monkeyplus1

My webhost upgraded the server hosting my site, and in the process, my blog got nuked. In any event, the good folks at dreamhost.com fixed it up. I did apologize for using the word “fucked” when describing my situation in regard to their upgrade.

At first, video games kept me occupied, then on-demand movies, and of course, my friend the public library. My reading list over at goodreads continues to grow phenomenally.

Lately, I’ve been devouring the work of the late writer Philip K. Dick.  Many things have been said about him, and I’d agree that he had a brilliant and uniquely original mind.

His writing has been behind some movies: Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, The Minority Report.

His writing style is stark, unornamented. The ideas behind his stories often overshadow the meager character development, but the ideas are brilliant.

Towards the late 60s and throughout the 70s, it seems obvious he experimented with all kinds of mind-altering substances, particularly hallucinogens and entheogens. The writing in the years before his death in 1982 grow vastly more metaphysical and psychological.

He wrote a lot, so when I pick up a book of his, I usually forego the synopsis on the back cover, and look for the first copyright date.  Any of his books in the late 60s forward are sure to be mindblowing.

A while back, one of my sisters (or ex-sister? I think she’s disowned me) sent me a link to some site where people can list, rank and review their favorite movies, see what they have in common with their friends.

I don’t watch a whole lot of movies, and had zero in common with her interests. Never followed up on that.

I got a link from a friend who is as voracious a reader as I am to a site called Goodreads that is the same idea, but with books.  Pretty cool, since I’m often wishing I should keep better track of all the books I read since I usually fly through one a week.

Here’s my list, including some which I review (and have also reviewed here in my blog).

Though I churned through a few more, a couple stand-outs on my reading list are worth mentioning.

Not sure why I hadn’t seen it before Goodnight Saigon by Charles Henderson was an astounding read. I’d already read two of his other books Marine Sniper, the true story of Carlos Hathcock and Silent Warrior.

As a writer, Henderson takes the opposite path as the book I’ll mention later. Instead of a historical account of this-happened, that-happened, Henderson fleshes out the history lesson with dialog. I imagine that is vastly difficult to do, considering the book recounts events from the three points of view, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and the Americans. He travelled across Vietnam to conduct his interviews, and former enemies that could have brushed him off instead sat down with him for hours to fill in the history from their vantage point and memory. And not just former Viet Cong guerillas and ARVN, but high-ranking communist officers, even some generals.

That in itself made thing unlike any book about the Vietnam War that I’ve read. In all the memoirs of American servicemen who fought there, they each saw only a small piece of the whole thing, and few of them understood the Vietnamese, the history of that country, and the significance of the war.

What’s also interesting is that this is the only book I’ve come across that describes what happened after the US withdrew it’s forces. It’s hard not to keep thinking about current events, and what will happen when the US withdraws its forces from Iraq.

Many of the Vietnamese that sided with the US during the war, and had a tenuous independence after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, were not able to be evacuated. They felt betrayed, and justifiably panicked, for many of them were summarily executed, or tortured, or imprisoned for years in “re-education camps” after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. I should also mention that many Vietnam veterans were outraged. They had fought, lost brothers and friends, made a such a huge sacrifice of their youth, and to see it flushed down the toilet. Nothing gained. 54 thousand American dead, anywhere from 3 to 5 million Vietnamese killed, only to duck out and look the other way.

Yet on one hand, after the North defeated the South and the country was unified, there was the first relative peace that land had seen in 50 years.

When you look at all the Shia and Sunni infighting in Iraq, and now the Turks wanting to run assaults into Iraq on the Kurds, I just don’t see how it’s going to be very peaceful.

Another strange parallel is that there was relative peace in both countries before we were involved.

But there’s no comparison to be made between Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein. Ho Chi Minh studied in Europe and travelled throughout the US. He had a deep respect for the American Constitution, and founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson. He wanted that for his country, and he wanted free elections. He would have won, had the US not stepped in to support the politically corrupt government the French had installed when it was their colony.

And while Saddam Hussein was a dictator, there was none of the lawlessness and chaos that troubles Iraq now. In a fucked up kind of way, I almost wonder if that is what the region needed - I wonder if democracy just doesn’t work among people like that.

