Book Report: The 50 Books I Read in 2016, Beginning with the War Books

In 2016 I read 50 books, more than a dozen for the classes I took in in the spring and fall of the year, many more because of the reading I had done for those classes.  One of the first questions I had in making this list is how to sort it? By author? By Title? By trade category: fiction, non-fiction, etc.?

Since the list is a spreadsheet, I sorted it by the language of the writer or the subject.  With that sort method, 25 of the books are by Russians or about the Russian language, plus a biography of Vladimir Putin, which has a very Russian subject.  Next is 15 books by english-speaking writers, then four by Greek writers, two by Hermann Hesse (German), two by Italian writers, one by an Israeli and one book in French.

Another column told me 15 of the 50 books are about war--some about war itself, some about the effects of war on civilians, some about life after war.

First on the war list is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. As vast as Tolstoy's War and Peace, the book weaves together lives in Russia centering on the Battle for Stalingrad in 1942.  The book includes descriptions of the Holocaust more wrenching than anything I have ever read. A short book of Grossman's dispatches from Stalingrad titled "From the Front Line" shows where he did his research.

Then a completely different book I will say much more about in the next few weeks:  Grunt by Mary Roach.  This is actually a popular science book about the science of keeping soldiers alive, restoring their health, or at least learning from their deaths.  It is a darkly funny book by a brilliant writer.

Three of the four books I read by Kazuo Ishiguro are about before and after war. I wrote about those three books here. The fourth was Nocturnes, five stories of love and music set in Venice.

Returning to sad war stories, Zinky Boys about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979-89.  All of the stories are first-person heart wrenching, especially the mothers.  This book should be sold with a Kleenex box.

Just a few years before the Soviet Afghan War was the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973.  The Lover is a dream-like tale set in the time of that war. It seems to unravel in the middle, but comes together in a very strange way at the end.

The Italian writer Primo Levi tells us about life before, during and after World War II in his native land in the book The Periodic Table. Another book covers the time Levi spent in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The saddest section is when Levi knew his fate and could not avoid it. Levi is a chemist and the chapters are elements.

Three more Russian war stories in three different eras:  A Hero of Our Time by M. Lermontov depicts life during a border war in the Caucuses in the early 19th Century. It has many similarities with the Afghan War in "Zinky Boys" and with Russia's War in Chechnya.  In the book Sin by Z. Prelepin tells us the story of his life in glimpses of his childhood, young love, his service in the Chechen War and how he lived after the war.  The book, by its many glowing reviews in Russia, tells the wrenching truth about life in 21st Century Russia. In between is a book not exactly about war, but about a Russian soldier who wanted to be a warrior and ended up a prison camp guard.  The Zone by Sergei Dovlatov, tells the story of life in a Soviet Prison Camp where the guards are not much better of than the inmates.

Finally, two war books from Ancient Greece: The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I read the first chapter and parts of several others in my spring Ancient Greek class.  The Odyssey is certainly more popular, but the Illiad is the real soldier's story.  It had been two decades since I last read Illiad. I had forgotten how well Homer knows the life and motivations of soldiers.  I read Illiad in translation.  If you read either, I suggest the translation by Richmond Lattimore.

I also used Lattimore's New Testament in the my fall Greek class. I have read a dozen translations of the Bible. Lattimore's New Testament is the best. Most Bibles are translated by a committee and all the writers sound the same. In Greek the individual writers are as different as Mark Twain, Hermann Hesse, Robert Frost and Junot Diaz. Lattimore gives the reader the writer's true voice, not a dozen writers in a blender.

Next post is the books on peace, or at least the absence of war.

Happy New Year--What a Year It Will Be!

On this first day of 2017, a new year begins and a vastly changed world.  After spending the majority of my military career as a Cold War soldier, the U.S. will be moving closer to Russia after January 20. Who knows what that means.

