Bury Us Upside Down - a review

March, 1968. Phu Cat AB, Republic of Vietnam.  Pilot holding the glass of champagne is Ed Risinger celebrating his last Misty FAC mission.  Holding the bottle is Brian Williams who would later be shot down with Howard Williams, Brian would be rescued while Howard would be killed.  Man with his hand on the stabilizer is Dick Rutan who would later co-pilot Voyager around the world unrefueled.

I have written previously on Bud Day and Misty FAC.  So why would I write another story?  Because I finally acquired a copy of Rick Newman and Don Shepperd's book on Misty called Bury Us Upside Down.

This book starts at a strange place, the belated funeral of Lt. Col. Howard Williams who had been listed as MIA and then declared KIA before any remains were finally found.  Then the book goes back in time to 1967.  Soon the reader is strapped into a F-100F Super Sabre and part of the secret Commando Sabre mission going into Route Pak One looking for the enemy.  Getting one's brain bucket rattled against a canopy side while clutching at a 35mm camera hoping something besides blurs will be on the film and then grunting as the Hun is wrenched through high speed jinks to dodge AAA.  And finally landing after over four hours in the cockpit and hitting a tanker at least two times to find your legs are rubber.  Then spending hours in a debrief followed by attitude readjustment at the Officers Club.  And next day finding yourself flying another mission.  Did I mention one of the authors, Shepperd, is a Misty alumni who as a two-star commanded all of the Air National Guard.

The authors cover much of the life and times of Misty from 1967 to official disbandment in 1970.  The reader's first glimpse of Misty is from a new Intel officer getting assigned to Misty after Bud Day has been shot down.  Almost nothing is recounted of the formative early days of Misty when they first tried to perform the mission with F-100Ds but Day realized the two-seat F model with a GIB was better suited.  Its almost as if it never happened. 

Soon though my annoyance with this omission vanishes as I am sucked in.  Incredible men doing incredible things is the simplest way to describe this book.  Even the intelligence officers assigned to Misty rose to the occasion, two Lieutenants writing travel orders for each other so they can catch a hop to Saigon to creatively acquire clear film from RF-101 film canisters.  Why did they need the clear film?  So they could create booklets full of maps covering all of Route Pak I, the clear film acted as laminate so the pilots could jot down instantly new targets with grease pencils which sped up debriefs and locating new dangers.  Or for more crazy daring do, Risinger's Raid has to be one of the greatest war stories to ever happen.  Ed Risinger had found a juicy target, a SAM, but there were no assets available to attack it. So he returned to Phu Cat.  Ed rounded up two more pilots, stole three ready F-100Ds, launched, and then attacked through clouds where the SAM had been.  Once he got back to base, him and his cohorts were grounded for thee days.  And then went back to flying, all of them.  There are also stories of their battle with the 37th's commander who got mad when Misty lost a F-100F or brought one home damaged, it seemed he cared more for his availability rates than getting a mission done.  We are granted a peek into the world of the flight surgeon at war.  And most importantly we are shown how the loss of a husband/father/son impacted the families, especially when they were declared MIA.  The cruel gamesmanship of the communist in Vietnam is exposed with frank brutality when describing the crash of Howard Williams' Super Sabre.  His death and the rescue of Brian Williams was duly noted as "1 man killed; 1 alive; they took him and he was lost."  Brian Williams would have been another pawn, tortured like Bud Day and possibly suffer the fate of Lance Sijan who was badly wounded upon ejection, tortured, and never received medical attention thus he was murdered in captivity.  There are many other stupendous stories in this book besides these.

Overall I was impressed with this book and the story it told.  It only fell down in two areas.  One has already been noted by having almost no documentation describing the early days of Commando Sabre under Bud Day.  The other is the amount of time describing the in-fighting in Washington D.C. which I considered excessive.  If that had been trimmed down then the authors would have had the space to cover the early missions of Commando Sabre.  Missions flown by Day, Fogelman, and McPeak.  Day would receive the Medal of Honor.  Fogelman and McPeak would pin stars on their shoulders and each rise to become Air Force Chief of Staff.

