A few hours south of Warsaw, the city of Krakow spreads out from a famous hill at its center: Wawel Hill. On the advice of my brother, Josh, who remembers, “loving the feel of the city,” I booked a longer stay in this…

In the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Neville Chamberlain and the French conceded a section of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland to Germany. In return, Hitler promised peace in Europe. Six months later German troops invaded and then occupied a large portion of…

On a break back in October, I headed off on a two week tour of Poland. I wanted to give life to my extensive reading knowledge of the country’s WWII history. My primary conception of the Poles were as the unlucky ones overrun…

I thought my next post would begin to cover my two week trek through Poland back in October, but the reverberations that kept me up last night unearthed a different memory. My fan and cell phone noise maker together couldn’t drown out the…

In late October, I headed back down to the land of sand and monotony. It wasn’t a choice this time and it wasn’t the same location. This time I had the “pleasure” of landing in Qatar. Fortunately the weather was a bit cooler…

I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time a few years ago. Sadly, it prompted my first serious consideration about Allied Firebombing during WWII. Not surprisingly, my encounter with this part of history piqued my interest. So when I had a four…

On a long, holiday weekend in early September, I took a look at a map and decided to trek up to Dresden, a place I knew from my WWII history books. On a whim, I decided to stay a night in Leipzig on…

One day as I was walking to the learning center on base in Kuwait, I realized I felt out of sorts. I was growing fuzzy as sound filled space where reflection used to be. I couldn’t find silence. I desperately wanted to experience…

I’m sitting soaking in the pleasure of a post-deployment morning with coffee so hot, thick, and strong that the milk hardly changes its color. I think I forgot what real coffee looked, smelled, and tasted like after two months of a watery, iced…