Shadow of the Sword: A Marine's Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption
Jeremiah Workman with John Bruning. New York, NY: Presidio Press, 2009. 272 pp. Prologue. Epilogue. $26.
Reviewed by Captain Wesley R. Gray, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
In Shadow of the Sword: A Marine's Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption, Staff Sergeant Workman and co-author John Bruning masterfully tell the gut-wrenching story of Workman's struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how it can debilitate even the strongest Marine. The tale is inspiring, tragic, and perplexing all at once.
Workman is a Marine's Marine: athletic, handsome, high-school football star, hometown hero, loyal to the last drop, and willing to die for his country. He proves himself during the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, which earned him the Navy Cross, the nation's second highest award for bravery. And yet even this exemplary Marine falls prey to the hidden, devastating wound that is PTSD.
The book interweaves Workman's combat experiences with the challenges he faces in daily life when he returns home. The skillful storytelling gives the reader a vivid sense of his tragedy. In one instance, the narrative flashes back to Workman courageously dragging a fellow Marine from certain death. During a hairsplitting firefight, Workman struggles to reach the HumVee. Exhausted, he hauls himself and his comrade toward safety: "I take a step, then another. Each move bleeds energy, erodes my strength. But I am not going to fail this man. I will die first. Weight down on my right hand, left leg crab-walks forward. Right leg pushes off. Weak now, barely functional. I scream from effort, teeth grinding, muscles straining, body taut and taxed. The sniper lays a bullet right beside us." In the end, Workman's efforts are not enough, and his buddy dies from his wounds before the hero can save him.
This tragic scene of bravery and gallantry in combat is juxtaposed with a very different sort of tragedy. Once home, his mind still focused on Fallujah, Workman bickers with his pregnant wife, and his thoughts turn to suicide. He envisions jamming a .22 pistol into his mouth against the back of his throat. "Dead inside, I don't care. Whatever I feel after this is over; I'll drown it in liquor and drugs. I pull the trigger and watch with fierce satisfaction as my son's face collapses with grief and trauma." Clearly, while Workman managed to escape with his life, he remains a combat casualty.
Although initially he believes that asking for help would betray his warrior ethos, Workman finally reaches out and is able to begin to heal his deep psychological wounds. The path to recovery is not easy, but he never gives up. He struggles with addiction to the drugs meant to ease his pain, agonizing over whether he failed his Marine brothers in combat. In the end, Workman, a true American hero, fights his way through PTSD with as much courage and bravery as he fought insurgents in Fallujah.
Workman's own words summarize the bitter struggle that thousands of combat veterans endure each day: "Every day is a new battle in this long campaign. There will be no decisive victory. There's no finish line with chronic PTSD. It all comes down to managing it and learning to live with its effects. It conquers you, or you conquer it. That's really what it comes down to, isn't it? And some days, I'll lose the fight. But that doesn't mean I'll give up on the campaign. It just means I'll have to come back harder and more determined the next day. And the next. To do anything else disgraces the men who died that day [in Fallujah]."
Shadow of the Sword is an important book about a debilitating injury that thousands of warriors struggle with each day. It is only fair that Americans understand the true costs of war. Be informed. Be inspired. Read this book.
The Age of Invincible: The Ship that Defined the Modern Royal Navy
Nick Childs. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2009. 208 pp. Illus. $39.99.
Reviewed by Andrew Lambert
In this engaging and lively study, BBC journalist Nick Childs explains how a limited hot war and the end of the Cold War changed the course of British history and revived the Royal Navy.
In 2008 the British government finally ordered the two 65,000-ton aircraft carriers that had been in the strategic plan since 1998. When they enter service in the middle of the next decade HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales will be the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy, and if they are equipped with F-35 aircraft, by far the most powerful. These ships will allow British governments to decide whether to respond to international events, and if so, in what form. They would be the flagships of any European reaction and a major asset for an American-led task force. They will sustain the Royal Navy as the world's second navy for the next 50 years, the only other fleet with truly global reach, significant amphibious forces, nuclear-powered submarines, and a useful, if thin, escort force. It might seem ironic that a Labour government is placing the order 42 years after another Labour government cancelled the previous "new" fleet carrier project, CVA-01, but much water has passed under Westminster Bridge since 1967.
