Fire Fighter Quotes

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fires, what do freedom fighters fight?

When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I'd been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn't get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn't even speak, so I held up nine fingers. Later, after they'd given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my head while she took my blood pressure and said, "You know how I know you're a fighter? You called a ten a nine." But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.

A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.At a point, one can only fight fire with fire

Then I realize from the hollow sound of her gun's click that her gun isn't loaded. Apparently she just wants to slap me around with it. The Girl doesn't move her gun away. "How old are you?" "Fifteen." "That's better." The Girl lowers her gun a little. "Time for a few confessions.Were you responsible for the break-in at the Arcadia bank?" The ten-second place. "Yes." "Then you must be responsible for stealing sixteen thousand five hundred Notes from there as well." "You got that right." "Were you responsible for vandalizing the Department of Intra-Defense two years ago, and destroying the engines of two warfront airships?" "Yes." "Did you set fire to a series of ten F-472 fighter jets parked at the Burbank air force base right before they were to head out to the warfront?" "I'm kinda proud of that one." "Did assault a cadet standing guard at the edge of the Alta sector's quarantine zone?" "I tied him up and delivered food to some quarantined families.Bite me.

Was I not tempting enough?” I asked him. “Not classy enough?” I didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. And that was almost worse. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” He’d stood up and slipped his hands into his pockets. I met his gaze and saw the green fire in his eyes. “You’re perfect—beautiful, intelligent, intractable in a kind of . . . attractive way. Headstrong, but a good strategist. An amazing fighter.

There must always be those with the fire of rebellion in their blood! There must always be those who will dare to fight an unbeatable enemy! Only thus can the race of man remain strong and fearless!

I had hoped to hear everyone discussing how much they missed my altruistic qualities, my legendary skills as a fighter and as a lover." He leered. "Instead, you're making plans for tomorrow. Interesting how life goes on in spite of itself.

Learning to let go is not giving up! It is simply passing the burden to a better fighter, so you can fight another day. (God)

He was a better fighter than I was, but he wasn’t faster than me. Nor was he as motivated, and I think he underestimated me. He thought he was fighting a girl with a stick when he was fighting Adam’s mate, Coyote’s daughter, armed with Lugh’s staff.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

A fighter who will only go into battle when they're at their best fights for pleasure and not principle. The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we'll only defend them in the sun.

For two years the battles raged across the lands, one side fighting for conquest, the other for freedom. Othium-powered weapons wreaked havoc on defending armies. The red fire was hard to resist, but the white light was stronger. Gradually the tide turned and the freedom fighters regained control of their lands and their cities. The stage was set for the final battle. The opposing forces met outside the Ackar city of Erbea in 1302 and the forces of good won the day. The alchemist escaped and was about to take his revenge at a wedding ceremony when he was bound by the white light. All that remained was his heart, or maybe his soul, encapsulated in a piece of red rock. Dewar the Third succeeded his father and the new king promised a time of peace and prosperity. History would call him the Peacemaker. Now, two hundred years on, a new Emperor seeks to rule the world, while an illegitimate son sets out on a path towards revenge and a thief begins to learn his trade. It is time for the alchemist to return.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.... Is there no other way the world may live?

She watched as the dancing lights of madness swirled and flickered in his eyes like the fires of hell, and she knew that there would never be anything that could quench those fires except death. Vanessa knew that Jango had become his own Grim Reaper.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Bad thing about fighters, though, too often they were forged in fire.

Did you set fire to a series of ten F-472 fighter jets parked at the Burbank air force base right before they were to head out to the warfront?" "I'm kinda proud of that one.

Even if they were trained fighters, they'd likely be as pathetic as the rest of Joya d'Arena's military." "Our pathetic military defeated yours in a single battle," I snap, before remembering that Storm is probably goading me for personal amusement. "No, my dear Queen, you did," he says. "You and your Godstone.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed … The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

It is one thing to overthrow a dictator or to repel and invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution.

They fought like fire, and you would think the sun and moon were gone, because the battle of the finest fighters around the dead Patroclus was so shrouded 370 in fog.

Firefighters are taught early on not to leave any person behind. It has been etched on countless plaques, statues, and national monuments honoring those who have fallen.

Being accountable is somewhat ingrained into the life of a first responder.

I want to merge oven mitts with boxing gloves, so I could effectively, and safely, fight fires. After all, fire fighters make better lovers.

As I watched him there, I didn’t see the most popular guy in college. The sex god. The illegal fighter. I saw the loneliest boy I’d ever laid eyes on. Sweet, confused, and lost. And I thought, bitterly, he didn’t even know that across the parking lot sat a girl just like him.

He listened to a fire fighter tell of a woman he had found strapped into her seat, screaming. When he cut the seat belt, she fell apart. She was being held together by the seat belt. She died at his feet.

Who constitutes the nation? Only the elite?Or do the hundreds of millions of poor in India also make up the nation? Are their interests never identified with national interest? Or is there more than one nation? That is the question you often run up against in some of India's poorest areas. Areas where extremely poor people go into destitution making way for firing ranges, jet fighter plants, coal mines, power projects, dams, sanctuaries, prawn and shrimp farms, even poultry farms. If the costs they bear are the 'price' of development, then the rest of the 'nation' is having one endless free lunch.

Watching him walk over, Alex mused that Eli Cooper was the sort of man who knew how to use his physicality. Beneath his handmade shirts and tailored suits, a street fighter hummed through every loose-limbed motion. But that impression did not extend to his face, which was structurally perfect. Skyscraper-high cheekbones. Superhero jaw. A mouth that should have a government warning. There were no signs of past trouble with a jealous husband or an abandoned girlfriend. No one had ever broken his nose. No one had busted his lip. Strange, because her first instinct on seeing him was to roundhouse kick him into the next millennium.

If the consequence is you get fired, is that an actual place you want to work? If you can get fired for challenging one idea in one meeting, is that company worth your time and energy? If the consequence is not that you’ll be fired or written up, then what is actually on the line if you speak up? Is it that you won’t be liked by whoever you challenged?

I aimed my rocket eighty-eight right into the torrent of enemy fighters and fanned the trigger on my flight stick to fire off a rapid volley of plasma bolts.

Everyone says what they’re supposed to, the usual clichés like “She’s a fighter.” Yeah, Danny thinks. There are two fighters in any fight, and one of them loses.

He’d wanted to be the spark that started a fire across the galaxy.

Once a fighter always a fighter. The fire may grow weaker with time, but it never truly dies. Is this not true?

There is a common thread that weaves throughout the very fabric of every first responder.

Firefighters are taught early on not to leave any person behind.

At this time in our history, we must encourage our fellow firefighters to find the care that they need.

We must work together to remove the stigma that has fulled our indifference to mental health and we must encourage our fellow first responder to seek professional care.

It is important to understand that the stigma around mental health creates barriers for those who most need mental health services.

There is a common thread that weaves throughout the very fabric of every first responder. It is the innate desire to safeguard and protect one's most intimate of relationships.

American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires gathered them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though German fighters came up again made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America where factories were operating night and day dismantling the cylinders separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

While other tributes that year were hard-pressed to get a handful of grain or some matches for a gift, Finnick never wanted for anything, not food or medicine or weapons. It took about a week for his competitors to realize that he was the one to kill, but it was too late. He was already a good fighter with the spears and knives he had found in the Cornucopia. When he received a silver parachute with a trident – which may be the most expensive gift I’ve ever seen given in the arena – it was all over. District 4’s industry is fishing. He’d been on boats his whole life. The trident was a natural, deadly extension of his arm. He wove a net out of some kind of vine he found, used it to entangle his opponents so he could spear them with the trident, and within a matter of days the crown was his.

The crowd, or the mob, has always quite enough fighters with a fire to fight alongside the 'underdog', but it fights, or it tries, while lacking the discernment or facts to determine the actual underdog.

In a battle involving so many fighters and bombers, one of the most valuable ships to the fleet at this precise moment was proving to be a ship that didn’t always see a lot of love or action—the flak cruisers.

There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X’s} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.

Where are we? What happened?" Syn pursed his lips. "Which question would you prefer I answer first?" "You pick." "Where... I commandeered a fighter." "You mean you stole it?" "Semantics, semantics." - Shahara & Syn

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography

Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter. Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience.

Fenella Doorn watched the unfamiliar wreck of a ship ghosting into her bay. Crippled by cannon fire, she thought. What else could do such damage? The foremast was blown away, as well as half the mainmast where a jury rig clung to the jagged stump, and shot holes tattered the sails on the mizzen. And yet, to Fenella’s experienced eye the vessel had an air of defiance. Demi-cannons hulked in the shadowed gun ports. This ship was a fighter, battered but not beaten. With fight still in her, was she friend or foe?

Real fights are always messy and chaotic, and real fighters rarely do exactly what they’re supposed to do under fire. And yet any leader of irregular cavalry or light infantry (or, indeed, any mounted constabulary officer) of the past century would recognize these simple tactics.

Walk Million miles away Your signal in the distance To whom it may concern I think I lost my way Gettin good at starting over Every time that I return Learning to walk again I believe I've waited long enough Where do I begin Learning to talk again Can't you see I've waited long enough Where do I begin Do you remember the days We built these paper mountains And sat and watched them burn I think I found my place Can't you feel it growing stronger Little conquerors Learning to walk again I believe I've waited long enough Where do I begin? Learning to talk again I believe I've waited long enough Where do I begin? Now For the very first time Don't you pay no mind Set me free, again You keep alive a moment at a time But still inside a whisper to a liar To sacrifice but knowing to survive The first to find another state of mind I'm on my knees, I'm praying for a sign Forever, whenever I never wanna die I never wanna die I never wanna die I'm on my knees I never wanna die I'm Dancing on my grave I'm Running through the fire Forever, whenever I Never wanna die I Never wanna leave I'll Never say goodbye Forever, whenever Forever, whenever Learning to walk again I believe I've waited long enough Where do I begin? Learning to talk again Can't you see I've waited long enough Where do I begin? Learning to walk again I believe I've waited long enough Learning to talk again Can't you see I've waited long enough

I could see their menfolk patrolling nervously up and down toting sub-machine guns and draped in cartridge belts. They were wearing their trademark sunglasses, those gold rimmed feminine accessories which should look comic on a man but instead manage to look as sinister as the wedding dresses and blonde wigs worn by Liberia's drugged fighters. They are the modern equivalent of the wooden masks donned around night fires by warriors preparing to do battle, which turn their wearers into something utterly alien -- faceless instruments of violence capable of unspeakable acts.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Syn grimaced as if pain cut through him. "We have to get out of here. Now!" Rushing toward her nightstand, she pulled out her weapons and module for her fighter. "Let's go." "Just one problem." He dropped the blanket and stood in her room completely naked. "I need something to wear." -Syn & Shahara

When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I’d been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn’t get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. A nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn’t even speak, so I held up nine fingers. Later, after they’d given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my hand while she took my blood pressure and she said, “You know how I know you’re a fighter? You called a ten a nine.” But that wasn’t quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again

At the same time, he expressed accurately and powerfully the state of mind of the countless underground fighters dying in the battle against Nazism. Why did they throw their lives into the scale? Why did they accept tor­ture and death? They had no point of support like the Fuhrer for the Germans or the New Faith for the Communists. It is doubtful whether most of them believed in Christ. It could only have been loyalty, loyalty to something called fatherland or honor, but something stronger than any name. In one of his stories, a young boy, tortured by the police and knowing that he will be shot, gives the name of his friend because he is afraid to die alone. They meet before the firing squad, and the betrayed forgives his betrayer. This forgiveness cannot be justified by any utilitarian ethic; there is no reason to forgive traitors. Had this story been written by a Soviet author, the betrayed would have turned away with disdain from the man who had succumbed to base weakness.

