The Red Badge Of Courage

As I've said in past posts, the study of war has fascinated me. A bunch of my earlier reading material was dedicated to war. I didn't give it too much thought, I liked reading about great men, especially those who displayed the selfless courage I knew I didn't have back then. And perhaps don't have even now, much as I'd like to think otherwise.

I do know who to thank; at least I know to whom I should be grateful that I live in a society in which it is not a practical necessity to prove one's courage every day. America is a product of its fighting men and women, period. That it is great today is directly attributable to the actions of Orwell's “rough and ready men.”

Victor David Hanson is a military historian who wrote an essay which I have just finished closely reading. Why Study War? is a good question to ask, especially now. I would have answered such a question with a snide, why ever the fuck not? but I'm no genteel, tutored military historian. Hanson delves deep into all the reasons why the study of war and fighting is not a losing proposition, as opposed to the recent surge (he calls it, I call it a sickness) of “peace studies.”

Calling war a “tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence,” Hanson does such an intensely admirable case for studying humanity's default state of existence that it would be presumptuous of me to attempt a précis. Read it for yourself, and be edified.

There is one bone I have to pick with Dr. Hanson: his insistence on exposing yours truly to the potentially destructive, wallet-emptying experience of reading his extensive suggestion of which books on the subject he recommends. Argh!

For you readers of my particular diseased ilk, here it is, reproduced in all its putrid magnificence, for posterity's sake:

Studying War: Where to Start

While Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the three-decade war between Athens and Sparta, establishes the genre of military history, the best place to begin studying war is with the soldiers’ stories themselves. E. B. Sledge’s memoir of Okinawa, With the Old Breed, is nightmarish, but it reminds us that war, while it often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner’s tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.

From a different wartime perspective—that of the generals—U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton’s War As I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric general’s diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself.

Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides’ Trojan Women.

Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrück’s History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigley’s The Age of Battles center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo as tools to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman’s spellbinding short account The Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Donald Morris’s massive The Washing of the Spears, about the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history’s most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne’s superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Anything John Keegan writes is worth reading; The Face of Battle remains the most impressive general military history of the last 50 years.

Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch’s lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington is a classic study of England’s greatest soldier. Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, has been slighted recently but is spellbinding.

If, as Carl von Clausewitz believed, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary J’accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime is purportedly a favorite read of President Bush’s. It argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers’ esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.

In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle, I took that argument further and suggested that three of the most audacious generals—Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton—were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.

How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. Mark Moyar’s first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, is akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Horne has written a half-dozen classics, none more engrossing than his tragic To Lose a Battle: France 1940.

Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom does, and his volume began the recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August describes the first month of World War I in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941. Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric with no military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new but rather helps explain more than two centuries of both wise and ill-considered intervention abroad.

Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.

—Victor Davis Hanson

Sigh.

You Don't Fight A Tactic

So says Dr. Yaron Brook, 46, head of the Ayn Rand Institute. In this well-written article, Brook dissects the idea of fighting a war on terror and why such a war is doomed to failure from the outset then proceeds to outline a better, even more humane way (I would argue) to win against the onslaught of Islamic totalitarianism:

Brook argues that this form of altruism goads both America and Israel to wage "compassionate wars": for the American army to build sewers instead of ruthlessly bombing terrorist targets, and for the IDF to send food into Gaza instead of troops and tanks. With such an altruistic approach, Brook says, Israel is setting itself up for defeat.

"There's a whole generation of post-Zionist professors who've been writing for the past 20, 30 years, here in Israel, how this country was founded on original sin," Brook said in his talk. "[They say] there's no basis for this country; there's no moral reason why this country should exist. We've exploited; we've stolen; we've taken from peaceful people. It's our fault for all these problems. When that's the center of your focus, when you're filled with self-doubt, when you don't believe that your values are better than anyone else's, you cannot fight. You cannot win.

"I believe victory is possible, it just takes something we're not willing to do." That "something," he said confidently, is to wage war with little restraint and without apology against Islamic totalitarianism.

"Israel should plan and execute a systematic invasion of Gaza in which its goal is to wipe out the political and military leadership and infrastructure of Hamas, and to do so systematically and brutally. It needs to send a message to the world, to the Muslim population of the world, to Palestinians in the West Bank, that Israel will not tolerate a terrorist state at its border and would not tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas."