In this first draft of the history of those earlier, tumultuous years, Childs uses the "Harrier carriers" of the Invincible class to examine the human, economic, political, and strategic issues. After 25 years' hard service Invincible, hero of the 1982 Falklands War, has paid off and is unlikely to be returned to service, but her sisters, Illustrious and Ark Royal, will sustain British naval aviation for another eight or nine years.
Childs' story begins with the cancellation of the CVA-01 Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier, a devastating decision much like the decision to scrap the USS United States in 1949, which threatened the very existence of the Navy. Through a combination of overwhelming need, technical innovation, and sheer good luck, the initial plan for a 10,000-ton helicopter carrier morphed into a 20,000-ton Harrier carrier, powered by the same engine plant as the Concorde. In the process the ship retained much of the character of a destroyer, in build, looks, and handling.
Yet no sooner had Invincible entered service than planned defense cuts in 1981 forced her sale to Australia. A few months later the Argentine military junta invaded the Falkland Islands. Invincible and the old light carrier Hermes deployed just over 20 Sea Harrier fighters to the South Atlantic and won the air superiority battle over the islands, paving the way for an amphibious invasion. The sale was cancelled. Since then all three ships have seen extensive service, especially after the end of the Cold War, as global flashpoints multiplied, and alliance/coalition operations proliferated. In the 1997 Strategic Defence Review the British government recognized that as a small island utterly dependent on the sea for food, fuel, and economic activity, such operations were inevitable. The Invincible class saved British fixed-wing naval aviation, proving that no amount of shore-based aviation can replace a single, tiny carrier when it comes to mobility, sustainability, and flexibility.
Anyone wishing to understand the contemporary Royal Navy would do well to start with this book. There are lessons to be drawn, but Childs avoids the obvious dangers of hyperbole. His cast of characters, many interviewed for this book, complements a solid research effort in the archives and the media. One conclusion that stands out is the problem of sustaining defense commitments in a modern democracy. The greatest threat comes not from politicians, who rarely last long enough to make a difference, but from their bureaucratic advisers, who last forever. Top Ministry of Defence civil servant Sir Michael Quinlan provided anti-carrier briefings for the RAF in 1961 and was still actively lobbying against the current carrier project in 2008, only months before his death.
Childs reminds us that history is an endless debate between the present and the way we choose among the many and contingent versions of the past that coexist. This book is the record of a successful fight back from disaster, but one strike of a politician's pen could turn it back into a tragedy.
War Stories: A Graphic History
Mike Conroy, with forward by Garth Ennis. New York: Harper Collins/Collins Design, 2009. Illus. Index.192 pp. $24.99
Reviewed by Eric Smith
Readers of a certain age will remember the classic war comics whose heyday arrived between the 1940s and the early 1960s. Sure, they were often plainly, even crudely drawn. Their plots were minimal. Their colors were either muddy or lurid. But there was something about the depiction of heroic American GIs blazing away at demonic Nazi, Japanese, and communist enemies that excited youngsters and helped turn the comic book industry into an economic powerhouse.
Now Mike Conroy, editor of Comics International magazine and author of several related books, has assembled a brief but lavishly illustrated history of the genre. He says in the introduction that his book is less an encyclopedic look at the field than "a primer, an introduction" to it.
Accordingly, he has arranged the subject of war comics into chronological chapters related to the conflicts they covered, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War and beyond. Each chapter contains a short essay on subcategories such as "Superheroes Go to War," "Flying Aces," "Tales of the Green Beret," and "Weird War Tales." Because the author is British, he includes a substantial amount of material on British war comics, a topic that will be much less familiar to American readers.
The real appeal of this volume, however, lies not in its words, but in its wealth of graphic images. In full four-color reproductions, every page displays a vivid array of rampaging tanks, exploding ships, gritty soldiers, and swooping war planes. The book's enlarged trade paperback format is just right for the artwork. All the great names in war-comic illustration are here: John Severin, the incomparable Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, the British illustrator Joe Colquhoun, Will Elder, and Wallace Wood. It would be only a slight overstatement to say that Kubert, of the "Sgt. Rock" series, is justly considered to be the Michelangelo of war-comic art.