In late 1915 there appeared on the Western Front a German flier named Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, after his royal title and a penchant for painting his squadron’s Fokker triwing fighters red. He was a natural born killer who shot down more than eighty enemy aircraft before himself being fatally brought down by ground fire

Yet trauma has been hard for the academic world to define and therefore understand its full scope. Part of the challenge is that ‘bad event’ is subjective. Let’s take an example. Consider, say, a fire at an elementary school. A veteran fire-fighter can walk right up to the flames and put them out, business as usual. In contrast, a first-grader witnessing his classroom burst into flames will experience minutes of intense fear, confusion, and helplessness. This illustrates one of the key issues in understanding a potentially traumatic event. How does the individual experience the event? What is going on inside the person; is the stress response activated in extreme and prolonged ways?

It takes guts to be married to someone who, in times of crisis, may be more available to strangers than to his or her own family. It takes determination to stay home alone at night, fortitude to go to a party by yourself, persistence to be both mother and father, and spunk to say what you really think. It might even take courage for you to read this book.

[The Chinese here is tricky and a certain key word in the context it is used defies the best efforts of the translator. Tu Mu defines this word as “the measurement or estimation of distance.” But this meaning does not quite fit the illustrative simile in ss. 15. Applying this definition to the falcon, it seems to me to denote that instinct of SELF RESTRAINT which keeps the bird from swooping on its quarry until the right moment, together with the power of judging when the right moment has arrived. The analogous quality in soldiers is the highly important one of being able to reserve their fire until the very instant at which it will be most effective. When the “Victory” went into action at Trafalgar at hardly more than drifting pace, she was for several minutes exposed to a storm of shot and shell before replying with a single gun. Nelson coolly waited until he was within close range, when the broadside he brought to bear worked fearful havoc on the enemy’s nearest ships.] 14.  Therefore the good fighter will be terrible in his onset, and prompt in his decision. [The word “decision” would have reference to the measurement of distance mentioned above, letting the enemy get near before striking. But I cannot help thinking that Sun Tzu meant to use the word in a figurative sense comparable to our own idiom “short and sharp.” Cf. Wang Hsi’s note, which after describing the falcon’s mode of attack, proceeds: “This is just how the ‘psychological moment’ should be seized in war.”]

In four separate fires in the 1990s, twenty-three elite wildland firefighters refused orders to drop their tools and perished beside them. Even when Rhoades eventually dropped his chainsaw, he felt like he was doing something unnatural. Weick found similar phenomena in Navy seamen who ignored orders to remove steel-toed shoes when abandoning a ship, and drowned or punched holes in life rafts; fighter pilots in disabled planes refusing orders to eject; and Karl Wallenda, the world-famous high-wire performer, who fell 120 feet to his death when he teetered and grabbed first at his balance pole rather than the wire beneath him. He momentarily lost the pole while falling, and grabbed it again in the air. “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.

Each dismounted fighter and each vehicle commander need only remember five basic rules. These rules define how the group fights at every scale (the individual, the dismounted squad, the vehicle, and the group of vehicles) and they never change, regardless of the terrain, the tactical situation, or the size of the engagement. They are: “Maintain an extended line abreast,” “Keep your neighbors just in sight, but no closer,” “Move to the sound of the guns,” “Dismount when you see the enemy,” and “When you come under fire, stop and fire back.” This

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies – in the final sense – a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”5               President Eisenhower proposed that savings from arms be funneled into world needs.

had tall windows and a usable, if narrow, balcony, with a view down an alley and straight up a boulevard to a dry fountain that once gushed and sparkled in the sunlight. It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War would soon erode the facade of their building as though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade.

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. •  •  • When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

The Soviet Union was the only nation involved in the Second World War to put women in the sky as fighter and bomber pilots, and what women they were! Products of the Soviet aviation drive of the 1930s, these young fliers were championed by Marina Raskova, the Amelia Earhart of the USSR. The day bombers and the fighter pilots (among the latter, Lilia Litviak, seen in cameo at the Engels training camp, was killed in an aerial dogfight during the war, but became history’s first female ace) eventually integrated with male personnel . . . but the night bombers remained all-female throughout their term of service and were fiercely proud of this fact. The ladies of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment went to war in the outdated Polikarpov U-2, an open-cockpit cloth-and-plywood biplane, achingly slow and highly flammable, built without radio, parachute, or brakes. (It was redesignated the Po-2 after 1943; I was unable to pinpoint an exact date for the change, and continued to use the term U-2 for clarity.) The women flew winter and summer, anywhere from five to eighteen runs per night, relying on stimulants that destroyed their ability to rest once off-duty. They flew continuously under these conditions for three years, surviving on catnaps and camaraderie, developing the conveyor belt land-and-refuel routine that gave them a far more efficient record than comparable night bomber regiments. The women’s relentless efficiency waged ruthless psychological warfare on the Germans below, who thought their silent glide-down sounded like witches on broomsticks, and awarded them the nickname “die Nachthexen.” Such dedication took a toll: the regiment lost approximately 27 percent of its flying personnel to crashes and enemy fire. The Night Witches were also awarded a disproportionately higher percentage of Hero of the Soviet Union medals—the USSR’s highest decoration.

His son wanted to be a firefighter, but didn't get the job. Mr. Neck is convinced that this is some kind of reverse discrimination. He says we should close our borders so that real Americans can get the jobs they deserve. The job test said that I would be a good fire fighter. I wonder if I could take a job away from Mr. Neck's son. Mr. Neck writes on the board again: "DEBATE: America should have closed her borders in 1900." That strikes a nerve. Several nerves. I can see kids counting backward on their fingers, trying to figure out when their grandparents or great-grandparents were born, when they came to America, if they would have made the Neck Cut. When they figure out they would have been stuck in a country that hated them, or a place with no schools, or a place with no future, their hands shoot up. They beg to differ with Mr. Neck's learned opinion. ... The arguments jump back and forth across the room. A few suck-ups quickly figure out which side Mr. Neck is squatting on, so they fight to throw out the 'foreigners.' Anyone whose family immigrated in the last century has a story to tell about how hard their relatives have worked, the contributions they make to the country, the taxes they pay. A member of the Archery Club tries to say that we are all foreigners and we should give the country back to the Native Americans, but she's buried under disagreement. Mr. Neck enjoys the noise, until one kid challenges him directly. Brave Kid: "Maybe your son didn't get that job because he's not good enough. Or he's lazy. Or the other guy was better than him, no matter what his skin color. I think the white people who have been here for two hundred years are the ones pulling down the country. They don't know how to work - they've had it too easy." The pro-immigration forces erupt in applause and hooting. Mr. Neck: "You watch your mouth, mister. You are talking about my son. I don't want to hear any more from you. That's enough debate - get your books out.

In April 1953, President Eisenhower delivered the first of two major speeches during his presidency that addressed the dangers of military spending. Speaking several weeks after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Ike offered what has become known as his “Chance of Peace” speech, telling American newspaper editors that an arms race with the Soviets would impose domestic burdens on both countries: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. Ike’s warning about the cost of military spending fell on deaf ears.

My God. How can people be so cruel and thoughtless? They should be thanking you for your service!” “That’s even worse! What the fuck do they think they’re thanking me for? They don’t know what I did over there! They don’t understand that I’ve got seconds to make a judgment call that will either save my guys or end someone’s life—and that someone could be an enemy combatant or it could be a civilian. A farmer. A woman. A child. Or it could be both! That’s the real fucked-up part of it. It could be both a child and the enemy. That kid you’ve been giving candy and comic books to? The one that brought you fresh bread and knows your name and taught you a few words in his language? Is he the one reporting your position? Did he pull the trigger wire on the IED that killed your friend and wounded every single guy in your squad? Has he been the enemy all along? Is it your fault for talking to him?” I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say. Tears burned my eyes, and my chest ached as I raced along beside him. “Oh, Ryan, no. Of course it isn’t.” “It is. I should have known. I let them down.” “You didn’t,” I said, trying to touch his arm, but he shrugged me off, refusing to be comforted. “And how about the time Taliban fighters lined up women and children as shields behind a compound wall while they fired at you, only you didn’t realize what they’d done until after you’d fired back, killing dozens of innocents?” The tears dripped down my cheeks, but I silently wiped them away in the dark. This wasn’t about me, and I didn’t want him to stop if he needed to get these things out. “Or how about the farmer I killed that didn’t respond to warning shots, the one whose son later told us was deaf and mute? Should I be thanked for that?” I could see how furious and heartsick he was, and I hated that I’d brought this on. “Yes,” I said firmly, although I continued to cry. “Because you’re brave and strong and you did what you were trained to do, what you had to do.

It occurred to her that she had never thanked Arin for bringing her piano here. She found him in the library and meant to say what she had come to say, yet when she saw him studying a map near the fire, lit by an upward shower of sparks as one log fell on another, she remembered her promise precisely because of how she longed to forget it. She blurted something that had nothing to do with anything. “Do you know how to make honeyed half-moons?” “Do I…?” He lowered the map. “Kestrel, I hate to disappoint you, but I was never a cook.” “You know how to make tea.” He laughed. “You do realize that boiling water is within the capabilities of anybody?” “Oh.” Kestrel moved to leave, feeling foolish. What had possessed her to ask such a ridiculous question anyway? “I mean, yes,” Arin said. “Yes, I know how to make half-moons.” “Really?” “Ah…no. But we can try.” They went into the kitchens. A glance from Arin cleared the room, and then it was only the two of them, dumping flour onto the wooden worktable, Arin palming a jar of honey out of a cabinet. Kestrel cracked an egg into a bowl and knew why she had asked for this. So that she could pretend that there had been no war, there were no sides, and that this was her life. The half-moons came out as hard as rocks. “Hmm.” Arin inspected one. “I could use these as weapons.” She laughed before she could tell herself it wasn’t funny. “Actually, they’re about the size of your weapon of choice,” he said. “Which reminds me that you’ve never said how you dueled at Needles against the city’s finest fighter and won.” It would be a mistake to tell him. It would defy the simplest rule of warfare: to hide one’s strengths and weaknesses for as long as possible. Yet Kestrel told Arin the story of how she had beaten Irex. Arin covered his face with one floured hand and peeked at her between his fingers. “You are terrifying. Gods help me if I cross you, Kestrel.” “You already have,” she pointed out. “But am I your enemy?” Arin crossed the space between them. Softly, he repeated, “Am I?

