Books: The picture that told a thousand stories

[thedrifter]

May 08, 2006
Books: The picture that told a thousand stories

By Mark D. Faram
Times staff writer

Ed Terella remembers that day in vivid detail, even though it happened in 1945. The young Marine private had been on Iwo Jima just four days when he and thousands of other Marines and sailors saw a flag go up on Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the volcanic island.

“We all hooted and hollered; it was an incredible moment and I’ll always remember it even though it happened over 60 years ago,” Terella said.

That memory and many others came flooding back to the 81-year-old former radioman as he looked through the pages of a new book, “Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph That Captured America” by Hal Buell, scheduled to be released by Berkley Books on May 2.

Until recent years, not many people outside those who were there knew that two flag-raisings took place on that Feb. 23, roughly four hours apart. Fewer still realize that the immortal picture taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal is actually of the second U.S. flag to be raised over the Japanese island.


Still, as fate would have it, that picture would capture the country’s imagination when it was published a few days later and propel the surviving sailor and Marines in the image to instant stardom — while those who raised the first flag fell into obscurity.

The photo won Rosenthal and the Associated Press the Pulitzer Prize that year and eventually inspired the statue that became the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va.

“It symbolizes everything about the Marine Corps and how they took that island,” Buell said. “Those men working to raise that flag did it through teamwork, and that’s how that island was taken, too.”

The book puts both flag-raisings into perspective by placing the story of the photograph against the background of the battle.

The book doesn’t just tell the story — it shows the story through hundreds of photos taken by Rosenthal and other Marine and civilian photographers during the monthlong battle that took the lives of 7,000 U.S. Marines and sailors and 22,000 Japanese. Another 21,000 were wounded on both sides.

The book contains a bonus, a 20-minute DVD documentary produced by Lou Reda Productions in Easton, Pa.

The film, produced exclusively for inclusion in the book, uses outstanding movie footage and still images to help weave the story told by Marines who fought the battle, as well as Rosenthal and others who documented it.

Though the movie and book cover much of the same ground, they’re meant to be complementary, Buell said.

And, in the end, the book is an excellent read made even better by the accompanying film. The story will prove a stellar addition to any World War II or Marine Corps history library.

It will also appeal to those interested in the history of photography and the impact that photography had on the American war effort.

“Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue” shows the circumstances that led a single image to symbolize not only that epic battle, but the entire American effort during World War II.

Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph That Captured America. By Hal Buell. Berkley Publishing Group. 258 pages. $28.95

Other recent releases
• Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam. By Mark Bowden. Atlantic Monthly Press. $26. The author of “Black Hawk Down” re-creates the story of the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis through the eyes of the people who lived it, on both sides.

• I Lie for a Living: Greatest Spies of All Time. National Geographic. $14.95. In association with the International Spy Museum, this book provides a guide to history’s 62 greatest known spies, including Benedict Arnold, Aldrich Ames and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

• Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945. By David Fairbank White. Simon & Schuster. $26. The use of archival material and fresh interviews brings new life to the saga of how the Allies fought a costly battle — 36,000 seamen perished — in their effort to ferry supplies from the U.S. and Canada to Britain during World War II.
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Ellie

[thedrifter]

May 08, 2006
The true story of America’s first naval hero

By Don DeNevi
Special to the Times

The enigmatic John Paul Jones, the American naval hero who bellowed, “I have not yet begun to fight!” when faced with certain death from overwhelming British firepower, is the subject of a fresh, long-overdue biography.

Employing a solid yet eloquent narrative pace, author Joseph Callo, in his “John Paul Jones: America’s First Sea Warrior,” portrays the revered 5-foot-5-inch, sharp-nosed, brown-haired, hazel-eyed figure as a fiery, intractable, complex personality whose ultimate fame resides in not only humbling British naval pride but also in providing the Continental Navy with an immeasurable victory and the U.S. Navy one of its most memorable historic moments.

And, as Callo explains, since this hero of the American Revolution was an unflagging patriot who envisioned Atlantic sea power catapulting the fledgling nation into a world superpower, Jones advances beyond the narrow military context of honor, courage and commitment into the realm of true naval genius.

Callo, who retired as a rear admiral after 30-plus years in the Naval Reserve and was Naval History magazine’s 1998 Author of the Year, examines various aspects of Jones’ amazing life — some well known, some not: his brief tour in the Russian navy of Catherine the Great, his warm friendship with Benjamin Franklin and his improbable victory off Flamborough Head in the Continental ship Bonhomme Richard.

Along the way, 200 years of erroneous legends and deconstructionist views are investigated and demythologized — that Jones was financially greedy, that he was socially eccentric and too stormy to be a good seaman, that his victories were too easily fought and won, and that he really didn’t have much to do with the success of the Revolution.

Of special interest to military buffs are the differences Callo lays out between Jones’ asymmetrical concepts of warfare and those of 21st-century terrorists, including the principles of maritime strategy he pursued and their relevance to our war against Islamic terrorism.

More than 30 biographies and hundreds of articles about Jones have appeared during the past 200 years, earning him such fallacious epithets as “Knight of the Seas,” “The Sailor England Feared,” “America’s Greatest Captain” and, inaccurately, according to Callo, “The Father of the American Navy.”

“While those overheated characterizations are wildly wide of the mark, one label does emerge: America’s first sea warrior,” Callo writes in his introduction.

Jones “was the first American naval hero to achieve significant public acclaim beyond his country’s borders, and he was America’s first serving naval officer to demonstrate an understanding of how profoundly naval power would play in the history of the U.S. Above all, he was the man who gave our Navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.”

