Seabees - Can Do! Happy 75th Birthday to the Navy's Seabees.

March 5th is the 75th birthday of the U.S. Navy's Fighting Seabees. Born of the need for uniformed construction experts to build essential naval and air bases in the far-flung Pacific War, the new builder/warriors quickly made themselves indispensable to military commanders in all theaters of war. Seabees laid the floating causeways that made the invasion of Sicily possible. They built artificial ports and operated "Rhino Ferries" at the beaches of Normandy. They even ferried troops across the Rhine into Germany.

But it was in the Pacific where the Seabees made their biggest contributions. Beginning with Guadalcanal, every amphibious operation of that vicious war saw vital work by the Seabees: hundreds of airfields and ports, thousands of miles of roads, thousands of prefabricated "Quonset huts," hospitals, mess halls, and berthing facilities. Seabees built the runways from which B-29s pounded Japan and from which the Enola Gay brought ultimate destruction to the enemy.

Most people don’t realize it, but many of the characters in the famous musical, South Pacific, are Seabees. The author, James Michener, featured Seabees prominently in his breakthrough novel, Tales of the South Pacific. One of his nineteen tales deals exclusively with a Seabee battalion planning and constructing an airfield on a tropical island. It may well be the finest piece of fiction ever written about the Seabees in their long history.

Recruited from the civilian construction trades, many World War II Seabees were much older than their official records indicated. Marines were known to quip, "Never hit a Seabee. He may be some Marine's father." The Marines' ultimate compliment may have been the sign they posted on Iwo Jima:

"And when we reach the isles of Japan,
With our hats at a jaunty tilt,
We'll enter the City of Tokyo,
On roads that the Seabees built."

Seabees have enhanced their reputation in every conflict since their birth. Their floating causeways made the daring invasion at Inchon in Korea possible. Thousands of Seabees built bases, airfields, fire bases, roads, and hospitals all over Vietnam. The wars in the Middle East again demonstrated how vital these builder/fighters have become to American Military operations.

So Happy Birthday, Seabees! May your endeavors continue to inspire.

My third novel, Asphalt and Blood, tells the tale of Seabees in the 1968 Battle of Hue City. Although fictional, many of the characters are composites of real individuals and most of the seemingly-outrageous incidents in the novel did occur.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, is a Pentagon thriller about domestic terrorism.  He is currently working on a new novel, Endure The Cruel Sun, the sequel to his best-selling novel, Hold Back the Sun. For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.

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Why Must We Demonize Those Who Disagree With Us?

While I was writing my Vietnam Seabee novel, Asphalt and Blood, I read a number of memoirs by former soldiers in the conflict. I was somewhat surprised to learn that the U.S. Army purposefully trained its troops to consider the Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers as lesser forms of humans. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised. The depiction of the Japanese enemy during World War II had been even more racist. In fact, the depiction of Germans in World War I as rapacious “Huns” was part of the same process.

The psychological purpose of such demonization is to make it easier for the trainee to kill the enemy in combat. If one is taught to hate the other side, killing becomes a reasonable reaction. Many of the electronic warfare games of today originated in military training programs designed to condition the user to “zapping” another human being.

While the military usefulness of such approaches may be understandable in times of war, why have we seemingly extended “demonization” to include just about anyone with whom we disagree? The practice has been particularly virulent during the recent U.S. election cycle. The practice was not exclusive to either party but extended across the spectrum of politics. As an amateur historian, I am well aware that American elections have been plagued with demonization since the beginning of the republic, but the advent of social media has allowed intensification beyond imagination a few decades ago. I have voted in the last 15 presidential elections, and I have never seen it so bad.

Demonization leads to hate. I have written before about how hatred does nothing but poison society. I have also written about “thought police” and their hateful results. Driving wedges between various segments of society will never result in a peaceful civilization. Breeding hatred is a sure path to the disintegration of any culture.

We as a society need to start listening to one another. We need to listen not to frame a counter-argument but to actually understand what the other is thinking. When negotiating engineering and construction contracts, I learned early on to first search for the items upon which both parties agree. To bind our nation together, we need to start looking for those points upon which we agree, both in our legislative bodies and in society as a whole.

Branding those who do not share our beliefs as inferior human beings is the product of intolerance and unwarranted arrogance. Looking down your nose at other segments of society does not prove the correctness of your vision. It just assures that you will be shortsighted.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, is a Pentagon thriller about domestic terrorism.  He is currently working on a new novel, Endure The Cruel Sun, the sequel to his best-selling novel, Hold Back the Sun. For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.