Our regiment was all women…We flew to the front in May 1942… The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor. Later on, toward the end of the war, we were issued parachutes, and a machine gun was installed in the pilot’s cabin, but before there had been no weapon, except for four bomb racks under the wings—that’s all. Nowadays they’d call us kamikazes, and maybe we were kamikazes. Yes! We were! But victory was valued more than our lives. “Before I retired, I became ill from the very thought of how I could possibly not work. Why then had I completed a second degree in my fifties? I became a historian. I had been a geologist all my life. But a good geologist is always in the field, and I no longer had the strength for it. A doctor came, took a cardiogram, and asked, “When did you have a heart attack?” “What heart attack?” “Your heart is scarred all over.” I must have acquired those scars during the war. You approach a target, and you’re shaking all over. Your whole body is shaking, because below it’s all gunfire: fighter planes are shooting, antiaircraft guns are shooting…Several girls had to leave the regiment; they couldn’t stand it. We flew mostly during the night. For a while they tried sending us on day missions, but gave it up at once. A rifle shot could bring down a Po-2… We did up to twelve flights a night. (...) You come back and you can’t even get out of the cabin; they used to pull us out. We couldn’t carry the chart case; we dragged it on the ground. And the work our girl armorers did! They had to attach four bombs to the aircraft by hand—that meant eight hundred pounds. They did it all night: one plane takes off, another lands. The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women…We didn’t have those women’s things…Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children.

Zelensky wanted—he needed—air defenses. F-16 fighter jets, to maintain air supremacy against the far larger Russian Air Force. A no-fly zone. Tanks. Advanced drones. Most important, long-range missile launchers. There was one in particular that the Pentagon, with its penchant for completely unintelligible acronyms, called the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). Zelensky wanted to arm these launchers with one of the crown jewels of the U.S. Army, a missile known as ATACMS that could strike targets nearly two hundred miles away with precision accuracy. That, of course, would give him the capability to fire right into command-and-control centers deep inside Russian territory—exactly Biden’s worst fear. In time, Zelensky added to his list of requests another weapon that raised enormous moral issues: He sought “cluster munitions,” a weapon many of the arms control advocates in the Biden administration had spent decades trying to limit or ban. Cluster bombs are devastating weapons that release scores of tiny bomblets, ripping apart people and personnel carriers and power lines and often mowing through civilians unlucky enough to be living in the area where they are dropped. Worse yet, unexploded bomblets can remain on the ground for years; from past American battlefields—from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq—there were stories of children killed or maimed after picking one up years later. Blinken told colleagues he had spent much of his professional life getting weapons like this banned. Yet the Pentagon stored them across Europe because they were cruelly effective in wiping out an advancing army. And anyway, they said, the Russians were using cluster munitions in Ukraine. With each proposal it was Biden who was most reluctant: F-16s were simply too provocative, he told his staff, because they could strike deep into Russia. The cluster munitions were simply too dangerous to civilians. Conversations with Zelensky were heated. “The first few calls they had turned pretty tense,” one senior administration official told me. Part of the issue was style. Zelensky, in Biden’s view, was simply not grateful for the aid he was getting—a cardinal sin in Biden’s world. By mid-May 2022, his administration had poured nearly $4 billion to the Ukrainian defenses, including some fifty million rounds of small ammunition, tens of thousands of artillery rounds, major antiaircraft and anti-tank systems, intelligence, medical equipment, and more. Zelensky had offered at best perfunctory thanks before pushing for more.

The war against ISIS in Iraq was a long, hard slog, and for a time the administration was as guilty of hyping progress as the most imaginative briefers at the old “Five O’Clock Follies” in Saigon had been. In May 2015, an ISIS assault on Ramadi and a sandstorm that grounded U.S. planes sent Iraqi forces and U.S. Special Forces embedded with them fleeing the city. Thanks to growing hostility between the Iraqi government and Iranian-supported militias in the battle, the city wouldn’t be taken until the end of the year. Before it was over we had sent well over five thousand military personnel back to Iraq, including Special Forces operators embedded as advisors with Iraqi and Kurdish units. A Navy SEAL, a native Arizonan whom I had known when he was a boy, was killed in northern Iraq. His name was Charles Keating IV, the grandson of my old benefactor, with whom I had been implicated all those years ago in the scandal his name had branded. He was by all accounts a brave and fine man, and I mourned his loss. Special Forces operators were on the front lines when the liberation of Mosul began in October 2016. At immense cost, Mosul was mostly cleared of ISIS fighters by the end of July 2017, though sporadic fighting continued for months. The city was in ruins, and the traumatized civilian population was desolate. By December ISIS had been defeated everywhere in Iraq. I believe that had U.S. forces retained a modest but effective presence in Iraq after 2011 many of these tragic events might have been avoided or mitigated. Would ISIS nihilists unleashed in the fury and slaughter of the Syrian civil war have extended their dystopian caliphate to Iraq had ten thousand or more Americans been in country? Probably, but with American advisors and airpower already on the scene and embedded with Iraqi security forces, I think their advance would have been blunted before they had seized so much territory and subjected millions to the nightmare of ISIS rule. Would Maliki have concentrated so much power and alienated Sunnis so badly that the insurgency would catch fire again? Would Iran’s influence have been as detrimental as it was? Would Iraqis have collaborated to prevent a full-scale civil war from erupting? No one can answer for certain. But I believe that our presence there would have had positive effects. All we can say for certain is that Iraq still has a difficult road to walk, but another opportunity to progress toward that hopeful vision of a democratic, independent nation that’s learned to accommodate its sectarian differences, which generations of Iraqis have suffered without and hundreds of thousands of Americans risked everything for.

After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.… We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

One of the most expensive projects underwritten in the era was a computing system known as SAGE, which stood for Semi-Autonomous Ground Environment. Once a radar station picked up an enemy aircraft entering American airspace, SAGE would calculate the incoming flight path based on speed, altitude, and direction and determine which fighter jets should be dispatched to intercept the threat. Other times SAGE might advise that a surface-to-air missile be fired instead. The computers, which were the size of buildings, needed to make recommendations that generals would follow. SAGE went beyond harnessing computing power; it also introduced networking. Through telephone connections, SAGE divided the country into geographic sectors, with a facility in each sector pulling in information from ground radar, naval vessels, and surveillance aircraft. Each facility’s computer was networked with the other facilities’ computers to transmit and receive data as to which combat facilities should be deployed in the event of an attack. Getting the contract to build computing centers for SAGE accounted for fully half of IBM’s computing revenues until the late fifties, subsidizing the transition from the days of punch cards to the new era of computing.

The time had come to deploy for the attack, and Commander Fuchida had a difficult decision to make. The plan provided for either “Surprise” or “Surprise Lost” conditions. If “Surprise,” the torpedo planes were to go in first, then the horizontal bombers, finally the dive-bombers, while the fighters remained above for protection. (The idea was to drop as many torpedoes as possible before the smoke from the dive-bombing ruined the targets.) On the other hand, if the raiders had been detected and it was “Surprise Lost,” the dive-bombers and fighters would hit the airfields and antiaircraft defenses first; then the torpedo planes would come in when resistance was crushed. To tell the planes which deployment to take, Commander Fuchida was to fire his signal gun once for “Surprise,” twice for “Surprise Lost.” Trouble was, Commander Fuchida didn’t know whether the Americans had caught on or not. The reconnaissance planes were meant to tell him, but they hadn’t reported yet. It was now 7:40 A.M., and he couldn’t wait any longer. They were already well down the west coast and about opposite Haleiwa. Playing a hunch, he decided he could carry off the surprise. He held out his signal pistol and fired one “black dragon.” The dive-bombers began circling upward to 12,000 feet; the horizontal bombers spiraled down to 3500; the torpedo planes dropped until they barely skimmed the sea, ready for the honor of leading the assault. As the planes orbited into position, Fuchida noticed that the fighters weren’t responding at all. He decided that they must have missed his signal, so he reached out and fired another “black dragon.” The fighters saw it this time, but so did the dive-bombers. They decided it was the second “black dragon” of the “Surprise Lost” signal. Hence, they would be the ones to go in first. In a welter of confusion, the High Command’s plan for carefully integrated phases vanished; dive-bombers and torpedo planes eagerly prepared to slam into Pearl Harbor at the same time.

The second wave of Japanese attackers was less than an hour behind the first. This time, knowing the defenders would be on the alert, slow-flying, low-altitude torpedo planes were judged too vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and were not included in the attack. Only Val dive-bombers and high-altitude Kates delivered the punches, but they reversed the targets of their comrades an hour earlier. Instead of the battleships, the Kates dropped their bombs on planes and installations on Ford Island and at Hickam Field. Eighteen struck Ford Island, although the billowing smoke from the Arizona and other fires was so intense that it obscured much of the target. Twenty-seven bombers hit Hickam, while the remaining nine Kates pummeled Kaneohe Naval Air Station on the eastern shores of Oahu. The eighty Val dive-bombers largely sought targets of opportunity among the undamaged ships throughout the harbor. Judging that resistance from American fighters had been suppressed by the first strike, the thirty-six Zeroes accompanying the second wave broke into two groups and went after their own targets. Eighteen hit Kaneohe and Bellows Field, while the remaining Zeroes strafed service buildings and parked aircraft at Hickam Field. Even if few American planes were flying, a barrage of antiaircraft fire from ships in the harbor shot down six Zeroes and fourteen Vals in this second wave.

Iranian missiles were hitting cities and military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel, meanwhile, was not simply being hit by hundreds of Iranian missiles, but also by tens of thousands of missiles, rockets, and mortars from Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. With Israeli missiles and fighter jets firing back, it was clear the entire region was going to be set on fire.

In the meantime, I hope you shed the guilt of not being able to get everything done all the time. I hope you are gentle on yourself when you drop a ball. I hope you give yourself grace when you cannot handle everything facing you. Fire yourself from the expectation that you should be Superwoman or Thor.

Instead of pushing the engines of concern argument any further, Buckley revived his attack on Baldwin's radicalism. Before describing the next phase in his assault, it is worth noting what is revealed by this rhetorical choice. As he had demonstrated time and time again throughout his career, he was far more comfortable on the attack than he was when he attempted to build an affirmative case for his views. If he had chosen to defend his claim that the United States was providing a world historical model of how to treat minority groups, he would have had to confront many uncomfortable questions. Was it true that the United States was showing "dramatic concern" for "the Negro problem"? If so, what did the policy of concern entail, and what problem, precisely, was being addressed? Was the American example really unprecedented in the history of the world? And perhaps most interestingly—assuming for a moment that Buckley was right about these matters—it would be worth asking why and how this policy of concern was activated and sustained. Was it primarily because of the enlightened humanitarianism of those in power or because of the radicalism of freedom fighters?    As a conservative who had been dragging his feet on civil rights for more than a decade, serious attention to these questions would have put Buckley in an awkward position. To the extent that the United States was giving "the problems of a minority" exceptional concern, it was in spite of the intransigence of Buckley, writers he commissioned to write for The National Review, and political candidates he supported. He likely surmised that he had better not dwell too long on what was animating "dramatic concern" for the Negro problem or whether he was personally devoted to this "primary policy of concern." If the engines of concern had been working in the United States, it was no thanks to Buckley and his allies.

