AUGUST 15, 2020 – After reading this week about: the Florida sheriff ordering his staff not to wear face masks; the Trump campaign’s effort to undermine the postal service and create doubts about the integrity of the electoral process so as to delegitimize an unfavorable result; the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet now being beyond the point of no return—no matter what we do (starting NOW!) to control carbon emission; after those horror stories and more, I realized that we’re so screwed in so many ways, it’s time to pray as never before since . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear warheads were ready for launch, aimed at major American cities.
Then I remembered an amazing story of how prayer—er, grace—actually saved a friend of mine from going to hell . . . in his case, “hell” being the Vietnam War.
My friend was Fritz Angst, who grew up in the northern town of Cloquet, MN. His office was right next to mine at the venerable old St. Paul firm of Briggs & Morgan. He was as smart and jolly a lawyer as I have ever encountered, and he knew how to tell a good story.
I soon learned three important details about Fritz, who was six or seven years my senior: 1. If you had a question about the Uniform Commercial Code, Fritz was your man; 2. One of his many hobbies was collecting stamps—not any old stamps but Canadian revenue stamps. (Every few weeks a new acquisition would arrive for Fritz in the office mail. He’d immediately rush into my office to show off the latest addition to his collection.); and 3. Fritz and his wife were rabid followers of drum and bugle corps and traveled widely to experience corps extravaganzas—an American sub-culture to which I’d been wholly oblivious.
Fritz was old enough to have been in the crosshairs of the Vietnam War draft. He’d exhausted his student deferment by attending Yale. Upon graduating, he was advised to enlist in the army before the army “enlisted” him. Moreover, once he joined up he was told to “go for” army intelligence in Germany to avoid the utter lack of an intelligent mission in Vietnam. The “intelligence” route, however, required proficiency in German.
Fritz’s surname revealed his paternal origins, but apart from a German language class in high school, Fritz had no handle on spoken German . . . except . . . [cont.]
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
