

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The Sadist Club: A Tale of Macabre Youth

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This is a Halloween Horror entry.  In about the year 1963 or so, four of us in Seventh Grade and one in Ninth Grade formed The Sadist Club.  It was meant to be as diabolically weird as possible.  We were committed to the eerie.  We had a secret meeting place (crawling up a tree and over an old roof, through a chink in a small boarded-up window into the second floor of an unused farm building, my father’s “Double Decker” building).  We had a collection of skulls and skeletons of various animals, usually woodchucks, turtles, mice, etc. 

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We had a secret oath (“Poe’s Honor,” as in Edgar Allan Poe, poet of the macabre and our main saint).  Our sacraments were watching the Friday Fright Night horror movie double feature on TV at 11:30pm, with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and the rest of the Classics of Horror.  We tried to be ghastly. 

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We were:  Scott F., Bob D., Greg D., Ron D. (the Ninth Grader), and me. 

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How do 13-year-olds get so weird?  Well, our Seventh Grade Reading class teacher retired two weeks into the term, and we got a great substitute teacher for the remainder of the year:  Mr. Johnston.  Incredible luck on our part, for he created his own strange curriculum. 

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Mr. Johnston was a romantic eccentric who would never have lasted as a teacher in mid-20^th century America.  He told us that this gig was just a temporary stepping stone until he could move to Ireland and marry his Irish fiancée, his sweetheart.  He played records for us of The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Irish folk music at full tilt!  Before he played such songs of theirs as “The Rising of the Moon,” he would explain the historical tradition behind the revolutionary lyrics.  Wow!   I am getting goose pimples and my hairs are standing on end just thinking about it now!  Powerful stuff. 

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He also played record selections such as the Berlioz Symphony Fantastique, the March to the Gallows theme, where the hero is ascending the scaffold of the guillotine.  He prepped us for it so that we would hear the part where the severed head rolls.  Are you getting the picture?  This teacher was ultra-weird and a tremendous gift to us. 

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Mr. Johnston told us about the Marquis de Sade, although I still don’t see how that fit into a Seventh Grade Reading curriculum!  We never read de Sade, but we were told stories about him.  No sexual themes were mentioned to our young ears, but we were told mainly that the word “sadism,” as a term partially meaning cruelty, was named after the Marquis.  Tales of torture fit into our monster movie mindsets, so we derived the name of The Sadist Club from this.  We were aspiring heretics. 

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As it was Reading class, we read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe.  I don’t remember much of the other readings in that year of class, but I’ll never forget Poe.  As we went through the stories, Mr. Johnston would explain the gory background and the historical context.  We found that our high school library had over a dozen neglected copies of a very ancient, small, hard-bound edition of Poe’s Poems, most probably from a literature class so long ago that the teacher and many of the students were long gone to their graves.  Bob D. presented to me copy number 13, inscribed, “From the Members of the Club.”  It was definitely not legitimately checked out, and I still have it in my Stateside book collection. 

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I think that The Sadist Club faded out as we started to be interested in girlfriends and Rock n Roll.  But it was a sick and glorious chapter of our youth.  Essential education.  I still thrill when contemplating the Horror Classics. 

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-Zenwind.

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Two Book Reviews: The Aeneid by Virgil, and Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin

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I’ve always been a bit ashamed to admit that I never finished reading (in English translation) Virgil’s classic epic, The Aeneid -- until reading Ursula Le Guin admit that she didn’t read it until she was in her seventies.  (But I will say this for her:  she read it in Latin.)  I just couldn’t finish it, because I cannot take the strained attempts of many translators to make it rhyme.  I finally found a translation that was readable for me, yet well-metered, the 2002 one by Michael Oakley, and I highly recommend it. 

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It was actually Ursula Le Guin that led me to read Virgil again, as she had written a novel about Lavinia, the last wife of Aeneas, and a character who Virgil only mentioned a few times and with no speaking parts.  I enjoy reading Le Guin’ works, and I knew that to read this novel, Lavinia (2008), I would first have to absorb myself fully in The Aeneid.  Oakley’s translation has a very fine Glossary and Notes.  The day I finished reading Virgil, I started right in on Le Guin’s book.  I enjoyed them both. 