Without Bronn she would never have reached the Vale, she knew; the sellsword was as fierce a fighter as she had ever seen, and his sword had helped cut them through to safety. Yet for all that, Catelyn misliked the man. Courage he had, and strength, but there was no kindness in him, and little loyalty. And she had seen him riding beside Lannister far too often, talking in low voices and laughing at some private joke.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of ferocious-looking, turban-wearing men who looked like they came from another century. I had been writing about the very same men for The New Yorker. After receiving them in the White House, Reagan spoke to the press, referring to his foreign guests as “freedom fighters.” These were the Afghan mujahideen. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the “Evil Empire.” For Reagan, they were the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes to kill Osama bin Laden and his men in Afghanistan-based camps. Mr. bin Laden, at whom fifteen American missiles were fired to hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years earlier the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my entire life. when I look at you I see a fighter. I see resilience and strength and defiance that no one can touch. you take my. breath away, no one - and nothing - will change that.

Specific details of the 2014 assault underline this point: over a period of fifty-one days in July and August of 2014, Israel’s air force launched more than 6,000 air attacks, while its army and navy fired about 50,000 artillery and tank shells. Together, they utilized what has been estimated as a total of 21 kilotons (21,000 tons, or 42 million pounds) of high explosives. The air assault involved weapons ranging from armed drones and American Apache helicopters firing US-made Hellfire missiles to American F-16 and F-15 fighter-bombers carrying 2,000-pound bombs.

Shireen Baraka Barghouti lives in a cauldron of hate that often boils over. She’s never been outside the Gaza Strip even though it’s only twenty-five miles long and three miles wide at the narrowest borders, seven miles at the widest. Qasem Soleimani, until his death in 2020, was the major general over Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who invested monstrous sums of Iranian money in the youth of Gaza. In fact, Hamas simply could not exist without the Iranian money he supplied. And to make sure he covered all the bases, Soleimani also funded the rival Islamic Jihad. Shireen doesn’t hold back when speaking about the climate of death and destruction that has helped create. “In Gaza, terrorism is our number-one export,” she said. “How sad that whenever the Gaza Strip is mentioned, people automatically think of radical Islamic terrorists. But how could they not? Our Gaza government is run by them. Iran gives Hamas thirty million dollars a month. “At different times we’ve had al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in charge, to name just a few. New groups form every year, and our young Gaza boys see these ‘freedom fighters’ as heroes to emulate. “In Europe, people idolize soccer players. But not in Gaza. Here, men dressed in green uniforms, toting AK-47s, and shouting ‘death to Israel’ are featured on billboards. “The explosions are enough to cause you a nervous breakdown. A few years ago Hamas fired over ten thousand rockets into Israel in one extended attack over several months. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Israelis responded, and once we heard the drones humming over Gaza, we took cover. “Hamas has done nothing for the people of Gaza. While they line their pockets with millions of dollars, the people go without eating. They are cruel and intentionally keep us in this senseless war with Israel. “You might think because I live in Gaza and grew up Muslim that I hate Israel. But I don’t. I do detest Hamas, however—and all the other terrorist groups that make life unbearable in the Strip.

He soon laid eyes on the enemy again – warriors of Lorgar’s Legion, advancing through the unnatural dusk with raw confidence, surrounded by the spectral flicker of half-instantiated daemonkind. Their armour was carved with words of power, decorated with the bones and the flesh of those they had slain, their helms deformed into outstretched maws, or serpent’s mouths, or the leer of some Neverborn warp prince. Their cantrips stank and pulsed around them, making the natural air recoil and mist shred itself into appalled ribbons. They were engorged with their veil-drawn power, sick on it, their blades running with new-cut fat and their belts hung with severed scalps. For all that, they were still warriors, and they detected Valdor’s presence soon enough. Nine curved blades flickered into guard, nine genhanced bodies made ready to take him down. He raced straight into the heart of them, lashing out with his spear, slicing clean through corrupted ceramite. The combined blades danced, snickering in and out of one another’s path as if in some rehearsed ritual of dance-murder, all with the dull gold of the lone Custodian at its centre. A poisoned gladius nearly caught his neck. A fanged axe-edge nearly plunged into his chest. Long talons nearly pulled him down, ripe to be trodden into the mire under the choreo graphed stamp of bronze-chased boots. But not quite. They were always just a semi-second too slow, a fraction too predictable. The gap between the fighters was small, but it remained unbridgeable. His spear slammed and cut, parried and blocked, an eye-blink ahead of the lesser blades, a sliver firmer and more lethal in its trajectory, until black blood was thrown up around it in thick flurries and the lens-fire in the Word Bearers’ helms died out, one by one. Afterwards, Valdor withdrew, breathing heavily, taking a moment to absorb the visions he had been gifted with each kill. Lorgar’s scions were little different to the true daemons in what they gave him – brief visions of eternal torment, wrapped up in archaic religious ciphers and a kind of perpetually forced ecstasy. They were steeped in some of the purest, deepest strands of Chaos, wilfully dredging up the essence of its mutating, despoiling genius and turning it, through elaborate tortures, into a way of war. To fight them was to be reminded, more acutely than with most others, of the consequences of defeat.

The one drawback to modern adventuring, however, is that people can mistake it for something it’s not. The fact that someone can free-solo a sheer rock face or balloon halfway around the world is immensely impressive, but it’s not strictly necessary. And because it’s not necessary, it’s not heroic. Society would continue to function quite well if no one ever climbed another mountain, but it would come grinding to a halt if roughnecks stopped working on oil rigs. Oddly, though, it’s the mountaineers who are heaped with glory, not the roughnecks, who have a hard time even getting a date in an oil town. A roughneck who gets crushed tripping pipe or a fire fighter who dies in a burning building has, in some ways, died a heroic death. But Dan Osman did not; he died because he voluntarily gambled with his life and lost. That makes him brave—unspeakably brave—but nothing more. Was his life worth the last jump? Undoubtedly not. Was his life worth living without those jumps? Apparently not. The task of every person alive is to pick a course between those two extremes.

But she forgot that, if she fell, her family was there, waiting to catch her like one of those big trampolines that he'd got to use in that fire- fighter show

**"Rise Above"** (Verse 1) Neon lights and pickup trucks, I'm moving fast, kicking up dust. Life's a game, sometimes it's rough, but I've got dreams, they're enough. (Pre-Chorus) They say I'm just a small-town kid, chasing stars, on the grid. But I've got fire in my soul, I'm on a roll, I'm in control. (Chorus) 'Cause I'm stronger than that, I'm the comeback kid, With every breakdown, I've got more to give. I'll turn the whispers into my soundtrack, Watch me shine, 'cause I'm stronger than that. (Verse 2) I've seen the highs, I've felt the lows, but here I stand, ready to go. With every word they throw my way, I'll build my castle, I'll make my play. (Pre-Chorus) So let 'em talk, let 'em spin their tales, I'm rising up, I will not fail. With every rumor, I'll just laugh, I'm unbreakable, I'm stronger than that. (Chorus) Yeah, I'm stronger than that, I've got the heart of a lion, Turning setbacks into moments to rely on. I'll light up the stage, no holding back, I'm the headline act, 'cause I'm stronger than that. (Bridge) Sometimes life's a storm, a relentless attack, But I'm the eye of the hurricane, I've got my own back. With a smile on my face, I'll tip my hat, I'm not just surviving, I'm stronger than that. (Chorus) I'm stronger than that, I'm the hero in my story, Turning pain into power, into glory. I'll take the stage, this is where I'm at, Singing loud and proud, I'm stronger than that. (Outro) So here's to the fighters, the dreamers in black, We're all in this together, we're on the right track. With every chord, we'll combat, The noise of the world, 'cause we're stronger than that.

The buildings had grown up around the old Swift homestead, which, now that so much industry surrounded it, was not the most pleasant place to live in. Tom and his father only made this their stopping place in winter. In the summer they dwelt in a quiet cottage far removed from the scenes of their industry.

RALPH OF THE ROUND HOUSE; Or, Bound to Become a Railroad Man. RALPH IN THE SWITCH TOWER; Or, Clearing the Track. RALPH ON THE ENGINE; Or, The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail.

Yes, I didn't plan to be gone so long," apologized Tom. "But I thought while I was there I might as well go all the way with her." "And did you?" "Yes. In the electric runabout. I wanted to come back and get the airship, but she said she wanted to look nice when she met her relatives, and as yet airship travel is a bit mussy. Though when I get my cabined cruiser of the clouds I'll guarantee not to ruffle a curl of the daintiest girl!

In 2018 I went back to the mountains to become a wildland firefighter again. I hadn’t been in the field for three years, and since then I’d gotten used to training in nice gyms and living in comfort. Some might call it luxury. I was in a plush hotel room in Vegas when the 416 fire sparked and I got the call. What started as a 2,000-acre grass fire in the San Juan Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains was growing into a record breaking, 55,000-acre monster. I hung up and caught a prop plane to Grand Junction, loaded up in a U.S. Forest Service truck, and drove three hours to the outskirts of Durango, Colorado, where I suited up in my green Nomex pants and yellow, long-sleeved button down, my hard hat, field glasses, and gloves, and grabbed my super Pulaski—a wildland fire fighter’s most trusted weapon. I can dig for hours with that thing, and that’s what we do. We don’t spray water. We specialize in containment, and that means digging lines and clearing brush so there’s no fuel in the path of an inferno. We dig and run, run and dig, until every muscle is spent. Then we do it all over again.

The Humanitarian Nerd (Sonnet 1538) Machines have a tendency of disconnecting mind from society. Unless you're driven by a humane dream, silicon dreams only facilitate inhumanity. Worse than silicosis is silicon psychosis, Worse than septicemia es la indiferencia. Worse than writer's block is fighter's block, to settle in ice-age is insult of la conciencia. Before you master raspberry and arduino, learn to master common everyday humanity. If you're not burning with the fire to do good, there's no point to your gray's anatomy.

Jasmine turned to see Fatimah, who was chanting something in an unfamiliar language, her eyes locked on Dahish's. Jasmine's mouth fell open as Fatimah's body jerked forward and began to spin, shedding her mortal skin... and revealing herself to be a magnificent blue genie. Dahish roared in fury, focused solely on the genie now. Fatimah extended her arm, sparks flowing from her fingertips as she fought Dahish's breaths of fire with flashes of lightning. While the genie and the ifrit battled on the landing above, and Aladdin and the street fighters defended the palace from the ghūls and monsters, Scheherazade's words echoed in Jasmine's ears. Create the ending of your story that you choose. Forget what is possible... And with the power of her conviction, Jasmine raced up the staircase two at a time to where the ifrit and the genie battled. Taking a steely breath, she leaped up onto the ifrit's fiery back, catching it by surprise--- and with Scheherazade's knife, Jasmine stabbed Dahish in the eye. Dahish flailed blindly, tumbling to the floor. Fatimah swooped down next to him and something materialized in her palm. The brass bottle. The atrium echoed with the sound of his defeated screams as Fatimah captured Dahish and forced him back into his brass bottle, throwing it into the last flames of the fire with Payam's bloodied body. As they burned, the remaining ghūls and snakes disintegrated before Jasmine's eyes, turning to ash now that the ifrit who controlled them was gone. Jasmine and Aladdin ran into each other's arms, exhausted and elated. The battle was won. Fatimah floated toward them, bowing gracefully, as if they hadn't all just been through a war. "Well done, Sultana.

More than playing with my friends, I love to play with my enemies.

