Tobacco Road

Little doubt in my mind as to why a twelve-year-old would balk at sharing a bed with her new adult husband. Especially knowing of her mother’s 17 pregnancies. Her father, Jeeter Lester and his wife Ada specialize in avoiding work, chewing “snuff”, stealing, and making babies. Their children, once old enough, leave home without ever looking back and move far enough away to avoid visits from Pa to put the touch on them. The action takes place on Tobacco Road in a part of Georgia on the Savannah River Marshes where tobacco and cotton once grew on soil now too depleted to grow anything without liberal applications of “guano” that washes out of the sandy soil when it rains.

I have always asserted that poverty is a state of mind. In this novel lack of education, malnutrition, ill-health, unemployment breed poverty, ignorance, racism, and crime. Erskine Caldwell does for the Low Country of the East Coast what John Steinbeck does for the migrant workers of the Salinas Valley in California or Ivan Doig for settlers in Montana. Published in the depression years of the “Dirty Thirties” this novel documents a time and place but could hardly be termed uplifting.

Lone Survivor

The writing style here is not unlike that of his buddy Chris Kyle who referenced this work in his own autobiography. Did they use the same ghost writer? Luttrell does spend more time describing his fellow Seals, the fact that all are dead allowing him to mention them by name in effect memorialising them. He also gives better historical background.

When a four-man Navy Seal Team calls for backup the situation is truly desperate, so bad indeed the 16-man backup team died when their helo crashed into a mountain.

Lutrell survived because he was blown into a crevasse from which he eventually crawled badly wounded 7 miles to seek aid. His physical wounds may have healed but the mental ones are not as easy to assuage. He suffers from the dislocation from civil society common to most returning vets with the added stress of his terrible loss and not a little survivor’s guilt. It is sad that a society that finds it necessary to train men to be such warriors feels uncomfortable about having them around. They are both lionized and feared.

The movie version of this action is in wide release as of January 10, 2015. Both the movie and the book are macho and jingoistic. Lutrell decries politicians and desk jockeys who set rules of engagement that endanger the lives of men in the field and make their task more difficult. Much has been made of the ‘fact’ that similar rules of engagement made the war in Vietnam unwinnable. Lutrell goes as far as to blame the rules of engagement for the loss of his team. In Afghanistan War Lords have held power and fought civil wars for millennia. The locals are loyal to whatever power is seen to be in control at the time. In that sense there are no non-combatants. In that sense the troops are being asked to fight a war that cannot be won and have their hands tied in the process.

The reader can understand that this writer is bitter about Rules of Engagement he sees as being directly responsible for the loss of his team. Beating his readers over the head with it repeatedly does not strengthen his argument. What I really hear him saying is that an elite fighting squad should not have been deployed in a war zone if you didn’t want dead bodies. Unfortunately soldiers do not get to pick their wars and rear-echelon desk jockeys don’t have to face battlefield conditions. This reader still wonders if deploying any troops in Afghanistan was a wise move. Luttrell’s own historical background argues against it.

Unbroken

Laura Hillenbrand is an engaging writer. The 487-page book reads quickly supplying the reader with more than a few laughs. It tells the life-story of Louie Zamperini who in today’s parlance would be termed hyper-active or suffering attention deficit disorder. His deliverance came in the form of running. His Olympic Medal hopes dashed when the 1940 Olympics were cancelled due to WW#2.

A bombardier on a dubious plane they are ordered up in spirals into the Pacific. What follows is an epic tale of survival and the indomitable human spirit that survives despite all odds. A pair of buddies survive ditching in the ocean; 2000-miles adrift surrounded by sharks in an ill-equipped leaking raft; solitary confinement and torture by sadistic, ignorant Japanese captors; and finally release at the end of the war. What follows is the trauma of return and the adulation of a public where everyone wants a piece of you. The nightmares and the panic attacks continue even while you put up the brave front everyone expects.

There are nearly 100 pages of footnotes at the end of the book; pictures are interspersed in the text. Although the book follows the life of Zamperini it includes the stories of many of his comrades and those of his captors. It also adds facts and figures along with not a little historical background.

Going After Cacciato

Written by Tim O’Brien the author of The Things They Carried. The war in Vietnam, for those who served was a trip to insanity. Not a big leap for a squad to go marching across Asia and Europe after a deserter named Cacciatio the route to Paris, France plotted on his Atlas. The book documents  their journey interspersed with descriptions of the soldiers, their missions, their dreams and snippets of days on leave, calls home, nights spent on watch, boredom, and the sheer terror of checking tunnels. So what is fact and what is fantasy. Dropping the grenade in the tunnel a despised Lieutenant entered after all his men refused a direct command?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The book is a series of letters to a friend written by a 15-year-old boy. Were this a girl they’d have been Dear Diary entries. Since the friend to whom all this soul-baring information is addressed is never identified one can only assume it is we the readers.

One wonders how many of the parents agitating for the censorship of this book have actually read it. The book does begin by talking about a student’s suicide. It mentions teenage sex and masturbation in discrete terms. The quarterback football jock is a gay bottom. The kid sees a psychiatrist, takes prescribed and other drugs, smokes, and drinks.

A stream of consciousness novel reveals the intimate details of a teen’s angst, mood swings, fantasies, depression, and exuberance. The ideal childhood doesn’t exist. Parents raise children with no clue what they’re doing and sooner or later every child finds them out and becomes disenchanted and rebellious. Through it all knowing they are loved seems of paramount importance.