It was surprising but, on reflection, it shouldn’t have been.
Of the books so far from Stephen Carter, my fourth choice from him to read addressed most directly the experience of racism by black Americans. Surprising, as you would think an American Civil War-era story, set in a time when racism was outright institutionalized, would feature it more than a present-day story. And yet, on further reflection, the focus makes sense.
The experience of black characters in Carter’s books is, in one respect, something that we all share. We all must (or, at least, should) worry most about those things that we can control. For a young woman in the 1860s, the pervasive racism (and, while we’re at it, sexism) was something to be borne. While most of that nastiness has been purged from society in the 150 years (it’s a 2007 novel, so the math is approximate) since, that which remains likely weighs upon minds more than it ever did – specifically because we now know it should not remain.
That said, I’ll repeat what I stated after reading Stephen Carter for the first time. To peg him as a “black novelist” or to shoehorn this novel into some sort of political or cultural discussion of racial injustice is to miss the point.
It took me a chapter or two to reacclimate myself to Carter’s writing style. In this case, it wasn’t the tense issue – although there is a chapter, towards the end, written in present tense. Rather the challenge, I think, is related to Carter’s use of time. His stories are not necessarily told linearly. I’d suggest that it is the accumulation of knowledge that drives his story, even if that might force the reader to jump around in time and place.
Once one gets into that groove, Carter builds solutions to the novel’s puzzle which pulls the reader along for the “ride1” as with the best of today’s thrillers. Furthermore, and unlike some of Carter’s best-seller rivals, I don’t feel cheapened by the experience. To me, Carter writes smart and informative prose that is also eminently entertaining. I’m not one to try to make top-10 lists of books and authors… but Carter would have to be high on such a list were I to do so.
In his prior work, much of the puzzle centered on the game of chess. The pattern continues here. In New England White, it’s more of a generic range of puzzles. The emphasis is on word games with a focus on anagrams. In some cases, the puzzle seems tantalizingly solvable (as opposed to an obscure chess problem), although I never did figure any of them out ahead of the book’s explanation. In his afterward, Carter points out that the website used by one of the characters to puzzle out anagrams is a real one, but warns the reader not to go down such a deep rabbit hole. In fact, I’ll not link to that site so as to spare you, the reader, your mental health.
The book ends at the beginning, having the main character refer to the title of the book. Having read the whole thing, we learned New England White has many meanings; the surface layer being that snow that coats the New England landscape for (what too often seems like) a good chunk of the year. In the end, I think we’re seeing Carter’s thoughts about race. New England is, indeed, very white in terms of demographics. Yet in my experience, this doesn’t make it racist.
Game Pairing: Politics as Usual
As much as I hate this term applied to fiction novels, I wonder if part of the reason for its overuse is that there isn’t a better word to describe the way a good thriller drives its readers. ↩︎
In the time since I last updated you, Cold Waters has become my most played game of the year. As I recently suggested, repeated trial and error has taught me how to avoid Russian torpedoes which in turns allows me to take it as well as I dish it out. Provided I have a sufficiently stocked ammunition tender, I can be fairly confident of prevailing in most1 of the scenarios assigned to me by the 1968 campaign.
Before I started reading, I glanced through some of Amazon’s reviews. Insomuch as one can rely on that review system (i.e. not very), I gathered the impression that this might not be the best book on this subject available. It is, however, the best book on this subject available to me – a factor that’s worth quite a bit. Furthermore, once I started reading, I was able to put some of the critiques into perspective. I have to say I like the direction that the author went with this work, even if some Amazon readers didn’t appreciate it.
There is an outsized emphasis on politics and that focus seems to have turned some readers off. Furthermore, said politics actually comes in two different flavors. There are the political aspects of running the war – politicians, bureaucrats, and career military officers butted heads over who was in charge of what and who was to determine policy. The book also features substantial discussion of the communist leanings (or outright allegiances in some cases) of many of the book’s leading figures. Having read it all, I think this approach is on to something. In many ways those politics are more interesting than the math itself – the computations that won the war are almost trivial in an age of ubiquitous computers and spreadsheets. These same politics, on the other hand, continue to dominate today’s world.
In the introduction, author Stephen Budiansky explains that the scientist referred to in the title, Patrick Blackett, remains underappreciated given what he contributed to both the advancement of scientific knowledge and to the British war effort. Part of the reason for that under-appreciation, the author supposes, is that Blackett was a committed socialist and a strong supporter of Stalin and the Soviet Union’s system. This allegiance persisted even when it should have been seen to be obviously problematic – for example, when Stalin made his pact with Hitler, who was at war with Britian. Given this context, put forth in the introduction, one shouldn’t, perhaps, be surprised when Budiansky devotes a good chunk of the narrative to the politics of the time.
A shockingly large portion of the scientific community in interwar Britain were socialists, if not outright pro-Soviet communists. The philosophical thought leaders of academia were convinced that socialism was the only way to bring the benefits of scientific discovery to the people and this seems to have become the default politics of that class.
Reading between the lines of Budiansky’s text, I blame the remnants of England’s feudal past. The “eggheads” who mastered the new technologies of the 20th century were still looked down upon by their “betters;” those who came from the right families. In a variation of the jocks versus nerds conflict that surely plays out everywhere and in all times, those with the intellectual ability to change society, government, and technology found themselves at the mercy of lesser thinkers. It would have indeed been tempting to dream that Russia’s proletariat revolution would flip this power balance on its head.
In the end2, the socialist and central planning instincts that turned out to be invaluable when fighting a war for national survival were quickly swept away upon the coming of peace. This led to disappointment among those, especially the socialists, who hoped their vision would continue to expand once the war was won. This all is yet another factor as to why most of us wouldn’t recognize a name like “Patrick Blackett” or many of the other scientific minds that helped win the war. Their philosophy fell out of favor once they were no longer necessary to the nation.
Politics aside, the storyline of the book was one that fits my tastes. It begins, as might seem familiar, in the First World War and development of submarine warfare. In fact, the narrative takes us back even further to the first submarines and some key bits of technology that made them feasible as weapons of war. Additionally, there is much consideration of the ethics, morality, and legality of submarine warfare Conclusion -and see below for more – it is none of these things.
Like I said, the actual math and technology was not as interesting as I was figuring it might be. The book emphasized the importance of cracking Enigma in Britain’s eventual victory but, as that story has been told elsewhere and better, Blackett’s War didn’t dwell on the details. Once place it did go is the use of statistics, which should have allowed the Germans to figure out that the British (and Americas) were reading their coded messages. The Germans never did figure it out and Budiansky explains that one of the reasons is that they never allowed their eggheads to serve this same critical role in the war. At the same time, and despite the influence of their own scientists and codebreakers, the British never seemed to realize that their own naval cypher had been broken. In fact, this was one of the reasons the Germans felt Enigma was secure long after it had been compromised; if the British had the ability to crack Enigma, they figured, surely they’d be using better encryption for their own communications.
Other amusing anecdotes concern simply the avoidance of some really bad decisions – as opposed to the brilliant application of the good. Budiansky talks about Germany’s torpedoes, which simply didn’t work at the war’s start. For the British, they were setting their depth charges too deep – an error that simple statistical analysis could correct. Another basic error that persisted, despite the math showing the solution, is that Allied convoys were too small. Naval professionals were wary of trying to coordinate too many ships at once. Logically, the ships lost during cross-Atlantic transit were proportional to the number of convoys, not the number of ships. As obvious (and demonstrable) as this was, the naval brass ultimately would only “compromise” with the scientists, allowing that convoys could be a little bigger but not too big.
