Let's write about human migration and how fiction can better frame the tragic impact it has on the human condition

‘No Place to Bury the Dead’ is a moving meditation on migration, displacement and loss, an essay and review by Ilana Masad published in the Los Angeles Times: 

Fiction can often better define the history about the human condition than investigative reporting.  Consider Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the epic of Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell and Roots, by Alex Haley, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and other classics....

In a fictional town not far from the border of an unnamed Latin American country, a woman named Visitación Salazar has made it her mission to provide a resting place for the unlucky dead — those who have been abandoned or whose families can’t afford to bury them elsewhere. The Third Country, as her unofficial, unsanctioned cemetery is called, should be a place of mercy where the ritual of burial provides comfort. But despite Visitación’s best efforts, it is also a place of violence; the land is owned by a powerful businessman, Abundio, and sought after by the irregulars, a guerrilla army sowing terror and selling heroin to fund its fight against the state.

Into this tense situation comes Angustias Romero, the protagonist of the second novel by the Venezuelan journalist Karina Sainz Borgo, “No Place to Bury the Dead,” translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer. Like the author’s first novel, “It Would Be Night in Caracas,” it revolves around grief and motherhood, only this time from the perspective of mother rather than daughter.

Angustias wasn’t supposed to end up at the Third Country. She and her husband left their home in a place described as the eastern mountains to escape a plague of amnesia sweeping their region — echoing a similar epidemic in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — and leaving the population disoriented and despairing.

“Men went out into the street to wait,” Angustias narrates. “For what? I never found out. We women did whatever we could to keep despair at bay: We gathered food, opened and closed windows, climbed up to the rooftops, swept the patios. We gave birth heaving and shouting like those madwomen whom no one offers even a sip of water. Life concentrated in us, in what we, until then, had been capable of holding on to, or pushing out.”

Women’s strength — terrible, tragic and, in the most dire circumstances, necessary — is emphasized throughout the book. Indeed, it takes much strength for Angustias to leave the plague-ridden place she knows. But she’s concerned about her twin baby boys, born very prematurely and with a heart defect, and hopes that going west will keep them safe.

Instead, the babies die soon after they cross the mountains, which is how Angustias winds up searching for Visitación. Once she’s buried the boys at the cemetery, she insists on staying there to be close to them. She earns her keep by mixing cement for the vaults Visitación builds for the dead and, over time, also learns to clean and prepare the bodies for the graves.

The novel’s plot follows the growing existential threat to the Third Country and its caretakers as the cruel, grasping Abundio sends his lackeys after them and the irregulars increasingly make their presence known through threats and violence. The powers converging to get Visitación and her dead off the land are immense. Yet both women stand strong — Visitación out of stubbornness and a sense of divine purpose, Angustias from the grief tying her to her sons’ grave.

Yet the plot isn’t really the point of “No Place to Bury the Dead,” which often dwells on quiet moments of pain, showcasing the small ways a migration crisis robs people of their dignity.

In Mezquite, the town closest to the cemetery, hundreds of migrants wait at city hall to be relocated. In Cucaña, some 40 miles closer to the border, all the women have terribly shorn heads — which Angustias notices because she was a hairdresser with her own salon in her former life — having sold their hair for a pittance. 

With few other options for raising money, the town’s women turn to sex work, while the girls handle child care and scavenge for things to sell. As for the men and boys, they rarely seem to be of much use.

Sainz Borgo’s depictions have some unsettling dimensions. Visitación, a 60-year-old, evangelical Black woman who drinks, smokes, has several boyfriends and enjoys showing off her body, may read as a caricature to some. Críspulo, an Indigenous farmhand who works for Abundio, is horribly abused but cartoonishly villainous as a result.