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The Fire Is Still There

On September 16th, I had the honor of attending a reunion of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion FOUR in Springfield, Virginia. BUC (Builder Chief) Jeff Parker, the principal organizer, invited me to the event. He had attended the reunion of the battalion in which I served, NMCB FORTY, last year and saw my presentation on my writing and my books. He purchased a copy of my Vietnam Seabee novel, ASPHALT AND BLOOD.  Having served in the Hue-Phu Bai area, the setting of the story, he identified with many of the events about which I wrote. He wanted to share them with his fellow veterans.

Any reunion of old Seabees brings out sea stories beyond count. Plenty were being bandied about when I entered the Hospitality Suite and started introducing myself. As I listened, I realized that I was in the company of Seabee legends. These were men who had performed amazing feats of construction under fire by an implacable enemy. Some had re-laid the first aluminum matting runway of the war at Chu Lai. Others had built camps and roads throughout the northern part of South Vietnam, the famed I Corps area. I was surprised by how many of their experiences mirrored my own.

Why do these men congregate every few years just to be together again? I believe that they realize that they share a set of experiences that set them apart from the civilian world in which they live.  A sense of brotherhood pervades these gatherings. It is so much more than just shared memories. The participants worked with each other, sweated with each other, took enemy fire together, and in some cases nearly died with each other. And the fire in their bellies that sustained them through those experiences still burns brightly today. They had each other’s backs in those days, and they still do today.

One factor I notice about Seabee reunions is that almost all the attendees are Vietnam veterans. A half-century after that unpopular conflict, the men and women who participated still feel a kinship for one another that subsequent generations seem to lack.  Some of this may be tied to the way many of us were treated when we came home. At best, we were treated like fools for having risked all in such a venture. At worst, we were vilified as war criminals, called “baby killers” and rapists. We were the young generation that listened when John Kennedy called on Americans to, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!” We were asked to go halfway around the world and fight a tenacious foe in a fight without battle lines or easily identified enemies. We did our job. Despite what revisionist historians would tell you, we were not defeated on the battlefield. That war was lost by the politicians, not by the men in uniform.

I was grateful for the reception that the NMCB FOUR people gave to my short talk and to my writing. Many purchased copies, and I have already had very positive feedback. But then, ASPHALT AND BLOOD is a book about Seabees written by a Seabee.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, is a Pentagon thriller about domestic terrorism.  He is currently working on a new novel, Endure The Cruel Sun, the sequel to his best-selling novel, Hold Back the Sun. For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.

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The Poison Fruits of Hatred

Today’s world appears awash in hatred. From lone-wolf shooters to suicide bombers, the results of hatred fill our newspaper headlines and television news broadcasts. Hatred takes many forms, and all of them are evil: racial hatred, religious hatred, tribal hatred, regional hatred, class hatred, and, of course, personal hatred.

Religious hatred fuels many of the conflicts in the world. The Moslem world is split between Sunnis and Shia, and these groups have been in conflict since the Dark Ages. The fall of Haddam Hussein in Iraq let loose a torrent of bloodletting between the branches of Islam that continues to this day. Mass suicide bombings and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which practices “Shia cleansing” by massacring “enemy” forces, goes on daily. Women are frequently kidnapped into sexual slavery.  No end to this conflict is in sight.

Racial hatred still haunts the world, and not only in the American South. Much racial hatred harks back to the concept of “white supremacy” that pervaded Europe and the Americas during previous centuries. Less evolved civilizations and their inhabitants were deemed to be “inferior.” Lopsided military victories by the better- armed Europeans reinforced that view. And when Spanish priests seeking to save Native Americans from extinction began preaching that African’s black skins were a punishment from God that marked their ancestors’ evilness, generations became doomed to chattel slavery. The concept of world racial equality only began to receive acceptance in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Racial hatred still pervades many parts of this planet.  Racial hatred is a two-edged sword. Any race hating any other race(s) is racial hatred. Any race or nationality that feels itself superior to any other is, by definition, racist.

Hatred for people of Jewish extraction is a combination of religious and racial hatred. During the Middle Ages, Jews were condemned as “Christ killers” by the European churches. During the Crusades, large massacres of Jewish populations occurred all over Europe. These attitudes continued into the Twentieth Century. Anti-Semitists began to decry the “undue influence” of Jews on European history. But it remained for the Nazis of Germany to dub the Jews a “race” that needed to be exterminated. The Holocaust was the result. Creation of the State of Israel in Palestine was the United Nations’ attempt to compensate Jewish survivors for the atrocities they had suffered. Many Arabs viewed the event as the reestablishment of the crusaders’ Outremer kingdom. The attempt by surrounding Arab nations to snuff out Israel in its infancy led to the first of a series of wars that solidified a lasting hatred between the parties.

