Seven Pillars of Wisdom

But nomads who lived at the mercy of the desert, who set forth on a journey from one water hole to the unseen next, taking with them as an act of faith all they owned and everyone they loved, trusting blindly that the path had been ordained for them and that after many days of near-death they would find the appointed well where it was supposed to b

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Conner also interacted with his men on a daily basis as he made his rounds through the post on a horse named Old Bill. As Eisenhower put it, Conner “never abandoned the position—and no senior officer ever should—of being an instructor.” Once, Conner encountered some Puerto Rican soldiers on a work detail who did not know how to use a scythe to cut

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“Putting it crudely, we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.” That’s a sentence worth reading twice. In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabi

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The submissive obedience of Haig’s subordinates, which Forester took for blinkered ignorance and whole-hearted support, was in reality the unavoidable consequence of the way in which the army high command functioned as an organization under its commander in chief. A personalized promotion system, built on the bedrock of favoritism and personal riva

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