Welcome to Tostada Speaks Blog.
I'm an avid reader and author, with a wide range of interests. Guest bloggers, most from fellow Taylor Street Publishing authors, will be here from time to time as well.
Stop by, look around, read what we have, and by all means, leave your comments for us.
My author's website is www.geogepolleyauthor.com, which also has its own blog.
In 1975, the Soviet Union and Communist China lay aside their differences and form an alliance. Their goal: to take over all of Europe and England. By early summer, 1980, “the combined Communist forces are poised for the initial assault.” From there, the action begins, and it is full-scale war, with all the explosiveness, viciousness and suspense that one expects, especially after an active Resistance movement is organized. Some of the scenes are gut-wrenching.
But the war story isn’t the only story. The other story, the underlying story, is that of the author himself, who discovers the manuscript in an old box file he hasn’t opened in thirty years, and comments on his novel and his editing of it between each chapter. As an author myself, as well as a devourer of books, I found this fascinating, almost like reading a second novel, one the “warp“ and the other the “woof” of the whole.
What makes this so fascinating and so important is that this is the way we experience life, the warp of life and the woof of memory, interwoven into our daily lives.
My hat is off to Brendan Gisby, the author of several wonderful books,of which this is the latest. You have a gem here Mr. Gisby.
“I was reminded of where I was once I heard the soldiers making noises in the yard of the camp.
Another day in Helmand.
“My senses opened hesitantly yet again to the mud-ceilinged room, and my heart seemed to lose all is saddened beats ...”
So begins Shah Wali Fazli’s remarkable novel about the life of an Afghan interpreter assigned to American soldiers fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. He knows well what he writes about, as he was once one of the interpreters about whom he writes so eloquently and with such sympathy.
It is not, as they say, “a cake walk.” It is a nightmare, especially when the main Taliban group you’re fighting is led by a man known as Mullah Dozakhi, a killer with a personal vendetta of hate against you because you once bested one of his men in a karate match in Kabul. What kind kind of person is this Mullah Dozakhi? “He had lived his entire life dealing out retribution, death and destruction. How could he stop all that? [He] had built a reputation for destroying other people’s lives. Why should he stop now?” And he is out to kill you and your American friends.
Having read Khaled Husseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, the story is a familiar one. Schooled in a doctrine soaked in resentment and hate, the Taliban are poisonous. But so are the warlords, many of whom dominate the Karzai government in Kabul.
The Interpreter is a book I won’t soon forget, and neither will you. Very well told, it is a book to treasure. I left it knowing the bond that exists between soldiers and their interpreters and between the interpreters who do such dangerous work. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Shah Wali Fazli for writing it, and for Night Publishing for publishing it so that we can all read it.
People return from war haunted by their battlefield experiences. Moody, jumpy, and unable to settle down, they drink too much, use drugs, are given to fits of rage and despair, and feel utterly alone and unable to connect with people who love them. What happened to them? Author and former career British Special Forces soldier Theodore (Theo) Knell knows from painful experience what it’s like. "As Special Forces soldiers,” he writes, “we were actively discouraged from talking about our feelings and the personal effects of combat on our mental health... Talking to a doctor could be perceived as [a] personal weakness, a flaw in our makeup... [S]o you learned to keep quiet, bottle it up and crack on.”
Away from combat when one’s mind is no longer preoccupied with staying alive, it “is left free to roam”. The old rule of bottling it up and cracking on, instead of keeping nightmares away or bringing loved ones closer, has the opposite effect. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) appears bringing horrific memories of battle unbidden at the most unexpected of moments, disrupting everything and sending the sufferer into a tailspin and pushing away loved ones who want to help, but can’t.
“Once inside [Starbucks] I grab at my coffee like a junkie with a long needed fix. I'll head for a corner, any corner, as long as I can get my back to the wall and still see the door.
Across the aisle sits a stranger hunched over a large black coffee, elbows on table, head bowed, pulling quietly at his unkempt hair. He has those same smoky eyes and that thousand metre stare.
