thedrifter
09-01-07, 08:57 AM
Fame & Fortune: Author W.E.B. Griffin
Saturday September 1, 6:00 am ET
Jay MacDonald
W.E.B. Griffin became America's master of military fiction by demonstrating how the worst of times often brings out the best in men and women.
A hell-raiser as a kid growing up in New York and Philadelphia, William Edmund Butterworth III enlisted in the Army in 1946. Following training stateside in counterintelligence, he served with the constabulary in the Army of Occupation in Germany, where one of his duties was to deliver food to former Nazi officers and their families.
After completing his service commitment, he remained in Germany and enrolled at Phillips University in Marburg an der Lahn. His studies were cut short in 1951 when he was recalled to serve in Korea as an Army war correspondent and public information officer on the front lines with several Marine divisions.
It was in Korea that a friend suggested he try his hand at fiction. His novels, which focused on ordinary Joes caught in extraordinary circumstances, were an immediate hit. Though he continued to work for the Army as the civilian chief of publications at Fort Rucker, Ala., during the ramp-up to the Vietnam War, his growing success writing military novels in his spare time soon rendered his day job unnecessary.
With some 130 works of fiction written under a handful of pen names to his credit, Griffin -- a pseudonym -- has been hailed as the consummate voice of the military. He has written six successful series, including "The Brotherhood of War" (Army), "The Corps" (Marines), "Men at War" (the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, precursor to the CIA), "Badge of Honor" (Philadelphia police), "By Order of the President" (contemporary counter-terrorism) and" Honor Bound" (the OSS in Argentina during World War II). He also contributed to the successful "M*A*S*H" series.
Today, the 77-year-old master of war novels and his Argentine wife divide their time between Buenos Aires and the Alabama Gulf Coast home where Bankrate bivouacked with him for a chat about his fascinating past.
Bankrate: Though your military books are about men at war, you rarely write about actual combat. Why?
Griffin: Yeah, well, I was in combat. People say I write well about combat, but the truth is, I don't write much about it. My theory is, the people who have been there don't want to read about it, and it's impossible to describe to somebody who hasn't been there.
Bankrate: Did you come from a military family?
W.E.B. Griffin: (Laughs) Oh no, no. My father was a charming scoundrel. He was a salesman of expensive women's shoes, a traveling one. It was like a caravan when he went out and crisscrossed the country; I used to put him on the train and there would be a whole platoon of red caps carrying his sample cases and stuff. It kept us in food during the Depression. The rich always had money. I didn't realize how many other people were really in bad shape during that period because we lived very well.
Bankrate: You marched to a different drummer however.
Griffin: I was a bad kid. I got kicked out of every school on the eastern seaboard and joined the Army when I was 16. I never went to jail, but I just didn't get along with schools.
Bankrate: That's surprising. One pictures you as being more of a scholarly kid.
Griffin: No, I used to think they were a little "delicate" (laughs).
Bankrate: Your military novels tend to touch on subjects that didn't make it into the history books, particularly spy craft and counterintelligence.
Griffin: They do. I was a soldier and I was lucky enough to be around some people who were very senior, and some lieutenants who later became very senior, so I think I know pretty much how the military mind works. I don't want to paint myself as a great counterspy, because that is absolutely untrue. But what that security clearance did for me was give me access; I could go in the files and look at things. I read things then.
Bankrate: You had written a host of books on the European theater of World War II when you discovered the largely untapped story of Juan Peron and Argentina's alliance with Hitler, which became your "Honor Bound" series. Your wife had something to do with that discovery, right?
Griffin: Well, I went down there to shoot duck (laughs) and I expected Mexico South; my ignorance of Argentina was monumental. Instead of Mexico South, we got a European-looking city (Buenos Aires), great food, and I met my wife, who ran the business of taking the hunters from the airplane to the (hunting site) and back and showed them around town. I married her; fell in love right away but it took three years to do it. She's an Argentine army brat; her father was a colonel in the cavalry, anti-Peronist. We've been married 15 years now.
Bankrate: What in Argentina fired your imagination?