At the same time, Angustias’ development is moving, her delicate, quiet steeliness contrasting wonderfully with Visitación’s big, loud, insistent personality. Late in the book, Angustias addresses Visitación’s strangely proprietary relationship with the cemetery inhabitants she refers to as “My dead”:

“There was one and only one truth, and nothing could change it: all these men and women were dead, and they were never coming back. That was the only sure thing, and there was nothing Visitación or anyone could do to change it. The dead were not hers. They did not belong to those who cursed them or longed for them. Not even my sons were entirely mine, even if they were the reason I had remained here.”

This novel ultimately serves as a deeply felt meditation on migration, mourning and the simultaneous entanglement and estrangement of the living and the dead.

Ilana Masad is a books and culture critic and the author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”

Let's write about the Jewish underground in Hungary

Echo essay published in the Los Angeles Times by Alon Bernstein:

78 years on, Jewish Holocaust rescuers want their story told:

KIBBUTZ HAZOREA, Israel —  Just before Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, Jewish youth leaders in the Eastern European country jumped into action: They formed an underground network that in the coming months would save tens of thousands of fellow Jews from the Nazi gas chambers.

Budapest: Most of the murders along the edge of the River Danube took place around December 1944 and January 1945, when the members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party police ("Nyilas") took as many as 20,000 Jews from the newly established Budapest ghetto and executed them along the river bank. (L'Heureux photograph)

This chapter of the Holocaust heroism is scarcely remembered in Israel. Nor is it part of the official curriculum in schools. But the few remaining members of Hungary’s Jewish underground want their story told. Dismayed at the prospect of being forgotten, they are determined to keep memories of their mission alive.

“The story of the struggle to save tens of thousands needs to be a part of the chronicles of the people of Israel,” said David Gur, 97, one of a handful of members still alive. “It is a lighthouse during the period of the Holocaust, a lesson and exemplar for the generations.”

As time passes, historians, activists, survivors and their families are preparing for the time when there will no longer be living witnesses to share first-person accounts about the horrors of the Nazi genocide during World War II. In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were wiped out by the Nazis and their allies.

Israel, which was established as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, has gone to great lengths over the years to recognize thousands of “Righteous Among the Nations” — non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Accounts of Jewish resistance to the Nazis, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, are mainstays in the national narrative but rescue missions by fellow Jews — such as the Hungarian resistance — are less known.

Budapest Synagogue Memorial Park (L'Heureux photograph)

Hungary was home to around 900,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion. Its government was allied with Nazi Germany, but as the Soviet Red Army advanced toward Hungary, the Nazis invaded in March 1944, to prevent its Axis ally from making a separate peace deal with the Allies.

Over the 10 months that followed, as many as 568,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in Hungary, according to figures from Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.

Gur said he and his colleagues knew that disaster was looming when three Jewish women arrived at Budapest’s main synagogue in the fall of 1943. They had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and bore disturbing news about people being shipped to concentration camps.

“They had fairly clear information about what was happening, and saw the many trains, and it was obvious to them what was happening,” said Gur.

Shoes on the Danube River in Budapest (on the Pest side of the river) -L'Heureux photograph- Shoes on the Danube Bank (Hungarian: Cipők a Duna-parton) is a memorial erected on 16 April 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. Conceived by film director Can Togay, he created it on the east bank of the Danube River with sculptor Gyula Pauer [hu] to honour the Jews who were massacred by fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. They were ordered to take off their shoes (shoes were valuable and could be stolen and resold by the militia after the massacre), and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.

In fact, Gur oversaw a massive forgery operation that provided false documents for Jews and non-Jewish members of the Hungarian resistance. “I was an 18-year-old adolescent when the heavy responsibility fell upon me,” he said.

There was great personal risk. In December 1944, he was arrested at the forgery workshop and brutally interrogated and imprisoned, according to his memoir, “Brothers for Resistance and Rescue.” The Jewish underground broke him out of the central military prison in a rescue operation later that month.

The forged papers were used by Jewish youth movements to operate a smuggling network and run Red Cross houses that saved thousands from the Nazis and their allies.

