It’s headed back to the 80s now, but we had a cold snap a couple of days ago. Daytime highs in the 60s, down to the low 40s at night.
That was First Notice. This happens almost every year in late August or early September.
My back-fence neighbor is firing up his grill again, so hardy is his hope. But summer will soon expire, and there is nothing you can do about it. Portents of autumn are everywhere.
A cheeky squirrel. Photo by Charles J. Sharp, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Sparrows and starlings have begun to flock. Twenty or so turkeys marched down our block this morning. More than half were this year’s poults.
Thousands of squirrels have jacked up their metabolisms. They’re getting cheeky. One ran right up to me this afternoon as I sat in my lawn chair reading. When he belatedly saw me for what I am, he retreated only a few feet and made a narrow circle around me.
This is no time for a squirrel to be faint of heart. The harvest is upon us.
Our raspberries—slim pickins back in June and July—now look like making a bumper crop of luscious red fruit in the September cycle. That’s assuming the weather holds. We could have highs in the 80s for a couple more weeks, maybe even three or four. And we’ll keep getting berries until there’s a hard frost at night. That could be sometime in October, if we’re lucky.
What we’re experiencing now, by the way, is not Indian Summer. That comes later, in the fall, if there should happen to be a warm spell after the frost comes. Right now, we’re still in summer.
But summer’s lease, as the Bard of Avon reminds us, hath all too short a date.
Those football guys are kicking their oblate spheroids again, so it’s only a matter of time before the hammer comes down for good.
Izzy Strikes Gold!, my middle-grade coming-of-age adventure set in the wilds of 1957, is already proving popular with readers ages 9-12 and with their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Modesty prohibits my mentioning the fabulous review recently received from Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer for the Midwest Book Review, but you can read it for yourself here.
Don’t miss out—get your copy now! If you savor the independent bookstore experience, wander into Mystery to Me, 1863 Monroe Street, Madison, Wis., or Literatus & Co., 401 E. Main, Watertown, Wis.—both of which have signed copies available. Or order it online and, if you’d like it signed, email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com, and we’ll get it done one way or another.
We now return to regularly scheduled programming:
Whither, Whence, or Howcome Peco Yeh?
If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, perhaps you will recall that in May 2019 I mentioned a lovely oil painting, a waterscape, that I had the good fortune to acquire more than fifty years ago, at a scandalously low price, directly from its source, Chinese painter Peco Yeh. In February 2023, I reposted the same piece, just as a remembrance.
My Peco Yeh painting.
Peco was a strange man—a sort of nebbish, to use a dated term—and I sometimes feel guilty about paying him so little for what is, in my eyes, a fine work of art. It’s too late to make amends, for Peco would be long since dead, but in a fine bit of poetic justice, this blog site has become—without conscious intention on my part—World Headquarters for the Retrospective Appreciation of Peco Yeh by Owners of His Scattered Canvases.
It came about in this way: In August 2023, six months after my repeat post displaying my Peco Yeh canvas, I got an email from Earline Dirks, who was in possession of a much different painting by Peco. Then Joshua Lowe of West Virginia chimed in with his own Peco canvas. And after several months’ silence, I heard from Jane Upchurch, who has a different work altogether.
Earline’s Peco Yeh painting.
Joshua’s Peco Yeh painting
Jane’s Peco Yeh painting.
Look up Peco Yeh, Dear Reader. I dare you. All you will find is a rather cryptic, 56-word thumbnail bio that bounces endlessly around the Internet, completely unattributed. It paints a rather romantic picture of the soft-spoken little man’s life and background, but who is to say whether it is true?
What is indisputable is that Peco lived—I met him in person and have heard from others who did also—and painted a number of canvases. The more of his paintings I see, the more I am struck by the variety of his works. In style, in manner, in subject matter, and in quality, they seem to be all over the map. One might even suspect the name “Peco Yeh” got attrributed to several different artists, but I don’t think so. I think he was simply interested in different approaches at different times and was, in general, an enigma.
A number of his paintings are available at online art sites. And for better or worse, I seem to be the repository of a fair number of images by, and stories about, Peco Yeh from private persons who own some of his works.