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Lavinia is much like Le Guin’s other light fantasy works.  Le Guin is very true to Virgil’s epic and also to his personal history.  Virgil left his epic barely finished and not revised at the time of his death, and this is relevant to Lavinia’s story. The more that Virgil's epic, and his personal history, is fresh in your memory, the more you will appreciate so many of the little details of Le Guin's story.  

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One big difference from Virgil was that Le Guin’s Lavinia, being an early Latin, has no concept of what we call the “Greco-Roman” gods, with all of their bickering, back-biting, and petty intrigues – which are the driving forces behind Homer's and Virgil’s epics; and those were the gods that, traditionally, Aeneas had only just brought with him from Troy’s ruins.  They were completely absent from this story – much to my relief, as Juno et al are just plain tiring.  

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The mysticism of Lavinia, her father, Latinus, and their people is an older pastoral one, more about the deep forests and the silent sacred spots found there.  My kind of places.  Ursula Le Guin re-creates those places for us. 

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-Zenwind.

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Atheist in a Foxhole

This is my experience as a teenage Marine who was totally convinced that he would die in combat before the night was over while alone in a dark, wet foxhole and contemplating whether God(s) existed or not.  Late 1969, Hill 55 area, Quang Nam Province, Republic of Viet Nam. 

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A common allegation amongst god-fearing folks often reads like this:  “There are no atheists in the foxholes” – implying that the experience of fear when coming immediately close to near-certain death in combat will change all skeptics into true believers.  It implies that those who, in safer situations, may reject supernatural beliefs in deities, in beliefs in Heaven and Hell, and in Judgment Day, etc., will nevertheless change their tune when face to face with the immense looming probability of death, and they will opt for blind faith and plead to a god for deliverance.  Fear will turn them to faith.

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This is probably true for many.  But for me it has never been true, and any of these liars who claim that it is a universal truth where not in the same foxhole with me when such situations actually happened. 

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In combat zones, a sudden ambush (day or night) is electrifying beyond anything imaginable -- often emptying one's bladder and/or bowels -- and at those times questions of theology did not come up (at least to me), simply because you don’t have time to think about them.  I vividly remember one night, earlier in my tour (in the Hill 34 area), being pinned down by enemy automatic fire that came as close as six inches from my head – I still remember a buddy and me hugging the ground helplessly after we were caught by surprise, faces only a foot apart, while watching and hearing enemy tracer rounds whipping over each other’s heads.  At that time, and similar times of sudden danger, it never occurred to me to think about gods. 

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But it was much different when we had a long time to wait for near-certain death, to wait and to think, to endure those long, long stretches of time when the enemy was undoubtedly right there upon us but invisible in the dark and close by in the silence, lusting to kill your sorry soul.  When will they hit us?  When will they overrun us?  How in the hell will we ever get out of this one alive?  Will I ever live to see another dawn?  Times like these – when one had time to think of looming death – were times of despair, but were sometimes also a chance for lucid philosophical reasoning.  There was one night that defines it and sums it all up for me. 

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 We had been constantly attacked every night by enemy assaults, often under their mortar and rocket barrage.  This particular night was a moonless one, dark, windy and raining extremely hard – a “black rain” – with zero visibility.  Several of us were pulled out of our familiar trenches to march over and beyond the hill to reinforce a perimeter on a distant northern ridge.  The terrain was completely unknown to us, rocky and uneven, so we each grasped onto the fighting harness of the man in front of us and marched – tripping and stumbling – on into the blackness.  Eventually we were briefed by a Gunnery Sergeant, who gave us the sobering straight dope:  intelligence said that there was a division of NVA (the tough North Vietnamese Army) in the province, moving under the heavy weather and intent upon overrunning all nearby fire bases.  Gunnies do not get rattled easily, but this one was very concerned. 

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We reinforcements were split up and assigned to various posts.  I was assigned to two Marines on a position on the dark perimeter, and, as I was the one most ignorant of the terrain, they assigned me to man a crawl-hole position (a shallow foxhole bunker) to man the Claymore mine detonators.  The only arms we had were our M-16s and some hand grenades.  (I had no M-79 this night.) 

