zenpundit.com

Zen here – today we continue a series by Dr. Timothy R. Furnish, a longtime friend of ZP blog. Timothy Furnish is an Army vet and former civilian consultant to Special Operations Command with a PhD is in Islamic history. He’s written five books and runs the website Occidental Jihadist.

by Dr. Timothy R. Furnish

In the previous two installments, I provided an overview of fiction books used in military education, and then a synopsis of the Future History fiction series that sprang from the brow of Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, with a little help from their friends. Now I will turn to specific examples of how these brilliant and entertaining books treat grand strategy, strategy, tactics, and even logistics. [Definitions thereof taken from Stephen Morillo, What is Military History?]  In doing so, I hope to make a cogent and convincing case that at least some of the 20+ books that make up the galactic backstory of the superb novel The Mote in God’s Eye should be part of American professional military education. 

Let’s start at the top, with grand strategy—which is “where warfare and politics merge: a country’s grand strategy in a war describes its goals not strictly in military terms but in political, economic, or even cultural terms with military action, including strategy, seen from this perspective as one tool, with diplomacy, bribery, marriage alliance, and so forth, of grand strategy.” (Morillo is great on substance, but he does tend toward run-on sentences.) In the Pournelle-Carr universe, the best example of this is the centuries-long struggle between the Empire of Man, on the one hand,  and Secessionist systems led by the genetically-engineered Saurons, on the other. This is covered in detail in John Carr and Don Hawthorne, War World: The Battle of Sauron (2007).  Although the actual war between the “cattle” of the Empire (as the Saurons derisively refer to normal humans) and the future übermensch lasts only 37 years, the conflict actually lasted for centuries—Sauron was part of the Co-Dominium-undermining “Brotherhood” of planets, and engaging in outlawed genetic engineering, by the mid-21st century. Five hundred years later, not only are all Saurons enhanced, but in the 2400s they began creating Cyborg “super-soldiers.” But open military conflict does not erupt until the early 27th century. For some years prior to that Sauron was the leader of the Secessionist movement of planets demanding the right, in the Imperial Parliament, to withdraw from the Empire. Much of the Secessionist dissatisfaction is with the Empire’s taxation and perceived heavy-handedness; but there are also the usual political squabbles, as well—with “Claimants” to the Imperial throne advancing their right to rule, while also carving off quadrants and systems as their own fiefs. (Roman, or for that matter Ottoman or Ming, imperial history transferred to the future and an interstellar setting, in other words.) The Saurons, of course, see themselves as not just the rightful rulers of humanity but the next step in human evolution. And normal humans as simply breeding receptacles and drones for them. The Empire, for all its flaws, is the only hope for humanity to avoid slavery—or worse. So it engages in intense propaganda against Sauron, branding its people as monstrously supremacist. Yet this succeeded because it was largely accurate. Also, in a brilliant stroke that helped win the war, the Imperial center on the planet Sparta granted amnesty  to traitorous Secessionists—who then brought their fleets of spaceships to assist the Imperial forces in not only defeating space forces of Sauron, but in destroying all life on the planet. Although one ship of Saurons escaped, the existential threat to normal humanity was ended—but at the cost of the First Empire collapsing shortly afterwards. As Galen Diettinger, the commander of the lone surviving contingent of Saurons (and a surprisingly sympathetic figure, as devised by Carr and Hawthorne), remarked:

“we led a totalitarian state into war against a representative Empire, a republic in all but name. Hannibal’s ironic victory was that his actions forced the Romans to adopt policies that did doom their Republic….” Likewise for the First Empire of Man.

Other great examples of grand strategy in the Pournelle-Carr Future History series are the accounts of the later 21st century attempts by Grand Admiral of the CoDominium Fleet, Sergei Lermontov, to deploy elements of the CoDo Marines—in particular the 42nd Marine Regiment commanded by Colonel John Christian Falkenberg, which had been decommissioned and turned into a mercenary outfit—to prevent any other colony planets’ military forces from rising to challenge to CoDominium.  And to help ensure stability on key planets so that society will survive on them once the CoDominium inevitably collapses. Lermontov’s grand strategic goals were largely successful. 

A level down from grand strategy is strategy: “the level of military action and analysis that has to do with deciding the objectives of operations in specific theaters.” There are legions of examples of such (pun intended), many of which involved the aforementioned Colonel Falkenberg. In particular, two of his brilliant campaigns are worth studying in this regard. One, on Haven, against a Muslim leader claiming to be the Mahdi. (See Carr, War World: Falkenberg’s Regiment, 2018, as well as Carr, ed., War World: Jihad!, 2013). Another, on New Washington, which is trying to stave off conquest by another colonized planet in the same solar system, Franklin—the latter employing its own mercenaries, infantry from the Scottish planet Covenant and armor from the German-settled Friedland. (Laid out in Pournelle and S.M. Stirling, The Prince, 2002). 

Haven is the setting for many of the War World stories.  It’s actually a (barely) habitable moon of a gas giant, quite cold and with thin atmosphere. It’s also, in the 21st century, the most distant colony from Earth—some 65 light-years away, which takes a year or so to reach. That makes it a convenient dumping ground for Earth’s undesirables and criminals; so “BuReLoc”—the Bureau of Relocation—transports many such there. Haven is also a very important source of several crucial minerals, as well as precious stones. And there’s a sizable presence of a new religious sect, the Church of New Harmony. In 2075 an Arab Muslim, Tawfiq al-Talib, is proclaimed Mahdi and begins a jihad on Haven—supported, behind the scenes, by the Arab planet Levant. He finds willing troops, as 60% of Haven’s 4.5 million population is Muslim. Falkenberg’s 42nd is sent to bolster the 77th Marine regiment already on Haven. They also bring in a Gurkha battalion from Earth, and arm miners’ militias. But the CoDo forces number at most 15,000, and face at least 200,000 Mahdists. 