In good news, arguably the best living general in America, and the entire world, is the nominee for Secretary of Defense.  If General James Mattis is SECDEF, the military will change in stunning ways.

Watching Mattis in action made me sure I will continue the blog in 2017.  It will be the place I blog daily as I ride across what I am calling Russia, but what is really the former Soviet Union. I will be riding south to north primarily in former Soviet states.  Route is not yet fixed.

Another reason to continue blogging about the Army in 2017 was given to me by Google stats.  It turns out seven of the ten most-read posts since I started writing in late 2007 were written and posted during 2016.

The top of the list was a interview with Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard Christopher Kepner.  Also in the top ten was a flight medic with two tours in Iraq, Staff Sergeant Pamela Leggore.

Dropping to second place was the post about the trailers we lived in while we were at Camp Adder, Iraq. A post comparing Soviet and American armor during the 1973 war in Israel was the next most popular. Israel was the Cold War lab for testing NATO weapons against Warsaw Pact (Soviet) weapons.  Staying with the Cold War theme, another popular post was about the Cold War draft Army being the best of the several branches I served in.

Another Cold War post with more than 700 readers is about the Soviet War in Afghanistan.  I just posted that last week.  That terrible war helped bring down the Soviet Union at a huge cost to families in Soviet States.

In the coming year I will be writing about the military under General Mattis (assuming he is confirmed), about visiting NATO countries that were formerly Soviet states, and about being an old soldier who served in the military off and on since 1972.

Happy New Year!

Russian Soldiers/Mothers/Wives Talk About Afghan War

I left the U.S. Army in November of 1979, discharged at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after 6-1/2 years of active duty service.  From 1976 to 1979 I was a tank commander in West Germany, waiting for a war that never happened in Cold War Europe.

Less than a month after I got out, the Cold War got hotter when all NATO forces in Europe went on high alert because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. There were worries at the time that this invasion was a feint and the Soviets were about to invade western Europe.  Neither the Soviets or NATO could know the Afghan War would help to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet War in Afghanistan lasted ten years and became their Vietnam War.  After ten long years, 50,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded the Soviet Union lost that war, as we did the Vietnam War.

The similarities go sadly further.  In her book Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghan War, Svetlana Alexievich publishes interviews with soldiers, mothers, wives, civilian employees, doctors and nurses who served in that horrible war.

"Zinky" refers to the sealed zinc-coated coffins that dead soldiers came home in.  For years the Soviets denied their was a war. Coffins were buried sealed and families were not told how their soldier died.

Alexievich chronicles their experience of war and their return to civilian life.  The "Afghansi" like Vietnam War veterans here were shunned by many people.  They were not consider "worthy" by some veterans organizations, just as Vietnam veterans were considered something different than World War II vets.

Despite everything that was wrong with the war, some of the veterans said, "If I did not go someone else would have to go in my place."  This statement occurred several times in the words of mothers remembering their sons saying this to try to explain why they were going--to their death. According to Alexievich, some men accepted the draft, some were eager to go, some celebrated when a medical problem made them unfit, some bought their way out.  But over and over again were the words, "someone else would have to go."

The book is painful to read.  In fact it is sad even among Russian books.  But it is refreshingly honest. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature last year for the kind of reporting in this book.  She is most famous for interviewing hundreds of victims of Chernobyl.

The nine presidents from Colonel Harry S. Truman, Army artillery officer, to Lt. JG George H.W. Bush, fighter pilot, were all veterans.  John Kennedy and Bush, decorated veterans of direct combat, and Dwight Eisenhower with a long military career culminating in the liberation of western Europe.  No veterans since Bush 41.

Proud Draft Dodgers Can Now Sneer at Veterans

I was going to write a different post about working with draft dodgers throughout my professional life from the mid 80s to 2015. During that time, draft dodgers who I worked with were deferential to me or avoided me. Because the men I worked with in multi-national companies, especially energy companies, did not serve, but were Conservatives.  Although it was only my word, I began to think of them as NeverServatives.  Some changed their political allegiance with the election of Ronald Reagan, some were always Conservatives, like Dick Cheney who famously said he had better things to do than serving in the Vietnam War.

