Tag Archives: Writing

HUE

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Frank Bowden

This excellent telling of the battle of Hue (Vietnam, February 1968) needs to be read.

(1) What happened? (2) Lies the American government and military told itself and Americans about the Tet Offensive (February 1968) and Hue. (3) The gallant, unselfish, courageous fighting of United States Marines against forces more than three or four times their number. (4) The lies the North Vietnamese told themselves to pursue fighting in Hue. (5) The military mistakes made by the Vietnamese, South and North, and Communist Part during the offensive in Hue. (6) Mistakes of the North Vietnamese were not capitalized on by the Americans. (7) The effect on the residents of Hue during the four weeks of fighting. (8) The small forces the South Vietnamese had and went through the daily grind of fighting for four weeks.

Somehow Bowden tells of combat, of wounds and of deaths (mostly Americans): Marines, where they came from, their training, their units, companies and a few battalions, where Marines were supposed to go – target, eliminate the opposition, and whom Marines were fighting against. Suddenly, a wound or a death of a Marine, introduced and ended that story. It was combat in a small city, not in the jungle. Everyone was crammed together, ill-supported except for weapons and ammunition, no washing, no hygiene, no clean clothes. Marines asked for tanks and sometimes never had any or enough; they fought with hand-held delivery of artillery, beginning with hand grenades.

There were no drones, no surveillance devices, no way of looking and locating the enemy. There’s no GPS. Hue was an old-time battle.

This book is well-written. Reading it at once takes the reader to the year 1968 and gives readers the sense of what Hue Marines went through, as well as the North Vietnamese, during those four weeks.

The book lacks comprehensive maps, on which every location mentioned, is on a map. There is no listing of maps in the Table of Contents, and what each map represents. NOTE, these omissions help tell of the battle. Every combatant, Marine, U.S. Army, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were strangers to Hue, and truly did not know where they were: Where was one landmark or building in relation to any other landmark. Indeed, a Marine Lt. Col. took off the wall of a gasoline station, a map of the City (large distances per millimeter) to help orient him and organize his advance to eliminate the opposition.

THE INVENTION OF MURDER

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BY BOOKJudith Flanders

The story of murder in the Nineteenth Century promises more than this book gives. In Nineteenth Century England an active swirl surrounds death, accusation, murder, trial and execution. According to the book not many murders happened, but enough gained public attention. Some stories survived decades; one Seventeenth century death was picked up during the Nineteenth century and used. The Invention seems to tell this story. It does in the first 110 pages when I stopped reading repeat actions and stories of death, accusation, etc… Victorian England had to be a dull place for the masses and the middling peoples to be enthralled by this sort of deviancy.

What could interest me in this book’s subject was developing detection of crimes and causes into evidence presented in court. This is no indication that this knowledge or ways were of interest, but the same trip, all well-put down. However, this book is neither a cultural anthropology nor a sociology. It is one telling of death, one after another, as though the public insisted upon new deaths to become sensational to engage them. One prays for the public’s interest to be distracted – like professional sports, largely a Twentieth Century invention coming from America.

How to judge this for The Invention? From a case that lasted decades, any reader and watcher of bit plays, would expect the basic facts of death, accusations, etc to be used as procedures and processes of detection became sophisticated; those ways and means would be written into the story as the time from the events distanced. Note the criminal is not the protagonist; nor is the victim. But investigators become prominent and their methods interesting. MORALE: the bad people are caught and punished.

In the one telling of a 1840’s murder, the story, according to the book, had to be close to the real facts for a long time. What Victorians seemed to like was thoroughly retro and religious: Repetition of accepted facts and outcomes as though to reassert the foundations of the purity, the justice and righteousness of their society. No one has to read 480 pages of that. However, writers might be expected to mention and use changing methods of detection. Those writers did not exist.

By 1894 Conan Doyle changed crime and detective stories, and decades of more nonsense followed. Raymond Chandler’s writing analyzes some of that, chopping up popular, misleading detective stories for readers to observe the nonsense. Chandler used current methods changing criminal investigations and writing. And what of detective stories today, and of the last 25 years? Can anyone spell DNA?

