Remember the Fallen, Those Who Gave Their Best

Memorial Day is a time of remembrance. We honor those who gave their lives for their country, and remember those who gave their best in service to their country. I know I shouldn't be, but I always feel a bit embarrassed when somebody says "thanks for your service." I guess it's because, unlike so many others, I was never shot at.

I enlisted in the Army Reserve for Aviation Cadet training in June of 1943, just out of high school. I wouldn't turn eighteen until the end of November, so wasn't called to active duty until January. D-Day in Europe was nearly six months away, and troops were fighting their way north in Italy. American and British bombers blasted away at targets in Germany, particularly Berlin.

With the air war going well, the U.S. Army Air Forces had more aircrew officers in the pipeline than needed. So they distributed us Aviation Cadets around bases in the South. I started out at Moody Field, Valdosta, GA, where I wound up doing KP (peeling potatoes, scrubbing pots and pans) and helping build a firing range the German POW's refused to participate in. When a College Training Detachment class opened at Winthrop College, a girls' school in Rock Hill, SC, I headed off to the first phase of training.

When nothing else opened up after that, I headed south to Sumpter, SC and Shaw Field, where luckier cadets were learning to fly the BT-13, also known as te Vultee Vibrator. I was assigned to the Air Inspector's Office, where I spent many hours filing Army Regulations. A lieutenant in the office test-flew aircraft after major inspections, and I rode the student seat on some of these missions. That was the closest I came to learning to fly.

In the spring of 1945, I finally made it to the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center (now called Lackland Air Force Base) for the next class in Preflight School. We studied subjects like meteorology, aircraft identification, and Morse Code. But, alas, when that was over, there were no openings for flight training. I joined other cadets at Randolph Field, on the other side of the city, to be guinea pigs in the School of Aviation Medicine. We performed such chores as getting physicals by candidates for designation as Flight Surgeons and trying out pills for airsickness. In the latter case, we took the pills then sat in swing-like gondolas where we were swung back and forth, higher and higher, to see how long it would take for us to get sick. I've never had a problem with airsickness, so I wasn't much help.

After a few weeks of that routine, another cadet and I were transferred to the Officers Mess, which also housed the VOQ, or Visiting Officers Quarters. We had rooms in the VOQ and worked in the office. After the barracks I had occupied, this was luxury. Built in the 1930's as the showplace of the new Army Air Corps, Randolph was known as the West Point of the Air. Its buildings were designed in Spanish Colonial Revival Style architecture, a far cry from those on bases thrown up during World War II.

It was here that I got the idea of becoming a writer. My fellow cadet had spent a year at Yale before joining the service. While chatting one day about what we'd do after the war, he confided that if he were to start college again, he'd study journalism. I'd never done any writing, but that stirred my interest. When news of the Hiroshima bombing came shortly after that, I sat at the office typewriter and started a story involving the A-bomb. When I was discharged about three months after the war ended, I set my sights on journalism school and enrolled at the University of Tennessee in January 1946.

While I don't think I contributed much in World War II, except my presence in uniform, I played a more significant role in the Korean War after getting an Air Force commission through ROTC. I served in the Estimates Division of the Directorate of Intelligence at Fifth Air Force Headquarters in Seoul. My job was to monitor enemy air activity and report on its consequences. I spoke on the subject at briefings for United Nations personnel and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service.

At one time I had the chance to join a group from the DI that journeyed up to the front lines, but for some reason I wasn't unable to make it. So I missed my best opportunity to get shot at.

But on this Memorial Day, I salute all those who served in whatever capacity. And I wish all the survivors a happy life. Mine certainly has been.

My accidental venture into writing

How authors get started in writing is a fascinating subject. I've read countless stories of people who wanted to be an author from the time they learned to hold a pencil. Others knew it would be their fate on reading the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew as youngsters. I'm not one of them.

I've told a bit of the story on the F.A.Q.s page of my website. Although I was a dedicated reader of short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and other weekly magazines as a teen, I never considered writing them myself. My closest connection to the printed page was as co-business manager (make that advertising salesman) for my 1943 high school annual, The Grey Eagle.

After graduation, I volunteered for Aviation Cadet training in the Army. My World War II military career did not consist of air raids on Tokyo or Berlin, however. I was shifted about from base to base waiting for openings in the next phase of training. I wound up in the summer of 1945 at Randolph Field in San Antonio, a legendary base with permanent buildings. I was assigned as a clerk in the VOQ, Visiting Officers Quarters, located upstairs above the Officers Mess.