Kings of the North

Elizabeth Moon's newest installment of her Paksenarrion universe will come out on March 22d, 2011. Kings of the North picks up from the end of Oath of Fealty, we see three kings caught in transition and uncertainty. Tsaia is still restive after all the Verrakai treachery. Lyonya is also unsettled as the divisions between humans and elves continues to bubble while other troubles encroach. And finally, there is the kingdom of Pargun which both Tsaia and Lyonya have had problems with in the past. How is the paladin Paksenarrion going to help in these troubled times as three new rulers and one veteran ruler all deal with unrest in their lands.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $14.26 for the hardcover or $12.83 for the Kindle edition.

For a peek inside the Pargunese court there is this story by Elizabeth Moon that is a stand alone but ties in with Oath of Fealty and the original Deed of Paksenarrion. For a peek under the hood to see the creative engine musing, Moon has her own blog called Paksworld.

Shock

I just finished reading Lois McMaster Bujold's latest Miles Vorkosigan novel Cryoburn. I have truly been punched in the gut as one of the foundational continents in all of Barrayar has been permanetly taken out of this plane of existence. Gonna miss that old gentleman dearly. Fair winds Sir.

Random Bits

Vice President Al Gore is getting an environmental school named after him. Too bad it might be on contaminated ground. Synergy? Just what we need another Love Canal.

Speaking of windbags, Hermine is blowing ashore near Galveston, Texas.

And President Obama, deciding devoting less than 20% of the $787 billion stimulus is not enough, has proposed spending another $50 billion to make sure the US has the best roads and airports. No word if any of this money will go to Midway Airport to get it renamed Barrack Obama International Airport.

Newsweek, the propaganda organ that recently sold for $1, thinks all of America over-reacted to the attacks on 9/11. Lets ignore the smoking crater of Flight 93, the gaping wound where the Twin Towers used to be, and the almost 3,000 people murdered.

And oh yeah this morning Fox interviewed Eliza Griswold about her book The Tenth Parallel. Its about the clash of Christianity and Islam in Africa and Asia. She talks about there seems no resolution between Islam and Christianity. Though I am not sure how balanced this book is when she equates in this interview the random Christian on Christian violence as being equal to what Islam does. Plus the socialist loving types like Bishop Desmond Tutu praise the book. Or if we look up her name over at OpenSecrets to find a writer named Eliza Griswold donated $300 to the Obama campaign. And as far as I know, she has no relation to Chevy Chase's National Lampoon's Family Vacation.

Kassandra's Warning

Before American television networks ran edited versions of jihadi snuff films in primetime. Before they breathlessly reported as TRUTH things terrorists told them. Before all these barbaric acts there was one book that warned of such possible calamities.

That book is called Final Warning: Averting Disaster in the New Age of Terrorism. It was co-written by Robert Kupperman and Jeff Kamen. This book came out in 1989, before Khobar Towers or the 1993 WTC attack. This was during the first year of President George H. W. Bush’s administration.

Back in 1987, such news anchor heavyweights as Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw realized there was something wrong in how their networks covered the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 that resulted in the murder of Robert Stethem, a US Navy diver at the hands of terrorists.

Tom Brokaw – “can’t get into a kind of hysterical competitive state, being by the terrorists to get on the air for whatever little contrived development there may be in the story. I thought 847 did develop into a feeding frenzy. I was over there. God, it was craziness! … An awful lot of manipulation was going on there. In a way, I think, that became part of the story that did not get adequate attention from the networks themselves.”

Peter Jennings – “Watching ourselves in action at that horrendous news conference [when the terrorists trotted out some of the hostages at gunpoint to be interviewed by the media] was a public embarrassment as it should have been. … We are forever making vows in our lives and not living up to them. But when the next incident came along – granted, they were different, in there was much less access for the media than in Flight 847 – there was a feeling in everybody’s mind that we shouldn’t rush as we had in the past.”