Because we have both seen what that does to people, and the idea of doing it to someone else would never cross our minds. Plus, I would never let you. I might not be as strong as you guys or have the money, but I’m a fighter like you said. Survived that way. You will never hurt me because I will never let you. I would kill you, kick your fucking asses if you tried. Diesel might cut my skin or fill me with pain, but it’s my choice. I want that, and I refuse to be ashamed by it. But I always want Kenzo’s smile and soft teasing… and your ice and fire.” “And Garrett?” I have to ask. “I want him too,” she admits. “I even told him that, but we’re taking it slow. I won’t ask what happened again. He’ll tell me when he’s ready, and I hope one day, we can work through it.” “That sounds like the words of someone who plans on staying,” I tease, and she laughs. “Do I have a choice?” She winks.

forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. • • •

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. • • • When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed. • • •

Encourage your loved one to eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, maintain a reasonable weight, stop smoking, and consume alcohol in moderation. If you can’t get your fire fighter to cooperate, model a healthy lifestyle yourself. A new study of 4,700 couples showed that there is a strong association between the health of husbands and the health of wives. Married people tend to follow the same kinds of diets, for better or worse, or to smoke if their spouse does.

With Rae’s hand in mine, I pull her through the crowd behind me, pushing and shoving anyone in the way. Someone elbows me in the ribs, another kicks the back of my knee, causing me to stumble forward. With fire in my eyes, I regain my balance and prepare to set everyone ablaze. Rae tells me to forget about it and pushes me forward. A circle has formed around the fighters, two skinny blonde kids. One bounces up and down in nothing but a t-shirt, while the other drinks from a forty ounce can of Coors Light. The crowd waits impatiently for the first swing. They taunt, they squeal. What an audience. Violence will solve this; someone was insulted and the person responsible will pay the consequences with however much abuse his body can take. What their knuckles and knees say will be louder than anything from their mouths or minds.

If the American culture of movies, shopping males, and soft drinks cannot inspire us, there are other Americas that can: Americas of renegades and prisoners, of dreamers and outsiders. Something can be salvaged from the twisted wreck of the “democratic sprit” celebrated by Walt Whitman, something subverted from the sense that each person has worth and dignity: a spirit that can be sustained on self-reliance and initiative. These Americas are America of the alienated and marginalized: indigenous warriors, the freedom fighters of civil rights, the miners’ rebelling in the Appalachian Mountains. America’s past is full of revolutionary hybrids; our lists could stretch infinitely onwards towards undiscovered past or future. The monolith of a rich and plump America must be destroyed to make room for many Americas. A folk anarchist culture rising in the periphery of America, and can grow in the fertile ground that lies beneath the concrete of the great American wasteland. Anyone struggling today – living the hard life and fighting the even harder fight – is a friend even if he or she can never share a single meal with us, or speak our language. The anarchists of America, with our influence as wide as our prairies and dreams that could light those prairies on fire, can make entire meals on discarded food, live in abandoned buildings, and travel on the secret paths of lost highways and railroads, we are immensely privileged.

It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War

For the kids at Chaff, the annual Career Day, held about two weeks before the summer break, was enough to make most of them at contemplate career suicide before they'd even taken an aptitude test or a written resume. Held outdoors on the schoolyard blacktop, the assemblage of coal miners, driving-range golf-ball retrievers, basket weavers, ditch diggers, book-binders, traumatized fire-fighters, and the world's last astronaut never does much to inspire.

Later on, Orpheus stood beside the hearth fire in the center of the hall and sang about the day’s adventure. On his lips, the northern raiders were transformed from swift, deadly riders to winged and taloned monsters, part hawk, part woman. Because they could fly so high that spears and arrows couldn’t reach them, only men with the blood of the gods in their veins could end the havoc they caused. Luckily, a ship of heroes came ashore to rid the land of the hideous creatures. Zetes and Kalais, the sons of Boreas, had inherited the North Wind’s ability to fly and soon defeated the Harpies. They would trouble good Lord Phineas no more. Orpheus finished his song, and the men cheered and banged their fists on the tables so loudly that it seemed like they’d bring the roof down in pieces. As for me, I kept my mouth shut and my arms folded. Orpheus noticed my frosty look when he sat back down. “You didn’t like it,” he murmured. “They deserved better,” I replied stiffly. “They were brave fighters.” “I thought I made that clear. Just look at Zetes over there, grinning ear to ear in spite of a nasty arrow wound that probably still burns like Hephaestus’s own forge-fires. It might leave him half lame for life, but he won’t mind, because in my song, he owns the sky.” “You didn’t see the way he fought today,” I shot back. “He’s not worthy to own a mud puddle. They fought well, those women. They were as skilled and courageous as any man, so you turned them into monsters!” Orpheus was silent for a little while. Then he took a sip of wine and said, “They attacked without warning, they destroyed good ships for the sake of destruction, they violated the sanctity of a sacrifice to the gods, and they would have cut down a blind old man, king or not, if we hadn’t come ashore when we did. I won’t argue with you about their valor or their mastery of weapons and horses, but see them for what they are, lad. You say I’ve made them monsters, yet you’d make them gods. They’re women, human women, as praiseworthy and as flawed as any fighting men I’ve ever known, but plain truth makes a poor song.

A flower splatted against the chest of one of Brigan’s top swordsmen, riding to Fire’s right. When Fire laughed at him, he beamed, and handed the flower to her. On this journey through the city streets Fire was surrounded not just by her guard but by Brigan’s most proficient fighters, Brigan himself on her left. The commander wore the gray of his troops, and he’d positioned the standard-bearer some distance behind. It was all in an attempt to reduce the attention Fire drew, and Fire knew she wasn’t playing her part in the charade. She should have been sitting gravely, her face bent to her hands, catching no one’s eye. Instead she was laughing—laughing, and smiling, and numb to her aches and pains, and sparkling with the strangeness and the bustle of this place.

From the front passenger seat, one of Yaqub’s fighters produced a short-barreled shotgun. As soon as Harvath saw it come above the line of the dashboard, he yelled, “Gun!” and fired multiple rounds through the windshield, killing the man instantly. The ISI driver tried to unholster his weapon, but Sloane was already at his window and fired two shots at his head, shattering the glass and killing him. When the fighter in the backseat on the passenger side made himself known, Chase had almost been on top of him. The man didn’t wait to get the door all the way open before firing. He sent heavy 7.62 rounds from his AK-47 slicing right through the door panel. Chase had to lunge between two parked cars to take cover and avoid being hit.

Again and again, the question was asked: What made the Poles so good? The answer wasn’t simple. Generally older than their British counterparts, most Polish pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time in a variety of aircraft, as well as combat experience in both Poland and France. Unlike British fliers, they had learned to fly in primitive, outdated planes and thus had not been trained to rely on a sophisticated radio and radar network. As a result, said one British flight instructor, “their understanding and handling of aircraft was exceptional.” Although they appreciated the value of tools such as radio and radar, the Poles never stopped using their eyes to locate the Luftwaffe. “Whereas British pilots are trained…to go exactly where they are told, Polish pilots are always turning and twisting their heads to spot a distant enemy,” an RAF flier noted. The Poles’ intensity of concentration was equaled only by their daring. British pilots were taught to fly and fight with caution. The Poles, by contrast, had been trained to be aggressive, to crowd and intimidate the enemy, to make him flinch and then bring him down. After firing a brief opening burst at a range of 150 to 200 yards, the Poles would close almost to point-blank range. “When they go tearing into enemy bombers and fighters they get so close you would think they were going to collide,” observed one RAF flier. On several occasions, crew members of Luftwaffe bombers, seeing that 303’s Hurricanes were about to attack, baled out before their planes were hit. On September 15, the Poles of

I can't deny the attraction between us.” She paused and emitted a shaky laugh. “But surely you must know that we would never suit! I am meant for a small, quiet life—your way of living is too grand and fast for me. You would grow bored with me in a very short time, and you would long to be free of me—” “No.” “—and I would find it such a misery, trying to live with a man of your appetite and ambition. One of us would have to change, and that would cause terrible resentment, and the marriage would come to a bitter end.” “You can't be certain of that.” “I can't take such a risk,” she replied with absolute finality. Bronson stared at her through the shadows, his head tilted a bit, as if he were relying on some sixth sense to penetrate her thoughts. He came to her and sank to his haunches before the chair. He startled her by reaching for her hand, his fingers closing over her small, cold fist. Slowly his thumb rubbed over her knotted knuckles. “There is something you're not telling me,” he murmured. “Something that makes you anxious… even afraid. Is it me? Is it my past, the fact that I was a fighter, or is it—” “No,” she said with a laugh that caught hard in her throat. “Of course I'm not afraid of you.” “I know fear when I see it,” he persisted. Holly shook her head, refusing to debate the comment. “We must put this night behind us,” she said, “or I will have to take Rose and leave right away. And I don't wish to leave you or your family. I want to stay as long as possible and fulfill our agreement. Let us agree not to speak of this again.” His eyes gleamed with black fire. “Do you think that's possible?” “It has to be,” she whispered. “Please, Zachary, tell me you'll try.” “I'll try,” he said tonelessly. She drew a trembling breath. “Thank you.” “You'd better leave now,” he said, unsmiling. “The sight of you in that nightgown is about to drive me mad.” Were she not so miserable, Holly would have been amused by the remark. The tiers of ruffles that adorned her nightgown and pelisse made the ensemble far less revealing than an ordinary day gown. It was only Bronson's inflamed state of mind that made her seem desirable. “Will you be retiring now as well?” she asked. “No.” He went to fill his glass, and answered her over his shoulder. “I have some drinking to do.” Wrenched with unexpressed emotion, she tried to twist her mouth into a smile. “Good night, then.” “Good night.” He did not glance back at her, his shoulders held stiffly as he listened to the sound of her retreating footsteps.

Lulu is not a big woman. This Atlanta grandmother is just over five feet tall. But she is a fighter, and she can shoot -- as several black carjackers discovered. In April 2012 Lulu took her grandson back to her daughter’s house. When she got in her car to leave she was approached by armed men. They mistakenly identified her as easy prey: “(The suspect) shouted, ‘Give me the (blanking) money and open the (blanking) door!’” Campbell told The Telegraph, describing her ordeal. “I said, ‘Oh my God, somebody is going to rob me.’ I said, ‘Baby, you’re going to kill me anyway, so I don’t have to open it!’” Campbell says the man fired at her, missing. The 57-year-old fired back, striking him in the chest. Her truck sustained eight bullet holes in the hood, one in the grill. Both front side windows were destroyed. The second man fled after she shot at him. “I carry a gun all the time,” she said.3

The US military and the CIA got busy working on plans for the conquest of Cuba. And it would be no Mickey Mouse boat operation this time. This time, Fidel Castro and his hairy henchmen would find out what it felt like to have American fighter-bombers drop the fires of hell on their heads three hundred times a day.

You will need to come in as soon as possible, the sooner we treat this, the better the chance of recovery…” Rose began to cry. “Will I die?” The doctor didn’t reply. Treatment began only days later, Rose took to it really well, phoning Kelly was the hardest part of telling the news, but Kelly supported her mother, offering to take some time out and come home to take care of her. Rose went into remission, the cancer was brought under control and Jim planned a holiday for her in Spain. Madeleine McCann a three-year-old child went missing in Portugal. Heavy flooding devastated Hull and Sheffield at least three people died. Four fire fighters were feared dead in the ‘Atherstone fire disaster.