History is replete with other “holocausts” around the world. Many consider the subjugation of Native Americans by European settlers and their descendants to qualify in this category. The massacre of Armenians during World War One and the inter-tribal warfare in Rwanda clearly meet the standard. Massacres in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the so-called “ethnic cleansing,” are another example.

Hatred on a personal level results in much of the violence in the world. Many cultures include the concept of vendettas, warfare between families over some wrong or perceived slight done to one of the parties. The cartoonist for Doonesbury captured the absurdity of some vendettas during the Iraq war. A mixed American/Iraqi team is about to go on a raid. The American tells the Iraqi that they must capture the target of the raid alive. The Iraqi replies that he must kill the target because of a family feud. One of the target’s kinsmen had killed one of the Iraqi’s family. The American asked when the killing occurred. The Iraqi replied, “in the Fourteenth Century.”

Hatred is corrosive to the human spirit. No good can ever come of it. Hatred makes a person bitter, paranoid, and spiteful. It consumes valuable mental energy that is better focused on bettering the human condition. It can also destroy the holder as well as the target. Author Jack Higgins likes to quote the old European proverb, “Before beginning a journey of revenge, it is necessary to dig TWO graves.” That sums up the fruits of hatred concisely.

I don’t have enough time left in my life to waste it on hatred. Humans all need to stop hating each other!

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Domestic terrorists have a high-placed mole in the Pentagon! During the turmoil of the late 1960s, former student radicals organized and established the Phoenix Guards Brigade (PGB). In 1975, the mole electrifies the PGB high command with details of weaknesses in the storage of Navy nuclear weapons. The terrorists immediately start preparations for a commando raid to steal some of the warheads.

Snowflakes in July has exciting aerial combat scenes, assassinations, bombings, high-stakes commando operations, and thrilling romance. Read Chapter 1 of Snowflakes in July, releasing soon!

Download Chapter 1 FREE         Register for Pre-Order Notification & Giveaway

Musings About My Father

My father, Jewell Bell (25) with my mother Olive Tatum

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my father. Perhaps it is because I am approaching the age at which Dad left us. As I look at myself and think back on him, I am struck by how much harder his life was than mine has been to this point. I realize that much of that was because he worked so hard to see that his children had better lives than he did.

Jewell Thomas Bell was born at home in Milner, Columbia County, Arkansas on September 22, 1904. His mother suffered a hard labor, and she never had another child. Being a “one young’un,” as they were called in those days, was not an experience he enjoyed.

Dad’s childhood was shaped by tragedy. When he was still an infant, his mother went blind. We learned later that the blindness was a result of a childhood head injury, which sparked a benign brain tumor.  But when he was growing up, his mother’s sisters drummed into Dad’s head that the strain of giving birth to him caused his mother to go blind. This guilt trip plagued him all his life.

My grandfather, whom we called, “Pappy’” never recovered from his wife going blind. For years, he spent every dollar he could get his hands on taking her to doctors all over the region seeking a cure. Unfortunately, the state of medicine in South Arkansas in the early Twentieth Century rendered his efforts fruitless. In the process, he ended up losing his farm and having to work as a logger in the lumber industry.  Relatives from a fairly large extended family helped care for my grandmother. After losing her sight, she had become a complete invalid.  When Pappy had to cook, their meals were usually dried beans and cornbread.

Dad was apparently an avid student. Years later, he could still conjugate Latin verbs and quote many passages of poetry. Given a decent education, he could have had a bright future. But as World War One erupted in Europe, family economics trumped such considerations. Dad grew to man-sized by the time he was in the eighth grade. Big enough to do a man’s work, Pappy pulled him out of school to work full time in the woods as a logger. He would support his parents for the rest of their lives.

Despite his circumstances, Dad managed to become something of a musician, although he couldn’t read a note of music. He played a mean honky-tonk piano and also played the fiddle in the manner of Charlie Daniels. He could hear a tune once and then play it on either instrument. This ability to play “by ear” was not passed on to his children or grandchildren, but two of my grandsons, Thomas Bell and Evan Williams, inherited it. Being a member of the band at the country dances of the era was a apparently a good way to attract girls. At close to six feet tall with black hair and a wiry build, Dad was devilishly handsome.

At some point in the late 1910s or 1920s, Dad and several other young men from Columbia County decided to go up to work the Kansas winter wheat harvest to earn extra money. Winter wheat is harvested in July, when the crops in Arkansas are still immature. Dad told me of this adventure late in his life. Piling into an old Ford pickup, they drove north on the dirt roads of that time, often camping in the woods on the way. Once in Kansas, they had no trouble getting work. The mechanized equipment the Kansas farmers employed fascinated Dad. They had huge steam-driven tractors and combine machines. Dad learned how the machines operated and how to keep them repaired. He would work with machinery for the rest of his life.

