『Bad War Stories: Ben Zweibelson on His Father's War, and His Own』のカバーアート

Bad War Stories: Ben Zweibelson on His Father's War, and His Own

Bad War Stories: Ben Zweibelson on His Father's War, and His Own

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10月19日まで。※適用条件あり
Ben Zweibelson was the kid in high school who was always drawing. Then his father died, the money ran out, and a National Guard recruiter at a Connecticut county fair offered him a way to pay for college. He took it — and he stayed for twenty-two years, four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, four Bronze Stars, and the Ranger tab. Along the way the Army also gave him three master's degrees and, on the GI Bill, a doctorate in philosophy.Ben is what that advice looks like when somebody actually takes advantage of all the opportunities that military service offers.But this conversation isn't really about a career. It's about a cigar box.Ben's father, Irving, was a 22-year-old Ashkenazi Jew from New York, blind in one eye, who was turned away by the Marines and the Navy before the Army took him. He served in Panama and West Africa. He came home, locked the war away, and never spoke of it again. Ben describes sitting at the dinner table at ten years old — full of The A-Team and Platoon — asking his father whether he'd ever killed anyone, and hearing the man's Parkinson's-stricken hand shake so hard that his wristwatch knocked against the underside of the table. "I had poked the bear, and I didn't understand."His father died when Ben was seventeen. "If you lose somebody that young," he says, "you spend the rest of your life searching for a ghost you'll never catch."Bad War Stories — his fifth book, and nothing like the four that came before it — is his answer to that silence. He calls it an anti-memoir: written in the third person, refusing the heroics and the veneer that make war legible to Hollywood, humanizing everyone in the frame including the adversaries and the civilians. Every event in it is real. He fictionalized only the names.Along the way, we get the stories that don't make the official record: the live-agent chamber at Fort McClellan and the atropine pen he jammed into a training dummy backwards — a secret he admits he has never told anyone until this episode. The white van he parked in a Special Forces unit's drop zone at Fort Polk, three kilometers from anywhere, ending their pre-deployment validation. The four men he dedicated the book to — a high school wrestling coach, two friends' fathers, and a Special Forces colonel who protected him decades later — who between them filled a hole his own father couldn't.And there's the harder material, too: what the institution does to curious people, why Ben thinks we are training to win a war that may never come, and what he wants his three sons to have when he's gone.The last question we asked stopped him. He admitted he'd been dreading it since he saw it on our list.We planned on thirty minutes. We went an hour, and we easily could have kept going. That's why we're going to have him back with us in October.IN THIS EPISODEHow an art student ended up in an infantry battalion — and whether an artist sees a battlefield differentlyFort McClellan, the Chemical Corps, and a live-agent story Ben has never told publiclyLady Luck and the Grim Reaper — "sometimes they switch spots"Irving Zweibelson: the one-eyed volunteer the Marines and Navy turned awayThe dinner table question, and the sound of a wristwatch under the woodWhy Bad War Stories is an anti-memoir, not an anti-war memoirHollywood's war as simulacra — "a copy without an original"The four men in the dedication, and the search for a father figureCreative curiosity, drones, AI, and the conflict we may already have lostWriting as a way through: Ben's advice for any veteran with a story and a blank pageABOUT BEN ZWEIBELSONDr. Ben Zweibelson is Director of the Strategic Innovation Group at U.S. Space Command. He previously spent seven years as the lead design educator for U.S. Special Operations Command through the Joint Special Operations University. A retired U.S. Army infantry officer, he served 22 years with four combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, earning four Bronze Star Medals, the Combat and Expert Infantryman's Badges, the Ranger tab, and Master Parachutist, Pathfinder, and Air Assault badges.He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut, three master's degrees (Louisiana State University, Air Command and Staff College, and the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies), and a doctorate in philosophy from Lancaster University in the UK. He has lectured at multiple war colleges, at Yale and Johns Hopkins, and to organizations including IBM. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and three sons.Ben appears here as a private citizen and author. His views are his own and do not represent the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or any organization with which he is professionally associated.GET THE BOOKSBad War Stories (Helion & Company, 2026)Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Bad-War-Stories-Ben-Zweibelson/dp/1804519421Helion & Company (UK) — https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/bad-war-stories-.phpCasemate (US distributor)...
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