There's nothing on earth that can open up old wounds like a mirror.”
When Theodore Knell’s From the Corners of a Wounded Mind was published, he quotes former soldiers coming up and saying: “I didn’t know you felt like that as well, I thought it was only me,” and wives telling him: “I just never realised, if only I'd known I would have tried to help more.” PTSD drives people away from loving relationships and friendships and into isolation and pain. Reconnecting brings life.
This book is a wonderful resource for men and women who suffer from combat-related PTSD. Had it been available while I was a practicing mental health counselor, itis a book I would have recommended without hesitation to the war veterans and police officers I counseled. Written in plain-spoken, compassionate prose and verse, it is a book that touches people where they hurt and helps them heal.
If you’re a combat veteran or police officer with PTSD, know someone who is, or are a mental health professional that works with combat veterans and police officers, and you are looking for a helpful resource, Theodore Knell’s From the Corners of a Wounded Mind is one that I recommend without reservation.
A review of Kumiko Kakehashi: So Sad to Fall in Battle, An account of war based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters from Iwo Jima.Ballantine Books, 2007.
As I Read Kumiko Kakehashi’s book about Iwo Jima’s commanding General Tadamichi Kuribayashi I had the feeling that, had we met, I would have liked him. He was a compassionate man who helped his wife, had their servant eat at table with the family, and worried about them right up to the final battle on Iwo Jima.
Kuribayashi was the kind of leader who commanded respect because he gave it to everyone, from the lowliest recruit to the top-ranking officers under his command. He cared about them, worried about them, and was attentive to their needs. “The army was an institution where social class distinctions were carried to an extreme … [F]or Kuribayashi to be so open and friendly with his ‘inferiors’ made him a most unusual officer (page xiii). This also made him unpopular with the military High Command in Tokyo.
Kuribayashi was meticulous in designing a plan that would protect them for as long as possible while at the same time inflict the most damage to the enemy. Though it “was completely contrary to the traditions of the Japanese army … and was derided as rash and aroused universal opposition at the time” (page 38), he held out for over a month and frustrated the goal of the Allied Command of defeating the Japanese in under a week. The Japanese military command lacked Kuribayashi’s grasp of on-the-ground reality and attention to detail. “The grimmer the reality,” Kakehashi writes, “the more commanders have to face it directly” (page 63) He “verified things with his own eyes, and never allowed preconceptions or wishful thinking to cloud his judgment. His strategy was effective in battle precisely because it originated from such a starting point” (page 63).
And in the midst of it all, the daily preparations, the sweat, the inadequate supplied and resistance from people in Tokyo, he wrote daily letters to his wife and family in which he expressed love and concern for them and their welfare.
Why, when he knew he could never win, did he keep fighting when he could have surrendered and saved the more than 20,000 men under his command that died in the battle of Iwo Jima? Honor aside, the reason was keeping the airfield on Iwo Jima from the Allied forces for as long as possible so they couldn’t use it to carry out massive attacks on Japan’s main islands. Sadly, with the advent of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bombers, these attacks had already begun.
If it dawned on him that these attacks had begun, it might have thrown him into despair. According to Kakehashi, there is some evidence that it did. Sergeant Ryumae Shinya, who was in close proximity to him, wrote: “When we escaped from the Command Bunker in the dead of night on March 17, he was not energetic… At first glance … he looked like some old man from the countryside being led outside by his children” (pages 189,190). “The sight of the weak, emaciated, and ghostlike soldiers dying in such number as they faced the terrifying intensity of the American assault on one hand, while suffering from hunger and thirst on the other, seems to have been a crushing blow for Kuribayashi” (page 191). “When he heard the news” (of the firebombing of Tokyo), (his) despair and sense of failure must have been tremendous. He did not even know if his wife and children were alive. They were, in fact, safe and sound – but he had no way of knowing that.” For a compassionate man, I don’t see how it could have been otherwise.