After returning to Arkansas, Dad learned to set up and operate the complicated planing machines that smoothed the good Southern Pine lumber of the region. There were no computers in those days. The sophisticated machines were set up  manually, continually making adjustments until the boards produced exactly matched the industry-issued templates. The precise quality of boards from Dad’s machines became legend in the pine lumber industry.

Dad spent the rest of his working life in the lumber industry. Still the primary support for his parents, he did not marry my mother until he was past 25. From that point on, his primary focus was on supporting his family. Times were hard in those first years of the Great Depression, but Dad always managed to find work of some sort. He told me later that he was completely out of work only one day during the Depression.

Our family was definitely what was called “working class” in those days. Some politicians called us “little people,” but that always rankled. Dad routinely worked 50 or 60 hours a week. Because he was a foreman, he didn’t get overtime pay. But we had a roof over our heads, good food on the table, and decent clothes on our backs. My brother, Tom, and I were encouraged to do well in school and to look beyond our circumstances for the future. We were both given formal music training and played in the high school band. Our parents helped as much as they could, but we also had to work for our education (I worked an average of 30 hours a week at Safeway during my high school years).

The inherent danger of working with heavy machinery finally caught up with Dad. While in his forties, his left hand was caught in a machine cylinder, and he lost the middle finger of his left hand. Besides losing the digit, that accident robbed him of his ability to play music. Then, in his early sixties, he caught the same hand in a powered roller, breaking almost all the bones. With only one working hand, he could no longer work.

In his retirement, Dad was a voracious reader. But like so many people of his generation, he became inactive in his retirement and his health slowly faded. Having smoked heavily all his adult years, he developed severe emphysema, which robbed him of breath.  I didn’t get to be with him in his last days. I was on Guam in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in October 1983 when he fell and quickly succumbed to his injuries. On the way home, I thought of what I might say at his funeral. I conjured up images of him playing piano in God’s jazz band. But Dad had asked for a simple graveside service, so there was to be no eulogy. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this now. He was a good, hard-working man who loved his family. 

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Terrorism in the U.S. Before 9/11/2001

Weatherman bomb factory explodes in Greenwich Village

Today’s newspapers and electronic news media are constantly sending the message that the United States is threatened by terrorist activity. The Boston Marathon has been bombed. Police recently shot a man they had been tracking for terrorist actions. Reports of thwarted bomb plots are fairly frequent. One might easily believe that these are the worst of times concerning terrorism. But they are not. The highest incidents of terrorist attacks in the U.S. occurred during the 1970s. In a six-month period in 1971 and 1972, over 2,500 bombings took place in the U.S. The following chart from the Washington Post illustrates this point.

 

Why were the Seventies so violent? The turbulent Sixties spawned a number of groups seeking to impose their ideologies of the rest of the country through force and terror. The Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the largest and most long-lived terrorist group in U.S. history, was still attacking and sometimes murdering civil rights leaders. Some radical black power organizations declared war on the police. They began bombing police stations and shooting policemen and moderate African American leaders, whom they branded “Uncle Toms.” Puerto Rican nationalists, who had earlier tried to kill President Truman and had shot up the House of Representatives, carried out more bombings and shootings. They blew up the Mobil Oil headquarters and ambushed a U.S. Navy bus, killing some of the occupants. And then there were the terrorist groups spawned by the American New Left.

Perhaps best known of the New Left groups was the Charles Manson “family,” the murderers who massacred movie star Sharon Tate’s family and tried to kill President Ford. Also fairly well known was the Symbionese Liberation Army, principally because they kidnapped Patty Hurst and brainwashed her into helping them rob a bank. They also assassinated moderate African Americans. Less well known to the general public was the Weather Underground or Weathermen. The Weathermen espoused the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and replacing it with a Marxist society. Terror was their weapon of choice. One of their leaders admonished them to be “crazy MFs and scare the hell out of honky America.” The Weathermen exploded bombs in police stations and government buildings, including the State Department and the Senate Office building. Weathermen also conducted an infamous armored car robbery. Fortunately, the deaths of some of their bomb makers in an accidental explosion hindered their bombing campaign.

Author Bryan Burrough recently chronicled New Left terrorist activities of the 1970s in Days of Rage. Anyone doubting the seriousness of the situation in those years can become informed by reading his book. Burrough considers the subject of his work to be an oddly neglected part of American history.

Why are the Seventies terrorists below the level of consciousness of most Americans? I believe that the earth shaking political events of the period—the impeachment and resignation of a President and the Fall of Saigon—forced domestic terrorism to the back pages of newspapers. The 24/7 news cycle did not exist at that time. If it had, might our collective memories be different?