But this evening a man driving a black Lexus like the one above parked in front of a local Starbucks in a way that blocked both the handicap ramp in the sidewalk and the fire hydrant.  The arrogant SOB at the wheel of this expensive car jumped as much as a 250+pound man can from a drivers seat when I pointed out the error of his ways.  He was belligerent and said he would knock me into next week, I laughed, told him to take a shot, and then called him a plus-size coward in Army language for blustering and backing off.  I was wearing an Army workout jacket and jeans.

He was very well dressed and said my clothes were out of style--a very schoolyard insult for a 65-year-old rich guy.  I said, "Army is out of style?"  He said, "What are you some kind of local Guardsman or something?"  I realized the way he said it, that he was a draft dodger and thought of the Army National Guard as a way to avoid war, the way it was during the Vietnam War.  Looking in his face, I saw a look I had not seen since the Vietnam War. This draft dodger is now vindicated, at least in his own mind.  When Bill Clinton was elected despite begging to get out of the draft, the Conservatives roasted him--with a huge helping of hypocrisy since they were mostly draft dodgers themselves.

But now draft dodging is "ancient history." The President Elect got elected after bragging about dodging the draft.

Draft dodgers wife returned to the car and they left.

Most of the soldiers I served with in our current wars take for granted that the public is pro-military. But now that someone who sneered at draftees will be in the White House, the military could drop in prestige.  Trump has already trashed Prisoners of War.  Every soldier is a government employee so cutting the size of the military would reduce spending.

When the rich, powerful men who dodged the draft are free from guilt for letting another man serve in their place, then Vietnam Veterans will be Losers again, and the veterans of our recent wars will not be far behind.

Who WILL Fight Our Wars? People of Color

My youngest son Nigel is a very proud member of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) chapter at McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pa.  We went to a military ball on Friday night for his chapter and two other chapters in nearby York and Reading.

More than 100 students and their families attended the event which concluded with a really tough drill and ceremonies competition.  Looking around that room, I saw mostly Hispanic boys and girls. Of the 100 or so students, about 75 were Hispanic, 15 were African-American, 8 were Asian and two were white.

These students are training to get a head start into College ROTC programs and become military officers.  Nigel said ten of the students in his chapter are Hispanic, three are African-American and three are from Nepal.  No white kids.  There are three girls in the program, all Hispanic.

At both ends of my career, during the Vietnam War and in Iraq, the active duty military is overrepresented with Hispanics and other immigrant groups and African-Americans.  During the Vietnam War this was the natural result of rich white kids getting deferments while brown kids went in their place.  In a volunteer military, combat service is a fast track to citizenship, or a to job training and college.

Since the Vietnam War and draft dodging became the norm for those with enough money, the American military has had more men and women of color than the population in general.  My son's JROTC program shows the trend is continuing.

The young people at the military ball are tomorrow's military leaders.

Three Books About Before and After War by Kazuo Ishiguro

[I am reposting this essay because some ten of my posts are getting odd traffic. Just an experiment.]



This summer I have read three more books by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I have just two books to go to read all of his seven novels and a collection of short stories. 

The first novel I read, and still my favorite, is "The Remains of the Day." Like the novels I will talk about below, it is about life in the years before and after World War II.  We see the world change and we see the effects when great men make great mistakes in all of these novels.

In the three novels I read recently, World War II is in the background, but we see very little fighting.  We see lives changed, relationships made and ruined and the horror of war lurking somewhere just beyond the page. 

Ishiguro's first novel,"A Pale View of Hills," is set in Nagasaki just after the War.  The narrator is Etsuko, a young woman who has a troubled friend who is a single mother.  The narrator eventually marries, has children, divorces and moves to England.  The single mother, Sachiko, is erratic and Sachiko's daughter, Mariko, is very strange.