So it seems that duty calls. Far be it from me to shirk.
The Latest Report
A couple of weeks ago I heard from Michael Tomczyk, who said, “I was dating a Taiwanese girl in 1972 who was a friend of Peco Yeh. He had a small gallery where I met him several times and selected and purchased these 3 paintings which are I think are some of his best.”
Here are Michael’s paintings, so you can judge for yourself.
Michael also sent along the following poem, which he composed:
IN MEMORY OF PECO YEH
There once was an artist named Peco Yeh,
Who painted scenes in an extaordinary way;
He lived in Taipei and his art was well known,
He always painted using sepia tone.
The scenes he painted were classic Chinese;
When we view them today they put our spirits at ease.
–by Michael Tomczyk
#
All I can say, as a sort of informal custodian of a Chinese artist’s memory, is, “Peco, where will you strike next?”
Thanks, Gentle Reader, for letting me get that off my chest.
Long ago there lived a boy beleaguered by the world. Everything was a potential threat. Bullies and demons lurked everywhere.
Grownups were no help; they had their own problems. It was better to keep your head down.
If life was good, why were so many people so sad?
The more he learned, the more confused he became. By the time he was a teenager, he was downright bewildered.
This boy came into adulthood a bundle of neuroses and labored through the next decades to unlearn misconceptions about life and gradually to attain the art of contentment.
The Long View
When he grew old and retired from work, when no longer besieged by the trials of midlife, the boy looked back on the whole span of his life. Oddly enough, recent years had become a messy blur; but he saw the childhood era with crystalline precision.
He saw much of pain and sorrow, but even more of joy and zest. He wanted to stand before his Maker and say, “Oh . . . now I see how this caused that, and how one thing led to another. . . .” Above all, he wanted to have it all make sense.
But it didn’t. It was just a life. No matter whan angle he took, no matter which way he looked at it, there was nothing in his growing up that explained how he had arrived at grownup responsibilities with such a skewed, anxiety-ridden outlook that it took all his life to get over it. There was no rational understanding of that.
Well, that wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot.
Writing Therapy
When the boy decided to try being a serious writer, his dearest project became a reconstruction of that bygone era—one in which the joys and sorrows of a rather ordinary childhood balanced out and cast a benign new understanding across the mind-screen of the past. He would write a story where the forlorn hopes and muddled yearnings that lingered in his soul across all the intervening years could find a comfortable home at last.
And, after a great deal of work, this strange project proved possible!
The catch was (there’s always a catch, ask Yossarian)—the catch was, it wouldn’t be the boy’s actual life. Oh, all the incidents of childhood would be there, accurately portrayed in an exact replica of the original setting; yes, of course, a few names would be changed to protect the innocent, as the announcer on “Dragnet” used to say; but every detail would be true. They would just be juxtaposed in such a way that there was a veiled form of causality. The things that happened in the story would have meanings that related to one another, and those meanings would form themes, and the whole thing would be immensely satisfying.
It would be a fiction. But satisfying.
Isn’t that why we tell stories, Gentle Reader? To resurrect our past, but in a better way?
The story became a book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, about a twelve-year-old boy living in a small town in the 1950s. Izzy has to try to keep his family together, but what he most wants to do is fit in with his schoolmates. And all the adjustments he has to make to reconcile those conflicting goals give him an opportunity to grow a larger perspective.
The Fifties are so long ago now that the book counts as historical fiction. It’s also, as a matter of form, what we call a coming-of-age story (or a bildungsroman when we’re being snooty and pretending we know German). From a bookseller’s perspective, it is a middle-grade novel, because it’s axiomatic that a story about a twelve-year-old boy must be targeted at nine-to-twelve-year-old readers. Yet, as someone who remembers the Fifties quite clearly, I must tell you this book is a Nostalgic’s delight. Grandparents will enjoy it as much as their grandchildren.
It came about simply because a boy grew up confused and was left with unsatisfactory longings.
Whooppee!
I am sworn to secrecy on the identity of the boy, but if you’d like to meet him and hear about his journey as an author, boy and man, and maybe even buy a copy of the book and get it signed,and maybe win a fabulous, Fifties-themed door prize, I commend you to the Izzy Strikes Gold! Launch Party, 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, July 24.