Thus, Falkenberg relies on innovative—if politically incorrect—tactics and logistics. The former are “what armed forces use in combat. They can be offensive (a cavalry charge, a tank attack, etc.) or defensive (a shield wall, digging a trench, or occupying a fortification, among other tactics)…. Tactics can also apply to ship-to-ship combat…and air-to-air….”).  The latter are “how armed forces are supplied, both in peacetime and on campaign.” It is important to realize “how significantly the strategic choices supposedly open to commanders [are] constrained by the potential availability of food and water sources….”  For example, Colonel Falkenberg leverages the latter by dropping pig carcass parts into every well, oasis and spring on the northern plains where the Mahdi’s supporters live, thereby effectively denying his hundreds of thousands of men potable water. The Mahdists persevere and attack a CoDo fort along a river. “In preparation for this mines had been laid in the shallows and along both banks. At the spot where the guns and rockets were all zeroed in, stakes had been planted at an upstream angle with their sharpened ends just beneath the faint ripple of current…. Their principal purpose was to deflate the [Mahdists’] rubber rafts and create maximum confusion at this point…. As the Mahdi’s forces predictably jammed and clotted among the stakes…the artillerists up at the fort made their contribution, proximity fuses spreading shrapnel at an optimum height….” (Falkenberg’s Regiment, p. 141). “By the third time this maneuver had been pulled off, the river—temporarily  dammed by the corpses of the Mahdi’s finest—had stopped flowing….” (p. 142).  Some time later the Marines took on the Mahdi’s Bedouin forces in a non-siege situation. “The Arabs, used to the Haven militias’ hunting rifles, had not expected men with automatic weapons. At the first shot they rushed. The Seventy-Seventh’s men responded with traversing fire from two light machines guns and something over a hundred automatic rifles. Fifty of the Mahdi’s men went down in the first few seconds before they realized their mistake….” (p. 165).  And so on.  The Mahdi’s forces are squeezed logistically (Falkenberg also has his forces round up, or kill, herd animals), goaded/lured into attacking CoDo armed nodes, then eventually cut off from their outside support. So he Mahdists are eventually defeated—but you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly how.

On New Washington Falkenberg’s forces effectively win the war via a mixture of subterfuge and relentless attack. Unlike the campaign on Haven, this was a clash of modern forces and conventional tactics. First Falkenberg’s men took the main enemy (Franklin) fortress by pulling off a Trojan horse maneuver: hiding soldiers inside boxes marked “commissary supplies,” who then emerge in the middle of the night to open the gates to the 42nd’s main forces. Falkenberg then sent the regiment north into a heavily-populated river valley, which motivated many of the local ranchers to turn out with their weapons in support. (It also gave the New Washingtonians control of the most fertile food producing area.) But their main objective, carried out, was to move artillery pieces several hundred kilometers north in order to cover the Friedland tanks moving west, through the only possible route, to attack his forces. That armored brigade was decimated by artillery strikes, and so too was the enemy infantry. These mercenary units then surrendered. Once the occupying power (Franklin) had lost these purchased forces, it could no longer hold on to New Washington with its own military. The strategy worked perfectly to undergird the grand strategy: “Neutralize this planet with minimum CD [CoDominium] investment and without destroying the industries.” But ensure that neither Franklin nor New Washington would be able to build their own space fleets for some time.

Such are just a few examples of grand strategy, strategy, tactics and logistics from the Pournelle-Carr Future History series. Per David Webb, whom I quoted in my first installment: these are engaging and thoughtful stories which “portray the military within a science-fiction context.” They are not “bug-shoots.” They are “about human beings…caught up in warfare and carnage.”  The many War World books; The Battle for Sauron; the 1000+ pages of The Prince—all are just as worthy of study by America’s professional military as Ender’s Game or Starship Troopers. In fact, I think the many volumes comprising the back history to The Mote in God’s Eye are, in fact, more worthy of gracing the reading lists of the service Commandants, the military academies, and the war colleges. Don’t believe me? Read some yourself. 

Zen here – today we continue a series by Dr. Timothy R. Furnish, a longtime friend of ZP blog. Timothy Furnish is an Army vet and former civilian consultant to Special Operations Command with a PhD is in Islamic history. He’s written five books and runs the website Occidental Jihadist.

Pournelle’s “Future History” Setting and Politics

by Dr. Timothy R. Furnish

Forty-seven years ago Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle published The Mote in God’s Eye. It’s not about religion, but about humanity’s first contact with aliens in the early 31st century. (I consider it one of the three greatest sci-fi novels ever—along with Frank Herbert’s Dune and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.) A sequel by the same authors, The Gripping Hand, came out in 1993. Since then, some 22 volumes have been published dealing with that universe’s millennium-long backstory. The books are “hard” science fiction—that is, in the genre that strives for scientific accuracy and avoids mysticism, magic, and the like. (Star Trek is usually classified as “hard,” Star Wars as soft—if not downright squishy.) They could furthermore be classified as “military” sci-fi, which speaks for itself. 

A website with info on the stories and novels, as well as the Secondary “World” (more properly, universe) itself, is complete up through 2018—although another volume came out in March, 2020 (with even more to come, according to series chief John F. Carr, with whom I’ve been in contact). Many writers have contributed, although the heaviest hitters have been Pournelle (before his death in 2017), the aforementioned, and prolific, Carr, and S.M. Stirling (author of the superb Dies the Fire and its many “Emberverse” sequels). Larry Niven, the original co-author, largely parted ways with the series after the two seminal novels. But Pournelle—whose doctorate was in political science—had a great deal to do with shaping what has come to be known as his “Future History.”

