The Road Ahead and Miles Behind by Mike Ligouri

The Road Ahead and Miles Behind: A Story of Healing and Redemption between Father and Son (Morgan James Publishing, 152 pp. $12.95, paper; $9.95, Kindle) is a book about a road trip taken by a two-tour Iraq War veteran and his father. Although neither is a Vietnam War veteran, the book’s messages are meaningful to all who served in uniform.

The two drove cross country in a van to attend the Sebring 12 Hours race in November 2020. Mike Ligouri and his father James were quite dysfunctional and close to estranged. James Ligouri had caused the divorce by cheating on Mike’s mother. This caused a lot of bitterness.

Plus, Mike and his dad had never connected. Mike felt that his father was never there for him. “It’s an awful thing to admit you dislike someone you love,” he writes.

His father was a race car fanatic and Mike was not interested. Suddenly, out of the blue, his father called him about accompanying him on his annual road trip to Florida to see the race. Mike decided to go, even though his father had a track record of letting him down.

The eleven-day trip allowed the two to mend fences and find common ground. Mike worried that all that time with his father would exacerbate their problems. That didn’t happen, and the good news is that the book is not about eleven days of silence—or yelling. The two ended up discussing a wide range of topics. God and the afterlife, for instance, which gets an entire chapter. The trip does not turn Mike into a racing fanatic, but it’s successful in bridging the gap between father and son.

Early in the book, you will start thinking of your father (or son) and by the end of it, you will be pondering a road trip with him. The book is not bittersweet. However, it could create bittersweet memories in its readers.

Although Mike is a war veteran and alludes to PTSD issues, his book is not about a troubled veteran dealing with his inner demons.

Mike and his dad have a fairly common relationship. Many will relate to being on a different wavelength than their father. “Our parents want what’s best for us,” Mike observes. “We want to discover on our own what’s best for us.”

The book has a few themes that will stick with you. “Life is not meant to be done alone,” for example, and “Life is a race anyway. Might as well run it.” Father and son buy matching t-shirts that read, “It’s all about the ride.” The book shows that a ride, if it’s hours with your dad (or mom), can totally change a parent-child relationship. 

Mike Liguori

I suppose that could be for the worse, but this book concentrates on the positives. If you take a similar trip, you may find that you are more like your father than you think or want to admit. 

The Road Ahead and Miles Behind is a book that I highly recommend if you have a less-than- ideal relationship with your father (or son). By asking why your fatther did things that had a negative impact on your life you may learn that he was sheltering you from things that were bothering him. 

In the case of Mike and James Liguori, it was job problems. If your father has died, you might find comfort in realizing that any coldness you felt may have been his way of sheltering you from the grim realities of life.   

–Kevin Hardy

Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth Samet

Is all sentimentality crass? Can nostalgia distort our collective memory into jingoism? Have Americans so celebrated victory in World War II to have willfully misremembered the past, setting a path for seventy-five years of misbegotten military adventurism? To Elizabeth Samet, an English professor at West Point, the answer to these questions is a resounding yes.

In her iconoclastic new book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 368 pp., $28, hardcover; $20, paper; $14.95, Kindle) Samet undertakes an examination of American cultural identity and history, which evolved from confusion and cynicism in the immediate postwar years to American triumphalism and exceptionalism in the subsequent decades.

That sea change, Samet argues, was based on a false sentimentality, a nostalgia promoted by three familiar names: the historian Steven Ambrose, TV anchor Tom Brokaw, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

Because Samet believes America’s entry into the Second World War was necessary and just, it’s instructive to undertake an etymological examination of the word “good,” as in “the good war.” In that instance, “good” is the depiction of the heroism abounding in Ambrose’s famed 1992 book, Band of Brothers and Spielberg’s acclaimed 1998 film, “Saving Private Ryan,” and the hagiography to Brokaw’s assessment of the World War II generation as America’s “greatest.”

