On writing a war novel - Part 3

Last January I posted parts 1 & 2 of my thoughts on the subject of writing a war novel. I explained my motivations for writing such a novel in part 1. In part 2 I showed how, after writing 90,000 words in a first draft, I had come to the conclusion that no novelist, no matter how talented, could accurately convey the true sense of the experience as it was actually lived by the participants.

I have not read War and Peace (it's on my Bucket List), perhaps one of the greatest war novels ever written, but I have read numerous other great war novels: Catch 22, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Thin Red Line, A Farewell to Arms, The Red Badge of Courage (to name just a few). Plus, I have read countless non-fiction memoirs and histories about war. I did not fall into the trap of copying or imitating any of these works. Whatever I wrote would have to be unique to me and my experience in Iraq, but would be universally understood and interesting to the readers (hopefully numerous) who undertook the time and effort to read and understand the words that I had written.

I have been thinking about and writing this novel for three and a half years. My efforts during this time were not continuous because I had other obligations to fulfill. This undertaking has taught me some things about writing and about myself and I want to pass some of this knowledge on to you.

At the meeting of the Tallahassee Writers' Association last Thursday night Michael Rychlik, a local author and English teacher, spoke to us about his latest novel. He arises every morning and writes at 5 A.M before he goes to work. Someone asked him about writer's block and he made an interesting (to me) comment. He said that he always had something to write if he had thought about it beforehand. This was very insightful to me because I immediately recognized this as the source of some of my own episodes of writer's block. I had positioned myself before a blank page with a similarly blank mind and been frustrated when no words had come forth.

This weekend I decided to use this insight in my own writing. I am halfway through the second draft of my novel and I desperately needed some insights into how I was going to weave the disparate characters and themes that I had introduced in the first half of my book to a consistent and coherent end in the second half. I decided to sit down and think about how I would resolve this problem.

I tried to assist this process based on my own experience with attempting "deep and profound" thinking. I knew that I did my best thinking on the screened back porch of my house. The abundance of trees, the scampering of squirrels, the sounds and movement of the birds (I often hear a hoot owl couple conversing) has the affect of clearing my head and allowing the onset of a reflective mood. I also knew that the casual care and maintenance of a lit cigar increased the reflectivity of my thinking.

I am blessed and cursed with the personality that requires that once I have decided to do something I am not easily dissuaded. On Friday night, with the knowledge that my wife would be gone until Sunday and that I would be home alone with the dog, I set aside Saturday afternoon in my mind as the time in which I would tackle the great, remaining issues in my novel.

Saturday dawned rainy and cold. In fact, at my appointed time Saturday afternoon the rain was considerable and the temperature on my porch was 45 degrees. Undaunted, I bundled up and headed out (no sacrifice is too great for my craft). When my cigar had expired and the cold had finally driven me inside, I had done a lot of thinking but had not resolved any of the issues confronting me. For the thirtieth or fortieth or maybe fiftieth time since I had started this project I wondered if I was ever going to figure out how write this novel.

Last Friday the Wall Street Journal (the source of all knowledge and wisdom) had an article on the scientific research on sleep. One quote caught my attention: "...the Harvard Medical School tested 56 college students and found that their ability to discern the big picture in disparate pieces of information improved measurably after the brain could, during a night's sleep, mull things over." Folk wisdom and experience ("let me sleep on it") indicated that this was the case but I was comforted that modern science was able to validate it just the same.

The next day, Sunday morning, with little expectation of success, I turned my mind to the issues that had defeated me before and within a period of ten minutes had resolved them all. Two minutes into that ten minute period I raced to my computer to write down all these revelations. Those ten minutes were unbelievably exhilarating and rewarding.

Immediately afterward I wrote this post to document and share the experience with you. The task of converting those revelations into sentences, paragraphs and chapters still awaits me. But I can now see the end of my journey. And better yet, I know that I would get there.

Plain language and the military

One of the first actions that Charlie Crist took upon taking office as the Governor of Florida was to sign an Executive Order that established his Plain Language Initiative. Acronyms and legalese were ordered to be stripped from public documents. In the world of emergency management, where I work, we were particularly prone to acronyms. As we now write new procedures we take extra care to ensure that no offending acronym slips into a document through force of habit.

Although these offending terms are ruthlessly excised from all written materials they remain a part of our vocal communication. Thus, the acronyms are quarantined in a special section in each document so that the newly arrived to the emergency operations center can translate the speech of the natives. I even made two posters listing the most common acronyms and placed them prominently in my work room at the emergency operations center so that the newbies could understand what we are saying.

Much has been written of the jargon studded language of the military. The term "pentagonese" was even coined to describe this disease but the affliction is not confined to the United States military. When I was assigned to the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium at the beginning of the Bosnia operation I was sent to attend a staff meeting. The SHAPE staff is composed of representatives from all the NATO countries. I was the first to enter the meeting room and saw that, in typical military fashion, place cards had been set in front of each chair to indicate which organization in SHAPE the occupant of that chair represented. I examined each of the twenty two place cards in the room and only recognized the one for my own organization. The language of the headquarters was English but the many terms used, and which I had to learn, were unique to the organization.