Overall, an interesting book on The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Atlantic, and the early stages of analytics taking hold of how we run our society. On any of these topics, I suspect that Amazon naysayers were correct – there are better books on the history of the war. As an interesting story built around a technological and political thesis, though, it was well worth my time.
Near the end of the book, the author speaks sourly of those who romanticize the U-boat warriors. He makes some interesting points, and raises some interesting facts, some of which I hadn’t thought much about before.
He spends some time discussing the laws of the sea and how non-combatants – both merchant ships and civilians serving aboard such ships – are to be treated. The rules of such had been established for centuries. Those rules had developed separately from those for land warfare and, occasionally, produced some odd contradictions. Nonetheless, naval combat in World War I was expected to adhere to the ways that these things had always been done.
Initially, the use of the submarine – particularly against merchant shipping – relied simply on its stealth. A submarine could hide beneath the waves and approach its target unseen. Engaging a ship suspected of aiding the enemy, however, was a more traditional exercise. The submarine would surface, threaten with its gun, and board, search, and (perhaps) seize the vessel in service to the enemy. The problem was that submarines were among the smallest and slowest vessels afloat (so to speak). Seizing ships as prizes or, in the case of a sinking, taken aboard refugees, simply wasn’t practical for such a small vessel – especially one already strained in terms of crew, space, and function.
Through World War I and most definitely into World War II, Germany bent and, ultimately, broke those rules of engagement for purely practical concerns. In all other ways, they were outmatched by Britain on the ocean. By maximizing the effectiveness of the submarine and its unique weaponry, they could come up even in naval warfare. Unfortunately for all involved, that meant throwing overboard the traditional laws of the sea.
The result, in Germany, was a glorification of the submarine and its crewmen for the purposes of propaganda. Echos of that propaganda continue to this day, and in stark contrast to the reality of the time. Serving aboard a U-Boat was dirty, nasty business that typically ended in an untimely death. Serving aboard the U-Boat hunters, surface ships hastily welded together in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of battle, wasn’t a much better experience. This is all before we consider the wholesale murder that was a torpedo attack against passenger liners, POW transports, or the like.
I finished the book feeling somewhat chastised – even if it won’t keep me from playing the next WWII submarine game I find appealing. It also made me think about those Cold War submarine sims and the missions assigned to them. Would a present-day Battle of the Atlantic involve terrorizing merchant shipping? When playing Cold Waters, I’ve certainly sunk a few Soviet merchant ships when they presented themselves as targets of opportunity. Why not3? This is war, right? Or is it? Perhaps the next time the world goes to war we will have internalize the error of the German Navy’s ways and return to a more restricted Rules of Engagement for submarines.
Blackett’s War offers one more reason why Nazi Germany was not utterly condemned for their persecution of unrestricted submarine warfare. The inconvenient truth was that America, against Japan in the Pacific, conducted very much the same submarine war against our enemies as Germany did against theirs. Accusing Germany’s naval command with war crimes might have caused a little too much reflection on the conduct of the U.S. Navy and its Silent Service.
Game Pairing: Atlantic Chase. Certainly not UBOAT.
I’ll say this. The one mission I cannot master is stopping an amphibious invasion. Every time I ended up in a fight with the escorts, which I can now win, but the landing craft themselves get away. You’d think that unescorted assault ships would scrub their mission… but not in this game. ↩︎
This isn’t a mystery story, where giving away an ending ruins it. Nonetheless, this is something of the “ending” of the book. Hopefully I didn’t, in fact, ruin it for anyone. ↩︎
That question isn’t answered by the game. After sinking Soviet-flagged, but non-military, merchant ships, I receive neither victory points nor a penalty for doing so. ↩︎
Through 2023, the new TV series that was generating the most buzz (at least in the places where I might pick up on buzz) was Slow Horses. Running a respectable 8.1 on IMDb I figured it was a must watch for me – except that it’s on Apple TV.
While fuming about it unavailability to me, I learned about how this series was based upon a popular book and, further, found that the source novel was available from my library as an eBook. It would take a while, but I eventually requested it. It then required a month-or-so additional wait before I finally got a copy allocated to me. Once started, I eagerly read cover to cover.
The writing style is, I’d like to think, how I would write if I had the talent to write a novel. For the first few chapters I found myself tickled, almost to the point of distraction, by the prose. Once I got into the story, though, focus on words faded away. The story is solidly in the spy thriller genre and a great example of one at that. I think this book has even more underneath its cover, though, than meets the eye.
The publisher’s marketing blurbs make much of a reviewer’s connection between the classic spy novels of John Le Carré and Slow Horses author Mick Herron. While it kind of annoyed me the first time I saw it, it grew more and more painful with each repetition. Yes, I’ll admit, this is not an idle comparison. Like Le Carré, Herron writes a spy thriller that’s long on desk work and office politics and short on actual thrills (relatively speaking). For me, Herron’s story draws me in more that did, say, Tinker Tailor… and is more fun to read. At least, that’s my impression having last read a Le Carré novel, probably, in my late teens.
Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t try to pretend to be some sort of literary critic. Teasing out hidden themes or deeper meaning I’d rather leave to those more qualified or, at the very least, more pretentious. In this case, however, I feel like I see something in Slow Horses that is worth sharing with all of you.
In my opinion, this work is intended to be a commentary on generational change. The world (and, in particular, the workplace) is very different for the twenty-somethings in this story than for its fifty-somethings. I recall from my own twenty-something years that this would have been considered a good thing. As a fifty-something, I’m not so sure – nor is, to my reading, Mick Herron.
The oldest characters represent the old way of doing business. The headliner of the TV series is Gary Oldman’s (get it, old man?) Jackson Lamb. I hesitate to call him such because I’m not sure he’s the “main character” of the book, the way the first in the series is written. In any case, the book’s Lamb is fat, sloppy, and unpleasant – as well as being a white male. He is old enough to have risen through the ranks in a time when almost everyone was a white male. Furthermore, his was a “manly” job, requiring physical proficiencies and a willingness to confront danger. Contrast that to the “new man,” exemplified by “Spider” (Freddy Fox on TV). He is well educated and dresses for success. His battlefield is in the conference room and his weapons are his secret alliances. He takes no physical risks; the worst that can happen to him at work is career failure. In fact, he considers the risking of one’s life and limb behind the iron curtain to be something best suited to lesser men. Certainly, in his world, actual work in the field is not the way to the top.
Who sits on top of Herron’s heap? Not fat, old, white men for sure. The organization is run by women – who as a class are innately more suited to the office politics (and actual politics) that make things run these days. The actual spies who made their careers in the post war era seem something of an anachronism.
This is no mere literary flourish – an allegory for the modern office. For years, I’ve read criticisms of the intelligence services and their penchant for moving away from human assets towards technology. I’ve even read that some of the blame for the large intelligence failures (9/11, etc.) falls on this trust in technology and bureaucracy and a lack of boots on the ground, as it were.
Certainly the events of 7/7 (the multiple, simultaneous attacks on the London transit system) would have caused many in the UK to think a little harder about how their approach to the spy game had changed and whether that change left them unsafe. England is no stranger to terror campaigns, courtesy of the IRA, but jihadist bombings must have seemed, on 7/6/2005 at least, to be something that happened only in far away lands. Herron’s book asks us to rethink that. Given what’s happened since, I don’t see that we actually have.