As George Orwell did before her, Samet deconstructs the tropes that have pervaded this mythology:

• that the United States went to war in 1941 to free the world of tyranny
• that all Americans were united and made sacrifices to advance that effort
• that the Americas fought only reluctantly and always decently
• that it was America that ultimately saved the world.

Samet investigates American culture in that context primarily through examining works of film and fiction, as well as through memoirs, correspondence, and government-issued travel guides.

The American War in Vietnam, she rightly notes, is widely seen as a dent in the armor of the country’s invincibility, one repaired by the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and the actions of George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War. Regrettably, the tragic Robert McNamara—an easy target—receives as much attention from Samet as the works of the Neil Sheehan, Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff.

In her final chapter, Samet makes a provocative, but ultimately tenuous, argument in which she likens the Civil War’s Lost Cause Theory to the so-called Greatest Generation. The Civil War, Samet believes, has been turned into a “theme park,” with the Lost Cause myth serving as Teflon—despite the removal of a “few statues”—to all attempts to foster a better understanding of the war. That “few” statues, though, is now approaching one hundred, and Samet’s perspective on this reckoning calls into question her perspective on the current culture.

A book of estimable erudition, Samet’s writing is proficient and accessible, though the sheer number of movie and novel summaries tends to distract. The book righteously calls for a more complete and nuanced understanding of World War II, but suffers from its own form of absolutism that diminishes its thesis.

Though Samet’s book is skillfully argued, her thesis is not wholly original. Nostalgia has long been the ideal strawman for progressive intellectuals—the historian Richard Hofstadter in the 1940s and 1950s being the exemplar—and pundits have criticized Ambrose, Brokaw, Spielberg, and their ilk for more than thirty years.

Military adviser Dale Dye with Tom Hanks shooting “Saving Private Ryan”

“We search for a redemptive ending for every tragedy,” Samet writes. But notwithstanding the Rambo movies, the cultural response to the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has generally lacked redemption, as well as sentimentality.

There is a fine line between understanding history and celebrating patriotism, between appreciating and honoring those who sacrificed and served and idolizing and mythologizing them to the point that they are dehumanized abstractions. Samet’s strength is showing the pervasive power of World War II on American identity and leadership. But is all sentimentality bad? Of course not.

Nonetheless, Samet’s Looking for the Good War is a valuable and provocative take on the dangers of nostalgia and the need for vigilance.

–Daniel R. Hart

Our Best War Stories edited by Christopher Lyke

The title—Our Best War Stories: Prize-Winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards (Middle West Press, 234 pp. $17.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) edited by Christopher Lyke—sets up expectations that the book meets time and time again. The awards, honoring an Iraq War veteran killed in a training accident, are administered by Line of Advance, an on-line veterans literary journal. Lyke, a U.S. Army veteran of the Afghanistan War, is the journal’s co-founder and editor.

As for the poems, I especially enjoyed “Starling Wire” by David S. Pointer because of its great word flow and the use of words such as “microscopicesque” and “retro-futuristically.” I also liked Eric Chandler’s “Air Born,” which has us flying home with a “war hangover,” and Jeremy Hussein Warneke’s “Facing 2003,” in which he looks at the aftermath of war with a poem inside a poem. Randy Brown’s “Robert Olen Butler wants nachos” deals with desire.

“Soldier’s Song” by Ben Weakley is my favorite among the poems as it lyrically deals with time and worlds that exist in the tip of a bullet that barely misses your head. In “Havoc 58” Laura Joyce-Hubbard describes a grief-filled widowed pilot’s wife as “Dressed black-drunk.”

Some of the short stories that stood out were David R. Dixon’s “The Stay,” about a man who can smell death, and Michael Lund’s “Left-Hearted,” featuring a man with a rare heart condition. Other worthy stories include  “Bagging It Up” by Scott Hubbartt, and “Walking Point” by former Marine Dewaine Farria, my second favorite story in the book, looks at the warden of a small town prison in Oklahoma. Some of his memories are of men who became only “blood-soaked heaps of jungle fatigues on stretchers.” He uncovers a prisoner’s dangerous shank and realizes that prison and war “encourage ingenuity.’”

