The Hawk and the Dove by Tom Baker

With his big novel, The Hawk and the Dove (Page Publishing, 493 pp. $21.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle), Vietnam War veteran Tom Baker draws a thread through more than a thousand years, tying together examples of military courage by men and women who find themselves engaged in conflicts of different kinds in different places around the world.

The book opens in the middle of a Viking raid, then moves to a time when British troops are trying to hold back Napoleon’s advancing forces. In its second half, the book takes us into the American Civil War, World War II, and then the American war in Vietnam and the 1990s civil war in Rwanda.

What ties the stories together are appearances in each one of a hawk as well as dove, which almost seems to be the hawk’s mate. Sometimes the hawk attacks people, sometimes it protects others. Some people direct it to attack and the hawk responds. Sometimes it influences battlefield decisions. Which leads to the question: Is it a reincarnated warrior?

When some Vikings are asked why they pillage and rampage, the response is because it’s what they’ve always done. Baker also writes that “every little boy wants to be a warrior.”

When the second chapter moved to the Napoleonic Wars I was happy to see that Baker wrote it without making it read like just the same people from the first chapter were saying the same things they did centuries earlier. Chapter Two—which contains one surprise after another—transports the reader to a different place and time, beautifully described, though the warriors still struggle with big and small questions about war and peace.

In Chapter Three we encounter a Confederate troops fighting against the Union Army during the American Civil War. While the big reasons for this war are up for debate, most of the southern troops say they are fighting because their land had been invaded by Lincoln’s army. Here we encounter ambushes, amputations, field hospitals, and prisoners of war. A character dreams of Vikings, tying us to the book’s first page. The pairing of the hawk and dove seems more than ever to be expressing a future possibility of human beings eventually learning to coexist peacefully.

The final two chapters deal with episodes during World War II and in the Vietnam War (briefly). Things finish up in the east-central African nation of Rwanda in 1994. Throughout the book it’s made clear than women can be guided by warrior spirits just as men can. Toward the end, things become mystical, but Baker makes it work.

A summarizing quote from the book could be: “The quest for peace is an ever-renewed task, calling forth brave men and women in every generation.”

Baker’s novel is an enjoyable, thoughtful, reading experience.

–Bill McCloud

The Life of an Airborne Ranger Book Three: Everyone Comes Home by Michael Kitz-Miller

 

Michael Kitz-Miller enlisted in the U.S. Army and served for three years, leaving the military as a 101^st Airborne Division Sergeant E-5. The Life of an Airborne Ranger, Book Three: Everyone Comes Home (Xlibris, 476 pp. $34.99, hardcover; $23.93, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is the third novel in his series of Airborne ranger books. It is filled with action, along with endless details about the nature of being a career soldier in the Army taking part in conflicts in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iran Hostage, Kuwait, and Iraq.

I had never read anything about our war in Grenada, so that section of the book especially interested me. Kitz-Miller, who died in July, portrays that war as a fucked-up mess from the get-go. As an example of how unready we were to fight that war, he points out that no official maps were available. The novel’s hero, Jack Donovan, has to obtain and use tourist maps to try to find the college campuses he is supposed to be protecting and evacuating.

The 44th Airborne Division and the 45th Infantry Division are fictional units invented by the author to protect the guilty. Kitz-Miller’s heavy reliance on the teachings and writings of Ayn Rand are interesting, but are not the bible of Objectivism, her philosophic system. Rand, who once visited West Point and delivered a lecture there is mentioned often in the novel, but she’s not the only one. Audie Murphy gets a major shout-out when Donovan is described as the most decorated soldier of the modern era.  Murphy is put in the shade by Donovan who seems to get five and six of most major medals.

This massive novel follows Jack Donovan’s career up to his promotion to four-star general. The details are engrossing and well-described and held my interest. The narrative is spiced up by the adventures of Donovan’s Welsh terrier and the academic progress of Donovan’s college professor wife.

I recommend this novel to readers who are interested in Army careers and what it takes to rise to the top in the modern military. I am glad I decided that a military career was not for me. Spec.5 was as high as I went. That happens to be where Jack’s career starts in this book. Right where mine ended.

—David Willson

 

Still Come Home by Katey Schultz

Katey Schultz’s Still Come Home (Apprentice House Press, 241 pp. $26.99, hardcover; $16.99, paper; $6.29, Kindle) is a work of literary fiction. Many books are written by people who have a story to tell and do so the best they can. Schultz, on the other hand, is a gifted writer who focuses in this book on a three-day period in 2009 in Afghanistan and on three main characters.

Aasey, seventeen, lives in “a village the size of a flea” in the middle of a war. Three years earlier her entire family had been murdered, victims of false rumors, and she was forced into a rushed marriage to her father’s cousin. She feels trapped in a culture that forces her to dangerously push boundaries as she longs for more independence.

U.S. Army 2^nd LT Nathan Miller is on his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan. His six-year marriage is shaky. That situation is not helped by his life being one of saying “goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye.”

Rahim, Aasey’s husband, who is twenty-three years older than she is, finds himself working for—but not with—the Taliban. He’s torn between shielding his wife from the horrors he’s seen and dealing with her independent streak, which sometimes makes him want to “shove her into the wall.”

Miller is preparing to lead his men away from their routine of watching movies and playing pickup football games to one final humanitarian mission. His unit gets orders to drive their armored vehicles fifty kilometers across the desert to do something a helicopter drop could have handled in a few hours. But the Army knows you get a better sense of what’s going on in an area by being on the ground.

So Miller and his men prepare to go to the village of Inmar, Aasey’s home, just as she has become concerned about the Taliban’s renewed presence there. After all, it was the Taliban who “stole everything from her but her own heartbeat.” One bright spot in her life is the friendship she’s developed with a younger, mute orphan boy.

Miller has never gotten over the death of an NCO on a previous tour. He begins to question the rules of engagement and increasingly considers the brass to be giving orders for a different war than the one he and his men are fighting.

Katey Schultz

An old battered paperback copy of a Merriam-Webster dictionary becomes almost a character in the story and there is at least one major surprise.

It’s a shame that in the decades since the end of the Vietnam War, wars are still taking place for people to write about. On the other hand, it’s a blessing that we have novelists like Katey Schultz to tell stories of those wars in an enlightened and empathic manner.

The author’s website is kateyschultz.com

–Bill McCloud