How pervasive is the reach of television and its impact upon those who make policy, those who carry it out, and those affected? I will let Col. Oliver North speak of it: “CNN runs ten minutes ahead of NSA.”

And what does such pervasive coverage do for the cause of terrorists? If we believe former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, this kind of media coverage is the oxygen of the terrorists. And Tom Brokaw acknowledges there is some truth in that statement and that it is a dilemma for them.

What becomes inescapable after reviewing these small snippets from Chapter 5 of this book is the media has not learned any lessons. Even after twenty years of more such atrocities and manipulations it has not sunk in. Which argues for a more serious charge to be levied, that the media is for the other side. Think about it.

As a postscript, Kupperman died in 2006 at the age of 71, he lived to see some of the things he and Kamen predicted come to pass. And if my memory serves me right, no one after 9/11 ever bothered to interview him on this book. As a friend pointed out as I wrote this, all those people probably did not want to hear 'I told you so.' Which is another damning indictment against not only the media, but the government.

Flying

Winging back from Germany, somewhere over the Atlantic.

Sorry for the light blogging, but the past two months have been a tad hectic. Work carried me to Germany for two weeks. Now I have added to my frequent flyer miles by attending two more trainning classes plus normal work. Yikes.

On the good side, managed to do some reading which I have been an infrequent acquaintance of for some weeks.

I surprised myself by buying a John Grisham novel called Playing For Pizza. A humorous story of an American quaterback finding redemption and happiness in all places Italy. I think I gained five pounds by just reading Grisham describe all the culinary feasts that await in Italy. He even managed to squeeze in some opera also.

Another surprisingly good book is called American Patriot by Robert Coram. What drew me to buying this book was who it was about: Colonel George E. 'Bud' Day. It is hard to summarize a life lived with such gusto and courage, from the hard scrabble life in the Depression to leading an elite unit of flyers doing an impossible mission over Route Pak One to almost making it to a Marine fire base in South VietNam to fighting the Clinton Administration when they cut off prescriptions for veterans over 65, Brokaw's Greatest Generation, and finally doing battle with a man who made the Hanoi Hilton POWs's life even more miserable. That is Bud Day's life, which is far from over. Along the way, many things almost forgotten but that should be remembered about America and its citizens are chronicled. We also get to know Bud's friends from childhood to now, including one Sen. John McCain with whom Day has a bond forged in the hell that was the Hanoi Hilton. I will let McCain have the last word on Bud:

"He's one of those people for whom everything is black or white. It's wonderful to go through life like that. I wish I could." (p. 373)

Arthur C. Clarke - Dead at 90

What can I say, I enjoy his books and movie forays, he will be sorely missed.

I could prattle on, regurgitating stuff from Wikipedia or cut&paste from the New York Times, instead please read the obituary the New York Times has published to get an understanding on the impact this one man has had on the modern world. Perhaps Sir Clarke has rendezvoused with Rama.

Charlie Wilson's War

This is supposed to be released this December, which means it could be nominated for an Oscar. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts star in this movie about a boozing Congressman from Texas who launches his own jihad against the entrenched bureaucracy of the CIA to help the mujaheddin of Afghanistan resist the Soviet invasion of their country.



Vlad has some axes to grind with his own country but he projects them onto the book Charlie Wilson's War that the movie is based on in his review posted on Amazon.