Fire Fighter Not many people remember us, not many people care unless a life is saved or lost, while we are fighting there. We learn to respect the fire we fight, and even love it too. In order to end its destructive path, It's what we train to do. There are many who can't comprehend, why we love the things they fear. We're the first they call in their time of need, it's the reason why we're here The next alarm might make us proud, And heroes of the same kind, Or maybe it will be our last, in service to man kind. But whatever fate brings us, It doesn't change our hearts. We're firefighters to the end. We'll always do our part.

Fox three, Brewski!” Jimmy Maili shouted on the command channel. All four Chinese fighters were locked on solid on his APG-77 radar, and the fire control computer had selected the best targets. With the press of a button, the left main weapon bay door opened and an AIM-120D AMRAAM was ejected into the slipstream and homed in on its target, followed a few seconds later by another from the right-side weapons bay. He could see tiny sparkles in the distance and assumed it was the Chinese pilots ejecting flares when they got the missile launch warning.

The Lord Commander had given him his orders when they made their camp on the Fist. “You’re no fighter. We both know that, boy. If it happens that we’re attacked, don’t go trying to prove otherwise, you’ll just get in the way. You’re to send a message. And don’t come running to ask what the letter should say. Write it out yourself, and send one bird to Castle Black and another to the Shadow Tower.” The Old Bear pointed a gloved finger right in Sam’s face. “I don’t care if you’re so scared you foul your breeches, and I don’t care if a thousand wildlings are coming over the walls howling for your blood, you get those birds off, or I swear I’ll hunt you through all seven hells and make you damn sorry that you didn’t.” And Mormont’s own raven had bobbed its head up and down and croaked, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.

The way America handled its “first team” differed markedly from Japan’s. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated squadrons in the Solomons, Captain John L. Smith, give him his Medal of Honor, and refuse his requests to return to combat, “not until you have trained 150 John L. Smiths.

I dropped to my knees next to Nakari, eyes welling up already, and in a strange way I welcomed the blur to my vision and let the tears come; I’d never done so before because it had never seemed the proper time to mourn. Ben had been there when I discovered the burnt bodies of my aunt and uncle and I’d bottled everything up in shock, telling myself that the Empire was hunting us and we had to get to Alderaan. When Vader cut down Ben, there was no time to mourn him, either, only time to escape the Death Star and then join the Battle of Yavin. I lost my old friend Biggs to a TIE fighter during that battle, but I could hardly allow myself to think of that when I had to make my firing run down the trench. Then, incredibly, we won the day and everyone was happy, and there was always more work to do after that. It was never the right time to stop and feel all that I’d lost.

which would be the only true statement in the chat with the Syrian fighter. They used a computer server in Germany, where FireEye found many of their chats in unprotected directories. A handful of the targets of the Syrian operation were contacted in recent months by FireEye researchers. ‘‘They really didn’t understand what had happened,’’ Mr.

The fact is America’s democracy uses a combination of capitalism (businesses and banks) and socialism (public schools, police, fire fighters and the military) and our most successful times have occurred when government, business and people work together and don’t demonize each other.

Rikar was entertaining the soldiers, again, telling crude jokes and making fun of people in Naru. But mostly, he said things at Talis’s expense. He told stories about Xhan, Talis’s older brother, and what a tremendous fighter Xhan had been (as opposed to Talis). It didn’t matter that Talis had beat Rikar in the Blood Dagger competition, Rikar always chose to tell stories about older fights in which Talis had lost. Rikar whispered something into a younger soldier’s ear, and they both scoffed and shook their heads at Talis. Could

Just then he spotted a German Messerschmitt in the sky ahead of them. It was firing its machine guns and seemed to be aiming right for them. He ordered everyone to dive into the alleyway beside them, and they all took cover just as the fighter roared by, killing all those who remained in its path. Then came another explosion, just behind them. Luc pressed his body down on Monique and Jacqueline, doing everything he could to protect them. But he knew they couldn’t stay pinned down. He could hear the German tanks rumbling up the road from the east. The Nazis were approaching far more quickly than he’d expected. They had to keep moving.

Fighters from various factions, hungry for meat, soon realized the zoo had a ready supply. They kebabed the crane and the flamingo, roasting them over an open flame as zoo workers watched. They killed the two tigers for their pelts. One day a few fighters wanted to see how many bullets it took to kill an elephant. The answer: forty. Others stole the wooden fences from the zebra enclosure to feed fires. Animals died of starvation, of disease. The

And so Andy Malloy became the first of many managers I was to have throughout my career. Up to the time I teamed up with Jack Kearns, the managers I had were mostly my friends or well-meaning acquaintances who tried to help me get fights, arranging the small details so that I could dedicate myself to my training. I never signed a contract with any of them, not even Kearns. It just didn’t seem necessary in those days; a handshake was stronger and more meaningful than any inked signature. The only ingredients necessary were respect and trust. There is no doubt in my mind that a fighter needs a manager. Ideally, a manager gets up good likely bouts, arranges suitable dates and times and living accommodations, hires and sometimes fires sparring partners, “sells” his fighter’s ability and skill to others by taking scouting trips and being a good press agent, and honestly handles all accounts as well. This gives the fighter more time to keep himself in shape, running miles, punching bags, jumping rope, sleeping. Together the fighter and the manager are a team, pulling and pushing toward the same goal. If either takes advantage of the other, underestimates or oversteps the given role, then that’s it; a loss of respect sets in and the whole relationship is shot to hell. If such a split does take place, it is usually the fighter who winds up with the short end of the stick. I learned many things from my manager Andy Malloy. I learned to make my body a complete unit, the muscles of my feet, legs, waist, back and shoulders all contributing to the power of my arm. He taught me, in short, that my entire body was at stake in the ring, not just my fists. He was a good teacher.

I know I'm playing with fire but for her, I would burn.

Mr. X went over to his laptop and fired the Dell up. Sitting down next to the dried brown stain of a blood pool, he called up the Scrolls and found the relevant passage. The lines of the prophecy calmed him: There shall be one to bring the end before the master, a fighter of modern time found in the seventh of the twenty-first, and he shall be known in the numbers he bears: One more than the compass he apperceives, Though mere four points to make at his right, Three lives has he, Two scores on his fore, and with a single black eye, in one well will he be birthed and die.

by 1947 nearly 47,000 worked in the region.78 They harvested onions, peas, sweet corn, sugar beets, cucumbers, hops and other crops, and, in direct violation of the agreement, found themselves pressed into jobs in canneries and food processing plants. The U.S. Forest Service even employed braceros as fire fighters, where at least one died on the job.79 In spite of their considerable contributions to the war effort, braceros faced a mixed response in Northwest communities. Residents praised braceros as a “God-send to farmers,” yet they routinely faced overt discrimination. 80 Bars and other public accommodations denied entry with signs reading “No Mexicans, White Trade Only” and “No Japs or Mexicans Allowed.

Ok, that’s cool,” said Dave, “but as I was saying— “I am Guyjack!” said another ninja, jumping up and doing a flip in the air. He was wearing light blue robes. “I am the leader of the Ninja Squad, and master of ice!” “And I am Ash,” said another ninja. “I want to be the very best—like no-one ever was! I am the leader of the Ninja Squad!” “Listen,” said Dave, “you don’t all need to—” “I am Chase!” yelled another ninja, doing a double backflip and then pulling a pose. “I am an agile, sneaky and strong elf, and the noble leader of the Ninja Squad!” Dave noticed that Chase had pointy ears. Although something about them didn’t look quite right... “I’m Knight Swagger!” said a huge ninja with muscles bulging through his black robes. “I’m a pro fighter and…” “Let me guess,” said Dave, “the leader of the Ninja Squad?” “Um, yes,” said Knight Swagger. A ninja in armour stepped forward. At first Dave thought, to his surprise, that the armour was made of bedrock, but then he looked closer and saw that it was just painted wood. “Behold,” said the ninja, “it is I, Knight Galaxy, the master of bedrock and slayer of lies. Also, I’m the leader of the Ninja Squad.” Dave was just about to say something when another ninja ran forward, flipping through the air and swirling two wooden swords around. “I am Oof!” he said. “The leader of the Ninja Squad! No foe can survive my swift sword attack ninjutsu!” “Do you fear the dark?” asked another ninja. This one was clad in black robes but without an eye slit, so he looked like a shadow. “I am Darkest Night, the master of the darkness and leader of the Ninja Squad!” “Flame on!” yelled another ninja, running forward and striking a pose. He was wearing red robes. “I am Jolt Flame, the leader of the Ninja Squad and Master of the Sacred Fire!” “I am the leader of the Ninja Squad too!” said another ninja. He had a white skull painted on the front of his hood and bones painted on the rest of his body. “I am Segid the Skeleton!” “But… you’re not a skeleton?” said Dave. “One day I will be,” said Segid. “I am Jackson,” said another ninja. “The Ninja in the Iron Mask and the leader of the Ninja Squad.”  True to his name, Jackson was wearing a helmet made of iron that covered his whole face, leaving only holes for his eyes.

A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.

The last thing Cole needed was Puff the Magic MMA Fighter showing up at his door breathing fire. By five o’clock, Pandora had finally begun to feel human again.

Red Flight, Break!

Listen to me carefully, Grace Shaw. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life. When I look at you, I see a fighter. I see resilience and strength and defiance that no one can touch. You take my breath away, and no one—and nothing—will change that.

Fire fighter finds me

For two years the battles raged across the lands, one side fighting for conquest, the other for freedom. Othium-powered weapons wreaked havoc on defending armies. The red fire was hard to resist, but the white light was stronger. Gradually the tide turned and the freedom fighters regained control of their lands and their cities. The stage was set for the final battle. The opposing forces met outside the Ackar city of Erbea in 1302 and the forces of good won the day. The alchemist escaped and was about to take his revenge at a wedding ceremony when he was bound by the white light. All that remained was his heart, or maybe his soul, encapsulated in a piece of red rock. Dewar the Third succeeded his father and the new king promised a time of peace and prosperity. History would call him the Peacemaker. Now, two hundred years on, a new Emperor seeks to rule the world, while an illegitimate son sets out on a path towards revenge and a thief begins to learn his trade. It is time for the alchemist to return.

I got called Smoke because I'm a fighter, and so are you. That's why we work. Just like there's no smoke without fire, there's no me without you. You're my fire, Kara. I love you.” Kara has tears in her eyes, and she smiles. “I love you, too, Smoke.

If liquid courage smelled like cologne and gushed out of my penis, I’d make a better fire fighter than I’m not right now.

Porkins was right, Dave knew. There wasn’t much else that he, Carl and Porkins could do apart from watch. They didn’t want to hurt Spidroth, so they couldn’t fire arrows at her or attack her with swords. Plus, Spidroth was such an amazing fighter that Alex was the only one who stood a chance against her in battle.

That is where we live - in that place - between life and death. It is a dark arena, where a game is played against a malicious enemy who never stops seeking victims. And sometimes, we have to make the trade. We have to trade ourselves for those we’ve sworn to serve.

Why is it that the U.S. government doesn't reward public servants by allowing them to live tax-free?

