Earlier this month I received a letter from the polling company Nielsen—excuse me, having done a Google search, I learned that Nielsen is not a polling company, but rather a media research company (talk about splitting hairs). My apologies.

That said, the envelope contained a nice letter inviting me to participate in a consumer survey it was conducting. To sweeten the deal the envelope contained a new, crips one dollar bill—a whole dollar!—just for reading the letter. And, if I chose to participate in the survey, I’d get an additional ten dollars by way of a thank you from the company. Well, gosh, you sweet-talk me like that and putting money (!) on the barrel head on top of that, how can I resist?

So, being retired and all, I figured what the hell, it would take up a few minutes of my idle time. Silly me. An hour and a half later, I finished the darn thing. Now, truth to tell, part of the reason it took so long was that I was taking notes along the way so that added to the time spent. But, still, the list of questions when through the alphabet, the entire twenty-six letters! And each lettered category contained lists of questions and sub-lists of questions with its own numerical breakdown. The upshot was that this darn poll/survey/interrogation/what have you got down to the studs of information extraction.

And it started with Category A: Activities/Travel

Question A1 was about sports activities. It listed thirty-one sports, of which I indicated one: skiing (I do cross-country, but that wasn’t listed as a subcategory within that sport).

Category A2’s headline was Places/Attractions. It listed 114 places ranging from theme parks (Disney World, etc.), zoos, museums, locations like Times Square, sporting events, concerts, even comics/collectible conventions. The basic question was, within the past year, which ones did I attend? The answer? None.

The operative word here is “attend.” First off, I abhor theme parks and all the expensive artificiality that they represent. Zoos? I have little interest in seeing animals outside their habitat confined in constricted environments. Museums—yes, I have attended them, but the question had a time frame attached to it and within it I had not visited my favorite museum, the Brooklyn Museum.

As for sporting events, hah! New York City sports teams all but demand a loan on your soul given the price of commutes, tickets, concessions, etc. Hell, that’s why I go to my neighborhood sports bar, watch the game on TV (and having a better view of the game) while drinking a reasonably priced beer. And then when it is over, taking an equally reasonably priced mass transit ride home at a reasonable hour.

And don’t get this Brooklynite from North Dakota started on Times Square! As for comic book/collectible conventions, as a retired comic book professional who attended my share of comic book conventions, I’ll pass.

But that was just the start of the “A” category! It went on to list a total of seventeen categories—poking and prodding for all manner of facts and figures. Hell, the start of this survey put to shame my GP who hides behind his computer screen as he asks me the rote list of questions on it and has all the bedside manner and charisma of our Ficus tree.

Category B was about local shopping and went into such detail that I felt I was undergoing the purchasing version of a colonoscopy. It took me forever to get through it. It had such weird questions as did I see within the past thirty days “Digital video displays or video screens that show customized programming along with advertising repeated continuously.” And within that one question there were fourteen different answers to choose from! (Unfortunately, I had, in a taxi that I’d taken home from JFK after visiting my mother back home.)

Category C: Credi/debit cards. A quick one, one of each, and disposed of follow ups. Moving right along.

Category D: Environment. Turns out I’m rather eco-friendly, living in Brooklyn, NY. My primary mode of motorized travel is mass transit.

Category E: Voting. Another quickie. Registered Democrat. Registered to vote. Vote every election.

Category F: Printed Newspapers

This was an interesting category. For many years the local bodega where we used to live would have piles of NYC papers, with the massive Sunday New York Times taking up significant space in its cramped isles. Then came the internet and digitalized editions of said newspapers. The result is that I now only buy one newspaper in print form: the New York Post. For its sports section, not its political slant. Yeah, yeah, that sounds like the hoary cliché regarding Playboy magazine back in its heyday where people would claim they bought it “for the articles.” But the Post does have the city’s best sports section. And it helps to check in on what in hell the other side is so riled up about. (This category went on to have twelve different questions with sub-questions.)

Category G: Healthcare. Oddly enough, there were only eight questions for me in this. I guess my responses met the minimum. Moving right along . . .

Category H: Tobacco. As I’m a non-user, that was an immediate “no.”

Category I: TV/Leisure Activities. These questions ranged from how watched (TV, computer, hand-held, etc.) to subscription and streaming services, paying extra for ad-free, viewing habits and preferences. Here is where I found myself getting into the weeds. There were thirty-one questions with accompanying sub-questions. Woof!

Category J: Beverages. This got weird for me only because of its emphasis. If I thought I had gotten into the weeds answering the questions in Category I, it was nothing compared to the first part of this category. The “J1” section, dealing with non-alcoholic drinks, had eighteen categories, along with sub-categories. The alcoholic side only had nine, and that lumped together beer, wine, and hard liquor.

Then I thankfully got into a series of categories that I was able to quickly run through.

Category K: Radio and Audio Listening. Public radio.

Category L: Business. Being retired, this one was skipped.

Category M: Transportation. Walking or public transportation.

Category N: Restaurants. I like to cook. Restaurants in Brooklyn are overpriced (and too often I found that I cooked the meal better than the chef). On the rare occasion I do go to a restaurant, I go to a diner. Why? Because the food is honest.

Category O: Cell phone. Yeah, I have one. Not changing service.

Category P: Internet Use/Computers. Yes, have it, use it. Moving right along.

Category Q: Lifestyle. Focused on physical activity. I have a gym membership. That seemed to be the focus of the category, and even then it was brief.

Category R: Telephone. Struck me as redundant (see Category O), but focused on landlines, which we don’t have.

Category S: Grocery shopping. Here the category had an emphasis on delivery services, which I regard as a bane. First of all I know what I want when it comes to food and do not want anyone other than my wife making said selections, especially produce. And the last thing I want is to be stuck at home twiddling my thumbs waiting for someone to deliver my order to me.

Category T: Coupon use. Don’t use them.

Category U: Automobile. This one had a fifteen-part series of questions, none of which applied to me.

Category V: Banking/Financial. A series of nine general questions regarding bank and investment accounts and if I planned to change any. I have them and I don’t plan to change.

Category W: Electricity. Kind of weird as it a utility, and as such a monopoly. A quickie.

Category X: Health Services. This one focused on whether or not I was hospitalized in the past three years. As I was not, this was easily disposed of.

Category Y: Items for Home. Hah! Had I received this survey three years ago I’d had have a lot to write about because we had sold our house and moved into a co-op apartment and needed to redecorate. As it were, there was nothing to say here.

Category Z: FINALLY, THE END! This one had the demographic wrap-up, and boy was I happy to blaze through it and finish this damn thing!

My reward? After all that time spent, earlier today, I got this. Thank you, Nielsen. Heading off to the bar for a beer on you.

Allen C. Lynch was a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and former director of the university’s Center for Russian & East European Studies (1993–2008). He is a former assistant director of the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia University and has written two other books about Russia.

This book was a gift. From him.

We were introduced to each other by a mutual acquaintance who knew I was a professional editor and that he needed an editor for a book he was writing. It was not another one about Russia. Rather, it was his autobiography and he needed someone to give him professional advice to complete and polish his story.

It’s quite a story.

Turns out this professor of Russian studies, who is fluent in four languages, and has worked overseas was also a kicker in a semi-pro football league. And he joined the team when he was in his sixties.

It’s a fascinating story on so many levels. The backgrounds between him and his teammates could not have been more extreme. He, white, highly educated, upper middle class. His teammates black, for the most part working class. Yet what they had in common was a love of the game (he had been a kicker for his college football team).

The manuscript is going through its second round of revisions.

A couple of weeks ago he gave me his book on Putin. And, it’s an eye-opener. I’m learning a lot about what makes him tick.

Apologies for the lack of recent posts. I’ve made notes on several topics, but summer in Brooklyn has been brutal and I’ve been in multi-week crisis mode working to rescue our ficus tree from an infestation of mites. Don’t want to jinx it, but it looks like I turned the corner.

When I was home visiting my 93-year-old mother in Devils Lake, North Dakota, I visited the fire department because my brother, who had visited mom a month earlier, had informed me that the fire department was planning to do a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Wow. Twenty-five years ago. I witnessed what happened, seeing the attacks from my editorial office window. I talked to the firefighters in the office, told them that Devils Lake was my hometown, that I had witnessed the attacks, and that I volunteered to deliver a talk about my experience. They agreed. This is the cover image of the visual presentation I will deliver next month.

Mohammed Saeed al-Shaaf was the Irai Minister of Information under Saddam Hussein. During Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 he was the spokesman for the regime and became famous, or, if you will, infamous, for his colorful, fabulous briefings of the war to international journalists, proclaiming in bombastic sincerity that coalition forces were being destroyed nine ways from Sunday by Iraq’s army. The epitome of his briefings was the one held on April 8, 2003, in which he proclaimed that American troops “are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender; it is they who will surrender.” The next day coalition troops occupied Baghdad. So, with that in mind, who is the Trump administration’s version of Baghdad Bob? To borrow the tag line from the late, great National Enquirer: “Enquiring minds want to know!”

Baghdad Bob’s pronouncements were so far removed from reality that they only made sense if you understood its context. Like various senior members of the Trump administration under similar circumstances, when he was behind the lectern he was speaking to an audience of one: Saddam Hussein himself. That was no small thing for people who displeased the Iraqi leader they were known to be thrown into prison or executed. For instance, FIFA, the international governing soccer body responsible for the World Cup, had to intervene to defend the Iraqi soccer team from retaliation by its government for not winning games and advancing out of the group stage in the World Cup. The television show Saturday Night Live even satirized (as if that were possible) Baghdad Bob in some sketches.

The first candidate for his mantle that comes to mind for most people is White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. While her last name inspires the phrase “leave it” with respect to the facts, proposing her is a lazy student’s answer. Also, it’s not nearly as much fun of an answer.

So, who else could be candidates? Gosh, on the surface there are so many! One could start with all the cabinet members. We’ll leave aside the ones who don’t make public pronouncements, because they’re unimportant to you-know-who. So, what’s the baseline? Well, here’s where we risk getting into the weeds (or, more appropriately, the reflective pool). First, we must discount events where Trump’s cabinet is all together in a room with their boss and, one after another, extoll in ever increasing terms the wonderfulness and exaggerated accomplishments of the man responsible for them having the offices that they hold. But that is quaint sycophantly that is, to borrow a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When it comes to looking at the many beyond the White House meeting room pronouncements from Hegseth, Rubio, other cabinet members, FBI director Kash Patel, et. al, upon stepping back, it’s obvious they’re more parroting their master’s line, not proclaiming fabulous falsehoods along the line of Baghdad Bob’s.

So, who is the heir to Baghdad Bob’s crown? Well, in my casual review of the facts I determined that it’s the man who, years earlier honed his public relation skills, amongst other things, under the pseudonym of John Barron. And in this day and age of social media, instead of using surrogates, whether news media or press secretaries (though they are used), this man has largely eliminated the middleman to make his pronouncements directly on his own platform the so-called Truth Social.

In other words, the modern-day version of Baghdad Bob, is Donald J. Trump himself. And, as we approach the midterms, to paraphrase a phrase, he’s proclaiming “the Democrats are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender; it is they who will surrender.”

On June 2, 2026, I reached the age of seventy-three. That day was commemorated by phone calls from a friend, my mother and sister, a text messages from a friend and my brother who on that day was on a flight to visit our ninety-two-year-old mother in North Dakota, and a dinner with my wife and daughter at a local restaurant featuring Austrian cuisine and, upon seeing the bill, reinforced my belief that restaurants in this town were too expensive to regularly patronize.

There’s a cliché that at one point as one ages, gifts become immaterial. For me, that happened early, in high school, now known as upper school. The major reason for that is the off-handed treatment along with maladroit gifts that I received from my parents while growing up. But this piece is not about me writing about birthday disappointments. This is an article about the greatest gift I have received, year after year, that of the success of my son, Eric, and daughter, Léa.

Those of you subscribers and readers who are parents are familiar with the awesome and awful paradox of parenting: of being simultaneously the most powerful individual in the life of that tiny lifeform you are cuddling in your arm, and, yet, how manifestly helpless you are. When our son was born, and he was lying in the warming tray, his purple skin starting to turn tan, I looked at him and said, “You’re on your own now.” By that I meant everything he got for survival from his mother while in the womb was history. Going forward, he was now responsible for him living.

It’s a hoary cliché that a baby doesn’t come with an owner’s manual to assist and guide a person in the awesome life-altering transition from adult to parent. Navigating that change of life experience on the fly is challenging enough when that baby cum child is normal. For us, the parenting challenge presented a series of baffling problems because, unlike children with disabilities physically evident, our two children’s disabilities were exquisitely tucked inside. For Eric, dyslexia, for Léa both dyslexia and SLI, Speech Language Impairment (a communication processing disorder).

Knowledge of their conditions only came out over time, study, and much cost and anguish, involving us navigating through a financial and emotional exploitative system composed of psychologist testing, lawyers, board of education confrontations, and special education schools. Our experience with the New York City education systems began with Eric.

Beginning in the 1980s and for roughly the next thirty years we lived in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, initially in an apartment in a brownstone, later in a home we purchased. Bordered on one side by Prospect Park and on the other by Green Wood Cemetery, it was—and is—a great neighborhood for raising a family. PS 154 is the neighborhood’s public school’s lower school. It was while we were living in the apartment that we enrolled Eric into that school’s first grade. After a few weeks we saw that Eric was unhappy and struggling.

I was the parent attending that first parent’s/teacher’s meeting early in the school year, my wife being a teacher herself (at a private school) and thus unable to get off work. I met Eric’s teacher, a well-dressed older woman wearing high heels (which caused me to wonder if she wore high heels in class, a fact that Eric confirmed when I asked him). She began to tell me about the problems Eric was having in class, among them being the fact that his verbal skills were behind those of other students. She also told me that not a day goes by when he doesn’t cry. When she said that, my immediate thought was, what are you doing to cause my son to cry every day?

I told her that my wife is French and that we were raising him bilingually and that we discovered it is normal for children raised bilingually to be slower in developing language skills because their brains are processing two languages as opposed to one. (When a toddler, as Eric learned how to speak and before he was able to separate French from English, he would speak to us in a wonderfully hilarious integration of French and English words in a sentence, a singular dialect only Joëlle and I could understand.) When I informed her of that, she told me we should stop doing that.

I silently stared at her for a moment, gathering my thoughts. I can’t now remember exactly what I said in response, though I recall I laid out a timeline. But my punchline was this: she had our son for nine months. We have him for the rest of our lives. We are not changing. She said nothing in response. Later in the year I put in a request for a one-on-one follow-up meeting which was scheduled. On the day of that meeting when I showed up, she was not there.

Seeing how bad things were for Eric at PS 154, my wife managed to get him enrolled at her private school, Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, where he flourished (typical ups and downs as a student, more ups than downs). Following high school, he attended the University of Maine in Farmington which had a respected special education program and got his bachelor’s degree in special ed. He then spent a couple of years working as a teacher in Maine, before going to France to attend L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq, a two-year course devoted to performing arts with an emphasis on physical movement. The important thing in the program is the culling process. The only way to attend the second year’s course is to be approved by the faculty. And, French teachers are very, very strict. Eric was accepted. He then spent a handful of years working as a tour guide in Paris and then as a member of an international theater troupe that performed educational programs throughout middle Europe. His mother helped him with the application process to the school. When he was getting ready to leave for what amounted to his European sojourn, I told him how happy and proud I was of him taking advantage of his heritage, having dual citizenship.

After his European adventure, he worked as a teacher in Brooklyn in the New York City public school system, an experience that was not good. Presently he is in Portland, Oregon, teaching and doing well.

Thanks to Joëlle being both a teacher, and a language teacher, early on she was able to identify learning problems with our son and daughter. At the time in the 1990s dyslexia was not a widely recognized learning disability. In the case of our daughter, Léa, there was a further complication, the aforementioned SLI.