Kindly old Mrs. Winders kept me after class one Friday afternoon in October. She sat me down by the dusty chalk rail and said next Monday morning I must report to the room across the hall.
Dazed by this announcement, I walked home. Skipping a grade was nothing I had heard of before. I didn’t know it could be done.
I told the news to Mom. She knew all about it. She, Dad, the teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist had already talked at length about this plan to make me a fourth-grader.
The only one left out of the conversation was me.
So What Else Is New?
It would have been extraordinary to include a kid in a decision that affected him.
We were to be seen rather than heard. Why would anyone consult us on a matter of importance? We were defective; that is, not yet adult.
“But Mom, I like my friends in third grade. Those fourth-graders are older than me. I don’t know them.”
“You’ll just have to make new friends.”
That was that.
The next Monday, I walked into a classroom where all the kids towered over me.
Where everybody already knew their multiplication tables.
Students practicing penmanship. Fair use.
Where the cursive characters—which I had barely begun to learn—were posted above the blackboards all around the room, from which vantage point they leered, taunted, and dared me to write using them all the time. And to practice “good penmanship,” whatever that was.
Fourth grade was a place where my new teacher, a mean old lady with beady eyes, saw me as an untutored savage, a burden thrust upon her.
Oh, the Humanity
Van Gogh suffering from an earache. Public Domain.
People say artists must suffer. If they never suffered, it’s not art.
Writers are held to be artists. Therefore we must have suffered too.
In this business of suffering I am also defective. I haven’t suffered much. At age seventy-nine, I look back on a life of tranquillity, prosperity, and more than my share of joy.
But in those days when I was an impostor posing as a fourth-grader—both smaller and younger than my classmates, resented by my harsh teacher, expected to know all sorts of things I had sped past in this oddball promotion—at that time, Dear Reader, if at no other, I thought I was suffering.
Making friends was the least of it. My classmates treated me as a novelty—a mid-season interloper with an overgrown brain and an undergrown body. At least they were nice. They showed a kind of mascot-worthy toleration. One or two offered real friendship.
Some other kid, with a different personality, might have used the sudden promotion to take fourth grade by storm. Some folks are outgoing, potentially meteoric, by nature. I am not one of them.
Years and decades have taught me versatility; the skills required to make new friends quickly; the ability to assert my own interests in a pleasant, no-nonsense way so I won’t be huddled in a dark corner when goodies are distributed. But way down deep, I’m still an introvert.
Timidity ruled me in third and fourth grades. I seemed born to be bullied.
“Stand up for yourself,” my parents said.
Now, I know what they meant. Then, I had no clue.
My path to a full social life may have been gradual, but I got here. Gone are my days of quailing and quaking. Life is now good to me.
Yet the wounds of childhood, even many years later, can still sting.
An Altered Ego
So there was a hidden agenda when I set out, a few years ago, to write fiction.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot
I thought through historical fiction—stories set in the past—I could fix the past.
I created a character, Izzy Mahler—a six-year-old boy, beleaguered by schoolyard bullies who shook him down for money, a dime he did not have. “You’d better get it,” said big bully Barton Bigelow.
Izzy’s first, forlorn appearance, from the Saturday Evening Post’s Depression-era art files. Fair use.
The ingenious means by which Izzy got the dime, warded off Barton Bigelow, scored a candy prize for himself, and learned a lesson in finance, became a fount of quaint humor. The Saturday Evening Post website liked the story well enough to publish it as “Nickel and Dime.”
By combining a couple of real incidents from early childhood—changing a few names, facts, and relationships—I had given Izzy a success that had eluded the actual me. How’s that for exploration, T. S. Eliot?
Two more Izzy stories, again bought by The Saturday Evening Post, showcased my flair for creative reconstruction of the past.
Then I caught the bug to write The Great American Novel. My great American novel, Price of Passage, took about five years to complete. All along, I had it in mind to write a book about Izzy’s grade-school experiences back in the 1950s.