According to Gur’s book, at least 7,000 Jews were smuggled out of Hungary, through Romania to ships on the Black Sea that would bring them to British-controlled Palestine. At least 10,000 forged passes offering protection, known as Shutzpasses, were distributed to Budapest’s Jews, and around 6,000 Jewish children and accompanying adults were saved in houses ostensibly under the protection of the International Red Cross.

Robert Rozett, a senior historian at Yad Vashem, said that although it was “the largest rescue operation” of European Jews during the Holocaust, this episode remains off “the main route of the narrative.”

“It’s very significant because these activities helped tens of thousands of Jews stay alive in Budapest,” he said.

In 1984, Gur founded “The Society for Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movements in Hungary,” a group that has promoted awareness about this effort.

Last month at a kibbutz in northern Israel, Sara Epstein, 97, Dezi Heffner-Reiner, 95, and Betzalel Grosz, 98, three of the remaining survivors who helped save Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, received the Jewish Rescuers Citation for their role in the Holocaust. The award is given by two Jewish groups — B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.

“There aren’t many of us left, but this is important,” said Heffner-Reiner.

More than 200 other members of the underground were given the award posthumously. Gur received the award in 2011, the year it was created.

Yuval Alpan, a son of one of the rescuers and an activist with the society, said the citations were meant to recognize those who saved lives during the Holocaust.

“This resistance underground youth movement saved tens of thousands of Jews during 1944, and their story is not known,” he said. “It’s the biggest rescue operation in the Holocaust and nobody knows about it.”

International Holocaust day falls on the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, 78 years ago. 

January 27, 1945, the Soviet's Red Army liberates Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland

Israel is home to some 150,600 Holocaust survivors, almost all of them over the age of 80, according to government figures. That is 15,193 less than a year ago.

The United Nations will be holding a memorial ceremony at the General Assembly on Friday, and other memorial events are scheduled around the globe.

Israel marks its own Holocaust Remembrance Day every spring.

Associated Press writers Eleanor Reich and Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Let's write about real space aliens! Really!

Big, shiny eyes. 

Towering nearly 10 feet tall. 100% not human. Aliens.  

The Los Angeles Times echo report- Really! 

By Alexandra E. Petri

That’s the 911 call that came into dispatchers last month from a Las Vegas area resident reporting extraterrestrial life in his backyard, just about an hour after local police witnessed an object falling from the sky.

The paranormal investigation by police did not turn up any answers.

“On May 1, 2023, at approximately 12:29 a.m. LVMPD dispatch received a call about a suspicious situation,” the Las Vegas Police Department said in an email statement. “Officer conducted a preliminary investigation and closed the event as unfounded.”

At around 11:50 p.m. on April 30, body camera footage from an officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police captured a bright, glowing object cutting through the sky, according to local TV channel 8 News Now.

About 40 minutes later, a local resident placed a 911 call to report that something “100% not human” was staring at him from his backyard shortly after he and his family saw an object fall from the sky, the station reported.

“There’s like an 8-foot person beside it, and another one’s inside us, and it has big eyes and it’s looking at us — and it’s still there,” the caller, who said that he and his family had seen something fall from the sky, told the dispatcher.

“I swear to God this is not a joke, this is actually — we’re terrified,” the caller said.

Local TV channel 8 News Now first reported the story and obtained the video and audio from that weird evening, including the 911 call and body camera footage.

The dispatcher clarified the situation with the caller, careful to choose the right words.

“So, there’s two people — there’s two subjects in your backyard?” the dispatcher asked.

“Correct, and they’re very large,” the caller said. “They’re like 8 foot, 9 feet, 10 foot. They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth. They’re shiny eyes and they’re human. They’re 100% not human.”

Two officers responded to the caller’s home, KLAS reported.

“I’m so nervous right now,” one of the responding officers said while en route to the house. “I have butterflies bro.” He continues to say that people “saw a shooting star, and now these people say there’s aliens in their backyard.”

