Fort Leavenworth

27 degree Kansas after 3 and a half years in Miami is a shock to the system; especially when the airline loses your luggage containing your only coat. The short sleeved silk shirt doesn’t do much except garner comments for "bravery." Nonetheless, it was truly gorgeous. Rolling hills resplendent in rich fall color, the cold looking "Mighty Mo" marching as surely as ever, clearly marking the boundary between Missouri and Kansas. The familiar grey steel bridge welcomes one back to Leavenworth, home not only to the biggest of Big Houses, but also to "The Army's Intellectual Center." Fortress Leavenworth initially feels like it’s stuck in a time warp. There’s a certain sense of familiarity and security that accompanies any return here. But upon closer inspection, much has changed.

Red brick abounds along tree lined streets, newly paved in recent years. This post's infrastructure, as with most of the Army, has benefitted greatly from GWOT spending. The impressive new Lewis and Clark Center, home since last year to the Command and General Staff College, now sits massively in the place where a deep cut once ran through the post's terrain. Inside, the college always seems to be in state of flux, scrambling to keep the curriculum relevant and challenging. Contractors are always ripping apart this or that room to enable yet another new program or system that will facilitate the understanding of, and preparation for future battlefields.

Hoge Barracks, the BOQ, smells the same as ever. The mind floods with vivid memories of countless trips here, countless nights spent studying. How many different generations of microprocessors have I used in these rooms, now wired with high speed internet access? The plumbing remains the same. Same instant coffee in the lobby. Same stream of students rushing to get to class in the morning. They still don backpacks, but different cargo. No more paper maps, acetate overlays and Field Manuals, now they carry laptops and blackberries. Same thermos of coffee, but different uniforms. The new grey we've donned to fight in the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan has finally displaced the green Battle Dress Uniform designed to hide amongst the trees of Germany's Fulda gap. A couple years ago the new blouses, pants and boots appeared quickly, but they were oddly intermixed with forest green accessories. Now those have caught up: gortex jackets, high tech pile sweaters and overcoats and even matching ruck sacks all in the new digital grey pattern abound.

And now there's one more recognizable change: a combat patch on almost every right shoulder. An empty right shoulder today is as rare as a combat patch was when I entered the Army in the 80's. Virtually every one of these warriors has done at least one, and many two or more, combat tours. And by being here, they've committed to more time in service and most likely yet more time in combat. These brand new majors don't know a peace time Army, many of them served their first tours as lieutenants in the Balkans prior to 9/11 and since, they've been back and forth repeatedly to war. They carry with them a seriousness about their business, they’re certainly more practical than I was at their age. They've buried too many soldiers and lost friends. These men and women are the hope of our present conflicts. They will be our Battalion and Brigade commanders before this era of fighting has ended. Their innovation will perfect the tactics that work in today’

Outside the gates, the people in middle America remain as friendly and patriotic as ever. Whether I wanted to or not, I struck up a conversation with every person I bumped into from airline agents to janitors. And this isn't a phony "how can I help you?", Customer service kind of friendly. It’s a "if you're not doin’ anything you can come over for Sunday supper" kind of friendly. I was stopped three times in 12 hours and genuinely thanked for my service to the country. All three times I wasn't wearing a uniform. These people go out of their way to look for soldiers. The warrior mentality, the service ethos is close to home for them literally because so many from this part of the country have worn the uniform. And, these days, many have neatly folded flags next to pictures of loved ones, now gone or wounded, above their fireplace.

My last night in Leavenworth, after hot wings and lite beer, I stood shivering in a parking lot with the four remaining SAMS students who had hung on the longest. I had come here, at their invitation, and spent the day talking about US Southern Command and my experiences as a planner. What a blessing to be able to give back a little bit to these soldier scholars. I've been back four times in the six years since I graduated the Army's premier planning school. Each year the students get younger. This year, this night their posture, their questions, their faces revealed their fear. They understand the seriousness of their task. One year from now they'll be developing plans and writing orders that others will execute. No simulations, just reality.

With minds forged here in America’s heartland, I know they’ll succeed.

CS Lewis on Sehnsucht: Joy - the serious business of Heaven

A couple months ago we switched churches; the much more intimate West Pines Community Church is suiting our family well. Flamingo just wasn't for us any longer - we continue to pray for them and their passion for reaching the South Florida culture "as it is."

We arrived at West Pines just in time for a new 6 week series on Heaven. It was wonderful! Pastor Jon's sermon one week really struck a chord with me, resurrecting old, rich memories of CS Lewis' ideas about heaven. It took me a few weeks but I finally looked up these quote and posted them on Jon's Facebook page (my other new experiment):


Jon -
sorry its taken me so very long to get these CS Lewis quotes to you...better late than never. The two points that stick in my mind concerning Lewis' vision of heaven are (1) that the central experience of heaven will be "joy" and (2) his description of joy as unsatisfied longing (or Sehnsucht). As always, his actual words are better than my memory:

"In this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven." - Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, p.93

"In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else...it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them: the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often it." - Surprised by Joy, pp17-18

And one of my all time favorite Lewis passages, that I had not previously linked to the idea of Heaven:

"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." - The Weight of Glory, pp3-4