In brief, this alternative history starts with the USSR surviving and joining with the USA in the 1990s to create the “CoDominium:” joint Soviet-American rule of the planet, carried out by the Grand Senate composed of American and Soviet politicians. CoDominium military forces, notably a Space Navy and Marines, are created. In the early 21st century an instantaneous interstellar drive is invented and by 2020 colonies are founded outside our solar system.  Before the century is up, there are at least 70 of them, many established by various countries on Earth, and/or by separatist and religious groups. The most important are Sparta, St. Ekaterina and Sauron. The first was founded by American professors who set up a dual monarchy with representative government. The second is Russian more than Soviet and eventually allies with Sparta. The last is run by “English separatists from Quebec and South African white expatriates” who soon embark on a program of genetic engineering to create a master race. By the beginning of the 22nd century, the US and USSR break their alliance and engage in nuclear war on Earth—making the stage of human activity the former colonies.  There are, arguably, four crucial aspects to this Future History.

First, although interstellar travel is possible, it has drawbacks. The Alderson Drive can only move ships between star systems, and is useless within one. There is no “warp drive” or ability to travel even close to light speed. “Starships,” whether commercial or military, take weeks or months to move within extrasolar systems in order to reach the “Alderson Point,” which is a “tramline” to another system. They then travel there instantaneously, but must repeat the slow process to reach the planets within the destination system. Ships do have powerful lasers, and nuclear weapons, but they fight each other at sub-light speeds. And most importantly in terms of military tactics, at least for the first few centuries of this history, armed forces that can be moved instantaneously between star systems still have to fight as infantry with rifles, artillery and the like on distant planets. 

Second, from the early 21st to early 31st centuries, there are no alien foes. All of the battles and wars take place between humans, albeit spread across hundreds of light-years. In this regard Pournelle’s universe resembles that of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which homo sapiens is the sole sentient measure. Man’s inhumanity to Man is spread to the stars, but is thus that much more fathomable. 

Third, this Future History is cyclical. Dr. Pournelle was known to be a  fan of C. Northcote Parkinson. Parkinson’s primary thesis (besides his famous law) is that history “reveals…a sequence in which one form of rule replaces another, each in turn achieving not perfection but decay” (The Evolution of Political Thought, p. 9). Indeed, “there is no historical reason for supposing that our present systems of governance are other than quite temporary expedients.” The Western arrogance that “the development of political institutions has progressed steadily from the days of Lycurgus or Solon down to the present day” with “the ultimate achievement being British Parliamentary Democracy or perhaps the American Way of Life” is just that that (Ibid., p. 8).  In sum, drawing on anthropology as well as history, Parkinson sees the human cycle of political systems running thusly: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, dictatorship. The final then institutionalizes into monarchy, and the process starts all over again. There are variations on each of the four types (see Parkinson, p. 12, drawing on Aristotle), but in toto those are adequate. Across space (literally!) and time, humans try each of these—sometimes more than one, simultaneously, on the same planet.

Fourth, the series is rife with Great Power conflict. The CoDominium initially serves as a hegemon, not an imperial power—the single most powerful polity, but unable to directly rule all the colonies. (See here for a succinct analysis of hegemony v. empire.) It’s largely a unipolar interstellar system, then. After the nuclear war on Earth, the system becomes multipolar, with various colonies—now independent planets—vying for the upper hand via their own fleets and military forces (both planetary and mercenary). Eventually Sparta emerges as the next hegemon, thanks in main to the fact that the bulk of the CoDominium Navy swears allegiance to the Spartan throne. Over the course of 150 years, Sparta then creates an Empire by consolidating—both peacefully and violently—most of the other human-settled planets into its rule. Pax Spartanica then lasts until the 27th century, when the First Empire falls mainly after exhausting itself in defeating the Nazi-like, genetically-engineered Saurons—during which human-occupied space was bipolar in conflict terms. Not until the early 30th century is the Second Empire (once again ruled by Sparta), proclaimed, consisting of over 200 planets, all human; that is, until 3017. 

[Up next: how these political divisions played out in various wars, on various planets and moons, across the centuries.]

Zen here – today we start a series by Dr. Timothy R. Furnish, a longtime friend of ZP blog. Timothy Furnish is an Army vet and former civilian consultant to Special Operations Command with a PhD is in Islamic history. He’s written five books and runs the website Occidental Jihadist.

Fictional novels about war have been around for quite some time. Millennia, in fact, if we include The Iliad in the category (although Homer likely thought he was recounting actual history). The genre, more realistically, began with La Chartreuse de Parme by “Stendhal” in 1839, who wrote about the Napoleonic Wars in Italy. Such proliferated in 19th, then 20th century, with realistic novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, about WWI, or The Thin Red Line, set in WWII’s Pacific theater. Military science fiction kicked in the genre’s door in 1959, with Robert Heinlein’s (in)famous Starship Troopers. The following decade alternate military histories began to proliferate, thanks in large part to Philip K. Dick’s famous The Man in the High Castle (which was made into an arresting Amazon Prime TV show, 2015-2019). Perhaps the most famous, and influential, military fiction books of recent years have been Stephen Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, about the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae; and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, set several centuries in the future, during an interstellar war humanity is waging to survive.

