The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

In Memory of Colonel Armstrong

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

“Reading your blog is a strange endeavor,” my old friend Joyce wrote me recently, “because I just don’t think about you writing of war.”  Joyce has a point.  I’m a guy who likes to hike, ski, garden, read poetry beside the ocean, coddle my sleepy old dogs.  War and the rough camaraderie of soldiers are about as far outside my ken as investment banking or particle physics.  I’ll confess that when I started work on The Long Way Home I didn’t know a battalion from a brigade.  But I was lucky because I had a friend on the inside – Bob Armstrong, Colonel Robert Armstrong, United States Army Reserve – who was happy to serve as my guide and guru to all things military.  I won’t say Bob was a typical soldier – those who knew him can attest that there was nothing typical about Bob.  But he was a soldier, first and foremost, and he spent a hell of lot of his too short life attending to the soldier’s business of war and peace.   To the extent that I ever felt comfortable writing about what it was like for guys to fight in the Great War, I have Bob to thank for it.

We met in the autumn of 1975 as grad students at Oxford.  Bob had a few years on me because he had taken a detour after high school: instead of going on to college, he had enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and 5th Special Forces Group.  Our first encounter took place in a grotty student pub near our college and I remember thinking, How the hell did this guy get into Oxford? Bob was on the short side, maybe five foot seven, wiry, intense, tightly wound, as blunt in his delivery as a sawed-off shotgun and incredibly foul-mouthed.  Whatever or whoever offended Bob – pretentious fellow students, idiotic college rules, English food or weather or manners – he would curse out foully and unhesitatingly, preferably right in the offender’s face.  When I learned that Bob had been in the military, I thought typical and gave him a wide berth.

But somehow we fell in together and gradually, as I got to know Bob, I came to realize that under that profane exterior there lurked not exactly a heart of gold – but a sharp, curious mind; a highly developed sense of morality and responsibility; a fierce, fearless loyalty to people and ideas he believed in.  For reasons I’ll never fathom, that loyalty got fastened on me.  God knows my opinions and actions elicited plenty of eye-rolling and the occasional mutter of “You asshole.”  But our time in the trenches as Yanks at Oxford made us comrades and for Bob that was a permanent condition.

Bob got his degree a year before me and for a while I kept up with him mostly through our mutual friend Jim Moran.  Bob went on to get a Ph.D. in agronomy and genetics from Purdue University, but his path was far from conventional.  In a couple of decades he burned through two wives, before finding a soul mate in Leslie in middle age; he fathered two children and adopted two more; he tried his hand at half a dozen careers including teaching at a New England private school, working for the CIA, and heading up a mysterious government-owned corporation dedicated, in Bob’s words, to shifting America’s energy source “from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates.”

The one constant in Bob’s life was the military.  Vietnam wasn’t enough for him, so he signed on with the United States Army Reserve and put in regular stints training young soldiers.  This work took on considerably more urgency when these young people began fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Bob eventually was promoted to the rank of colonel but he fervently wanted to be a general; a fellow officer told me that the only reason Bob didn’t make it was that he was too outspoken around superiors.  Bob never could resist calling an asshole an asshole.

Though I didn’t often agree with Bob’s political views, I still took delight in how he expressed them.  He once boasted to me that he belonged to the very small cohort of people who had voted for both Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader; he hated George Bush (“born with a silver spoon up his ass” as Bob put it) and assured me that he and his military pals loathed Cheney and Rummy and their war of choice on the cheap in Iraq.   Bob had a special string of curses reserved for people who abused power and threw their weight around; a born iconoclast and bitter cynic, he quailed under authority; yet strangely, he thrived in the rigid hierarchical structure of the army.  A complicated guy.

Bob and I got a lot closer in middle age when I started traveling frequently to D.C. on research trips.  It was in the cafeteria of the National Defense University, where he worked in the final years of his life, that Bob helped me clarify the idea for The Long Way Home.  It pleased him no end that our interests had converged after all these years and he was tireless in answering my questions and putting me in touch with colleagues and contacts inside the vast military bureaucracy.  With a little arm-twisting, Bob secured me an interview with Brigadier-General John Nicholson, then head of the American Battle Monuments Commission (the organization in charge of the nation’s overseas  military cemeteries and monuments).  “The General was a little suspicious,” Bob told me before the interview, “and he kept asking, ‘Is this guy a liberal? You’re not sending me a liberal, are you, Bob?’ So don’t blow my cover.”

Bob was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2000 and he fought the cancer bravely and stoically for as long as he could.  I last saw him at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was being treated, on a bitter cold day in the later winter of 2008.  We talked about the 1918 influenza epidemic which he had studied in depth (Bob’s work at NDU focused on ways to combat the spread of infectious agents) and the disastrous aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles.  It worried me that Bob didn’t swear once or call anyone an asshole.

More than anything Bob wanted to live to see his youngest daughter Katie established at a good college.  Devout rationalist though he was, he never stopped hoping for a miracle cure.  Our friend Jim told me that on the last day, the doctor told Bob that it was okay to stop fighting.  Only then did this soldier-scientist surrender.  Bob died on April 3, 2008, eight months shy of his sixtieth birthday.

8 Comments  |  Permalink  |  Posted in Blog Posts

Comments

1. Michael Affatato  |  January 7th, 2010

   Brilliant tribute to a dynamic individual, David . You were both lucky to have each other as friends. Cheers – Michael

2. K.C. Victor  |  January 7th, 2010

   Dear David,

   Even after almost two years, my condolences. You lost a special friend.

   As another liberal, I have always cherished the people on the other side of those political issues with whom I simply connect as one human being to another.

   K.C.

3. Alice Laskin  |  January 7th, 2010

   Have been catching up on your blog posts this morning. I love how your posts mix poignancy and entertainment, serious topics with lighthearted curiosity. Love, the daughter upstairs

4. Susan  |  January 7th, 2010

   There are no boundaries in friendships with remarkable people. You make me wish I had met
   the Colonel.

5. David  |  January 7th, 2010

   I have just lost a former student to the war in Afghanistan, so feel drawn more and more to the subject of your forthcoming book. Your blog about an Oxford comrade hits the mark too when it shows how we can transcend politics in unexpected ways.

6. Leona Laskin  |  January 8th, 2010

   I think I know all the ways that make me so proud to be your Mom but then you write something like this that just adds to the never ending list.
   Mom

7. Ann  |  January 8th, 2010

   I’m sorry you lost a friend.

8. Ken Lord  |  May 30th, 2010

   Bob and I served together in the 220th Military Police Bde, USAR, Gaithersburg, MD. There was not a finer officer. Brilliant, great sense of humor, did not suffer fools. I was deeply saddened by his passing. He was really ‘one of a kind’.

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