March 16, 2013

And the wargaming crowd: for three weeks that table in the kitchen was covered by that map of Europe and the World. 720 hexagons, and 5 by 3 metres wide. And it leaked out on the floor, the pieces. And every night for a month, they'd sit around it like some kind of zombified General staff, playing chess with tanks. It's kind of fascinating in a way. How we can all get involved on our own little worlds. Or maybe our little worlds open their mouths, and swallow us whole. It's like falling into a black hole, that sort of thing. Or you open your mouth and reveal the Beast within.

Udo Berger was the grand champion of Third Reich. But then he left for Spain and never came back. Well—not all of him, anyway. People often asked him what happened back there. And he answered—nothing. Well nothing really, anyway. He lost. Udo Berger never loses.

Udo Berger was working on a strategy for Germany. In a purely academic way, of course. He stood on the beach and shouted about totally annihilating France in 1940 and his girlfriend told him to shut up. No wonder people looked at him funny. The point was: Udo Berger was lost. He got lost in a barren wasteland, a world that has no sense of the epic of heroic anymore. He stumbled around like an idiot. He didn't get it.

And the trick to winning, my friend tells me, is that you go for Russia last. Don't make the same mistake Napoleon did. Just be patient. You know, if they'd been patient, they might've had a chance. Yeah, or if the Führer had been handsome, they might've had a chance. The three of us sat around the table, at like two in the morning, and I was bored as hell. And then they got into Canada and I was like—all right, I can't take this anymore. And she said, look at the goddamn map. Germany fits like twenty times in there! At what point do you look at that and not realize you're fucking nuts? And he said: that's not how war works, honey.