Skip this last paragraph if you don’t want to risk having the story ruined for you…. but I must give away at least part of the plot to note a final yet important point. As much as this is all about terrorist, counter-terrorism, and the like, it is notable that the centerpiece of the book is simply office politics taken to the extreme. It may look to be about Islamic terrorist – but it isn’t. Worse yet, the political stakes are simply about who is going to get ahead; who will make it to the top. For that, a nation is terrorized and lives are lost.
Have we lost some of the perspective that the generations before us still had? I think, just maybe, that is a substantial part of what this book is about.
I had long wanted to read the source material for The Outlaw Josey Wales. While the movie tends to be available at a discount from Amazon and at big box stores, the book was very hard to find. When it popped up on Amazon as an eBook, I put it into my wishlist. When I found I had some of Amazon’s “digital credits” burning a hole in my virtual pocket, I decided that I’d spend them on this.
While I was going through this process, I learned that the author of Gone to Texas, the story adapted into The Outlaw Josey Wales, had been subjected to cancel culture, along with (to some extent) his book. I rolled my eyes and figured it was par for the 2020s course and didn’t let it deter me from my Texas-bound trail. It wasn’t until after I finished that first-of-two Josey Wales stories that I looked up the controversy. Not only had I missed the mark in my understanding of it, it is all an interesting tale in its own right.
The author of Gone to Texas, as we can see on the Amazon link, is one Forrest Carter. Carter has told how he hails from a mixed ethnic background, a large part being Cherokee. In an autobiographical-ish book, he explains that he had been orphaned as a child and raised in his people’s ways by his grandfather. A book like Gone to Texas, at least in part, is an attempt to honor this ancestry by showing the suffering of the American Indian at the hands of the American government.
The problem with this integration with Forrest Carter’s life story is that it isn’t true.
Forrest Carter was the pen name for Asa Earl Carter. The real Carter was a politician and activist whose primary issue was preserving segregation. Almost as famous as the story of Josey Wales is the phrase that Carter coined, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” in a speech he wrote for George Wallace. Like Wallace, Carter was a Democrat. Eventually Carter split with Wallace and challenged his former boss over their party’s nomination for governor of Alabama. Carter did not win the endorsement in that race and Wallace went on to serve his second stint in that job.
Even more damning, before engaging in mainstream politics, Carter had been an active member of the Klu Klux Klan. He even had the dubious distinction of having formed his own splinter (more radical) group called the “Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy.” For a time, Carter put out a monthly magazine called The Southerner with a white supremacist and anti-communist focus.
After his electoral loss, Carter moved to Texas and attempted to start his life anew. He changed his name to Forrest1 and began work on The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales. He even began referring to his own sons as “nephews” in an effort to fully adopt his new lifestyle and distance himself from the old. Even if his adoption of an identity as a persecuted minority seems jarring against his racist background, after reading what he has written I can accept his sincerity. He seems to be consistent, at least within his own mind.
Sincerity aside, there is an odd style to the way he writes. My first thought was it was just some mediocre writing. Then I began to wonder. Perhaps, I thought, he is trying to reproduce the style of the dime novels of the late 19th century. I’ve never read a dime western, but composing this novel is such a way would make some sense. After all, Josey Wales was a real person. Sort of.
Even having accepted the novel’s style, it was still not the most enjoyable read. The prime mitigating factor is that I know and love this story. As I went through the chapters, in my minds eye I was reliving the corresponding scenes from the film.
In many ways, the film turned a so-so story into a good one. The script added comedic elements that maybe didn’t do justice to the original. Maybe, even, as tastes about what’s funny have changed, these were not exactly the strongest elements of the film. For example, the character of Lone Wattie – in the book a guerrilla fighter nearly as fearsome as Wales himself – is portrayed as well past his prime, often for the laughs. The character of the carpetbagging salesman was nowhere in the book, place in the move as a foil for Eastwood’s outlaw. Taken as a whole, the script and the film come together as a much improved piece of entertainment.
At this point I’ll offer an interesting aside. As I hinted above, the character of Josey Wales is based upon the life of Confederate raider Bill Wilson… sort of. It would be most accurate to say that Josey Wales is a composite of real rebel riders such as Wilson2, “Bloody” Bill Anderson, Jesse James, and others. Wilson’s true story, as far as it is known, is similar enough to the story of Josey Wales to be recognizable. The vague similarity, however, departs decisively at the ending of the first of the two novels. Bill Wilson was killed by fellow outlaws, former Confederates who also rode with Qauntrill’s Raiders. The pair killed and robbed Wilson and left him in a shallow grave. They were later caught and hanged for the crime.
By contrast, the movie and the first book ends with the hope that Josey Wales can, once again, find a new and normal life with his adopted family. Yet we sense that he is the sort of man that trouble follows and thus a sequel seemed to be in order – especially after the success of the movie. Many must have been eager to learn of Wales continuing trails, trials, and triumphs. For me, the decision of Carter to write a second book gave me another chance to judge the odd quality of his writing and determine if, in fact, it’s awkwardness was mere affectation as opposed to an indication of a decided lack of writing talent.
The benefit-of-the-doubt that I gave the first of the two books went out the window when I completed the second; The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales. It was published in the same year that the film The Outlaw Josey Wales was released. The writing style is different than that used in Gone to Texas and clearly not an imitation of the dime story style. It is still bad, but a different kind of bad. It is also dominated by extremely graphic descriptions of rape and murder. While the rapists and murderers are obviously the “bad guys,” one has to wonder that such crimes are so lovingly described. My ability to grant the benefit of the doubt as to the author’s purpose is hampered by the his history with the Klan.
As a side note, I discovered that the follow-on book was, in 1980, turned into a follow-on movie titled The Return of Josey Wales. This film is mercifully unavailable on Amazon – it is bad even by bad movie standards, garnering a mere 3.5 stars on IMDb. One of the IMDb reviewers may have captured the essence of what seems to be a grave error in filmmaking. “Even if you are a lover of westerns, you’ll greatly dislike this movie, even more so if you don’t care for the genre.” I guess I lucked out on this one because if it was available to me for free, I’d feel compelled to watch it just to close out my Josey Wales chapter.
In the end, while neither of this pair of books were all that good, I am still glad I read them. As I say, the first was most valuable as an extension of my love of the movie. The second, while it occasionally left me shaking my head in disbelief, wasn’t that bad of a story. Together, the pair added some depth3 to the character of Josey Wales, a depth that didn’t make it into the film. While I generally deplore “cancel culture,” in the case of Asa Earl Carter, the man was awful enough that it might just be justifiable. Even still, I’d like to think I’m capable of evaluating the man, the story, the writing, and the historical context all independently from each other (as well as together, as appropriate) without the hive mind deciding what I am allowed, or not allowed, to see.
The movie-sequel bullet dodged, I elected to bookend my experience by rewatching High Plains Drifter, which is due to be removed from Netflix in March. Released in 1973, this was Eastwood’s second film as director and his first self-directed Western. Coming out three years (and three films) before The Outlaw Josey Wales, I viewed it the other night as a prototype for what is, by all measures, the better film. I found myself frequently filling in blanks with information from Josey Wales (book and/or movie).
Now that I’m thinking about it, High Plains Drifter is a little rapey too. I guess it’s not the 70s anymore – and thank the Lord for small favors.
