What Thomas E. Ricks taught me about war

I'm done reading the parts of Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals most relevant to my Bouchercon panel on wartime crime fiction.  Here's what I take from those sections, on World War II and the Korean War:

1) High respect for the skill, tact, wisdom, foresight, and calculation of the good generals: George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Matthew Ridgway. 

2) Hatred of the sloppy invocation of military metaphors in areas of civilian life whose laughable triviality is matched only by the self-seriousness of the morons who invoke them. Every football coach who likens his game to war.  Every corporate executive who issues a mission statement. Every middle manager who expects his or her underlings to take that crap seriously. Every business person who invokes The Art of War. At best you're a clown. At worst you're a destroyer of lives for no noble cause. I knew that already, but Ricks taught me that in appropriating military lexicon without any of the risk or the high purpose that attends some military action, you're not just debasing the English language, you're disrespecting an institution you'd probably pretend to admire. 

3) Ricks writes about war without resorting to the condescending, ethically dubious you-were-there in which reporters transport themselves into the bodies of the people who really were there. (You know the sort of stuff: "Harry Grabowski shivered in the early-morning chill on that fateful day in June 1944." How does the reporter know this?)  Ricks does a perfectly fine job relating the rigors and horrors of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir without resorting to such trickery.

4) Another reason to hate the Dallas Cowboys, if football fans need one. Clint Murchison, Ricks writes, father of the Cowboys' first owner, was among the arch-conservative Texas oil billionaires who bankrolled a nationwide tour by the frothing, insubordinate Douglas MacArthur with a view toward getting MacArthur elected president. Lest this offend any Republicans, conservatives, oil men, or Texans, they should know that Ricks also notes the role of Sid Richardson, another rich Texas oilman, in the political career of the much saner Eisenhower. And is MacArthur to blame for such scary creatures as Alexander Haig and Oliver North? (I wonder, too, if Murchison or Richardson inspired any of the characters in James Ellroy's Underworld USA novels.)

I thought of including boots on the ground, much overused these days, in 2) above, but Ricks sheds some incidental light on why that particular phrase, rather than some other, is the self-serious instant cliché in the current debate about Syria. In the 1950s, Ricks writes, the future of the U.S. Army was in doubt. Many in the army and out believed that sea and air war would render ground troops and the army itself obsolete. So boots on the ground may reflect bitter relearning of a lesson Donald Rumsfeld did not know or pretended not to know: that warfare still requires troops, sometimes in massive numbers.

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Thomas E. Ricks' presence will loom over my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m., which will include authors Susan Elia MacNeal, Martin Limón, John Lawton, J. Robert Janes, and James R. Benn.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Thomas E. Ricks on the Vietnam War

I'm back to my pre-Bouchercon reading, and my respect only grows for Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals. I read Ricks' sections on World War II and the Korean war for my Bouchercon panel on wartime crime fiction. Here are some excerpts from his section on the Vietnam War, the first from another author whom Ricks cites:

"From corporals to colonels, the men whose main job it is to train fighting soldiers and forge them into fighting units find themselves instead mere cogs in the vast machinery of the `system'; martyrs to the American devotion to the idea that the American businessman is the most efficient individual in the world and therefore all American institutions should be `run on business lines.'"

— George Fielding Eliot on the Korean War-era U.S. Army 

* 

"'We were beautifully managed and inadequately led,' O'Meara wrote." 

*  

"A popular myth, persisting even in today's military, is that senior civilians were too involved in the handling of the war. In fact, the problem was not that civilians participated too much in the decision making but that the senior military leaders participated too little. President Johnson, Maxwell Taylor, and Robert McNamara treated the Joint Chiefs of Staff not as military advisers but as a political impediment, a hurdle to be overcome, through deception if necessary." 

* 

"Unlike what happened in Hue City, the My Lai massacre has lived in in American memory — but only as an instance of a rogue platoon led by a dimwitted lieutenant. What has been forgotten is that the Army's subsequent investigations found that the chain of command up to the division commander was involved either in the atrocity or in the cover-up that followed." 