“Village With No Name” by Ray McPadden is my favorite short story in the book. It’s set in Iraq and looks at a group of men motivated to get their dangerous mission completed quickly because of an impending sandstorm. They shoot dogs “for no particular reason” and carelessly rip down electric lines as they drive through a village. Then, when one of the men is bitten by a poisonous cobra, and the medic says, “I ain’t no snake doctor,” they find themselves begging for help from an old woman and her jar of paste.

Christopher Lyke

In Travis Klempan’s “Some Kind of Storm” a newly discharged veteran finds himself in “the least hospitable place in America,” a Christian rock festival in southern Oklahoma. He encounters the Painted Man (a tribute to Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man) whose tattoos seem to come to life.

The most exciting story is “Green” by Brian L. Braden. In it, a helicopter pilot refueling in-flight suddenly sees tracers from ground fire arcing in the sky. In William R. Upton’s “A Jeep to Quang Tri” we’re aboard a fixed-wing Caribou in Vietnam about to land on a “small dirt strip with more VC than flies on a dog turd.”

Our Best War Stories contains many great poems, stories, and essays—all of them well-told. That’s as good a combination as you can ask for.

–Bill McCloud

Call Sign Chaos by Jim Mattis and Bing West

Commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1972, Jim Mattis missed serving in the Vietnam War. But as he points out in Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (Random House, 300 pp; $28, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle; $45, Audio CD), the Vietnam War generation of Marines “raised” him. In his book, written in collaboration with Bing West, Mattis shares what he learned during a forty-year Marine Corps career.

A four-star general who led troops into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mattis recently served two years as the Secretary of Defense. In his prologue, Mattis describes himself as “old fashioned” and unwilling to “take up the hot political rhetoric of our day.” That’s why he doesn’t discuss his personal relationship with President Trump in the book.

Bing West served as a Marine grunt in the Vietnam War in 1966-68 and as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration. A journalist, who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was present for many operations Mattis led. West has written ten books on military topics.

From the rank of lieutenant colonel through lieutenant general, Jim Mattis led Marines the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, In Afghanistan in 2001-02, and Iraqi in 2003-04. He commander all U.S. forces in the Middle East (CENTCOM) from 2010-13. In describing the war zones, he often alludes to events from the Vietnam War. His thorough reading of military history allows him also to compare his decisions to those of leaders throughout history.

Call Sign Chaos is loaded with stories that reflect the application of positive leadership principles, more often than not under stress. Mattis illustrates the dichotomy between political and military thinking (and sometimes even within the ranks), particularly during the first battle for Fallujah, a stalemate. This separation of thinking prevailed even in his dealings with United States ambassadors in the Middle East when Mattis commanded CENTCOM during his final two years on active duty

Gen. Mattis and Big West

Nevertheless, Mattis presents leadership lessons applicable to occupations beyond the military. I particularly appreciated his arguments for designing a “lean staff” and delegating as much authority as possible. Regardless of the situation, Mattis remained fearlessly outspoken and true to himself.

Sixteen pages of photographs of people and events and four maps of operational areas support the Call Sign Chaos story line. Bing West shot a majority of the images in remarkably clear color.

—Henry Zeybel

 

Arabic with a Redneck Accent by Aaron D. Graham

Aaron Graham, an assistant poetry editor for The Tishman Review, is a Marine Corps veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where he served as an analyst and linguist.  He is working on a PhD in literature at Emory University and teaches English Lit and writing at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

His chapbook, Arabic with a Redneck Accent (Moonstone Press, $10, paper), contains twenty-six pages of poetry, much of which has been published in small magazines and journals such as Grist, Digging Through the Fat, The Seven Hills Review, and The Taos International Journal of Poetry.