Game Pairing: Red Dead Redemption 2
One is tempted to draw the connection between Nathan Bedford Forrest and the founding of the Klu Klux Klan, but General Forrest was a truly complex character. Carter being a diehard Confederate sympathizer, I’d hesitate to read too far into what he meant with his choice of “hero” when reinventing and renaming himself. ↩︎
In an interesting acknowledgment, there is a scene near the end of the film where Wales’ new friends attempt to distract soldiers hunting him (including Captain Fletcher, who commanded Wales and thus knows him on sight). Wales, who is there, is introduced as “Mr. Wilson.” In the book, they call him “Mr. Wells.” ↩︎
Just for one example, the film (spread across several scenes throughout the movie) has Lone Wattie describe Wales’ search for “an edge” in a fight. In the film, it almost seems trite. The book explores the concept much more deeply. For example, while on the trail Wales forgoes feeding himself if that’s the only way he can get high-quality grain for his horse. He knows that, if it comes down to it, having his horse just a little more capable than that of his enemy could mean the difference between living and dying. An “edge” is more than just the location of the sun (although that is in the book as well). ↩︎
In last month‘s Wall Street Journal was a book review that addressed an issue that had been going on about in some length. Namely, I have been concerned about how big tech’s algorithms manipulate our perception of the user experience to lead us into think we’re getting something more than what we get. in deference to my affinity for things political, the thought went unremarked at the time. I figured I’d make a belated comment about the review, now, because it did strike a chord with me.
The book is Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. I didn’t buy the book and I haven’t read it – I’ve only read that review – so there isn’t much I can contribute to the conversation. Still, I do have two things to say.
It sounds like the book is very much on the right track. The way that social media filters and manages our consumption of news, entertainment, and more, gives us the illusion of infinite choice while giving the operators of those media the ability to restrict our choices. Such restrictions can be the equivalent of the most severe of government censorship efforts. As we’ve come to learn, sometimes that “free market” censorship is implemented in connivance with government. We immerse ourselves in this brave new world at our peril.
It also appeals to me that Mr. Chayka, apparently, spends a chapter reminiscing about the “good old days” of listservs, Geocities, and LiveJournal. Some of us still live there.
Late in life, author Robert Graves explained that he wrote I, Claudius because he needed the money. A land deal had gone bad and he needed £4000 (probably more than $300,000 in 2024 money) to pay off the loan he took against his house. After only six months in print, the book had already brought him £8000.
It’s an inspirational story. In fact, I could use a half-a-million or so myself – why not just slap together a novel? Granted, Graves was an accomplished writer and historian when he seized upon this opportunity. He had a number of non-fiction books to his name plus several fictional works (not to mention his poetry). Still, one would like to assume that these masterpieces of literature are created because the authors have something burning inside them, dying to get out. One doesn’t expect a masterpiece to come into being simply because the author needed the money.
Wikipedia uses words like “masterpiece” and “pioneering” to describe I, Claudius. These are words that may be prone to overuse but, in this case, I’d have to say that they are fully justified. In fact, the accumulation of all the praise I’ve heard about this book over my lifetime still doesn’t do it justice. It is an enjoyable read and a great story. Most amazingly, it is as relevant as ever, both in terms of content and with respect to its style and readability.
Part of this is the conceit of the work. It claims to be a modern (circa 1934) translation of an autobiography written by the emperor while he was still alive. As prophesied in the book’s opening pages, the original was lost after his death to be rediscovered 1900 years later. We are told we are reading, simply, a “modern” translation of the original1 Latin.
Between this and the fact that the book is obviously British, I can overlook almost all of the oddities of language. I would expect an archaic tinge to the language included to give the impression that this is all translated from the Latin. Other less-than-current phraseology I would simply write off to the great Atlantic divide.
I’ll cite one exception so as to prove the rule. In his preface, the author (the real one, now… Graves) talks about how he tries to refer to things in contemporary language rather than the original Latin. For example, towns in France or Germany are called by the name that we would now recognize, not what the Romans might have called them. Weapons use current terminology, not the Latin generally used to refer to them. The one instance of this that stuck in my craw was the Roman legion. Graves always uses the modern “regiment” rather than the familiar “legion.” It just seems wrong… and I wonder if it was so jarring when read by 1930s eyes.
Setting that one (albeit frequently repeated) sin aside, the book holds its own (and then some) against any of the writers and novels that followed in its footsteps. For years I’ve read the likes of Robert Harris or Steven Saylor. It was that exploration of more contemporary historical fiction that slowly built out my impression that I, Claudius was out there. Maybe, as with the Clancy-launched genre, or Crichton‘s techno-thrillers, or the Stoker/Lovecraft/King progression, I assumed that by standing on the shoulders of a giant, the newest products would be necessarily that much better.
Not necessarily.
Is there much I can tell you about a work that just passed its 90th birthday? I doubt it. If the book was missing anything, I would have asked that there be an epilogue (a la Harris or Cornwell) where the assumptions and embellishments of the fiction are separated from the documented history. I suspect the writers of 1934, and maybe Robert Graves in particular, were less likely to walk us through the historical/fictional mix.
However he might have explained it, Graves did intend to do right by the history with this book. As he states in that interview, he really did think he was (at least in some way) correcting historical misconceptions with his imagined recreation of history.
Claudius was a writer and historian and it is recorded that he did write an 8-part autobiography that has been lost to the ages. Maybe it looked a little something like this? ↩︎
This is the hundred-fifty-fifth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. Go back to the previous post in the series or return to the master post.
There was a point where I had Flight of the Intruder queued up to watch – well, somewhere. I didn’t watch it, for a number of reasons, and I suffered some measure of regret when it got removed from streaming. My intention all along was to hold off watching it until it jived with the date that I had reached within this blog. At the time, my writing had me looking at America’s initial entry in the war, not the later war and Operation Linebacker.
The film was the final directorial effort from John Milius. Milius is most notable to me for having directed Red Dawn (no not that, the good one). He is also notable for his, shall we say, interesting political and cultural views. Another red-blooded American war movie about Vietnam would seem to have been right up his alley. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps the rest of us as well, the film was a critical and commercial flop. Milius would continue screenwriting (he went on to success a few years later with Clear and Present Danger), but the film turned out to be something of a career-ender. One more reason I had not to trip over myself in a hurry to watch it.
In point of fact, I’m still not in the right part of the war. However, the IL-2BAT campaign, also called Flight of the Intruder, is configured to take place in March of 1969. This, of course, is an operational problem when matching history – the date plants you after LBJ called his bombing halt in the North but well before Nixon resumed it. Some of the targets given to the player in the game’s series would have been quite off-limits. Nonetheless, I happened to be looking for a book to read and the novel, Flight of the Intruder, was staring at me from my bookshelf. No time like the clear and present, you might say.
The source material for the movie got published in the wake of the success of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. There developed a sense of a substantial, mass-market appetite for highly technical, realistic military thrillers and a decided lack of books to fit that particular bill. Clancy’s publisher, the United States Naval Institute, took on lawyer-newly-turned-author Stephen Coonts as well. Like Hunt, Flight of the Intruder saw breakout success, with vigorous sales and a good six months on the New York Times bestseller list.
I’ve long recognized the author’s name. It would be unreasonable for me to say I accurately recall what I thought about him back in the 1990s but I’m thinking my impression was that of a lesser Tom Clancy. When I pulled the book from my shelf a year or so ago, I was surprised to realize I had various impressions about Coonts over the years. I knew the name as a prolific author of this “warrior” genre1, a successful author of the 1990s, and as the author of the film’s source material. The surprise was that this all was the same person. It’s hard to imagine how I didn’t see it, yet there it is.