* 

"They were led by Lt. Calley, a short, pudgy 1963 dropout from Palm Beach Junior College who had drifted into the Army while down on his luck in Albuquerque and has somehow been sleeked to be an officer." 

That last bit exemplifies one of Ricks' main strengths as a writer. Ricks is a reporter, but his touches of color are light years beyond the typical hyperventilating to which most journalists resort when they follow the dreary rule that says they must humanize their stories by giving the reader more than just process. Ricks' description of Calley could be the sketch of a character in a neo-noir novel.

(Here are my previous posts about The Generals. Click on the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Thomas Ricks knows "transition" is not verb

"Petraeus and Odierno reversed some of Casey’s directives. ... formally demoted `transitioning' to Iraqi security forces from the top American priority to number seven on their mission list. Replacing it as the number-one task was the mission of protecting the Iraqi people."

 As I take my leave of the most thrilling, important, trenchant book that I've read since The Man Without Qualities, I highlight a small but significant additional reason to treasure it: The author, Thomas E. Ricks, clearly thinks good writing important, and he is unafraid to say that others should do so as well.

The sneer in those inverted commas around the odious transitioning above made me cheer, and it's worth noting that Ricks sneered in the context of commending two generals who de-emphasized "transitioning" in their effort to salvage a sloppy, directionless U.S. military effort in Iraq.

Ricks concludes his analysis of U.S. military leadership since World War II with an  epilogue of suggestions for undoing the damage wrought by incompetent generals and the diseased culture that the Army had become. Among these is better education (as opposed to training) for generals.

"As an added benefit," Ricks suggests, "many would learn to write clearly, a skill notably lacking in many American generals in this era of PowerPoint bullet-point briefings that lack verbs and causal thinking and all too often confuse a statement of goals with a strategy for actually achieving them."

Thomas E. Ricks, you are the man.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The general line: American military leadership and crime fiction

"As Lt. Col Paul Yingling noted(sic) during some of the darkest days of the Iraq war, a private who lost his rifle was now punished more than a general who lost his part of a war."

That's from The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks' study of the rise and decline of American military leadership from World War II to 2012. But substitute Korea for the Iraq war, and the passage could come straight from Martin Limón's fiction.

One passage in particular, from Nightmare Range, Limón's new collection of short stories, has co-protagonist George Sueño musing with some bitterness that he and his colleague, Sgt. Ernie Bascom, spend their days tracking down small-scale dealing in black-market groceries while generals and their spouses who evade customs law by illegally exporting and trafficking in Korean art treasures are not so much as investigated, much less punished.

That's a terrific moral setting for crime fiction, a world I suspect is unfamiliar to most crime fiction readers but at the same time akin to the civic corruption so central to early hard-boiled writing. And it's a big reason I'm pleased Limón will be part of a wartime crime-fiction panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in a week and a half.

The Generals is also relevant to fellow panelist James R. Benn's Billy Boyle novels. The hero of Ricks' study is Gen. George C. Marshall, one of whose first great accomplishments was to recognize the talents of a regimental officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower and groom him for the role he would fill as supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II.

One of Marshall's and Eisenhower's great skills, according to Ricks, was their ability to recognize talent and choose the right man for the big job. Billy Boyle's task is not as big as that of a real-life Eisenhower appointee, Gen. George S. Patton. But Billy is Eisenhower's relative by marriage, handpicked by the general to serve on his staff so he can have an investigator he trusts close at hand. Since personality is important, according to Marshall, expect me to ask Benn what Ike saw in Billy.

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Martin Limón and James R. Benn will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Military history, sharp thinking, and good writing

I expect I'll like Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime almost as much as I liked Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals, and not just because I came to Cohen through Ricks' approving citations.