And I did it. The result, Izzy Strikes Gold!, is a middle-grade novel that grandparents will also enjoy reading—as a dip into the roseate past, if nothing more.
It’s 1957. Twelve-year-old IZZY, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer COLLUM swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
MOM and DAD are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. THE RUSSIANS launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying LYLE dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking IRMA seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and GRANDPA, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
DEEP IN DILEMMAS, HOW CAN IZZY HOLD ON TO HOPE?
Because it features a child protagonist with a child’s problems, this book is classified by booksellers as a middle-grade novel—one meant for readers eight to twelve years old.
But, Dear Reader, I wrote it for EVERYBODY. I hope there’s enough universality in Izzy’s story that people of any age can enjoy it as a snapshot of a magical time in a child’s life. People my age, who can remember the very different world of the 1950s, will resonate with the events contained in its pages.
I hope they will give this book to their grandchildren—read it along with their grandchildren, perhaps. It may spark wonderful conversations.
Themes
Authors must talk with people about their work. It’s easy to talk about characters and events in a story you have written. It’s harder to talk about themes.
You may not know the themes until the dust has settled.
Long before starting on the Izzy novel, I shared with my friend Christine DeSmet the fact that I wanted to write a “coming-of-age” book which would be mainly about “acceptance.” That desire sprang from the many times I suffered anxiety, hoping my classmates would accept me as a true peer even though I was younger and smaller, and knew bigger words.
But when the book was finished, I found its main themes are hope, friendship, and love.
All these transcend mere acceptance. In fact, taken together, they make acceptance unnecessary.
I thought I wrote about a child’s struggle to be tolerated in juvenile society. What came out was a saga of hope tenaciously held, friendship slowly gained, and love made manifest.
I went in for a penny but came out with a pound.
Having arrived where I started, I knew the place for the first time.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
P.S.—If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on July 24, come to the FABULOUS LAUNCH PARTY. You can buy the book on site and get a genuine author’s signature on the title page. Details here.
Your New Favorite Writer’s second novel, Izzy Strikes Gold! hits the streets July 24, but you can place your order now, for delivery then.
SUMMER 1957: Twelve-year-old Izzy, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer Collum swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
Mom and Dad are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. The Russians launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying Lyle dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking Irma seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and Grandpa, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
Deep in dilemmas, how can Izzy hold on to hope?
A FUNNY, SAD, UNFORGETTABLE JOURNEY, ROOTED IN THE AUTHOR’S OWN BOYHOOD
So What?
I may have mentioned this project once, twice, or three times in this space. That’s because I’m proud of this book. It’s a story that’s close to my heart.
Being the story of a 12-year-old boy, bookstores classify it as a “middle-grade” novel, meaning it’s for kids.
But we were all twelve years old once, and Izzy’s experiences, while unique to him, are darned near universal among Americans of a certain age. His adventures take place in 1957. Whether or not the Fifties were the time of your youth, you are likely to find things in this brief narrative that speak to your memories, and to your heart.
It’s a story about a kid trying to fit in.
How You Fit In
If you will be in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on Launch Day—July 24, 2024—you are cordially invited to attend our gala Book Launch Party at Mystery to Me Bookstore. They will have enough copies for everybody who wants one, and I’ll be happy to sign your copy. Tickets are free, but you have to sign up in advance.
Of course, you can always wait a couple of months and buy it at your favorite local bookstore; you may have place an order through them. Or get it on Amazon, if all else fails (Don’t look, it’s not there yet).
How To Use the Product
Read it. Then read it to, or give it to, your son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, neice, nephew, or all of them (you’ll need extra copies). Some readers of recent generations may be astounded at certain things they will read in this book. You may have to assure them that yes, indeed, that’s how things were, not so very long ago.
Come to think of it, this is a book that could start all sorts of useful conversations.
In case you’ve lost track, you can get it by clicking on the cover image just below:
What can I say? Nothing that has not been said before.
It gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. People died for me. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, for good cause or in vain—they gave their lives.
This morning we will attend the Memorial Day Parade in Monona. Given just a little wedge of dry weather, we’ll cheer as our granddaughter marches down the street, playing her trombone in the high school band. We’ll applaud, full of pride and happiness—as we ought.