Furthermore, most of my impressions were probably wrong. It’s too much to expect me to reevaluate a life’s worth or writing based on reading one book, but at this point I couldn’t possibly classify Coonts as a lesser Clancy. Perhaps Flight of the Intruder doesn’t have quite the thrill of The Hunt for Red October or the epic scope of Red Storm Rising, but I’m tempted to call it a better book. Coonts does the military techno-babble genre as well as Clancy ever did and his writing, I think, is a notch better. Even before I was finished reading Flight, I bought the next few novels in the Jake Grafton series – to be set aside for some future date.
For me, the best part of the book was not the detailed description of aerial combat – although it wouldn’t have been much of a book without it. What stood out for me were the details about what it was like to be in the Navy – to live on a ship and fly combat missions “for a living.” Given that he did, in fact, fly the A-6 Intruder over Vietnam during the time in which this novel is set, I’ll assume that the portrayal is accurate. I’m not saying representative, necessarily, but at least a facsimile of the author’s own experience.
It must be a coincidence but it sure doesn’t seem like one… A few weeks after I finished reading the novel, the film reappeared2 on Amazon – just in time for me to wind this all into a big, multimedia post. Naturally, I jumped on it (as soon as I’d wrapped up the last of the expiring-in-January series) and probably you should too. It is already on Amazon’s leaving-soon list.
On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t. Quite frankly, the critics and the audience of the early nineties were right – the movie just wasn’t that good. For me, I took it as an illustration of the book I had just read. As that, it wasn’t so bad. The film features some pretty good footage of the A-6 in flight and performing carrier ops. To the extent that the story from the book was reproduced, you can follow along, checking the boxes as you see it play out on screen. To the extent that it is not – well, yes, that will be a matter for frustration as often than not. However, you still will have the story in your head to fall back on.
Maybe this film is also useful as yet another lesson on how not to adapt a book.
It feels a little like kicking a man while he’s down, but I’ll poke at a few of the weaknesses of the adaptation. Everything is simplified a bit, leaving what became a best-seller as a result of its gritty realism looking more like an A-Team inspired cartoon action film. The plethora of weapons mischaracterizations were summed up in a scene where Willem Dafoe’s Virgil Cole blasts away with his 1911 service pistol. All the while, the hammer on his pistol is quite clearly not moving. Even the highlight of the film, the in-air footage of the A-6, is degraded when we cut to the cockpit. Brad Johnson’s Jake Grafton flies with a frantic yank-and-bank method, through which he dodges the anti-aircraft bullets flying at him from the ground defenses.
This last is particularly disappointing when contrasted with the novel. The writing meticulously lays out how difficult it was to fly the aircraft under combat conditions. In particular, I recall the emphasis on the fine control and concentration required to race along the treetops at full throttle. I suppose that trying to portray the subtle adjustments of reality would inevitably make for a more boring film. If you want to portray the pilot turning, he’s got to slam that stick all the way over so the audience can see.
Likewise, many of the sins of this adaptation I can write off as an attempt to make the story work in the new medium. Or, at least, I can see what they are going for. In so many cases, I’m sure they could have done better. For another and non-technical example of an obvious attempt to avoid boring the audience, they brought forward the romantic theme from the book. Or tried to, I suppose I should say.
The point, if I could try to divine Coonts’ intent, was to make a statement about character and honor that goes beyond one’s role as a naval officer or crew member. Yes, you shall be judged on your contributions as a warrior but your character is defined also by your actions as a man – a boyfriend, a husband, or a father. He may be asking us to consider if the two worlds can really be separated? The book, therefore, features an interconnected motif, through multiple characters, contrasting men who take full advantage of the prostitutes available to them in The Philippines and Thailand, to the enlisted man who marries a Filipino gal, to Jake himself – falling in love with a young American woman from the diplomatic corps.
The movie forgoes this depth, leaving the girl and a bunch of prostitutes but removing most of what the book had to say. Ultimately the literary Jake Grafton finds, in his love for Callie, a reason to survive the war. In the movie, it seems mostly left in so that marketing would get a steamy love scene.
Finally, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t mention the top-billed actor Danny Glover. Glover was at the peak of his popularity, starring in a number of blockbuster films – most notably the Lethal Weapon series. Thus his choice for lead actor (in name if not necessarily in role) was probably expected to boost ticket sales. He plays the book’s squadron commander Frank Camparelli. The decision not to change the character’s name to match the actor spawned a whole bunch of dialog about Glover’s Italian ancestry and his connections to the Mafia. It’s meant to be fun and give the film some color, I suppose, but I found it a little weird. I’m happy enough with Glover’s portrayal but I think it would have been easier just to rename Camparelli to something non-ethnic.
Now the book, in stark contrast with the movie, was very informative regarding my struggles with the IL-2 as a simulator of this aircraft. And yet, as with the movie, I leave my game experience feeling that I didn’t quite get out of it what I was looking for.
As I say, through the book I learned a lot about the difficulty of flying carrier operations. I’ve complained at length about the instability of some of IL-2‘s airplane models and even speculated that these planes couldn’t possibly be as twitchy in real life as they are in some of these scenarios. If anything, Stephen Coonts suggests they may have been even more so. He conveys the difficulty in being able to successfully (i.e. nearly flawlessly) operate from an aircraft carrier and provides small details that bring the experience to life for the reader. He does so in a way that isn’t as geeky as when Clancy did it. It all inspired me to try again to improve my in-game flying.
At first glance, the Flight of the Intruder package is just what the doctor ordered.
In the BAT installation, this is a series of ten scenarios delivered in the “Single Missions” folder. I’ll digress a moment to say that these were originally created as a “Campaign.” Somewhere within the forums I recently read that the user is “encouraged” to play these campaigns as campaigns. It is necessary to first do some reconfiguration but that appears to be very easy to do. I didn’t – and you’ll soon see why. I have a hard enough time completing a single mission so the added challenge of trying to survive through all ten would probably just add to my frustration. No… I’m content to take each mission one at a time.
The first of those ten missions (shown in the above introduction screen) calls for simply executing a carrier take-off and landing. For the novice, or just the less skilled among us, it can be used over and over again to practice getting the basics down. Or, if you’re like me, to see how many creative ways one pilot can smack into the back of a carrier during a failed landing.
I take this as a “tutorial” scenario – helping me smooth out the failures which I’ve highlighted throughout my prior gameplay. You can see in the above, the specifics of take-off are relayed to the user. Last time I flew the A-6 model, I told you that I was pleasantly surprised by my ability to handle take-off. This was no fluke – the A-6 can essentially launch itself if you have the trim set right. Landing is not so easily done. As my caption on the below screen hints, I expected to get a little more in terms of help here and sorely feel its absence. What is the glide path for an A-6 carrier landing? Is there a proper throttle position? Is there a perfect trim setting for an unladen Intruder? While I am given the target airspeed at touchdown, and that helps a lot, it is not enough information for me to know what I’m supposed to be doing.
My reading of Flight of the Intruder helped explain why Maverick would “call the ball” whenever he landed. I’ve got to assume that “ball” has to do with the three squares towards the upper-left of the above screen, with two short, golden-colored lines in the bottom square. The middle square, when it lights up (which isn’t often when you’re flubbing a landing), features a green-colored circle. “The ball,” I presume. I genuinely thought I’d be getting some assistance with this stuff having read into the scenario introduction a promise of aid – but it doesn’t deliver those goods.
From the book, I also learned just how much help an actual pilot had. While it explains that, if anything, the carrier landings are even harder than I’d imagined, even there the A-6 pilot isn’t on his own. He’s got his bomber/navigator sitting next to him and he also gets constant feedback from the carrier deck about where he is relative to where he should be. Add to that, he hasn’t had to figure out throttle, trim, and angle of attack by trial and error – his carrier training has burned into his brain the exact sequence required to conduct a by-the-book landing.