Ok, I got side-tracked, there was another good read worth mentioning:

“Dak To: America’s Sky Soldiers in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands”, by Edward Murphy - I didn’t recommend this one at first, because it took about 60-70 pages of reading before I got into it.

The wikipedia has a decent article on the Battle of Dak To, that summarized the action, but Murphy’s extensive research does a mind-blowing job of presenting the battle in a wide perspective, chains of command from the battalion and company-level decisions, to the real life or death struggles at the individual, squad, and platoon levels.

This is one of the few books I’ve read written by a historian rather than an actual participant, but Murphy does an excellent job of citing references, and placing all the names of real soldiers, alive or killed in action, in an index.

Of course, this chunk of history is told from the perspective of the Americans. The branches of the military all record the details of their engagements in reports documenting their history.

The battles described in this book gave me a new respect for the North Vietnamese Army. At the time, they shocked the Americans by what they perceived to be suicidal tactics.

That remains a criticism of their strategy, which is to throw human-wave attacks at the enemy, when in terms of “bodies” they clearly lost. But their goal was really to demoralize the enemy, to get us to quit fighting, which is how they eventually pursuaded the end of the war.

Where Americans rely so much on air support, be it from artillery or airstrikes, the Vietnamese quickly adopted a strategy to “hug the belt” of the American perimeter. If they were just few dozen yards from the American perimeter, there was very little chance the US would call an airstrike so near its troops.

At the time of this battle, American commanders had just been taught a very painful lesson. An entire company of men (around 120-130 people, or 4 platoons), was surrounded, cut-off, and mowed down by very disciplined North Vietnamese troops. The piles of dead bodies, lost brothers and friends, still weighed heavily on the commanders tasked with securing the countryside around Dak To.

This is extremely hilly, triple-canopy jungle. Extremely humid, and so overgrown there is little visibility. Nightmarish.

The battle(s) around the Dak To area, when you read between the lines, give an amazing amount of insight of the North Vietnamese, and a decisive view into the strengths and weaknesses of the American military mentality at that time and place.

“Dak To” isn’t for the faint of heart, or light-stomachs. In a couple instances, entire companies of American soldiers are cut to pieces, by enemy fire as well as accidental friendly-fire.

The action was too typical of battles in South Vietnam. The US would win, in terms of “body count”, every fight they had. But the North Vietnamese (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) always chose the time and place for a fight.

At Dak To, the Americans were surprised to find dug in, well-defended North Vietnamese troops. Being so close to the Laotian border, where the enemy could escape, the US took costly measures to take these hills. Fighting in the enemy’s own backyard, completely unaware of how prepared and dedicated the Vietnamese were to hold their own.

Reading this book, I was stunned several times, having to put it down. It reads like a boring history book in some places, but it has so many shining moments where small details recorded from the survivors make the battle, and it’s tragic carnage, almost too real.

I’m as anti-war as the next Portlander. Nevertheless, it does happen, and usually, some intense stories come from it.

I was born in the year the war in Vietnam ended, and for reasons unknown, I’d always been deeply curious about this war nobody talked about.

I grew up wanting to be a pilot. In fact, I still plan on taking lessons at some point. I started reading memoirs of former pilots. While most flying is getting from point A to point B, I came across some books written by combat aviators. I was hooked.

In modern times, a ground commander can call in an airstrike with a set of GPS coordinates. Within 20 minutes, an unseen aircraft at 20,000 feet altitude can drop a bomb from miles away that will “fly” itself to the target.

Not that long ago, the pilot would have had to dive in towards the target, align his sight, estimating the wind-drift, pickle the bombs and pull up before smashing into the ground. Shit hot.

I’ve just finished reading up a handful of books that are memoirs of combat pilots from the Vietnam era. I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite.

I’ve listed the books and their authors along with the type of aircraft and missions they flew, so anybody interested could get right to what they’re after. A little background:

Vietnam was divided in two. I’ll spare you the history lessons, but to give a general context, the fighting on the ground was done in South Vietnam. This is where the helicopter war was fought. Fighter-bombers also supported troops in the area, with the assistance of FACs (forward air controllers) who flew small planes low and slow, kept in contact with the ground troops and directed the fast-moving jets to the targets. The FACs also patrolled their areas, looking for targets of opportunity, such as trucks moving supplies from North Vietnam down the network of the Ho Chi Minh trail, bunkers, enemy encampments, etc.