In his final telegram to Tokyo, with a copy to his wife, he wrote “so sad to fall in battle.” And indeed, as it always is, it was. General Kuribayashi’s body was never identified. He had removed all insignias of rank from his uniform before the final charge.
Quite a man and quite a book. I give it a hearty *****rating.
Howard Zinn: The Bomb. San Francisco, Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 2010, 91 pages. $8.95
Comprised of two previously published essays on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the French village of Royan at the end of World War Two plus a new Introduction by the author. Both attacks were justified and defended as necessary in bringing the wars with Germany and Japan to an end. Yet, as Zinn and others have shown, not everyone was in agreement with that. More likely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were done to show the Soviets that we had the ultimate weapon. On the incendiary carpet bombing of the little village of Royan Zinn writes that "The evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation" that, like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of the lack of viable military targets, were carried out against civilian populations to make a point: Resist us and you shall die.
In Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, September 1, 2001), British ethicist Jonathan Glover writes about "the moral slide" in reference to the decision during World War One to block aid shipments to the German people that caused thousands to die of starvation. From there it was a simple matter to push the envelope a little further and allow the bombing of civilians as a means of crushing an enemy's spirit and defeating him. Civilians, in other words, were now players in a military drama. Once frightened non-combatants, they were now an element military strategic planning, bargaining chips in an endgame that they was chosen for them by people they did not even know.
What Glover did in his masterwork, Howard Zinn did years earlier in his essay on the bombing of Hiroshima. "The strategic argument ... that there was no military necessity to use the bomb, is not enough. We need to confront the moral issue directly: faced with the horrors visited on hundreds of thousands of human beings by the massive bombings of modern warfare, can any military-strategic-political 'necessity' justify that?" (emphasis added). It is a question that each of us needs to ask ... and answer for ourselves.
In the Introduction, written in late 2009, Zinn brings the discussion into the present: "What you see over and over again in the news reports is the words 'suspected terrorist' or 'suspected al Qaeda' -- meaning that 'intelligence' is not sure whom we are bombing, that we are willing to justify the killing of a 'suspect' in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, something we would not accept from a police operation in New York or San Francisco (emphasis added). This suggests, to our shame, that the lives of people other than Americans are of lesser importance" (page 19). I don't know if this hits you like it hit me, but when I read that I put the book down, looked out my window at my neighborhood, and thought. I thought about my country's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and its support of Israel in its dealings with the non-Jewish residents of Palestine. I thought about its deadly "Operation Cast Lead" attack on the tiny enclave of Gaza that unleashed an overwhelming rain of fire and death on everyone living there, and justified it as retaliation for a few missiles Hamas fired in its direction. I thought about the Obama administration's rejection of the well-documented Goldstone Report condemning Israel's actions as unjustified and accused its leaders of war crimes. And our long support of Israel in spite of a growing mass of evidence that shows that its treatment of Palestine's non-Jewish residence has from the beginning been a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And I thought, as a citizen of the U.S.A., they are doing these things in my name. And by my silence I give my unspoken support to behavior that I do not agree with because it is morally reprehensible and wrong. It is this moral question -- are attacks against civilians morally acceptable or not -- that is the basic question for each of us.
In his book House of War about the Pentagon, James Carroll includes an anecdote about a group of American general officers thinking about nuclear war against the Soviet Union. One of them says that since the U.S. has more of them, we would win, even if there are only two of us and one of them left standing. This is not only irresponsible, it's insane. I remember thinking "You idiot! You haven't won a damn thing! All three of you are men!"
I give Zinn's little book a 5-Starrating. If the moral issues that he raises concern you, and if they don't, buy a copy and read it.
How Can You Mend This Purple Heart? by T. L. Gould. Publisher: Night Publishing (UK) in paperback and kindle editions. Available at www.amazon.com.