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The foxhole was a low shallow bunker that one man could crawl into, with very low sandbag walls front, left and right, and a corrugated steel roof with sandbags overhead.  Lying on my belly I could easily look up over the walls.  It was filled up with rainwater and too small for comfort.  In front of my face on the front wall were three Claymore detonators, but I wasn’t sure where the mines were positioned in the wire in front of me.  My two fellow Marines said that they would take up positions left and right of me behind rocks, and that was the last human contact I had.  The rest of the night was one of long solitary darkness – before the shit hit the fan. 

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I lay on my belly in the water of the crawl-hole and waited with zero vision ahead because of the constant black rain.  Then long after midnight it started to happen.  Between gusts of wind I heard unmistakable running foot treads of many men running from my left to my right in front of me – out somewhere invisible beyond 30 meters in front and outside the wire.  I heard many heavy feet on wet earth, heard someone shouting in Vietnamese (as if in urgent commands), and heard the clanking sounds of many alloy metal rifle ammo magazines (AK-47) – heavily laden troops with multiple bandoleers of ammo.  The group that first ran by my front was at least a couple of dozen, a platoon.  Then silence.  And wait. 

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I did not detonate the Claymore mines, nor did any other foxholes along the line, because the enemy was not (to our knowledge) inside our wire yet.  Long-standing orders of the day (from Commander-in-Chief down) were for extreme fire-discipline, i.e., to minimize any actions that would give away our positions.  Do not fire without a definite target, do not give yourself away.  And Claymores have brilliant flashes. 

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Sometime later in that endless night, a second group of NVA troops (another platoon) ran heavily from my left to my right out in front of me with commanders yelling and bandoleers clanking (“ka-chunka-ka-chunka-chunka”).  Then it was black rain darkness, and again silence except for the wind and driving rain.  Where are they?  At what point in our perimeter will they attack?  We were waiting for them to overrun our positions and kill us all.  No target, no knowledge.  Silence.  Terror. 

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Because there was such a long wait time between events, I had time to think fully about the situation.  First, at this position on an isolated ridge, we were spread pathetically thin – and the enemy knew this – and in the black rain darkness they could cut through the wire and infiltrate our perimeter and kill all of us in this sector.  Their concentrated numbers, and our thin spread, put us in a losing position with no way out.  I could not imagine any scenario that would have me living to see dawn.  I would die this night – I accepted that as a complete certainty. 

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It was the long wait time that made it possible for me to be philosophical.  My mind was racing on three levels:  sensory alertness; tactical combat knowledge review; and philosophical thinking.

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On the first level, the sensory level, my eyes and ears were like radar, head moving back and forth trying to pick up sights (near impossible in the black rain) and sounds.  The wind and rain drowned out most sounds, and I felt cut off from all senses except lying alone in a hole filled with cold water.  I was hyper-alert and charged with adrenaline. 

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On the tactical level, I remembered everything taught in Infantry Training.  I fixed my bayonet, a pathetic six-inch thing for the M-16.  I also had a nicely balanced five-inch Pilot Survival Knife (which I had won in a drawing) which I stuck into a timber for quick reach.  I mentally rehearsed all the drills on clearing a jam in an M-16; deploying hand grenades; first-aid to stop bleeding; how to withstand the concussion of close explosions (hands tightly over ears, open mouth); and, most dreadful of all scenarios, hand-to-hand bayonet or knife fighting on slippery ground.  I thought that, although it was certain that I would die before dawn, I was grimly determined that I would fight tooth and nail to survive.  I will not go down without a fight! 

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On the philosophical level, consciousness was more unhurried, relaxed, and controlled, and because of the long silent dark wait after those first sounds of enemy movement, it was very thoroughly thought out. 

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My hybrid Zen/Hinayana Buddhist practice has always been an atheistic one with absolutely no supernatural beliefs such as reincarnation, deities, miracles, prayers, etc.  On this night it integrated my three consciousness levels of the sensory, the tactical, and the philosophical. 

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Philosophically, I am thinking:  I will die this night and never see another dawn.  (Meanwhile eyes and ears are like radar; tactical considerations are constantly available for review.)  Although I am not passively going out without a fight, a rational review of the situation points to my immediate death.  My life will end.  This is when people are said to analyze their beliefs about death. 