I am a big fan of historical fiction in my world history courses, and always assign a relevant novel, such as Gore Vidal’s Creation. In military history courses, I have used Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius, Michael Shaara’s Civil War classic The Killer Angels, and Gates of Fire. 

In recent decades, such books have found their way onto some professional military reading lists. And why shouldn’t they? As genre author David Webb has said: “military science-fiction is science-fiction which is written about a military situation with a fundamental understanding of how military lifestyles and characters differ from civilian lifestyles and characters. It is science-fiction which attempts to realistically portray the military within a science-fiction context. It is not ‘bug shoots.’ It is about human beings, and members of other species, caught up in warfare and carnage. It isn’t an excuse for simplistic solutions to problems.” Certainly, a nation with a Space Force might find it worthwhile for future military leaders to study thoughtful, intelligent, well-written military fiction, set in the future as well as the past. Yes, there are some who would not deem it wise—for the danger exists that military fiction “confirms existing thought patterns of political and military leaders about future military conflict.” That is, “rather than fighting the last war, as the old axiom goes, military leaders may be more susceptible to fighting the fictional wars of their imagination, fueled by war fiction, instead of the conflict unfolding in front of them.” This same critic contends that “future war fiction, especially in the English-speaking world, tends to use super-weapons and surprise attacks as the two major plot devices.” 

As for the first objection, methinks it’s more contrived than concrete. The examples offered are unconvincing, and in fact one of them—that President Reagan, because of The Hunt for Red October, increased military spending—proves just the opposite, since Reagan’s defense build-up was largely responsible for the Cold War ending sans nuclear war.  Also, this objection presupposes that an educated leadership cannot distinguish between reality and fiction. Finally, not all futuristic military fiction in the Anglosphere utilizes “super-weapons and surprise attacks.” In fact, one major, largely-ignored series of such books employs the former rarely, and the latter not at all: Jerry Pournelle’s Future History.

Before examining the books and stories set in the universe created by Dr. Jerry Pournelle and further elaborated upon by S.M. Stirling, John F. Carr, and Don Hawthorne, as well as other contributors, let’s take a look at the fiction books on several major military institution’s recommended reading lists. In 2017 the Army Chief of Staff recommended professional reading list included 98 books, five of which were fiction: The Aeneid, The Iliad and The Odyssey (lumped together as one work), Gates of Fire, Singer & Cole’s Ghost Fleet (about a future world war between the US and Russia + China), and Marlantes’ Vietnam novel, Matterhorn. The most recent list from the US Army Chief of Staff includes only one fiction book, Anton Myrer’s Once An Eagle. That’s one more than the Air Force CoS recommends, however. Ditto for the JFK Special Warfare Center and School. Neither the Air Force chief, nor the folks who educate our special ops, think much of fiction, it appears. In 2019 the Commandant of the Marine Corps put out a list with dozens of books, including four fictions ones: The Killer Angels, Gates of Fire, Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game. But those are recommended only for junior enlisted, not at all for officers. And the 2020 list from the same office had removed even those. The Chief of Naval Operations does recommend some fiction, notably the aforementioned Matterhorn, as well as Singer and Cole and Starship Troopers. But the CNO also wants sailors to read Ibrahim X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist—which might well qualify as fiction, come to think of it. 

Contrast these with the 131-page list, nay volume, of approved books promulgated by the Chief of the Australian Army. A full 25 of those are fiction. These include the usual suspects: Pressfield, Heinlein, Card, Shaara. But also ones on the Romans, the British in India, the Napoleonic wars and even a few alternative histories, such as Robert Harris’ Fatherland (another “Nazis won WWII” take) and the even more surprising, and little-known, Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson—in which Europeans were wiped out by the plague, and the modern world is dominated by China, India and Islamic states. Last year two Marine Corps officers even suggested that The Lord of the Rings be read “because of the focus…on alliances, coalition building, and strategy.” (As the author of a book on the political history of Middle-earth, I strongly agree.)

I have read many (but not all) of the fictions books mentioned herein. And I can still say that Pournelle, et al., stands with—or above—any of them in terms of potential value to the professional education of military leaders.

[Up next: a detailed look at the politics- and war-riven interstellar setting, 2020-3018 AD, which grew out of Pournelle and Larry Niven’s famous novel The Mote in God’s Eye.] 

[by J. Scott Shipman]

“…strikes may in all instances be necessary but they will not in all instances be sufficient to achieve a national military purpose…[and] a fleet is incomplete which has not elements that can operate in waters next to the enemy coast.” From Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, Second Edition, pg 249-250 by Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., CAPT, USN, Ret (emphasis added).

.

“Where missiles are concerned, the contest between the offense and defense is marked by a serious differential in starting points. In practical terms, the offense has a huge and nearly motionless target to hit and needs to hit it only once. One large missile warhead is equivalent to something like five or ten direct hits by a sixteen-inch gun. The defense, on the other hand, is required to intercept an extremely fast and quite agile flying object, sometimes hardly detectable in the various phases of its trajectory, which can be launched from any operational dimension and often—for design purposes, every time—completely by surprise.” From The Littoral Arena; A Word of Caution, by RADM Yedidia “Didi” Ya’ari, Israel Navy, Naval War College Review, Summer 2014 (emphasis added) (this was a reprint suggested by Wayne Hughes who wrote, A Prophet For Our Times to accompany the rerelease.)

.