"The direction of one sided, pro-government "journalism" which serves as one of the tools used to brainwash average American." I think that more accurately describes how TASS and other such official Soviet news organs presented the invasion and ten years of hell inflicted upon Afghanistan.
Did the United States really fund the 'freedom fighter' Taliban we now face as Vlad claims? No, after the Soviet withdrawal, the Taliban came out of Pashtun and with Saudi assistance quickly pushed back the United Islamic Front which was made up of parties that did receive funds from Charlie Wilson's end-around the CIA.
Was it all peaceful in Afghanistan before the flow of US funds and arms? Here Vlad is missing the mark because the USSR misread the whole mess in Afghanistan and saw it all through the lens of Marxism-Leninism and not the reality of how the country called Afghanistan really is.

• However, often our people, acting out of their best intentions, tried to transplant the approached we are accustomed to onto the Afghan soil, encouraged the Afghans to copy our ways. All this did not help our cause, it bred the feelings of dependency on the part of the Afghan leaders in regard to the Soviet Union both in the sphere of military operations and in the economic sphere.

In 1982 there was one report of Soviet forces killing a boy who protested the burning of the mosque's fuel. Or the mystery of some tribal leaders from Ghanzi being found dead and their bodies in advance state of decomposition though they had been in Soviet custody just a few days. Of course back in 1979 to 1981 there were reports that Secretary of State George Schultz stated were cases of the Soviets and their Afghan allies using chemical agents on anti-government forces.

When Gorbachev and the Soviet Union finally realized the futility of this mis-adventure, some 13,000 Soviet soldiers had paid the ultimate sacrifice while another 35,000 were wounded or disabled. Some in Russia still cling to the idea it was only due to the infusion of American supplied weapons and cash that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was thwarted. I would think Colonel Tsagalov, a veteran of the Red Army would disagree. In fact he did disagree and was sacked for his honesty.

Will this Tom Hanks movie be a decent recounting of what really happened, that remains to be seen. I might give this movie a whirl to find out.

Book Review With Comments on Censorship

I finished reading Meredith's memoirs on his service aboard PT boats in World War II. At one point he talks in detail about the letters home being censored. They were not allowed to write about such things as enemy activity, unit locations, or boat strength.

All mail was censored. My mother never knew where I was for a year. As Exec of the boat, one of my duties was to read and censor the crew's mail, cutting out with scissors or razor blades anything that I thought might jeopardize our security; Marsh Roper censored mine. It was a task I didn't like. I felt I was prying into the men's affairs, intruding on their privacy, but it had to be done.

We listened to the news on the radio regularly and sometimes picked up Radio Tokyo, the Japanese propaganda station. Tokyo Rose, an American woman who worked for the Japs, liked to personalize her messages to us. She startled us several times by calling our PT skippers by name and boat number, with threats of retaliation for our barge attacks. How they obtained their information I don't know, but it made my censoring task more acceptable to the crew. - pg 115

Overall I tremendously liked this book. Ted Meredith took the letters he had mailed to his mother, mixed in research from other books like Devil Boats and At Close Quarters, and shared stories from the two PT crews he served with in the Pacific and Mediterranean to create a very personal view of the PT war that is worth reading. Even when his 23 year old views of the Papua New Guineans is to call them Fuzzy Wuzzies, apparently like everyone else in the PT force did, and complaining the local women are unattractive. Or when he talks about how many eggs his crew ate or how many times they had steak in letters to his mother.

Then there is the incredible moment when his boat PT 129 is ordered to ferry Gen. Douglas MacArthur between two islands. Meredith is worried sick about protocol because the whole crew, including him, are dressed barely in skivvies; but when MacArthur comes aboard the general doesn't bat an eye. Meredith does some impressive feats of seamanship to bring MacArthur smartly to the dock only to ruin everything on the departure by bending a prop because he had to show off some more. The whole event seemed so fantastic that it caused Meredith 50 years later to doubt it really happened until one of his crew said it was because of that incident he still smokes a briar pipe.

Off Armageddon Reef

This is a hard thing to write since I am a fan of David Weber's work. Honor Harrington got me entranced and so did Colin McIntyre. Until now the only time Weber has disappointed me was with Apocalypse Troll, well add Off Armageddon Reef to that list.