The US built many large airfields in South Vietnam to support this effort. Da Nang, Chu Lai, Tan Son Nuit, to name a few. Helicopters were based in camps far too numerous to list.

An entirely different kind of war was being fought in North Vietnam. With permission from the King of Thailand, the US built several air bases through Thailand. Takhli, Korat, Udorn, Ubon, Nakhom Phanom, etc.

These were launching points for bombing raids into North Vietnam for the Air Force, while the US Navy launched attacks against the North from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Amazing stories, all of them. None of these authors say that what the US did in Vietnam was right, in fact, most are outspokenly critical of the war, and the handicapped way Washington made them fight it. They were there, and surviving a year-long tour and keeping one another alive was all that mattered.In no particular order:

War for the Hell of it by Ed Cobleigh. F-4 Phantom II - Bombing / Mig CAP. A mature, deeply introspective look at his tour in Vietnam, Cobleigh was one of the first pilots to test the Paveway laser-guided bombs in actual combat. After the Air Force, he went on to work for the giant defense contractor Raytheon. Digging around on Google, I discovered Cobleigh holds a recent patent on a system where a missile or bomb will self-destruct in the air if it is going to miss its target.

Palace Cobra by Ed Rasimus. F-4 Phantom II - Bombing / Mig CAP. After 100 missions to North Vietnam in an F-105 Thunderchief, Rasimus stayed in the Air Force. He volunteered to go back six years later, for another tour flying the Phantom, during which he witnessed the draw-down of forces from Vietnam. He also describes the Linebacker II raids, where the US finally stopped pulling punches and mercilessly bombed the shit out of the North, bringing the Vietnamese delegates back to the table, ultimately ending the war.

Bury us Upside Down by Rick Newman & Ron Shepperd. F-100 Super Sabre - Fast Forward Air Control.  The title refers to a common saying among troops in Vietnam, “when I die, bury me upside down so the world can kiss my ass”. Where most FACs flew low and slow prop-planes, the men of the “Misty” unit flew F-100 jets, becoming known as Fast-FACs. This book makes no attempt to conceal the disgust most American pilots had with the war, and the way lives on both sides were pointlessly wasted. Coincidentally, one of the men in his Misty unit was Dick Rutan, who in later years flew the first non-stop flight around the world in an experimental aircraft, “Voyager”, designed by his brother Burt Rutan. Most recently, their company, Scaled Composites, won the Ansari X-prize, with the first non-government aircraft to reach outer space.

The next four books I’ve already written about in a prior blog. The F-105 Thunderchief bombing missions into North Vietnam are some of the most riveting accounts I’ve ever read of combat aviation. I’ve read each of these books at least twice. Gripping stuff.

Thud Ridge by Jack Broughton. F-105 Thunderchief - Bombing.
When Thunder Rolled by Ed Rasimus. F-105 Thunderchief - Bombing.
100 Missions North by Ken Bell. F-105 Thunderchief - Bombing.
Pak Six by G.I. Basel. F-105 Thunderchief - Bombing.

Forward Air Controllers, or FACs, had interesting jobs. Many flew military versions of civilian Cessnas, slow-flying propeller planes with no armor, and no real weapons. They flew in support of units on the ground, and also looking for signs of the enemy. When the found something, or were called in to help ground forces, they juggled radio frequencies, determining where the friendlies and the enemy were, all while jinking the plane to make themselves a hard target. Then, they called for help from above, the fast-flying fighter jets. They’d describe the details to the fighters, which way they wanted them to roll in and out, while the fighters orbited in an overhead wagon-wheel. The FAC would then shoot marking rockets, whose white phosphorus smoke would be easy to see for the fighters, and clear the fighters in to hit the area around his smoke. All fighters had tremendous respect for these FACs, who really hung it out on the line. As one put it, the FACs must have needed wheelbarrows to carry their balls around.

