Review by Allen Best
Skiing – May 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ice Crusaders: A Memoir of Cold War and Cold Sport
by Tom Wolf
Published in 1999 by Roberts Rinehart Publishers
ISBN: 1570982562
I FIRST CAME ACROSS Tom Wolf’s writing in 1987 when he wrote a story for Cross Country Skier about skiing to the 10th Mountain Division huts between Eagle and Aspen. In that story he created a foggy reality, sliding between the contemporary and the dream state of being a 10th mountain trooper training for war. He referred to his guide, Buck Elliot of Paragon Guides, as Sergeant Elliot or some such. He was carrying a 90-pound rucksack, as the 10th Mountain troopers had. He was at war.
This wasn’t typical outdoor writing. His technique worked in that it honored the 13,000-plus soldiers who trained at Camp Hale during World War II. Among them was Fritz Benedict, father of the huts.
Still, I thought Wolf’s style confusing, maybe even weird. This guy, I thought to myself, was born about 20 years too late. He should have been with the other 10th Mountain boys at smoke-plagued Camp Hale, located in a peak-encircled park at 9,300 feet. Instead, he was forced to imagine the romance of war.
Ice Crusaders represents a far more ambitious undertaking than learning to telemark ski. Again using the backdrop of the 10th Mountain Division, Wolf tells his own story of growing up under the spell of the Colorado Rockies, of refusing to fight in Vietnam, of his passion for skiing, of ruination of the Colorado high country by those very 10th mountain troopers he has been so taken with, of fraudulent psychological therapy for Vietnam vets, of…
You get the idea; he covers some ground. This bumpy ride lurches into many disparate locales. The theme is the life of one Tom Wolf, a now 50-something college professor in Colorado Springs and a part-time Westcliffe resident. He has been part of the best and the worst of Colorado since those 10th Mountain vets he idolizes put their guns away in 1945.
The book’s subtitle accurately labels what lies within as a memoir. That subtitle fails, however, to note the prerequisite book-reading list that gives Ice Crusaders meaning.
I have done that advance reading. Ten to 15 books, mostly memoirs of troopers, have been written about the 10th Mountain Division. I’ve read nearly all, as well as some unpublished diaries and what not.
CONSEQUENTLY, I know about the 10th’s battles in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, and where Riva Ridge stood in connection to Mount Belvedere. I’ve tramped the irrigation ditch of the Eagle River that Wolf’s father helped create at Camp Hale. I’ve gone to at least one reunion.
Readers lacking that background might easily get lost in Wolf’s memoir.
Wolf knows the story about the 10th Mountain very well, and I found few details to fault, much to admire. He could have chosen to write the narrative, the well-synthesized history that nobody, for all the books already written, has ever bothered to write. He did not.
Instead, he weaves bits of that story into his own story, his family’s story, and the story of winter skiing in Colorado. We learn about his travels to Germany, and of the politics of his girlfriends’ parents, of his experiences as a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War, of this experience in skiing and of that detail of mountain warfare. It’s a strange mix, but one I enjoyed. You might enjoy it too, just as you would enjoy reading a newspaper published on the day you were born.
Take away those local names and color and his thesis is that mountain warfare, as fought by the 10th Mountain troopers in Italy, was an honorable one, and that winter war is the ultimate winter sport.
OK.
Wolf grieves about being asked to fight in another nation’s civil war, the Vietnam War, instead of the good fight, one against Communists. Joseph Stalin and the Soviets, he insists, were the real enemy, even before Americans and Germans swapped bullets on Italian soil in 1945.
Growing up, he wrote, “I hated the grey, dull weight of their tyranny, their relentless war on imagination. I still do. That was the just war, the Cold War, the right war, for our times. But I also hated Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon. I still do. Their lies led us into the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. They needlessly prolonged the Cold War. They forced my generation of Ice Crusaders into the second American civil war, turning us aside from our just war, the Cold War.”
THAT’S AN INTERESTING ARGUMENT, even if it curiously excludes John Kennedy. It’s also a curious premise for a book so grounded in the passion that skiing and mountains can incite. Wolf’s memoir worked for me, but I think many readers will see it as more self-indulgence from the ’60s.
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” said Winston Churchill in recalling one of his own escapades in a British colony.
Wolf seems resentful that he changed hospital bed pans during his salad days instead of dodging bullets in a war of consequence. Pity the warrior in a time of peace.
Wolf’s stories about the “ice crusaders” of his father’s generation are much better. One story concerns the German prisoners of war kept at Camp Hale in the closing days of World War II. Some American soldiers at Hale were sympathetic to the German POWs, as were some WACs (Women’s Army Corp), and they helped execute a prisoner escape that got as far as New Mexico.
That’s a side to the mountain soldiers that has been told less often, and I would have enjoyed a more complete recounting of mountain soldiering.
When Wolf does it, he’s absorbing.
But soon we’re off to visit Hemingway learning to ski, on to California to incite protests, off to Crested Butte to somebody’s marijuana hut. In between, we’re skiing at Winter Park, or Vail, or at Jackson’s Corbett’s Couloir, with a grizzled 10th Mountain vet looking over our shoulder.
For Wolf, the mountains are always a place of turmoil, never a place of bliss. Now that the Cold War is over, he tells us, we should use the Winter Olympics to explore the “secret, undeniable, erotic attractions of war.”
This is a bold, experimental book that sometimes flares with success, sometimes droops with weird, oddly-shaped arguments. If you don’t like snow, don’t bother.
–Allen Best