WAR STORIES

My brother Stanley was not very motivated in high school and was not admitted to the University or California, but went to the University of Oregon instead. After one semester, he went into the army in 1942. He was in an officers' training program, but it was terminated, and he ended up in the 66th infantry division in England.

The division was ordered to cross the channel on Christmas Eve, 1944, to go into the Battle of the Bulge where the fighting was very heavy. His unit was to embark on a ship, the Leopoldville, but for unknown reasons, he and some others were ordered to go ahead on an LST. Five miles from the port in France, the Leopoldville was hit by a torpedo from a German submarine, and around 750 men were lost.

Because the division had been so badly crippled, it was sent to a holding operation in Brittany where the erman submarine pens were located, avoiding the heavy fighting.

After the war, Stan returned to the University of Oregon, passionate to study history and the reasons for war. He excelled and did his PhD at Harvard and returned to teach at Oregon for his entire career.

A footnote: his son Paul teaches political science at Berkeley and has written three books with Jacob Hacker of Yale (Winner Take All Politics and Let Them Eat Tweets are two of them), showing how over the last forty years the tax structure in the United States has increasingly favored the wealthy, putting our democracy in danger.

- Paul Pierson