Tag: Afrika Korps

Local Cease Fires and Other Humanities in War

~ MD Harris Institute ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes wars stop because of the thoughts, words, and actions not of presidents and generals but of ordinary people. Other times, on-the-ground combatants exhibit genuine mercy towards each other. Occasionally, good leaders hold out an olive branch to their foes. In the long run, and sometimes the short run, the power of peace is greater than the power of war.

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

Every December my family and I watch short videos about Christmas, in addition to our normal Christmas movie fare. I have two favorites, the video describing Handel’s Messiah, and a video discussing the Christmas Eve Cease Fire between German and British troops on the Western Front of World War I in 1914. A similar but smaller truce happened on Christmas Eve in 1915. Local truces, occasioned by ordinary soldiers rather than politicians or generals, have happened in military history.

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The Dance of the Headquarters

~ MD Harris Institute ~ Leave a comment

Individual units of large organizations and higher headquarters always misunderstand each other. Front line personnel feel like their leaders are detached and sometimes incompetent, while higher level leaders have pressures that small unit personnel do not understand. How do we bring them together?

In Iraq in late 2003 a draft recommendation came to the Task Force 1st Armored Division Headquarters from our higher headquarters, the Combined Joint Task Force Headquarters. It referenced tuberculosis in Iraq and proposed aggressive use of preventive measures against the disease, citing huge numbers of new cases per year. As the Task Force Preventive Medicine Officer and Deputy Division Surgeon, I was responsible to review all public health and other medical recommendations coming from outside. The math didn’t seem right and I went to the World Health Organization website to check the incidence and prevalence of tuberculosis in Iraq. Suddenly I realized that whoever had made the recommendation had badly overestimated the incidence of new tuberculosis cases. To our medical team it was just another example of trouble from our higher headquarters.

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