Thanks to our experience with Eric, Joëlle saw indications of our daughter having a learning disability. Determining exactly what that was led us down a complicated and financially and emotionally wrenching process that started with our daughter spending three years in a public school (her disability too severe for her to be accepted at Joëlle’s school, though in retrospect my wife regretted not fighting harder for acceptance). When in the third grade we saw her not learning at age level, having to fight the school to have her repeat third grade (Eric wound up repeating first grade when he attended Saint Ann’s), and to searching for special education schools in the city of which, at the time, there were fewer than the fingers on one hand. We had to hire a lawyer specializing in the field and had to sue the city’s Board of Education in order to have the city pay for Léa’s tuition (which we couldn’t otherwise afford) because we had to show just cause for the city’s failure to provide proper education for her. That experience was hell. On the day that Joëlle and I, along with our lawyer, met the board to fight for the city to pay for our daughter’s education, it was a searing experience that drove my wife to tears. After the meeting, while in the hallway and with her crying hysterically, a couple members of the board came up and congratulated her on her win, something she didn’t at first understand because she was so emotionally wrought.

The special education school that Léa attended was, and I’m being charitable, not that good. It struck me as a dumping ground for kids with all manner of learning disabilities and that the administration was more interested in getting money from the city and wealthy parents than in educating students.

Following graduation Léa attended Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, graduating from that. From there she applied and got accepted to the Pratt Institute, a highly ranked private college dedicated to the arts, design, and the arts, from which she graduated. A graphic designer, she then held a series of jobs from hell. Then a couple of years ago, she landed a job as a graphic designer at The Topps Company, where she is currently employed. A familial completion of the circle as it were, as she is now working for the company I did during the 1990s.

So, when it comes down to it, while individual gifts on birthdays are nice and welcome, it’s the enduring gift of seeing the success in the lives of my two children that is the birthday gift that I hold dear.

This post is prompted by an encounter I had a few hours ago in the grocery store around the corner in which the woman behind the counter was asked if I was Russian.

Though rare, over the years, every so often in a conversation with someone I’d get the question essentially framed as “What are you?” My reply is, “I’m an American.” Invariably the response is a puzzled look on the questioner’s part and a follow-up along the line of: “Are you Indian [Native American]?” To which I reply, “No.”

I am an American. My parents were born in this country, as was I and my siblings. That makes me a native-born citizen (Trump administration notwithstanding). In short, I. Am. An. American.

Now, if you ask me what my heritage is, that’s different. With respect to that, I’m Norwegian (father’s side) and German (mother’s side). I know, “Zimmerman” is a German last name. Also, Jewish (something I discovered after moving to New York City). Blame the federal immigration officer changing the spelling of my paternal Norwegian grandfather’s last name in the ledger when he was registered. Which reminds me of a classic regional ethnic “Ole and Lena” joke (and, boy, are there lots of those back home, along with Lutheran jokes in the Dakotas and Minnesota which have large Scandinavian heritage populations). Here’s the joke (one of many variations):

A cousin goes to a family reunion to meet for the first time his uncles. His mother brings him over to a table where they’re sitting and begins to introduce him to them. She points at one and says, “He’s your uncle Ole Oleson.” She then points to another, “And here’s your uncle Ole Oleson.” She points to a third, “This is your Uncle Ole Oleson.” This goes on for a couple of more uncles, each with the name Ole Oleson. Then she gets to the last man. She says, “He’s your uncle Sam Ting.”

The kid looks at his mother and then at his uncle, baffled. He then asks his uncle, “How come you have a Chinese name?”

The uncle, speaking English with a heavy Scandinavian lilt, says, “So there I was in line behind my broders. That immigration feller there, he asks my first broder, ‘What’s your name?’ My broder answers, ‘Ole Oleson.’ When my next broder steps up, the immigration feller asks for his name, and my broder says, ‘Ole Oleson.’ This here question and answer thing goes on to all my other broders. Finally, there I am in front of that immigration feller and he asks me my name, and I point to my broders and tell him, ‘Saim t’ing.’”

Yeah, it helps to be from the region.

I’ve a history of being misidentified, most commonly with regards to my age. I’ve always looked younger than my age (now 73). I was carded well after I turned twenty-one-years-old. Two carding incidents stand out. The first occurred in my late thirties when my wife, infant son, and I flew to Denver to attend my sister Mary’s wedding.

Mary and I went to the local liquor store to get the wine and champagne for the reception. We loaded up our respective carts, and she preceded me to the check-out. She went through without a hitch. I pushed up to the check-out counter and as I began putting my bottles on the counter the check-out woman said, “I need to see some ID.”

Upon hearing that, my sister stopped abruptly, turned around, and stared at me with a WTF expression on her face. I sheepishly looked at her, shrugged my shoulders, and showed the woman my driver’s license.

I’m four years older than my sister.

Boy, did I hear about that on the drive back to her house!

The second similar ID request happened about a decade later, in the 1990s, in San Diego. This time I was in my early forties. I was executive editor of Topps Comics, and we had a booth at the San Diego ComicCon. A co-worker and I were taking a lunch break and decided to go outside the convention center and grab a bite at a local restaurant. We walked around and saw a Hooters outlet and decided to go in. We sat down and when the waitress arrived we gave her our order, with both of us ordering beers to drink. The waitress looked at me and said, “I need to see your ID.” I did a double-take and asked her if she was serious. She was. I looked at my co-worker, who was about twenty years younger than me and whose age had not been questioned, and said to him, “You’re my witness.” I pulled out my wallet and showed her my driver’s license. I got my beer.

All of that to say . . . I’m now getting to the Russian anecdote. Yeah, it took a while, but the thing is, it sparked these memories.

When we sold our house in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn and moved deeper into the New York City borough to the neighborhood of Midwood where we bought a co-op apartment, we landed in a multi-ethnic neighborhood that includes Pakistanis, Azerbaijanis, Uzbekistanis, Russians, Hasidic Jews, amongst others. The grocery store around the corner features in its storefront sign the Uzbekistan flag. Periodically I see a van unload goat carcass which are carried into the store’s meat department for processing. Weights are labeled in liters, not pounds, and typically I hear conversations in a Slavic language.

So, earlier today I picked up some stuff for dinner and when I was at the counter the woman behind it spoke to me in a Slavic language, to which I answered in English, asking her to repeat. She then asked me, “Are you Russian?” I told her I was not. She then said, “You look Russian!” I thanked her, silently thinking that if that were truly the case, I’d be in big trouble with my Ukrainian friends. I explained to her my heritage. She reiterated how much I looked Russian—a first. I paid for my groceries and left.

That caused me to remember another case of mistaken cultural identity. This was in the 1980s in my visit to Paris in the winter (a fun long story as it involves the woman who became my wife). So long as I kept my mouth shut, whenever I met a local and had to interact with him or her, that person always initially thought I was French.

Then I opened my mouth and spoke.

The United States began as a narrow strip hugging the Atlantic Ocean in the late eighteenth century. By 1861 the country through purchase and war had quadrupled in size and had brought into the nation states anchored on the other side of the continent, three thousand miles away from the original thirteen.

The country’s explosive growth had an enormous impact on the roles of women. Though restricted by the “Cult of Domesticity” that dominated antebellum society in America with its emphasis on women being pious, pure, submissive, and domestic (which underscored why the Margaret Corbins, Deborah Sampsons, Mary Ludwig Hays, and others were such outliers because of their “unladylike” manners of smoking, drinking, swearing, and fighting), and a lack of rights that made them dependent on their husbands or male relatives.

Then came the American Civil War. In her book Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution Major General Jeanne Holm wrote “women on both sides became active on an unprecedented scale. Many of the restrictions and social conventions with respect to women’s activities were set aside or simply ignored to meet the unusual demands of this all-pervasive war.”

It’s impossible to know how many women actually served in the army as soldiers on both sides because those that did disguised themselves as men and kept knowledge of their participation to themselves. Thanks to forensic evidence, it is known that at least one woman on the Confederate side fought, and died, at Gettysburg. No doubt there are other women who also earned a soldier’s grave on the battlefields of that great war. The women presented here serve as representative examples for them all, crowned by Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the greatest of them.

KADY McKENZIE BROWNELL

Kady McKenzie Brownell was an army brat literally born into the army. In 1842 her mother gave birth to Kady in a tent in a British army camp in South Africa. Her mother died shortly after childbirth and with her father unable to care for the new baby, family friends Duncan and Alice McKenzie agreed to raise her (records are unclear whether or not they formally adopted her). Eventually the McKenzies emigrated to the United States and settled in Providence, Rhode Island.

Kady was nineteen years old and working as a weaver in a textile mill in Central Falls, Rhode Island, when she met and fell in love with twenty-five-year-old Robert Brownell, a mill mechanic. This proved awkward because Robert was already married. Upon learning of their affair, Robert’s wife took unsurprising umbrage and divorced him. Though now free to marry, they were content to live as common law husband and wife, a circumstance that continued through the Civil War.

Upon the war’s outbreak, Rhode Island’s governor charged militia Colonel Ambrose Burnside to form a regiment of volunteers. On April 17, 1861, Robert Brownell enrolled in Company H, First Regiment, Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry.

Wishing to be with her husband, Kady successfully petitioned the governor to join his entourage when it visited the regiment in Washington, D.C. Upon being reunited at Camp Sprague, she prevailed upon Colonel Burnside to allow her to say and he approved her role as a regimental vivandière “daughter of the regiment.”

Wearing a uniform like the rest of the unit, she practiced with both musket and sword, impressing her fellow soldiers by becoming proficient with both. She also refused to restrict herself to the role of water carrier and other support services. If her husband was going to risk his life on the battlefield, so was she. She volunteered to be the regiment’s color-bearer, a position of great significance and risk.

In an age that pre-dated smokeless gunpowder, it did not take long after a battle was joined for the battlefield to be obscured by thick clouds of gun smoke from cannon and musket volleys. Large regimental battle flags with their bright colors served as an anchor in the chaos and confusion—simultaneously an asset to the regiment and a danger to the person charged with holding the flag. The capture and defense of the colors was regarded as a particularly heroic act and many Civil War Medal of Honor citations record the recipient either defending or capturing the colors.

Her baptism of fire occurred in July 1861 at the First Battle of Bull Run. Despite the fury of bullets, shot and shell, and even after being wounded, Kady remained at her station holding the colors high as a rallying point for the regiment. But her effort in that afternoon of battle was in vain. A Confederate counterattack had routed the Union army into in a panic-stricken retreat that didn’t end until elements reached Washington, D.C. thirty miles away. Such was the post-battle confusion that a search for her husband would take thirty hours and only end after Colonel Burnside himself assured her that he had seen Robert and said he was unhurt. Shortly after the battle the regiment’s ninety-day enlistment expired (the federal maximum at the time and soon to be changed) and Kady and Robert were among those honorably mustered out.

In December 1861 a new regiment, the 5th Rhode Island Infantry, was formed and once again Robert and Kady enlisted, with Kady adding the duties of nurse to her role as daughter of the regiment. Burnside, now a brigadier general, had been appointed commander of an Expeditionary Crops whose purpose was to establish a series of forts and defenses along the North Carolina coast in order to sever communications and in support of the Union’s naval blockade and among the regiments assembled for it was the 5th Rhode Island.

In March 1862, as the regiment was preparing for its role in the attack on New Bern, North Carolina, Kady prevailed upon the regiment’s commander to allow her to be its color bearer. His assent turned out to be a life saver for the regiment. As it was moving into position, units on one flank mistook the men as Confederate troops in disguise. Seeing that the regiment was about to come under friendly fire, Kady ran forward and waved wildly the regiment’s flag, successfully preventing what otherwise would have been devastating fratricide.

Robert was severely wounded in the battle and after a convalescence that lasted eighteen months he was medically discharged. Kady also received her discharge papers which were signed by General Burnside. In 1884 she was granted a pension. She died on January 5, 1915, at the probable age of 73 and was buried in the North Burial Ground cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island.

ANNA ELLA CARROLL

Anna Ella Carroll, born on August 29, 1815, the eldest of eight children, was the daughter of a wealthy and prominent Maryland family whose great-grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and her father was governor of the state. Tutored by her father, when she became an adult she worked as a lobbyist and fact-checker for shipping and railroad companies. Thanks to her connections she became a political activist who helped create the nativist, short-lived Know-Nothing Party, became friends with Presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, and though a slave owner, because of her growing abolitionist beliefs, she worked to get Lincoln elected. When Maryland’s governor came under pressure to join other slave states in seceding from the Union, she was instrumental in convincing him to have Maryland stay in the Union. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, she freed her slaves.

The outbreak of the Civil War saw her move from the political arena into that of the military and embark on a career tinged with controversy. Working as a paid agent for the War Department, in 1861 acting under orders from President Lincoln, she slipped into the Confederacy on a secret reconnaissance mission to determine the feasibility of dividing the Confederacy by seizing control of the Mississippi River. One of the people she met was riverboat captain Charles Scott who advised against it, pointing out that the river had too many defensible and easily reinforced locations. When she asked about other rivers, he recommended an expedition down the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and gave her details about conditions and likely locations for offensive action. In November 1861, she presented her report with the recommendation of an expedition on those rivers. Controversy arose when General Ulysses Grant had his victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson because Grant’s commanding general Henry Halleck claimed to have arrived at the same conclusion independently.

The dustup didn’t deter her, or the War Department. She remained in employ and later when Grant was planning his attack on Vicksburg, because of the knowledge she had of the Mississippi River thanks to her reconnaissance she advised that he invest the city by land from the rear. Her advice was rejected. Grant’s eventual success was the result of him employing her recommended approach.

Despite post-war efforts to acknowledge her contribution, she never received official credit for her role as strategist in the war, becoming a “symbol of male injustice” regarding contributions by women in what was regarded as a man’s world, the military—especially when it came to the level of strategy. She died on February 19, 1894 and was buried in a family plot at Old Trinity Church near Church Creek, Maryland. In 1959 the Maryland Historical Society unveiled a gravestone monument to her containing the inscription: “Maryland’s Most Distinguished Lady. A great humanitarian and close friend of Abraham Lincoln. She conceived the successful Tennessee Campaign and guided the President in his constitutional war powers.”

NADINE TURCHIN

Instead of “daughter of the regiment,” Nadine Turchin became the “mother” of one. When her husband, Colonel John Turchin, became commander of the 19th Illinois Volunteer Regiment on June 17, 1861, the childless Nadine “adopted” the regiment, caring for the soldiers in countless ways big and small. So great was their respect and affection for her that when the regiment was ordered to Missouri after completing their training, no one objected when she boarded the train with them, even though it was against regulations.

Born Nedezhda Lvova on November 26, 1826, Nadine was the daughter of a colonel in the Imperial Russian army. Born into title and privilege, her education exposed her to Western philosophies then in vogue among liberal members of the Russian aristocracy. She met Colonel Ivan Vasilyevich Turchaninov, of the Imperial Russian Guards in 1850. The two shared liberal ideals, which included fierce opposition to serfdom and slavery, that put them at odds with the conservative Russian court. In 1856, after he had returned from fighting in the Crimean War, they eloped to Krakow, Poland, then a part of the Austria-Hungary Empire, and later emigrated to the United States where they anglicized their names.

After a failed attempt at farming on the East Coast, they eventually moved to Chicago where with the help of company vice president John McClellan, whom he had met when McClellan was a U.S. Army observer in the Crimea, he got a job with the Illinois Central Railroad. When war broke out in 1861, Turchin offered his services and, because of his experience, Illinois governor Richard Yates commissioned him a colonel of volunteers.

Impressed by his knowledge and skill in training and, later, his courage under fire, the men of the 19th Illinois quickly came to love their roly-poly colonel with his balding head, bushy whiskers, and thick Slavic accent. It was during training that the childless Nadine effectively adopted the soldiers of the regiment. So great was the bond between the two that when the regiment was ordered to Missouri following the completion of training, even though it was against regulations for wives to accompany their soldier husbands, no one objected when she boarded the train with them. Recalling her after the war, one soldier spoke for them all when he said, “Dear Madame Turchin! How we all respected, believed in, and came to love her for her bravery, gentleness and constant care of the sick and wounded in the Regiment.”

She kept a diary of her experience, only one volume, covering the 1863 Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, survived and when her husband had been promoted brigadier general and brigade command, which is a shame because her experience with the 19th Illinois was full of adventure.