Officers interviewed the family on their front lawn.

“What did you see?” one of the officers asks.

“It was like a big creature,” one witness said, adding it was around 10 feet tall.

The officer tells them about the incident his colleague saw just before the call came in.

“I’m not going to BS you guys. One of my partners said they saw something fall out of the sky, too,” the officer said. “So that’s why I’m kind of curious. Did you see anything land in your backyard?”

A man in a robe said some of his family members saw “a big something with light” plummet from above.

Police continued to investigate that evening, asking neighbors if they too had witnessed any unusual objects fall from the sky. KLAS reported the investigation lasted for several days.

The Department of Defense is tracking more than 800 cases of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” often called UFOs, from the past 27 years, according to government officials, who added that only 2% to 5% of cases can be explained.

Writing about the Korean Conflict (1950-1953) also called the Korean War

50 Years Later, the Korean Battle of Chosin Ends

By Paul Richter* June 25, 2000, in the Los Angeles Times. 

In the bitter cold of December 1950, a convoy of 3,200 U.S. Army troops came under withering fire from tens of thousands of Chinese infantrymen massed in the hills east of Chosin Reservoir, in North Korea.

(Maine Writer:  The Choisin Resevoir poem by Bob Hammond: below this article.)

Twelve hours later, about 1,500 Americans from the 7th Infantry Division were dead, more than 1,000 were wounded and most of the convoy’s 40 vehicles were charred hulks or in flames. The attack was the brutal conclusion of four days of assaults by the Chinese, and when it was over, only soldiers strong enough to stagger six miles to a U.S. Marine encampment escaped capture.

For years, the units involved have been accused of incompetence, malingering, even cowardice. But now, at the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, the military has taken a new look at the battle and officially affirmed the contribution of what came to be called Task Force Faith.

Survivors were decorated with a Presidential Unit Citation acknowledging that, even though the Army units were ill-prepared and poorly trained, without their resistance the Chinese likely would have swept south and achieved their larger goal of destroying a Marine force of 17,000.

“The fact is, this group kept the others from being annihilated,” said Bob Hammond, 67, of Anaheim, who was a 17-year-old Army artilleryman when he faced the onslaught that killed the six other members of his squad at Chosin Reservoir.

The story of Task Force Faith is a tale of collective anguish and official redemption. It also is emblematic of America’s broader struggle to come to terms with a war that began in confusion and ended in stalemate.

In the war’s opening months, the U.S. military, shrunken by demobilization, was a shadow of the force that had whipped Adolf Hitler and the Japanese military machine in World War II. 

In Korea, it demonstrated its fallibility: faulty intelligence, ill-prepared troops and erratic leadership--all the way up to the most celebrated American war hero of the era, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was the top allied commander in Korea.

These questions about the performance of the troops and their leaders were agonizing to contemplate in the years after the Korean War. And for decades, many Americans chose simply to ignore or deny them. As a result, difficult issues arising from America’s “forgotten war” have remained largely out of sight for decades.

Now, however, some of these issues are finally receiving the scrutiny they deserve as official embarrassment over the conduct of the war subsides and as veterans, nearing the last years of their lives, seek to understand better what happened to them so many years ago.

For Army veterans of the Chosin Reservoir fighting, the negative perception of their performance has made the wait for official reconsideration long and painful. 

Compounding their discomfort was the way Chosin has come to be seen as a brilliant tactical operation by the Marines who fought next to them.

Marines, Army Fight Over Battle Story

Though then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson called it the greatest defeat for American arms since the Civil War battle of Bull Run, Chosin Reservoir has been celebrated as a success for the encircled 1st Marine Division, which fought its way out of the trap, bringing along its equipment, its dead and wounded, and inflicting 40,000 Chinese casualties.

Some Marines, recalling this feat, have contrasted the corps’ performance with what they regarded as the Army’s failure. The story has been a lingering source of friction between members and veterans of the two services.