Not me. After a whole mess of crashes, I moved along.
The second mission involves an easy ground support mission – the player is tasked to drop some bombs on a docile enemy in the open. For this one, I’ve got the same bellyaches as above, but louder. Once again, the introduction teases with access to the technical assistance that a pilot relied upon to deliver accurate ground support. The novel illustrates the use of technology to deliver highly-accurate airstrikes as well as the struggles of the crew to compensate when that technology faltered. Bombing missions were targeted from the ground (AN/TPQ-10, etc.) and through equipment3 operated by the bombardier. A pilot almost never had to “eyeball” his bomb release. The approach could be dictated to him as well as the exact moment for bomb release.
Wiser, I can now see that those instructions provided for the scenario are actually intent on making it harder than how I play, not easier. The additional hints are to provide distance and bearing information (that a bombardier would be giving you) via on-screen text. This allows clean navigation without the use of the map (which is pretty much cheating, especially with all the icons turned on). I make full use of that map because I need all the help I can get.
For all of my complaints, this series really remains something that I would have wished for had it not fallen into my lap. By replaying the missions over and over and observing how I get it wrong (and perhaps how my wingman succeeds), I am getting, slowly, a little better. In my last run through, I managed to kill three enemy ground targets and bounced around on the deck a little before my plane blew up. The tutorial-like setup of these scenarios might eventually find me in a state where I don’t automatically dread being assigned bombing missions.
Allow me one last parting shot. As I wrapped up this post, I happened to glance again at my copy of the paperback novel. On the cover it has the publicists blurb, “A thrill-a-minute ride.” I hate that phrase. The book was not a ride nor did it impart one thrill per minute. If, back in 1986, I had been standing in a Waldenbooks wonder whether or not to buy this book, this phrase might have been enough to convince me not to do so.
Return to the master post for more Vietnam War. In the next article, I return to Steel Panthers and find that, after more than three years without, my sound and full-screen graphics have returned..
As an example, Liberty’s Last Stand (2016) came up on my library wish list a few years ago (when it was new enough to be popular but old enough to be in the library). I simply did not make the connection between the author’s name and his success starting in the 1980s. ↩︎
This is from my perspective. I think it was actually on Netflix when I was eyeballing it before. ↩︎
A note on this, and something I haven’t tried to fully comprehend. As I said, the IL-2 scenarios take place in 1969 instead of the 1972 of the book. As a result, the player doesn’t have access to the A-6E that Jake Grafton piloted. You fly the A-6A. The A-6E’s Target Recognition and Attack Multi-sensor was yet to be deployed, potentially making its absence from these missions a realistic feature. ↩︎
I learned something new about Amazon Prime’s streaming video interface. I’ve complained before that I find their sorting of recommendations, sometimes, difficult to use. The various recommendation lists can be helpful to me, but they aren’t consistently available. I’ve found myself scrolling down for many interminable minutes, trying to find the “movies we think you’ll like” or “shows to sample this month” queue – as often as not in vain. There is one queue, though, that is always near the top and is always populated. This is the “continue watching” list.
Conveniently, and as you must expect, that queue contains whatever movies or shows-in-series that you have watched partway through but didn’t finish. Also a little less conveniently, it contains those features that you’d started watching but were unable to finish because Amazon removed them. There they remain with a graphical notification that, if you want to finish what you’ve started, you’re going to have to pay up. Obviously, when a series is viewed to completion or a movie is watched to the end, it no longer sits in this queue.
I’ve explained that most of what I’ve watched I select from the tried-and-true – that is, features that have been out for a while. What I learned is just how the “continue watching” queue’s behavior also applies to a series that is still in production or still being released. In that case, when a series gets new episodes or a new season and those episodes become available on Amazon, the title pops right back in the “continue watching” list. That’s what happened to me. I was using the “continue” list to finish a series that would be gone at the end of December when, suddenly, Reacher reappeared at the list’s head.
I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I am very prone to suggestion. Despite having goals focused on higher-priority things to watch, I dropped what I was doing and picked up with Season 2 episode 1 of Reacher. In another first for me, I did so while its episodes were still being dribbled out by Amazon. At the time I started in, only three episodes had been released. This, mercifully, provided a welcomed backstop for this sudden and unexpected distraction.
Reacher continues in its appeal from Season 1, such as it was. Because I was interleaving it with an objectively-better show, it was all the more clear that this wouldn’t be considered “great” TV. It’s good and it is entertaining. Even while it does feature black lesbians, it refrains from shoving them down your throat.
When I watched Season 1 of Amazon’s Reacher series, I expressed some hope that the producers’ adaptation would be comprehensive. That is to say, seeing that they started with book 1 of the series, perhaps they intended to stick with the narrative as defined by the written works. I mean this as a contrast to the movies, which grabbed willy-nilly from the now2 29 book series. When they announced the green-lighting of Season 2, my hope was that they would continue with the books in order. They did not.
Season 2 is adapted from Bad Luck and Trouble (that’s just one book), which is the eleventh book in the series. In an interesting nod to the gap, Reacher mentions that he had a run-in with James Barr (the patsy of the first CruiseReacher film and the ninth book in the Reacher series, One Shot). So the show acknowledges that a lot, and perhaps a whole lot, has happened since we left off with Season 1.
I figured I need to fill in that gap on my own.
I’ll explain here and now that I bought my first Reacher book, the first Reacher book, back in 2014. This was two years after the movie came out and probably fairly soon after I’d seen it. I read the first three books in quick succession before deciding I needed a break.
I’m not sure I can call these these books good but they are compelling; dare I say addictive? At some point, you absolutely must get through to the end to solve the mystery, even if that means staying up all night reading. The compulsive nature of the book, combined with some rather explicitly-sexual descriptions, made it all feel more like a bad habit than an nourishing read. I figured I’d have to wait a bit and then come back to Reacher after taking in some soul-cleansing alternatives. I didn’t plan on taking the better part of the decade to do so. After all, it’s not that Lee Child’s writing is sooo bad… I just don’t want to drown myself in it.
With my Reacher appetite whetted but the next course (i.e. Episode 4) not yet on my plate, I picked up the next book in line. That book is the fourth in the series, released in the UK as The Visitor. On this side of the pond, the title sounded too much like a science fiction work to the ears of the American publisher. We changed the name of it to Running Blind.
After such a long break, it’s comforting to know that my opinion hasn’t changed. It’s not great literature, this book, and I feel a little less for having read it through. Don’t get me wrong – I willfully chose to read and I did so because it has genuine entertainment value. As I say, though, it is written in a way that the reader must see it through to the end and in a style does feel a bit like manipulation. Mercifully, that manipulation doesn’t extend beyond the book in hand. I DON’T feel compelled to immediately grab the next book in line. Instead, I am able wait – wait to take in Reacher’s next adventure when it suits me. The fact is, I probably will keep at this series – just not right now.
I’ll note that this sense of compulsion, this feature of the written series, does not translate to the TV adaptation. Watching Season 2 of Reacher was enjoyable enough but I certainly didn’t feel forced to take it in all at once. When I stumbled upon some better alternatives, I was content to let Reacher wait through the better part of January before I wrapped it up.
For another tangential comment on my Reacher viewing experience, let me turn to Amazon’s “X-Ray” feature. Amazon has augmented something on their interface in a way which backs up one of my earlier theories. Up until now, X-Ray popped up upon pausing to display a handful of actors present in the scene that you were watching (when you hit pause). It thereby allowed the viewer to see who the actors’ names and scan a brief biography (this is something that I do like to do). With their new addition, Amazon displays some related merch as well. When watching Reacher, Amazon suggests I might want to order up Bad Luck and Trouble.