My upcoming novel, Snowflakes in July, is set during the turbulent Seventies. The story traces the formation and operations of a terrorist group with ambitions to steal U.S. Navy nuclear weapons. Will the Navy be able to counter the plot? Chapter 1 of Snowflakes in July will be available on my website next month.

Graphic: The Washington Post

Note: Warren Bell is a historical fiction author with three novels for sale either for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. The first two are set during WWII, with Fall Eagle One taking place in Europe, and Hold Back the Sun set in the war in the Pacific. His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, covers the U.S. Navy Seabees in Vietnam.

Illegitimis non Carborundum

Loosely translated, the title Latin phrase means, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” It is one of the many mottos of the U.S. Navy’s legendary Seabees. “Can do!” is the most common Seabee motto because of their ability to always get the job done quickly. Another is, “We have done so much for so long with so little that now we can do anything with nothing.”

In the long history of the Navy, Seabees are of fairly new origin. In late December 1941, Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, was gravely concerned about the loss of life among civilian construction workers on the Pacific islands that the Japanese had conquered. Realizing that a uniformed Naval Construction Force would be required for the island-hopping campaigns that lay ahead, Moreell proposed the formation of Naval Construction Battalions made up of skilled construction workers. The concept was approved early in 1942. Part of the approval was the authority to grant naval rank based on years of experience in the construction industry.  The initials C.B. spawned the nickname, “Seabees.”

Admiral Moreell approached the Construction Trades Council of the labor unions for help in recruiting construction experts. As a quid pro quo, the admiral promised that Seabees would never be used in the continental U.S. in competition with the civilian construction industry. Thousands of skilled construction men were soon flooding recruiting offices. Many were the men who had built the prodigious public works of the New Deal era.

After a short boot camp in Virginia, the new Seabees were sent to Davisville, Rhode Island, or Port Hueneme, California, and formed into battalions officered by members of the Navy Civil Engineer Corps. One of the Davisville Seabees designed the iconic fighting bee emblem for which the units became famous. Construction battalions were soon deploying to the far-flung battlefronts.

Seabees went ashore at Guadalcanal a couple of weeks after the Marines first landed. They finished the new airfield (Henderson Field) begun by Marine engineers and started building the piers, housing, roads and other facilities necessary to a modern fighting force. With the Japanese Navy bombing and shelling the airfield on a regular basis, Seabees camped in bunkers alongside the runway. As soon as the “all clear” was sounded, they rushed out with their equipment and pre-positioned materials and filled in the holes and installed new steel plank pavement. The Marines were full of praise for how the Seabees kept Henderson Field operating in those crucial months of 1942.

The teenaged Marines were also astounded by how old some Seabees looked. The official average age of the World War II Seabee was 37.  The actual average was much higher. Men in their sixties lied about their age in order to serve. The young Marines developed the saying, “Never hit a Seabee. He may be some Marine’s father!” The Seabees adopted the Marine slogan, “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” into “Once a Seabee, always a Seabee.”  There are no such things as “former Marines” or “former Seabees.”

Over 325,000 Seabees served in World War II.  Besides constructing sprawling based and airfields throughout the Pacific, the Seabees also built and fought on six continents. The amphibious landings at Sicily and Normandy would have been impossible without the Seabees and their pontoon causeways and Rhino ferries. A Marine on Iwo Jima paid the Seabees perhaps the ultimate compliment when he posted the following poem on a roadside sign:

            And when we reach the isles of Japan

            With our hats at a jaunty tilt,

            We’ll enter the city of Tokyo

            On roads that the Seabees built!

Seabees have played pivotal roles in all of America’s conflicts since WWII.  Seabee- placed pontoon causeways allowed the Marines to cross the seawall at Inchon in Korea, reversing the course of the war. Twenty-two active duty and reserve Seabee battalions built the critical ports, bases, roads, and airfields the U.S. forces used in Vietnam. Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the military operations in Afghanistan would not have been possible without widespread Seabee support.

Last month, I spent a weekend at a reunion of Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Forty. I was Operations Officer of this battalion in 1968 and 1969. My experiences there formed the basis of my Vietnam War novel, Asphalt and Blood. We old Seabees swapped sea stories and generally enjoyed each other’s company.  We also dedicated an NMCB 40 plaque at the Navy Memorial and visited the Vietnam Wall and Korean War Memorial. Although few of us retained the slender bodies of our youth, we still have Seabee fire in our bellies. All retain a fierce espirit de corps and pride in being a Seabee. I felt honored to be in the presence of these valiant Americans and their families.

The Nature of War

I write historical novels about war. My first book, Fall Eagle One, is about World War II in Europe. My second novel, Hold Back the Sun, is set in the opening months of the Pacific War in the Western Pacific. Asphalt and Blood, which is at the copy edit phase, tells the story of U.S. Navy Seabees in the Vietnam Battle for Hue City.