The reservoir campaign unfolded as part of a huge allied counteroffensive that began with MacArthur’s daring landing of U.S. forces at Inchon in September and was intended to capture all of North Korea--and end the war--by Christmas.

As part of this drive, MacArthur sent the 1st Marine Division and some units from the Army’s 7th Infantry Division on an offensive from the northeastern coast toward the Chinese border. But as the advance continued, American lines grew thin--and the Chinese became increasingly unhappy with the Americans’ approach. China moved 300,000 troops into North Korea in the late fall, although the Americans continued to believe that they would not jump into the war.

Korean War Memorial in Washington D.C. (I have always found this memorial to be just mesmerizing! I can feel the suffering by focusing on the statues.)

While the Marine force included many battle-hardened officers and NCOs, the Army units were markedly weaker. 

In fact, the Army’s troop strength had been reduced significantly in the rapid demobilization following World War II, leaving units with fewer soldiers than often were needed to engage in combat.

Some of the Army soldiers sent to Chosin Reservoir were hastily trained teenagers, who had been rushed to Korea from cushy garrison duty in Japan. 

About 700 of the original 3,200 members of Task Force Faith were young Koreans who had been swept up in South Korean cities and pressed into unpaid service.

The Army units had meager supplies of ammunition, food and equipment. Many of the soldiers found themselves facing winter temperatures that fell to 40 degrees below zero with only light parkas and thin cotton pants for protection.

In early November, the 1st Marine Division and the Army units began a laborious advance up a gravel mountain road that wound 78 miles into the interior toward the huge reservoir, about 40 miles from the Chinese border. While most of the troops headed toward the west side of the reservoir, three Army battalions and a few other units turned east.

The Army brass told them that only a scattering of Chinese units was in the area. The soldiers set up three separate camps on the night of Nov. 27 without digging foxholes into the rock-frozen earth as military practice required or, in some cases, without setting up communication links so neighboring units could be contacted for help.

By 11 p.m., the soldiers found out that Army intelligence was wrong.

Hordes of Chinese infantrymen, some armed with captured U.S.-made Thompson submachine guns, announced their arrival with bugles, whistles and shepherd’s horns. Swarming through the camps in subzero weather, they killed some soldiers as they slept in their tents and destroyed vehicles, artillery and other equipment before they were repulsed.

Pvt. Hammond, assigned to the 57th Field Artillery, saw in the dawn’s light that only a few men in his unit were left to operate its six 105-millimeter guns.

Only slowly recognizing the extent of the threat, Army leadership first ordered the units to continue their mission.

According to historical accounts, Gen. Edward M. Almond, commander of the Army’s X Corps, flew in by helicopter and urged the men on: “Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stand in your way.”

Two days later, the brass ordered the troops to withdraw, though some senior Army leaders privately doubted that many would make it out. For four days, the task force held out against two Chinese divisions, who attacked at night and remained hidden during the day.

Except for Marine aircraft, the Americans had no support. An Army tank unit a few miles south tried briefly to join them--but turned around after two of its tanks were destroyed by the Chinese. American aircraft tried to airdrop supplies to the units, but some were lost to the enemy. In other cases, the wrong ammunition was sent.

The Chinese were carrying only light weapons, but they had large numbers of troops and were highly disciplined. 

Clarence White, then an 18-year-old supply sergeant, recalled watching the Chinese march in formation toward the American positions as grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns from an Army tracked vehicle cut them down. “It was unbelievable,” he said of their determination.

Many of the Army’s officers were killed or wounded in the first days at Chosin Reservoir.

Col. Allan D. MacLean, the commanding officer, ran out across the reservoir ice to greet what he thought was an American rescue mission. It turned out to be a Chinese column. He was wounded, then captured by the Chinese.

The new commanding officer, Lt. Col. Don Carlos Faith, on December 1, ordered the troops to form a convoy of trucks for a withdrawal. The wounded, then numbering 600, were piled in the vehicles and lashed onto hoods and fenders.