Tremendous.

Power Of Art

PBS has an astounding series titled Simon Schama's Power of Art. Schama recounts the lives of eight artists and specific works that defined their careers. This series is truly amazing, and should be watched, nay studied, by all and sundry. In order (with the latest—Caravaggio—tonight, Monday, June 25):

* Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Wheatfield With Crows,

* Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Guernica,

* Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) and David With the Head of Goliath,

* Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and The Ecstasy of St. Theresa,

* Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis,

* Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and The Death of Marat,

* J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On),

* Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and the Seagram murals.

A blurb from the PBS site that stuck:

In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Gestapo visited Pablo Picasso's Left Bank flat, where a member of the secret police spied a postcard of the artist's most famous work, Guernica. The giant mural memorialized Germany's 1937 aerial obliteration of a small Basque village. "Was it you who did this?" the Nazi demanded of Picasso, to which he replied, "No. It was you."

Eduard Imhof

First came to my attention through reading a thread on Edward Tufte's discussion board. Tufte calls Imhof's Cartographic Relief Presentation a “deep and essential book” about design and information representation.

Damnit, yet another book to buy!

Anyway, a link on that thread took me to Imhof's biographical page on the web site of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology where he was a professor of cartography from 1925 until 1965. He died in 1986.

His work is sharply clear and very beautiful. He was an artist and a scientist who was able to combine those two skills to produce amazing stuff:

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A watercolor so-called “bird's eye” map.

This one is from Imhof's sketchbook from 1930 when he was asked to measure the position and elevation of the “Minya Konka” in Tibet:

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A pencil drawing (!) of Minya Konka.

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Measurements for triangulation.

And my favorite, a pen and ink drawing of his house:

2Lt. Daily

Michelle Malkin tells the tale of an Army Second Lieutenant, Mark Daily, who posted to his blog explaining his decision to join the Army. It is a sober, intelligent precis written by a genuine American Hero, a thinking man's soldier.

Mark Daily was 23. He was killed by an IED in Iraq. R. I. P, Lieutenant. You have given more to this country than millions of naysaying chickenhawks and certainly me who may be a chickenhawk, but at least realizes it enough to praise those who aren't. Thank you.

"I joined the fight because it occurred to me that many modern day "humanists" who claim to possess a genuine concern for human beings throughout the world are in fact quite content to allow their fellow "global citizens" to suffer under the most hideous state apparatuses and conditions."

No doubt, to the liberal assholes, this is another idiot who threw his life away in service of this shitty country of ours. < /sarcasm > < / bitterness >

Half-caste

Growing up in Nigeria the offspring of a black African mother and a white American father wasn't easy. I was teased mercilessly and although I have come to realize that children will quickly and deftly pick on anyone unlike them with an alacrity and dispassion that is Nazi German in efficiency, it still was a difficult road to trudge.

I remember getting in fights with the neighborhood boys who thought they could pick on me simply and only because I was an oyibo (nativespeak for a white person). I was able to quickly show them that wasn't the case and left many a bloody nose in my wake. In fact, I came to be known as Gaddhafi, the Libyan strongman, to my friends and enemies, such as they were.

The term for people like me-and there were quite a lot in Nigeria--was "half-caste." My mom did not like that term and suggested I never use it around her. She answered, one of the few times I asked, that my brother and I were mulattoes. It wasn't until later that I found out the unflattering etymology of the word but at the time, it sounded a heck of a lot better than half-caste and I quickly corrected anyone, "no, I'm a mulatto." If nothing else, I liked the puzzled expressions on their faces that told me they understood I wasn't your "average bear"!

When I moved to the United States, not only did I move physically, I crossed racial lines as well. Suddenly, I was no longer an oyibo, a white person, I was now a black person! I could not understand why though. I am half-white, and half-black. Why am I black? For that matter, why was I white back in Nigeria? I really am neither, and took to checking the "Other" box when I filled forms asking for my ethnic group.

Which is why I get pissed off when people like Barack Obama, the opportunist whitebread Kenyan lawyer from Illinois; Mariah Carey, the once-talented, now crazy-bitch singer; Alicia Keys, that hairy-chested piano-thumper and others just drop the white half of their parents like so much tonnage. Suddenly, they're black. Also, why are half-black, half-anything people always black?