These are short poems, mostly about one page in length. They are all very powerful. Here’s one, “Mohave Viper,” an example of Graham’s fine work:

The nearest civilization

The world’s

Biggest thermometer

Is a palm tree

On our horizon

Approaching the plywood MOUT town

The first seconds of light

Breached the horizon—

The silence of darkness

What exploded before us

Was not shrapnel, prosperous

Or tetanus-seeping Philips-head screws,

Explosions were

Refracted light bouncing from

Microfilament spindle silk

Strands left by Tarantula-legions

Covering their cacti overnight

Like a police tape perimeter

Made of muslin

A crystalline kingdom of perfection

So delicate only the infant

Rays of sun would hold in focus.

 

In predawn hours

The Mohave sand

Already instructing—

The cost of invasion is

How something beyond

Fathom is lost—

Or, rather

Comes to end

 

under retread souls—

Issued combat boots.

Fine stuff and well worth savoring at great length while—as I did—drinking my morning cup of mint tea with honey. No better way to start my day.

Aaron Graham

Reading a poem in the morning is a great way to jump-start a day in Maple Valley, Washington, or anywhere for that matter.  It’s better than reading a chapter in a war memoir, which tends to be a downer.

For ordering info, go to squareup.com/store/moonstone-arts-center/item/arabic-with-a-redneck-accent-1

–David WIllson

Shooting War by Anthony Feinstein

Anthony Feinstein’s Shooting War: 18 Profiles of Conflict Photographers (Glitterati Editions, 224 pp., $50) isn’t a photo book. It’s about war photographers; each one’s profile usually is accompanied by a single photo. Despite the striking Vietnam War image on the cover, anyone expecting the book to center around that conflict will be disappointed. Only two profiles are about photographers who covered that war. Just one of the profiled photographers—Chim Seymour—worked in World War II.

Conflicts have continued since 1975, and the men and women profiled here—several born after the conclusion of the Vietnam War—courageously documented fighting in such places as Serbia, the Central Africa Republic, South Africa, Libya, and Israel. Feinstein interviewed each photographer (or friends or relatives in the cases of Alexandra Boulat and Tim Hetherington, both of whom died in the conflicts they covered), then wrote individual essays describing their work, their motivations, the personal cost of their occupations, and what they witnessed.

Don McCullin has made a life’s work of covering conflict, including the Vietnam War. He was there at Hue during Tet ‘68, documenting some of the worst of the fighting. His stunning image of a battled-fatigued American Marine in Hue graces the cover of the book. Feinstein—a University of Toronto psychiatry professor who won a Peabody for his documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat—considers McCullin’s “intoxicating allure of war itself,” and compares his work to Goya’s etchings, The Disasters of War, which depicted Napoleon’s occupation of Spain.

“The name Tim Page is synonymous with the Vietnam War,” Feinstein writes. Page’s up-close images of that war are well known, as is his delight in working alongside the troops. Despite serious head injuries and obvious PTSD, Page recalls the war Vietnam with awe:

“What a great place to have a war,” he told Feinstein. “Good-looking women, great food, beaches, and the best dope.”

—Michael Keating

I Just Want to See Trees by Marc Raciti

Marc Raciti wanted to commit suicide but could not make himself do it. Instead, he opted for “passive suicide” by repeatedly volunteering for deployments to hot spots where he hoped to “die with dignity” in “support of the Global War on Terror.” During his 1989-2013 Army career, Raciti, a retired U.S. Army Major, survived five deployments to Kosovo, Iraq, and on the African continent while his life turned increasingly unbearable.

As an Army Physician Assistant who treated the dying and wounded, Raciti suffered guilt feelings for surviving while troops around him died or disappeared into the medical network without him ever knowing their fate.

“I had cared for the wounded, mourned for the dead and consoled the survivors to the point that I was numb,” he says.

In I Just Want to See Trees: A Journey Through P.T.S.D. (Jones Media, 160 pp. $9.99, paper; $5.99, Kindle), Raciti tells the story of personal agony that became PTSD during his twenty-four year Army career. He wrote the book in hope that telling how he dealt with his disorder might serve as a lesson for others with PTSD.

