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On Military Life and Sacrifice

Before he addressed the crowd that had assembled in the St. Louis Hyatt Regency ballroom last November, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly had one request. “Please don’t mention my son,” he asked the Marine Corps officer introducing him. Four days earlier, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly , 29, had stepped on a land mine while […]

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The Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age

I went ahead and dedicated my new book to Maj. Harold Hering because Maj. Hering sacrificed his military career to ask a Forbidden Question about launching nuclear missiles. A question that exposed the comforting illusions of the so called fail-safe system designed to prevent “unauthorized” nuclear missile launches. How can any missile crewman know that […]

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Blood Brothers

In 1984 two soldiers, an Iranian and an Iraqi, meet on the battlefield. Amazingly, 20 years later, in Vancouver, they meet again. “Haftlang’s orders were to kill any surviving Iraqi or deliver him to his almost-certain death at the hands of others. Hoping he wouldn’t find anyone alive, Haftlang began moving through the bunkers. In […]

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Hiding Out

The child of an outspoken Libyan dissident on attending boarding school in England. “I was to pretend that my mother was Egyptian and my father American. It was thought that this would explain, to any Arabs in the school, why my Arabic was Egyptian and why my English was American. My first name was Bob. […]

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53.1% of You Already Know What This Story’s About. Or Do You? Need a Hint?

It’s about Professor Daryl Bem and his cheerful case for ESP. “Over seven years, Bem measured what he considers statistically significant results in eight of his nine studies. In the experiment I tried, the average hit rate among 100 Cornell undergraduates for erotic photos was 53.1 percent. (Neutral photos showed no effect.) That doesn’t seem […]

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