“Future wars in which LRPS (Long Range Precision Strike) systems predominate will involve efforts by all sides to find adversary platforms while hiding their own from the enemy’s ISR and targeting systems. In the “hider/finder” competition, a mobile platform that can hide in clutter (such as environmental or electromagnetic noise, dense traffic areas, on and under the water, etc.) will likely survive and be capable of offensive action. This will become the paramount element in contested seas, straits, and littorals. The offensive action of targeting and counter targeting is decisive, and no navy ever triumphed at sea without having the offensive advantage.” RADM Walter E. Carter, Proceedings, May 2014

Back to Nuts and Bolts, or as a friend in the intel community called “ground truth”

.

An affordable and executable set of solutions will be needed to make the most of these ideas. We believe essential elements of these action groups should be a combination of manned and optionally manned, subsurface and surface platforms. For the subsurface vehicles the price per hull should not exceed $250M and for the surface platforms the price should not exceed $100M (though we should aim for $70M). We should buy these ships in numbers. The broad concept of operations for these vehicles would be to operate and compliment our growing number of unmanned underwater vehicles, and our SSNs, where appropriate.

[mark safranski / zen ]

This year saw the passing of Charles Cameron, the longtime managing editor and co-blogger here at ZP. Charles is deeply missed by everyone who read or blogged here and to honor him on what would have been his birthday on Friday, we are publishing a memorial essay by his oldest son, Emlyn Cameron.

Ashes in California: A reflection on the end of my father

By Emlyn Cameron

In his mid-seventies, my father, always reluctant to do anything that might benefit his health, had a heart attack. A year later he had another one. This time he would undergo open-heart surgery. His physical condition meant the operation would put him at greater-than-average risk of dying.

The night before the surgery, I decided to walk to his hospital and talk to him. Telling your parent what you’d like them to know before they die is unhappy work. In my case, I got dizzy, and my face went numb and mostly immobile, and I felt as if I had a large bruise spreading deep in the tissue of my chest.

I had hoped it would bring him some fulfillment to know the effect he had upon his son. But, I doubted that when the issue of death ultimately asserted itself he would be in a position to care. My real aim was to make his death easier for me. This was part of a long attempt to steal incrementally from and lessen the store of grief I’d feel when he finally died.

I had started by trying to outright deny him the privilege of dying: When I was small, it occurred to me that Father wouldn’t be around forever. He was in his mid-fifties by the time I was 10, already unhealthy, and even other healthier, younger people died. I checked this with Mum, who confirmed my worry. So, I tried to go over his head – I asked God to step in and make a compact with me on the order of I’ll be good and pious if you’ll give my father a permanent reprieve. 

Santa Claus stuff. 

Some years later, in my early teens, I tried instead to maximize time with Father, despite my parents’ divorce: Every trip to a thrift store, or Saturday cruise between yard sales, in his battered sedan, and every heat-choked afternoon spent combing through his storage unit became essential. If I could spend enough time with him, maybe I could skip out on saying, “I could have, should have seen him more.” Whenever he drove away, I stood by the curb waving until his car evaporated at the horizon. Sometimes this would go on until my arms ached, or the blood refused to make the journey up to my fingertips and I had to use my arms in shifts. The way the street was quiet and empty and unchanged after he was gone made me uncomfortable. Eventually this ritual seemed silly and wasteful, so I gave up. 

I tried a more circuitous path. My father and I had always been similar in our temperaments but extremely different in our interests. Now, I played that up. I was more contemptuous than necessary, said “no” whenever possible, and highlighted our differences. If I renounced a certain amount of my ability to see him and show him my total affection, it seemed to me that made the occasions when I did so more meaningful and the weight of his eventual death less of a loss.

Living with him for a while near the end of high school, I stuck rigidly to my plans to be out of the apartment as often as possible, though he invited me to spend evenings watching movies with him; Pointed out the flaws and limited results of his flitting and optimistic approach to life – always working on some new, abortive book project, always living paycheck to paycheck and relying on good fortune to prevail. I unloaded my more militant, cynical, and ambitious ideas on him and heckled him for not cleaning his dishes. For his part, like Bazarov’s father in Fathers and Sons, he smiled and adored me for my cavalier and dismissive attitude – every correction was proof that his boy had grown up bright and bold, an improvement, however bizarre, on his old man.

After I’d left for Oregon to attend college, Mum called. She had taken Father to the emergency room for chest pains. It was his first heart attack. In spite of all the time I’d spent trying to think my way around grief or fear, I was nervous, desolated, and a little excited by the drama of it all. Friends of mine drove up from Sacramento so they could give me a ride to the hospital. The sun sank behind the hills. We drove fast through the dark fields of rural northern California. The road ahead was foggy. The cabin of the tiny Volkswagen, where the blaring radio glowed, held the only visible light. My friends joked. I gripped the hand beside me.

Father was swaddled in hospital clothes and thin blankets, his hair a mad mess. I took a video to keep with my collection of his voicemails.

“This is what I was like before,” he said, looking into the lens. He smiled, and then stuck his tongue out.

After that crisis, my approach softened. I was more interested in setting aside time, though not all of it, to see him; in behaving with tenderness when it seemed honest; and in talking proudly about him, and in agreement with him. 

When I sat by his hospital bed the following year, I shared what feeble, obvious sentimentalities I could: That I loved him, that I would miss him, that I appreciated all he had made me. I tried to keep it simple, in part so my voice would quaver as little as possible, and in part because – for all my consideration – I wasn’t sure what I could add to our time together. I remember crying. Not a great flow, but one or two warm, constricted tears, and I think he held my hand.

The next day, his operation was postponed. A friend who had been visiting him to talk about poetry took me to a drive-thru coffee shack.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do when he’s gone,” my friend said as we waited for our turn, the car idling in line. “Life’s going to be so different.”