First off, I did not care for any of the characters in the book. That is a tough hurdle to surmount. I could not identify with anyone since it was abundantly clear that Nimue had a mission and she would have to use people to accomplish it. And unlike Sean, Harriet, and their friends on the planet Pardal having this urgent need to contact home while being wracked with guilt over what they are forced to do to accomplish that in Heirs of Empire; there is no immediate need with Nimue's mission, which is to drag Safehold to a technological level high enough to rid the universe of the Gbara which have annihilated humanity from the universe except for this hidden colony nor does Weber really dwell that much on Nimue's guilt. Again I am reminded strongly of Colin McIntyre's struggle to get Earth ready for the Achuultani assault in The Armageddon Inheritance. Or even when Birhat, as the last human settled planet of the Third Empire created the Fourth Empire to oppose the next Achuultani invasion. This book never overcame in my mind the many similarities it had with previous Weber books. And catching Weber in a historical goof really kicked me out of this book, there was no Xenophon at Salamis. Think of another name starting with X.

On the bright side this caused me to dig out David Brin's second Uplift Trilogy which starts with Brightness Reef. We find the conflict that the Terran survey ship Seeker accidentally created by finding an ancient fleet in the Shallow Cluster in Startide Rising has spread to a fallow world called Jijo. On Jijo Terra has created a secret colony in case races such as the Soro wipe out humanity. On Jijo are other races in hiding and with the humans they form a common government. We get to follow the further adventures of Dr. Gillian Baskin, reluctant commander of Seeker, the Niss machine, and the tattered hard-pressed remnants of Seeker's crew while being introduced to such new characters as Huck, a hoon raised G'kek, or Sarah, a human of the Jijo colony, who has figured out there is a great rupture about to unravel the Five Galaxies. I much prefer reading again Sundiver, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef, Inifinity's Shore, and Heaven's Reach since there is so much 'what if' to explore in the universe of the Five Galaxies and Brin invites us in. I found no 'what if' or even wonder in Weber's book.

Or if we want to explore a human settled world that has regressed to pre-space flight technology, in fact to 19th century technology there is always King David's Spaceship by Jerry Pournelle. We see the planet Samuel's World scheme and plot to acquire the technology for a spaceship so when they request admittance to the Empire they won't become a satrapy. To do so people from Samuel's World travel to an even more primative planet that has a pre-collapse Co-Dominium library the locals have no idea of how to operate. The Empire of Sparta though has some rules when dealing with more primitive planets, one of them is one can not use technology greater than what is already on the planet. Which is why the heroes must use subterfuge to get their spaceship technology. In the end they do get their spaceship and admitted to the Empire while our brave heroes are charged by the Spartan Navy with violating the technology edict. Their crime? Introducing horse collars on that world with the library, which made horses far more efficient than slave labor.

The inspiration for some of Jerry Pournelle's work can be traced back to a previous master of science fiction, a fondly missed gentleman named H Beam Piper. Piper twice visited the concept of a church that had the world wrapped around its finger; in the Kalvan Paratime universe the story is called the Gunpowder God and in his TerroHuman Future History as When In The Course. In both cases the church in question has discovered the secret behind gunpowder and uses that knowledge to leverage it's way to dominance except for a small rebellious kingdom. In Weber's universes this rebellious kingdom is called Malagor in Heirs of Empire and in Off Armageddon Reef it is called Charis. And Piper writes from the perspective of the rebellious kingdom as they set out overthrowing the tyrannical church. For When In The Course, Piper tackled a whole planetary rebellion lead by the kingdom Hostigos in a mere 180 pages along with sketching some vivid characters. Off Armageddon Reed is over 600 pages and is not even finished. Sometimes more is not a good thing, like super-sizing a meal from McDonalds.

Alas since I bought the electronic copy of Off Armageddon Reef, there is no way to put it on eBay in an attempt to recover some of my expense. Which is a pity.