This weekend's postcard, and the new tragedies of a war that wouldn't wait

October 28, 2023

The Medicine Wheel, on the crest of the Bighorns, east of Lovell, Wyoming

I don’t smoke but I think it would have helped, yesterday, to be with someone who does.

In 1962 ABC introduced a TV show about war. “Combat!” was invariably described as a “gritty” depiction of platoon-level warfare, with its constant tides of moral and ethical challenges—even if you are convinced you’re on the right side. Four of the five seasons were in black & white and I think this helped a young mind, like mine, to keep it at a safe enough distance from a happy life in living color. At least until the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

The episodes of “Combat!” are compressed in my memory, like an old zip file. The stories wouldn’t have worked as well on radio. So much of the dialogue was in the silence of vacant eyes and plumes of exhaled smoke. Words alone simply couldn’t express the pain of chaos and loss, or the bleakness of the choices. And that’s how I felt yesterday, somewhere in the afternoon, when I heard the broadcast voice of someone named Mark Regev, identified as a “senior advisor” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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