“No, it’s not. It’s going to be painfully the same,” I said. “That’s the tragedy: We want the death to be big and life-changing but nothing changes. Every once in a while, we’ll get an idea to go see him and then we’ll remember we can’t. The world’s the same. Just a little poorer.”

My father came out of the surgery fine: an indefinite reprieve, a little longer to figure out how to make his death matter.

In 2018, I was accepted to grad school in New York. I credit this acceptance in large part to a personal essay I wrote describing my father’s ascetic approach to life — an apartment empty of most luxuries, but verdant with books, where all of his waking life, more or less, was spent studying and writing about the subjects of his passion — and how I felt that,irrespective of our many differences, if I was “my father’s son,” it was because I had inherited his monastic devotion to the subjects of my interest (My father, whose own pater had died well before Father was old enough to go to university, in turn credited his acceptance to Oxford to an essay about Bach’s B Minor Mass)

However, this acceptance — in combination with my family’s finances — meant I was going to be far from my home state indefinitely. Because I would not see many old friends for quite some time, and because Father had relinquished the apartment in which we’d lived together in favor of a nursing home, I stayed most of that summer as a guest of friends throughout California. It was only near the end of that summer that I saw him.

I visited him in his nursing home. Most of his things had been moved to the storage unit, but he had brought some small shelves with him. Across from the electric hospital bed in which he slept and worked, these had been deployed along the wall and filled with books on Russia, drone strikes, religious extremism, and protest art. Above his head was a photograph of his father, an officer in the Royal Navy who’d died young of a heart attack. Next to Father’s bed was a swivel table built to slide over his bed to provide a surface for food. His laptop occupied it and left only so much room as was filled by notepads and a mug stained with instant coffee grounds. Mum liked to joke that all my father had ever wanted was to stay in bed, writing, while food was brought to him, and he’d finally arranged it. She joked too that, when the nursing home had received him they had not thought he had the look of a long staying tenant. But Father had some secret vitality that was loathe to give up his endless work.

We talked about my classes. I was planning at that time to focus on conflict reporting and perhaps tensions in the Middle East. This enthused father, since it brought my interests within the sweep of his own. He also seemed to like it because I told him I thought domestic politics in the US was becoming so central to the news cycle that I might find myself working outside the spotlight of current events, and he was always proud when I found myself tacking against prevailing winds.

He told me that, when I was growing up in California he could always imagine my day to day life (even after the divorce) because he usually lived nearby by, and when I’d gone to college I attended a school at which he’d once taught so his imaginings could roam up to Oregon with me. He couldn’t say the same of New York and he asked me to write him a descriptive email once a week to help him out. 

I said no, I didn’t think I’d be able to keep that up, which made him laugh. When my father laughed, there was usually no sound. He just smiled with his few teeth (four in the front, on the lower gum) and his shoulders hopped and jumped in a pantomime of chuckling.

I told him I was going to record a video every day and, instead of a weekly email, I would try to send him a montage of a year in New York. I said this with some self reproach, because I was not sure if he would live a year. 

We had a long goodbye.

I went away and passed a glorious year in school. I found myself not following conflict reporting (I am a coward and fear death pretty patently, which rather limits the career options of a conflict reporter) and I also found myself increasingly fascinated by the topic of the American Right. I had found a field that felt as unifying to my own interests as religious extremism had been to my father’s career. 

I recorded a video most days, but did not set aside time to edit it into a whole. Instead I sent Father irregular emails and every so often we had a video call via facebook messenger. In our exchanges he welcomed my new focus as a kind of secant to his intellectual sphere.

So, for that first year and some change, we bonded primarily by exchanging articles that showed a convergence between our interests. Being a continent away, and trying to navigate my first experiences of continuous independence, I sought to balance my need to focus on daily life in New York and making the most of the new ways in which my father and I had found ourselves connecting. This did not usually translate into lengthy messages, but I tried to make my responses consistent and prompt. Promptness was especially important. 

And occasionally, without a better reason to say anything, the shadow of fear would fall over me and I’d send him an email or a twitter message just to say I loved him and hoped he knew, in case we went too long without speaking to do so again.

Eventually I tried something new with Father: He had been producing book reviews and short blog-post essays for many years. His focus had been Islamic fundamentalism and the wars in the Middle East, which had dominated current affairs for close to 20 years. My focus, domestic politics and the American Right, was increasingly central to current affairs now and an area that, while interesting to him, was not his primary concern. I was going to write essays and book reviews dealing with that topic, and he could edit them. If the finished product was good enough, he could post them as a domestic supplement to his writing on events abroad that would suit the political moment. In the process we could speak often and I could keep him apprised of what I was learning in an area of mutual interest.

So, from August 2019 on, my father and I worked on a series of essays and reviews together. He recommended works that had caught his attention or I broached a possible subject. Once a draft was complete, I would leave it with my father. He’d disentangle its clauses and disinter the submerged or incomplete ideas. Then, over messenger–our pixelated faces blurry and halting–he and I would discuss changes for hours.

My father and I, often interested in different topics or different parts of the same subject and hard to steer away from our preferred tracks, had not always been able to talk for very long or very constructively. Sometimes we spoke briefly along a mutual path; Sometimes we spoke at length but digressed ever further away from one another, each reaching for the conversational tiller. But, usually, it was at best one or the other between us and the conversations were (at least for me), frequently less about an organic back and forth that rarely appeared than about ensuring we had talked in any case.

But, during the months when we worked on these essays we kept steadily and naturally in close intellectual cooperation for whole afternoons. And at the end of day we had created something tangible together. 

I returned to California briefly in December 2019 for a friend’s wedding reception. While I was home, another friend took me to see my father. Father had had a portion of his foot removed, so I helped him into his wheelchair. 