Written in French in order to maintain her fluency in the language, her diary is notable for its eloquence, insight, and candor. Perhaps most important, she is the only woman to provide written accounts of battles she witnessed. Her entries are forthright and passionate, and she gives free rein to her displeasure and disdain, acknowledging that she uses it as an emotional “safety valve.” A May 26, 1863, entry while in Murfreesboro is typical: “We are in the thick of the civil war, great, very important in principle, but low, miserable in execution.” She is unsparing in her observation of the army, writing, “We have an army poorly organized, composed of the best soldiers, but of the worst officers in the world.” Her critique of General George McClellan was scathing. She calls him “a mediocre personage who . . . has made us look ridiculous in the eyes of the world.” General Ulysses Grant she called a “lucky inept” because of his high casualties. One of the few generals receiving praise was Joseph Reynolds whom she described as “an honest man, modest and courteous, without a sign of the impudence and the rudeness of the Americans.”

She was sensitive to perceived slights to her husband and his military career, ready to see him as a victim of political intrigues and malicious gossip.

She is also outspoken regarding women’s rights, writing at length on the subject as patriarchal American society provided much grist for that mill. In a June 5, 1863, entry she railed, “if society treats the majority of women like beasts of burden or superfluous beings, so much the worse for society. I protest against it as much as I can, and follow the path of my conscience.” Those social mores restrictions caused another outburst of frustration a week later, on June 12, when she wrote; “My life is so sedentary, I write, I read much, I must have more physical exercise. The trouble is we poor women must not go out alone, good manners do not tolerate it; what a stupid thing! As if a woman of my age [she was thirty-eight years old at the time] needed a chaperone. However, one cannot change customs, and the only thing I can do is to inconvenience somebody to be my escort. This may cause someone to say: what bores these women are! Well, gentlemen, it is you who want it that way.”

But Nadine proved to be more than an inspiration for the unit. Mary Livermore, a journalist and member of the Chicago branch of the Sanitary Commission, wrote that “In the spring of 1862 . . . Colonel Turchin was taken seriously ill, and was carried for days in an ambulance. Madame Turchin not only nursed her husband most tenderly, but took his place at the head of the regiment—the men in the ranks, and the subordinate officers, according her implicit and cheerful obedience. She was not one whit behind her husband in courage or military skill. Utterly devoid of fear, and manifesting perfect indifference to shot or shell, or minie-balls, even when they fell thickly around her, she led the troops into action facing the hottest fire, and fought bravely at their head.”

In 1862 Turchin was commander of the 8th Brigade containing the 19th Illinois, 24th Illinois, 37th Indian, and 18th Ohio. The brigade had occupied the city, a major regional hub, and for several weeks relations between the brigade and townsfolk were peaceful, despite harassment and raids by Confederate-sympathetic partisans and cavalry. The town became a battleground in April in which Turchin’s troops were forced to evacuate the town. The brigade’s recapture of Athens led to a sacking of the town by the troops whose motivation was revenge because of belief the townspeople were actively supporting the partisans.

Turchin was court-martialed. Charges included neglect of duty, failure to maintain military discipline, and violating the order against the presence of females in camp or on the field. Turchin pled not guilty to all the charges save that of the last, admitting guilt for allowing his wife to be with him in camp.

While the trial was going on, Nadine rushed back to Chicago to rally influential citizens to her husband’s cause. Following that, she then went to Washington, D.C., and met with both Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln, and demanded they reinstate her husband. Her eloquent advocacy coupled with earlier letters of praise and recommendation of promotion by Turchin’s commanding officer Brigadier General Ormsby Mitchel, convinced Lincoln to set aside the court-martial sentence and approve Turchin’s promotion to brigadier general. When news of this series of events reached General Buell’s army, a soldier-correspondent there wrote, “truly in the lottery matrimonial Col. Turchin had the good fortune to draw an invaluable price.” The incident earned Turchin the nickname “The Mad Cossack.”

In 1873 Turchin co-founded the city of Radon in southcentral Illinois as a Polish enclave where he and Nadine lived until his death in April 1901. That June Nadine applied for a government pension which was granted in April 1902. She died two years later on July 17, 1904, age 77.

LORETA JANETA VELASQUEZ

Another colorful woman with a controversial life, let alone war story, though this from the Confederate side, was Loreta Janeta Velásquez. She was born into a wealthy Cuban family in June 26, 1842. A woman with a fiercely independent streak, at age fourteen she defied her family by eloping with John Williams (or William) a Texan and lieutenant in the American army, moving with him to New Orleans, and converting from the Catholic to the Methodist faith.

When the Civil War broke out her husband resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and became an officer in the Confederate army. When Loreta expressed interest in disguising herself as a man and enlisting, her husband agreed to give her a “trial run” experience, hoping that exposure to the realities of soldier life would scotch that idea. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, when he went off with his unit to Pensacola, she managed to obtain two lieutenant’s uniforms and, sporting a fake mustache and calling herself Lt. Harry T. Buford, went up to Arkansas, raised a regiment of volunteers, took it to Pensacola and presented it as a “gift” to her husband.

A few days later he died in a weapons demonstration accident. She relinquished her regiment to an officer friend and traveled north as an “independent soldier” in search of adventure. She found it in the First Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. This was followed by a short stint as a female Confederate spy working in Washington, D.C. Wanting to return to the battlefield, she again adopted the Lt. Buford identity and went to Tennessee where she participated in the siege of Fort Donelson. Wounded in the foot and fearing her identity would be discovered by doctors, she managed to leave before the fort fell and returned to her home in New Orleans.

Still in her Lt. Buford disguise, she was arrested and charged with being a Union spy. Revelation of her true identity cleared her of the spying charge and saw her instead fined for impersonating a man. (Medal of Honor recipient Dr. Mary Walker would face similar and repeated brushes with the law for wearing “mannish attire.”)

Upon recovery, she returned to Tennessee, was reunited with the Arkansas regiment she had formed, and subsequently fought in the Battle of Shiloh. Wounded again, she decided she had finally had enough of soldiering and renewed her career as a spy. At one point she found herself in the novel position of being hired by Union officials to locate and apprehend the female Confederate spy operating behind Union lines who happened to be her.

Following the war, she married for a third time (her second husband, another Confederate officer, having died in the war) and emigrated with him to Venezuela. After he died, she returned to the United States, and having to support a child, she wrote and in 1876 had published her memoir The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velásquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Henry T. Buford, Confederate States Army (writers back then were in the habit of writing long subtitles for their books). It became a bestseller and made her a celebrity. She would go on to have a varied career in public and politics. Despite her efforts in speeches and in the text to assure the veracity of her memoir, it was immediately surrounded with controversy. One of its most prominent critics was former Confederate general Jubal Early who denounced it as a work of fiction. Historians became divided in their opinion, with many stating a belief that it was largely a work of fiction based on historical fact. Even in death she aroused controversy. Initial accounts put the year as 1897, location unknown. Then historian William C. Davis decided to weigh in.

In 2016 Davis wrote Inventing Loreta Velásquez: Confederate Soldier Impersonator, Media Celebrity, and Con Artist, a biography of her in which he not only does a chapter and verse debunking of her memoir but also of the identity of Loreta Velásquez itself, asserting that instead of being a child born into an aristocratic Cuban family, she was actually a con-artist, prostitute, and more, whose real name and place of birth are unknown and that she died in 1923 in a Washington, D.C., hospital for the insane. While it is beyond the scope of this book to argue the merits pro and con of either side, whether Loreta Velásquez is hero or humbug, what is germane is that even after the passing of 140 years, a woman’s account of her role in the Civil War could not go unchallenged.

THE KEARNY MEDAL and KEARNY CROSS

And now we come to the medal section.

George Washington’s Revolutionary War Badge of Military Merit, which in 1932 became the Purple Heart, was not the only medal created by a commander to honor valorous action by his troops. During the Civil War and on November 29, 1862, a group of officers from the Union army’s Third Division, III Corps in Virginia approved a resolution to create the “Kearny Medal of Honor” in memory of their commander Major General Philip Kearny who had been killed in action that September in the Battle of Chantilly. Issued to officers who had “honorably served in battle under General Kearny in his division,” it was a gold cross patte with black enamel inscribed with the words DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI (“It is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland.”) on the obverse and the recipient’s name and medal number on the reverse and suspended from a red ribbon. On March 13, 1863, Brigadier General David B. Birney, who had succeeded Kearny as division commander, issued an order creating a “Kearny Cross of Valor” for enlisted personnel who had “most distinguished themselves in battle.” The medal for this decoration had a bronze Maltese cross containing the words “Kearny Cross” on the obverse with the words “Birney’s Division” and the recipient’s name on the reverse with the medal suspended from a red ribbon. The medals came to be referred to collectively as the Kearny Cross.

It’s not known for certain how many were awarded. General Birney’s General Order #48 issued after the Battle of Chancellorsville lists 454 “meritorious and distinguished non-commissioned officers and privates, selected for their gallantry.” One article suggests that as many as 800 or more were awarded. What is known is that at least four women received the Kearny Medal: Anna Etheridge, Marie Tepe, Charlotte Elizabeth McKay, and Mary Ann Taylor. As of this writing, all that is known about Mary Taylor is her name. What follows are the stories of the other three women whose distinguished service for the division earned them the Kearny Cross.

THE MEDAL OF HONOR

A Brief History

Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, Assistant Adjutant General Lieutenant Colonel Edward Davis Townsend (founder of the military prison at Fort Leavenworth) and chiefof staff to Commanding General of the U.S. Army General Winfield Scott, proposed that a military decoration acknowledging battlefield valor, a Medal of Honor, be authorized. The hero of the War of 1812 rejected it, believing it an expression of European aristocratic frippery not in keeping with the republican principles of the nation. When he learned of it, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thought otherwise. He saw it as a means to help boost morale in a navy battered by the defection of so many officers to the Confederacy. When Scott retired in October 1861, Welles made his move with the Senate and on December 21, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law legislation establishing the U.S. Navy Medal of Honor. The following year, on July 12, 1862, Lincoln signed a similar bill establishing the U.S. Army’s Medal of Honor.

For fifty-seven years, it remained the military’s only decoration for valor and as such it was vulnerable to abuse. While most recipients received it for valor in combat there were a significant number who did not. At the time individuals could personally petition to receive the decoration. In 1872 one such petitioner was Civil War veteran Captain Asa Gardiner. In his application for a Medal of Honor he wrote, “I request I be allowed one as a souvenir of memorable times past.” He got it. As did President Lincoln’s funeral honor guard. The most egregious example was that of the 27th Maine Infantry Regiment in which its soldiers received the decoration for serving an extra three days past the expiration of their enlistment doing garrison duty at Washington, D.C. during the Battle of Gettysburg. The story gets worse. Half the soldiers refused to extend their enlistment, yet even they still got the decoration.

Though the criteria had been revised and made more restrictive, it was not until 1916 that Congress authorized the military to once and for all set the Medal of Honor criteria house in order. In 1917 the criteria, still in use today, was authorized and it was applied retroactively back to the Civil War. In what came to be known as the Purge of 1917, 911 recipients were struck from the Medal of Honor roll and ordered to return their decorations. Gone was the 27th Maine, Captain Gardiner, the Lincoln honor guard, and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

And that leads us to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.

DR. MARY EDWARDS WALKER

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker is here because she has a distinction unique in military history. She is the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor; a high point in a life that ran the gamut from great achievement to great injustice.

While many extraordinary women populated nineteenth century America, none garnered more attention or inspired more controversy during their lifetime than the maverick Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. Her rise to the pedestal of international fame and fall to the wilderness of an historical footnote was epic. She was the second woman to earn a physician’s degree in America, a social activist for women’s issues and temperance, an abolitionist, bestselling author, lecturer, spy, prisoner of war, and veterans advocate, amongst other things.

Though all of that contributed to her worldwide fame, it was not so much what she did that set her apart from other similarly driven women, it was her status as a fashion pariah that made her notorious, particularly to her sister suffragettes. Dr. Walker wore pants. While it seems trivial now, in the nineteenth century it was anything but. This was a time when gender roles rigidly demarcated what was and wasn’t acceptable attire for women. Dr. Walker defied feminine fashion custom and wore “mannish attire”—also known as “reform dress.” Her reason was one of health, that de rigueurcorsets and tight skirts were unhealthy (which they were). She wasn’t the only woman to do so, but she was the most famous, even more famous than Amelia Bloomer who gave her name to a style of reform dress that she advocated. Dr. Walker would be repeatedly shunned, mocked, arrested and jailed for wearing pants.

Mary Walker was born on November 26, 1832, in Oswego, New York, the youngest of seven children. Her farmer parents were progressive to the point of revolutionary when it came to the raising of their six daughters (and one son). Ignoring the gender norms of the day, they encouraged their daughters to fend for themselves, instilled in them a sense of justice that charged them to be forthright in speaking out, and exercise other traits and behaviors then attributed to men.

When she enrolled in Syracuse Medical School in 1853, Mary Walker was exposed to a gender-centric prejudice that would dog her medical career: the attitude held by both men and women that while it was acceptable for a woman to be a nurse, being a doctor was, well, weird. Upon graduation in 1855, she divided her time between her medical practice and her women’s rights activism, lecturing and writing for the dress reform, suffragette, and other social issues.

By the time the Civil War erupted in 1861, Walker was already a rising star on the national scene regarding women’s issues, but it was in the Civil War that her fame would skyrocket. In journalism parlance, she was “good copy.” Early on she had learned how to cultivate reporters, and she maintained a lifelong relationship with the press.

In addition to cultivating powerful and influential friends, she accumulated a number of powerful enemies in her life. In the suffragette movement the two most important were Susan B. Anthony and Elisabeth Cady Stanton. Though they didn’t like each other, they buried their hatchet in common cause against Dr. Walker. So great became their jealousy and hatred of her (after all, she was something they weren’t: an independent career woman and Civil War hero, and most galling of all, she violated their sense of fashion propriety) that once they attempted to have her arrested during a women’s rights convention and, more successfully, literally wrote Dr. Walker out of the multi-volume post-war official history of the suffragette movement even though she was one of its most influential advocates.

Another adversary was the War Department.

Her battle against the War Department began at war’s outbreak. Mobilization made the need for doctors acute. Dr. Walker was among the many physicians offering their services to the War Department. But she was turned down flat. The reason: she was female and told it was illegal for a woman to be an army officer. Further, the War Department would accept her as a nurse, but not as a doctor. Thus began a years-long battle between her and the War Department bureaucracy over various issues, the most contentious being her request for an officer’s commission. Resolution of that sticking point would make history.

Opting for an indirect approach to army service, from 1861 to 1863 she worked as a volunteer physician going back and from Washington hospital to Virginia battlefield treating the wounded and overseeing their transport to Washington, D.C. She also acted as concierge, scribe, lawyer and War Department red tape cutter for soldiers and their families convalescing and living in Washington, all the while keeping up the pressure to formally serve.

Following the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, she went west to assist in caring for wounded from that engagement and the Battle of Chattanooga. Her medical and organizational skills so impressed Army of the Cumberland commander General George Thomas that he signed orders authorizing her appointment as a “contract civilian physician” with the equivalent rank of lieutenant. In addition to her medical work for Thomas’s army, she also served as a spy, going behind enemy lines in North Georgia to gather intelligence. On April 10, 1864, she was captured and became a prisoner of war at Castle Thunder Prison in Richmond where she became the bane of her jailers. She was released as part of a prisoner exchange on August 12, 1864, and it became a point of pride for her that she was exchanged for a surgeon with the rank of major. The official notation on the Confederate POW list described her as “The notorious Miss Dr. Mary E. Walker, Surgeoness of the 52nd Ohio Regulars.” It was not the first, nor would it be the last time she was called “notorious.” News of her freedom was reported nationwide, and she met President Abraham Lincoln who asked about her treatment as a prisoner.

After a brief period in recovery she returned South to treat soldiers wounded in the Battle of Atlanta and later was supervisor of a prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and after that director of a refugee house in Clarksville, Tennessee. She was mustered out of the service on June 15, 1865.

She resumed her medical practice in Washington, D.C., once again became active in the women’s rights movement, and petitioned President Andrew Johnson to recognize her wartime service retroactively with an officer’s commission.

The issue of granting the officer’s commission request quickly became an embarrassing political football for the administration. By now Dr. Walker was too famous and had too many powerful allies and advocates to be further stonewalled and ignored. Finally, in October 1865, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who had been assigned Dr. Walker’s case, sent at twelve-page epic of legalistic hemming and hawing to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that finally said granting her an army commission would set “an inconvenient precedent.” But, well aware of the political stakes involved, he gave Stanton an out, adding “her sacrifices, her fearless energy under circumstances of peril, her endurance of hardship and imprisonment at the hands of the enemy and especially her active patriotism and eminent loyalty . . . may well be regarded as an almost isolated one in the history of the rebellion; and to signalize and perpetrate it as such would seem to be desirable.”

