The main job an officer had in the squadron was to be a pilot or RIO. Pilots were judged on their competency in the air, whether they were ‘a good stick’. This ranking went on a scale from “a damn fine stick’ to ‘unsafe at any speed’.
Introduction: Jim Enderle, Dispatches Editor
I was asked to introduce myself, so here goes. I’m an active duty (until this November’s retirement) Navy Chief Petty Officer/Hospital Corpsman stationed in Groton, CT. I oversee, as leading chief, Substance Abuse Rehabilitation/Traumatic Brain Injury/Behavior Health Clinics situated on the Navy’s New London Submarine Base. After retirement, I hope to continue serving my comrades in arms in one form or another.
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.”
MWSA members: here is the link to my upcoming interview on Military Author Radio Sunday evening at 1730 PST: http://www.militaryauthorradio.com/. Looking forward to seeing you all in Dayton!