I wheeled him out of the building, past other tenants. Many were moaning or seemed lost. Their vulnerability made me uncomfortable, especially as I rolled Father along and wondered if he would eventually be as unreachable. I did not think I would have the courage to visit him if his faculties eventually left him. Maybe that was why there seemed to be so few other visitors.

We drove my father to a Himalayan restaurant. He braced himself against my arm as he limped from the car to the door. We had a good dinner and spoke happily. When I took him home I said goodbye. This took quite some time, because I would give him a long hug and then I would delay leaving and talk awhile longer and then hold him again. 

Finally, I hugged him the last time. I bent down to his chair, he stretched thin arms up around my neck, and I held him a long time. I kissed the crown of his head. Age had made the fine hair and skin very soft. 

Then I joked that he had to be on his guard to live long enough for me to see him again when I could next fly into California. 

I flew back to New York and not too very long after the Coronavirus brought most things to a halt. My father, because of his age and his reliance on dialysis, was in a high risk category, but the nursing home closed its doors to visitors and reported no internal cases. From that point forward my brother and Mum visited him by bringing his favorite foods to the glass door of the nursing home and waiving when he was wheeled to the front. Then his food would be taken inside by a staff member to ensure containment wasn’t interrupted.

On August 11, 2020, my father sent me an article about William Bar and conservative jurisprudence via twitter. I thanked him. 

On August 12, 2020, my father sent me a link to an article by email and I put off responding. 

The next day I sent him a photo of a line from Ezra Pound that reminded me of something he’d told me once. He read it but didn’t respond. 

On August 28, 2020, my father had an outpatient surgery that went smoothly and my mum told me to email him, but I didn’t. I reminded myself a few times to do so, but I did not.

Ten days later, on Labor Day, I was having a beer with a friend outside of a bar in Brooklyn. Mum called and said that Father had had a heart attack in his nursing home and had been taken to the emergency room. She said she’d keep me informed.

I explained to my friend what had happened and said I wasn’t sure what to do, but that this had happened before and it wasn’t certain what it would mean. So we finished our drink and walked back to his apartment.

At 6:45PM, Mum texted me saying, “Still awaiting word. I think no news is good news in these circumstances.”

At 6:58PM my phone started to ring. It was Mum. It occurred to me briefly that she had said she would text me updates. I answered, finished something I was saying to my friend, and said hello.

“Hey Emlyn, so I’ve just talked to the doctor and something’s come up: Your father was flatlined for twenty minutes. They’ve managed to get his heart going but his brain isn’t coming back,” she said, calmly. “And they’ve asked me whether we want to continue having him on a ventilator, brain dead in a coma, or if we should let him go–” her voice broke, “–and I think we should let him go.”

I remembered that Father had liked to say that his body had just been there to carry his library card and his books. It struck me a little cruel that in the end it was only his brain that couldn’t be revived.

“I just thought you’d want to know.”

“Okay,” I said, and my voice shook, “Will you call me back afterwards?” She said she would. I asked her to put the phone near him when there was a chance, even though I knew he wouldn’t hear me, and to send me a photo of him since I couldn’t be there.

My mum put her cellphone near Father’s ear for a while. I said what I could, and for all the years I’d spent thinking about this moment, it was not much and it was difficult. I was glad I’d tried beforehand, and with more success I think, because, despite the sentimental need to say something, the time had passed. 

People say that the dead are “gone,” but I believe “over” is more appropriate. The aspect of people we love, their character and personality, is like a tremendous event occurring briefly. And, though his heart was still working, the tender spectacle of my father was over. 

Some time before, my father, who’d flirted coyly with religion all his life, had waylaid a Catholic priest present at the nursing home to perform last rites and asked him to visit

regularly to talk about theology. Mum arranged for this priest to come to the hospital and perform last rites for Father. My stepfather held up his cell phone on speakerphone, so that my younger brother — newly settled in his dorm room in LA — could listen in and Mum held the phone up on speaker phone so I could hear as well. The priest recited the Lord’s Prayer. The whole family, with the exception of Father and I, recited it with him.

When the ventilator was removed I heard a gasping, sucking noise. Mum assured me this was the ventilator and not Father. After that, it was uncertain how long his shallow breathing would sustain his body. 

Mum sent two photos of Father. It was hard to look at them. Like when I visited him a few years earlier and he had smiled into the camera and said, “This is what I was like before,” he was in thin hospital clothes and his hair was in a disarray. But he looked horribly abandoned now, not in the sense of a person but of a place. He looked empty and his face sagged, mouth open, in a way that reminded me of an old pumpkin sinking in on itself.

I had a few more calls with Mum that night, as I tried to keep a distant vigil, and my friend very kindly allowed me to use a guest room to take the calls. At one point, he put on some low, nordic music with a chanting sound and walked me to a small shrine he had on his book case, where he kept funeral cards from his grandparents and his grandfather’s pipe. He performed an impromptu service involving scented candles and smoking the pipe, then allowing it to burn (as if to allow someone invisibly with us to partake as well). Though he did not have a specific practice to offer me, he gave me this improvised ritual as a kind of sacrament to my father in recognition of his life, which was kind.

I began alerting people via text message. I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of a large wave of consoling messages, though the sentiment would not go unappreciated, and I felt oddly hesitant to tell anyone lest it should somehow turn out that a mistake had been made and I would have to walk back the announcement later. So, I told a relatively small group of people to begin with, people I spoke to so often or who were so close to Father that leaving it unsaid would be bizarre. Otherwise, I might have told no one.