Griffin: I was excited about Argentina because nobody in this country ever wrote about it before. And the doors are open to me now; I'm part of the system down there, at least the military system, because of my wife's father. And he was an anti-Peronist, which is even a smaller community. They are interesting people, done a lot of things. I like the country. The government is absolutely rotten; the president's a moron beyond description. But I like it down there. We spend half the year down there, maybe more.
Bankrate: Incompetent, meddlesome politicians are often the bane of the military in your novels. Did you experience that firsthand?
Griffin: There was a Jewish guy (American finance minister Hugo) Morgenthal who, with reason, absolutely hated the Germans, and he had the nutty idea of turning Germany into an agrarian nation. He was absolutely opposed to reindustrializing it, that being defined at the time as reopening the Volkswagen plant, which was a very good thing for Germany and the world. He thought they ought to all be farmers! It sounds idiotic, but this is true. He fought us tooth and nail. He had no idea what he was doing and he was a powerful politician trying to run the Army. And they had two very bright guys at the time, (Eisenhower deputy) Lucius Clay and John McCoy, a civilian, and this guy interfered with everything they were trying to do. I was in the same office and hung around with them, drove a car and things like that, and I heard all this stuff when I was a kid. It was fascinating to me then and still is.
Bankrate: At what point did you realize you would one day create fiction from these experiences?
Griffin: This is a wild story. I was a master sergeant in the Army on my way to Korea and I didn't look like a master sergeant in the Army. And at New American Library, my editor also edited James Jones ("From Here to Eternity"). And here I was, James Jones starting to tell me how to get along with the Army, and I looked at James Jones, this great chronicler of the military, thinking this (guy doesn't know anything) about the Army (laughs)! And he was really trying to help me, being a really nice guy, on what I shouldn't say to the corporal!
I found out that a lot of these guys ... do you know what Hemingway did in the Army? He was a lieutenant in the Italian army. Do you know why? This is a true story; I got this from the guy who bought Hemingway's first book. The Italians realized they couldn't treat these nice young middle-class American kids like they treated their own privates, so they made them all officers. True story, absolutely true story. He got wounded; I'm not denigrating his service. But that's why he was an officer. Because an Italian private doesn't live too well. All the Americans who were over there were officers.
Bankrate: Were you able to make a living as a writer coming out of the service?
Griffin: No, I had a hard time when I first got out of the Army. I spent the worst year of my life selling Karo and Mazola in Philadelphia, hitting every grocery store in that area. Then my boss in Korea was at Fort Rucker learning how to fly and he ran me down and said, "Come down and work for me in the mornings and you can write your books in the afternoons." And of course he was lying. I went to Rucker and worked for him day and night for about 18 months when they were starting up Army aviation for the Vietnam War. I wrote FM1-1 for Army Aviation Operations. That was fascinating. And while I was there, I wrote my second novel and about 10 more books and then I quit, because I was making enough money and it didn't make any sense to have a government job. It was all technical material. It's a good way to learn how to write. It's a lot better than taking some course in creative writing.
Bankrate: How did you view the Vietnam War then?
Griffin: I had several emotions about it. I didn't go -- my wife wouldn't let me go. She said she would divorce me and ultimately did (he since has remarried). I would have gone out of curiosity because all my friends were going. We didn't lose that war militarily; we lost it politically. I'm a great dis-admirer of Westmoreland. I think he did a very bad job over there. And the villain of the century was McNamara, who was waging a war he had no intention of winning. I think that's the worst thing anybody's ever done to this country. You can hate Rumsfeld all you want, but Rumsfeld wants to win, or wanted to win. We could have won that war (Vietnam), but I don't know what the hell good it would have done us.
Bankrate: Are you tempted to weigh in on the Iraqi conflict?
Griffin: No. I didn't get into Vietnam either. I don't feel comfortable writing about it because I don't know that much about it. It's a different war than the kind I knew. When I was there, we never heard from the Pentagon; we did, but everybody ignored them. Now these guys are controlled by some GS-7 at the Pentagon. That changes the whole face of war. I've talked to a lot of guys who have been there, but I don't want to write about it. There's nothing really to say.