Occasionally characters in the story mention that some part of Nagasaki is looking more lovely than ever.  No one says Nuclear Blast Site, but the park or garden they praise not so long before was the site of the single biggest bomb blast in World War II.  The people of Nagasaki are trying to restore their lives under American occupation and with an invisible hazard no one really understands. 

Was the troubled child a radiation victim? Did the narrator's daughter eventually commit suicide as an adult because of being born in Nagasaki just after the war?  Losing the War, the Bomb, and American Occupation haunt the narrative and deepen the tragedy of this beautifully told story.

The second novel is "An Artist of the Floating World" The first-person narrator is an aging artist named Masuji Ono. The story is set in post-war Japan in an unnamed city.  We hear the story of Ono's life in his memories and through conversations he has with old colleagues and with his family, especially his daughters. 

Ono started as a commercial artist churning out paintings for sale to tourists.  He eventually finds a "master" and spends several years with an artist who paints the pleasure world of Imperial Japan--Geishas and the places they work.  As the war nears, Ono becomes political and is rejected by his master.  Before and during the war, Ono's propaganda paintings have a wide audience, but in the Japan of democracy and US Occupation, Ono hides his paintings and his past.  Again, the war is not at the center but hovers everywhere in the background.  The "Floating World" of the title is the euphemism for the pleasure zones where men gathered for drink and games and women.   

The third book is "When We Were Orphans," is a detective novel set in Shanghai in the years before and after World War II.  We follow the narrator, Christopher Banks, from his childhood in Shanghai in the 1920s through the 1950s and the resolution of the mystery.

Christopher is the child of English expatriates working and living in Shanghai. His best friend is a Japanese boy, Akira, whose family is also in the expatriate community in pre-war Shanghai.  When Christopher is nine, his parents disappear, first his father, then his mother.  Christopher goes to England to live with relatives and grows up to become a great detective.  On the eve of World War II, Christopher returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents disappearances. 

Through Christopher Banks we see China torn by the communists and the nationalists and the horrible atrocities committed by both.  We also see the beginnings of the Japanese invasion. The return of Akira to the story was the most implausible moment of an otherwise brilliant book. 

As with "The Remains of the Day" each of these books present the atmosphere of the period before and following World War II from a very different perspective.  For people like me who are interested in war and its effect on history, these books show how profoundly wars change the lives of those who survive the war, especially those on the losing side.   

Recruiter Update and ASVAB Scores are No Help for Old Men

On Friday last week, I visited Army National Guard Recruiter SFC Doug Kicklighter.  We were talking about one of my sons possibly joining the Army.  Doug also let me know that I had mixed apples and oranges on the scores I used in my previous post on drill sergeants and recruiters.

A recruit must have and AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) score of 31 or better to enlist.  But that score is on a 99-point scale.  I said it was on a 160-point scale like all the individual scores on the ASVAB (Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery).  So the 31-point minimum is out of a possible 99, not 160.

Of the ten scores that make up the ASVAB, the one most often referred to is the GT (General Technical) score.

A GT score of 110 or above allows a soldier to qualify for any job in the Army.

I took the ASVAB test on April 18, 2007, to re-enlist after a 23-year break in service. I was 54 years old.  When I finished the test at MEPS (Military Enlistment Processing Station) in Mechanicsburg, the Navy Chief overseeing the computer-based test stood up and shook my hand.  He congratulated me and said, "You have the highest score of the year so far. These kids here right out of school can barely pass and here you are, a man your a.......I mean a gentleman like yourself outscores all these kids."

A few minutes later he walked over to me and said, "You know Mr. Gussman, with a GT score of 141 and an AFQT of 99 you qualify for just about any school the military offers."  Then he smiled and said, "But at your age there ain't any schools will take you. Good luck.  Damn good job."

He shook my hand again.

Age discrimination is legal in the Army.