Book Reviews

Title: A Wound in the Mind
Author: Francis J. Partel, Jr.
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewer: Fran McGraw

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): B00361FBVS

It is 1968. The US naval war in Vietnam is at peak level of intensity. USS Ticonderoga, Attack Carrier 14, is in the Gulf of Tonkin for her fifth combat cruise of the war prosecuting Operation Rolling Thunder. The historical naval novel has moved forward from the Napoleonic Wars of C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian to the modern navy. The ships and weapons may have changed, but time-tested traits of courage and leaderhip remain very much in demand.

Ltjg. Cannon has just returned to his stateroom when Gunnery Sergeant Mates phones him to take on the defense of a marine's marine who won the Navy Cross in the brutal Hill Fights of Khe Sanh in 1967. LCPL Cachora is charged with assault and battery while on liberty in Hong Kong. Ltjg. Cannon along with Ens. Chase take on an uphill struggle to defend their client. With the odds stacked against them, they creatively mount a spirited defense. This is the thrilling drama of Cahora's court-martial.

Title: In Our Duffel Bags, Surviving the Vietnam Era
Author: Richard C. Geschke & Robert A. Toto
Genre: Non-Fiction Military/Army
Reviewer: Ron Camarda

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 146202355X

DECEMBER 28, 2011 - First Lieutenant Richard C. Geschke and Lieutenant Robert A. Toto co-authored a book sparking emotions and revealing buried memories of the Vietnam War within the book titled In Our Duffel Bags, just published by iUniverse.

Both men are longtime service buddies as well as friends and it is through
this book they share the sometimes harrowing events encountered during their service in the “War with no purpose; no mission statement.” This
narrative book uniquely conveys each man’s first hand experiences as
soldiers serving in the US Army during the Vietnam War era and their
transition to civilian life afterwards.

“I did not realize that I had PTSD, until I started to cry while I was out
walking near my home” said Robert Toto during a recent interview. “This
book became part of my therapy.” As for Richard Geschke, his memories came about differently as he said, “It wasn’t until I had a vivid dream of
reality about a trip down the Hai Van Pass which occurred forty years ago
that the thoughts of not only Vietnam but of my entire army experience came to my foremost thoughts. I immediately put them on paper, starting with the chapter titled “Going My Way” and followed by the chapter titled “Was That Forty-One or Forty-two Rockets?”

Both men entered the military through the ROTC program which put them in as an officer once completing college. “During our day there were protests,
draft card burnings and a very lively debate about the merits of the war.
Today, because we have an all volunteer army, the regular population is more or less mute on the war. Current debates about the wars are timid in
comparison to the Vietnam era,” said Richard Geschke.

Aside from the political unrest our country was going through, these men each had their battles with society dealing with the stigma of serving the country in a war which was shunned by their peers. For Robert Toto, “It was
difficult being in grad school once I was discharged. The undergraduate
students really had no clue of what military life was.” Richard Geschke
commented, “Vietnam was a different era altogether, with the protests and
the divisive politics of the times.” He summarized, “I didn’t make military policy, and all I did was to serve my country in an honorable way!”

The stories within In Our Duffel Bags are written in a down to earth manner
using language that makes it easy to relate to the storytellers. This is the
type of book that can be a captivating read for those wanting to indulge in
the mindsets of young men forced into becoming soldiers during a war in which no one wanted to fight.

Title: Black Eagle Force: Eye of the Storm
Authors: Ken Farmer & Buck Steinke
Genre: Thriller/Adventure
Reviewer: Joyce Faulkner

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1617779644/

The AK-47 instinctively rose toward the Mexican sergeant, and bullets poured out of the suppressor like water from a hose from hell. The only sound Mike heard was the rapid, metallic clack, clack, clack of the bolt cycling, and then he caught a glimpse of two now three more uniformed men with rifles. He could sense the three shooters' intentions as their fingers moved to the triggers. For the first time ever, the inactive Marine had a really, really bad thought ... I'm not gonna make it.'

Title: In the Gray Area: A Marine Advisor Team at War
Author: Seth Folsom
Genre: Military - Marine
Reviewer: Bob Flournoy

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1591142814

In the Gray Area builds on Seth Folsom s earlier award-winning memoir, The Highway War, which described his 2003 command of one of the first Marine light armored reconnaissance battalion companies to march on Baghdad. In February 2008 Major Folsom was deployed again to Iraq as the leader of a U.S. Marine advisor team embedded with an Iraqi army infantry battalion. The realities of the Marines mission is frankly addressed by Folsom in this new work as he reflects on challenges they and their Iraqi counterparts faced in their struggle to gain control of al-Anbar province. He explores the bonds he formed with his men, the Outlanders, and the tenuous relationships forged between the American and Iraqi soldiers whose cultures were so vastly different. The author creates a compelling picture of the obstacles faced by both as they lived, ate, and fought side-by-side.

Title: Remains of the Corps
Author: Will Remain (Thomas Hebert)
Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Reviewer: Joyce Faulkner

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): B005T5BVRM

Will Remain is a fictional author. He is a third-generation Marine and a veteran of the war in Vietnam. He is writing a trilogy that will be the first multigenerational account of a Marine Corps family, chronicling his own family’s service and lives over a sixty-year period and through four wars. His work is titled The Remains of the Corps: A Marine Family History. Book I of the trilogy is titled Eagle, and Books II and III will be titled Globe and Anchor, respectively. Offered here for your consideration is the Prologue to and Chapter 1 of Eagle. Readers are encouraged to provide feedback on the material presented. In the Prologue (1,900 words), Will Remain provides, through excerpts from his personal journals, the back story on how he came to write The Remains of the Corps. In Chapter 1 (29,000 words), Will’s grandfather, Kenneth Remain, rises from the poverty of his youth to attend Harvard College where he befriends two people, the born to the purple Lawrence Blakeslee and Lawrence’s beautiful sweetheart, Kathleen Mulcahy, both of whom will greatly impact Kenneth’s life. Kenneth’s early story is told against the backdrop of historic Harvard College during the period 1913 to 1917, as war rages in Europe and Harvard students are heading off to the war by the hundreds, while America is still debating its role in the conflict. Since he was a youth, Kenneth has wanted to be a part of a great crusade. He has also long been enamored of the United States Marines and enlists as an officer in the Corps, triggering events that will have enormous repercussions on two families for generations to come.

Will Remain is a pseudonym for Tom Hebert, a second-generation Marine and a veteran of the war in Vietnam. Tom is also the author of Notes on Once An Eagle, a non-fiction work (cliff-notes style) on Anton Myrer’s classic novel Once An Eagle.

The Remains of the Corps has been in development for more than three years. Tom takes his writing very seriously. Prior to writing the novel’s first words, he completed comprehensive inventories of applicable vocabulary, clichés, and slang. He also studied literary devices, making significant use of alliteration, allusion, anagram, assonance/consonance, characterization, cliché, conflict, dialect, epigraph, flashback, foreshadowing, imagery, irony, personification, metaphor, mood, motif, repetition, quotation, setting, simile, style, vocabulary, and vocabulary of the period. He also employed: comic relief, euphemism, idiom, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, and symbolism. To ensure the authenticity of this work of historical fiction, he thoroughly researched Marine Corps history and, for the period encompassing the early 1900s, the cities and people of Boston, Worcester and Cambridge, as well as Harvard College.

The Remains of the Corps is dedicated “To every American, past and present, who claimed the title of United States Marine.”