A short time later, Haganah officers came to take the village from the Irgun. One officer remarked, “All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women, or children.” He noted, “The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.” Another Haganah commander sneered, “You are swine,” and ordered his men to surround the militiamen. A tense standoff ensued as the Haganah commanders debated about forcibly disarming the dissidents and shooting them if they refused. At last, the Haganah commander ordered the Irgun to clean the village and bury the dead. They carried the bodies to a rock quarry and set them ablaze. “It was a lovely spring day,” the Haganah commander recorded. “The almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out, and everywhere there was the stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry.”8 The next day, the Haganah commander issued a communiqué: “For a full day Etzel [Irgun] and Lechi [Stern] soldiers stood and slaughtered men, women, and children—not in the course of the operation, but in a premeditated act which had as its intention slaughter and murder only. They also took spoils, and when they finished their work, they fled.” Irgun and Stern leaders denied that any deliberate killings of civilians occurred at Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin noted that they had set up a loudspeaker at the entrance of the village, warning civilians to leave: “By giving this humane warning, our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. A substantial number of the inhabitants obeyed the warning and they were unhurt. A few did not leave their stone houses—perhaps because of the confusion. The fire of the enemy was murderous—to which the number of our casualties bears elegant testimony. Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable casualties.”9 The Jewish Agency did not accept Begin’s explanation and immediately condemned the killings. Regardless of which view was correct, the events at Deir Yassin would have a more far-reaching impact than anyone could have imagined.

Fire typically spreads by slowly heating the fuel in front of it—first drying it, then igniting it. Usually, a walking pace will easily keep fire fighters ahead of this process. But sometimes a combination of wind, fuel, and terrain conspires to produce a blowup in which the fire explodes out of control.

Cat operators suffer some of the highest fatality rates on fires because they are reluctant to leave their machines until it’s too late; on the Butte fire they had to be dragged off their machines by other fire fighters. Burnovers are considered catastrophes even if no one gets killed, and the people who survive are given counseling within twenty-four hours.

Description: red-gold or orange scales; enormous wings Abilities: powerful fighters and fliers, can breathe fire Queen: Queen Scarlet Alliances: currently allied with Burn and the MudWings in the great war

The Ginkgo Leaf Jet was developed by the last remaining eco-engineers, a response to the war-torn skies dominated by traditional fighter jets. While the old machines roared with fire, the Ginkgo whispered through the clouds—silent, unseen, unstoppable.

A great number of young people have been inspired to such an extent as to make them courageous enough to speak to sinners every chance they get...prayer meetings are held in the trains and many converts are made. The public houses and beer clubs are empty; old debts are paid, jealousy vanishes, church and family feuds are healed; great drunkards, prize fighters and gamblers pray in the services and give their testimony; the chapels throughout the populous valleys of Glamorganshire are full every night, all denominations have sunk their small differences to co-operate as one body and the huge processions along the streets send a thrill of terror through the vilest sinners. Owing to these things the attention of the whole of South Wales is entirely captivated, the revival is the topic in all spheres and amongst all sections of society; and strong people are overwhelmed by reading the newspaper accounts of it. People begin to pour in from all parts of England, Scotland, Ireland to see and judge for themselves of the nature and characteristics of the movement and most of them say - “This is truly the work of the Holy Spirit and it is wonderful”2

Hesitation is death. A racecar driver doesn't have the liberty of thinking about the next turn for a week or so. They need to act or die. A fighter jet pilot can't "think about things" when a bomb is heading their way, they need to act immediately and trust themselves to do the right thing, with their life being at actual stake. An athlete can't stop mid-run to ask their wife if it's okay that they cross the finish line. They need to run like hell just set their feet on fire. A CEO does not have the right to hesitate or ponder on things for days on end. You either do it or you don't, and if there's no impulse to act to the left or to the right, you are probably not a natural born decisionmaker. Slow decisionmakers don't belong in top management. High performance people make high performance decisions at high speeds, they trust themselves, and they act.

Transgender claims can affect all our lives. Once biology and the history and experiences of what it means to live in a sexed body is rejected, there is no touchstone especially for children, who are left with the confusion of picking a gender. This confusion encourages a regression to sex-role stereotypes because it’s the sex-role markers that are out there and easier to grab onto, the confusion ratified by the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. If you like trucks and want to be a fire fighter, you’re a boy. If you like dolls and dress up in frilly clothes, you’re a girl.

I’ll never be a hunter or a fighter, but I’ll set the world on fire if that was what she needed.

Violet has given me the opportunity to prove myself, and I’ll be damned if I mess it up again. I’ll never be a hunter or a fighter, but I’ll set the world on fire if that was what she needed.

People, men like Brick and his team, seldomly viewed themselves as heroes. Dangerous, unpredictable, fucked up, beyond redemption, destroyer, fighter, serviceman, soldier, slayer, brute, savage, and deadly. Those are the words they’d use. Not hero.

The difference between a heel and a coward and one who jumps in the fire and one who runs away from the fire; is up to the individual in how they manage a given situation.

The first thing I do with a young fighter,” D’Amato said, “is explain fear. Most people don’t know much about fear. They think it’s a sign of being yellow. But fear is normal. It’s like fire. If you let it get out of control, it will destroy you and everything around you. If you can learn how to control it, you can make it work for you. Fear is just nature’s way of preparing you to fight.”7

Like so much of the city, the Kurfürstendamm was left in rubble by the bombing and subsequent fires of World War II. From the now-destroyed Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche to the remains of Halensee, only 43 of the 235 buildings were habitable by 1945, the other 192 were completely destroyed. By the end of the conflict the Ku’damm had been used as a runway for fighter aircraft and had been one of the last lines of defence of the city, as Russian army tanks rolled up the boulevard from the bridge at Halensee, heading for bunkers in the Tiergarten, and onwards to the Reichstag.

Hamas hides its rockets and bombs in schools and mosques, builds tunnels under United Nations facilities, and often surrounds its fighters with children and other civilians, using them as human shields. It hopes that Israel will either refrain from firing on known terrorists or that, if Israel does fire, enough children will die for the world to express outrage against Israel. In other words, this organization launches rockets hoping to kill children, and when Israel responds, it does all it can to make sure that only Palestinian children die.

The fighter pilots thought they were the real heroes, but our missions required guts and skill: the soldiers and bush reconnaissance troops, referred to as recces, held us in the highest esteem. Our squadron’s pilots had saved many lives, picking up the seriously wounded in the most difficult of places, in small clearings in the bush never intended for the use of winged aircraft, braving ground fire and surface-to-air missiles.

Pakistan first tried to seize Kashmir in 1947. As British decolonization of South Asia loomed, the sovereign of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, hoped to keep the country independent of either of the two new states, India or Pakistan. As Singh held out, marauders from Pakistan’s tribal areas invaded the territory of Jammu-Kashmir in hopes of taking it for Pakistan and were supported extensively by Pakistan’s nascent provincial and federal governments. This attack expanded into the first war between India and Pakistan. When it was over and the cease-fire line was drawn, Pakistan controlled about one-third of Kashmir, and India controlled the remainder. Although the war ended in a stalemate with international intervention, Pakistan may have rightly concluded that the strategy of using irregular fighters succeeded. After all, Pakistan had claimed at least some part of Kashmir, which it would not have had

An engineer who stands at his post, tools in hand, dies no less a warrior’s death than a fighter with fingers gripped tightly around his rifle.

The True Comrade Is A Pacifist! Love Is What Drives All Great Revolutionaries, Love For The People, Love For The Country, And, Most Importantly Love For All Of Humanity! A Revolution Only Requires One's Voice, Not A Single Bullet Is Needed To Be Fired...We Are All Comrades In The Battlefield Of Life! Listen To The Oppressed, Speak Up Against Injustice It Is Our Duty As Sane Human Beings, Feel The Pain Of Those Who Are Suffering Because The Suffrage Of Another It Is Your Own...We Are All Brothers, And, Sisters In This Game We Call Life!

To set the scene: Madzy Brender à Brandis was a young mother with two small children, trying to survive through years of hardship and danger – and some unexpected pleasures. In May 1942, after her husband was suddenly taken prisoner and sent to a German camp, she began writing a diary to record the details of her life – for her husband to read when he returned, if he returned. She called it “this faithful book.” Here are some passages: 28 October 1944 [when the electricity was cut off because of lack of fuel for the generating plants]: “We have to use the daylight to its utmost, and we figure this out already in the morning. [At the end of the afternoon] We flew faster and faster to use the last bits of daylight, lay the table, lay everything ready so that at 5:30 we could eat in the dusk until we couldn’t find our mouths any more. Blackout and one candle, finished eating and washed the dishes. Read to children in pyjamas and then they to bed. Then unraveled a knitted baby blanket [so that the yarn could be used to knit other things] and at 9:00 blew out the candle and continued by moonlight. But now I’m going to bed, tired but satisfied with my efforts, though very sad about all the misery.” 1 November 1944 [after a threat of having the house demolished]: “Well, our house is still standing. I filled a laundry bag with many things, and everything is standing ready [in case there was a need to evacuate]. Because there is much flying again. At one moment an Allied fighter plane flew over very low; just then three German soldiers were walking past our house and one, “as a joke,” shot his gun at the plane. Tje! What a scare we had!” 24 December 1944 [addressing her husband, still in the camp]: “The whole house is in wonderful peace and I’m sitting by the fire, which gives me just enough light to write this. [The upper door of the small heater, when opened, gave a bit of light.] My Dicks, I don’t have to tell you how very much I miss you on this evening. It is a gnawing sense of longing. But beyond that there is a sorrow in me, a despair about everything, that pervades my whole being. Besides that, however, I’ve already for days seen the light of Christ coming closer and in these days that gives me hope. So does the waxing moon, the hard frost, the bright sun – in a word, all the light in nature after that endless series of misty, rainy, dark days. And so I sit close to my unsteady little light, that constantly abandons me, and think of you. It’s as though you are very close to me. I’m so grateful for everything that I have: your love, the two children, and everything around me.” 12 February 1945 [during the “Hunger Winter” of 1944-45, after one of her trips to forage for food]: “Today I went to Rika in Renswoude: 1¼ hours cycling there, 2½ hours walking back pushing a broken-down bicycle and with 25 pounds of rye [the whole grain, not flour] through streaming rain, while there was constant booming of artillery and bombing in the distance.

Of 10,492 V-1s ultimately fired at Britain, about 4,000 were destroyed by fighters, balloons, and antiaircraft guns, while others veered off course or crashed prematurely. But about 2,400 hit greater London, killing 6,000 and badly injuring 18,000. (Not one struck Tower Bridge.) It was, an official British history concluded, “an ordeal perhaps as trying to Londoners as any they had endured throughout the war.

One factor that led the Central Intelligence Agency to believe it could topple Castro was its success in Guatemala in 1954. Using a force of only 150 exiles and a handful of World War II P-47 fighters flown by American contract pilots, the CIA brought down the legally elected government of Socialist President Jacobo Arbenz in less than a week, firing hardly a shot, and installed the Agency’s handpicked leader, Carlos Castillo Armas.

After the season, I applied for a position with the North Cascades smoke jumpers in Washington State and got a new tattoo on my left forearm, a tattoo of my life, with the motto “Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est,” which means “The World Is Made of Fire” in Latin, a quote from a Helprin book (A Soldier in the Great War) that I had read maybe five years earlier. It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul.

