My father retired from the Navy, and I always assumed I’d go into the Navy. When my fellow geeks were playing Dungeons and Dragons, I was playing naval combat wargames. I did enlist as a nukee, but I was only 17 and my father wouldn’t sign the papers. He wanted me to get a degree first. I finally did enlist as a mechanic in the ANG to pay for school, I never did go to OCS, but I always kept my passion and interest in naval history and combat. History has now come full turn, and many of the same issues in the Pacific are coming to the fore again.
When I wrote my first book, I thought long and hard about what land combat would look like to a soldier or marine.
When my brother came back from AF tech school, he gave me the book Fields of Fire by Jim Webb (A platoon commander in Vietnam). Although it is fiction, it reads like it could be memoir, but moving smoothly from the point of view of each of the three main characters.
The characters are written so deeply and deftly that it was possible to identify with any one of them.
The storytelling is so deep and immersive, one feels like you are in Vietnam, slapping at insects and feeling the heat and the rain.
The concussion of 155mm artillery and the stench and fear of battle. It is imagery that has stuck with me for 40 years.
Hailed as the most important novel to emerge from the Vietnam War when first published in 1978, this book launched a spectacular writing career for James Webb that now includes four bestselling novels. A much-decorated former Marine who fought and was wounded in Vietnam, Webb tells the story of a platoon of tough, young Marines enduring the tropical hell of Southeast Asian jungles while facing an invisible enemy--in a war no one understands. Filled with the sounds and smells of combat, it is nevertheless a book about people, an amazing variety of closely observed characters caught up in circumstances beyond…
My brother also brought home Tom Clancy’s first book, which is one of his best.
Where did that book come from? Was this some retired submarine captain? No, it was an insurance salesman from middle America that told parallel stories in multiple countries, with submarine combat and high-stakes diplomacy.
It's an amazing story, even better because almost all the tropes about modern submarine combat in books and movies are from that story. He also created the genre of military technothriller.
Prior to that book, it was always sub against ship, ships against a submarine.
Clancy really opened up the undersea world to the general public. He ended the book without open combat, deliciously teasing and then delivering in his following books.
Tom Clancy's rich imagination and his remarkable grasp of the capabilities of advanced technology give this novel an amazing ring of authenticity. It is a thriller with a new twist, a "military procedural" with an ingenious, tightly woven plot that revolves around the defection of a Soviet nuclear submarine--the USSR's newest and most valuable ship, with its most trusted and skilled officer at the helm.
A deadly serious game of hide-and-seek is on. The entire Soviet Atlantic Fleet is ordered to hunt down the submarine and destroy her at all costs. The…
William Manchester was such a great writer that I felt the loss keenly when he announced he couldn’t finish the 3rd book.
A writer that made the mundane soar and takes the already amazing life and speeches of Winston Churchill and frames them in a story that seems timeless. Churchill wasn't perfect, but he had seen WWII approaching, predicted what would happen, and then managed to get into power at the crucial moment to keep the UK alive.
Manchester's prose sings, and the story ends at the darkest hour.
I think Britain's experience in WWII is a very good example of how a future war could look. A country fighting on multiple fronts, with insufficient resources as the forces of evil encroach ever closer.
Manchester's book finishes at a point that makes the reader ask how is this winnable?
This is the second in William Manchester's masterly 3 volume life of Winston Churchill. It contests the favoured view that Churchill's finest hour was as Britain's wartime leader, viewing his greatest period as a statesman during 1932 to 1940, ignored in Parliament and disowned by the social and political establishment as a warmonger, he stood his ground, both in the Commons and outside of it, maintaining his principles until ultimately he succeeded in drawing the country behind him. He is seen as a man with limitations who could be unkind and callous, indiscreet and reckless to the point of foolhardiness…
The first year of WWII is what I think modern combat with a peer competitor would look like.
The whole series is fantastic, but what fascinated me about this book was the details on the first three months of the war, where Japan is victorious everywhere. American pilots and commanders had to learn the basics of modern naval combat.
We have grown accustomed to air superiority, and losing one or two aircraft is front-page headlines. The American carriers in WWII lost aircraft, squadrons at a time, and though they recovered many more pilots than the Japanese did, they still saw casualties of fifty percent.
Modern combat against a peer would look similar, with air strikes destroying bases and decimating units, and air combat attriting away squadron after squadron of aircraft.
On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative.
Ian W. Toll's dramatic narrative encompasses both the high command and the "sailor's-eye" view from the lower deck. Relying predominantly…
A fantastic book that tells the story the last major naval combat in the battle of Samar.
How a small task force made up of destroyers, destroyer escorts and escort carriers stood toe to toe with the biggest battleships of the Imperial Japanese Fleet.
Modern combat at sea wouldn't come down to a single destroyer sailing against an entire enemy fleet, like the USS Johnston, but it would come down to ships and crews continuing to fight even when massive shells, or missiles are raining down all around them like the ships of Taffey 3.
They fought with holes blasted into the ship, with one boiler destroyed, and with entire gun mounts blown off the ship. The escorts of Taffey 3 said they were going in harm's way, and they did just that, to glory.
“This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”
With these words, Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland addressed the crew of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts on the morning of October 25, 1944, off the Philippine Island of Samar. On the horizon loomed the mightiest ships of the Japanese navy, a massive fleet that represented the last hope of a staggering empire. All that stood between it and Douglas MacArthur’ s vulnerable invasion force were the Roberts and the other small ships of a tiny American…
Arrow Storm is a book about a future war between the USA and Communist China. After months of tension and a space war that disables the GPS network, the invasion of Taiwan and combat with US forces begins. There are other dastardly plans afoot as well, as a country riven by political dissension struggles to respond to invasion from without and disunity within.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
