The Brooklyn Burkeans
"Soon after they appeared in print, Kristol was drafted to serve in the Second World War. He fought as an infantryman in the 17th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 12th Armored Division, nicknamed the "Hellcats," which secured a series of crucial victories over the Wehrmacht at Colmar and in southern Germany and liberated several Dachau "satellite" camps. The tour of duty extinguished for him any lingering progressive fantasies not already squelched by Soviet totalitarianism and exposure to the works of neo-orthodox Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Thrust for the first time into close proximity with disparate Americans from across the nation, Kristol concluded that the distance between the socialist man he had trumpeted while an undergraduate in the musty basement alcoves of City College and the actual man found in the real world was — for good and for ill — too expansive to traverse, and it made little sense to pretend otherwise."
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