Authors I Have Known (Really!)

While looking for books for Ward to read in his spare time while in Iraq (LOL) and as Christmas gifts, the first place I perused was the History section. There I stumbled across the title of a relatively new release written by an old friend from West Point, COL James Scott Wheeler. The title alone is a bit of a dissertation: The Big Red One: America’s Legendary 1st Infantry Division from World War I to Desert Storm (Modern War Studies). I’m out of breath just saying it! But I was so tickled to find it that I immediately ordered it, not just because it got good reviews, but how cool is it to actually know the author?!

Then I got to thinking that we know several published authors. Our good friend Dana Mangham wrote the tome (well it is large!) Oh For The Touch Of A Vanished Hand: Discovering a Southern Family and the Civil War. Is that not the most poetical, romantic title, Ann with an E? And it was I who commiserated with Nan on how much time Dana spent away from home on research! But what fun we had when it was finally published and we attended one of his first book lectures in Atlanta.

Another friend, Steve Eden wrote, Military Blunders: Wartime Fiascoes From the Roman Age Through World War I.

Then there is the author of Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,John Nagle, who came to our home for dinner with a PCC group a few years ago. He and Ward stayed up half the night discussing the new type of warfare.

Of course the common thread with all of these books and authors (other than their all having excessively long titles) and myself is that we met through the Army connection. It is not surprising that what they write about is military in its scope, but what is surprising is that they are very good reads. Fiction cannot compete with real life drama or history.

That brings me to the another author that I remember from West Point, Wesley Allen Riddle. He has published mostly articles of a political nature, and I’ll never forget when he and Ward stayed up almost all night tracking Clinton’s second win. What a heartbreak that turned out to be.

But how appropriate this quote from Wesley is in the light of today’s political climate:

If some do not recognize their impending slavery, it is because the tyrant who steals our freedoms is subtle, multifaceted, sometimes benevolent, and wears the mask of a smiling bureaucrat and government social worker, who has your supposed best interest in mind... The liberty we have gotten is not the sort the Founders intended. It serves no purpose nor ends but our own destruction. We witness now the onset of social chaos sanctioned by government, without the consent of the people to do it.
"Secession and the Moral Compact", Vital Speeches of the Day, Wesley Allen Riddle, August 1, 1995, pWest Point is USA equivalent of Sandhurst military officers academy in the UK.