Bankrate: Is that because it seems to be largely a political war?
Griffin: No. I'm terrified of the (terrorists). I think they are determined to destroy Christian civilization and Jewish civilization, which means the western world, and nobody wants to accept that. They scare me to death. These people don't have the same concept of reality that we do. We couldn't surrender if we wanted to. It's just a nasty, nasty place to be. You're living in air-conditioned barracks and going out and getting killed. Part of why I couldn't write about it is, you can't get victory.
Bankrate: You completely changed course with the "Badge of Honor" series, shifting into police work for the first time. Were you familiar with police protocol going in?
Griffin: Not at all. There was a cop named (Philadelphia Police Chief) Zeb Casey who invited me up, and I liked the guys, but frankly there was no sense in me doing it, they're a closed fraternity. He said, "You come up here and I'll get you in," and he indeed did. There's a strong parallel between the military and the cops. Most of the white shirts in Philadelphia, had they been in the army, they would have been Green Berets or SEALs or Marines.
Bankrate: How have you invested your money?
Griffin: For years and years, I did it myself, and I did it in absolute ignorance. Now I have a money manager and he's very good. I didn't do bad. I went with T. Rowe Price for a lot of it and I made a lot of money, but it wasn't that I was smart; I was just stupidly lucky. I didn't know what in the hell I was doing. I was investing in mutual funds -- I think there were 75 of them at T. Rowe and they're all in something weird -- and I played with that and I didn't do bad. My accountant said, "You know, you're lucky. You better stop this and get somebody who knows what he's doing." So I got one of these guys who doesn't get a commission from buying and selling; he gets his commission based on how much more money he makes for me, and I'm absolutely delighted with him. I'm amazed at private citizens trying to think they know the market.
Bankrate: You've been very successful writing about the military during decades when the public appetite for war has been at an all-time low. What's your secret?
Griffin: That's very true. I think it may be because I write about people rather than stereotype soldiers. That sounds self-flattering to speak that way and I don't mean to be. I've been lucky, there's no other way to put it. They gave me a lot of money for doing something I love to do. That's as good as it gets.
Ellie
Saturday September 1, 6:00 am ET
Jay MacDonald
W.E.B. Griffin became America's master of military fiction by demonstrating how the worst of times often brings out the best in men and women.
A hell-raiser as a kid growing up in New York and Philadelphia, William Edmund Butterworth III enlisted in the Army in 1946. Following training stateside in counterintelligence, he served with the constabulary in the Army of Occupation in Germany, where one of his duties was to deliver food to former Nazi officers and their families.
After completing his service commitment, he remained in Germany and enrolled at Phillips University in Marburg an der Lahn. His studies were cut short in 1951 when he was recalled to serve in Korea as an Army war correspondent and public information officer on the front lines with several Marine divisions.
It was in Korea that a friend suggested he try his hand at fiction. His novels, which focused on ordinary Joes caught in extraordinary circumstances, were an immediate hit. Though he continued to work for the Army as the civilian chief of publications at Fort Rucker, Ala., during the ramp-up to the Vietnam War, his growing success writing military novels in his spare time soon rendered his day job unnecessary.
With some 130 works of fiction written under a handful of pen names to his credit, Griffin -- a pseudonym -- has been hailed as the consummate voice of the military. He has written six successful series, including "The Brotherhood of War" (Army), "The Corps" (Marines), "Men at War" (the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, precursor to the CIA), "Badge of Honor" (Philadelphia police), "By Order of the President" (contemporary counter-terrorism) and" Honor Bound" (the OSS in Argentina during World War II). He also contributed to the successful "M*A*S*H" series.
Today, the 77-year-old master of war novels and his Argentine wife divide their time between Buenos Aires and the Alabama Gulf Coast home where Bankrate bivouacked with him for a chat about his fascinating past.
Bankrate: Though your military books are about men at war, you rarely write about actual combat. Why?
Griffin: Yeah, well, I was in combat. People say I write well about combat, but the truth is, I don't write much about it. My theory is, the people who have been there don't want to read about it, and it's impossible to describe to somebody who hasn't been there.