Our happiness came with a price tag. Later in the day, we’ll make time to remember the fallen.
My great-great-grandfather, Anders Gunstensen, who died of dysentery contracted at Vicksburg in 1863, as surely a victim of the war as if a bullet had found his heart.
My uncles, Stanley and Franklin Sommers, shot from the sky at opposite ends of the earth—one over the Solomon Islands, the other over France. They were uncles I never knew, taken before I entered the world.
My friends Billy Harff and Bruce Hulting, among the many lost when America stumbled into a little-understood war in Southeast Asia.
Ryan Jopek, a Wisconsin Guardmember who died in Iraq, before his twenty-first birthday. I photographed him with his father before he left Madison.
It’s personal.
War comes for each new generation, with the regularity of a clock striking twelve.
The aggressor fails to resist the lure of power. The defender can hardly be blamed for choosing survival.
The cost is obscene, but young men and women must pay it just the same.
Let us weep for our lost brothers and sisters and honor their sacrifice.
The Zambezi River rolls across a vast plateau in southern Africa and falls into a deep cleft in the earth. This sudden descent is known as Victoria Falls.
Victoria Falls is twice as wide as Niagara, and twice as high. Though neither the widest nor the highest waterfall, when height and width are combined it is the largest sheet of falling water anywhere on the planet.
Your New Favorite Writer visited Africa a few years ago. On takeoff from the airport at Livingstone, Zambia, our pilot flew a slow S-curve at low altitude, so passengers on both sides of the plane could get a good gander at the falls.
It was an astonishing spectacle.
Another view of Victoria Falls. Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA.
The trench into which the Zambezi tumbles is cross-wise to the river. It is so wide, so narrow, and so deep that the water seems to plunge straight into the bowels of the earth. There is an outflow stream at the bottom of the gorge, but it is narrow, dwarfed by the immense falls.
Victoria Falls—white horizontal line in center—seen from the International Space Station. Public Domain.
Wait For It
I have reached that point in life when old friends, whom I’ve known for ages, are dropping dead one by one. It concentrates the mind. One dwells on death.
Now here, on a different continent, an image presented itself: Picture all of us, all humanity, moving across a wide plain. And somewhere in that plain is a crevasse. But it can’t be seen from any distance.
Perhaps the crevasse is crooked, so you may reach your part of it it before or after I reach my part of it, even though we march abreast.
From my point of view, a friend or aquaintance suddenly drops out of view—yet here I am, still sauntering forward. Someday, without warning, it will be me—and people I know will keep strolling or marching along, wondering what became of me.
Now, Here’s the Payoff
Like the waters of the Zambezi, I may appear to have been swallowed whole. But actually, I will just flow out sideways, like everyone else, through new channels, into wide lakes, past twisty creeks and broad estuaries, to God’s eternal sea.
We are in Holy Week, the name Christians give to the time between Palm Sunday and Easter.
Your New Favorite Writer was going to expound on holiness but found he is not yet grown-up enough to write on that subject in a sensible way.
So, maybe next year. I’ll be 79 then.
But now, for Something Completely Different:
Meeting Steve Canyon
We turn a page from the sacred to the profane.
I have just read Meeting Steve Canyon . . . and Flying With the CIA in Laos, by Karl L. Polifka. It’s a memoir of a particular time and place in the Vietnam War.
Thinking men, in war, may notice a discrepancy between facts and ideals. So it was with Polifka. A U.S. Air Force pilot, he was assigned as a forward air controller, or FAC, in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.
A Cessna O-1F Bird Dog takes off in South Vietnam, 1968. This aircraft was later used by the Ravens in Laos. USAF Photo.
Polifka’s job was to scout enemy assets and troop formations from a slow-moving, propeller-driven aircraft—an O-1, a U-17, or a T-28—to mark enemy positions with phosphorus-tipped rockets, and to direct fighter/bombers to attack the places marked by his rockets.
Sounds simple, right? In reality it was a severe task, which called for technical skills, sharp reflexes, steel nerves, and iron resolve in the face of physical and psychic trauma.