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What happens to a human when they die?  Is their conscious self (their “soul,” mind, esprit, or geist) extinguished, annihilated?  Or is it “reborn” somehow, surviving death in some mystical way such as “resurrection” or “reincarnation”?  Is theism true?  Are there gods?  Is there a Last Judgment?  Will I be sent to be tortured in Hell forever because I do not believe in a God or gods?  (I had been an atheist, completely lacking any belief in gods, since I was 17.)  This seemed like a good time to review these issues, and adrenaline was making me wide awake. 

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Many versions of Pascal’s Wager came clearly into my consciousness during this night.  E.g., if I lack belief and it turns out that gods are most probably a fantasy, then I lose nothing and have lived a life free of superstition.  But if I lack belief and it turns out that I’m wrong and that gods indeed do exist, then I am doomed to Hell, shit out of luck. 

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During this my last night alive, I looked carefully and fairly at all of the arguments I knew that asserted the Existence of God, and I found them seriously lacking.  All of them.  As death threatened me with severe immediacy, I decided that I was indeed going to die this night as an atheist – an “atheist in a foxhole”, thus falsifying that particular theist myth; this made me chuckle, while being fully aware of the dark irony of it.  But I would die with a rational confidence in my own honest and sovereign judgment. 

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I also thought that, even if I was mistaken and if God really did exist to judge me, he had to recognize that my lack of belief was an honest judgment on my part, honestly reasoned according to the evidence I had seen, or not seen, and with my complete openness and objectivity.  (And I saw faith, believing without evidence, as an act of telling a lie to oneself and to the world.)  If God still considered my lack of belief to be a terrible sin, in spite of my honest inquiries, and if he still thought me worthy of Hell, then he was an unjust tyrant with no moral right to run a universe of rational beings.  I would repudiate such a being for his utter unfairness, injustice and barbaric cruelty. 

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After as honest and thorough a philosophical/ theological review as I could undertake, I felt quite tranquil about the notions of God, life after death, Hell, “eternal destinies”, etc. – i.e., I rejected them as most probably being fantasies because I found no convincing evidence to believe them, and I saw death as most likely being nothing but dreamless annihilation of self.  (No brain, no consciousness.)  I was not afraid of death as an atheist.  My coming death, at only 19 years of age, was certainly too soon.  I had many things that I wanted to do in life, but I did not fear death itself.  And of course I still was determined to fight tooth and nail to survive.  This line of cool thinking under the night’s pressure left me feeling very complete, whole, and integrated. 

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Then a horribly sickening thought came to me:  knowledge of the effect upon my family – my mother, father, and my 14-year-old sister – when news of my death reached them.  This horror made me so nauseated that I almost puked.  I sobbed at the thought of their anguish.  Just thinking about it now, over 40 years later, brings tears to my eyes.  I still remember that stab of helpless grief for the grief that they would feel. 

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As it happened, I obviously did survive that night – and “God” had nothing to do with it unless he shamelessly plays random favorites:  I may have lived, but six other young Marines died that night.  Kids who had families back home.  Not even mentioning the brave Vietnamese enemy who died that night, and their families. 

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The black rain was still pouring down and obscuring everything.  Then, suddenly all hell broke loose.  All at once it became evident that NVA infantry had broken through our perimeter about 75 meters to my right.  The NVA had sent sappers in quietly with wire cutters, followed by sappers who used poles and ropes to spread and separate the wire to make a hole big enough for infantry infiltration.  It was all under the cover of the rainy darkness and the loud wind, and it was impossible to see or hear the sappers at work. 

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For me, it was a sudden shock awakening from my philosophical reveries.  Now was real-time terror – right here, right now – with no time to think about trivial cosmological speculations.  It was now all senses, practiced tactics, and cunning.  The NVA had breached our perimeter and suddenly started firing on us from behind the foxholes off to my right.  The black rain obscured everything except for the tracers of AK-47 rounds.  Tracers told that night’s entire story.  NVA tracers went into the two holes on either side of their breach in the wire, and a responding fire was evidenced by M-16 tracers from the Marines there, who were taken completely by surprise.  The Marines’ tracers gave away their positions, and their fire weakened as they were quickly overwhelmed and annihilated. 

