Ben Stein How Not to Ruin Your Life

A few days ago I was in Berlin. It's a beautiful city, with an astonishing number of good-looking people. Its ancient buildings are magnificently designed, and were impressively rebuilt after World War II and nearly 45 years of Communist domination in the eastern zone.

Touring a Troubled Past

There are broad plazas and hauntingly familiar sights, such as the Brandenburger Tor (or Brandenburg Gate), through which Hitler paraded in triumph after the conquest of France in 1940. There's also the Reichstag, where Hitler's diehard soldiers fought inch by inch against the Red Army heroes who won the final battle of the war in Europe. It's been rebuilt, but is still haunting and frightening (like most of Germany).

When you go past the area of museums and monuments into the deeper recesses of what was Communist East Berlin, along Karl-Marx-Allee (yes, that's its name), you see immensely boring, immensely oppressive apartment blocks with typically hideous Soviet Bloc architectural uniformity. It's easy to imagine how regimented the lives of those who lived in those grim buildings were.

Then, of course, there's the Berlin Wall, which kept human beings in and freedom out. There are still some sections of the Wall that are quite intact, although they're now covered with graffiti. It's a testament to a serious attempt to stifle the human spirit, which succeeded for a long time.

Forgotten Heroes

As I drove and walked past these monuments to a horrifying past and to what might have been, I was moved to deep gratitude for the men and women of the armed forces, who defended this great nation against Hitler, then Stalin, and then Brezhnev. Without their sacrifice, without the lives they put up and often lost, we wouldn't be a free people. There was no heavenly mandate that we would win the Second World War, just as there was no assurance that we would win the Cold War.

But we did, and while primary credit goes to those in the trenches, in the skies, and at sea, there's another vital group that gets very little credit: the people in the defense industry.

World War II was won by a combination of Churchillian determination; the efforts of heroic American, British, and (yes) Russian soldiers; and the mighty power of the U.S. defense industry. Names that have largely disappeared, like North American Aviation, Studebaker, and Hudson, and names that are still very much on the scene, like Boeing, GM, Ford, and Chrysler, helped win the war at home while the troops won in combat.

Masters of Peace

During the Cold War, we couldn't possibly have done as well as we did against the Soviet juggernaut without the super-high-quality defense products of Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Pantex, L-3, and many other great companies. We were spared Communist domination largely because we had such good technology that the Soviets didn't dare challenge our weaponry, even though we couldn't compete with them in manpower.

The anonymous engineers of Boeing, Rockwell, and all the other companies are as responsible for our living in peace and freedom as anyone. These people literally never get any credit or respect -- there are no monuments to them anywhere that I know of, and you never hear anyone praising them.

But I think they deserve a lot of praise. They aren't the "masters of war" that my hero, Bob Dylan, wrote about so angrily some 40 years ago. They're the masters of peace, freedom, and decency, and we have them to thank for not having to wage nuclear war.

Now they're fighting to keep terrorists at bay. I have a lot of correspondence with soldiers in Iraq, who tell me stories of amazing new weapons to stop small-arms attacks on them, to jam IEDs, to keep control of battlefields under unimaginably complex conditions, and to preserve bodies and lives.

Defend Your Retirement

I admire the hundreds of thousands of defense industry people more than ever. Let's pay tribute to them all -- and, like the good capitalists we are, let's invest in them.

There are two ETFs that make it easy to buy into the defense sector: the PowerShares Aerospace & Defense fund (PPA) and the iShares Dow Jones US Aerospace & Defense fund (ITA). Both have done fantastically well in the last few years, mostly led by Boeing's amazing performance (I was touting Boeing when it was in the high 20s a few years ago, and now it's in the hundreds or close to it.)

Personally, I see no sign of the threat to America receding. Hillary Clinton, possibly our next president, has come out for a substantial increase in defense spending (bless her pointy little head), and over the long run it's a field that's so vital to the nation's survival that it can't help but grow.

So let's pay our respects -- and help prepare for retirement -- by joining with the men and women who work to defend peace and freedom everywhere.

Ben Stein has no financial interest in the stocks and ETFs mentioned in this column.