So, it was decided. Instead of an army commission, President Andrew Johnson would award her the Medal of Honor. The unintended consequence of this “consolation prize” was that it made history. On November 11, 1865, President Johnson signed the citation and on January 24, 1866, Dr. Mary Walker received it, becoming the first woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Unfortunately, that part of the story didn’t end there.

In 1916 new, restrictive criteria was approved and made retroactive for all on the Medal of Honor roll. After review, in 1917, an army board, known as the Medal of Honor Board, determined that because she was a “civilian contract surgeon” and not a soldier (as per the terms of the new criteria) her Medal of Honor, and that of 910 others was revoked and all names were struck from the Medal of Honor roll.

Ordered to return her medal, she refused. Defiantly continuing to wear it every day, daring those in power to take it from her. None tried.

But that was not the only late-in-life indignity she suffered. When she died on February 21, 1919, at age 86, she had also become marginalized as an embarrassing anachronism to the movement she had dedicated most of her life to, a sad conclusion for one who had fought the good fight for women’s rights.

Sixty years later, upon the urging of one of Dr. Walker’s descendants and after a review and recommendation by the Army Board of Correction of Military Records, on June 19, 1977, Army Secretary Clifford Alexander righted six decades of wrong and restored her decoration. To date Dr. Mary E. Walker remains the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

Into the Breech One Way or the Other

From the American Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, women who served in the military generally served in an auxiliary capacity, usually as nurses or providing such support as cook, laundress, and water carrier—the famous “Molly Pitchers.” Those who actually fought were more outliers than trailblazers, and, particularly in the American Civil War, did so disguised as men (unless they served as spies). Regardless of how they served these women received little or no formal recognition. What formal recognition they received came in the form of a pension. Though societal attitudes were the predominant reason for this, there was another.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, medals capable of being worn on a blouse were associated with the nobility and our nation’s military and civilian leaders felt they ran counter to the republican principles of the new nation. That’s not to say acts of military achievement or valor weren’t recognized. In such instances Congress authorized the striking of gold, silver, or bronze medals in commemoration. But this was a singular, not a categorical, honor, and one not designed to be worn, but to be placed on a mantle or desk. There were two general honors: Certificates of Merit (originally issued as paper certificates, later in the years prior to World War I, as a medal) and brevet rank promotions which increased one’s rank but without the commensurate raise in pay. The oft-cited American Revolution’s Badge of Military Merit was a decoration authorized by General George Washington, not Congress, so was technically a personal, not a national, medal.

The bias against medals changed with the authorization of the Medal of Honor in the American Civil War. Needless to say, such recognition went to men—with one singular exception.

In the absence of medals, it is the duty of history to honor the women of this period for their sacrifice. Sadly, only a handful of such women are known to history. Herein are a few of their stories. With apologies to William Shakespeare who said best the task in Henry V:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,

Our bending author hath pursu’d the story,

In little room confining mighty women,

Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

They were called “Daughters of Liberty.” And they did everything men did during the American Revolution and more; most often openly as nurses, cooks, maids, laundresses, seamstresses and sometimes fighting side-by-side with their husbands; other times covertly, as spies and disguising themselves in order to serve as fighting soldiers. The most famous of these women was “Molly Pitcher.” Originally a term arising from the calls by soldiers for the women to bring them pitchers of water for drink and to sponge the hot bores of cannon barrels (“Molly! Pitcher!”), it evolved into a generic name for such water bearers and came to be associated most with three women who did much more than haul water during the American Revolution: Margaret Corbin, Deborah Sampson, and Mary Ludwig Hays.

MARGARET CORBIN

Margaret Corbin was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania in 1751, she was orphaned at age five and raised by an uncle. At age twenty-one she married John Corbin. When he joined the military in 1775, becoming a matross (gunner’s assistant) in a Pennsylvania artillery company, she went with him, performing all the typical tasks of a camp follower. Because she regularly brought water to thirsty soldiers, she received the nickname of “Molly Pitcher” and it was under that nickname that she would go down in history.

On November 16, 1776, Corbin’s unit was a part of Colonel Robert McGaw’s 1,200-man garrison at Fort Washington in northern Manhattan when it came under attack by General George Howe’s 4,000-man mixed force of British troops and Hessian mercenaries. When the gunner for John Corbin’s cannon was killed, Margaret, who had become familiar with the cannon drill through observance, became her husband’s matross when he took over command of the cannon. Shortly thereafter John Corbin himself fell dead, slain by a Hessian musket ball. Margaret immediately took over operation of the cannon, loading and firing it with such ferocity that at one point as many as ten British cannons were shooting at her position.

Outnumbered, but undaunted, she continued the uneven exchange until being severely wounded by a combination of musket fire and cannon grapeshot that tore into her jaw and chest, almost severing her left arm.

Captured when the fort fell, British doctors treated her wounds, saving her life. After she had sufficiently recovered, she was paroled and was taken to a Philadelphia hospital for convalescence. Permanently invalided, she was assigned to the Corps of Invalids, disabled soldiers kept on Army rolls to serve in rear echelon roles such as guarding military facilities.

In 1776 Pennsylvania gave her a one-time disability payment and in 1779 the Continental Congress voted her a lifetime disability pension, making her the first woman to be so compensated. She died in Highland Falls, New York, in 1800 at age 48. In 1926, remains believed to be hers were exhumed and re-interred with full military honors in the cemetery at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

DEBORAH SAMPSON

Deborah Sampson was born on December 17, 1760, one of several children born to parents who, though descendants of Mayflower Pilgrims, were so impoverished that they had to have their children raised by others. Deborah was bound to a family as an indentured servant during which time she taught herself sufficiently to qualify as a part-time teacher following her release.

Whether out of a desire for some adventure in life, patriotism, or a need for money in January 1782 she disguised herself as a man and under the name Timothy Thayer, enlisted. This first attempt proved a quick failure, the result of her identity exposed after sharing a few too many rounds at a tavern with her fellow soldiers.

Her second attempt, made in May 1782, was more successful. Using the name of her deceased brother Robert Surtleff (other spellings include “Shirtliff” and “Shirtliffe”), because of her exceptional height (standing five feet nine inches at a time when a woman’s average height was five feet and a man’s five feet eight inches) and robust constitution, she succeeded in joining an elite Light Infantry Company in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment.

Her baptism of fire occurred in the summer of 1782 when her unit fought a number of skirmishes in “Neutral Ground,” an area of the lower Hudson River Valley in what is now New York’s Westchester County. Accounts vary about whether she received her wounds in one or more skirmishes. What is known is that she was cut on the left side of her face by a saber and received two musket ball wounds in the thigh. Knowing treatment of the leg wound would expose her identity, she managed to escape the aid station before doctors could get to her. Using a penknife and sewing needle and no anesthetic, she managed to extract one of the bullets. The other proved to be lodged too deep and would remain in her leg and be the source of chronic pain for the rest of her life.

After she recovered, she went with her unit to Fort Ticonderoga where in November 1782 she saw further action. In April 1783 she was transferred to Philadelphia where she served as an orderly to General John Paterson. Summers in Philadelphia were known as the “sickly season” when yellow fever, malaria, and other mosquito-borne plagues would ravage the city. That summer she came down with a fever and was sent to Dr. Barnabas Binney for treatment. During examination he discovered her real identity. Initially he kept her secret, only revealing it in a letter to General Paterson when it came time to muster out soldiers following the signing of the Treaty of Paris in September 1783 that ended the war. Instead of being reprimanded or, worse, dishonorably discharged which would have eliminated any chance of pension, General Paterson gave her an honorable discharge.

After the war she married and had three children. In 1792 she successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for backpay withheld when her identity was revealed. In 1802 to help earn money she began giving lectures in the region about her wartime service. Following an appeal made by her friend Paul Revere, in 1805 Congress authorized a pension that was increased in 1816.

MARY LUDWIG HAYS

Mary Ludwig Hays, born on October 13, 1744, is the woman most famously associated with the Molly Pitcher legend. Her husband, William Hays, enlisted in the 4th Pennsylvania Artillery in 1777. Mary joined him that winter at Valley Forge where, as a member of a group of soldiers’ wives in camp led by Martha Washington, she worked at a variety of duties including laundress and nurse.

It was at the Battle of Monmouth in central New Jersey on June 28, 1778, that Mary Hays entered the history books as Molly Pitcher. The day dawned hot and would go on to set a temperature record. As the British and American armies prepared for battle, Mary searched and found a nearby spring she could use. When the battle commenced, she ignored heavy enemy fire in order to keep infantry and artillerymen supplied with water. At one point in the afternoon Mary saw her husband collapse beside his cannon, either from heat stroke or wounds. She quickly grabbed his ramrod and took his place swabbing and loading his cannon throughout the rest of the battle. Soldier and diarist Joseph Plumb Martin observed her and later wrote the passage that would make her famous: “A woman whose husband belonged to the artillery and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece the whole time. While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation.”

Though both sides claimed victory, the battle ended inconclusively. Following it, George Washington is reputed to have asked about the woman who served with the artillery crew and after being told gave her a battlefield promotion to sergeant (other accounts attribute the promotion to General Anthony Wayne). Thereafter she was known as “Sergeant Molly,” a nickname she used for the rest of her life and a piece of verse further commemorated her action:

Molly Pitcher she stood by her gun

And rammed the charges home, sir;

And thus on Monmouth bloody field

A sergeant did become, sir.

For his services in the war, William Hays received 200 acres of land in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. He and Mary moved to Carlisle where they lived until his death in 1789. Mary’s subsequent marriage to George McCauley, a Revolutionary war veteran and friend of William’s, proved a personal and financial disaster and he disappeared from her life following the forced sale of the 200-acre land grant. Mary continued to live in Carlisle, working at a variety of domestic jobs. In 1822 Pennsylvania awarded her an annual pension. She died in Carlisle on January 22, 1832 at the estimated age of 87.

THE ANTEBELLUM YEARS

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War the United States was involved in two major wars, one again with Great Britain in the War of 1812 (sometimes referred to as the Second War for Independence) and the Mexican American War (1846-1848). While there was no doubt more women who participated in those conflicts, two have stood out in history: Lucy Brewer and Sarah Knight Borginnis Bowman.

LUCY BREWER

The War of 1812 produced the fabulous account of Lucy Brewer who, disguised as George Baker, served with distinction as a marine sharpshooter aboard the USS Constitution before being honorably discharged. It if sounds like a plot for an improbable pot-boiler novel, all subsequent evidence indicates that it is—a flight of imagination written by Nathaniel Hill Wright and published in 1815 under the title The Female Marine. All works of fiction require of the reader a suspension of disbelief. To anyone with even a passing knowledge of life aboard a sailing ship in the early nineteenth century, that suspension amounted to a trampoline leap over the topmost mast. That a woman could successfully keep her identity secret under such circumstances, well, let’s just say that in this author’s acknowledged envy his story proved quite popular, going through at least nineteen editions over a three-year period.

SARAH KNIGHT BORGINNIS BOWMAN

Now a woman during this antebellum period who did become a bona fide and notorious legend was Sarah Knight Borginnis Bowman, an Irish American woman, possibly born in 1813, who became famous as the “Heroine of Fort Brown” in the Mexican American War. The eventually much-married Sarah was on her second husband (Borginnis or Borginnis or Bourdette—people were more casual about the spelling of names back then), a soldier in General Zachary Taylor’s army, and was operating the mess at Fort Brown (originally Fort Texas) located outside Brownsville, Texas, on the United States/Mexican border.

When war between Mexico and the United States broke out in April 1846, the fort was put under siege a month later by the Mexican army. While other women took to bunkers to sew sandbags and perform other services, Bowman braved cannon and musket fire to deliver coffee and food to soldiers manning the fort’s ramparts as well as attending to the wounded. When the siege was lifted, her husband proudly recounted her exploits to reporters whose stories about her made her famous.

When General Zachary Taylor took his army into northern Mexico, Sarah followed. She added to her legend in the Battle of Buena Vista, once again bravely serving coffee and food to soldiers during the fighting, as well as reloading muskets and carrying away wounded, earning the nickname “Doctor Mary.” Legend has it that, in one-upping the Molly Pitchers of the Revolutionary War, she was working at a cannon when attacked by a Mexican soldier who slashed her face with his saber before she killed him in return. Sadly, history does not record how.

Her personal life was at least as colorful. Amongst other things, when push came to shove, she had a practical disregard over the niceties of having a formal wedding ceremony in order to get married. After the war ended and the army planned to march to California, because husband number two had either been killed or abandoned her (accounts vary) and was told she could not accompany the army to California as only military wives were allowed. She mounted her horse and rode through the ranks shouting, “Who wants a wife with $15,000 and the biggest leg in Mexico?” When a dragoon reputedly by the name of Davis volunteered on the condition that a priest perform the ceremony, she replied, “Bring your blanket to my tent tonight and I will learn you to tie a knot that will satisfy you, I reckon!” She went with the army to California.

By the time she died in 1866 and approximately at the age of fifty-three, she had been a much-married woman (exact number in dispute, but what is not is that she was experienced when it came to the subject of husbands). She had worked as an innkeeper, restauranteur, and madame. Upon her death she was breveted an honorary colonel and buried with full military honors at the Fort Yuma, California, cemetery.

So, I have to get a new computer. And, of course, I didn’t back-up the latest files I was working on.

I blame Donald Trump.

In the early days of my comic book writing career in the 1980s upon my return to New York City (and, yes, I have to write that second part of my return dealing with my time at Comworld the TV commercial production company that initially employed me—I’ll get there, honest), I lived the freelance writing life bouncing between assignments for Marvel Comics, Marvel Books (it’s assorted children’s publications), Byron Preiss Visual Publications (who later became my employer in the late 1990s-early 2000s), and DC Comics. And this anecdote is about my experience with one of my editors at DC Comics.

Ah, editors. In the forty-plus years of my professional career I’ve had all manner of editors, some good, some excellent, some completely hands-off, and then there was my editor on THE OMEGA MEN No. 29.

The story in question was “Survivors,” a six-page back-up story for THE OMEGA MEN series. The editor was new to both DC and to the comic book industry have been hired from the book publishing side. In typical freelance fashion, I had trolled the editorial offices in search of work and upon meeting him and making my pitch, he green-lighted my little back-up tale, a trial run for future assignments.

In one of my earlier visits I had succeeded in landing with a different editor, again someone who came to DC from the book industry, to write an inventory for WORLD’S FINEST COMICS, one of the titles she was editing. My script caught the eye of artist Keith Giffen, who was one of the major talents at the time. That was a major coup for me. That story was about Astrid, a small-town woman from Minnesota, pursuing her dream as an actress by going to the big city of Metropolis, only for things to go criminally wrong when she falls into the clutches of the mob and appears to have been killed. Her twin sister, Helena, a police officer, flies to Metropolis to try and find out what exactly happened to her. That subplot is the driving thread that involves both Superman and Bat-Man (the two headline super heroes in the title). Trying not to go into too much detail in this digression, Astrid strikes a bargain with Bat Man, in return for her aid in helping him save Superman from what amounts to a “death ray” (Hey, it’s a comic book super hero series!), he must convince Helena that she, Astrid, is dead (Astrid’s shame over what has happened to her that she can’t see her sister). He agrees, reluctantly. Superman is saved. And Bat-Man shows Helena the headstone of Astrid’s “grave.” The final panel we see the silhouetted figure of Astrid in the distant background witnessing the scene.

Ahhh, me and my digressions.

So, getting back to “Survivor.” I write the full-script text, which meant that I did a chapter and verse story that broke down the number of panels on the page, provided detailed art instruction, and finally, all the caption and dialogue text to go into each panel. A six-page story.

A couple of weeks later I get a call from the editor who left a message on my land-line voicemail. This at a time pre-internet. I called him back, he said he wanted to go over some things about the story and we arranged for me to see him the next day.

I show up the following day. He has on his desk a copy of my script, marked up, as well as a yellow notepad on which he’s written, single-spaced, his comments. It turned out that those comments ran to eight pages. For a six-page story.