But the withdrawal began in disaster as a Marine Corsair fighter plane dropped a canister of napalm too close to the column, incinerating a dozen U.S. soldiers at the head of the convoy. 

The mistake encouraged the Chinese, who increased their fire and panicked many of the U.S. soldiers, who surged down the road without waiting for orders.

For the next 12 hours, the convoy moved sluggishly as Chinese marksmen picked off drivers and trucks broke down. Finally, with Faith dead and the column still six miles north of the Marine encampment, the convoy ground to a halt.

The Chinese troops swarmed in, shooting the wounded, lobbing grenades, setting other vehicles afire and taking the few unwounded soldiers prisoner.

Thomas Sealey, 68, then an 18-year-old private, was crouching under a broken truck with only five rounds remaining when the Chinese surrounded it and poked their bayonets in his direction.

For 33 months he was held prisoner, living on two boiled potatoes a day and watching weaker soldiers die in filth and despair. Over the next several days, the last soldiers straggled in to the Marine camp at Hagaru-ri. Only 385 members of an Army force that once numbered 3,200 were healthy enough to join the Marines in their withdrawal to the sea.

The Army soldiers’ battlefield ordeal was over. But a new fight soon began--over their reputation.

A Marine chaplain who had been at Chosin, Lt. Cmdr. Otto Sporrer, returned to the states to give news interviews and write an article deploring the Army’s performance.

Sporrer, who resented the fact that the Marines had been used in the Chosin campaign, said that some Army soldiers had thrown down their weapons. 

Others feigned injuries once back at the Marine camp, he said, so they would be evacuated to safety and would not have to fight. In “Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950,” a 1999, account of the campaign as seen largely through Marine eyes, author Martin Russ reported that an anonymous Marine had written lyrics about the task force, to the tune of Hank Snow’s classic country song, “Movin’ On”:

Hear the pitter patter of tiny feet

It’s the U.S. Army in full retreat.

Responding to accusations from Sporrer and others, the Army had its inspector general study the units’ performance. He found no evidence to support the accusations. In the years after the war, Col. Faith was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor and the official Army history praised the soldiers.

Yet the stain on the Army units’ reputation has been difficult to erase.

In 1952, when U.S. military commanders in Asia proposed a Presidential Unit Citation to honor the American performance at Chosin, the Marine commander, Gen. Oliver Prince Smith, recommended inclusion of Marine components but not the Army units who fought nearby.

In recent years, some Marines, Army veterans and others have petitioned repeatedly to honor Army units as well. They cited documents from official Chinese archives showing that the Chinese had thrown two full divisions and an attached regiment--20,000 troops--at the task force. But the authorities demurred, saying that rules required them to abide by the judgment of the commander on the scene, Smith, the Marine general.

Last year, two groups of veterans again urged authorities to grant recognition to Task Force Faith. One group consisted of the directors of a veterans’ group called the Chosin Few, four-fifths of whose members are Marines.

In October, Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who has authority over the Marines, signed a terse order calling for the Army units to be included in the citation for displaying “extraordinary heroism.” At a convention of the Chosin Few in Lancaster, Pa., on June 10, the veterans finally were honored.

Some Army veterans acknowledged that many of the soldiers at Chosin Reservoir were ill-prepared and that their officers made mistakes. But they deny that there was malingering and insist that, if any soldiers threw down their weapons, it was because they were malfunctioning or because they had no ammunition.

Merrill A. Needham Jr., a sociologist and writer who has pushed since 1993 to win recognition for the Army units, said that it made him “very emotional . . . to think of this unit, stripped of its honor.” That they “fought as long and hard as they did, basically unsupported, was miraculous,” said Needham, who has written a book, “Foot Soldiers,” about the long military tradition of Faith’s family.