Their algorithms don’t know that I picked up Bad Luck and Trouble used at the library books sale. Well, maybe they do now (if Amazon’s AI reads my blog).
I was also amused to see that Amazon has added a new genre category to help me search for things to watch. The category is called “Faith and Action.” It combines the various Christian-themed media (selections that look similar The Chosen) with choices likeThe Covenant and The Terminal List. As I said, they seem to have pegged one segment of their viewing audience – the one that isn’t so keen on woke Tolkien or gay romance stories3.
I may be trying to allude to a key plot point to make a joke. I’ll say no more so as not to ruin anything for you. The joke isn’t all good either. ↩︎
This is according to Wikipedia, which suggests that the 29th book in the series will release in the fall of 2024. In an interesting sign-of-the-times, the table of all the books in series has, as a column, the “point of view” of the books narrative, specified as either 1st, 2nd, or 3rd (or some combination). ↩︎
This is the hundred-fifty-forth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. Go back to the previous post in the series or return to the master post.
One of our greatest problems in our society today is that we’ve constructed echo chambers within which we engage in our political and cultural discussions. If someone is wrong (i.e. disagrees with us), we shun them and their opinions. It is an ever-growing feedback loop that reinforces and then entrenches our existing beliefs. In fact, as long as we can drum up a good-sized sample of our fellow man who agrees with us, we can forever “prove” we are right.
The strength of this phenomenon lies, in part, with the technology that allows us to filter those opinions that reach our ears and our minds. We’ve always been able to choose with whom we associate, which allowed us to create cliques of like-minded fellow travelers. It may even be that we clearly recognized the downside of these insular groups1 at work, creating bad policy well before the internet and social media. What’s worse today, though, is that we choose, wittingly or unwittingly, our exclusive sources of “unbiased” news, information, and analyses.
I’ve stated it so often that I hesitate to do so again but you must know I read The Wall Street Journal, a paper to which I have a subscription. I don’t also have subscriptions to all the major, national papers. I read the Journal and, most days, it alone. I’ve chosen to do so because I agree with their slant on many issues and therefore trust all-the-more their analyses on issues with which I am not familiar. That said, there are certain topics about which I find them to be entirely mistaken. That is, I know they’re not always right even as I restrict myself from alternative sources that may serve me better on those particulars.
This also is nothing new.
And yet it gets far, far worse within our current ecosystem surrounding our communication technology. Social media algorithms are designed to show us that which we want to read (i.e. will click through to trigger sponsor payments) over that which we will ignore. Thus it becomes ever easier to give ourselves the impression that we are open to all sources and opinions and, even when we get selective and shun alternative opinions, that we are only excluding discourse from way out on the fringe. A Twitter or a Facebook is designed to look that way to each user scrolling through their feed. Of course, another use with a political bent will see an entirely different feed, giving individual consumers of the same media product the completely opposite impression. Or maybe more accurately, the same impression but from a diametrically-opposing viewpoint.
It was with this situation in mind that I set to picking the next book I should read. I decided to focus on something late-60s related and but from a different angle than what I’ve been reading recently. I narrowed it down to three choices.
The first, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, is an analysis of how that year’s politics have impacted all of America’s elections that took place since then. It seemed like a timely and informative write-up until I noticed that (at least within the blurb), the keystone to this analysis was how Nixon “stole” the election from an obviously-ascendant Democratic party through an action that met “the statutory definition of treason.” While my stated goal was to seek out a range of opinions in general, I’d like to think the Chennault affair is one where I’ve been well informed on both sides. I’m not in the mood for another polemic on this one, whichever side it falls on.
Choice number two was a critique of U.S. nuclear weapons policy in the-1960s-and-beyond called The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. It is written by Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND employee who leaked the Pentagon Papers. This also is an extraordinarily timely work, given the tenuous international situation we find ourselves in today along with my recent exploration of hot war scenarios in the 1960s and beyond. Alas, this book does not seem to fit my bill either, at least if I am to go by the Amazon user reviews which warned me off the title. While reviewers mostly had praise for the book’s material, the writing was roundly criticized. Many referred to a poor editing job that left an overlong, repetitive work. Others felt Ellsberg wanted to say more about his importance as a writer and a whistleblower than he did about nuclear weapons. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in the mood for this. I read a little bit from the beginning which left me, first hand, with the same sense that I got from the negative reviews.
What I picked instead was the book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, a title derived from the supposed orders given before the My Lai massacre (and, perhaps, other times and places to boot). It is written by a younger writer, Nick Turse, who wasn’t himself born when Saigon fell. If you put stock in his subtitle or perhaps your eye caught Amazon’s additional subtitle (“American Empire Project”), you might expect that the author is trying to reframe our current understanding of America’s involvement in the war. You certainly wouldn’t be surprised to find that he wrote a biased account.
A little surprising (or maybe not if you can put yourself in the mind of the author) is Turse’s contention that academic understanding of the War in Vietnam has been exclusively pro-America, pro-Military, and unapologetically patriotic. Thus he considers his work to be a revisionist document, digging out the real truth hidden behind decades of lies and obfuscation. It’s a surprising assertion after having just read Moyar saying the same thing but from the opposite angle. It’s surprising Turse feels that way given his citing of sources such as Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, books that are accepted by the mainstream to be truthful accounts of the war and, I must assume, widely read.
It is not at all surprising for me either, then, that Turse is biased and that bias is on full display throughout. In a prominent example, he refers to the communist opposition in Vietnam by the most mild terminology he can muster. “Nationalists” or “revolutionaries” are his main descriptors when referring to communist forces in the field. The fact that the movement was communist is downplayed or even denied and the connection between the government of North Vietnam and the combat units of the Viet Cong is minimized. The harshest descriptive he uses, perhaps, is “guerillas,” although that seems employed mostly to emphasize how impotent said “guerrilla” fighter might be when squaring off against America’s high-tech army.
You see, while Turse never connects all the dots, we can easily see the pattern. He does not believe that America should have been involved in Vietnam AT ALL. To him, the government of South Vietnam was illegitimate, created and propped up by America to thwart the “people’s will” – a single Vietnam united under communism. Furthermore, the nature of America’s involvement was also wrong – soup to nuts. That the U.S. would employ modern technology and weaponry at full scale against a third-world nation, while our foes at best got some paltry economic aid (maybe, he never actually mentions it) from the Soviet Union and China, he considers to be immoral and objectionable. While the outright (and, despite his protestations otherwise, openly acknowledged) criminality of the My Lai massacre starts, ends, and is peppered throughout the book, that criminality is essentially equivalent (in his mind) to America’s standard rules-of-engagement. These rules were not unique to Vietnam. America’s employment of force and support had already been doctrine for decades and, basically, continues in its use today.
To make its point, the book mixes disparate incidents – separated by time and location and very different in surrounding circumstances – to build a unified narrative. In some ways, this makes sense. The book’s thesis is that what we know on its subject is but the tip of an iceberg. Therefore, a careful examination of written records will undoubtedly turn up bits and pieces of other atrocities similar to My Lai. From there we are to extrapolate that there is much, much more that was never officially reported and/or recorded. But are we getting the full picture when the writing is designed to point entirely to this preconceived answer?
