Creative History

  By February 7, 1951 Captain Lewis Millet of the United States Army was already a hardened warrior.  He is a seasoned veteran of combat in two of America’s major wars.   Millet served with distinction in Italy during the Second World War, and now, at the still tender age of 31 Captain Millet is on his second tour of duty in Korea. In the cold snowy dawn, on a barren hillside near the 38th parallel, labelled as Hill 180 on military maps, outside a town called Anyang in South Korea, a platoon of American infantrymen is pinned down by ferocious Chinese mortar and machine gun fire. Unable to move forward, the beleaguered American troops scrape at the frozen ground with entrenching tools and attempt to press their bodies into the earth to avoid being killed by the relentless Chinese fire which is falling on them like rain from the entrenched and fortified Communist positions atop Hill 180. After beating back the North Korean invasion of the South in the summer of 1...

            Completely devastated.  Damage to properties 100%.  Damage to agriculture 100%.  Impossible to clean.  Human life impossible. This is how the French government originally defined what it called Zone Rouge (the Red Zone) at the end of the First World War over one-hundred years ago in 1919.   Zone Rouge encompassed over 450 square miles of French countryside along the trench lines and no man’s land that had once made up the Western Front. At the end of the war areas within what the French government had defined as Zone Rouge were considered absolutely unfit for human habitation.  The Red Zone remained littered with hundreds of thousands of tons of unexploded artillery shells, countless human and animal remains and fetid toxic soil that was the result of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas bombardments. Farming, forestry and human habitation were all banned within Zone Rouge.  Many of these res...

    At nine in the morning on the 27th of August 1896 the British Consul’s ultimatum to the Sultanate of Zanzibar expired. Two minutes later three battle cruisers and two gunboats of the Royal Navy backed by a contingent of one-hundred fifty Royal Marines and nine-hundred pro-British Zanzibaris begin a ferocious bombardment and assault on the Sultan’s Palace complex. There is a brief naval engagement.  The two British cruisers under the command of Admiral Harry Rawson launch an attack on the lone enemy boat that patrols the waters of Zanzibar’s harbor.  The boat is a royal yacht named the HMS Glasgow and it was gifted to the island state of Zanzibar by Queen Victoria herself. British shells cause the boat to founder and sink in the shallow waters of the harbor.  The HMS Glasgow gets stuck in the mud with only its masts showing above the waterline.  The sultan’s crew, servants  he has forcibly staffed aboard the yacht, wave a British Union Jack flag f...

            Around one in the morning on September 28, 1778 just a few miles across the border from New York in northern New Jersey six companies of British infantry stand in silence with bayonets fixed and at the ready. The redcoats wait in the pitch darkness without a sound.  A number of local Tory guides have led them to this spot on the side of a road in Bergen County.  The redcoats are under the command of Major Turner Staubenzie.  The Major has gained a reputation for brutality and he has ordered that his troops give no quarter and make no sound. Over the past three years no place in the whole of America has been more ravaged by the War for Independence than New Jersey.  British and American, patriot and loyalist alike, have fought a ceaseless struggle for supremacy and forage all across the Garden State from New York City to Philadelphia.  Both armies have laid waste to the land and occupied and vacated the same to...