President Theodore Roosevelt advised that every military officer “should know by heart the deeds of John Paul Jones,” suggesting the leadership qualities that enabled the blue-jacketed skipper to succeed as a self-taught naval officer are relevant in today’s world.

“John Paul Jones: America’s First Sea Warrior” assembles all available knowledge to reveal the core of the man beneath the celebrated name. In telling this involved, sometimes knotty life story, Callo stirs both mind and soul. First-rate personality analyses, especially about our founding fathers, are always difficult to put down. In this hardcover, a reader could easily consume all 250 pages in one evening.

Don DeNevi is a freelance writer in California.

John Paul Jones: America’s First Sea Warrior. By Joseph Callo. Naval Institute Press. 250 pages. $30

Ellie

[thedrifter]

They Also Serve Who Only Wait
By Emily Yellin,
author of "Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II"
Wednesday, May 3, 2006; C01

WHILE THEY'RE AT WAR

The True Story of American Families on the Homefront

By Kristin Henderson

Houghton Mifflin. 317 pp. $23

WHEN THE WAR CAME HOME

The Inside Story of Reservists and the Families They Leave Behind

By Stacy Bannerman

Continuum. 237 pp. $22.95

The idea that war is men's work has been around for as long as war itself. Women, tradition has it, were the supporting players -- dutiful, uncomplaining and sheltered from any real action. One of the most time-honored such images was the wife or mother "left behind." She sent her soldier off. She welcomed him home. And in between, she was not to be seen or heard from much but presumably pined away in patriotic martyrdom.

Iraq is far from the first war in which the roles assigned to women do not match up with what they actually do or who they are. But it is the first war that has included women, for better or worse, playing major parts in the main story line. Think Condoleezza Rice, Cindy Sheehan, Jessica Lynch, Lynndie England and Jill Carroll.

Now, two new books about the Iraq war have given a 21st-century recasting to the war wife. Stacy Bannerman's "When the War Came Home" and Kristin Henderson's "While They're at War" provide vivid descriptions and heart-wrenching details of the way war reaches into every aspect of the lives of soldiers' spouses. The books also make clear that the government's wavering support for the needs of military families in this particular war has made their survival here at home seem as tumultuous and uncertain as that of their soldiers in Iraq.

Bannerman is a career peace and human rights activist, whose husband, Lorin, a sergeant in the National Guard, was called up to serve in Iraq. She uses the challenges the couple face in reconciling his war work with her peace work as a focal point of "When the War Came Home." And she makes important points, such as showing that the most passionate activism against this war is not on college campuses but in the households of those with the most at stake, the primarily blue-collar military families. Yet Bannerman is strongest when she sticks to her own feelings of anger, frustration and heartache at her husband's absence.

The e-mails between the couple are especially touching. After an appearance by Bannerman on MSNBC's "Hardball" aired at her husband's base in Iraq, Lorin e-mails that some of his colleagues applauded her, others didn't. Bannerman replies, "If they want military wives to shut up, tell them to recognize us as the unpaid resource we are." In another e-mail, Lorin assures her, "I thank you for having the courage to speak out. . . . I support you my wife and I know you will do the right thing." And she ends one e-mail by thanking him for "being the answer to every prayer I have ever prayed for love."

Bannerman also effectively conveys the isolation and lack of government support particular to National Guard families who operate on the military's second tier. However, she occasionally veers off into breathless, unsubstantiated or distracting tangents -- about war policy, peace activism and even a transsexual friend -- that detract from the more profound story of love during this war that is the worthwhile core of her book.

Henderson's eye-opening work, on the other hand, skillfully carries the reader through her vast subject, bringing up appropriate, well-sourced details at the right time. Henderson is a journalist whose husband, a longtime Navy chaplain, served with the Marines in both Iraq and Afghanistan. "While They're at War" provides a wide-ranging portrait of this war's effects on the day-to-day lives of military wives and a few husbands (honorary members of their sisterhood) in and around Fort Bragg, N.C. Their stories illustrate common problems such as inadequate child care, lapses in insurance and bouts of debilitating depression. Henderson also chronicles the resentment and burnout among spouses who serve the military as unpaid but desperately needed family outreach workers. And she describes wives facing monstrous effects of their husbands' combat stress long after the homecoming, including domestic violence and even murder.

Henderson closely follows a woman named Beth Pratt, whose husband finally returns from Iraq and wants to get her a gun so she can protect herself when he is sent away again. Beth objects, explaining that if she had had a gun the last time he was in Iraq, she surely would have used it to kill herself. Suicidal depression is just one of her worries. Her husband's combat pay is so inadequate that she will qualify for welfare if she decides to stay home with the baby that she is expecting.

For these family members, terrible news can come anytime. In one of many poignant scenes, Henderson describes an Army wife named Teresa Metzdorf home alone watching "American Idol" when her husband calls from a military hospital in Iraq. He tells her his leg was blown off that morning in a roadside explosion that killed three of his fellow soldiers and blasted the face off another. Teresa then spends seven long months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with her husband in rehabilitation, among countless unheralded amputees and paraplegics. Their story will jolt readers out of obliviousness -- reality-television-induced or not -- as surely as that phone call did Teresa.

What comes through loud and clear in both books is the enormous, and underreported, toll this war has taken on military families at home. Unlike most other civilians, they must live through its impact every day. Near the end of Henderson's book, a seasoned Army wife who has survived her husband's many deployments tries to comfort a group of angry younger wives. She says there would be something wrong with them if they weren't mad at the uncertainty pervading every minute of their lives. Rejecting the traditional stoicism of military wives, she declares, "This 'suck it up and don't complain' is for the birds."

As both these books demonstrate, so is our long-standing tendency to ignore the pressures under which these overburdened military families fight our wars.

Ellie