There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.  The very notion that I have worked a lifetime to achieve the highest level of education and experience in my field would offer some degree of confidence that one could alter this dark tradition of Fate.  However, the  more one struggles against this ominous constrictor, the tighter the constriction.  Little could one imaging that a 30 year struggle brought on by a determination to repair the fateful damage of  Fate inflicted as a result of serving four years as an Arctic Paratrooper would result in my return to the battlefield.  One would think that the pursuit of a more gentile and intellectual approach to life would lend to a more peaceful and inward focused approach to existence consisting of a heart replete with joy and gratitude, which would serve as a measure of compensation for the fatigue and anxiety of earlier trials.  But such is life and its meandering tributaries.

I am mistaken if we are not verging fast to one of the most important periods in America's history.  The Arts of the enemies of Liberty, and the low dirty tricks which they are daily practicing is an evincing proof that they are lost to all sense of virtue and honor, and they will stick to nothing, however incompatible with truth and manliness, to carry their points.

Now, at the time when our domestic strife is most effected by injury, I am now required to take leave once again from the tranquilities of an industrially domestic life, and take up the cause of War.

So, it is with fresh mental and physical provision that I embark upon the gentle gales of conflict, and with contradicted abilities, carry forward to the scenes of battle.  After three and one-half decades of staying away, the constrictor Fate has transmitted me to where I began my journey long ago.  The life of a war-fighter is seemingly inescapable, and it appears that the most rigorous exertions to the contrary has only sharpened the direction that levies me for War.....Yet, while the thought makes me tremble with an unaccountable deprivation of torments, and the presumption that Fate is a scoundrel hackneyed in villainy, I somehow find solace and a strange sense of exertion.  The misfortunes and perplexities attributed to my past and the dismission of military service....and the collection of another.....provides me with a certain sense of restitution and perhaps even a fatal blow to that old hack named Fate.  Perhaps the constrictor has now released me from its bonds, and my energy and wisdom can now be applied in unlimited fashion to what one might call destiny.....a much preferable character for the keeping of company, especially in the lonely mountains of Afghanistan.....

Just a thought

In writing my apologia pro vita mea, I have discovered that I have a profound affection for a very narrow set of mentalites and ideologies that have, in the most historical sense, accounted for the lion's share of Mankind's tumultuous blasts and explosions of achievement. Only a besotted Faust would attempt to keep up with the magnitude, variety, and growth of this great proliferation. I have a confident suspicion it is only natural that these olympian principles will prevail and continue to define a Great People. I would infinitely prefer to raise my glass of tea to toast the clarity and definitiveness of such principles, rather than drink the Kool-Aid mixed with the euphoric and debased low expectations of those collective ideological despotisms that, as a primary objective, attempt to lock the human spirit within the dark dungeon of compromise and relativity.

On History

The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside event, I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event, I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar's defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event. He is interested in the crossing of the Rubicon only in its relation to Republican law, and in the spilling of Caesar's blood only in its relation to constitutional conflict. His work may begin by discovering the outside of an event or historical process, but it can never end there; he must always remember that the event was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent.

In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavors to trace. It is true that the scientist, like the historian, has to go beyond the mere discovery of events; but the direction in which he moves is very different. Instead of conceiving the event as an action and attempting to rediscover the thought of its agent, penetrating from the outside of the event to its inside, the scientist goes entirely beyond the event, observes its relation with others, and thus brings it under a general formula or law of nature. To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon', not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within.

In thus penetrating to the inside of events and detecting the thought which they express, the historian is doing something which the scientist need not and cannot do. In this way, the task of the historian is more complex than that of the scientist. In another way it is simpler: The historian need not and cannot (without ceasing to be an historian) emulate the scientist in searching for the causes of laws or events. For science, the event is discovered by perceiving it, and the further search for its cause is conducted by assigning it to its class and determining the relation between that class and others. For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought and motivation expressed in it. To discover that thought is already to understand it. After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened. Thus, history is knowledge of the human mind.