I made my first impression of France – or, more accurately, the French – in 1963. In Texas. It was not accurate.

I had been stationed at Ft. Bliss training in the HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) missile system. In 1963, Ft. Bliss was the training center for HAWK and they trained all the NATO troops – including the French – plus the Japanese and Israelis.

As an aside, when I came back from Korea, I was assigned to a unit teaching the HAWK system to Germans. As an aside to the aside, I had a friend – probably not really a friend, a fellow E-5 sergeant that lived in a room near me – who was from North Dakota and spoke rudimentary German; he taught Israelis. End aside to the aside. We taught outside, in the desert at the Orogrande [Missile] Range, in southern New Mexico. I started in late April and it got hot, really hot by mid-afternoon. To get around the heat, we started classes at five in the morning and ended at one in the early afternoon, before the heat (then the Germans went back to Ft. Bliss and we hung around Orogrande pretty much doing nothing). We were already there, every morning when the Germans marched into the training area. I was in the Army duh – and HAWK was an Army system in the US military, but the Germans assigned it to the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. The Luftwaffe wore grey fatigues with jackboots which had just been relegalized for the military (the Allies had banned them for the German military after the war because the jackboot was identified with the Nazis). I still remember the creepy feeling watching the Germans march into the park – that’s what we called it – in the darkness of the early morning twilight. They marched much closer together then we did – about 15″ apart while we marched at 30″ apart – dressed in field grey, wearing jackboots, singing Deutschland über alles as they marched. End aside.

But that was later, in 1965, and I formed my French impression in the spring of 1963. The French, while still in NATO, had just started distancing themselves by building their own nuclear deterrent, and developing a separate command structure under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. For reasons that seem incomprehensible now, we – we being the commanders and troops I saw every day in 1963 – thought this was treasonous and that the French people and troops were cowards at best and probably traitors to the cause of saving the world against communism. The funny thing is that, even then, I knew our constant war was mostly bogus but I signed on to the belief that the French were cowards for not slavishly following us (I do take comfort, however, in that I never even thought of calling French fries something else).

France, it turns out, left NATO in the 60s for the same reason they didn’t support the invasion of Iraq, they did not consider it in their self-interest. And there is an additional factor, France considers itself a world power and does not want to be in anyone’s shadow (and, with the US, everyone else is in the shadow). All one has to do is spend a couple hours walking through the Louvre to see why. Look at the sculpture, the paintings, the opulence: money flows towards power and art follows. For most of the last 1500 years, France, or proto-France, has been the center of Europe and that is hard to give up.

That is why I was shocked when I turned a corner in the Louvre and saw this: 

*with credit to Gail Cousins 

Strasbourg is overwhelming on first seeing it but it was also somewhat familiar, another French-German City on the Rhine. We spent almost the whole time in the old city pretty much between the Cathedral and the Lock area, which, I have a feeling, is like spending the whole time on a trip to San Francisco at Fisherman’s Wharf. Although we did get across the river to the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, we probably didn’t get the most well-balanced picture of the city. The old town part of Strasbourg was packed. It was way, way, more packed than anyplace I have been except Disneyland. I think that is because, heretofore, I have only been to Europe in October or early December and more than half of the packees are students. Hugh groups of students – mostly high school students? it is hard for me to tell any more – and what appeared to be college students bumming around Europe. It does give the place a sort of sexy air, even as it clogs up the place, but we are fellow tourists, so it is hard to complain.  The Cathedral is a Gothic improbability. It is made of sandstone without any reinforcing steel, everything just balances, resting on whatever is below. For me, the river through and around the city was the biggest surprise. Here are a couple of snapshots; Another pleasant surprise was the Museum. I had been disappointed in the Centre Pompidou-Metz but I thought this building was great. It was designed by Adrien Fainsilber from Paris and the central space soars to Cathedral heights. We had gone to the museum in our quest to find a meal without liverwurst and, we had read, it has a good view of the old town. The view was OK and the lunch was terrific.   At the end of the day, it is hard not to love this place. It is both very old and very contemporary…and very charming. 

“Men my age made this war.” Mr. Dawson in Dunkirk

Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Miguel de Cervantes

I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, either, but, growing up, there were a lot of silver spoons on the table. Now Michele and I have some of those silver spoons and we use a couple of them every day. While I was polishing one of them last week, it got me thinking about where they came from and that lead me to think about our constant wars. My parents got divorced in 1956 or ’57 and my mother got the silver. When she died, in 1985, I got the silver. Sometime between those dates, my mother told me it was originally a wedding gift from a vendor who was a supplier to my Grandfather’s restaurant.

My Grandparents originally came to San Francisco from Hungry in the late 1890s and, in my personal family myth, at least, my grandfather, who was a tailor when he got here, always wanted to own a restaurant. He got the chance when an almost defunct restaurant, across from the Ferry Building in San Francisco, was put up for sale. When the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was finished in 1936, Ferry traffic had dropped way off and the businesses – like that restaurant almost across the street from the Ferry Building – also lost most of their traffic, allowing my grandfather to get a good deal. It was a good deal on a restaurant just limping along but then the world changed.

Again, in my personal mythology,  when the war started, ship yards all around the Bay Area started up and workers used the ferry system to get to the various shipyards that were now working 24 hours a day, every day. Bethlehem in Alameda and South San Francisco as well as San Francisco, Kaiser in Richmond – where they once built a Liberty Ship in five days, assembled from pre-made sections – the Navy Shipyards in Vallejo, in total about 60 ship yards that employed about 244,000 workers at their height of production. Many of those workers took the ferry boat to get to their jobs and business boomed at Stern’s Coffee House. Now, polishing the spoon, I began to think my timeline was off. My parents got married on New Year’s Eve, 1937 and a complete set of silver was a big present. Somebody, or several somebodies, must have been doing a lot of business with Stern’s to be able to justify a very expensive silver set as a gift. Business must have been very good even before the war; a lot of people must have been already working in ship yards around the bay.

That got me thinking, we have been taught – maybe not today, after all, people aren’t even taught about Dunkirk anymore, but when I was in school in the 50s – that the United States was foolishly isolationist, even though Roosevelt and other wise people wanted to go to war, they couldn’t talk the people into it. We were told that the war, for us, didn’t start until Pearl Harbor, but biz was good at Stern’s before that. What if it were today and I was not looking at it through the lens of knowing what will happen? I probably would have been against going to Europe again. It seems to me that, then when people didn’t know what we know now, the people who were at risk of dying in the war were much less interested in doing so than the people who send them and were going to profit from it. After all, in 1939, it had been just twenty-two years earlier, that over 116,000 Americans died in Europe and it didn’t seem to change a thing. But the elites, the people who owned ship yards and airplane factories, were already gearing up for the war. In the end, more than 180,000 Americas died fighting Hitler and very few people would claim it wasn’t worth it, certainly not the much smaller number that got silver spoons.

As an aside, Hitler was a good thing for war makers. First, Hitler justified every and any thing we did during the war; our strategic bombing campaign killed over 600,000 German civilians including an estimated 47,000 children with almost no drop in German production but that was lost in the greater horror of the Holocaust. Hitler justified our going into the war; today, nobody, with a straight face, can say that we shouldn’t have fought the Nazis. And, most disturbing in my book, Hitler justifies every war ever since. Anybody we don’t like gets compared to Hitler sooner or later and we have already agreed that fighting Hitler, saving the world from Hitler, is not an option. End aside.