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The NVA were pouring in and fanning out within the perimeter, as their constantly increasing volume of tracers revealed.  Then we suddenly had heavy incoming automatic fire from in front, from close outside the wire, as well as from the rear, from inside, and we were pinned down by this crossfire, faces in the mud.  It was overwhelming and faster than one would believe.  I was confined in my tiny, tight crawl-hole bunker and could not even begin to get a shot off.  If I detonated the Claymores now it would only reveal our exact positions with the big flashes and not do much harm to any enemy outside the wire.  Besides, it was happening too fast.  It looked like it would be over extremely soon with a bad ending for us.  I readied my bayonet and psyched up for the apocalypse.  Then we got unexpected assistance. 

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Unbeknown to me, there was a daytime observation tower on this ridge, behind us to the right, and it was manned this night by a Platoon Sergeant whose name I never got.  Wish I could have met him because he saved numerous Marine lives that night, including yours truly.  He had an M-60 machine-gun up in his tower with an A-gunner feeding him ammo belts, and this guy never let up.  Suddenly his tracers came down on the NVA within the perimeter – which gave away his position and caused them to fire up at him.  NVA tracers all tilted up at him immediately.  It was a wild fireworks show in the dark rain.  The machine-gunner in the tower shot in a series of long sweeping bursts and never fully paused until a 100 round belt had been spent, when there was a short pause as he secured another belt and then continued firing.  The pouring, blowing rain cooled his barrel enough that it did not burn out, and he just kept pouring lead into the infiltrators.  It was masterful work. 

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The machine-gun fire from the tower thinned out the NVA on the inside of the wire and broke their momentum, and then he directed fire at the hole in the wire where tracers indicated that they were still coming through.  He hosed them down with lead.  He backed up the incoming NVA at the bottleneck hole in the wire and stopped any more from coming in.  The NVA were stumbling over their comrades’ dead bodies and dying in heaps.  (Later we found them piled four-deep in the bottleneck.)  A mopping up within the perimeter was done, and the gap was secured.  The NVA still outside our perimeter knew they would not prevail and vanished into the rain before dawn. 

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Dawn came slowly because of the heavy overcast and rain, and I was shocked that I had seen the dawn of another day.  The two Marines on my position, one to my left and one to my right, spoke, saying, “I’m coming in.  Don’t shoot me.”  We just shook our heads at the long crazy night just past.  Eventually a Marine came by to guide me and other temporary reinforcements back to our entrenchments over the hill.  We shuffled back to whatever semi-dry digs we could find, and I slept almost the entire day with adrenaline burnout. 

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Six Marines died that night, the guys on two holes over to my right.  I never met them and never even knew their names.  A number of ours were wounded, some severely.  The NVA dead numbered a couple of dozen. 

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Looking back, as unchanged an atheist now as I was then, I am still haunted sometimes by “survivor guilt”, a common feeling among combat vets, wondering why in hell I was spared while these other Marines were killed.  Should I, could I, have done something else?  Why did I survive?  Was it just luck that the NVA hit a bit to my right rather than coming over the top of me?  Haunting thoughts. 

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All in all, I put my survival down to dumb luck, mere chance – and an M-60 machine- gunner with balls of brass in a tower. 

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But don’t ever tell me that there are no atheists in foxholes. 

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-Zenwind.

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Climbing Memories, Black Betty, and Mundee

My favorite Hard Rocking band in Bangkok is Mundee, who play at The Rock Pub. I see them every chance I get, usually at midnight on Wednesdays.  They play a fantastic cover of Black Betty, an American Southern folk-blues prison work song, plus they play amazing covers of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and many other great Rock bands.  They do rock.

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Black Betty was a radio hit by Ram Jam in 1977, and it seems that the song is always connected in my memory with my earliest climbing days since that year was my first for technical climbing.  Later, in 1980 or 1981, I was teaching climbing techniques to an adventure specialty group of teen Explorer Scouts; we focused on mountaineering, climbing rock, snow and ice.  The lyrics to Black Betty came into my mind spontaneously and mysteriously as we were climbing during a storm on one of our multi-pitch rock climbs in the Adirondack Mountains.  (This is a long story, but as we will see at its end, it was Mundee that helped me figure it all out.) 

