I taught history, about which I am passionate, but I guess I was always a writing teacher at heart. History was the medium I used to teach thinking, writing, speaking and—here’s where we get a little Wokey, I guess— empathy for the people who populate our past. And, contrary to my generally squishy and gentle reputation, I had some hard edges, I guess. I was never the same after I took twenty students out to see the SLO debut of Master and Commander.

So I could be a jerk when a jerk was needed. I preferred to think of myself as Lucky Jack Aubrey, the creation of novelist Patrick O’Brian, frigate captain, and those thirty-five students were men and women with Hearts of Oak.

This is from AP European History at Arroyo Grande High School, maybe just a few years ago. The music is Boccherini.

This dealt with free-response essays. Our favorites—my English teacher partner and dear friend Amber Derbidge and I—were what are called Document-Based Questions, in which the student is given an hour to weave a series of primary resources, from both history and literature, into a coherent essay that answers the essay prompt. One example is shown below.

I wrote every essay myself, whether free-response or DBQ, before I assigned them to our sophomores.

Our students were sixteen years old. Some of them were fifteen. The rigor we demanded of them paid off, I think; it was such a joy to see the change in them from the beginning of the year to the end. Their maturation was kind of miraculous.

I loved teaching teenagers.

So Prigohzin, the hot-dog vendor turned mercenary chief turned his Wagner Group column around on the M4 highway to Moscow, belying a few unguarded moments of hope this morning that pointed to the end of Putin’s dictatorship.

That means the kids who posed happily this morning on television in Rostov-on-Don with Wagner Group tanks will wind up looking like the Soviet novelist Alexander Sohlzenitsyn, seen here as a zek–a political prisoner–in Stalin’s Gulag.

If we are lucky, Prigohzin will wind up the way the Romanov family did in Yekaterinburg in 1918, where the Bolsheviks held them captive in an immense home, the Ipatiev House.

This is the wall of the room in that home’s basement where the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, used pistols to murder all of them.

In the decades after 1918, so many devout Russians visited the home to pray that the local communist party chief ordered it torn down in 1977. His name was Boris Yeltsin. All Saints’ Church stands on that site today, memorializing a beautiful but profoundly clueless family.

Prigohzin, a war criminal, deserves pistols but no churches. CNN ran thankfully blurred footage of his mercenaries interrogating a prisoner by smashing his hands and feet with a sledgehammer. The man did not survive Prigozhin’s boys, most of them recruited from Russian prisons.

But I was rooting for him for just a few hours on Saturday, if only in the hope that the hole his Wagner Group had left behind in Ukraine would be filled by Ukrainian soldiers.

I was reminded, too, of Operation Market Garden—in someways similar t0 but in more important ways vastly different from Saturday’s event—in the fall of 1944, where Field Marshal Montgomery came up with what sounded like a brilliant idea: Drop paratroopers into Holland and drive into Holland with British armor along the excellent Dutch roads and then force a Rhine crossing into Germany.

It was a disaster. Market Garden included two South County 101st Airborne soldiers; one, Arroyo Grande’s Art Youman, was promoted to sergeant by Easy Company’s Richard Winters for his conduct and the other, a young lieutenant, Oceano’s William Francis Everding, was killed as the Germans retook the town his regiment had liberated. After Market Garden’s failure, most of Holland, except for the south, was reclaimed by the German Army, the Wehrmacht. But the difference between 1944 and 2023 lies in the character of the would-be liberators. I offer these photos as proof.

But the Dutch thought all of their progressive, prosperous and historically brilliant nation had been liberated. For a few days, they were jubilant, just like the kids taking selfies Saturday with the Wagner Group tanks. Hitler had been defeated, or so it seemed and, for a few hours, it must’ve looked like Putin was about the be defeated, too.

And so now Vladi Putin, two inches shorter than Hitler but in every other respect his doppelganger–down to kidnaping children to raise them Russians, just as Hitler did Eastern European children to raise them as Aryans–might have just enough breathing space to reconsolidate his power and turn his attention again to the important business of destroying Ukrainian churches.

But there’s one hopeful sign, macabre as it is.

The most famous sniper of World War II was named Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Red Army soldier credited with killing 300 German soldiers who were part of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

She has a modern-day counterpart, a Marine, who goes by the pseudonym “Charcoal.” She has another nickname that once belonged to Pavlichenko:

“Lady Death.” Like her predecessor, Charcoal is Ukrainian.

I don’t think it’s possible to tell you how much I love this book. It was so inspirational and so instructive—about horses and horse-racing, about which I know little–but being immersed inside stables and jockey’s locker rooms and the Santa Anita grandstands, with smells ranging from liniment to buttered popcorn, was one of the most vivid reading experiences of my life.

What’s just as impressive as the racehorse is the book’s author.

Laura Hillenbrand was essentially paralyzed by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (her New Yorker account of her disease is haunting) and she persisted in researching and writing a book interrupted by days when all she could bring herself to do was crawl out of bed to fix a bowl of corn flakes.

Although I come from a family familiar with horses—my father and my sisters—I am not. (I raised chickens.) But the writing of Hillenbrand and of Elizabeth Letts (The Perfect Horse) was so powerful that it led me to write perhaps the best essay I’ve ever written, “Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse,” about a “blocky little mare,” an Arab, who became the national champion cow horse in 1961.

Central to the Hillenbrand book and to its film adaptation is the great match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in 1938. It figures, oddly, in a recent event in our lives: my much-loved brother-in-law, a Naval Academy grad and retired Navy Captain, died recently. When my wife, her sister Robin, her brother Dana and my son John went to Virginia for the funeral, they encountered something I’ve heard of before. They were Californians and once that was discovered, some of the East Coasties snubbed them. Not all of them, to be sure, but there was a discernible distaste in the air, as if those who had known and loved Captain Steve the longest were pretty much Neanderthals.

The film Seabiscuit was on the television yesterday and, of course, I misted up during the final sequence when the ‘Biscuit, recovered from the injury that had nearly led to him being put down, wins the 1940 Santa Anita Derby. It’s glorious filmmaking.

But it’s not the centerpiece. For me, that would be the 1938 match race between the little California horse and the Kentucky-bred and East Coast darling, War Admiral, a magnificent athlete.

The way that race was run made me feel better about being a Californian; the way the film portrayed it—down to the elegant pre-race narration by historian David McCullough—reminded me of the mare Ronteza, Sheila Varian’s Arabian, Sheila took on twenty male competitors and Ronteza took on twenty Quarter horses in 1961 and they beat them all. There is nothing I love more than a good underdog—in this case, underhorse—story.

Forty million Americans listened to the great match race call that day in 1938. That’s because of the point Hillenbrand’s book makes: Seabiscuit was their horse, the underdog champion of an underdog people—Hitler dismissed Americans as “a mongrel race”— in the transition years between Depression and War, when they would prove that they were champions, too.

Somehow the 1942 photo below is consistent with Seabiscuit’s legacy. The statue dedicated to him was installed at Santa Anita in 1941. The following year, the racetrack became an assembly center for Japanese Americans, headed for desert camps, who slept in the track’s stables. Here, internee Lily Okuru, Japanese American— poses alongside the Biscuit. The horse and the young woman, and her people, shared remarkable similariies: They were unappreciated, sometimes reviled, banished, loyal without reservation to those who loved them, courageous in combat—whether on Caliornia racetracks or Italian battlefields—and Seabiscuit, like 120,000 of Lily Okuru’s people, were Californians.