A T-28D Trojan trainer of the Royal Thai Air Force waits for takeoff beside a U.S. Air Force F-4D Phantom, 1972. The T-28 trainer is like the ones used by the Ravens. Public Domain.
Polifka believed in the cause. He appears never to have suffered the deep doubts developed by some fighters in the long Southeast Asian war.
But the job required mental toughness and gave many opportunities for an intelligent observer—which Polifka clearly was—to question the utility, even the sanity, of operational tactics.
Flying out of Gia Nghia, in the Central Highlands, Polifka ran afoul of “pre-plans,” operations concocted by shadowy experts at Seventh Air Force headquarters. He often felt the pre-plans were not informed by good knowledge of actual conditions on the ground.
Steve Canyon, as drawn by Milton Caniff. Fair use.
When Polifka grew tired of the routine at Gia Nghia, someone suggested he tell his supervisor he was “interested in Steve Canyon.” Uncertain what the phrase might imply, he did what was suggested. His supervisor frowned but in due course of time a transfer came through. “Steve Canyon” turned out to be an unofficial cover name for a clandestine project in Laos.
If the name doesn’t ring an immediate bell for you, Steve Canyon was the hero of an Air Force-themed adventure comic strip drawn by writer-artist Milton Caniff from 1947 to 1988. Steve Canyon the action hero was very well-known, but the program in Laos that bore his name was hush-hush.
A Fine Mess
The Kingdom of Laos, officially neutral, was used by North Vietnam as a conduit for troops, arms, and provisions bound for South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its allies the Viet Cong fought the South Vietnamese Army and its allies including the United States. Other players in Laos included Communist Pathet Lao guerilla forces interested in overthrowing the royal government, plus both left-neutralist and right-neutralist armies.
It was a mess created by a major power vacuum in close proximity to a hot war.
Because of the theoretical neutrality of Laos and the desire to appear righteous on the world stage, U.S. operations in the kingdom, though undertaken to support our official and public Vietnam war effort, were partly dissociated from regular military channels.
Polifka and the other Steve Canyon controllers, known as Ravens, got their targeting priorities from CIA case officers on the ground and from General Vang Pao, an ethnic Hmong in the Royal Lao Army leading his people against the Communists.
Gen. Vang Pao is the face in center, under a tan cap, behind the shoulder of King Savang Vatthana, the big guy in tan uniform, shown at a 1968 royal visit to Sam Thong, Laos. Photo by NruasPaoYPP, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Officers at U.S. Seventh Air Force resented these arrangements. A conference had to be called to allocate air strikes in Laos. The conferees decreed that sixty percent of ordnance dropped would be directed by Ravens and the remaining forty percent by Seventh Air Force controllers.
The Nitty Gritty
These matters of protocol and bureaucratic infighting are only the background. Most of Polifka’s book is a retail account of dozens of deadly fights in the hills and valleys of Laos, centered on the plateau known as the Plain of Jars—Plaines des Jarres in French, abbreviated PDJ.
On one level, Polifka’s narrative is a persistent justification of the tactics developed by the Ravens, the CIA, and the Hmong fighters and their work as a successful team defending the Hmongs’ lands and villages, as well as a condemnation of unsuccessful and ham-handed operations undertaken by higher headquarters.
More basically, it is a tale of merciless slaughter. The telling is cumbered with a heavy load of jargon—CBU-24s and PTs and T-76s and 12.7s in bewildering variety—which the reader must struggle through to get the story. It’s a tough go, even for a reader with a military background.
But the reward for coping with all the acronyms and terms of art is a story that is steeped in authenticity. There can be no doubt that with minimal exaggerations and simplifications, this narrative presents the day-by-day reality that the Ravens and their comrades-in-arms lived. Getting that story is a fairly grim reward, yet it’s an important story, told by a combatant who had both a bird’s-eye and a worm’s eye view.
Memories Triggered
These events interest me because during this period, 1968 and 1969, I was immersed in the same war—mercifully for me, at a greater level of abtraction.