I had a partner on the job, another cadet named Wolfson, who had spent a year at Yale before going into the service. While chatting one day, he told me that if he had it to do again, he would study journalism. For some reason, that idea took root in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it sounded.

We had a typewriter in the VOQ office. I had used it to hunt and peck letters and such. After news of the atomic bomb exploded across the front pages, I sat down at the typewriter and began punching out a story involving a nuclear weapon. I don't think I got too far with it as the war quickly came to an end, and we began to consider what would happen next.

A lot of the guys who had volunteered for Cadet training came from families in high places. I heard that some of them had lobbied the War Department (now Defense) to release us, rather than put us in other Army units for postwar occupation assignments. Whatever happened, orders came down in the fall giving us the option of taking a discharge. I was ready to head home and resume my education, so I split.

I wanted to study journalism. I learned that the big J schools were upper class programs, meaning I couldn't get in until I was a junior. So I enrolled at the University of Tennessee in January of 1946. I considered transferring to Wisconsin, one of the top-rated J schools, but I learned that UT would have a reporting course in my sophomore year. I signed up for that one and enjoyed it immensely. The following year, a full journalism program was established.

I had worked on the student newspaper, the Orange and White, and was tapped to be managing editor of one of the semi-weekly editions. However, my reporting course teacher returned to his post as executive editor of The Knoxville Journal and offered me a job as a reporter. I skipped the student assignment and became a cub reporter at the morning daily.

I quickly found my forte was writing feature stories, finding interesting twists to make articles come alive more than with a straight news treatment. After reading two mystery books by Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and No Pockets in a Shroud), I decided to write one of my own. Going to school in the day and working nights didn't leave a lot of spare time, but I sat down in my basement room at the fraternity house and banged out a mystery novel on my little Smith-Corona portable.

The manuscript was rejected by a publisher, and I was too much a neophyte to know I should try others. I was hooked on mysteries, though, and on writing in general. I've been at it now for more than sixty years. Who knows what I would have done if it hadn't been for Cadet Wolfson?

Garden of Beasts - a review of sorts

I'm not much of a book reviewer. I probably have three showing on Amazon.com. A friend has asked me to review an anthology, so I'm currently reading that one. But I just finished Jeffery Deaver's Garden of Beasts and thought I'd make some comments here.

It's a bit larger than most books I read, running 536 pages in mass market paperback. I really enjoyed the book but found it interesting that the publisher put "A master of ticking-bomb suspense." - People on the cover. While the book contained lots of suspense, it wasn't one of those page-turners you couldn't put down. In fact, it took me several weeks in my hit-and-miss reading style.

I suppose one reason the story appealed to me is that I'm a history buff. It deals with a short period before and during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I like intrigue. This one involves a rogue American plot to assassinate a top Hitler aide responsible for preparing Germany's armed forces for a major war.

Deaver obviously did a mountain of research on pre-war Berlin and the Nazi hierarchy. I've never visited the German capital, but his descriptions of the neighborhoods and the people who inhabit them are so realistic you feel you've been there.

Hitler and his inner circle are depicted chillingly with all their little quirks, like Hitler's obsession with drinking hot chocolate. Obese Herman Goring, thin, clubfooted Paul Joseph Goebbels, and bespectacled Heinrich Himmler are portrayed as edgy schemers, always mindful of Hitler's volatile temper.

The American plot was hatched by a senator and a business magnate working with a small group in an Office of Naval Intellgience hideaway on New York's Upper East Side. The most intriguing part was the killer they chose, a "button man," or hitman for the Mafia. But Paul Shumann was a native German brought to New York as a boy, not a Sicilian mobster. He chose to eliminate the bad guys because of what they had done to his father.

The two most interesting characters, those who hold the point of view, are Paul and his nemesis, Berlin Kripo (criminal police) Detective-Inspector Willi Kohl. Deaver does a masterful job of plotting to keep the path of events inexorably pushing the two men together for the climax.

Unexpected twists and turns fill the book. I did not guess the ending (though I'm rarely that prescient). Did the assassination succeed? Was Paul captured? Did Kohl suffer the fate of Germans who did not share Hitler's hatred of the Jews?

Read Garden of Beasts and find out.

I suppose you could call it "ticking bomb" suspense, but it ticked rather slowly. One reason was the meticulous characterization used throughout to give everyone the feeling of reality. It was accomplished by careful use of thoughts and actions rather than overuse of details.

In an Author's Note at the end, Deaver tells what happened to some of the places mentioned in the book, and he details the fate of the Nazi bigwigs who carry much of the plot. Though it's a work of fiction, it makes you wonder what might have been the outcome if something similar had actually occurred.

Who knows?