At the other end of the spectrum was the multitude of mediocre war stories produced by Atlas, later to become Marvel Comics. With its stable of hack writers and unskilled illustrators, Atlas war comics, notably the "Combat Kelly" and "Combat Casey" series, look today as if they had been drawn by the children who nevertheless read them so avidly. British war-comic books of the era, on the other hand, offered more accurate depictions and more realistic stories than their American counterparts. Firearms in the hands of American GIs, for example, were often drawn so sloppily as to be laughable, but a British Tommy's rifle was invariably a well-rendered Enfield. British comic book writers also preferred to base their stories on actual battles and incidents rather than imaginary ones.
The author takes his history into the present, as the patriotic fervor of the mid-20th century has devolved into widespread cynicism about the military. Comics dealing with the wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, terrorism, conflicts in the Balkans, and the Gulf wars have a harder, more bitter edge to them than, say, their naive World War II predecessors. Jingoism and propaganda have been replaced by suspicion and skepticism, and the war comics of our time (sometimes called "graphic novels") reflect these sentiments.
War Stories is both a visual delight and a fascinating, informative account of the origins and growth of the grand old war comics of our youth. If you have become too mature to read them, you're never too old to read about them.
Terror on the Seas: True Tales of Modern Day Pirates
Daniel Sekulich. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2009. Notes. Bib. Index. 308 pp. $24.95.
Reviewed by Martin N. Murphy
Authors, and publishers keen to excite the interest of the reading public, continue to conflate the words terror, terrorism, and the terrifying. Terror is the use of coercive measures by a government to cow the population under its control into acquiescence. Terrorism is the use of violence by a non-state group against individuals or collectives carried out with the aim of forcing a government to agree to its political demands. These activities are terrifying, but so are many other experiences, including being hijacked and robbed at sea beyond the possibility of rescue. This is the author's subject, and despite its title Mr. Sekulich has written a useful book that employs anecdote to highlight some of the main features of modern-day piracy.
Its strength lies in its solid reporting. In this Sekulich follows in the footsteps of John Burnett's Dangerous Waters, about an encounter with pirates off Borneo, and Robert Stuart's In Search of Pirates, a tale of piracy in and around the Singapore Straits. The author is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, giving him an eye for detail and a gift for conveying atmosphere that draws in the reader. We are transported briskly from a London populated by ghosts of pirates long gone, where meetings are conducted in offices at the end of narrow alleys or outside in the street with someone who warns the author to take care because, it's "a funny old world, piracy is," to isolated villages overlooking the Malacca Strait, and the dockside at Mombasa, Kenya, where the heat and humidity stupify even the cockroaches.
During his journey Sekulich meets experts and even a real pirate who help him identify many key features of modern-day piracy: that the number of attacks is seriously underreported, the shipping industry is secretive and treats piracy as a cost of doing business, piracy can be violent and, while sharing common features wherever it occurs, its causes and the way it is carried out differ from place to place. Moreover, even when attacks against international shipping decline as they have done in the Strait of Malacca, those against local fishermen continue, and few observers believe the problem will be eradicated any time soon. By weaving in stories of modern-day piracy with vignettes from the past, the author reminds the reader that little in modern piracy is new.
However, while the author recounts each incident with panache, he does not explain why piracy occurs or why it declines, who benefits, what the costs are, and how it might be curtailed. Piracy is a specialized form of thievery. It demands particular skills and capital for the boats and other equipment, the complicity of government officials, and in many cases, political figures who are willing to turn a blind eye for a share of the profits. It can take place only in narrow seas well-populated with targets, whether these are local fishing boats or international oil tankers, and to make it really profitable it requires access to markets into which hijacked cargoes or people can be sold. Pointing to the need to eradicate root causes is simplistic and sidesteps the need to address the particular circumstances that make each case of piracy different.
The attempt to link piracy and terrorism also falls flat. The author argues that in simple terms the two phenomena are linked but then proceeds to undermine the assertion by acknowledging that several problems arise when looking for actual evidence. The admission that any such search leads the researcher quickly into "what if" territory leads in turn to the realization that lying and misinformation come with that territory and that the "hard part is trying to separate fact from fiction."
This dead end should not, however, discourage the interested reader. The book is a good starting point for anyone keen to know more about an often terrifying crime.