Needham sees the soldiers as belonging to a centuries-old military tradition called the “forlorn hope"--a small band of warriors who are thrown into the path of likely destruction to slow an enemy’s attack.

With many soldiers’ bodies “left smoldering amid the wreckage of their trucks, or frozen in the ice of Chosin,” the Army units fit that definition, Needham wrote in a letter to one officer of the outfit. 

“Neither then, nor later, were they honored.”

The Army veterans, though, said that they now are trying to focus on the positive aspects of what happened, including the way some Marine veterans helped push the Pentagon bureaucracy to clear their names. “It was, really, the Marines that got it done,” Hammond said. And that may be a sign that, 50 years after the fighting, the wounds are healing.

One of the Bloodiest Wars in History

The Korean War was one of history’s bloodiest, a Cold War flash point that set the stage for American involvement later in Vietnam. It began on June 25, 1950, after Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The U.N. entered the war in support of South Korea. The Soviet Union and China supported the North. The United States supplied about 90% of the troops and supplies that the U.N. sent to South Korea.

*Paul Richter covered the State Department and foreign policy for the Los Angeles Times out of its Washington, D.C., bureau.

Poem:  The Chosin Reservoir by Bob Hammond 7th Div.

The Chosin Resevoir, a poem written by Bob Hammond, is published on line in Korean War social media pages and in Brothers and Heroes: A Chronicle of Military Service of Six Americans by George J. Lambert.

“In the hills of North Korea by a lake of azure blue, rides a farmer in his ox cart on the road to Hargaru.

He is singing songs of history that his father taught to him, as his eyes survey the scenery that’s no longer gray and grim.

In his mind he hears the cannons, the reciolless rifle’s roar, and the chatter of the Burp guns, all around the Reservoir.

Mortars crashing, Carbines flashing, Screaming men and boys, Bugles, flares and Howitzers, A symphony of noise.

He is thinking of his childhood, when he saw the soldiers come, to this peaceful mountain valley, that had never heard a gun,

And he’s never understood it, he will always wonder why, why so many men had come there from so far away, to die.

How they fought with savage fury agonizing through the snow, fingers turning black with frostbite, Death was sweeping, to and fro.

MacLean and Faith, Commanders: Hodge, and thousands more, fought and froze, and bled to death at Chosin Reservoir.

In the hills of North Korea, by a lake of icy blue, there’s no monument to witness, and no crosses are in view.

Just some land of little value covered well by falling snow, but they say to listen carefully when the wind begins to blow,

And you will hear the ghostly bugles from the mountain pass, nearby. You may hear the battle spreading from the mountains to the sky.

Lives were ending, Futures pending, Fate was casting dice.

Some would live and some would die, Karma, carved in ice!

The battle long is over, but fought each night anew, in dreams of those who can’t forget;

They’re called “The Chosin Few.”

So, let the Veterans tell the stories, let the legend live and grow, let the Chosin be remembered with the Men of Alamo,

With Bastogne and with Wake Island, and the Bunker Hill Command, and wherever there’s courageous men to take a valiant stand.

Once they fought to save a nation, they could not have offered more, than the sacrifices made there at the Chosin Reservoir. In the bitter bloody battles, at the Chosin Reservoir.”

Let's write about ancient roots of Halloween rituals

Op-Ed: Halloween’s Celtic roots are a lot spookier than witches and candy bars:

Samhain, halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

This interesting history about the roots of celebrating Halloween was published in The Los Angeles Times with The Conversation. 

"As the light of summer fades and the season of darkness begins, the ancient holiday of Halloween arrives to celebrate the dead mingling with the world of the living, as it has for thousands of years."

As Halloween approaches, people get ready to celebrate the spooky, the scary and the haunted. Ghosts, zombies, skeletons and witches show up in yards, windows and stores. Festivities revolve around the realm of the dead, and some believe the dead might actually mingle with the living on the night of Halloween.