He began by telling me he had many concerns about the story because he said it had too many story omissions. He told me of the first omission. I looked at him and pointed out on the first page of my script on his desk where that information was written. He then told me about the second omission he found. And I then pointed out the panel in which I had written the very thing he said was missing. This went on for a few other examples, with him saying I hadn’t written something and me pointing out in the appropriate panels that, yes, indeed the text he thought was missing was in fact there.

Finally, I looked at him and said, “Wait. You just don’t like my writing style.”

He paused, then nodded, and said, “You’re right.”

Well, I did not rewrite the story. It did see print as I had written it, with no changes. And, he soon left DC, presumably returning to the book side of the industry.

Broadly speaking, producing a book falls into two categories: creating it (the writing), and marketing it (the selling). The former results in the euphoric reward of a finished work. The latter? Well, in my experience that has been something that felt like the labors of Hercules because of the many different demands by the publisher’s marketing department, causing me to become a completely different person. I’ve experienced the gamut. Here’s one experience, one which I file under the category: “Well . . . you can ask!”

The background: It involved promotion for my book written with my late friend John D. Gresham, Uncommon Valor. The publisher, St. Martin’s Press, contracted with a company who created a website titled CommandPosts.com, dedicated to the promotion of the publisher’s line of military histories and biographies. As it was presented to me it would include excerpted material from upcoming books as well as “interviews, original commentary from bestselling authors, honored veterans, and award-winning historians.” It also touted weekly giveaways and other free stuff! Sounds good, right?

And then things started going sideways. It started with the excerpt selected. Oh, I forgot to mention that Uncommon Valor was one of a group of books that would be launching the website. So, you’d expect that special effort would be made to ensure that the site was interesting, exciting, and accurate as possible, right? Oh, you naive, trusting . . .

It began with the excerpt itself, pulled from the chapter about U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith. Thank God my editor had the good sense to send me the excerpt selection for approval! Uncommon Valor was about the Medal of Honor recipients of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the first-ever complete history of the Medal of Honor. The hardcover edition recounted the stories of the posthumous recipients. John and I were able with the trade paperback edition to include the living recipients, something that I wrote about in an earlier posting.

By definition combat actions contain drama. At the risk of stating the obvious, life and death drama. So, you would think that someone going through such text would look for a dramatic passage for a website publicizing military themed books in order to excite the interest of a potential buyer. But, no! Whoever made the selection picked one of the most inconsequential passages in the chapter. One that was about logistics! While important for executing combat operations, the details of getting ammunition and supplies into the hands of those going into combat is hardly something that’s going to cause anyone other than perhaps a veteran supply sergeant’s pulse to race.

I emailed our editor and explained the situation and offered to find a more dramatic passage for the website. He agreed and said he needed it by the next day. I went through the chapter and found a passage that I thought was suitably dramatic. It recounted the counterattack by a superior force of the Iraqi Republican Guards and his decision that led to him sacrificing his life to save his unit. Here are the last two paragraphs of that passage:

“The tactical situation was bad, bordering on disaster. Smith had three wounded men with him and scores more at Four Corners [a collection point]. They were receiving fire from the watchtower, from enemy troops in trees and on the courtyard wall, and from the main body approaching from the north.

“His men needed time—time to get the wounded to the aid station, time to organize a better defense at Four Corners, and time for reinforcements to arrive. Smith made the decision to buy his men that time.”

I emailed the excerpt to our editor and problem solved. All is now well and good in the world. Or so I thought.

The site was launched and I was notified. I logged on and what image do I see in the box that contained the title to our book? A close-up of the USAAF decal on the side of a P-51 Mustang fighter. A World War II image for a book about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars!

For those of you who are not veterans, or military history buffs, those who are take accuracy very, very seriously! During the production of the TV documentary series based on my book First Command there was a segment devoted to the first command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. He was a junior officer in World War I. I got a tape of the first cut and what did I see in it? A shot of a Bf-109 fighter plane flying in combat. A World War II fighter in a World War I story.

Okay, that was an obvious problem to fix. Then there was a little thing that wasn’t a mistake, but that one reader still decided to rake me over the coals over it. When I was writing my book Top Gun: 50 Years of Naval Air Superiority, my friend, and fellow author, Robert F. Dorr died of brain cancer. To honor him I dedicated the book to him: “To the late Robert F. Dorr, who served his country as a US Air Force pilot and State Department diplomat and honored me by allowing me to become his friend.”

So, of course, a U.S. Navy veteran called me on the carpet for committing interservice “sacrilege” by dedicating a Naval Aviation book to an Air Force pilot! My response? To paraphrase Lesley Gore’s song, “It’s My Party”: It’s my book and I’ll dedicate it to whom I want to, whom I want to, whom I want to . . .

But wait—there’s more! Remember that little mention CommandPost.com had about “original commentary”? Well, sure enough, not long after the posting for Uncommon Valor I got an email from a woman representative from CommandPost.com asking me to provide an original article for the site on a topic related to Uncommon Valor. I wrote back stating that I’d be happy to and asked what the fee was.

She responded stating that they did not have a budget for that and that any payment I received would be in the form of royalties, the result of increased book sales due to the appearance of my ancillary article.

Ahem.

I decided I’d take her to the woodshed, not to punish, but to educate. While there have been times that I did do some writing for free, those were favors, usually for friends. I’m a professional writer and this was business. I decided to give her a financial breakdown. I used the retail cover price for the trade paperback, $15.99, which for convenience I’ll round up to $16. The reason I used that price was because by this time the trade paperback edition was out and thus hardcover sales were all but dead.

Royalty payout is a percentage game. In this case it was ten percent of the retail cover price. So, that meant that the author’s royalty share was $1.60. That amount had to be split three ways, between me, John, and Howard Zimmerman who packaged the book for St. Martin’s Press (I’m not going to get into the financial weeds explaining the packaging role). That meant my share was $.73 per book. Now, I was getting $50 for short articles (300-400 words) that I was writing for an online military site. So, I used that as my baseline. But for me to comparably make that fifty dollars, my article would have to boost book sales by about 150 copies, because the royalty pie was being split three ways. (The math’s not exact, but it’s close enough.) Which then led me to my question, can she track such a sales boost and provide it as evidence of comparable worth?

I never heard back from her.

And now for something lighter, because boy, do we need it.

Every so often I hear voices. Seriously. And no, it’s not something mental (though, being a writer that does arouse a certain amount of suspicion). Actually, it’s something physical. I kid you not. I have bad teeth. As a result of a wealth of cavities and root canals and repair work done thereof, the upshot is that many of my teeth have metal fillings. As it turns out the combination of mouth moisture, metal fillings, and when night sky atmospheric conditions properly align, my jaws become a low-level antenna. This can mean that as I am about to go to sleep, I hear voices. Sometimes I can make out a word here and there, but most often not—at best I am only able to identify the sounds as words in a conversation.

One day I told my dentist of my condition. After a pause, he confirmed that, yes, while not common, it was something that was possible. He also told me that I was the first one of his patients to inform him of that.

“Absolutely the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was that big helicopter hovering over me.”—F-105 Thud fighter pilot call sign Marlin 01

This is the first in a short series of postings about Combat Search and Rescue.

The Trump administration’s “excursion” in Iran has, with the shoot downs of two American fighters, reached the level of . . . well, I’ll let you find the words you think most appropriate. When I read that the F-15E Strike Eagle’s pilot had been rescued, but not its weapons systems officer (the former flies the plane, the latter monitors threats and controls/fires the arms) who, as of this writing, is still at large in “Indian Country,” the term to describe downed aircrew members deep in enemy territory. I went through my archives and gathered the pieces that I wrote either on my own or with my late friend John D. Gresham about CSAR and CAR (Combat Search and Rescue and Combat Air Rescue) missions. He and I found three that stood out as significant missions for reasons of either longevity prior to rescue (F-4 Phantom Weapons System Operator Captain Roger Locher, Oyster 1 Bravo, who evaded capture in the Vietnam War for twenty-three days), complexity (Lt. Colonel Iceal Hambleton, Bat 21, by SEAL Lt. Tommy Norris, also in the Vietnam War, an action for which Norris would receive the Medal of Honor and which would become the 1988 movie starring Danny Glover and Gene Hackman), or the unique unit used in the rescue (Captain Scott O’Grady in Operation Deny Flight over disintegrating Yugoslavia). This posting is a summary about the history of combat air rescues, and an explanation of why our military commits the resources it does to rescue those of its members stuck deep in Indian Country. Subsequent postings will be about those missions.

Modern CSAR began during World War II and during that conflict was overwhelmingly confined to aquatic rescue operations. Rescue buoys containing temporary living quarters stocked with rations, survival supplies, and a radio were deployed by both the British and German navies along the English Channel. Downed aircrews who managed to reach them would then radio their location to their respective commands, which of course were picked up by the enemy. Then they sat back and hoped to for a friendly rescue as opposed to one by an enemy who would then ship them off to a prisoner of war camp. Submarines and long-range PBY Catalina flying boats were also used for search and rescue missions in the Atlantic Theater of Operations.

In the Pacific Ocean Theater of Operations said rescues generally involved submarines and/or PBY Catalinas. During amphibious campaigns, or in conjunction with bombing missions of the Japanese islands from air bases in Saipan and Tinian, these assets would generally be pre-positioned in order to expeditiously rescue downed aircrews.

The first land use of CSAR/CAR occurred in Burma in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations in 1944 in Burma using a Sikorsky R-4 helicopter. It was a primitive rotary wing aircraft, but its success in that theater paved the way for its exploitation in the Korean War. It was in the Korean War that the helicopter as an air rescue vehicle came into its own, not just in CSAR but also in timely medical evacuation (medivac). But it was in the Vietnam War that CSAR itself achieved its “golden age.”

In 1964, the U.S. Air Force assigned to the Air Rescue Service (ARS) the duty to conduct combat aircrew recovery missions (as they were then known) in Southeast Asia. In 1966, the ARS was redesignated the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service (ARRS), but its mission in Southeast Asia remained the same. When the war ended, the ARRS had successfully rescued 3,883 aircrew members in Southeast Asia, and the 3rd Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Group was the most highly decorated unit in U.S. Air Force history.

Like so much else to do with the Vietnam War, the reasons for this success were both simple and complex. More than twenty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, Major General Lance L. Smith, USAF, summarized the multifold value of rescuing downed air crews: “Combat search and rescue (CSAR) preserves critical combat resources while denying the enemy a potential source. It is a key element in sustaining the morale, cohesion, and, ultimately, the operational performance of friendly forces.”

There were consequences to this doctrine, though. On the plus side was the obvious positive morale factor. During the Vietnam War an F-105 Thud fighter pilot, call sign Marlin 01, expressed a common sentiment by downed airmen when he said of his rescue, “Absolutely the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was that big helicopter hovering over me.” On the negative side was the awareness by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong of American policy and efforts to go all out to recover downed aircrews. They were not above using these men as “bait” in an effort to shoot down more aircraft.

Successful search-and-rescue missions under combat conditions are among the most time-sensitive of operations. U.S. Air Force studies begun during the Korean War and continued throughout the Vietnam War revealed that “an airman’s chances of being rescued were very good if recovery forces could reach him within fifteen minutes, but the probability of recovery decreased significantly if the ACR force took longer than thirty minutes to reach the area.” Ominously that recover dropped to less than 20 percent if the aircrew member was on the ground more than four hours.

To reduce that time to the minimum, in 1966 during the Vietnam War, Colonel Bestow Rudolph of the ARERS planning staff stated, “Rather than stand by and wait for a call, we want to be as close as possible to the strike area, loitering on the periphery of the action and then going right in when a man needs us. We want to pick him up in seconds, not in minutes or hours.” The ARRS coordinated with mission planners so that rescue assets would be in place in the event of a shootdown.

Prior to each mission, a Hercules HC-130P (the “H” being the code letter for rescue and recovery) would orbit in a preestablished location. On board the HC-130P was a mission coordinator whose task was to manage any rescue effort. Additionally, the Hercules would provide refueling assistance to rescue helicopters that might need it. That was the protocol in place during the Vietnam War. And presumably it has continued, in modified and updated form, to this day, at least one hopes so. The point here is that there is a moral imperative that high command—at least those wearing the uniform of our military and are on the front lines—recognize. That everything humanly possible must be done to make the rescue of those who place themselves in harm’s way for their country.

A U.S. Navy Special Boat Unit Mark III pulls alongside a raft from the Iranian mine-laying ship Iran Ajar. US Department of Defense photo.

The controversial Operation Epic Fury is not the first time that our nation has actively deployed and utilized combat operations against Iran in the Persian Gulf. Twelve years ago I wrote an article for The Year in Special Operations 2013-2014 about the new Special Operations Command’s role in an authorized military operation against Iran’s military in 1987-1988. Though the focus of the article is the role of SOCOM and Special Operations units in action, it also touches on how the administration and military successfully navigated the complex and fraught political “minefield.” What follows is that article.

“In my view, to be successful in the northern Gulf we must establish intensive patrol operations to prevent the Iranians from laying mines.”—Rear Adm. Harold J. Bernsen, commander, Middle East Force, in an Aug. 6, 1987, memo to Gen. George B. Crist, USMC, commander, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)

By 1987, two of the most powerful nations in the Persian Gulf had been slugging it out for seven years in the costly stalemate known as the Iran-Iraq War. The escalation of attacks on neutral merchant shipping by both sides, referred to as the “Tanker War,” caused the United States to initiate Operation Earnest Will in July 1987. Initially designed to protect Kuwaiti tankers re-flagged as American ships, Earnest Will would also be the first combat test of the new U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) formed just three months earlier on April 16, 1987. Created in response to congressional action in the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 and the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1987, USSOCOM united all the services’ special operations components under a dedicated command equal to that of the other services. It was an independence long advocated by Special Operations Forces (SOF), and in Operations Prime Chance and Praying Mantis, part of Earnest Will, they would make an important first step in validating that decision.

To the uninitiated, the Persian Gulf appears to be an open, if somewhat narrow, body of water. The reality, so far as commercial oil tankers and blue-water navies are concerned, is that the Gulf more resembles a narrow valley in a long canyon dotted with numerous looming promontories. The combination of shallow depth with numerous islands, shoals, and oil platforms restricts deep-draft traffic to a few well-charted passages. With Iran bordering the entire eastern side of the Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz to Iraq, the result is a shooting gallery-style gauntlet more than 600 miles long from which Iran could stage attacks. As such, Rear Adm. Harold J. Bernsen, commander of Middle East Force at the time, quickly discovered that as a combat environment, the Persian Gulf gives the advantage to unconventional warfare tactics. So while Earnest Will, the escort of tankers by conventional warships, would be the high-profile—which is to say, highly publicized—side of the mission, the actual work interdicting Iranian attacks would be conducted covertly in Operation Prime Chance—making it, fittingly, the secret debut of USSOCOM.

Prime Chance’s primary adversary was Iran’s littoral fleet of small boats, mostly Swedish-built Boghammers and Boston whaler-type craft, used by the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) to attack commercial shipping or lay mines, and Iranian oil platforms used as observation posts. The Pasdaran’s favored tactic for attacking ships was to swarm around a target and shoot at the vessel’s bridge and superstructure with 107 mm rockets, RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and machine guns. The intent was not so much to sink as to inflict as much damage as possible on the ship and crew.

Prime Chance was a joint special operations and conventional force operation utilizing personnel from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne)—the 160th SOAR, or “Night Stalkers”—SEALs, Special Boat Units, Marines, and the Navy. Prime Chance began with missions launched from Bernsen’s flagship, the command ship USS La Salle (AGF 3), and frigates USS Jarrett (FFG 33) and Klakring (FFG 42). Additional missions were planned to be staged from two large oil platform construction barges—the Hercules and the Wimbrown VII—located in Bahrain that were being converted into mobile sea bases (MSBs). Once operational, they would then be deployed in international waters near Iran’s Farsi Island in the northern Gulf. The conversion of the barges, and especially their deployed location, sparked a bureaucratic firestorm among traditionalists in the Pentagon opposed to the mobile sea base concept. Joint Chiefs of Staff critics of the plan claimed the MSBs would be irresistible targets dangerously vulnerable to air attack. With memories of the 1983 truck bomb attack on Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, still fresh, some went so far as to call the barges “Beirut Barracks.”