Cleared Hot! by Bob Stoffey. OV-10 Bronco - Forward Air Control.
Danang Diary by Tom Yarborough. O-2 Skymaster - Forward Air Control.
Naked in Da Nang by Mike Jackson. O-2 Skymaster - Forward Air Control.

Zero Dark Thirty by Samuel Brantley. A-4 Skyhawk & Ground Forward Air Control. This one is a little different. Although he flew an A-4, his second tour was a ground-based FAC. The Marines at the time decided that it was best to have an experienced aviator, on the ground with the troops in contact with the enemy, to direct air support. Not the kind of job a pilot envies. Zero Dark Thirty goes into more detail of the difficulties Brantley had in adjusting to civilian life.

Flying Through Midnight by John T. Halliday. C-123 Provider - Transport. This book centers around one particular, harrowing event, that happened to Halliday, where he was forced by engine trouble to land in a secret base in Laos - and get out.

Cheating Death by George Marrett. A-1 Skyraider - Search And Recovery. Really cool read. These guys flew WWII/Korean-era prop planes, ugly beasts, to find downed airmen. Marrett also had an extremely long career as both a military and civilian test-pilot.

It would seem the stress of being a combat helicopter pilot made them all a little (or a LOT) crazy, so often their stories are a little less buttoned-down than the books above. Another difference is that while the Air Force pilots had nice, comfy bases to return to, and strict rules of engagement, many helicopter pilots out in the field were often far away from the military bureaucracy, so not all of their actions were rigidly by-the-book, especially the Air Cavalry, and the crazy tales that came from the famous 1/9th - 1st Air Cavalry Division/9th Brigade. It wouldn’t seem the Air Cav scene in Apocalypse now is too far of a stretch from the real thing.

They also took incredible losses (5,444 pilots killed, 28,000+ wounded), especially the scout pilots who had a 1 in 3 chance of surviving their year in Vietnam.

Many of the ground troops in Vietnam owe their lives to the actions of helicopter pilots, who put themselves in harm’s way to get them in, out, drop supplies, carry wounded to hospitals within the critical “golden hour”, or rain hell with 50 cal and rockets down on the enemies.

Firebirds by Chuck Carlock. UH-1 Huey - Gunship.
Chickenhawk by Robert Mason. UH-1 Huey - Slick.
Headhunters by Matthew Brennan. UH-1 Huey - Gunship.
Taking Fire by Ron Alexander. UH-1 Huey - Slick.
Snake Pilot by Randy R. Zahn. AH-1 Cobra - Gunship.
The Price of Exit by Tom Marshall. OH-58 Kiowa - Observation & Command And Control.
Easy Target by Tom Smith. OH-6 Cayuse - Scout.

The Odyssey, by Homer.
I’m sure I had to read this in school at some point. I don’t know if I read the wrong translation, but I don’t remember it very well. I came across the Samuel Butler translation on Project Gutenberg, a website of free ebooks in public domain, and decided to look it over. I started reading a few pages, and I was immediately hooked.

The story is about Ulysses, a sly and cunning hero of the Trojan War. After the war, Ulysses and his men set sail to return home. However, the end up royally pissing off Neptune, the god of the sea (Ulysses blinds Neptune’s cyclops son with a red-hot poker to the eye, to escape from a cave where the cyclops has trapped, and been eating, some of Ulysses’ men). As the tale progresses, all his men end up dying (mostly due to their own fault by pissing off Hyperion, the sun god, by eating some of his cattle), and Ulysses gets stranded on a remote island for ten years.

On the island, a goddess/nymph Calypso, who’s fallen for him, has been taking care of him, and offered Ulysses immortality if he stays there with her. But no, Ulysses just wants nothing but to go home to his hot (and faithful) wife, Penelope.

Meanwhile, his son, Telemachus, is now a teenager, and is getting fed up with all the men that are hanging around their estate, eating their food and drinking the wine. Ulysses was a fairly wealthy man, even before reaping the spoils of the Trojan war. The men are trying to convince his mom, Penelope, to remarry, since nobody knows what became of Ulysses. But she holds out. I’m sure they not only want to get up in her tunic like nobody’s business, but they know Ulysses’ fresh crib has some fat bank to loot. Horny, greedy, lecherous assholes.