While Karl Polifka and his cohorts felt the heat of anti-aircraft and mortar fire zoomed through at tree-top level, I and other members of my squadron soared blissfully overhead in RC-130 and 135 spy aircraft, intercepting radio signals at altitudes of 30,000 to 39,000 feet.
We flew some missions from Cam Ranh Bay up and down the Mekong River for several hundreds of miles. Where Polifka and his fellow Ravens kept constant lookout for 12.7mm, 14.5 mm, and 37 mm anti-aircraft fire, we had no worries except the remote chance that the NVA might bring in 85mm or 100mm cannons somewhere along our route. Even the 57mm artillery they did have spotted along the Mekong could only reach 28,000 feet.
So Polifka’s war and mine were the same war. But the nature of my mission and the organizations that oversaw it placed me in a different context than his. My role was the bland gathering of intelligence, little of it related to immediate action, most of it valued for long-term analysis of enemy capabilities and intentions.
EC-121 aircraft on the ramp at Korat RTAFB. USAF photo.
An F-4 Phantom jet releases its bombs. USAF photo.
Polifka mentions with admiration F-4E pilots out of Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base who could shred ground targets with great finesse. There were times I flew out of Korat on EC-121 airborne control platforms, and when near the flight line I saw fully-loaded F-4s screaming off with a great bang of their afterburners. Some of these must have been the same guys Polifka worked with over the Plain of Jars.
As Close As I Care to Get
Sometimes I did glimpse the grim realities of the war.
One night after dark, riding at 30,000 feet back to Cam Ranh Bay from one of our Mekong River flights, white flashes splashed into our compartment from outside. Crowding the side window, we saw what looked like an intense thunderstorm over central Laos. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of white flashes, closely spaced, at intervals less than a second.
“Those are ARC LIGHT sorties,” said our pilot. “Buffs dropping their payloads. Each flash is a 500- or 750-pound bomb exploding on impact.”
How could anyone, or anything at all, live under such a heavy rain?
At Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, we used to watch B-52 Stratofortress bombers—“buffs,” in Air Force slang. They were something beautiful to see—ungainly yet graceful at the same time—slipping down over the ocean, crossing the shore on final approach.
B-52 landing at Guam. U.S. Air Force photo.
Each buff carried fifty or more bombs. “Between June 1965 and August 1973, the Strategic Air Command scheduled 126,663 Stratofortress combat sorties, of which 126,615 were actually launched. The number of aircraft reaching the target area was 125,479 with 124,532 successfully releasing their bombs on the targets.” (https://media.defense.gov/2017/Mar/28/2001722969/-1/-1/0/04-ILL_HIST_CH08-CH10_(PAGES149-200).PDF, Ch. VII, “B-52 Arc Light Operations,” p. 167.)
In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, God revealed himself to a man named Moses in the semblance of a burning bush. Moses thought it odd that although the bush was aflame, it was not consumed by the fire. So he decided to take a closer look.
Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush (1610–16) by Domenichino (Italian, 1581-1641). Public Domain.
When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
—Exodus 3:4-5, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition
One must not go shod, you see, on holy ground.
Writing a Sermon
Dear Reader, you already know Your New Favorite Writer is . . . a writer.
I’ve written many things: Utilitarian items like training manuals, instructions, official reports, news releases, magazine articles, photo captions, even the occasional speech. Literary products like poems, screenplays, short stories, and novels. Desultory or occasional outbursts like this blog.
You may be unaware that I also write sermons. I don’t mean sermons in a figurative sense, like “Did you see Larry’s rant about civil public discourse last Tuesday? It was a regular sermon!”
No, I mean actual sermons. I sometimes preach on a Sunday morning, because I am a lay preacher in the Congregational tradition. Some denominations only allow ordained clergy to preach, but in our chuches, official credentials are not necessarily required. It’s more about being called to preach the Gospel.
A local church may be deprived of its regular preacher for a time. My name is on a list of people who may be called to fill in. This week I am readying a sermon to be preached in a small town a couple of Sundays from now.
Sermon writing is not like any other kind of writing. It’s not just that it must be from the heart; all good writing should come from one’s heart. It’s not even, exactly, that it’s informed by the Spirit of God; I like to think the Holy Spirit is there somehow in everything I do.