In order to write about war, one must understand it. I spent over 29 years in the U.S. Navy, of which seventeen months were in Vietnam. I hold the Navy’s Combat Action Ribbon. An amateur historian all my life, I have concentrated my studies on WW2. From personal experience and rigorous study, I believe that I have an understanding of modern warfare.

War is, by its very nature, barbaric and horrific. The purpose of war is to impose one’s will on the enemy through the use of military force. War is not a duel, with rules to assure that one opponent has no advantage over the other. War is successful only when the enemy loses the will to resist.

In today’s Washington Post, Eliot A. Cohen, former Counselor of the U.S. State Department, argues persuasively that many in today’s Washington, D.C., do not understand the nature of war. He points out that President Abraham Lincoln hated war as much as anyone on earth, yet he understood that winning the American Civil War required his generals to break the will of the Confederate population to continue the struggle. I assert in Fall Eagle One that Union generals invented the modern concept of Total War as it was practiced in WW2. The “scorched earth” campaigns carried out by General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and General Sherman’s March to the Sea in Georgia speak for themselves. Photographs of Richmond, Virginia, after its surrender look much like those of Berlin in 1945.

Only rigorous application of force makes possible a rapid conclusion of hostilities and a minimization of total casualties. Following the suicide bombing of U.S. Marines in Lebanon early in his administration, President Reagan ordered Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, to develop a new doctrine for the use of military force. The resulting “Weinberger Doctrine,” sometimes called the “Weinberger/Powell Doctrine,” espoused the following: 

1. military force should only be used as a last resort in situations where key national interests are involved, 
2. military force should only be used in situations where a large majority of the U.S. public supports its use, and 
3. when military action is taken, it should be in such overwhelming force that the ensuing conflict is concluded quickly, thereby minimizing overall casualties. 

This doctrine governed U.S. military involvements through the NATO actions in the Balkans during the Clinton Administration. 

Unfortunately, sometime during the run-up to the Vietnam War, the competing doctrines of “Just Enough Force” and “Proportionality” crept into the conduct of war. For years, the U.S. attempted to apply just enough military pressure to force the North Vietnamese to give up their conquest of the South. When Moshe Dayan, the former Defense Minister of Israel, visited Vietnam in the 1960s, he was asked how the U.S. could end the war. His answer was direct: take the war to the enemy’s homeland. Because obliterating North Vietnam’s capacity to continue fighting was not even being considered, the Vietnam War dragged on for years.

“Proportionality” implies that, when attacked, the response should be no more severe than the attack. This doctrine seems especially attractive to reporters in the news media, who ask about it continually when interviewing combatants. “Proportionality” calls for a “leveling of the playing field,” a minimization of one side’s military advantages. In the context of warfare, “proportionality” guarantees prolonged conflict, which in turn maximizes total casualties. Pursuing this course is anathema to any competent military commander.

War is not some game. People suffer and die in war. It is not, as Chancellor Bismarck argued, simply “Diplomacy by other means.” As I said earlier, war is both barbaric and horrific. I believe that Secretary Weinberger and General Powell got it right on the use of military force.  Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Harry Truman all understood the nature of war and applied overwhelming force to end WW2. Current world leaders could emulate their wisdom.

Note: Warren Bell is a historical fiction author with two novels for sale either for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. Both are set during WWII, with Fall Eagle One taking place in Europe, and Hold Back the Sunset in the war in the Pacific.  

Another Glass Ceiling Shattered

Admiral Michelle Howard

Last Tuesday, July 1st, Admiral Michelle Howard became the first woman four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy, joining the first women who hold four-star rank in the Army and the Air Force. Admiral Howard is becoming the Vice Chief of Naval Operations (VCNO), the second most powerful job in the Navy. Many people who hold this billet go on to be CNO.  By the way, Admiral Howard is also an African American.

Her new position is but the latest in a career filled with “firsts.” She was among the first women to attend the Naval Academy, graduating in the Class of 1982 (the first class to include women at all was the Class of 1980). A Surface Warfare Officer, she served in increasingly responsible positions aboard ship and ashore. When she took command of the dock landing ship, U.S.S. Rushmore, in 1999, she became the first black woman to command a U.S. Navy warship. She was later to become the first black woman to command a strike group at sea and the first to attain the rank of vice admiral.  She is a super smasher of “glass ceilings.”

Admiral Howard’s path to these achievements was not easy.  “This is not for wimps,” she told an audience at NOVA Southeastern University in Florida. “You have to develop a sense of humor. You have to develop stamina because there’s going to be tough days. Like the pioneering women of old, you have to let some things go. It can be scary going into an environment where no one looks like you. I have been in rooms where I was the only woman and the only minority.”
 