Bankrate: Did you come from a military family?
W.E.B. Griffin: (Laughs) Oh no, no. My father was a charming scoundrel. He was a salesman of expensive women's shoes, a traveling one. It was like a caravan when he went out and crisscrossed the country; I used to put him on the train and there would be a whole platoon of red caps carrying his sample cases and stuff. It kept us in food during the Depression. The rich always had money. I didn't realize how many other people were really in bad shape during that period because we lived very well.
Bankrate: You marched to a different drummer however.
Griffin: I was a bad kid. I got kicked out of every school on the eastern seaboard and joined the Army when I was 16. I never went to jail, but I just didn't get along with schools.
Bankrate: That's surprising. One pictures you as being more of a scholarly kid.
Griffin: No, I used to think they were a little "delicate" (laughs).
Bankrate: Your military novels tend to touch on subjects that didn't make it into the history books, particularly spy craft and counterintelligence.
Griffin: They do. I was a soldier and I was lucky enough to be around some people who were very senior, and some lieutenants who later became very senior, so I think I know pretty much how the military mind works. I don't want to paint myself as a great counterspy, because that is absolutely untrue. But what that security clearance did for me was give me access; I could go in the files and look at things. I read things then.
Bankrate: You had written a host of books on the European theater of World War II when you discovered the largely untapped story of Juan Peron and Argentina's alliance with Hitler, which became your "Honor Bound" series. Your wife had something to do with that discovery, right?
Griffin: Well, I went down there to shoot duck (laughs) and I expected Mexico South; my ignorance of Argentina was monumental. Instead of Mexico South, we got a European-looking city (Buenos Aires), great food, and I met my wife, who ran the business of taking the hunters from the airplane to the (hunting site) and back and showed them around town. I married her; fell in love right away but it took three years to do it. She's an Argentine army brat; her father was a colonel in the cavalry, anti-Peronist. We've been married 15 years now.
Bankrate: What in Argentina fired your imagination?
Griffin: I was excited about Argentina because nobody in this country ever wrote about it before. And the doors are open to me now; I'm part of the system down there, at least the military system, because of my wife's father. And he was an anti-Peronist, which is even a smaller community. They are interesting people, done a lot of things. I like the country. The government is absolutely rotten; the president's a moron beyond description. But I like it down there. We spend half the year down there, maybe more.
Bankrate: Incompetent, meddlesome politicians are often the bane of the military in your novels. Did you experience that firsthand?
Griffin: There was a Jewish guy (American finance minister Hugo) Morgenthal who, with reason, absolutely hated the Germans, and he had the nutty idea of turning Germany into an agrarian nation. He was absolutely opposed to reindustrializing it, that being defined at the time as reopening the Volkswagen plant, which was a very good thing for Germany and the world. He thought they ought to all be farmers! It sounds idiotic, but this is true. He fought us tooth and nail. He had no idea what he was doing and he was a powerful politician trying to run the Army. And they had two very bright guys at the time, (Eisenhower deputy) Lucius Clay and John McCoy, a civilian, and this guy interfered with everything they were trying to do. I was in the same office and hung around with them, drove a car and things like that, and I heard all this stuff when I was a kid. It was fascinating to me then and still is.
Bankrate: At what point did you realize you would one day create fiction from these experiences?
Griffin: This is a wild story. I was a master sergeant in the Army on my way to Korea and I didn't look like a master sergeant in the Army. And at New American Library, my editor also edited James Jones ("From Here to Eternity"). And here I was, James Jones starting to tell me how to get along with the Army, and I looked at James Jones, this great chronicler of the military, thinking this (guy doesn't know anything) about the Army (laughs)! And he was really trying to help me, being a really nice guy, on what I shouldn't say to the corporal!
I found out that a lot of these guys ... do you know what Hemingway did in the Army? He was a lieutenant in the Italian army. Do you know why? This is a true story; I got this from the guy who bought Hemingway's first book. The Italians realized they couldn't treat these nice young middle-class American kids like they treated their own privates, so they made them all officers. True story, absolutely true story. He got wounded; I'm not denigrating his service. But that's why he was an officer. Because an Italian private doesn't live too well. All the Americans who were over there were officers.