I found that in the military the closer one gets to the common soldier the plainer the language. The staff officers at division headquarters speak a special jargon but the sergeant's instructions to the private are in clear English. At the front line the Army puts a premium on clear, simple instructions. In combat, or even in exercises, miscommunication can kill.

Plain language can and does reside in the military. One simply has to look for it in the right place.

OBL and the 2008 election

OBL and Al Qaeda have a vested interest in the candidates and the eventual winner of the 2008 campaign for President of the United States. The question is: who would they want to win, and what actions are they planning even now to influence the outcome of that election?

Osama tried to influence the 2004 election, and may even have succeeded. He released a video tape four days before the election, and several pundits asserted that this video helped Bush win. After the election, FOX News reported that John Kerry blamed the Osama tape for his loss.

OBL is many things to many people but all would agree that he is very intelligent and shrewd. His release of a tape four days before the 2004 election in which President Bush was attacked for his response to the 9/11 attacks was designed to achieve an emotional reaction in the American electorate. The timing was critical because little opportunity was given for any rational discussion of OBL's statements before the voting was conducted.

The fact that the tape criticized Bush was taken at first by some pundits to mean that OBL was promoting Kerry. On reflection, and after the election, the tape was seen to be pro-Bush. OBL must have known ahead of time that the American populace would react in a manner directly opposite to his stated intent. I believe that he knew this, and I believe that his intent was to get Bush reelected.

Why would he want Bush reelected? The argument can be made that OBL has been trying to provoke the United States since the first World Trade Center attack. If this was his intent, and he has so stated, then with the attacks of 9/11 he succeeded. President Bush responded to this provocation by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. OBL's strategy was to provoke the sleeping giant in the hope that his response would awaken and unite the Muslim world to OBL's vision of a new Caliphate.

Some have argued that Bush followed OBL's strategy as designed, to the Western World's universal detriment. The way this argument goes, the U.S. military actions in the Middle East have turned the Muslim world against us. More and more Muslims are rallying to OBL's banner. If we had not "overreacted" to the Al Qaeda attacks the World would still love us. The way to deal with the Al Qaeda terrorists is through law enforcement and the courts: arrest them, read them their rights and then put them on trial. If they go free, well, at least we have the self satisfaction that we protected their rights.

Not everyone agrees with this argument. My view is that we weren't that popular in the Muslim world before 9/11. The escalation of attacks by Al Qaeda was going to get worse if we continued to ignore them, not better. Assuming we were able to actually locate and arrest these terrorists, their trials would be security nightmares and propaganda bonanzas for OBL and his minions. The better solution is to take the fight to the enemy.

Would OBL rather face Hillary or Rudy as an opponent? A better question is whether he would rather face a Republican or a Democrat. His preference for a candidate will dictate his choice of actions. He has displayed a tendency for the dramatic. The most drama and the most impact would be some kind of action immediately prior to the election. He has already released a tape prior to the previous election, so the drama of this action would be lessened.

A better option for him would be a well planned, coordinated attack: his specialty. The attack would be immediately before the election. To execute such an attack the planning would even now be underway.

Veteran's Day 2007

On this Veteran's Day 2007 holiday I spent two and a half hours helping Colonel Bear cook sixty pounds of bacon for the annual Veterans breakfast at the American Legion Hall in Tallahassee. Because the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 2007 fell on a Sunday, by Act of Congress we celebrated Veteran's Day on Monday November 12th. Almost 300 Veterans and their families came together for a traditional military (and Southern) breakfast of bacon, scrambled eggs, sausage, and biscuits smothered in sausage gravy.

Colonel Michael Whitehead, in Kuwait in April 2003, preparing to enter Iraq.

We cooked the bacon outside on propane burners in iron, deep fat fryers bubbling with oil that Colonel Bear provided. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Calvin A. "Bear" Winter was the chief bacon cook and I was one of two assistants on duty. I had a variety of tasks to perform but the most important, and the reason that I volunteered myself for this duty, was to listen to Colonel Bear's stories about his military career.

Some of his most interesting stories came from 1952 and the six weeks he spent under almost continuous direct and indirect fire on a bone cold, freezing piece of ground called Heartbreak Ridge. By continuous fire I mean he never left that hole for six weeks for fear of being killed. The particular hole in which he resided was important because it provided him with an uninterrupted view of the movements of the Chinese Communists to his front. He used a radio to relay his observations to an array of artillery battteries to his rear. The timely and effective artillery fires that he called down on the Chinese made them all the more determined to get him out of his hole. Spending six uninterrupted weeks in a hole brought to my mind certain unavoidable issues of sanitation and I asked him about that, while we stood there cooking the bacon. He told me that he honestly didn't remember how he solved that particular problem (one of many, I'm sure, that he encountered, but he did). Like many veterans, Colonel Bear's uncertain memory helped him in this and many other ways.