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It was the middle of June, but on the day we hiked up to Mt. Rooster Comb with all of our gear, a cold storm was coming in.  We stashed our bivouac gear on the summit of the mountain, then carried our climbing gear down a trail around to the bottom of the South Face, and our objective was to climb the “Old Route,” an easy but long climb first pioneered by the great German-American climber Fritz Wiessner, one of my great climbing heroes.  (I had first free climbed it in September 1977 as my first major solo climb with minimal roped backup and poor equipment – all alone.) 

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As our Explorer team started this long climb – in a rope-team of five or so – it started raining on us.  I led the hardest pitches, being sure that solid anchors were in place to keep our team from falling all the way to the ground far below.  By the time we were getting to the highest parts of the climb, the weather got colder and turned from rain to hail.  When we looked up at the higher mountain peaks all around us, they were plastered with snow. 

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Our easy rock climb now became much more dangerous.  All of us were soaking wet from the rain, it was cold and hypothermia was a big threat – when hypothermic, a person’s judgment is greatly diminished, as well as his coordination.  And we were at the most exposed part of the face, near its top.  The hail-stones were slippery round balls of ice under our feet, and they covered the tilted rock ledge we had to traverse to our right.  This ledge slants/ tilts outward from the wall left-to-right, and it is scary – it seems like it wants to dump you off the cliff at its highest point.  It is scary to walk this ledge when the rock is dry and sunny, as it had been when I soloed it years before, but now it was horrifyingly dangerous with all of the ice under our feet. 

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But we were roped together as a team, and I was confident both that I could anchor all of us with “bomb-proof” rock anchor protection and that our team was well-trained.  But it is never easy to protect a rope-team on a traverse, so I had a reliable climber go ahead and clip into a solid anchor, in order to belay the team between us as they traversed, and I stationed myself at the most dangerous part of the ledge, to make sure that everyone who climbed up to me and then past me was clipped in correctly and well-protected.  What I was most afraid of was our hypothermia and the possibility of making simple mistakes at that critical spot.  

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I also wanted to show my cold, wet, shivering team that I was upbeat and confident in that exposed spot, so, from somewhere in my crazy mind I got the idea to start clapping my hands, stomping my feet, and singing “Whoa, Black Betty, bam-a-lam/ Whoa, Black Betty, bam-a-lam….”  As each team climber came up to me on the beginning of that high ledge, they looked at me like I was crazy as I sang those lyrics to them while grinning like a madman. 

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These guys had already known that I was nuts – I climbed mountains – but they were equally insane to follow me into such situations.  I was never able to explain to them the weird “Black Betty” lyrics that I sang to them on the most dangerous spot on that climb.  I was never even able to explain it to myself. 

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Only in 2011 in Bangkok did I discover why that song came into my head at that earlier specific time and place in 1980 or 1981.  In February 2011, I was at the Rock Pub on a Wednesday midnight, and Mundee sang Black Betty.  The song really rocked me, and it reminded me of that team rock climb.  So after I got home I looked up the song and its history. 

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I discovered that the song was a radio hit precisely in September 1977, and that explained everything.  1977 was my first year of technical rock climbing.  That year I was constantly on the road, driving to climbing areas with my car’s Rock n Roll radio as my only companion.  In September 1977 I did my first major solo climb – the “Old Route” on Mt. Rooster Comb – and the song on all radio stations at that time was Black Betty by Ram Jam.  (“Bam-a-lam!”) 

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That is the reason the song suddenly came into my head three or four years later on the second time I climbed it (this time with my Explorer team).  The song was embedded into my memory of that rock face from the first day I climbed it alone.  Music has that magical way of embedding itself into our life’s memories – into the soundtracks of our lives. 

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Thank you, Mundee, for refreshing my memories and for playing such great Rock n Roll.  I’m a fan.  (I also wrote about Mundee two years ago HERE.)

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-Zenwind. 

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