Speaking of Obama, I heard him on Talk of The Nation sometime last week waxing nostalgic, philosophic, euphoric, etc., and getting his ass kissed by every single black caller, including one sibilating man (and I use the term very loosely) who recalled crying because the idea of a black President was so emotional. What the fuck? The next Black President of the United States indeed. Ordinarily, no one would be paying any attention to this shyster lawyer with no political experience if he weren't (excuse me here) "black."

God, I hate Democrats.

Fragrance festival

I just noticed I've been swimming in the Guns category the past few posts and I don't want to end October that way, even if it is Halloween, a time for pissy ghosts, so let me tell you what I'll be doing tomorrow, All Saint's Day.

The missus, my sister-in-law, and your humble correspondent will be attending a Fragrance Festival! That's right, ladies and gentlemen, between the hours of 6 and 9 in the evening, I will be inundating my olfactory nerves with stimuli. Macy's puts these things on every so often to showcase new fragrances and I'm hoping there were be some older classics to smell as well.

While I'm very doubtful they will be featuring the greats, like Jicky (Guerlain, 1889), I can hope they'll have some real modern classics available. I may even win the drawing they're holding. At the very least, since I'm sure to be the only real man at the Fragrance Festival (the homosexuals do not count), I could strong-arm my way into winning, if you know what I mean :-)

There's a beautiful story behind Jicky, by the way: Aimé Guerlain, while completing his studies in England, fell in love with an English girl. However, at the age of 27, he was obliged to return to France alone, dejected and heartbroken. The years passed. ... Aimé Guerlain created Jicky, a dazzling composition and an homage to Jicky, the sweetheart of his youth.

From Mimi Froufrou (I kid you not):

Jicky was created in 1889 by Aimé Guerlain. It is not only considered to be the first modern fragrance through its invention of the now classic 3-tiered structure comprising the head, heart, and base notes, as well as the introduction of the combined use of synthetics and natural essences, it is also a perfume that attempted to reverse a trend that rested on the rigid codification of gender categories. This conservative trend emerged in France after 1820, during the Second Restoration, when the bourgeois mentality imposed its mark more decisively upon society, moralizing the use of perfumes and deriving its ideas about the propriety of certain scents from the triumphant hygienist movement. In this context, Aimé Guerlain is reported to have said that he wanted to create,

"an audacious, vigorous, and quasi revolutionary perfume: the perfume of an amazon, difficult to decipher, of which you wouldn't be really able to tell whether it was meant to be for a man or a woman."

And so it was; disconcerted by the novelty of the concept, women started adopting it en masse only after 1910 while men, meanwhile, decided it would be theirs. Today, despite Aimé Guerlain's efforts at creating a unisex fragrance, Jicky is still not considered to be gender-free and in a new historical twist, has mostly come to be considered a feminine fragrance and marketed as such.

And so, I bid you goodnight and farewell, October, 2006.

Ivan the Terrible, part two of three

Continued from part one ...

Ivan brooded until the morning of December 3, 1564, when the citizens of Moscow awoke to a strange sight. Hundreds of sleds filled the square before the Kremlin, loaded with the czar's treasures and wth provisions for the entire court. They watched in disbelief as teh czar adn this court boarded the sleds and left town. Without explaining why, he established himself in a village sourth of MOscow. For an entire month a kind of terror gripped the cpaital, for the Muscovites feared the Ivan had abandoned them to the bloodthirsty boyars. Shops closed up and riotous mobs gathered daily. Finally, on January 3 or 1565, a letter arrived from the czar, explaining that he cuold no longer bear the boyars' betrayals and had decided to abdicate once and for all.

Read aloud in public, the letter had a startling effect: Merchants and commoners blamed the boyars for Ivan's decision, and took to the strets, terrifying the nobility with their fury. Soon a group of delegates representing the church, the princes, and the people made the journey to Ivan's village, and begged the czar, in the name of the holy land of Russia, to return to the throne. Ivan listened but he would not change his mind. AFter days of hearing their pleas however, he offered his subjects a choice: Either they grant him absolute powers to govern as he pleased, with no interference from the boyars, or they find a new leader.