You know the type…

The goddess Minerva, fine babe in her own right, is sympathetic to Ulysses, and convinces Jove, the asshole king of the gods, to let her help Ulysses home. Neptune grudgingly accepts Jove’s decision, but intends to be a dick and fuck with Ulysses as much as he can. Minerva takes on different disguises throughout the book, always to help Ulysses. Sometimes he knows it, other times he’s none the wiser.

I’m not going to recap the entire story, there’s way too many twists and turns. I can’t believe I didn’t like this story the first time I’d read it. There is gore and action a-plenty! And what a heck of a ride it is! I was anxious to see how Ulysses was going to escape from one fucked up situation to the next, rooting him on. Of course, Ulysses has by now heard of the men after his wife, and is hungry for a revenge. BLOOD-BATH!!!

Homer paints an interesting picture of the people of the time. Most are very well spoken, generous, wise and even-tempered. Very civilized. They LOVE to eat and drink. Everywhere Ulysses goes, someone offers him food and wine, and THEN asks him if they can help him. Food and drink are always the first order of business. They may not know who he is, but it pays to be nice to strangers, since it might be a god in disguise (the gods are always messing with people like that, and ready to make someone’s life hell should the mood strike them).

If there isn’t already some awesome comic or movie about Ulysses, there should be. The language certainly could use some modernization to appeal to today’s people, but the Butler translation is fairly unfettered and easy to read, and Homer’s certainly spun a bad ass story to work from.

A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).
Mark Twain is considered one of the great American writers of the 19th century, yah yah, you’ve heard it all before. While most people know him from the tales of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain also wrote non-fiction. In “A Tramp Abroad”, Twain writes about his experience travelling through Europe in the 1880s. It’s actually his second trip, the first trip he wrote about in “Innocents Abroad”.

Then an innocent, now a tramp. Nice.

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind, Twain is dope. His masterful way of telling a story keeps your attention, but he’s also extremely funny, sometimes subtlely, other times outrageously.

I should also point out that the book is lavishly illustrated with hundreds of engravings by an artist friend who went along on the trip. Twain also includes a couple crude pictures he drew as well.

“Tramp” is quite often hilarious, as Twain is almost always poking fun at himself, other Americans abroad, or the Europeans he encounters as he goes through Germany, the Swiss alps, and Italy.

During their travels, he

• inadvertently trashes a hotel room, fumbling around in the dark
• crashes a raft against some bridge pillars, for the hell of it
• tries, and fails horribly, to appreciate the music of Wagner, and German Opera
• gets lost in the fog “mountain climbing” (to get to a hotel at the top of the mountain) only to discover he was only 100 yards from the hotel.
• wakes up early to see a sunrise in pajamas and a blanket, only to realize a few minutes later that he overslept so long, the sun is actually going down, and there is a crowd of people staring at laughing.
• decides to climb a mountain via a telescope, as physically doing it would be much too dangerous.
• has heard that glaciers actually move, so he decides to take a seat and wait for it to get him back to the town below, before figuring out that it will take over 500 years to do it.

By the end of the trip, he’s definitely ready to come home, and goes on one last tirade about European food and the cruelty to the brain that is the German language before bringing the book to an end.

A Hostage to Fortune (autobiography)
Fate is the Hunter (nonfiction)
Fiddler’s Green
all by Ernest K. Gann

Okay, I’m a fiend for aviation literature. Gann’s “Fate is the Hunter” is one of the most well-known books in aviation circles, chronicling events Gann was a witness to as he was a pilot in the first days of the airline business. Gann flew for a couple different airlines in the 1930s and 40s, and later flew for the Army air service shuttling men and supplies across Newfoundland during WWII, and later across “the Hump”, the airlift from India to Burma to China over the Himalayas, also in WWII. “Fate” describes numerous events throughout his career as an airline pilot where, in retrospect, the cold hand of death was very near his shoulder, and in other cases, took the lives of other pilots he’d known personally. Very gripping and well written non-fiction.

As soon as I’d finished this, I was happily surprised to discover Gann wrote an autobiography much later in his life.
His main success came not from his career as a pilot, but from work in the film industry as a screenplay writer. Several of his screenplays even became blockbuster hits in the 1950s, including the John Wayne movie “The High and the Mighty”, “Island in the Sky”, “Blaze of Noon” and others.