This memoir should interest Vietnam War veterans because of the guidance and hope it offers for those suffering from trauma generated by war. In presenting what he experienced, Raciti does not dwell on the gore and horror that produced his recurring guilt and nightmares. Instead, he concentrates on his post-war misbehavior, which created what he calls “a wide trail of severed relationships.”

Raciti examining a Somali woman in northern Ethiopia

Sharing hard-earned methods for coping with “constant anxiety and paranoia,” Raciti tells how he conquered “survivor’s guilt, shame, and feeling unworthy of life.”

The book ends happily. Raciti learns to control his PTSD with help from an enlightened wife, a caring counselor, and a service dog.

“PTSD is a chronic condition and medication only manages part of it,” he says. “Therapy manages the rest.”

The author’s website is marcraciti.com/services.html

—Henry Zeybel

The Pentagon’s Wars by Mark Perry

If you are looking for an inside look at the most important military discussions that took place in the last thirty years, read Mark Perry’s The Pentagon’s Wars: The Military’s Undeclared War Against America’s Presidents (Basic Books, 368 pp.; $30, hardcover; $17.99, Kindle).

Perry—a military historian, author, and a former editor of The VVA Veteran—presents behind-the-scene arguments based on his three decades of on- and off-the-record interviews with the nation’s highest civilian leaders and senior U.S. military officers. This book includes the fruit of eighty-two interviews Perry conduction with more than fifty military officers in the last two years.

Perry first explains the technical Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which began in the 1970s. He ties it to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act. Combined, the two actions aimed to end inter-service competition and required the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps “to plan and fight together, or ‘jointly.”’ It didn’t always work that way, Perry explains.

Goldwater-Nichols took the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of the chain-of-command and reduced them to organizing, training, and equipping tasks. Thereafter, the chain went from the President to the Secretary of Defense and then to unified commanders worldwide. That included “functional” commands of special operations, strategic nuclear weapons, and global force projection.

In essence, the act gave the President a more direct link to men in the field. The change also increased the tactical and strategic advantages provided by RMA. But each general still sought a share of glory in his service, Perry says.

He goes on to lay out the story of civilian-military relations from Desert Storm to the rise of the Islamic State. That includes a wide variety of situations such as an evening meeting in the President’s limousine and an early-morning argument in a stuffy hotel room in Dayton, Ohio. In doing so, Perry conveys the emotions (and too often the pettiness) of American leaders. The scenes he describes—including the planning of Desert Storm—ring with authenticity

Naturally, Perry focuses on conflicts surrounding presidents, Secretaries of Defense, and strong military leaders such as Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Tommy Franks, “Mad Dog” Mike Mattis, Mike Mullen, Martin Dempsey, and David Petraeus. Perry highlights confrontations between Bill Clinton and Powell and Donald Rumsfeld against nearly everybody.

The 2005 “Generals’ Revolt” against Rumsfeld makes a most interesting chapter. In it, Perry explains the difficulties that America, as the world’s lone superpower, endured in finding capable leaders and tending to “overreach” to “shape the world as it saw fit.” In these respects, more than thirty years after the end of the Cold War, military leaders still have not had their voices fully heard.

Although men in uniform retained the right of freedom of speech, they frequently were bypassed in decision making, particularly on subjects that civilian leaders saw as minor issues such as those involving gay and transgender service members. Problems compounded themselves when generals failed to have their thoughts considered on issues of greater importance, Perry says.

Mark Perry

The Pentagon’s Wars closes by pointing out that today “American soldiers [are] fighting in more wars in more countries, and with less success, than at any time since the end of World War II.”

Perry concedes that civilians “elected by the people, choose which wars to fight and when.” But he champions a need for generals to have a more-influential voice. “Those in uniform deserve better,” he says. “And so do we.”

How does The Pentagon’s Wars relate to the Vietnam War? What happened there greatly influenced the thinking of the generals cited in the book. As young officers, they established reputations and proved their credibility in Vietnam, to which they refer repeatedly.

—Henry Zeybel

Brave Deeds by David Abrams

David Abrams served in the U. S. Army for twenty years and was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as part of a Public Affairs team. Much of that experience was used for his first novel Fobbit and for stories published in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Narrative, and other magazines.