It was the French who fired the first shot. That evening Rafale fighters bombed a convoy of Gaddafi’s tanks and armored vehicles just outside Benghazi. Operation Odyssey Dawn had begun. A short while later 110 cruise missiles were launched from U.S. ships in the Gulf, targeting radar, communications, fuel storage and air defenses around Tripoli and Misrata, followed by air strikes from British Tornados.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.4

But some things require a person to be more than a name. A kingdom in need of a fighter. The threat of a war that could destroy everything. Or a girl holding fire in her hands.

9. Pilots worry about how their call signs will sound over the radio, which does not transmit either the very high or the very low frequencies in the human voice. This slight alteration sometimes renders a familiar sound unrecognizable. I remember well one fighter group call sign, “Flit Gun,” which was always misunderstood by ground controllers when transmitted by the squeaky voice of our excitable group commander. “Roger, Six Gun,” they would say, and he would tartly reply, “No, it’s Flit Gun.” “Roger, Six Gun.” That would destroy him. “No, goddamn it, Flit Gun! Flit! Flit!” It was a pleasure to fly in his formation and share these military moments.

awarded the French War Cross for their gallantry under fire. The newspaper suggested that the “Germans will have to find as apt a name for the American Negro fighters as they have given to the Scots,” who were nicknamed the “Laddies from Hell.” Soon the Germans did come up with a name. The U.S. regiment would be known forever after as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” At the war’s end, France would award the entire unit the Croix de Guerre.

In Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the local newspaper proudly reported the fact that two hometown heroes from the 369th had been awarded the French War Cross for their gallantry under fire. The newspaper suggested that the “Germans will have to find as apt a name for the American Negro fighters as they have given to the Scots,” who were nicknamed the “Laddies from Hell.” Soon the Germans did come up with a name. The U.S. regiment would be known forever after as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” At the war’s end, France would award the entire unit the Croix de Guerre.

There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,” Dempsey said. “But there was one fellow I wouldn’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly. I didn’t want to do that to Hemingway. That’s why I never sparred with him. “If you write this and you want to hand the people a laugh, tell it like this. Did I duck Harry Wills? Hell, no. They just never offered me a decent purse to fight him. The only man I ever ducked was Ernest Hemingway. I never ducked a fighter, just a writer.

Priestess, a fighter who will only go into battle when they’re at their best fights for pleasure and not principle,” he said. “The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we’ll only defend them in the sun.

The selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many; but after much deliberation he chose a collie, called Flame from his yellow coat. True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very particular friend of Smoke’s, and had fathered it from kittenhood upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. It was this that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage. Moreover, though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and its anger when provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and irresistible. It had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the air of the hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than skin and bones and teeth. For a collie it was sturdily built, its nose blunter than most, its yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had full eyes, unlike the slit eyes of its breed. Only its master could touch it, for it ignored strangers, and despised their pattings—when any dared to pat it. There was something patriarchal about the old beast. He was in earnest, and went through life with tremendous energy and big things in view, as though he had the reputation of his whole race to uphold. And to watch him fighting against odds was to understand why he was terrible. In his relations with Smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or shyness. He recognised that Smoke called for strong yet respectful management. The cat’s circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate pretences perhaps shocked the dog’s liking for direct, undisguised action. Yet, while he failed to comprehend these tortuous feline mysteries, he was never contemptuous or condescending; and he presided over the safety of his furry black friend somewhat as a father, loving but intuitive, might superintend the vagaries of a wayward and talented child. And, in return, Smoke rewarded him with exhibitions of fascinating and audacious mischief.

When Rahman returned to his home during the first temporary cease-fire on August 2, however, he found rubble of his neighbors’ home littered with human flesh and dismembered limbs. Some had not been able to escape after all. According to Rahman and several of his neighbors, Israeli troops from the Givati Brigade ordered the Wahadan family who lived next door to him to remain in their home when they invaded on July 17, warning them that if they attempted to evacuate they would be shot. Seven military-aged males among the family were blindfolded and abducted to Israeli prisons, where they were subjected to days of interrogations about Hamas, tunnels, and guerrilla operations they had no involvement in. The rest of the family — women, children, and an older man — were then kept on the ground floor of the house for six days. During that time, while the Israeli army engaged in periodic clashes with fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other armed factions operating around Beit Hanoun, it held the Wahadan family in the ground floor of the house, refusing to allow them to leave as the soldiers maintained the home as a base of operations. When it appeared that a brief ceasefire would take hold on July 25, the soldiers retreated from the home, but ordered the family to stay inside. The following day, with the Wahadans still inside their home under direct army orders, the Israeli military called in strikes on the area, killing every trapped member of the family. In the course of an hour on July 26, much of Beit Hanoun was destroyed under a storm of Israeli artillery shells.

The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of business men, being nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the purpose of effecting the transfer of power. Twice a year, in the spring and fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the business men and expended by this army; meetings were held and clever speakers were hired, bands played and rockets sizzled, tons of documents and reservoirs of drinks were distributed, and tens of thousands of votes were bought for cash. And this army of graft had, of course, to be maintained the year round. The leaders and organizers were maintained by the business men directly—aldermen and legislators by means of bribes, party officials out of the campaign funds, lobbyists and corporation lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by means of jobs, labor union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors and editors by advertisements. The rank and file, however, were either foisted upon the city, or else lived off the population directly. There was the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance of the civil list, from the meanest office boy to the head of a city department; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was the world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle and plunder and prey. The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them necessary. The law forbade prostitution; and this had brought the “madames” into the combination. It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the poolroom man, and the same with any other man or woman who had a means of getting “graft,” and was willing to pay over a share of it: the green-goods man and the highwayman, the pickpocket and the sneak thief, and the receiver of stolen goods, the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased meat, the proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake doctor and the usurer, the beggar and the “pushcart man,” the prize fighter and the professional slugger, the race-track “tout,” the procurer, the white-slave agent, and the expert seducer of young girls. All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person,—the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon. “Hinkydink” or “Bathhouse John,” or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago, and also the “gray wolves” of the city council, who gave away the streets of the city to the business men; and those who patronized their places were the gamblers and prize fighters who set the law at defiance, and the burglars and holdup men who kept the whole city in terror. On election day all these powers of vice and crime were one power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an hour’s notice.

The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of business men, being nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the purpose of effecting the transfer of power. Twice a year, in the spring and fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the business men and expended by this army; meetings were held and clever speakers were hired, bands played and rockets sizzled, tons of documents and reservoirs of drinks were distributed, and tens of thousands of votes were bought for cash. And this army of graft had, of course, to be maintained the year round. The leaders and organizers were maintained by the business men directly—aldermen and legislators by means of bribes, party officials out of the campaign funds, lobbyists and corporation lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by means of jobs, labor union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors and editors by advertisements. The rank and file, however, were either foisted upon the city, or else lived off the population directly. There was the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance of the civil list, from the meanest office boy to the head of a city department; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was the world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle and plunder and prey. The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them necessary. The law forbade prostitution; and this had brought the “madames” into the combination. It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the poolroom man, and the same with any other man or woman who had a means of getting “graft,” and was willing to pay over a share of it: the green-goods man and the highwayman, the pickpocket and the sneak thief, and the receiver of stolen goods, the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased meat, the proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake doctor and the usurer, the beggar and the “pushcart man,” the prize fighter and the professional slugger, the race-track “tout,” the procurer, the white-slave agent, and the expert seducer of young girls. All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person,—the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon. “Hinkydink” or “Bathhouse John,” or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago, and also the “gray wolves” of the city council, who gave away the streets of the city to the business men; and those who patronized their places were the gamblers and prize fighters who set the law at defiance, and the burglars and holdup men who kept the whole city in terror. On election day all these powers of vice and crime were one power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an hour’s notice.

The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of business men, being nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the purpose of effecting the transfer of power. Twice a year, in the spring and fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the business men and expended by this army; meetings were held and clever speakers were hired, bands played and rockets sizzled, tons of documents and reservoirs of drinks were distributed, and tens of thousands of votes were bought for cash. And this army of graft had, of course, to be maintained the year round. The leaders and organizers were maintained by the business men directly—aldermen and legislators by means of bribes, party officials out of the campaign funds, lobbyists and corporation lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by means of jobs, labor union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors and editors by advertisements. The rank and file, however, were either foisted upon the city, or else lived off the population directly. There was the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance of the civil list, from the meanest office boy to the head of a city department; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was the world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle and plunder and prey. The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them necessary. The law forbade prostitution; and this had brought the “madames” into the combination. It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the poolroom man, and the same with any other man or woman who had a means of getting “graft,” and was willing to pay over a share of it: the green-goods man and the highwayman, the pickpocket and the sneak thief, and the receiver of stolen goods, the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased meat, the proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake doctor and the usurer, the beggar and the “pushcart man,” the prize fighter and the professional slugger, the race-track “tout,” the procurer, the white-slave agent, and the expert seducer of young girls. All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person,—the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon. “Hinkydink” or “Bathhouse John,” or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago, and also the “gray wolves” of the city council, who gave away the streets of the city to the business men; and those who patronized their places were the gamblers and prize fighters who set the law at defiance, and the burglars and holdup men who kept the whole city in terror. On election day all these powers of vice and crime were one power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an hour’s notice.

We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible

A good man is like a good horse. Now a good working horse is a big, strong animal, isn’t he? He could knock you down, stomp on you, grind you into the ground–kill you if he wanted. But, you see, he doesn’t. Not because he doesn’t know how…but because he knows how to keep himself in check. He doesn’t want to hurt you, even though he could, because he trusts you. He respects you. But you give him a reason to dislike you, and he’ll fight you tooth and nail. A man is a tough fighter–with tempered strength. “Any fool can learn how to fire a gun, Miss Warrendale. Pulling the trigger is a dangerously simple thing to do, and even a child will kill. The difference is the one who can kill—maybe even easily—but knows when to walk away, and when to fight. A man who knows how to keep that mean side of him—that dangerous side—under control until the moment it’s needed.

The Almighty Jar by Stewart Stafford Protestors in the street chanted: "Crackpot!" Mocking supreme leader The Almighty Jar, Rattling it into swift and oleaginous action, It flipped its lid and sought vengeance. The jar ordered its troops to open fire, On the defiant yet unarmed crowd, But the army flatly refused to obey, Until the jar started oozing sneakily. Too late came a decree that military personnel, Smear Deindividuation serum on themselves, Freedom fighters stormed the jar's shelf palace, Smashing it and replacing it with an urn. © 2021, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

The next day, September 16, I was sitting with Kerr and several of my AUB colleagues on the veranda of his residence when a breathless university guard came to tell him that Israeli officers at the head of a column of armored vehicles were demanding to enter the campus to search for terrorists. Kerr rushed off to the university entrance, where, he later told us, he rejected the officers’ demands. “There are no terrorists on the AUB campus,” he said. “If you’re looking for terrorists, look in your own army for those who’ve destroyed Beirut.” Thanks to Malcolm Kerr’s courage, we were temporarily safe in a faculty apartment at the AUB, but we soon heard that others were at that moment in mortal peril. On the same night, September 16, Raja and I were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops’ arrival in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no shooting. The city was quiet and fearful.

When the world feels cold and hollow, and the clouds won't let you breathe, awake, arise, and walk the marrow, you are fire fated to be free.