Bankrate: Were you able to make a living as a writer coming out of the service?
Griffin: No, I had a hard time when I first got out of the Army. I spent the worst year of my life selling Karo and Mazola in Philadelphia, hitting every grocery store in that area. Then my boss in Korea was at Fort Rucker learning how to fly and he ran me down and said, "Come down and work for me in the mornings and you can write your books in the afternoons." And of course he was lying. I went to Rucker and worked for him day and night for about 18 months when they were starting up Army aviation for the Vietnam War. I wrote FM1-1 for Army Aviation Operations. That was fascinating. And while I was there, I wrote my second novel and about 10 more books and then I quit, because I was making enough money and it didn't make any sense to have a government job. It was all technical material. It's a good way to learn how to write. It's a lot better than taking some course in creative writing.
Bankrate: How did you view the Vietnam War then?
Griffin: I had several emotions about it. I didn't go -- my wife wouldn't let me go. She said she would divorce me and ultimately did (he since has remarried). I would have gone out of curiosity because all my friends were going. We didn't lose that war militarily; we lost it politically. I'm a great dis-admirer of Westmoreland. I think he did a very bad job over there. And the villain of the century was McNamara, who was waging a war he had no intention of winning. I think that's the worst thing anybody's ever done to this country. You can hate Rumsfeld all you want, but Rumsfeld wants to win, or wanted to win. We could have won that war (Vietnam), but I don't know what the hell good it would have done us.
Bankrate: Are you tempted to weigh in on the Iraqi conflict?
Griffin: No. I didn't get into Vietnam either. I don't feel comfortable writing about it because I don't know that much about it. It's a different war than the kind I knew. When I was there, we never heard from the Pentagon; we did, but everybody ignored them. Now these guys are controlled by some GS-7 at the Pentagon. That changes the whole face of war. I've talked to a lot of guys who have been there, but I don't want to write about it. There's nothing really to say.
Bankrate: Is that because it seems to be largely a political war?
Griffin: No. I'm terrified of the (terrorists). I think they are determined to destroy Christian civilization and Jewish civilization, which means the western world, and nobody wants to accept that. They scare me to death. These people don't have the same concept of reality that we do. We couldn't surrender if we wanted to. It's just a nasty, nasty place to be. You're living in air-conditioned barracks and going out and getting killed. Part of why I couldn't write about it is, you can't get victory.
Bankrate: You completely changed course with the "Badge of Honor" series, shifting into police work for the first time. Were you familiar with police protocol going in?
Griffin: Not at all. There was a cop named (Philadelphia Police Chief) Zeb Casey who invited me up, and I liked the guys, but frankly there was no sense in me doing it, they're a closed fraternity. He said, "You come up here and I'll get you in," and he indeed did. There's a strong parallel between the military and the cops. Most of the white shirts in Philadelphia, had they been in the army, they would have been Green Berets or SEALs or Marines.
Bankrate: How have you invested your money?
Griffin: For years and years, I did it myself, and I did it in absolute ignorance. Now I have a money manager and he's very good. I didn't do bad. I went with T. Rowe Price for a lot of it and I made a lot of money, but it wasn't that I was smart; I was just stupidly lucky. I didn't know what in the hell I was doing. I was investing in mutual funds -- I think there were 75 of them at T. Rowe and they're all in something weird -- and I played with that and I didn't do bad. My accountant said, "You know, you're lucky. You better stop this and get somebody who knows what he's doing." So I got one of these guys who doesn't get a commission from buying and selling; he gets his commission based on how much more money he makes for me, and I'm absolutely delighted with him. I'm amazed at private citizens trying to think they know the market.
Bankrate: You've been very successful writing about the military during decades when the public appetite for war has been at an all-time low. What's your secret?
Griffin: That's very true. I think it may be because I write about people rather than stereotype soldiers. That sounds self-flattering to speak that way and I don't mean to be. I've been lucky, there's no other way to put it. They gave me a lot of money for doing something I love to do. That's as good as it gets.
Ellie