Faced with a choice between civil war and the acceptance of despotic power, almost ever sector of Russian society "opted" for a strong czar, caling for Ivan's return to Moscow and the restoration of law and order. In February, with much celebration, Ivan returned to Moscow. The Russians could no longer complain if he behaved dictatorially--they had given him the power themselves.

From The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.

Ivan the Terrible, part one of three

From early in his reign, Ivan IV, later known as Ivan the Terrible, had to confront an unpleasant reality: The country desperately needed reform, but he lacked the power to push it through. The greatest limit to his authority came from the boyars, the Russian princely class that dominated the country and terrorized the peasantry.

In 1553, at the age of twenty-three, Ivan fell ill. Lying in bed, nearing death, he asked the boyars to swear allegiance to his son as the new czar. Some hesitated, some even refused. Then and there Ivan saw he had no power over the boyars. He recovered from his illness, but he never forgot the lesson: The boyars were out to destroy him. And indeed in the years to come, many of the most powerful of them defected to Russia's main enemies, Poland and Lithuania, where they plotted their return and the overthrow of the czar. Even one of Ivan's closest friends, Prince Andrey Kurbski, suddenly turned against him, defecting to Lithuania in 1564, and becoming the strongest of Ivan's enemies.

When Kurbski began raising troops for an invasion, the royal dynasty seemed suddenly more precarious than ever. With emigre nobles fomenting invasion from the west, Tartars bearing down from the east, and the boyars stirring up trouble within the country, Russia's vast size made it a nightmare to defend. In whatever direction Ivan struck, he would leave himself vulnerable on the other side. Only if he had absolute power could he deal with his many-headed Hydra. And he had no such power.

From The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.

Never! Part two

Continued from part one.

Making his way back to the farm, Douglass feared the worst. He told himself that he would do his best to obey Covey and somehow survive the weeks ahead. Arriving at the stables where he was supposed to work that day, he began his chores, when out of nowhere, like a snake, Covey slithered in, rope in hand. He lunged at Douglass, trying to get a slipknot on his leg and tie him up. He was clearly intending the thrashing to end all thrashings.

Risking an even more intense beating, Douglass pushed Covey away and, without hitting him, kept him from getting the rope around his leg. At that moment something clicked in Douglass’s head. Every defiant thought that had been suffocated by his months of brutal labor came back to him. He was not afraid. Covey could kill him, but it was better to go down fighting for his life.

Suddenly a cousin came to Covey’s aid, and, finding himself surrounded, Douglass did the unthinkable: he swung hard at the man and knocked him to the ground. Hitting a white man would most likely lead to his hanging. A "fighting madness" came over Douglass. He returned Covey’s blows. The struggle went on for two hours until, bloodied, exhausted, and grasping for breath, Covey gave up and slowly staggered back to his house.

Douglass could only assume that Covey would now come after him with a gun or find some other way to kill him. It never happened. Slowly it dawned on Douglass: to kill him, or punish him in some powerful way, posed too great a risk. Word would get out that Covey had failed to break a Negro this one time, had had to resort to a gun when his terror tactics did not work. The mere hint of that would ruin his reputation far and wide, and his job depended on his perfect reputation. Better to leave the wild sixteen-year-old slave alone than risk the kind of crazy or unpredictable response Douglass had showed himself capable of. Better to let him calm down and go quietly away when his time of service there was over.

For the rest of Douglass’s stay with Covey, the white man did not lay a hand on him. Douglass had noticed that slaveholders often "prefer to whip those who are most easily whipped." Now he had learned the lesson for himself: never again would he be submissive. Such weakness only encouraged the tyrants to go further. He would rather risk death, returning blow for blow with his fists or his wits.

From The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene.

Never! Part one

In 1833, Mr. Thomas Auld, the slaveholding owner of a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, summoned back his slave Frederick Douglass, fifteen years old at the time, from Baltimore, where Douglass had just spent seven years serving Auld’s brother. Now he was needed to work the fields of the plantation. But life in the city had changed Douglass in many ways, and to his chagrin he found it quite hard to disguise this from Auld. In Baltimore he had secretly managed to teach himself how to read and write, something no slave was allowed to do, for that would stimulate dangerous thoughts. On the plantation Douglass tried to teach as many slaves as possible to read; these efforts were quickly squashed. But what was worse for him was that he had developed a rather defiant attitude, what the slaveholder called impudence. He talked back to Auld, questioned some of his orders, and played all kinds of tricks to get more food. (Auld was notorious for keeping his slaves near starvation.)