The crane aboard the barge Hercules prepares to life a Mark III patrol boat into the water for a patrol. the 65-foot aluminum patrol boats worked in pairs to monitor small boat activity in the Gulf. A specially equipped 160th SOAR UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter is parked on the helicopter pad. U.S. Department of Defense photo

Every operational aspect of the barges—from arms and ordnance storage and types, numbers, and placement of patrol craft and helicopters to pilot flight certifications, Navy health inspections of the barges’ food service areas, and more—was examined and argued by the Joint Chiefs.

Bernsen countered that Iranian air capability against the barges was a non-issue—Iran had only 20 operable F-4 Phantoms and few Harpoons. U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. George B. Crist, USMC, threw in an additional challenge: “Would you rather risk losing two oil barges or a billion-dollar ship?” This was a stinging reference to the Feb. 28, 1987, missile attack “by mistake” of Iraqi fighters on the frigate USS Stark (FFG 31) that killed 37 sailors, and a reminder that the northern Gulf was dangerous to high-value assets as well. On Sept. 17, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., inspected the Hercules. While acknowledging the risk, Crowe decided using the barges as MSBs in the northern Gulf was the best way to go. With that, opposition ended. The Mk. III patrol boats conducted presence patrols, escorted convoys, and carried out intelligence missions beginning Sept. 9.

The 160th conducted nocturnal search-and-destroy missions using night-flight capable MH-6 (command and control) and AH-6 (attack) Little Bird helicopters equipped with forward-looking infrared (FLIR) and night vision goggles. Night Stalker pilots flew Little Birds an average of 30 feet above the sea.

Even though he advocated Prime Chance, Bernsen harbored some doubts about the Little Birds’ stealth capability, worried that Iranian ships would be able to identify and target them. The Night Stalker commander, Lt. Col. Bob Codney, set up an exercise to allay those concerns. On a moonless night, a pair of Little Birds was launched on a “patrol.” A half-hour later they reappeared—directly in front of the La Salle’s bridge. The first thing Bernsen or anyone else in the bridge knew of their presence was when they received the radio message: “Bang. You’re dead.” Bernsen was sold. From that point on, the call sign for the Night Stalkers in the Gulf was “Seabats.”

One of the 160th UH-60s on the flight deck of the barge Hercules as a Mark III patrol boat passes by during operations supporting Navy efforts to provide security for U.S.-flagged shipping in the Persian Gulf. The UH-60s were equipped with FLIR and a few other modifications, including a coat of gray paint that earned them the nickname “Grayhawks.” U.S. Department of Defense photo

The two most notable missions conducted in Prime Chance were the attack on the Iran Ajr, an amphibious landing craft converted into a minelayer, and the so-called “Battle of Farsi Island.”

On the night of Sept. 21-22, 1987, three Little Birds from the Jarrett flown by Bob “Flapper” Fladry and co-pilot Tom Leedom; Paul DeMilia and co-pilot Brian Collins; and Steve Chilton and co-pilot Terry Pena, all chief warrant officers, were flying patrol about 12 miles from the La Salle. It had been a boring patrol, with only marker buoys and dhows being spotted. With fuel starting to run low, the pilots were about to return to their ship when Fladry, in the command and control Little Bird, spotted the shape of a ship, the Iran Ajr. With DeMilia and Chilton breaking into a holding pattern a mile away, Fladry flew toward the ship. Fladry radioed in a contact report of a ship, work lights on and exhibiting no hostile action. Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Blankenship, captain of the Jarrett, had just ordered the flight to return to the ship when over the radio an alarmed Fladry stated, “They just turned all their lights off!”

This immediately raised everyone’s suspicions. Flying in a holding pattern 200 meters astern of the ship, Fladry went on to report deck activity in which crew members appeared to be “pushing shopping carts on deck” and into the water. Bernsen immediately identified the shopping carts as mines and ordered the helicopters to ready their guns while he got on the Satcom to Washington, D.C., to request permission to attack. After a third mine had been pushed overboard, Bernsen gave permission to “use whatever force is necessary” to stop the mine-laying.

Chilton flew into attack position perpendicular to the Iran Ajr’s hull, with DeMilia right behind. For 10 minutes, Chilton and DeMilia raked the minelayer with rocket and minigun fire. With the Iran Ajr dead in the water and burning from several small fires, the surviving members of the Iranian crew abandoned ship.

A SEAL team boarded the Iran Ajr at dawn. A search of the vessel discovered nine mines still on its deck, as well as a logbook detailing the number and location of the mines that had been laid and other intelligence. Five Iranians had been killed and 26 captured, later to be repatriated. After they had gathered all the intelligence they could, the SEALs scuttled the Iran Ajr.

In September, the Hercules was operational and towed into position in international waters a few miles away from Farsi Island. Navy SEAL Lt. Cmdr. Paul Evancoe was the officer in charge of the mixed contingent, which, in addition to the SEALs, Night Stalkers, and U.S. Marines, included about 30 foreign nationals, part of the lease contract terms specified by the barge’s owner. The Night Stalker pilots stationed on theHercules included Fladry, Leedom, DeMilia, Collins, Pena, and Chief Warrant Officer Bob Witter.

Two members of a Navy special warfare unit practice firing rifles from the deck of the barge Hercules during Operation Prime Chance. One sailor (foreground) is firing a .50-caliber sniping rifle, the other an M600 7.62 mm sniping rifle. U.S. Department of Defense photo

On the night of Oct. 8, they were escorting a reconnaissance mission along a section of the island’s coast by Special Boat Unit craft. At a specified time, they were to rendezvous at the Middle Shoals Buoy with a surface group from the Hercules containing a Seafox and two patrol boats. But when they arrived at the waypoint, they were surprised by three Iranian patrol ships that took the Little Birds under fire. The helicopters returned fire, sinking the vessels. American SOF craft arrived and rescued six Iranian survivors, two who later died of wounds. A short time later, radar screens detected what appeared to be as many as 40 small Iranian vessels heading toward the Hercules. The Americans prepared their defenses, but as the USS Thach (FFG 43) sped toward the Iranian vessels on an intercept course and six armed Little Birds orbited overhead, the contacts reversed course. The Hercules did not come under attack. Some later speculation suggested that the attack was possibly a false radar read, though other sources claim the vessels had been visually identified.

The next major action involving American and Iranian forces occurred on Oct. 19, 1987, in Operation Nimble Archer. During the spring and summer, Iran, which had seized Iraq’s strategic Al Faw Peninsula, had been deploying Silkworm anti-ship missiles there, posing a serious threat to the ships harbored in and around the port of Kuwait City, approximately 60 miles southwest. In early September, Iran had fired two Silkworms, the first of which harmlessly landed in Gulf waters and the second hitting an uninhabited beach about two miles south of an oil loading terminal. On Oct. 15, however, the tanker Sungari was heavily damaged by a Silkworm attack, and on Oct. 16, another tanker, the Sea Isle City, was also hit. In response, the American military command decided that instead of hitting the Silkworm sites on the peninsula, its forces would attack farther south in Iran’s Rashadat oil field located across the Gulf from Bahrain and Qatar. Two inactive oil platforms were being used there to stage attacks by Pasdaran forces and as ship traffic observation posts.

On Oct. 17, six U.S. Navy warships approached the platforms. Cmdr. G.J. O’Donnell, captain of the frigate USS Thach, which had assisted in the Oct. 8 action, radioed the two platforms, warning them of the warships’ intentions and advising personnel aboard to leave, which the Iranians did. Once the Iranians were clear, four destroyers—USS Hoel (DDG 13), Leftwich (DD 984), John Young (DD 973), and Kidd (DDG 993)—commenced firing. One platform caught fire, but the other platform, even though it was hit by almost 1,000 rounds, remained standing. A SEAL team boarded the platform and, after gathering a variety of intelligence, destroyed it with explosives.

But the Iranian government refused to back down. On Oct. 22, it launched a Silkworm attack on Kuwait’s Sea Island oil terminal, which handled a third of the country’s oil exports. It also ramped up its anti-shipping campaign, staging 27 attacks in November and December that sank one merchant ship and rendered two others CTL (constructive total loss). The increased attacks continued into 1988.

When the Wimbrown VII became operational in December, original plans called for it to be stationed at the opposite end of a 100-mile area of operations off Farsi Island. That was changed, and the smaller barge was deployed 10 miles north of the Hercules in order to provide mutual support and help relieve the barge’s overstretched pilots and crews.

The captured Iranian minelayer Iran Air with a U.S. Navy landing craft alongside. U.S. Navy SEALs boarded and captured the ship during Operation Prime Chance after it had been attacked by 160th helicopters. The SEALs found mines and vital intelligence aboard the minelayer. DoD photo

In February 1988, Rear Adm. Anthony Less relieved Bernsen as Middle East Force commander. The following month, Less assumed a more aggressive role regarding Iranian shipping attacks.

Navy captains operating in the Gulf were frustrated that their rules of engagement prevented them from protecting neutral non-American-flagged vessels, forcing them to remain spectators when those ships came under attack. Though he upheld U.S. policy, Less instructed his captains to “explore the gray area” between shooting and remaining spectators. His instructions, which specifically targeted Iranian actions, ran the risk of escalating the conflict by causing Iran to no longer regard the United States as a neutral party.

On April 14, 1988, the U.S. frigate Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) was severely damaged by a mine that almost tore the ship in half. Heroic action by her damage control crew saved the ship. Upon receiving the news, the American high command began discussing retaliation. The State Department, wishing to avoid escalation, stated that any response needed to be “proportionate.”

Crowe proposed that retaliation be the destruction of an Iranian warship. And in an unusual move, he went so far as to identify the ship, the frigate Sabalan, as its captain had ordered the cold-blooded machine-gunning of survivors of sunken tankers.

Crist recommended the destruction of oil platforms that were also used as Pasdaran observation posts.

Less recommended a combined air and Tomahawk missile attack on Iran’s Bandar Abbas naval base on the Strait of Hormuz.

President Ronald Reagan sided with Crist, and two Iranian platforms in the Sirri and Sassan oil fields located in the lower half of the Gulf off the coasts of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were identified as the targets. The stage was now set for Operation Praying Mantis, the largest major surface action conducted by the U.S. Navy since World War II.

Less organized the attacking force into three surface action groups (SAGs). SAG Bravo, commanded by Capt. James B. Perkins and containing the USS Merrill (DD 976), Lynde McCormick (DDG 8), and Trenton (LPD 14) with its Marine Air-Ground Task Force, was assigned the Sassan platform. SAG Charlie, commanded by Capt. James F. Chandler and containing the Wainwright (CG 28), Simpson (FFG 56), and Bagley (FF 1069), which carried a SEAL team, was assigned the Siri platform. SAG Delta, commanded by Capt. Donald A. Dryer and containing Jack Williams (FFG 24), O’Brien (DD 975), and Joseph Strauss (DDG 16), was assigned security patrol duties near the Strait of Hormuz. Additional support in the form of air cover was provided by the Enterprise (CVN 65) on station in the Gulf of Oman, and Saudi-based airborne warning and control system AWACS and tanker aircraft.

Marines inspect a ZU-23 23 mm automatic anti-aircraft gun on the Iranian Sassan oil platform. Marines attacked, occupied, then destroyed the platform as part of Operation Praying Mantis, which was launched after the guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) struck a mine on April 14, 1988. US DoD photo

Operation Praying Mantis commenced on April 18, 1988. At 6 a.m., Perkins broadcast warnings in English, Arabic, and Farsi to the Iranians on the Sassan platform, telling them to abandon it. About 30 Iranians complied, but some remained and fired upon the SAG with a 23 mm cannon. The Merrill returned fire, destroying the cannon and causing the remaining Iranians to evacuate in a rubber raft. At the same time, Iranian F-4 Phantoms approached, but turned away without engaging SAG Bravo. A contingent of Marines was then air lifted to the platform. After a gathering of intelligence material, explosive charges were set, and the platform was so severely damaged it was rendered useless.

At about the same time, SAG Charlie was conducting similar action on the Siri platform once all the Iranians had abandoned it. At 10:48, an approaching Iranian frigate, Joshan, was identified. The Joshan ignored three warnings issued from the Wainwright, and launched a Harpoon missile that narrowly missed the cruiser. SAG Charlie returned fire with SM-1 and Harpoon missiles, heavily damaging the Joshan. The burning frigate was then sunk with gunfire. As this was going on, the Wainwright engaged an Iranian F-4, damaging it and forcing the fighter to retire.

This was followed by a chain of events throughout the Persian Gulf. A force of Pasdaran small craft attacked a number of targets in the Mubarek oil fields in the southern Gulf, hitting several ships. These small craft came under fire from A-6 Intruders from the Enterprise that sank one of the Iranian vessels. The Iranian frigate Sahand, sister ship to the Sabalan, attempted to engage Enterprise aircraft, but found itself on the receiving end of bomb and Harpoon missile strikes that quickly sank it. The Sabalan almost followed her. That afternoon it attempted to shoot down an A-6, and the Intruder dropped a bomb down the frigate’s smoke stack. Dead in the water with its engines destroyed, it was saved from being sunk when a follow-up air strike was called back. All told, Iranian losses were three oil platforms heavily damaged, six surface vessels sunk, one heavily damaged, and an unknown number of casualties. American losses were one AH-1T attack helicopter and its two-man crew.

Iranian attacks on merchant shipping dramatically fell after that. Operation Earnest Will would continue until Sept. 26, 1988. When it concluded, it was judged a success. The only major negative was the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes (CG 49) in which all passengers and crew perished. In the political and diplomatic arena, America’s strategic goals of protecting Kuwaiti – and later other, neutral – shipping, standing up to Iran without escalating the conflict, keeping the Soviet Union out of the Gulf, and proving its worth as a friend of the Arab world had been largely achieved. For special operations forces, USSOCOM had proved its worth with its successful completion of a variety of missions. Much work remained ahead, but an important first step had been taken.

After a four-year detour living in the scenic foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of northeast Georgia (where, amongst other things, I met the French woman who later became my wife), in the summer of 1983 I returned to New York City to restart my comic book career. But, since I had few contacts of my own at Marvel, and none at DC, I needed to have another means of making a living in one of the most expensive towns in the country. Fortunately, that option existed and I took it: working as a production assistant (PA, aka: “gofer”) for a Manhattan-based TV commercial production company.

That opportunity came about through a series of fortunate circumstances during my last weeks in Rabun County, Georgia. Bear with me, as one of my digressions is about to begin, but some, okay, a lot of, background is necessary.

Thanks to its generous tax breaks, the state had become a popular location site for movie and television production companies. And Rabun County and the immediate area, in particular, had become a sought-after region for said shoots. There were two reasons for that. The first was the landscape itself; predominantly rural and rustic, with a wide variety of mountain, valley, lake and river scenic locations. The second reason for northeast Georgia’s popularity: Frank Rickman.

Frank, who died in 2004 at the age of seventy-nine, was born and raised in Rabun County. When I lived there in the late 1970s–early 1980s, the county was very rural. And very Country. One example: I got to know a couple of moonshiners, one of whom whose ’shine was so smooth and deadly that after taking two long sips from his gallon jar I became blind drunk and had to sit in my Jeep for quite some time before I was sober enough to drive home. Rabun County has since become more populated and gentrified. It now even sports vineyards, amongst other upscale businesses.

Frank was a character! And as Country as they came. Whenever he opened his mouth, what he called his “hillbilly accent,” a rich and warm baritone, would fill the room or flow across the landscape. An epitome of Southern charm, he consistently downplayed his smarts, but he was anything but a dumb, ignorant hick from the hills.

Clayton, the county seat, was a small town, population around 3,000. Born and raised in North Dakota and with my hometown of Devils Lake having a population (still) of around 7,000, I was familiar with small-town rural living. The reason I was in Rabun County was that my high school best friend, who had preceded me at Marvel and helped me break in (another long story), had the opportunity to purchase a printing plant in the county where he had worked during his salad days prior to breaking in at Marvel. Knowing of my printing background, he asked me to join him as the plant manager. I agreed. Literally the day before we were to take over, the owner said the deal of was off. This, despite the fact that a contract had been signed. Well, in the fallout, Dave bought a house on top of a mountain overlooking Clayton, then returned to New York City to restart his Marvel career, and I held down the fort in Rabun County taking on what amounted to a variety of day jobs and co-writing stories. (That is a very short version of what happened.)

Small towns being what they are, I wound up getting to know several important locals, among them Frank and his family. I became friends with them.

