Duel in the Paris Sewers

Professor Roger McGrath’s splendid article on James Warner Bellah in your June/July issue (“Soldier and Scribe of the Old West”) triggers some memories of “The Colonel” (as he was known).  

The Colonel was a dear friend of mine until his death in 1976. I was proud to be one of his pallbearers and to give part of his eulogy. Bellah’s style of speech was exactly like John Wayne’s portrayal of Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), a film based on Bellah’s short story “Command.” 

The Colonel sponsored my membership in the British United Services Club, which was composed of officers from various nations who had served with the British military. We met in the basement anteroom of the old “Masquer’s Club” on Sycamore Avenue above Hollywood Boulevard. The Colonel introduced me to fellow club members, such as LeRoy Prinz, who was a director for Paramount and Warner Brothers. As a young man, Prinz had run away from home to join the French Foreign Legion in Algiers. He later served during World War I in Eddie Rickenbacker’s 94th Aero Squadron in France. Because he crashed something like 15 Allied aircraft, Prinz was ironically called “America’s German Ace” by the press.

The Colonel was a better flyer. He proudly wore his Canadian flight wings, Combat Infantry Badge, and Glider wings. He also had an odd World War I medal from the Polish military, which he received for delivering a package to that country in his Sopwith Camel (he said he would emerge from the cockpit after flying the Camel covered in castor oil, a blowback from the plane’s Rhone engines). He joked that it was one of his lesser “heroic” experiences during the wars—his life was filled with adventure, as Prof. McGrath recounts. One of the more colorful rumors about him was that he once fought a duel in the sewers of Paris. I asked him about it, but I never received a good answer.

—Lt. Col Max K. Hurlbut (retired)

Special Forces Branch, U.S. Army
Bellingham, Wash.

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The Danger of Deporting Unpopular Opinions 

The New York Times published an op-ed titled “Today Harvard Is the Target, Tomorrow It Could Be Your Church,” about President Trump’s ongoing attempts to punish Harvard for not sufficiently cracking down on anti-Semitism, by trying to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, among other measures. The piece shows that even the Times can be right once in a while (and the piece should have been published in Chronicles!)

Students, some of whom have been arrested and some of whom on international visas or green cards face deportation, are right to protest the United States’ support of Israel, for both moral reasons and for the reasons laid out in Pat Buchanan’s 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire: We ought not get involved in foreign entanglements.

Furthermore, why do Zionist students get special protection from “anti-Semitic” protests against Israel? Does a white Christian student have the chance to complain and sue Harvard because the Black Lives Matter riots made them feel uncomfortable, or Columbia because a rainbow flag upset his religious sensibilities?

Over the summer, a group of white Afrikaner refugees from South Africa arrived in the United States, and it’s a good thing that Trump has decided to help them. However, I read in the papers that the white Afrikaners are known to be very religious, which means that they are most probably “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and “pro-life.” Does that mean that if these Afrikaners were to express their opposition to homosexuality or to attend a Right to Life rally, the next Democratic administration could deport them back to South Africa? After all, we know that the American State Department is engaged in fighting “homophobia” and “transphobia” as part of American foreign policy, just like it is fighting “anti-Semitism.”

Or, suppose if a Christian foreign exchange student attending Hillsdale College, Bob Jones University, or a Catholic university were to write an op-ed in a student newspaper stating what the Bible says about homosexuality. Could the Democrats, following the blueprint now laid out by Trump, deport that student?

—Yehuda Littmann
Brooklyn, N.Y.