The two share a talent for incisive analysis and clear, elegant writing. That each writes about a subject of continuing vital and contemporary interest is a bonus. (In Ricks' case, the subject is the rise and precipitous decline in American military leadership from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. In Cohen's case, the subject is the military leadership of the civilian heads of state Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion during wartime.)

I'm going to like Cohen because he attacks the commonplace that a civilian leader's job during wartime is to get out of the military's way, and I'm predisposed to like attacks on commonplaces. Cohen's introductory chapters range well beyond his specialty (He's a professor of strategic studies). His discussion of the pervasiveness with which the idea of military supremacy in wartime has penetrated popular culture, for example, includes a slyly funny putdown of the movie Independence Day.

I'd recommend these books for readers interested in current affairs, military history, and world politics. More to the point, I recommend them to that tiny minority to whom good writing and clear argument matter.

(If recent discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders has got away from crime fiction, know that it was a short story by Martin Limón, crime fiction all the way, that first got me thinking about military leadership and the consequences of leadership policies whose goals are to protect the leaders.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Liam McIlvanney; plus the way some presidents lie

As was the case last Friday, I'm too lazy to assemble and develop a coherent string of thought, so I'm going to play newspaper columnist again. If I were a real columnist, I'd try to make a virtue of my failure, and I'd call this post "While I was cleaning out the cobwebs of my mental attic" or "Stuff I wish I woulda thoughta." But, as that recently departed former journalism student Lou Reed sang in lines that could have been a copy editor serenading a columnist, "Some people, they like to go out dancing / And other people like us, we gotta work."  So, let's get to it.

1) Liam McIlvanney's All the Colours of the Town squarely confronts an issue I've long thought lurks beneath the surface of crime stories, especially those set during wartime: the queer, in-between situation of taking part in the action and, at the same time, observing it from the outside. McIlvanney's protagonist, Gerry Conway, is a Glasgow journalist sent to Belfast to dig up information on a Scottish politician's connections with sectarian paramilitaries in Northern Ireland:

"Maybe the News-Letter staffer was right. I was here to pick at scabs. I was greedy for all the old badness, the past’s bitter quota of hurt.

"I wasn’t alone. Across the West of Scotland, in the clubs and lodges, the stadiums and bars, people missed the Troubles. They mightn’t admit it, but they rued a little the ceasefires’ durability, the Armalite’s silence. We had followed the Troubles so closely for so long. There is something narcotic in watching a war unfold on your doorstep, knowing all the while it can’t harm you."

 Liam McIlvanney is William McIlvanney's son, and he shares something of that fine writer's penchant for long, loving descriptions of his protagonists' physical and human surroundings.

2) H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam got me thinking about changing fashions in presidential lies, evasions, and deceptions. McMaster's (and also Thomas E. Ricks') censure of Gen. Maxwell Taylor's close personal and social ties with the Kennedy family and of President Lyndon Johnson's preference for hand-picked advisers who would tell him what he wanted to hear reminded me of President Clinton and the Friends of Bill.  Johnson's insecurity reminded me of Richard Nixon and, reading how Johnson took advantage of instability in the Dominican Republic to divert attention from (and funding to) Vietnam in 1965 reminded me of the Iran/Contra scandal. I wonder if Reagan's advisers learned from Johnson's fate to make sure the president was well insulated from any dubious activities his administration might get up to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A post about McGilloway, McMaster, and me

I have nothing to say today, so I'm going to write a newspaper column. You know the kind I mean: the ones the columnist calls "Not that it really matters but..." or "Sudden thoughts and second thoughts," unless he abandons all pretense and simply reproduces great chunks of previous columns. Here's my version of what I'd do if I were a columnist rather than merely what a reporter of pedestrian literary talent once termed "editorial support":

1) The first three words of Brian McGilloway's The Nameless Dead, available in paperback from the folks at Pan (the entire novel, not just the first three words), are a pretty damn good first three words that would make a fine title: "The cadaver dog ... " That makes me want to keep reading.