Turse has found multiple, reasonably-well documented cases of orders being given to kill civilians in an uncontested village. This is horrible and is all the more so because it flies in the face of how we, as a nation, see ourselves and our episodes of military intervention. We are the good guys, right? We wouldn’t do this. Mixed in, however, are incidents that (reading between the lines) arose from a bona fide military engagement – except that Turse believes that the American employment of force was2 disproportionate to the communist action to which it was responding.
In some cases, his evidence, his documentation, is taken from courts-martial proceedings. In other words, someone in the military had identified the action he questions as potentially criminal. For several of these instances Turse describes how the accused American perpetrator was not punished after his trial. In other cases, he does not state such, leading one to assume that the military justice system did, indeed, identify the bad behavior and punish the man who did it. All of these things are part of the horror that is war and none of them reflect positively on the American military conducting that war. It is, nonetheless, a fact that they are not all equivalent.
Not only must I criticize Turse’s youth, but also his inexperience. As one example, he makes really obvious mistakes in his technical descriptions of firearms. He writes of soldiers who used a hand-held 60 caliber weapon3 to devastating effect, even though such a thing doesn’t exist. I think he must be mixing and matching the .50 caliber, crew-served machine guns with the 60 mm mortar, both of which are (albeit very different) infantry support weapons. He also cites the M-16 as a weapon that fires more than 700 rounds in a minute4 – suggesting that the infantry standard-issue was an inappropriately lethal weapon for our soldiers to be using, even while engaged in warfare.
While I certainly appreciate his reliance on government sources to back up his accusations, the way he does so can be5 disingenuous. Turse applies the above-described equivalency to imply meaning that almost certainly isn’t intended. For example, a government document saying that (then) Major General Julian Ewell was aware that a large-scale operation like Speedy Express would result in civilian casualties is cited as official recognition that Ewell ordered the execution of civilians to drive up “body count.” While both things may or may not be true, the first does not prove the second.
For all of this, the reviews on Amazon are mostly positive. The selection of readers who scored the book negatively seem to heavily lean towards Vietnam veterans whose personal experiences contradict the version of the war that Turse claims was the “real” one. One cannot simply dismiss what Turse writes. Although I didn’t “do my own research,” as the internet would advise these days, I did follow a few of Turse’s endnotes and he has apparently done valid research to back up his claims. I don’t doubt that when he cites a specific document or eyewitness account that his summary is accurate.
The problem is he’s clearly made no effort to seek a truth that differs from his thesis, even simply as a way test of the validity of his claims by challenging them. In the end this relegates his efforts to simply more information to be tossed into the still-heated discussion about what happened as opposed to a current, and measured, understanding of past events.
You might sense how hesitant I am to dismiss Turse out of hand. One reason I go back and forth is that his book is far more than just a criticism of the Vietnam -era military. By extension, it is a criticism of military doctrine to the present day. In fact, as pointed out and criticized in Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945, the reliance on overwhelming support fire to soften up the enemy has been a characteristic of American fighting doctrine going back to World War II. More importantly, as the world mires itself in multiple low-to-mid-level wars (in Ukraine and in Israel), debates about the nature and necessary limits of asymmetric warfare dominate the screens of Twitter and newspapers’ Op Ed pages.
A recent letter to The Wall Street Journal points out a problem. In it a Gen Zed responds to an earlier Op Ed about why Gen Zeds aren’t eager to join the military. He explains that the 9-11 attacks occurred before he was born. His lifetime has only seen continuous low-level conflict driven by an event that happened to the elders. People his age are expected to fight and die but to no obvious purpose. Reading that letter, I further remembered a speech given by a millennial (one who served in the Marine Corps in the late twenty-teens, for what it’s worth), describing the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as the most traumatizing event of his lifetime. He meant it both in the personal sense and in the global sense. For him, the effort to remove Saddam Hussein was a trauma of near-world ending proportions.
Nick Turse is two decades older than my traumatized ex-Marine or the Journal‘s “I will not serve” Zed. Given that age, one might assume that his audience reflects America’s population in general, a population consisting of almost entirely of individuals who have never witnessed the kind of total war where nations commit everything they have and more to their struggle for survival. One might even argue that, outside of Sherman’s march to the sea, this nation has never (thanks to our geographic isolation) had to endure a total war, at least on the receiving end. Does this mean that we’re stumbling towards World War III with a collective experience that labels half-assed police actions as major wars?
Warfare has rules. Warfare needs rules if we are going to avoid destroying civilization in our efforts to save it. That said, you whip up a bunch of 18-year-olds into a homicidal frenzy and point them towards the enemy lines, you can’t expect them to behave like Officer Friendly once they engage.
Thinking about this bigger picture is not only critical as we weigh the use of American force across the globe but it becomes necessary to our understanding of today’s headlines. In Ukraine, both militaries have been accused of war crimes (even if one side’s accusations might be more plausible than the other). Your stance on the current fighting in Israel seems framed by which side you think has engaged in war crimes and genocide and which side is engaged in legitimate, defensive use of force. I recently read an online comment suggesting that, objectively, maybe none6 of these “war crimes” are war crimes. Some of the awfulness we see on our small screens is simply the horror of war, brought to us with a unique immediacy by modern technology.
There is one more benefit, for me personally, to having read this book. I had on my reading list both Caputo’s and Sheehan’s books and I’ve now removed them. From Turse’s writing, I gather he relied heavily on them as sources and I’m convinced that his summary has conveyed the essential information of the similar writing that came before him. Maybe I’d be kinder reading the testimony of an eye-witness rather than the next generation’s politically-charged research but, after reading Kill Anything That Moves, I am satisfied that I got the point.
Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or join me as I mix book, movie, and video gaming in an attempt to better appreciate how it felt to pilot a bomber during the war.
The notion that those in power worked for their own interests and not for “ours” is as old as history itself. For example, if foreign or domestic policy is designed by a small group of individuals, all from the same Ivy League college, might we not expect it to exclude the preferences of some other segment of our body politic – those of us who can’t afford the Ivy Leagues? ↩︎
It is worth noting that he found examples of this opinion coming from higher up in the American chain of command. That is to say, even those involved at the time doubted the wisdom of flattening a village with airstrikes to take out a single sniper, even if they wouldn’t call such a “war crime.” ↩︎
For the nerds reading this, I think the .60 cal was a real cartridge designed and tested as an aircraft-mounted machine gun. I don’t think it was ever put into production as a military weapon. It would be similar to the 20 mm, which is often cited as the breaking point between “rifles” and “artillery.” ↩︎
I reread how he wrote it multiple times. If he was simply saying that the max-rate-of-fire of the rife is 700 rounds/minute, he’d have been technically accurate (but perhaps still misleading). That’s not what he said – he said a soldier could put 700 rounds down range in a minute. Assuming a spray-and-pray tactic, said soldier would only get out 20 rounds (most of them going nowhere near what he was aiming at) in a couple of seconds. Then he’d be empty. If he had extra magazines, he could maybe do a reload or two. At best, I think giving Turse every benefit of the doubt leaves him short by a factor of ten. ↩︎
It is ironic that, even as I accuse the author of failing to assess the big picture, I am going to do the same. I didn’t read all (or even many) of the footnotes nor did I try to, in more than a handful of cases, explore the gap between the quoted phrase, Turse’s ascribed meaning, and the intended meaning of the source. I pick, here, one example that makes my point for me. I admit that other examples probably would not. ↩︎
If the word “none” gets your blood boiling, please understand… I do not recall the exact scope of his comments. He did not assert that every slaughter of civilians that’s happened over the last few years is legitimate and I’m not saying that either. The “none” was in the context of the particular online discussion. ↩︎