Scholars have often noted that these modern-day celebrations of Halloween have origins in Samhain, a festival celebrated by ancient Celtic cultures. In contemporary Irish Gaelic, Halloween is still known as Oíche Shamhna, or Eve of Samhain.

In 9th century Irish literature, Samhain, halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, is mentioned many times as an integral part of the Celtic culture. It was one of four seasonal turning points on the Celtic calendar, and perhaps the most important one. It signaled the end of the light half of the year, associated with life, and the beginning of the dark half, associated with the dead.

Archaeological records suggest that commemorations of Samhain can be traced back to the Neolithic period, some from 6,000 years ago. Neolithic Ireland had no towns or cities, but the people did craft huge architectural monuments, which acted as seasonal gathering spots and housed the remains of the societies’ elites.
These megalithic (“big stone” in Greek) sites would at times host huge numbers of people, gathered together for brief periods around specific calendar dates. Archaeological records reveal evidence of massive feasts yet little to no evidence of domestic use. If people did live year-round at these sites, they would have been a select few.

Data from animal bones can reveal approximate time periods of the feasts, and additional data come from the monuments themselves.

The monuments are not only situated in key places in the landscape but are also celestially aligned to allow the sun or moon to shine directly into the center of the monument on a particular day.
These sites connect the landscape to the cosmos, creating a lived calendar, scripted in stone. The UNESCO World Heritage monument of Newgrange, for example, is built so that a shaft of sunlight illuminates the innermost chamber precisely on the winter solstice.
Less than 30 miles away lies the hill of Tara, another massive megalithic site. The Mound of the Hostages, the oldest extant megalithic structure at Tara, is aligned to Samhain. Tara is known as the traditional spiritual and political capital of Ireland, and here too archaeologists have found evidence of mass seasonal gatherings of people, with the remains of feasts and great bonfires.

Samhain ghost art

According to early Irish literature, as well as traditional folklore collected in the 19th century, Samhain was a time for people to come together, under a command of peace, to feast, tell stories, make social and political claims, engage in important sacred rituals and, perhaps most important, commune with the dead.

The traditional, pre-Christian realm of the dead was referred to as the Otherworld. The Otherworld was not somewhere far away but, rather, overlapping with the world of the living. The Irish beliefs about the Otherworld were detailed and complex. It is full of magic, of witchcraft, of speaking with the dead as well as seeing into the future. The dead were traditionally believed to continue to see the living, although the living could only occasionally see them. The most prominent occasion would be on Samhain itself, when lines between the Otherworld of the dead and the realm of the living were weakened.

There were not only particular days that one might encounter the dead but at particular places as well: the megalithic sites. These sites are known in Irish Gaelic as sí sites, the word sí meaning the spirits of the mounds. This word is often translated into English as “fairies,” which loses a great deal of meaning. “Fairies” in Ireland are spirits deeply connected with the realm of the dead, the mounds and, perhaps most especially, Samhain.

The connection can be witnessed in the figure of the banshee — or bean sí, in Irish — an important mythological figure in Irish folklore, believed to be heard wailing with grief directly before the death of a family member. With “bean” meaning simply “woman,” the banshee is thus a female spirit of the mounds and a ruler of the realm of the dead.

The sí spirits are not only spirits of the dead but are a particular aristocracy, who host the dead with feasting, merriment and eternal youth, often at the megalithic sites. In Irish lore, they are powerful and dangerous, able to give great gifts or exact great damage. They once ruled Ireland, according to folklore, and now they rule the world of the dead.

The Otherworld is always there, but it is on the beginning of the dark half of the year, the evening of Samhain — now Halloween — when the dead are at their most powerful and the lines between this world and the next are erased.

As the light of summer fades and the season of darkness begins, the ancient holiday of Halloween arrives to celebrate the dead mingling with the world of the living, as it has for thousands of years.

Tok Thompson is an anthropology professor at USC Dornsife and author of “Posthuman Folklore.” This article was produced in partnership with The Conversation.