NARRATING A STORY

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“In the middle of an exacting history course, it takes a high degree of moral courage to resist one’s own conscience to take time off; to let the imagination run; to give serious attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be human in situations very different from our own.

“It is essential to take that risk. For a history course to be content to turn out well-trained minds and deeper sympathies would be a mutilation of the intellectual inheritance of our own culture, of an element of imaginative curiosity about others whose removal may be more deleterious than we would like to think to the subtle and ever-precarious ecology on which a liberal western tradition of respect for others is based.”

Brown, Peter, SOCIETY AND THE HOLY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, p. 4.

This grand three-sentence, two paragraph statement somewhat expresses the point. I found it of interest and read on in this book. There was something wrong with the writing, though, and I remembered that this book was a collection of the author’s lectures. Apparently, nothing had been edited to remove the oral-nature of the lectures. Reading became problematic especially when the author did not develop the point, mentioning it as though it was an advertising teaser in a commercial. So I stopped reading.

Fortunately, I have been reading Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. That book is told in narration, by one man to another about what happened to a subordinate office of a ship who abandoned it with all the ship’s crew, while leaving all the Muslim pilgrims aboard a sinking ship. LORD JIM is not always easy to read. Passages and paragraphs can run two pages, and sentences… The narrative style of telling anything can make the story difficult and the writing impossible. Conrad writes Lord Jim about as well as can be done, using that voice.

Yet, this is exactly what the problem historian, Peter Brown, faces in his collection of lectures. In an exacting history, no historian writes, “Once again…” and that sort of parenthetical is littered in the pages of Brown’s book I read, 30-40 pages. I quit. I have read books that develop the passage, above, from page 4, and upon reading it, I hoped Brown would give greater and deeper analyses. Nope.

A Life of Sorts

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Graham Greene

This autobiography of Graham Greene recounting his years of failure – youth, schooling, university, employment and writing novels unsuccessfully, drifts. It might be the drifting without the young author showing much zeal tells that life intentionally – slacker does good without knowing how it happened. However, the writing is mediocre. Good writers must be masters of the language to write poorly. Graham Greene does not have those abilities.

It is supremely odd that while growing up Greene does not mention knowing or reading John Buchan.

Passages where writing is discussed are lazy. Either a writer believes in 1,2 and 3, or a, b or c, or I, II or III, or Mercury, Venus and Earth. Rules and advice are clear using snappy words. The reader and any writer looking for advice from Graham should be cautious: “The smell of opium is more agreeable than the smell of success.”

Other than drugs and Russian Roulette, Greene is the type of writer who does not use the imagination – he must experience something first hand to tell of it – although someone coming from a drug stupor and trying to write about it frequently fails to say much.

NEANDERTHALS

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“Neanderthals are hunter-gathers. They are protectors of their family (sic) They are resilient. They are resourceful. They tend to their own.” Marsha Blackburn, United States Senator, Tennessee.

Neanderthals are extinct. That fact shows their total inability to be resilient, resourceful, and to tend to their own. So much for that evolutionary success story.

Senator Marsha Blackburn is of the ilk to be a Southern Belle, but nothing in her life suggests she has ever liked or known Neanderthals. Her husband is not. If her daughter is dating a Neanderthal, she would tell the Senator. Is the Senator’s son a Neanderthal? That judgment is better made by women his own age.

Which Neanderthal attributes does Marsha prize? Neanderthals beheld the sun as a God, and the moon has his wife. Being unsanitary was part of their lives – they left their garbage in caves where they presumably slept. Did Neanderthals use the same cave space as potties? Were Neanderthals careful where their off-spring played? Did a pandemic finally wipe Neanderthals from the face of the Earth? Did the Neanderthals ever wear face masks? Did they eat food off rocks of strangers? Did they bathe often, or where they just hairy, stinky hulks of jockey height?

When Neanderthals were on the hunt, did each of them go to eating the kill, right off the carcass, rather than cook it? Did Neanderthals eat fowl when it had not been cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit? Did Neanderthals use soap and water and sing “Happy Birthday” twice when washing their paws? Did Neanderthal’s spit or regurgitate stuff during dinners with their families?

