a terrible price at the sharp end, they did not break. In the end, they fought because they refused to surrender. They were not simply victims in this massive industrialized war. They found ways to cope; they created new survival tools.

The key to victory in the Great War was the endurance of the common fighting man. We can sometimes forget this, ninety years later, as we look back over the wreckage of war that tore apart the twentieth century, the cities of silent white crosses in Europe, and the several thousands of stone memorials in local communities that span this country as mute testimony to a lost generation.

This article originally appreared in the October November 2008 issue of The Beaver.It's all fun and games until somebody gets burned at the stake.

And Hugo Was His Name-O

It was just brought to my attention that today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo’s landfall in coastal South Carolina. Wow, time flies.

I remember Hugo. We were living in Beaufort, South Carolina at the time, and had been nervously watching the weather updates over the past few days as the storm got closer. That morning, we looked at the forecast, and they said Hugo was expected to make landfall somewhere between Savannah and Charleston… Beaufort is smack in the middle of that zone, so we loaded up the car and got the hell out of there. My dad, a physician’s assistant with the Naval Hospital in town, had to stay behind in