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What Gen. Hertling Learned Watching the Israeli Army
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Overtime

What Gen. Hertling Learned Watching the Israeli Army

Plus: The Feminist Horror of Lisa Tuttle

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Jim Swift
Oct 13, 2023
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GEN. MARK HERTLING: What I Learned Watching the Israeli Army.

The author receives an orientation on a Merkava IV tank during a visit to Israel as commander of U.S. Army Europe, 2012.

BY ALL EXPECTATIONS, THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT is poised to order a ground invasion of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. After the shocking and blood-curdling attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, there is ample speculation about what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) might do to, in, and about Hamas and Gaza. The IDF is one of the world’s most respected militaries. Through my career as a U.S. Army officer, I came to understand that it’s also commonly misunderstood.

My first encounter with the IDF was just on paper. As a recently promoted Army major in 1987, I was selected to attend a year-long course in operational planning at the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. One requirement of the course was to write two monographs for publication. As a career armor officer, I wanted to analyze some historical tank campaign. All the tank battles of World War II, the 1967 Six Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War seemed like promising choices—until my adviser suggested something else. ā€œYou want something more relevant, something that points to the future of armored warfare,ā€ he advised. ā€œHow about the more recent ’82 campaign, Operation Peace for Galilee?ā€

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BILL RYAN: The Feminist Horror of Lisa Tuttle.

I BELIEVE THE FIRST TIME I became aware of Lisa Tuttle was around 1990, after Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s indispensable collection of short essays Horror: 100 Best Books was republished in the United States (its sequel, Horror: Another 100 Best Books is equally worth your time). In that book, the essays are written by one hundred different horror writers, each choosing their favorite horror, or horror-adjacent, book. The late Robert Holdstock chose Tuttle’s story collection A Nest of Nightmares, which at that time would have been a fairly new book (it was published in 1986).

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