Frank’s first brush with Hollywood came in 1956 with Walt Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase, a Civil War-era film. Part of the film was shot in the Rabun County area. The studio had shipped two period train engines from California to Rabun County. When they arrived at the train station, the crew discovered that the locomotives were too big and heavy for the local cranes to offload from the flatcars. Frank had a construction company and when told of the situation he custom-built a siding and offloaded the locomotives and placed them on the railroad track. He then proceeded to further help the production by scouting locations, constructing sets, and acting as a liaison between the crew and local businesses. Walt Disney was reportedly so impressed by what Frank did that he tried to get him to come with him to Hollywood. Frank refused.

While that experience put Frank on the Hollywood map, as it were, what cemented his reputation was the work he did fifteen years later for the movie Deliverance. He became a member of the Georgia State Film Commission and was instrumental in helping bring film projects to the state and to Rabun County in particular. During my time in Rabun County, I rubbed elbows with the cast of the movie The Long Riders and of a television movie starring Ralph Waite.

In 1983, I was working as a day laborer for a vanity-project company created by a resort owner for his wife. Earlier in the year President Ronald Reagan launched his new economic program which plunged the local economy into a recession. I thought that that was the temporal reason I lost my job. But when my boss informed me she was letting me go, I discovered there was a spiritual reason—an Act of God—behind it. On the day she called me into her office, she told me that during the previous night she had talked with God, and He gave her permission to terminate my employment.

Truth to tell, it was a relief to no longer work there. But that meant I was without gainful employment. At the time Dave was in New York City and work that he was intermittently feeding me was financially insufficient. With little to no local opportunity for work, as far as I could know, I decided that I’d have to return to New York City. I informed him of my decision. My timetable was open because I knew he had to set things up and, I needed to find through some sort of employment short-term money to pay for my flight back to New York City.

And that’s where Frank came in. I had told Frank what had happened to me. Since I knew of his many connections in the county, I asked if he’d keep me in mind if he heard of something coming up. A few days later he came through. He called me and said that he needed a driver for Comworld, a Manhattan-based TV commercial crew doing a two-week location shoot for a Yoplait commercial. Pay was $100 a day. Was I interested? I sure as hell was! For the next two weeks I helped ferry cast and crew to the various sites Frank found.

My defining moment during that period occurred at the end of one day’s shoot when we were back at the motel. It was late at night. I was plugging the camera batteries into chargers when I noticed that the producers and directors were huddled together in a discussion. From their expression it appeared that they had a problem. After I finished hooking up all the batteries I walked over to the associate producer who was my boss and asked her what was going on. She said that they had neglected to get packs of Polaroid film for the following day’s shoot. This was at a time when Polaroid instant film photos was used to help frame a scene prior to it being shot. I went to the producer and got from her confirmation of that information. Upon receiving it, I said, “Let me make a phone call.”

I went to the room’s phone and called Miz Deal, the mother of Eleanor Law who owned the family drug store. For a variety of reasons, among them a shared experience of Eleanor and her husband Albert having lived in New York City, the family and I had hit it off and had become close (they were the couple that introduced me to the French woman who became my wife; another long story). After apologizing for calling her so late—well after her bedtime—I laid out the situation and asked of her a favor: could she open the store at 6 a.m. so I could buy the packs of Polaroid film the store had? The reason I called her and not Eleanor was that I knew that Eleanor and her husband were away on a short vacation. Miz Deal said that she’d be happy to meet me. I thanked her, hung up, and then walked over to the producers and director and told them that I could deliver the Polaroid film. I just needed the cash to secure the transaction. They gave me a hard stare, then handed me a handful of bills. The next morning, I met Miz Deal at the store, bought all the Polaroid film packs in stock, paid for them, and handed the film packs to the producers. We were good for the next day’s shoot, and several days after.

Long story short (Hah! Where else have you heard that from me?), I saw work on this shoot as an audition. I busted my butt for them. As the end of the shoot neared told the producers and crew members that I had lived in New York City and that I was planning to return there. Would it be okay for me to contact them for work? Having impressed them with my work on location, everyone said it was and I collected business cards. A couple of weeks later I was back in the Big Apple. I was staying at a friend’s apartment until I could get my own place. I then hit up everyone from the shoot and landed a regular freelance job as a PA with Comworld and a couple of other companies.

I renewed my friendship with Jim Salicrup who was an editor at Marvel. In 1984 he gave me my first work, writing articles for the company’s promotional magazine, Marvel Age. My foot was back in the door. And, not long after that, I wound up becoming freelance editor of Dave’s line of black and white comics.

Then, when he lost the election to Joe Biden, those not wallowing in the cult of MAGA thought that we had thankfully closed the book on that chapter of presidential history.

Silly us.

For as much as his lies in that first term were promiscuous and demeaning, they have proved to be, oh, to use a college metaphor, Division II compared to what he’s been saying in this present term. We’re now experiencing a Venezuela Angel Falls waterfall-level of extreme and outrageous lies, falsehoods, fabulous exaggerations, and fornications of the truth . . . hell, as I recently wrote in one of my Facebook posts, “If Donald Trump said that the sky was blue, I’d look out my window to confirm.”

All of that to say . . . I propose to Merriam-Webster, Oxford, and to all the English language dictionary publishers that when they announce their new list of words to be included into the English language vocabulary, that they include this term: “Donald Trump.” Its definition being that of, as I mentioned, a person who consistently expresses statements of extreme lies, falsehoods, exaggerations, demeaning and defamation attacks that have negative impact on individuals, peoples, businesses, national economies, and/or national security. As stated in this example: “Don’t Donald Trump me/us/our country.”

Your thoughts.

This was a piece of doggerel that came to me as I was walking to the farmers’ market yesterday. And doggerel it is, for he deserves nothing better. Feel free to share.

Little Donnie T. whines oh, so mournfully,

“Why will no one come out and fight Iran with me?

“Can’t Canada, Great Britain, the EU, and everyone else see

“I’m fighting to install by my hand a land of the free!

“Be a man, not a wuss! Of their air force and navy, trust me, they’re gone.

“All that remains are their drones, a weapon dismissively wan.

“You! Send your warships into harm’s way!

“Iran’s drones are gnats you can just shoot away!

“Ignore our Navy’s reluctance. Of their leaders I will soon fire or sway.

“After all it’s Iran’s fault, not ours, that you’re hitting the resources wall.

“So, you must strike back, that’s your duty, after all.

“To voters here, of your concerns my Cabinet cares not one whit

They exist solely to praise and march to my MAGA tune

In shoes they now wear that no longer fit

“And so will you all, someday, perhaps soon.”

As for the reporters who record Little Donnie T’s actions and fallout,

He says, “Unless you smile and nod ‘fine’—you’re losers who should shut up and get out!”

He blusters and boasts that of Iran’s next leaders he must have a say.

And is flustered when the country’s ingrates he’s bombing aren’t genuflecting his way.

He wants them to kiss his a** and his ring.

This despite their religious ban on contact with things porcine and unclean.

The one thing about him we must most fear

Is the day he goes all-out King Lear.

Because unlike that flawed monarch of the bard

Little Donnie T. possesses nuclear-powered numbers on a card.

Before audiences and cameras he speaks, nods, and weaves,

With people props and participation trophies he smiles,

While we live our lives outside his gilded halls.

Yet take comfort in the truth that our vote is our power and right.

So, to all, go forth and fight the good fight.

There’s a cliché in fiction writing that if an author creates a strong enough character, said character will write itself in any scene. Well, in Patience’s case, she not only wrote herself in whatever scene in which she appeared, she wound up hijacking the storyline itself! The result was that a tale which originally started on a remote site in the sub-Sahara Desert in modern day, now begins in Constantinople in 1898.

What follows is the chapter that originally introduced her. Some background: Alison is now a U.S. Army colonel (as is Patience). Corporal Wilson is someone Alison met under singular circumstances when he was going through Marine boot camp at Parris Island (I had fun writing that chapter), and she was instrumental in turning him into a vampire the first step in him becoming a member of a Code Word Classified Special Operations team code-named Lazarus Force. Wilson’s meeting with Patience is the final stage of his acceptance of that team within a team.

As for the setting of the Brooklyn Museum. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and have visited the museum off and on. For the scene that follows, I spent the afternoon there taking notes. Everyone is in civilian attire. Patience is a senior curator for the museum.

Introducing Patience Margaret Locklear

A guard at the Norman M. Feinberg rear entrance of the Brooklyn Museum was expecting them. He unlocked the glass and chrome-plated door and the two stepped into the spacious, high-ceilinged lobby.

They proceeded past the vacant ticket counter and down a hall that had a glass wall that looked out at an enclosed courtyard to the elevators. Colonel Stackhouse punched the button for the third floor. A moment later they were walking though the entrance to the Beaux-Arts Court.

“Patience is old, which means she is always punctual,” she said, making a sharp right turn and stopping in front of “The Doge’s Palace” by Claude Monet. “As we are a few minutes early, let’s take a moment to enjoy ourselves. If you’d prefer, the Ancient Egypt and Assyrian galleries are on the other side of the floor and off to the left. The museum has an impressive collection of artifacts from those eras.”

Wilson looked around. Despite the subdued after-hours illumination, he saw that the dominating feature on the floor was an immense glass and stone court in the middle that occupied most of the space. Its periphery was lined with paintings of portraits and landscapes and some sculpture. He shrugged, “That’s okay, colonel. If it’s all right with you, I’ll stay here.”

“As you wish.” Nodding at Monet’s painting, she asked, “So, what do you think?”

Standing three feet in front of the Impressionist’s interpretation of the palace overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal, Wilson furrowed his brow as he leaned closer in an attempt to make sense of the splotches of blue, yellow, and white. Finally, he said, “It has an interesting patina.”

Stackhouse stared at him. “Corporal Wilson, do you know what a patina is?”

After a short, embarrassed silence, he confessed, “Uh . . . no. I heard it once as a kid on a school trip to a museum. It stuck in my mind as a safe thing to say when looking at art.”

Before the colonel could answer, they heard a joyful, English-accented feminine voice behind them call out, “Alison, my dear, you look absolutely smashing! Your sophisticated taste in clothing turns me positively chartreuse with envy. Were I not so thrilled to see my niece, I’d chop off your head and cut out your heart on the spot out of jealousy.”

Startled, Wilson turned and then did a jaw-dropping double-take. Gracefully striding to them was a slender woman with flaming red hair who appeared to be in her late twenties, early thirties at the most.

“Tante Pat! Salut!” Stackhouse exclaimed as they kissed each other, French style, on the cheeks. “As usual, you lie outrageously. No woman can hold a match, let alone a candle, to you when it comes to knowing what to wear. I recognize the Jimmy Choos. Who took care of everything above the ankles?”

Patience Margaret Locklear’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “She’s a smashing talent I discovered—recently graduated from F.I.T.! I’m mentoring her for her debut at next year’s New York Fashion Week show. She’ll be a sensation!”

“Got to hand it to you, colonel, when you play ‘gotcha’ you don’t mess around,” muttered Wilson, trying not to stare, and fearing he was failing. Neither woman heard him, as they were totally focused on their rapid-fire verbal exchange of catch-up.

Patience had the face, complexion, and figure of a cover girl model. Her hair was cut short in a stylish bob. Her full red lips framed a perfect set of teeth—with normal-sized canines, he noted. Her eyes were a sparkling green that Wilson was embarrassed to discover seemed to pull him into their depths even though she wasn’t looking at him. He had to visibly shake his head in order to look away.

Her outfit was a form-flattering silk blouse and slacks outfit in midnight blue. On her feet was a pair of Jimmy Choo pumps the same shade of blue as her belt. The brightest splash of color was the silk scarf around her neck. At first it appeared to be an abstract mixture of yellow, blue, and white, but as he looked closer, Wilson saw it was a print of “The Doge’s Palace.” For jewelry, she had a pair of emerald studs for earrings. Her manicured fingers had no rings and if she wore a necklace, it was hidden by the scarf.

He was startled to realize that the two women had stopped talking. For how long, he was embarrassed to acknowledge he didn’t know. What he did know was that those hypnotic green eyes were now locked on him and that the small smile on her lips struck him as being disturbingly sinister and predatory.

“So, Alison, this is the latest Daniel you’ve lured into the lion’s den. Let’s see if, unlike his predecessors, he passes muster.

“Dear boy,” Locklear clucked, “unless you are auditioning to be an advert for toothpaste, do close your mouth for your hound’s canines are most dreadfully on display. Truly, were the cavity below your nostrils any wider one might mistake it for the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.”

Startled, and blushing deeply, Wilson shut his mouth with an audible click.

“Much better.”

“I-I’m sorry, ma’am, but . . .” Wilson’s attempt at apology trailed off weakly.

“But what, dear? Come, come, we’re all adults here.”

“Well, uh, that is . . .” he said, angry with himself because he felt he was acting like an awkward schoolboy. “That is . . . um . . . it just that . . . oh, hell. From what the colonel told me about you, I thought you were, well . . . because she said you were old, I was expecting to meet someone like a grandmother.”

Her eyes narrowed with icy intensity, then turned to Alison, “A grandmamma? So, it’s come to that, has it, dear niece?”

After giving her an I’ll get back at you later look, Locklear returned to Wilson and said, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

“Uh, my name is Gregory . . . Gregory Wilson.”

Wilson saw her give Colonel Stackhouse a baleful I told you so look. His brow furrowed as he tried to think what he said that was wrong.

“Where do you hail from, Wils?”

“Hail? Oh, uh . . . California.”

“California. Yes, that would help explain why Desirée, also my niece, would colorfully describe you as ‘an eyeful of yum.’” Cupping her chin with her right hand, Locklear tapped her index finger on her cheek as she gave him an assessing once-over. “Still, I assumed an Adonis from California would come in bronze, not alabaster.”

With a small sigh, Locklear looked at the colonel, “Alison, I suppose there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? And if you mention that ridiculous spray paint tan procedure . . .”

Returning her attention to Wilson, she said, “Pity you’re not a woman. I own some pearls that would go well with your new complexion. They have a history attached to them; their story begins in the incarnadine tumult that swept Imperial Russia in 1917. Your history, on the other hand, has the potential to have its chapters written.”

“I was wondering when—begging your pardon, ma’am, but isn’t this the wrong place to brief me about the mission? Even though it’s after hours and the only guard I’ve seen is the one at the entrance, this place isn’t secure.”

“The what? Wils, dear boy, whatever are you babbling about?”

“Well, earlier you mentioned the lion’s den, and I thought that was code word for—”

Locklear threw back her head and emitted a ululating peal of banshee laughter that chilled Wilson to the bone and caused him to instinctively jump back in terror. Recovering, he thought, How could someone so beautiful make such a horrifying sound?

“Dear boy, your naiveté is disarmingly delightful,” Locklear said, punctuating the statement with a suppressed sound that might have been a chuckle of mirth if it weren’t so evil sounding. “When I said ‘lion’s den’ I was not referencing a mission. I was talking about me.

“Yes, this persiflage has been most entertaining, but the dark clouds of impending doom are . . . impending. Very well, Wils, allons-y!” With that, she motioned for them to follow her as she strode down the periphery.

A moment later she stopped in front of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Prodigal Son.” Locklear turned to Wilson and said, “The Brooklyn Museum has one of the most extensive collections of Rodin sculptures in the world—more than sixty. Auguste Rodin was famous for the realism he gave his works. He was also a beast—his treatment of his mistress, Camille Claudel, a sculptress, was abominable.” Nodding at the bronze representation of a young man in anguish, she said, “Give me your thoughts about this work, Wils.”

Oh, no. Here we go again! he thought. He walked around the figure, looking at it from a variety of angles. A couple of minutes later, he stopped his study, looked at her, and sighed. “You said you wanted my thoughts, ma’am?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Okay, here they are. I don’t know what sort of Kool-Aid was given to those people who said he did realistic sculptures, but I’m telling you this Rodin guy can’t do anatomy worth a damn! The hands and feet and hips are too big, the body’s all distorted . . . pardon my French, ma’am, but look at its male parts—that statue’s dimple of a dick and balls are all wrong!”

Locklear regarded the corporal in silence. Then, in a voice roiling with suppressed rage, she said, “Alison, when I saw the two of you before Monet’s ‘The Doge’s Palace’ please tell me that in describing it Wils didn’t claim the painting had an interesting patina or some other similarly misplaced observation.”