But mainly, this is writing produced on commission for a Very Special Customer. When writing a sermon, and when delivering it, one stands in the presence of God. One ought to go barefoot.
The Homiletic Tradition
Some preachers, taking a cue from Exodus 3, go so far as to stand barefoot, or stockingfooted, in the pulpit when preaching on Sunday morning. (They do! You could look it up.)
Some preachers don’t even write their sermons down—convinced, as a theological tenet, that when preaching, they must simply be a spontaneous instrument, tuned in to God’s frequency. The Almighty will put words in their mouths at the right time. And He always does. Almost all of those whose preaching is completely spontaneous also spend a great deal of time reading Scripture. When God gives them a message on the spur of the moment, Bible verses are automatically embedded in it.
George Whitefield. Engraved by J. Cochran, 1877. Public Domain.
Jonathan Edwards, mezzotint print from Welsh Portrait Collection. Public Domain.
Methodist evangelist George Whitefield (1714-1770) made up his sermons on the spot. Congregationalist cleric Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) mostly wrote his out in advance.
I, like Edwards, write my sermons. I write what I want to say, so that when it comes time to say it, I will remember what it was I wanted to say. A revelation is neither more nor less divine for having been written on paper before it is spoken.
Authenticity
“All well and good, O New Favorite Writer,” I hear you cry—“but how do you get the divine part in, in the first place? How do you know that you are preaching what God wants people to hear? Or are you merely an unshod charlatan, after all?”
I am glad you asked, Gentle Reader.
I think my sermons have some spiritual validity because I start from the Bible. When preachers write sermons, there are generally two different ways of “starting from the Bible”:
1. Refer to the lectionary. The lectionary is a table that associates a set of scripture passages with each Sunday of the year. It was worked out, many years ago, by clergy who wanted a systematic way for a congregation to work through large parts of the Bible over a three-year period. So the lectionary repeats itself every three years. And its pattern is complicated. But it’s all written down, so on any given Sunday, you can easily find out what the readings are. In some chuches, use of the lectionary is law; in others, it’s a respected tradition. Still others disregard the lectionary entirely.
2. Use some other method. You simply choose a Bible verse to preach about. You may pray to God for a passage of Scripture to be sent to you. You may reflect on something important the congregation ought to hear, and your reflections may put you in mind of something from the Bible. You may don a blindfold, open the Bible to a random page, put your finger down on the page, take off the blindfold, and see what you’re going to preach on. Any of these methods, or others, can work; any of them can be useful if you are preaching in a church that does not use the lectionary but prefers to leave the choice of text to the preacher.
Which method do I use? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Mostly it depends on the local custom of the church I’m addressing. If they love the lectionary, far be it from me to disturb their idyll; I’ll simply preach on the lectionary text. If they are lectionary-independent, I will find a verse on my own.
More important than the specific verse chosen is the approach and attitude of the preacher. This brings us back to the burning bush, and the sandals. When preaching a sermon, one stands quite consciously in the presence of God. It is presumptuous to speak a word purporting to be God’s word, when in the actual presence of God. The only approopriate attitude is humility, whether one shucks one’s oxfords or not.
So when starting to write, before I open the Book to the verse chosen, I first pray to God that a new understanding of the verse may be sent through the Holy Spirit. That’s a good approach. If you pray thus, and pray sincerely, something interesting and useful will pop off the page and into your consciousness. Then it’s just a matter of writing it down.
Chutzpah
What gives one the sheer, gosh-awful audacity to write messages on behalf of God, for delivery to God’s people?
While God was speaking to Moses from the burning bush, he commissioned Moses to go to the pharaoh of Egypt and liberate the Children of Israel held in thrall there. And Moses said, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I will be with you.”
But Moses continued to demur. His Impostor Syndrome prompted this plea: “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And God replied, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” (Exodus 4:10-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.)
There are many more examples of people wholly unqualified to speak for God, who have been commissioned by God to do so anyway.
The Bottom Line
I have received the gift of writing. I believe in the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and someone has to speak to his people on Sunday mornings. So here I am, Lord: Send me.