As a twenty-nine-year Navy veteran, I can well imagine the discomforting situations Admiral Howard faced.  One of the central characters of my new novel, Asphalt and Blood, is “Bull” Barker, a young African American petty officer in a Seabee battalion in the Vietnam War.  While happy and comfortable as a Seabee, Barker encounters many instances of overt racism as the story progresses. Getting Barker right is one of the most difficult challenges I faced in writing Asphalt and Blood. 

The Navy has changed a great deal since I retired. In an interview last Monday, Admiral Howard commented that many of the obstacles she faced and overcame no longer exist, at least not to the degree they did at the outset of her career.  Repeal of the combat exclusion law has allowed women to serve on all types of ships and aircraft. Now even submarines are open to women.

“Admiral Howard is also a great example of how much we lose as a Navy and a nation if we put artificial barriers in,” Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told a crowd of about 150 people at Howard’s promotion ceremony. “If we don’t judge people on their ability, based on their capability.”

Like any successful executive, Admiral Howard has her detractors. One contemporary hinted that she might not have been required to cross as many hurdles as her male counterparts. In an interview with Navy Times, Rear Admiral Sonny Masso refuted such claims. “Do I think she’s a token female, a token African American?” Masso commented. “I would say absolutely and emphatically not. With her performance and critical jobs across the spectrum, …she has brought an extraordinary amount of experience that is equal to any of her peers.”

To those who would question the ability of women to command in combat, I would cite Admiral Howard’s performance while Commanding Task Force 151 during anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. In April 2009, when Somali pirates seized the cargo ship, Maersk Alabama, and her skipper, Captain Richard Phillips, Admiral Howard devised a plan to get him back and sent destroyer, U.S.S. Bainbridge, to perform the rescue. Navy Seals aboard Bainbridge later shot and killed the pirates and freed Phillips.  A win-win situation for everyone but the pirates. This woman is a warrior!

In closing his remarks at the promotion ceremony, Secretary Mabus concluded, “I hope that I have always been as passionate about that (judging people on their abilities), but the intensity has increased since I became the father of three daughters, and I refuse to believe that there are any ceilings for them, glass or otherwise. That they can get to where their abilities take them. And with that, they and countless others in the Navy now have a wonderful role model in Michelle Howard.”

To paraphrase a popular TV commercial of past years, “Admiral Howard gained her new position the old fashioned way—she earned it.”

Note: Warren Bell is a historical fiction author with two novels for sale either for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. Both are set during WWII, with Fall Eagle One taking place in Europe, and Hold Back the Sun set in the war in the Pacific. 

Déjà vu All Over Again

Evacuating Saigon

Headlines in this morning’s newspapers trumpet the collapse of the Iraqi Army before the onslaught of the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda spin-off. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of central government soldiers appear to be taking off their uniforms, abandoning their weapons and equipment, and surrendering in droves. ISIS now controls most cities north of Baghdad, and the ability of the Iraqi Army to forestall the capture of the capital is in question.

To Vietnam veterans, all this seems like what the famed baseball catcher and manager, Yogi Berra, called, “déjà vu all over again.” We have lived this experience before.

CNN has been showing a special series on the decade of the 1960 this week. For those of us who were adults at the time, the series sparks poignant memories of those years. The U.S. went into the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) to save that small state from the tyranny of communism and to build a stable, democratic state. The term, “nation building,” was coined to describe our efforts. After several years of war, an administration that sensed the war weariness of the population decided to accelerate training of indigenous forces and then make a quick exit. The process was termed, “Vietnamization.” In the beginning, it seemed to work. But the government left in place became corrupt. Politically dependable military commanders began replacing competent ones. Antiwar elements in the U.S. Congress engineered a cutoff of military assistance funding. When the North Vietnamese Army renewed attacks, RVN collapsed like a house of cards. U.S. diplomats scrambled to escape aboard hastily organized U.S. military helicopters. Over a decade of sacrifice by the U.S. armed forces went down the drain.

In my new novel, Asphalt and Blood, I explore the thousand-year efforts of the Vietnamese people to remain free of foreign domination. I believe that very few if any U.S. decision makers on the Vietnam struggle had any grasp of local history and culture. Our well intentioned “nation building” programs ignored these important parameters. “Strategic Hamlet” programs uprooted much of the population from their ancestral homes and the tombs of their ancestors. Planners had no concept of the importance of Confucian veneration of ancestors. After U.S. Generals took over command of the war, Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, and their subordinates were able to cast the U.S. as but the last in a long line of foreign conquerors.