One day Auld informed Douglass that he was hiring him out for a year to Mr. Edward Covey, a nearby farm renter who had earned a reputation as a consummate “breaker of young Negroes.” Slaveholders would send him their most difficult slaves, and in exchange for their free labor Covey would beat every last ounce of rebellion out of them. Covey worked Douglass especially hard, and after a few months he was broken in body and spirit. He no longer desired to read books or engage in discussions with his fellow slaves. On his days off, he would crawl under the shade of a tree and sleep off his exhaustion and despair.

One especially hot day in August 1834, Douglass became ill and fainted. The next thing he knew, Covey was hovering over him, hickory slab in hand, ordering him back to work. But Douglass was too weak. Covey hit him on the head, opening a deep wound. He kicked him a few times, but Douglass could not move. Covey finally left, intending to deal with him later.

Douglass managed to get to his feet, staggering to the woods, and somehow made his way back to Auld’s plantation. There he begged Master Auld to keep him there, explaining Covey’s cruelty. Auld was unmoved. Douglass could spend the night but then must return to Covey’s farm.

From The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene.

Continued in part two.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and school

I know of exactly one book by Wa Thiong'o (also known as James Ngugi at one time, if I remember right): Weep Not Child. I had to read it for Literature class in the early years (or Forms) of secondary school and I absolutely loved it. Another book we read that I loved was a play, a Nigerian version of Oedipus the title of which I've forgotten. In my third form, I had to severely curtail the art subjects--of which Literature was one--to focus on the sciences.

When I was in secondary school, there were five forms, one through five. In the first two, all students took the basic, general subjects: Mathematics, English, General Science, Social Studies, Literature, etc. Nothing too specific. In the third year, the student got to choose (at 14 or 15!) which "track" (and thus career) to pursue: the "hard sciences", the "social sciences", and the "arts". The General Science of the first two forms was broken down into Biology, Physics, and Chemistry; Social Studies into Geography, Economics, History, etc.; the Fine Arts into Literature, actual Art, and languages like French, etc.

The "hard sciences" ultimately led to University courses in Engineering, and Medicine among others. The "social sciences" meant University courses in ... well, I don't remember. I do know the "fine arts" usually ended up in courses like Law and Education.

The "hard sciences" students, depending on their grades, got to attend Forms 4A and 4B. The "social sciences" were in Forms 4C and 4D with the "arts" in 4E. This was when there were only five classes per year. As school size exploded, there were Forms 4F and onwards, at which point the system broke down although Forms 4A and 4B were still the premier forms.

The boys (I went to an all male secondary school) in form 4A and to a lesser extent 4b, were la creme de la creme, mostly because they'd gotten the best grades in the previous three years. The others, well, they were The Others. Looking back, I intrinsically thought that was wrong, but what did I know, I was 16-years-old and in Form 4A!

My mother, a French teacher, wasn't too happy I had to give up the Arts, like Literature and now, I completely agree with her. The Arts are a vital part of a solid education and I regret not having had those subjects for longer. For my school leaving certificate exams (after Form 5A), I had the following subjects:

1. Mathematics
2. Additional Mathematics (which I took up at the last minute because ...)
3. French (I had to give up, because the teacher stunk! I felt bad afterwards because he died of cancer soon after)
4. Physics
5. Chemistry
6. Biology
7. Geography
8. Bible Knowledge (Huh? Why'd I take this again?)
9. History (Couldn't be sure if I had this subject)

Except for Add. Maths, I did very well in the others. Add. Maths was essentially Calculus and I'd not had enough studying before taking the exam. Now I wish I'd taken Economics and Literature instead of Bible Knowledge and History or even instead of Add. Maths, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Of course, my path after school took me in strange directions and I ended up not studying Medicine or Engineering in Nigeria, but that's a tale for another time. I wonder if my reminiscence today is because Mama's in Asaba getting buried?