Are all the Senator’s constituents homo sapiens sapiens? Is Curt Shilling the sort of Neanderthal the Senator likes? Has the Senator learned over the years that constituents have retroluted on the genetic track, and they are truly Neanderthals? Depending upon the number of affirmative answers from the Senator, it may be time to quarantine Tennessee from the remainder of America to protect homo sapiens sapiens from the Neanderthal crowd.

PUT YOUR BODIES UPON THE WHEELS

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KENNETH HEINEMAN (226 PAGES)

Some arguments and assessments in this history of the Sixties are off, but this book is short and invaluable; it describes many people prominent during the Sixties: Have a name, and likely there is a short reference in the index. The shortcomings of the book is a lack of footnotes and a truly functional bibliography.

What was written about West Coast events is largely in error. There are arrests and generally the dates are accurate, but what happened is wrong. The easiest of such issues happened at San Francisco State, escalating riots about minority studies. Administrators were frozen. S.I. Hayakawa, set up a mass arrest in late 1968 and let it be known he – Hayakawa – was ready to talk. He talked with each minority and hammered out solutions. The only group Hayakawa would not negotiate with were whites. Hayakawa had the blessing and backing of Governor Ronald Reagan. Hayakawa did not cave into leftist demands as Heineman says. Hayakawa’s success was felt across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, where University Administrators were wondering, What is Hayakawa’s secret?

In its organization the book suggests much more organization the leadership of the Left had over events and happenings. Thee are names and in some places, those names may have had great sway over events, which had repercussions elsewhere. Kent State was a multiplier. But many of those issues were national in origin, not local which also could give rise to protests and violence.

Primarily, the names who wrote were not read. No one wanted to slog through Marxist-Stalinist- Maoist tripe. Whereas writers in the feminist, the ecological and in the disability movement were read. They discussed issues pertinent and common sensical to the American future, for young and old. Women, ecology and disability arose during the last Sixties but are little mentioned in this book.

Heineman does not otherwise sugar coat much when describing youth and their times: I did not know to get James Meredith’s admission into the University of Mississippi (October 1962), the Kennedy’s assigned U.S. Marshalls to protect him; they could not use their weapons. In a riot 166 Marshalls were injured including 28 gunshot wounds. 1962, was the first violent campus riot of the Sixties. It was also buried by the Cuban Missile Crisis beginning two weeks later.

I never liked George Wallace, but I did not know he rallied hecklers at his political rallies: Wallace said they liked four letter words, and offered two of his own: Soap. Work.

Needless to say Old Miss rioters and shooters were not the ideological companions of rioters and protesters elsewhere, except for the hate, loathing and disregard for law and civil order. Issues of these leaders and rioters are set forth in this book, briefly and intelligently.

In the final sum-up Heineman short-shrifts the counter-culture as causing long-lasting effects of those events and forces. The primary manifestations are drug usage and loud music. And today many Boomers are hard of hearing, are reliant on pharmaceuticals (One pills makes you bigger, and the other makes you small) and they think little. Obscurantism is an American problem.

It should be observed that many of the incidences directed at the Fifties and Sixties Civil Rights Movements and at its leaders are present today.

THE NEW EMPIRE

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Walter Lefeber

RECOMMENDED

Written 60 years ago, this book is remarkably prescient. The story of American business, government and policy from 1860 to 1898 begins with the policy makers, non-government or one-time government employees writing to advise the United States government how to conduct foreign affairs to make the most of business opportunities.

STOP! At one time America had competent diplomats amongst its politicians. Benjamin Franklin in Paris was the best. John Adams was not bad, but certainly not as good as his son, John Quincy Adams.

One hundred years after relying on experts or shills e.g. the old wise men who decided and advised fighting in Vietnam, the policies of experts has not changed. Wilson had his Colonel House and indecision. FDR had inexperienced wise guys making horrendous decisions before and during World War II, etc., etc., etc.. The Reagan administration took advice from Adam Ulam, preeminent Harvard Professor (Soviet expert) who did not want to be on-top. Ulam wanted to be on-tap, giving advise when asked but the responsibility of decision making was on the politicians.

The New Empire ably marches readers through 25 years of American business and diplomatic history – Hawaii, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and eastern Asia. Many one-time hot-spots have sensible historical passages devoted to them; sources are fact and resource-rich e.g. American policy on a canal in Nicaragua and Panama.

