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the average American infantryman in World War II had carried 84.3 pounds each day. That made him the most heavily laden foot soldier in the history of warfare. The figure startled some people, including, inexcusably, generals. It didn’t surprise the former GI. He knew he had been a beast of burden. Moving into the line, he had worn or carried his uniform, his steel chamberpot helmet and helmet liner, an M-1 rifle, a knife, his canteen, an entrenching tool (a combination pick and shovel), his bayonet, his first-aid pouch, a web belt with cartridge magazines in each pocket, two bandoliers of extra ammo, hand grenades hung by their handles from his belt and the suspender harness supporting his pack, and the contents of the pack: a poncho, Primacord fuses, mess kit, cigarettes, a Zippo lighter, writing paper, letters from home, and various rations—C, K, or canned ham and eggs from H. J. Heinz Co., winners of the Army-Navy E pennant. In addition, the GI had to carry part of the outfit’s communal weapons: a Browning automatic rifle or its tripod, or Browning light or heavy machine gun or its tripod, or a 60- or 81-millimeter mortar or its base.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it? One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. “These are very close to religious questions,” Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001. The Big
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Bannon was still worried, though he saw some positives in the Trump-Pence strategy. They were using Pence well, Bannon believed, running him essentially on a circuit of states—at least 23 appearances in Pennsylvania; 25 in Ohio; 22 in North Carolina; 15 in Iowa; 13 in Florida; eight in Michigan; seven in Wisconsin. The theme was for Pence to campaign as if he were running for governor of those states, focusing on local issues and what a President Trump in Washington could do for the state. “And every now and then we’d pull him [Pence] out to Jesus-land,” Bannon said. Trump, he said, was essentially running as county supervisor in 41 large population centers. Bannon was amazed that the Clinton campaign did not use President Obama strategically. Obama had won Iowa in 2008 and 2012 by six to 10 points. “He never goes.” Clinton never went to Wisconsin in the general election. She didn’t talk enough about the economy. “When I saw her go to Arizona, I said, they’ve lost their fucking minds,” Bannon said. “What are they doing?”
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