Gann always had a love of the sea as much as the air, and with the proceeds from the movies, bought a ship which he re-rigged as a brigantine. The ship was called “The Albatross”, which he sailed all over the world with his friends and family. Incidentally, the same ship, in another owner’s hands, sunk in a sudden storm some thirty or so years later. That story was told in the movie “White Squall”. Interesting coincidence.

“A Hostage to Fortune” is a very well written autobiography about his amazing life, definitely worth the read. Since I knew he’d written fiction, I decided to see if I could find one of them (since they were all too old for the library to have), and sure enough Powell’s books had a 1956 publication of “Fiddler’s Green”, in the context of San Francisco fishermen in the 1950s.

Here is another weird coincidence in the title of “Fiddler’s Green”, which relates to an Irish legend of special land where old fishermen retire, that is green and happy, and there is always dancing and fiddling going on. It is said that a retiring fisherman was to take an oar, put it over his shoulder and start walking inland. When he got far enough away from the sea, someone would ask him what it was. At that point, the fisherman should plant the oar in the ground and settle down. The coincidence is that that legend probably comes from The Oddyssey. In one part of the Oddysey, Ulysses visits a seer in the underworld name Tiresias. Although more goes on in that visit, Tiresias tells Ulysses that the only way to get Neptune off his ass is that once he gets home and has put his affairs in order, he must go inland with an oar on his shoulder until he comes across someone who asks him what it is. There, Ulysses is to make a big sacrifice to Neptune, and all will be cool.

Anyway, “Fiddler’s Green” by Gann was a decent read. Probably pulp-fiction of it’s day, but enjoyable. In it, a criminal named Bruno Felkin flees from the police after a drug-deal gone bad, and ends up hiding on a fishing boat at the wharves. He wakes up at 4am the next morning to find they are well away to sea, and after some smooth talking, convinces the owner, a first-generation Scandanavian American, to let him stay, and work his way. Besides, he needs the heat to blow off, and what better hiding place than the sea. Although it is extremely hard work, Bruno finds himself really enjoying it, and even more so, enjoys the fatherly relationship he finds in the old scandanavian. The hardships he endures have a redeeming effect on him, but the book persists in avoiding predictability.

When Thunder Rolled, by Ed Rasimus.
Thud Ridge, by Colonel Jack Broughton.

I’m lumping these two books together because their authors shared the same mission in the same war, but from different perspectives. Rasimus and Broughton write about their experiences as F-105 Thunderchief pilots during the Vietnam War, flying out of Thailand, across Laos, to targets in the “route packs” of North Vietnam.

Imagine waking up every day, hours before dawn, going to a briefing to cover primary and secondary attack plans (in case the target is socked-in), going over maps, weather, recon photos, radio frequencies, and call signs of the day. Getting a g-suit, survival gear, spare radios, and a parachute strapped on you. Preflighting a massive 1950’s era fighter-bomber (originally designed to drop a nuclear weapon on Moscow at supersonic low-altitude) carrying thousands of pounds of weapons in the pre-dawn darkness. Climbing up a ladder and strapping into the huge jet, taxiing to an arming area, then to the runway, lighting the afterburner and streaking into the sky just as the sun comes up over the mountains. Mid-air refuel over Laos, and then through holes in monsoon weather to the target area, screaming at 500 knots over the jungle, where the sky is exploding in flak, tracers, and SAMs snake up into the sky on curly white tails of rocket exhaust, with the sole purpose to destroy you. Spot the target, pop up, roll over inverted. Pulling back over the top of the arc and rolling back, in on the target, line up the aiming reticule, take a guess at wind speed near the ground for adjustment, pickle the bombs, and punching the afterburner, craning our neck to see if you got bombs on target (if you missed, you’re likely going to have to come back tomorrow), scrambling to rejoin your flight, if you don’t get shot down first. Refueling in mid-air again, and returning home to Thailand. Debrief, dinner and drinks at the officer’s club, showering and hitting the sack, only to do it again early the next morning.

Shit hot.