When the breakfast was over, I delivered John and Betty O'Farrell to the American Legion float so that they could ride in the Veteran's Day Parade. Although they were both WW II veterans, neither had been in a Veteran's Day parade, and they both participated at my invitation. John fought in the Battle of the Bulge and Betty was an Army Nurse. I told them the Parade would be a moving experience for them, and when it was over they agreed. To watch the crowd on the side of the road rise and give us a standing ovation as we passed by brought tears to our eyes.

Before the parade I looked for and found a Viet Nam veteran that I had first met at last year's parade. His name is Jerald Collman and he was a graves registration officer in Viet Nam. In this and many other wars, the bodies of the fallen in the field were placed intact, or in pieces, into black bags and delivered to graves registration units, where they were prepared for the journey by air back to the United States. Jerald told me that the Veteran's Administration has documented that the two categories of veterans most likely to receive 100% disability for Post Traumatic Stress were members of front line combat units and members of graves registration units. Jerald was granted just such a disability by the VA.

Jerald admitted to me last year that he had suffered greatly from his experience in Viet Nam. He said that he had committed to memory over one thousand names of the dead that he and his unit had cared for in the year that he spent there. Many times at night he had recited the names as he tried to fall asleep. Last year, and this year, he carried a large, thick book that listed the over 55,000 names of the fallen in that war.

Since we had spoken last year, Jerald told me that he had returned to Viet Nam and had found the slab of concrete where his unit had received and processed the dead. The Vietnamese knew and understood the significance of this piece of ground and had refused to allow any other building or structure to be built on this spot. He showed me pictures of a memorial plague that was erected on this piece of hallowed ground as a result of his visit. I asked him if he was doing any better and he said that he was, that his visit to Viet Nam had been instrumental for him in exorcising some of the demons that he had carried for so many years.

As a commissioned Army officer for thirty years I have a very clear and unequivocal understanding of the concept of duty. Doing my duty for my family, for my job and for my country are an important part of my life and how I see myself as a person. My participation in the American Legion and the small part that I play in the Veteran's Day activities in my small town are my duty. I do it for Colonel Bear, for John, for Betty, for Jerald, for myself and for all the other Veteran's out there.

World War IV

"Are we really at war against a deadly foe or are we fighting small bands of deluded fanatics whose probability of even minor success is pitifully low?"



- Christopher Wilcox, in the Wall Street Journal

Norman Podhoretz, the neo-conservative columnist, believes that we are currently engaged in World War IV (the Cold War being World War III). The term that cropped up in Pentagon briefings after 9/11, GWOT, or the Global War on Terrorism, has fallen into disfavor. How do you wage war on an asymmetrical strategy? The new term popular in many circles is The Long War. I'm not sure what we should call it, as long as we say we're at war. Not everyone believes that.

World War IV is another name for the worldwide struggle against an Islamist, fascist ideology that is actively at war with Western civilization and particularly the leading national representative of that set of beliefs, the United States. The war began on November 4, 1979 when some friends and cohorts of the current President of Iran assaulted the U.S Embassy in Tehran and took sixty six American citizens hostage.

Even though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his friends declared war on the United States most of the country failed to notice. In the 1990s similar believers in their ruthless ideology tried to get our attention, killing Americans in the Marine barracks in Lebanon, in the streets of Mogadishu, in the World Trade Center attack of 1993, in the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in Kenya, in Tanzania, and aboard the USS Cole in Yemen. The attacks on September 11 finally got our attention.

It seems, however, that some people have a short attention span.

The fact that over six years have passed without any subsequent attacks have led a number of people in our country to some widely varying conclusions. Some have concluded that maybe 9/11 was more luck than skill: Maybe we aren't at war after all. Maybe my political disdain for the current President and his inept handling of the war in Iraq means that the threat has gone away. Or better yet: never really existed.

Maybe. Maybe the ill starred war in Iraq consumed fanatics that would have traveled to the Homeland to kill Americans but didn't because there were so many nearby in the Euphrates valley. Maybe they are all nothing but a stupid bunch of ragheads who can only spell IED.

But then again what if they aren't? What if being paranoid is the appropriate reaction? What if they really are out to get us? What if we really are at war?

Good news on the war in Iraq

The good news is not that the Surge is working and the violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically. General Petraeus reported that news last month, to mixed reviews. The good news is that the Washington Post in an editorial today admitted that the General was right and his critics were wrong.

The criticism of the war will now shift from the "failed strategy" of the Surge to the failure of Iraqi politicians to resolve in a matter of days or weeks problems that were a century in the making. Calculating the interactions of the motives of all the political players and the internal and external factors that influence these players would be the equivalent of a supercomputer model that tracks the movements of a hurricane.

One can expect many commentators and talking heads in the upcoming months to provide their solutions.