Professor LaFeber tells the history straight, not editorializing much about outcomes from adverse, poor or hurried decisions.

A FISTFUL OF SHELLS

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Toby Green

The author says this is the first history telling of West African circumstances from 1300 to 1750. That is true. No other history attempts to put together communities, countries and activities along the 1200 miles of coast from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, and tell of the slave trade. No one has a complete picture of West Africa for those centuries. Documents are scattered everywhere; letters and diaries are in more diverse places. Within West Africa it seems oral traditions of conveying history can be reliable – stories and incidences passed down from generation to generation.

And readers of A Fistful of Shells still have no idea what was going on during those centuries along that coast.

  1. Maps of West Africa should be specific as to time and to each place mentioned in the text. The book and its maps are not helpful because the names of locations changed in those four hundred years. And remember, tell of one place at a time because it is 1200 miles of coast, plus villages, communities, and towns inland. I suspect communications along that coast were irregular.
  2. Next write the history chronologically, as to one place and then the next. The reader goes wary: Good stopping pages were 48 and 49: Fifteenth Century – seven lines later Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries – carried over to page 49 the year 1200 – next paragraphs 2015 London Lecture; 2017 Lecture.

This history should be reorganized to convey all the events of that coast. Or take an area and write a history of it over those 400 years. Or, have some other organization which readers, completely unfamiliar with the subject matter, can follow.

TRUMP SUPPORTERS – REALIZATION

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A line of dialogue at the end of the movie, Good Morning, Vietnam, is applicable to the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The line of dialogue is offensive and rude, but it is true. They are the last words Robin Williams [Adrian Cronaur] says to J.T. Walsh [Sgt. Major Dickerson]. Next Williams shuts the door, and J.T.Walsh races from the office to be stopped by Noble Willingham {General Taylor]. After their encounter, Noble Willingham walks the hallway, repeating that line of dialogue and chuckling.

It is obvious from the scurrilous mob at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 that each of them [including female participants] were in dire need of the action described by Robin Williams in that line of dialogue. Indeed, if each had gotten one, it is likely each would have been carrying flowers rather than guns, knives, chemical sprays, pipes, zip-ties, pipe bombs, etc.

Never sell short the beneficial influences from words [books, plays and film] to teach and remedy societies’ problems.

THE LIQUIDATOR

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Spymaster, Trevor Howard, casually recruits Rod Taylor to become the state Assassin of the United Kingdom. This low-budget movie looks like a screen-test for Sean Connery’s replacement to play James Bond.

There are no gadgets. No special guns, no knives, no darts, no poisons, and no other weapons to kill human beings. Unlike the carphone in Goldfinger, there are no communication devices, like a shoe phone.There are no alternative identities – driver’s licenses, passports: all the victims are in Britain and pretty close to London. And there is no Dome of Silence. At the end of training Howard tells Taylor about his job in a crowded dining room – kill people whom Britain wants dead; Taylor also learns his code name L, for Liquidator – feels very Chicago in the 1920s.

What Taylor likes about his position is the lifestyle it supports: Meeting pretty babes and alluring each to his spacious flat, living room 1000 square feet supposedly with auxiliary rooms for essentials. While enjoying all that, Taylor hires professional hit persons to kill his targets. London is a very dangerous town.

Jill St. John is the love interest, so much so she is in most of the film. She always seems fully clothed. I too would have gone to France for a rendezvous with Jill in the 1960s before she became a Bond girl and got ruined. But on this unauthorized out-of-country trip for a honey-trap, I would not have gotten kidnapped, been roughed up by bad guys, turned, and sometime later hooked up with Jill after 20 minutes of emptiness (I didn’t watch; I was taking out the garbage.) In the next scenes Rod Taylor is true to his character: He is reluctant to kill his foremost adversary, Trevor Howard. The script somewhat plays toward comedy, but not the sly stuff at which the British excel.

If reading this writing about The Liquidator is dreadful, remember the film is worst. In my future and happening upon it, I will immediately turn to a station broadcasting Gilligan’s Island.

However, there are significant plot points to develop in The Liquidator. The story suggests The Bourne Identity et seq. and Airplane.