Over three decades later, many of us who served in Vietnam watched in dismay as civilian officials in the Department of Defense made the same mistakes in Iraq that Robert McNamara and his acolytes made in the 1960s, starting by overruling military commanders on the forces required for a successful operation. Civilian officials lacking military experience decided that a brigade of military police to maintain order in a conquered Baghdad was unnecessary. Chaos reigned in Baghdad after the conquest. When General Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, warned that pacifying Iraq would require 500,000 troops, he was replaced. Unruffled, the architects of the war announced a new program of “nation building.” No one appeared to be aware of the simmering, hundreds-of-years-old sectarian fractures in the Iraqi population. Once more, local history and culture were ignored. Veterans truly felt “déjà vu all over again.’

The end of the Iraqi war is playing out to a script similar to that of Vietnam. Again weary of conflict, the U.S. declared that local forces were now capable of maintaining order and withdrew its military presence. The indigenous government soon gutted leadership in the Iraqi Army by replacing competent commanders with political allies. They are now “reaping the whirlwind.” Fragmentation of Iraq into smaller, sectarian states appears inevitable. Another decade of U.S. military sacrifice may be headed down the drain.

I have mentioned the famous Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, in previous blog posts. His admonition that “those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it” springs to the forefront of the mind. Is it time to call in the evacuation helicopters again? 

Note: Warren Bell is a historical fiction author with two novels for sale either for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. Both are set during WWII, with Fall Eagle One taking place in Europe, and Hold Back the Sun set in the war in the Pacific.  

Balancing Accuracy and Readability in a Story

My current writing project, Asphalt and Blood, has reached the editing stage. The book follows the adventures of U.S. Navy Seabees during the 1968 Battle For Hue City. For the uninitiated, Seabees is a nickname for the famed Navy Construction Battalions formed during World War II to build advanced bases in the Pacific islands and for the war in Europe. Without the airfields, port facilities, and support facilities they constructed, neither the Pacific island campaigns nor the amphibious invasions in Europe would have been possible. On Iwo Jima, Marines put up a sign that read, “And when we reach the isles of Japan, with our hats at a jaunty tilt, We’ll enter the city of Tokyo, On roads that the Seabees built.” Seabees proved equally as crucial to the war efforts in Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

My wife and primary editor, Annette, is pouring over the work with an eagle eye.  Several chapters in, her most frequent criticism to date is that I have used too much of what she calls, “Seabee-ese.”  In other words, she believes that, in striving for accuracy in conversations between my characters, I have used too many acronyms, technical terms, and slang that only a fellow Seabee can understand. Going back over my text, I can see that she is right.

Here are some examples. In describing earthmovers, I used the standard designations, TD-6 and TS-24, etc. The TD stands for, “tractor-dozer, ” TS for “tractor-scraper.” Every Seabee would recognize this immediately. Likewise, all Seabees would understand the designation of characters by their position in the battalion organization, such as “ALPHA-6” for the company commander of A Company, the horizontal construction force, or “S-3” for the Operations Officer.  While this is actually the way that Seabees talk, use of such terms without explanation or in narrative passages can be very confusing to other readers. 

An author must continually keep the target audience in mind. My target audience for Asphalt and Blood is not only Seabees everywhere and of all ages but also the general military fiction readers of my first two works, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun.  Sometimes, precise technical accuracy must give way to the ability of general readership to quickly grasp the story.  The key editing question, “Does this move the story forward,” must be kept continually in mind.

In making my first pass through the manuscript with Annette’s comments in hand, “TD-6” is becoming “bulldozer” or “dozer.”  “ALPHA-6” in narrative will be replaced by the character’s name.  Organization positions used in dialog must be carefully but succinctly explained. When I worked in the Pentagon, all documents had to be subjected to what was called, “the idiot test.” The question, “could anyone from the general population be able to understand what the document was trying to convey” had to receive a positive answer. I’m sure that a new name applies now because of “political correctness,” but the gist remains the same. If readers become bogged down with confusion over words, they will likely lose interest and stop reading. The author has failed.

All this brings up another related question, “Can an author be too close to his/her subject?” When the author is closely and emotionally invested in the story, especially when writing about personal experiences, the tendency to make it “just like it actually happened” can be very powerful. When writing fiction, these urges must be subordinated to clearly relating the story. The reader must be stimulated to anticipate every page turn to learn what comes next.

Re-writing and editing takes discipline that every author must learn to become successful. In most cases, the use of a professional editor may be necessary. I know that Fall Eagle One, my debut novel, is immeasurably better because of a professional editor. It’s becoming clear that Asphalt and Blood could benefit from similar treatment. I still have a lot of work to do.

Note: Warren Bell is a historical fiction author with two novels for sale either for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. Both are set during WWII, with Fall Eagle One taking place in Europe, and Hold Back the Sun set in the war in the Pacific.