How can you mend a purple heart? According to the men I've interviewed over the years, it isn't easy. My uncle Martin went to France in 1918 as a happy-go-lucky eighteen year old whom everyone loved and came home two years later emotionally shattered and alcoholic. No one ever knew what had happened to him over there except that he drove ammunition trucks to the front lines. He didn't say a word about his experiences until, at age 66 and no longer drinking, he told his sister (my mom). Two years later, his health ruined, he died, sober and a happier man than he'd been in fifty years.
The title of the novel is a good one because it describes so well the condition of men and women and women who return from combat having experienced things beyond their imagination, things that damage their hearts. My uncle's wounds shattered his heart.
Each of the young men in this story have terrible physical wounds. Their bravado and, in Earl's case their fear and doubt, reveal the deeper emotional wounds of the heart that are at least as shattering as the terrible physical wounds they have received and need mending.
How Can You Mend This Purple Heart is a worthy addition to the literature of war, soldiering, survival and recovery. I heartily recommend it.
Once I picked James Carroll's huge history of the U.S. Defense Department/Pentagon, I couldn't put it down. It is fascinating, upsetting, and because I lived through its history, utterly believable. But it has not been popular with everyone: some reviewers have panned it as distorted and biased (they are in the minority), and I would guess it has received a very negative response from the Bush Administration, the Pentagon and the CIA.
Three things stand out for me in this fine book: (1) the power of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so eloquently cautioned against; (2) the power of the Defense Department bureaucracy over other branches of government, including the President and Congress; and (3) the insanity of some of its top officers and their political allies as they planned and contemplated devastating attacks against those whom they considered enemies. When people talk about plans to drop atomic and hydrogen bombs and killing hundreds of millions of "the enemy"; when they talk about "winning" when only three people have survived such a holocaust (two of "us" and one of "them", those people are out of their minds. They are not living in reality. They are insane.
If James Carroll's massive book does nothing else, it eloquently documents what happens when leaders begin to think in terms of "us" versus "them", to divide the world into opposing camps of "winners versus losers", "us" versus "them", and arm themselves with weapons of such appalling destructiveness that the consequences of such recklessness is mind-numbing to contemplate.
Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that for a future to be possible on this planet, we – each of us – has got to do something to turn things around so that a future is possible for our children, grandchildren and beyond?
“The day we stop killing off our own species,” writes Zoe Taylor of McClure Middle School in Seattle, WA, “our world will become a book with no more torn pages.” (Source: Wisdom Commons, www.wisdomcommons.org.) That ought to be so obvious that no one would question it. Yet people go on killing each other every day in acts of war and vengeance.
Are there active movements where you live to reduce violence and the madness of war? If there are, what are they? If there aren’t, why not? What prevents such movements from happening? Historian Andrew Bacevich has written that Americans are seduced by war (“The New American Militarism”). I am convinced that America and its citizens are seduced by violence. It’s in our militarism, our video games, our domestic relations, our language and in our gangs. Is this true where you live? What can you – can we – do to change this where we live? What are we willing to do.
For the first time in my life, I live in a country – Japan – that is committed to the peaceful means of solving conflicts. Nonviolence has been written into its Constitution since the end of World War Two. Does this mean that war thinking has ended? Not at all. It means that the nation, and its people are dedicated to seeking peaceful means to solving conflicts. Looking back at the horrors of World War Two, the Japanese people wanted nothing to do anymore with war and warmongers, and they have stuck resolutely by that and demanded that their politicians and military leaders do the same. (The last military officer to publicly rattle his sword, a four-star Air SDF general, was summarily fired from his job earlier this year and mustered out of the Self Defense Force.)
South Africa changed from a White controlled government to a racially inclusive government led by Nelson Mandela without the eruption of violence and hate that most people had predicted. And in Northern Ireland, in spite of occasional outbursts of sectarian violence, the people and their leaders seem committed to a peaceful future.
For a future to be possible we, as individuals, neighbors, communities and nations, must begin committing ourselves to beliefs, attitudes and activities that bring a peace that respects our differences.