Colonel Stackhouse covered her mouth with her hand to hide a grin. Locklear threw back her head and uttered another ear-splitting banshee wail. “Alison, I swear upon Agnes’ blessed grave that you shall be the death of me yet!” she cried. “Where do you find such . . . such . . .

“Oh, never mind,” she said, composing herself. “That his appreciation of sculpture possibly extends no further than to the works of Frederick Remington—”

“Hey!” Wilson said. “Remington’s damn good.”

“Oh, so you do know something. Yes, as an expressor of the idealized and romantic American West of yore, he is,” she allowed. “Myself, regarding that genre I find the work of C.M. Russell to be superior. Follow me, I must show you something else.”

Why don’t you just shoot me now and get it over with? he thought as the three entered the elevator and went to the ground floor.

Locklear led them into a large room just off the ticket counter. Wilson looked around, puzzled. “What’s this, a museum’s version of an attic?” he asked.

Locklear smiled. “An apt observation, Wils. Actually its purpose is to provide in one location near the entrance a representative cross-section of the museum’s holdings. On the wall over there are some notable porcelain and glassware. Off to the right, some aboriginal carvings. On the wall there is Picasso’s ‘Woman in Gray,’ part of our European collection. And American works are represented by—”

“Patience, you did this deliberately,” Colonel Stackhouse said.

“Alison what do you—? Oh, dear,” Locklear said, her voice falling as she saw the colonel slowly walk toward the Hudson Valley School landscape “A Pic-Nic Party” by the Thomas Cole studio. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I’ve been away—”

Colonel Stackhouse’s eyes took on a soft and distant look. She smiled poignantly. “It’s okay,” she whispered as she sat down on a bench located in front of the painting. She exhaled a long sigh. Her gaze slowly roved across the painting of a family enjoying an afternoon of leisure in the country along a riverbank, pausing now and then to stare at the figures. Without taking her eyes from the landscape she said, “This is as good an excuse as any for me staying out of your way, Patience, while you finish doing what you need to do. Carry on.”

Wilson saw Locklear open her mouth to say something, then stop and turn away. In a tone of command that sent a chill down his spine, she said, “Come.”

She led him purposely past an assortment of sculptures and displays arranged on the floor to the far side of the large room. She stopped in front of a seven-foot-long object on a raised platform. Pointing at it, and in a neutral tone, she ordered, “What this is?”

He looked at the predominately white object, black on its underside, with trim and accents in multiple shades of blue. Prominently emblazoned on both sides was a large, blue swoosh.

Wilson looked back and forth at it and her. Then he said, “It’s a sculpture of a giant Nike sneaker.”

“You’re certain? Look again.”

He took a step closer and saw a detail he had missed: a long groove suggesting that the sculpture might be two pieces instead of one. Wilson cocked his head in puzzlement. Then he saw the explanation plate and began reading. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s a coffin!”

“Yes, from Ghana. In some regions in Africa tribes use coffins to make a personal statement about the deceased. In this case, a Nike athletic shoe which to them represents status and modernity.

“Things are not always what they at first appear to be, Wils.”

“Like you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. Colonel Stackhouse said you were old. And I find out that this part of Lazarus Force is a family operation. Time to come clean, Ms. Locklear.”

“You accuse us of weaving the Penelope web?”

“The hell with whoever or whatever Penelope is! You and the colonel have been playing me as if I were some sort of cultural punching bag in a whacked-out family hazing ritual. Okay, I may not know jack shit about fine art and sculpture, but whoopee ding! I’m trained as a Marine, and Colonel Stackhouse thought I was good enough to literally change my life and make me a special operations member with a Dracula twist! And I wound up saving her life—from her daughter, some sort of feral . . . I don’t know what! Now I’m looking at someone she calls Patience—what a joke of a name that is—and for reasons yet to be explained and I’ve had it! I want an answer to my questions!”

Locklear looked up at him with an expression of amusement and respect. “Well done, Wils,” she said. “So, open the Pandora’s box and tell me how old you think I am.”

“How in hell should I know?” he shouted. “You look about twenty-seven, maybe thirty-two at the most, but—”

“You wonderful, alabaster Californian Adonis!” she exclaimed. Before the astonished Wilson could react, she clapped her hands on his cheeks, pulled his face to hers, and gave him a quick, deep kiss full on the mouth before releasing him.

Her green eyes sparkled as she looked up at him, licking her lips. “And a mouthful of yum as well, Desirée,” she said, smiling not only in a manner overlaid with sinister meaning, but also in a way that disturbingly conveyed newfound knowledge.

Wilson stared at her in bafflement. Before he could open his mouth, she pressed an index finger to his lips.

“Shush, dear boy, savor your victory in silence,” she said.

“Congratulations, Alison, this time you proposed a candidate who passed muster as part of my team! Alison . . .?”

They turned and looked back at the painting to discover that she was gone.

Locklear gave a small, sad smile.

Feeling like a bull charging headlong into a China shop, Wilson said, “Look, ma’am, if you tell me it’s none of my business, that’s fine, do so and I won’t mention it again, but, what’s with you and the colonel, and why’d the colonel got so choked up over that painting?”

“You’re now a member of Lazarus Force, more importantly, now a member of our little team that includes Alison, Desirée, and me. You will come to know all eventually for we are too long-lived to keep secrets, no matter how deep, from one another,” she said.

Then, seeing his expression, she smiled in that disturbingly evil way she had and said, “You look nonplussed, dear boy . . . again. Beware, the ultimate tragedy would be having that expression become permanent and, oh, it would so mar your yummy alabaster Californian visage.”

Locklear then became serious. “Alison is a woman upon whom much rain has fallen,” she said. “Come with me.”

A moment later they were standing in front of the painting.

“What do you see, Wils?”

“Is this another one of your—”

“No, no games now. Tell me what you see.”

Pointing at the plate on the wall beside the painting he said, “It’s like what the title says, it’s a family having an afternoon picnic out in the country.”

“That’s correct. Now, look at the two girls and boy off to the right.”

“Yeah, I see them.”

“The girl in white with the straw hat is Alison. I’m afraid the reason why this painting affected her so will have to come later. I must go and find Alison now. We’ll meet you by the elevators,” she said, leaving.

Gregory Wilson stared at the painting for a few more minutes, lost in a swirl of thoughts. Finally, as he got ready to go, he looked at the painting’s explanation plate and saw the date: circa 1870

.

CURSED did not start out as a period piece set in the turn of the twentieth century whose main characters were a group of women, all related. Nor was CURSED its original title. That was the obscurely pretentious LET FALL DAMOCLESE. I’ve long-since forgotten why I started with that. Thankfully, I came to my senses and changed it to what it is now.

My work-in-progress novel started eleven years ago (and counting!), and its origins came out of the blue. It happened one afternoon in the summer of 2015 as I was walking up Prospect Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Windsor Terrace when we lived in a house of Vanderbilt Street, heading to the local Key Food grocery store.

I was in something of a creative rut. It was at a time when I had been writing all manner of military history books and articles for print and online. While I enjoyed the work because of its variety—it was from everything from major battles to such topics as military medicine (I wrote about a Navy dental technician who was also a beauty queen, amongst other surprising paths of discovery). But I felt that creatively I was getting stale.

Anyway, as I was walking up the slope to the grocery store, suddenly and apropos of nothing, a scene flashed into my mind. It was the aftermath of a battle in the desert. A Marine, on his knees, hands bound behind his back in a zip tie, was flanked by Special Operations warriors. He had been a witness to an engagement, something he was not supposed to see because of the location and nature of who formed the Special Operations unit that conducted the attack.

Fortunately, I had both a notebook and a pen in my pockets and I was able to quickly write down the basics of the scene. When I got home, I wrote the first draft of the complete scene. The next day I tweaked it.

Here’s that scene, with some additional tweaks (after all, it’s eleven years later). Unlike the novel you’ve read, this is set in present day. At its conclusion I’ll explain who constitutes that Special Operations unit and why it’s “special.” And, in following articles, I’ll give more about the novel’s origin and how it took such an unexpected turn, which both helped the tale and made my writing of it so wildly complicated.

PROLOGUE

So, this is how it ends.

Staff Sergeant Eric J. Carter, USMC, looked up at the full moon and the broad sparkling band of the Milky Way that arced across the sky above the rugged Adrar des Ifôghas (Mountains of Ifôghas) region of northeast Mali. His gaze then returned to the desert valley and the corpses, smoldering wreckage, and ordnance scars on the ground and around the mouths of a dozen canyon caves, the detritus of a savage battle begun two hours and an eternity ago. And now . . .

Sgt. Carter shuddered. Not from the night chill, but from knowledge of the fate he knew awaited the handful of insurgents who had escaped. Thought they had escaped, he silently corrected himself.

Kneeling on the desert ground, his wrists bound behind his back by a sturdy zip tie, Carter glanced at the two armed U.S. Special Operations warriors standing a couple of paces off to each side before him. They hadn’t said that they were, but they had the uniforms and, from exercises he had participated in with various Special Operations units in the past, he recognized the attire and the methods. And then some with this group, he thought. He shifted slightly to relieve some of his discomfort. The guards didn’t react. Not so much as a glance at him. To an untrained eye, they could have been mistaken for statues, which, as Carter knew, they were anything but. Even if he somehow managed to wriggle out of the zip tie around his wrists and get past the guards and onto his MRZR2 Razor dune buggy (an impossibility, but still . . .) he’d have no chance of eluding the other operators roaming the valley in search of prey, for that’s what the surviving insurgents now were—and soon to be dead prey. Carter did not feel pity for the vengeance disguised as rough justice that would be meted out on them. The insurgents had well earned their fate.

Still, of all the possible ways he had imagined how his life would end, none involved the situation he was now in. Not even close. He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

They’re waiting for somebody otherwise they’d have already killed me. Who?

Then he heard the muffled sound of the rotors of an approaching UH 60 Black Hawk stealth helicopter and saw its darker shape against the night sky circle above him before landing about a hundred yards away. A moment later a tall figure emerged and strode toward the trio, crouching slightly until he had cleared the decelerating rotor blades. The two guards came crisply to attention.

When the figure was about three paces from them, he stopped. Carter looked up and stared into the impassive face of General William J. Smith, commander in chief, Special Operations Command—CINCSOCOM.

“Staff Sergeant Eric Jason Carter, USMC. Two tours of duty in Helmad Province, Afghanistan, and special duty as an embassy guard in Niger. Silver Star, Bronze Star with “V” device, Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster. The first decoration was for your unexpected intervention during that ambush in Helmad. The second decoration for that firefight you coincidentally walked into at the U.S. embassy compound in Niger, an action where you also earned your third stripe. Purple Hearts in both. You have a history of unexpectedly showing up in hot spots—like you did here earlier this evening. That’s why I’ve had to fly up from Starbase on the Gerald Ford where I was overseeing this op. You’ve presented me with a problem.

“Son, you now know too much, and I must decide, right here and right now, what happens next. Any last statement you’d like to make before I pass judgment?”

Sgt. Carter looked up at the general and thought, This little North Dakota boy is sure a long way from home.

So, who exactly are the Special Operations warriors in this unit?

They’re vampires. Which is why Sgt. Carter is in the fix he is in.

Meanwhile the concept of a Special Operations unit composed of vampires created a whole new problem for me with regarding writing a story. What kind of villain could be an adversary that could be an effective counter? Because any normal human adversary would be easily killed. The answer turned out to be in my library.

After a roughly thirty-year drought regarding a dearth of individuals receiving Medals of Honor it was as if the dam had burst. Within the span of four years six men were posthumously awarded America’s highest decoration for military valor, thus providing the basis for UNCOMMON VALOR the Six Warriors Who Earned It in Afghanistan and Iraq, written by my late friend John D. Gresham and myself. And you could have bet the farm on what happened next. As soon as the hardcover edition of our book came out, the Defense Department announced two more recipients. Crucially, one of them Salvatore Giunta, was living. Thus, the stage was set for a minor behind-the-scenes drama regarding the trade paperback edition of UNCOMMON VALOR.

Prior to the brave new world of ebook and other digital editions (and, boy, do I have a tale to tell about the months-long contract backlog hell that descended on the major publishing houses’ legal departments that was the consequential fallout of dealing with that rights situation) book publishers released titles in three format categories: hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback. Publishers quickly discovered that the three formats were mutually exclusive markets with little to no cross-over. Certain people were dedicated hardcover people, certain people were equally dedicated trade paperback customers (the format basically the size of a hardcover book, but with paperback covers), and as the term “mass market” suggests, it was the largest segment, appealing to the mass audience because, thanks to its “pocket book size” was the cheapest of the three.

To maximize sales, a publisher would start by releasing a hardcover edition. This was followed, usually a year later, with a trade paperback edition, and if the title really took off, a year after that there’d be a mass market paperback. (I’m not including reprints in this, as reprints overlap the different format releases for the customer reasons I mentioned above.)

Things are a lot more complicated now.

But, back to UNCOMMON VALOR. When the news broke about the two new recipients, John and I went into attack mode. We brainstormed and came up with a sales pitch to add the stories of these two men to the trade paperback edition. That was no small thing because publishers can be notorious skinflints and need serious justification to adding new material—thus incurring new costs (read: paper, the single most expensive production cost for books—something I’m familiar with having started out as a printer). But we were bound and determined, and to win our selling points were: an update and that one of the two, Salvatore Giunta, was a living recipient, the first since the Vietnam War.

Our editor was convinced and conditionally on board; the publisher having the final say. He took our case to the publisher who agreed, with one condition: that we would write the two chapters at no additional cost. In effect, for free. (Did I mention something about publishers being skinflints?) Some things are more important than money, and we agreed. The chapters were written and included in the trade paperback edition, noted in the title and blurb of the edition’s front cover:

Now, about my phrase “some things are more important than money.” We meant it. What follows is a transcript of the introduction we wrote for the trade paperback edition that will explain:

“Nothing makes a man more aware of his capabilities and of his limitations than those moments when he must push aside all the familiar defenses of ego and vanity, and accept reality by staring, with the fear that is normal to a man in combat, into the face of Death.”

—Major Robert S. Johnson, U.S. Army Air Force

History has a way of surprising those who chronicle it. In the almost four decades since the end of the Vietnam War only eight Medals of Honor were awarded to U.S. service personnel. It seemed an appropriate time to tell the stories of the six men who had received them for their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, in September 2010, as we awaited the release of the hardcover edition of UNCOMMON VALOR, the White house announced that two additional Medals of Honor would be awarded from the Afghanistan conflict.

Like the six men originally featured in UNCOMMON VALOR, Army Staff Sergeant Robert J. Miller, a Green Beret of the Third Special Forces Group, would be a posthumous recipient. The second announcement, however, was truly historic. Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, one of the most decorated units in army history, would be the first living Medal of Honor recipience since the Vietnam War—and the first of the new century.

We realized their stories had to be part of any future editions of UNCOMMON VALOR on November 10, 2010, after we had received invitations to speak at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Initially we thought the event would be a lecture and book-signing, certainly an honor in and of itself. Instead, the academy rolled out the red carpet in a daylong series of events, including the lecture and signing. Beyond that, there were personal briefings, a private meeting with the commandant of cadets, a guided tour of the academy, and a lunch with the cadets.

Prior to the lunch being served, guests are traditionally brought up to the “poop deck”—an elevated platform in the center of the historic mess hall—and introduced. When our names were announced, the entire corps of cadets—more than 4,700 strong—rose and gave us a standing ovation. Later, during lunch, we asked the first captain of the class of 2011 why we had been received so warmly and enthusiastically. The twenty-something-year-old officer in training responded, “You tell our stories for us.”

Damn.

We were motivated.

Discussions with our editor at St. Martin’s Press quickly ensued. The result is that we proudly include chapters about the two newest Medal of Honor recipients in this edition of UNCOIMMON VALOR. Our thanks to everyone who worked to make these additions possible under a tight deadline. Moreover, we wish to thank everyone who has supported UNCOMMON VALOR from its inception to this new edition, especially those who shared with us their memories of friends and fellow warriors.

Most important, our thanks go to Staff Sergeant Miller and Staff Sergeant Giunta for their actions above and beyond the call of duty.

The front cover of the trade paperback edition. Note the change in the subtitle. Also, I was annoyed with the “Fully Revised and Updated” label as, yes, just before the trade paperback edition came out, new Medal of Honor recipients were announced.