His new novel, Brave Deeds  (Grove Press/Black Cat, 256 pp., $16, paper) takes place during one long day in Baghdad during which just about everything that could go wrong does go wrong. I’m much reminded of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which a \funeral dominates the narrative. The main difference is that in Faulkner’s novel the body of Staff Sgt. Rafe Morgan is not dragged on a long, dusty walk made necessary by the malfunction of a Humvee. As I Lay Dying is dark comedy classic, which Brave Deeds seems likely to become.

We get to know a squad of six soldiers about as well as a reader could in the span of this short book about perseverance and people being where they have no business (or proper preparation) to be. The squad’s predicament is funny or we wouldn’t be able to stand reading about young men who are lacking in what it takes to be modern day Lawrence of Arabias.

These are deeply troubled young men:  Cheever—fat and whining about his sore feet—is no worse than the other five, just more annoying and irritating.

This is a dark, deeply sad book, but mostly I recollect how funny many of the scenes were. A beat-up old van full of flowers and a pregnant stowaway who is about to give birth—very funny and beautifully observed by the author.

The six young men walk west across war-torn Baghdad, making fish out of water seem the most comfortable and positive and hopeful of clichés. How can they not all die horrible deaths?  Reading Louis L’Amour novels, going to Rambo and Tom Cruise movies, and watching “mud-streaked men straining up a jungled hill with Mel Gibson toward their deaths in We Were Soldiers” has not prepared them for this war.

David Abrams

One chapter is entitled “This Ain’t No Movie,” and my one thought upon seeing that heading was: That’s for damned sure. I’ve never seen—nor do I want to see—a movie like this book. The book is cinematic enough for me. This is the chapter in which golf gets a mention, which caught me off guard.

“Casualties of war, collateral damage, battle tally” get discussed in this fine novel of modern desert warfare—discussed and portrayed as well.

Read this book. Don’t send your children off to fight any war out in the desert. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.

The author’s website is davidabramsbooks.com

—David Willson

Bringing Boomer Home by Terence O’Leary

Terence O’Leary writes acclaimed, realistic, coming-of-age novels that focus on teenagers facing family crises. The crisis in Bringing Boomer Home (Swan Creek Press, 238 pp., $11.99, paper; $7.99, Kindle) relates to the war in Iraq and to young men who leave small-town Friday night football behind to serve in that conflict.

Cody and Boomer are brothers who were stars on their high school football team. When Boomer graduates from high school, he chooses to join the military and go to Iraq to become a warrior.  He saves the lives of three buddies who were being burned alive. In the process of trying to save them, Boomer is horribly burned. His face and his hands need months of reconstructive surgery.

The Vietnam War is often referred to in this book, as Cody’s girlfriend is part Vietnamese and lives with her grandmother who is 100 percent Vietnamese and who lost part of an arm in the war in Vietnam. Boomer’s father encouraged him to join up, but his mother was against the idea.  This was a source of family conflict, especially after Boomer comes back to the United States hideously scarred.

Boomer spends many months in rehab and eventually returns to his community. Cody’s girlfriend Kim, a photographer, prepares the community for Boomer’s return by creating a photo essay. Kim’s grandfather was a Vietnam War photographer and there is much discussion of other Vietnam War photojournalists, including Larry Burrrows, Catherine Leroy, Eddie Adams, and Nick Ut.

The title gives a lot away. The final third of the book is devoted to what steps are taken to bring Boomer home to his community. These steps are risky and complicated, but they work out—after a fashion.

Terence O’Leary

This is a Young Adult novel, and one expects that since it is aimed at young people, it will have a hopeful conclusion. Those are the kind of books that Terence O’Leary writes and this one is no exception. There is no real villain, except for perhaps the war.

The book ends with yet another football game. I’ll let you guess who wins: Cody’s team or the Panthers.

This is an excellent YA novel, and one that this not-young adult enjoyed reading.

The author’s website is www.terenceoleary.com

—David Willson