The next day I asked for my four days bereavement leave and booked a flight home. In the afternoon, Father’s heart stopped. After that, when I informed people, I wasn’t sure if I should tell him he died Monday, as I believed, or Tuesday as the death certificate would likely state. 

Then I had dinner with some friends based in part on food my father had liked. We talked over what had happened. I got through most of it rather casually, until I tried to explain how I had waved at father’s car when I was a teenager. I began to cry and could only say, “I wrote it down. I wrote it down.”

The next day I flew out. As we approached California the landscape was obscured, but, unlike the trip through the darkened mountains to the north when father had his first heart attack, this time it was not fog: While I was away my home state had caught fire. Everything was hidden behind a pall of ash.

I stayed on a friend’s couch. The next morning the air quality was rated as unhealthy for the sensitive, and because I did not consider myself sensitive, I went outside to see the place I’d grown up. 

Every time I return, the buildings are much the same but seem a little smaller. I walked a street where Father and I had often visited a local Indian restaurant and a Goodwill during the time when I had volunteered for every thrift store run. While I was away the Goodwill had closed and the building stood empty. 

I looked towards the sun, which, through the smoke, looked like a blood moon. The layer of ash was so thick that one could stare into the sun indefinitely without one’s eyes watering. I wondered how long that would hold true.

I travelled with Mum to the crematorium, where I signed some papers and looked through a catalogue. We chose to do the simplest cremation and container and focus on where to spread the ashes. I asked if I could see my father and was told it would cost approximately $200, so I declined. 

I couldn’t see him in the hospital either because of the virus and the high number of bodies currently being held in their morgue. I understood the necessity and decided that I would focus instead on the meal I’d had with him at the Himalayan restaurant and the way it had felt to hug him when I said goodbye. That was probably better. 

It occurred to me that I would have to work hard to preserve that memory distinctly, because I would not feel his hair or soft skin again, or the way his arms reached up to encircle me.

In my time in California, Mum and I would have to sort his things to be sold or donated. Over the years, considering this ahead of time, I had made it a point to try to consider what to prioritize and if there was anything I would particularly want to preserve. I had a short list in my head.

Because I had taken my four days of leave starting Tuesday, and my flight back was early Sunday morning, I had three days left to help. Sometime after that, an antiquarian friend of my father’s was going to come and appraise what he’d left behind. 

Mum took me to the storage facility where my father had kept his library. We stepped out of the car, into air thick with smoke. It would have felt humid, except that it was palpably dry.

I unlocked the slatted metal door. I lifted it part way before it stuck, pinned by a collapsed tower of file boxes. I ducked under, shifted the tower, and pulled the door the rest of the way up.

The inside was a mess. In the heat cardboard boxes full of books, just about the sum total of my father’s worldly possessions, had degraded and slumped against one another or spilled entirely to the floor. A folding table with two old eMacs and an electric typewriter atop it had collapsed in a warped V. A stained mattress lay sideways against folded bookcases. 

I had hope that, even though the time was short, I could unpack it all and look through everything, determining what to save and what to let go. I trusted in a certain urgent determination to sort it all out by force of will.

We spent several hours going through box after box: My father’s books on games and game theory; His collected Jung; his material on jihad; some boxes of papers he’d written or read on millennial cults and Y2K when he’d worked for a think tank; and his poetry.

I found most of what I’d hope to find, and, in an unconsidered addition, a small yellow book of the sheet music for the B-minor mass, which I kept. As I sorted, Mum would occasionally point out something I had taken no notice of and pull this aside. Then she’d tell me some new story about my father’s life I had not known.

I found, also, a surprising number of books on my own pet subject, the American Right. Not collected because of me (they well predated my interest in the topic) but because they had been of interest to my father in their own right, if more tangentially and some time ago. There were many more than I had anticipated, and I realized that they had been on his shelves for years, there to see all the while. Because I had not yet come into my own before I had gone away and his things had been transferred here, I had never noticed. 

By the end of the first day of sorting we had gone through perhaps a third of what there was to uncover. We had spent a long time under the sun and, though the glare was not terrible yet, the heat still affected us, as did the smoke, and night was approaching.

Unable to keep everything that had been his, I opened an account with the same storage facility. It was smaller, but my own, and I took such as I could justify and moved it into my own keeping.

When we returned the air quality was rated Unhealthy and getting worse. I worked as fast as I could, but after a few hours we had only finished half the sorting and my chest had begun to tighten and my throat was feeling hoarse. 

A friend — whose own father had died when we were all in High School and who gave me such counsel as he could — came to assist us. With his help I made what was inside more organized, if not fully inventoried. 

My mum promised that she would go through it all with the antiquarian and if she saw anything she thought was important to keep she would do so. I gave her some suggestions and with regret shut the heavy metal door. I’d had my chance to make some sense of what had been left in my father’s wake and saved what I could, and I’d managed some but not nearly all of it. I felt a heavy sense of the inconclusive. 

The next day I would have to fly back to New York and get some sleep before I started work again. 

I could see the end of summer approaching. There was precious little to show for the year so far. 

Father wouldn’t be around to see the change of colors in the fall, or the spring of new life out ahead. 

That night Mum and I ate dinner together near the shuttered Goodwill. We ate in a restaurant that had monopolized my adolescent summer nights: Mel’s, a west coast phenomenon whose sock hop aesthetic is meant to be immutably quaint and familiar, embalmed in vinyl and fins. 

Outside the coronavirus was still raging and the wildfires were still burning. But, the day I’d flown in the local restriction on indoor seating had been lifted. 

The world was trying to go back to normal.