2) As a follow-up to Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals, I'm reading H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. McMaster, a career military man and a scholar, shows a nice reporter's eye for detail in this vignette of the rivalry between Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in 1963:

"LeMay’s bushy eyebrows, sagging jowls, and jutting jaw advertised an irascible personality. Aware of Taylor’s aversion to tobacco smoke, he hung his ever-present long dark cigar out of the left side of his mouth and intentionally puffed the thick smoke in Taylor’s direction."

3) Dana King has posted the second in his series of Bouchercon interviews, this one with me in my capacity as a moderator of panels. I've been moderating for five years now, and Dana's questions gave me the chance to think about interesting aspects of this most enjoyable pastime. I am especially pleased at his declaration that I am "among the Bouchercon moderators whose panels are worth attending even if you don’t think you have an interest in the topic." That's the highest compliment a moderator can receive. Thanks!

Dana's interview with those superb panel organizers Judy Bobalik and Jon Jordan appeared last week, and further interviews with authors, organizers, and readers, all talking about what goes into a successful crime-fiction convention, will appear weekly through December.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Two little pieces of prose: Cohen and McKinty

1) His picture of Abraham Lincoln's wartime military leadership is brisk and exciting, but I am sorry to say that Eliot A. Cohen is not the prose stylist that Thomas E. Ricks is. One Maj. John J. Key, Cohen tells us in Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime, "made the greatest sacrifice a man could to the Union cause" and, on the same page, "had just made the greatest sacrifice imaginable to the Union cause."

A good writer might have avoided the overdone "greatest sacrifice" trope. A careful editor allowed to do his or her job would surely not have let Cohen use it twice on the same page. Even if the expression were not a cliché (or even if it bothers you less than it bothers me), repeating the phrasing so closely creates a monotonous effect, not to mention the unfortunate impression that author, editor, or both did not pay careful attention to what they were doing.

2) Then there's Adrian McKinty, the first page of whose upcoming novel In The Morning I'll Be Gone contains as neat a parenthesis as you'll ever see. Now, the em-dashes with which McKinty sets off the remark may become commas or even parentheses by the time the book is published, so I can't reveal details here. But the remark's commentary on what went immediately before suggests a wry, disillusioned humor that I think I will like.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Some good books I've read so far in 2013

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil. No big deal that this book is on some crime fiction blog's top-books list; it's one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It's funny, it's acute in its analysis of social types, a kind of grimly prophetic social comedy. (Musil fled Austria with his Jewish wife and died in 1942 in Switzerland.)

Maifya, Charlie Stella.  A bit different from Stella's previous novels at first, with less humor and characters more savage and vicious. But the same multiple viewpoints he uses in the other books—Stella loves to show men and women at work, out, and at home, doing what they do in their daily lives—here make the vicious Russian gangsters even more chilling. The humor picks up  when Stella introduces a few Italian cops and agents, and Stella's sympathy for working men and women struck a chord with me even though my collar would be decidedly white if I didn't wear T-shirts or sweaters to work most days.

Graveland, Alan Glynn. Words are weapons, and Alan Glynn knows weapons can be evasive and defensive as well as offensive. Anyone who says "going forward" clearly would prefer that you not examine what he or she has left behind. Glynn's sensitivity to the evasions that lurk behind fashions in everyday speech are one reason his tales of corporate and government infiltration are so convincing.

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Alistair Horne.  Here's an excerpt from one amateur review of Horne's history of the Franco-Algerian war: “Alistair Horne … is first and foremost hopelessly biased in favor of the Algerians.” Here’s a bit from another: “This epic work … remains a remarkably racist work loved by State Department officials and neocons alike … Alistair Horne describes in gory detail atrocities committed by the FLN, or Algerian nationalist rebels, while skimming over far worse atrocities committed by the nice white-guy French."  Horne must have done something right.

The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth. For all its thriller trappings, this story of a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle is really a police procedural—and a damned good one—that has marked affinities with hard-boiled P.I. stories as well. No wonder it won the best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972.

Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson. Dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of Thompson's work that I've read.

Pike, Benjamin Whitmer. This 2010 novel is like Daniel Woodrell, but with a tougher edge, maybe with a shot of Jim Thompson mixed in.

Laidlaw, William McIlvanney. Start with compassion and humor. End with such telling detail that one feels one is reading novel observation rather that obligatory place-holders. Here's how the novel opens: "Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the pavement. The lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs. ..." Find me a better description of alienation than that, of feeling inside one's body and removed from it at the same time. If you do, I bet it won't end on McIlvanney's humorous note:  "A voice with a cap on said. `Where's the fire, son?'"

Europe Between the Oceans and Britain Begins, Barry Cunliffe; Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain, Stephen Oppenheimer.  Three stimulating books on the origins of Europe's populations that debunk old theories without drifting off into bloviating self-congratulation.

Gun Work, David J. Schow. A perfect "new" hard-boiled novel in significant ways. It captures the hard edge of post-war pulp without seeming campy or nostalgic on the one hand or veering into smirky self-consciousness or jokey, over-the-top violence on the other. (Events obliged Schow. Gun Work is set in Mexico, the country's explosion in kidnapping last decade permitting a plausible recycling of that old hard-boiled stand-by, the dangerous trip south of the border.)

Bluffing Mr. Churchill, John Lawton. Lawton's Troy novels are a delicious social comedy and social history of England in the mid-twentieth century: "Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago. ‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?’”

Tapestry, J. Robert Janes. Tapestry's moral, ethical, and physical environments are the darkest I have read in crime fiction. Kohler and St. Cyr are called on to work in a city so darkened by blackouts that characters must feel their way through the streets at night. Plunder, greed, puritanism, lust, patriotism, violence, and luxury in the face of deprivation slip in and out of focus, the reader never sure if any one is staged to cover for another.

The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks; Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, H.R. McMaster. Some of what these two books taught me: 1) High respect for the skill, tact, wisdom, foresight, and calculation of the good generals: George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Matthew Ridgway. 2) Hatred of the sloppy invocation of military metaphors in areas of civilian life whose laughable triviality is matched only by the self-seriousness of the morons who invoke them. Every football coach who likens his game to war. Every corporate executive who issues a mission statement. Every middle manager who expects his or her underlings to take that crap seriously. Every business person who invokes The Art of War. 

The Hunter and Other Stories, Dashiell Hammett. Includes twenty stories uncollected or unpublished during Hammett's lifetime, plus a tantalizing fragment of an uncompleted Sam Spade story. E-book editions include three additional pieces of what Hammett hoped would turn into political novels, according to Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and a co-editor of the new volume. Rivett invokes The Maltese Falcon in discussing "The Secret Emperor," but I'm reminded of The Glass Key. Like that novel, which appeared in 1931, "The Secret Emperor" feels like it could have been written decades later, even today.

Criminal Enterprise, Owen Laukkanen. Laukkanen's second novel does some familiar crime-fiction tricks well, and it rings refreshing changes on others. It manages the considerable feat of keeping all its subplots interesting, and its twists are surprising but plausible.

Interface, Joe Gores. If you like Dashiell Hammett and Donald Westlake, you'll like Interface. If don't like Hammett and Westlake, as Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

HHhH, Laurent Binet. Binet's 2010 novel is a thriller; a history lesson; a lesson on the importance of history (which is not the same thing); and a meditation on how we read, write, and experience fiction and history; and it has, as almost any serious book will, good jokes.

California, Kevin Starr. Starr is a passionate, engaging writer and a great lover of California, which he served as state librarian. Yet he is fair-minded in dealing with the violence that has attended the on-going birth of this strange piece of the planet. He is the sort who can give history a good name. He's also savvy enough to tie the state's raucous, dream-filled history to the crime writing that arose there.

Blood's A Rover, James Ellroy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013