Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

26 submission to his captors. Freedom remains, even in death, unbroken until the end. He lived to tell this tale. I wonder what lessons he learned, what philosophical change in direction took place. Perhaps none of these. As soon as this experience was over and he knew he’d dodged the proverbial bullet, did he just return to figuring out how to get through another day? War as Play While I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois (1979-1985) I took a class on play. The theme of the class focused on why people have a need to play, and its relation to work and leisure--the philosophy of play. One of the assigned readings was a book by Dutch author Johan Huizinga, entitled the “Homo Ludens”, written in 1938. Huisinga proposed that war displayed many elements of play. I viewed war about as far away from play as just about anything I could have imagined. On a visit home to England one summer, I brought up the concept of war as play for discussion with my father. So, dad, would agree that war could be

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