Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
In my first years as an activist I often said that Putin was a Russian problem for Russians to solve, but that he would soon be a regional problem and then a global problem if his ambitions were ignored. This regrettable transformation has come to pass and lives are being lost because of it. It is cold comfort to be told, “You were right!” It is even less comforting when so little is being done to halt Putin’s aggression even now. What is the point of saying you should have listened and acted when you still aren’t listening or acting?
Winter Is Coming
Garry Kasparov
was getting toward dusk, and everyone knew how bad the whole thing was. Paul O’Dowd was with the artillerymen who by then were buttoning up their guns, preparatory for the last move. If they went south, it was going to be a very bad trip, they all knew, because they had two spotter planes flying over the road and the reports on the destruction were shocking. It sounded like a massacre to O’Dowd. But for the moment he had only one job, getting those guns out of there. Lieutenant Colonel John Keith of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion had told him to load up their guns, and he was doing just that, sure that they had fired their last round in the Kunuri region. Just then one of his forward observers, First Lieutenant Patrick McMullan, showed up and started screaming, “Fire mission! Fucking Chinese! Fire mission! Fucking Chinese everywhere! Fire mission!” O’Dowd had never seen McMullan so out of control—he thought maybe he was drunk, for some of the men in other units had been drinking that day. “Fire mission! More fucking Chinese!” “We’re on closed station march orders,” O’Dowd told him, which was the exact phrase they used for the moment when they had closed it up and were ready to get out. But gradually O’Dowd got more information: the Chinese were moving in for the kill right out in the open in daylight, seemingly thousands of them. Just then Colonel Freeman walked by and asked O’Dowd what was going on, and O’Dowd explained what McMullan had seen. “Get the goddamn guns into fire positions,” Freeman ordered. There they were, all those Chinese, perhaps five thousand yards away, a vast field of them closing in just as McMullan had said. Freeman told the men that their mission was to delay the Chinese, even if they did not get out in time themselves, even if they did not get out at all. The regiment, Freeman later remembered, unloaded all its weapons and ammo, and the men laid everything out in front of them. This is where they were going to make their last stand, he thought, and quite possibly die. The artillerymen had unloaded the big 105s from the trucks and pointed them in one direction—eighteen howitzers in all, the last guns of Kunuri. It was called a Russian front in the artillery. Paul O’Dowd had fought in two wars, survived the worst of the Naktong fighting, and he had never seen anything like this. Everyone in the unit—cooks, clerk typists—helped take shells off the trucks and carry them to the guns. They fired everything they had in what seemed to O’Dowd about twenty minutes, though it probably took longer. There was a lot of ammo because they had shells that two other artillery units had left behind. They were firing so fast that the guns were overheating and the paint was peeling, just rolling off the guns in giant chunks. The recoil systems on those guns were going to be ruined, O’Dowd decided, but there was no time to worry about that. He was just a little scared that the chambers were so hot the guns might blow. It was an…
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
Caesar rode into Annapolis on December 19, 1783. At least some hoped—and others feared—that he was Caesar. He turned out to be George Washington, and as much as he may have admired Caesar he admired the republic more. He had come to Annapolis, where Congress sat, to surrender the commission he had accepted eight years before. Washington might simply have written a letter of resignation and enclosed his commission. The occasion offered too much of the dramatic and the symbolic to be passed by with such a flat performance, however, and Washington recognized the dramatic and symbolic importance of his resignation as commander in chief. The republic after all was barely on its way; its health was not yet robust; and it was surrounded by atmospheres heavy with monarchy and militarism. Hence he must seize the opportunity to reaffirm the uniqueness of a nation in which a congress, a representative body, held a weightier authority than the military.
The Glorious Cause
Robert Middlekauff
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise