Jim Medding’s Blog

My father recently sent me a copy of Visions from a Foxhole, A Rifleman in Patton’s Ghost Corps by William A. Foley Jr. Foley had served as a replacement in the 94th ID during the second world war; my father had served as a combat engineer. Many of the places, and some of the events, matched with my father’s experiences so he thought I might enjoy the book.

He was right. Foley has done an excellent job of providing a first person narration of what it was like for an infantryman to fight the war in Europe during some of its worst combat conditions seen by the US troops. He begins by describing a bleak, ominous arrival as a replacement in January, 1945 at the Siegfried Switch Position on the Moselle River. Within hours he’s in a foxhole, in freezing cold conditions with the wrong kind of boots and being shot at.

Foley goes from there to provide a gritty, nothing held back, description of combat. He unapologetically describes dispatching enemy troops simply because it was expedient. And only occasionally does he describe any emotion at the loss of a fellow troop. But as the war begins to wind down, his humanity begins to reemerge. I was particularly taken by his narration of capturing two German soldiers near Krefeld; one in his 50s and the second no more than 16.

All of the narrations provided by Foley are not only engaging but they are also clear, detailed and easy to follow. I’ve read several personal recollections of solders; this has to be one of the best.

When I read a good history book, I’m frequently amazed at how relevant a quote from many years ago is to current affairs. Such was the case when I read the following quote in David McCullough’s John Adams. The time was early in the year of 1776. Belligerent actions had been taken on the part of both sides and the colonies had made numerous attempts to bring about peace all to no avail. Still, some wanted to try again. John Adams had the following to say about these conciliatory measures:

I constantly insisted that all such measures, instead of having any tendency to produce a reconciliation, would only be considered as proofs of our timidity and want of confidence in the ground we stood on, and would only encourage our enemies to greater exertions against us.

So far, I’ve read two books which were truly disturbing – Sheriff David Reichert’s Chasing the Devil and James Bradley’s Flyboys. I mention this to provide context for the following quote from Bradley’s book:

Few people reflect now that samurai swords killed more people during WWII than atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, “The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”

In Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, he defines, I think quite eloquently, the process of product evolution:

The evolution of form begins with the perception of failure, but is propagated through the language of comparatives. ‘Lighter,” “thinner,” “cheaper” are comparative assertions of improvement, and the possibility of attaching such claims to a new product directly influences the evolution of its form. Competition is by its very nature a struggle for superiority, and thus superlatives claims of “lightest,” “thinnest,” “cheapest” often become the ultimate goals. But, as with all design problems, when there is more than a single goal, the goals more often than not are incomparable. Thus the lightest and thinnest crystal can be expected also to be the most expensive. But limits on the form of artifacts are also defined by failure, for too light and too thin a piece of crystal might hardly be usable.

Anybody who knows me well, or reads my blog, knows that I enjoy reading history books. I especially enjoy military or science history books. Given the number of these books I’ve read, which I’m sure is far too many, it’s a bit surprising that one military history book and one science history book stands out way beyond all the other. It’s not that I haven’t read some very good books; for example, I would say that Steven Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In The World is an excellent book. However, these two other books transcend all the others because they epitomize the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction.”

The military history book is Commander Eugene Clark’s The Secretes of Inchon. This book also includes an introduction & epilogue by Thomas Fleming since Clark never intended his memoirs to be published. His memoirs read like a John Wayne movie- spies, pirates, young tragic love story, chase scenes. When I got to the end of Clark’s memoirs, I’m thinking “Is this guy for real?” And then I started reading Fleming’s epilogue and I say – “WOW, why didn’t Clark write about these adventures?” Now, I’m flabbergasted as to why Hollywood hasn’t made it into a move.

Robert Whitaker’s The Mapmaker’s Wife is, unfortunately, destined to never be a best seller because the publisher doesn’t know how to market the book. The subtitle for this book is “A true tale of love, murder and survival in the Amazon” reads like promotion for a romance novel yet the description on the back cover compare the book to Sobel’s Longitude and Alder’s The Measure of All Things. The book is, in fact, two stories with the first half very comparable to the referenced books (IMHO, Whitaker’s book provides a better description of the methods used and the challenges faced by early cartographer’s than Alder’s book). The subtitle better describes the second half of the book. This second half, however, is not to be skipped and is the reason to purchase the book; for science history buff, the first half is a bonus. All I can say is that this book is incredible!

A book that I would highly recommend is The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Although the framework of this book is Taleb’s life and professional career in the financial markets industry, the applicability of the concepts within the book are wide sweeping. Taleb explains a Black Swan as follows:

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence…One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird…

What we call here a Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

A Black Swan can be either negative, e.g. 9-11, or positive, e.g. the Internet; negative Black Swans tend to occur quickly while positive Black Swans unfold over a longer period of time. Because Black Swan events can occur in all endeavors in life, traditional statistical sciences can’t always be trusted as a predictor. This, fundamentally, is why I don’t believe in “technical analysis” in stock investing nor do I believe in “six sigma” in engineering.