Charlie Wilson's War

The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
George Crile
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0-87113-854-9


Halfway through reading Charlie Wilson's War I went out and rented the movie. I had the picture of Tom Hanks on a white horse firmly entrenched in y mind the rest of the way through. It was an interesting exercise to see how much of a Cliff's Notes version of the story the movie really is. Charlie Wilson's War, the book, is a much more complete story than the film, and much more exiting.

Charlie Wilson's War has a cast of characters, real world people, who are like some demented screenwriter's idea for a film version of the A-Team. First is Wilson himself, a hard drinking playboy, who always has a beauty queen on his arm while jet setting around the world at the taxpayers' expense, who represents a straight laced, bible belt district in Congress and who gets the money to run the operation by wheeling and dealing on the hill; Gust Avrakotos, a rogue CIA case officer, working undercover inside his own agency, undermining the stated Afghanistan policy by overstepping his authority at every opportunity; technical wonder- boy Mike Vickers, Green Beret, weapons expert, he is a lowly GS 11 who isn't supposed to even know what's going on and he's the commanding general at CIA headquarters, calling all the shots; Muohammed Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistan, he has a secret program to develop an atomic bomb , meanwhile he is doing everything in his power to help the CIA defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Despite the movie tie-in, this is not a work of fiction. This is the story of a real CIA operation, which became the largest in history, thanks to the efforts of a congressman from east Texas who made it his business to find a way to shoot down the Soviet Union's Hind helicopters. Charlie Wilson, on a trip to Pakistan, was shown the devastation caused by these flying tanks, which were invulnerable every weapons that the Afghan Mujahideen had.

The CIA was providing the Afghans with World War I era Enfield rifles and some light machine guns to fight the Soviet Army with. The had a $5 million a year budget at the time. Their goal was to annoy and bleed the Russians and keep them on edge, as part of the longstanding policy of containment. Wilson thought that, with a way to shoot down those helicopters, the Afghans were capable of driving the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan altogether. He wanted to abandon containment and attempt to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He was only a congressman. He succeeded.

By the time the Soviets left Afghanistan the CIA operation there was spending over a billion dollars a year, half of it provided by Saudi Arabia. Kalashnikov rifles, Stinger missiles, mortars, Swiss Oerlikon anti aircraft guns, and millions of rounds of ammunition were streaming in through Pakistan.

Those Afghan "freedom fighters" who defeated the Soviet army with the help of Charlie Wilson and the CIA, helping to precipitate the fall of the Soviet Union, are the same Afghans who now are fighting again in Afghanistan, some with us and some with the Taliban. The Arab volunteers who went to Afghanistan to join in the jihad against the Soviets are the core of Alkaida. The challenges we face today are a direct result of our success in facing down the last perceived existential threat to or way of life. The biggest shortcoming of the movie is that it mentioned none of this. Instead there was a scene where Wilson fails to get a pittance appropriated to build schools in Afghanistan. In fact there was a multi million dollar AID effort that went on for three years after the defeat of the Soviets, which was finally cut off because the Mujahideen were robbing the aid convoys.

The World Without Us

Alan Weisman
St, Martin's Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34729-1
ISBN-10: 0-312-34729-4

What would happen on the Earth if, one day, all the people suddenly disappeared? Alan Weisman suggests some kind of Universalist rapture or mass exodus with the help of space aliens as a vehicle for our departure so that he can continue with his thought experiment. How would nature deal with everything left behind by 21st century humanity?

Weisman looks at several places in the world,remaining vestiges of the of the pre-human world and case studies for his thought experiment. Bialowieza Puszcza is a vestigal old growth forest on the border between Poland and Belarus. It is not untouched by man, of course, but has been preserved since the middle ages as a royal hunting preserve and as a national park. The wisent, the European bison, is still in residence there along with deer, wild boars an other European large mammals. No aurochs, sadly. Weisman suggetsts that a forest like Bialowieza Puszcza could once again cover most of Europe.

The subways, tunnels and buried streams on Manhattan would suddenly fill with water. New York pumps thousands of gallons of water every day out of it's underworld. When the pumps stop all would go underwater. This water would rust out the steel structure holding New York up, cause the streets to become canals, the buried streams to re-emerge and the tall buildings to fall. Central Park would become the source of seed to reestablish a forest on the island, wildlife would cross the bridges, soon to collapse from rust and lack of maintenance, and repopulate the island. Rats and cockroaches would die off without the support of their human hosts to feed them and heat their homes. - That's a good thing, Martha.

Houston would become a huge oil and chemical spill which would pollute the ship canal and cause problems for life far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, Weisman hopes, nature would heal the mess, as it is doing for Prince William Sound. It could take centuries.

Nuclear power plants need us to keep them from melting down. Nature would move right in to te contaminated areas, however, as it has done at Chyrnobl An article that he wrote about the aftermath of Chernobyl is, in fact, the inspiration for this book. Grasses, trees, animals and human squatters have occupied the contaminated zone around the ruined nuclear plant, and will pay the inevitable penalty in increased cancers and birth defects.

The worlds oceans would recover, over time, coral reefs would come back and, interestingly, Weisman predicts that the oceans would soon be filled with huge sharks and other large predators. Some studies have suggested that, in a healthy, balanced ocean, much of the biomass is stored in large carnivores, and not is the smaller herbivores and plants as on land. This is because to the rapid rate of reproduction of small fish and of plankton, corals and other marine life, which is quickly eaten. The large carnivores live longer and store that energy, to be recycled years later, when they die of natural causes.

There is no big message in The World Without Us, no doomsday prophecy. Weisman simply wanted to think about the effect humanity has had on the world and his method for doing so was to imagine our sudden withdrawal. He does suggest that the Earth might miss us if we went away. Humanity is a part of nature, too.

Princess

A man's affair with a boat
Joe Richards
Susan Richards, Pub.
JoeRichardsPrincess.com



Years ago, my friend Johnson, the man with two last names, lent me an old yellowed hardback book called "Princess, New York." He told me that I had to read it and that it was a great story of an artist, who had bought a 60 year old Friendship sloop at the tail end of the great depression and sailed away in it, looking for an island. Johnson is a lover of old crankity wooden boats. He has one of his own that is just turning 44 this year, which keeps him gainfully employed in order to pay the repair bills.

Eventually Johnson got the idea to find the boat "Princess" and have it restored and put in a museum somewhere. He made a lot of telephone calls and even traveled to Florida, the last known location of the boat, to no avail. He did meet Joe Richards' daughter Susan, though, and his obsessive behavior regarding "Princess" gave her the idea that a new edition of the book was in order.

Johnson was right about one thing. "Princess" is one heck of a good read. Joe Richards was an artist, living in New York who discovered, on Long Island, the ruins of an old sloop, built in the 1870s in Friendship Maine. He bought the thing and then found himself learning the craft of wooden boat repair. Eventually Richards set off down the inter-coastal waterway, headed for Florida and an as yet to be discovered island, where he would live happily ever after- or something.

The book is a well written memoir of an impractical quest for an undefined goal, interrupted by the Second World War. There are many asides, stories of adventures in the merchant marine during the war, as Richards tell the tale of his journey down the inter-coastal to Florida.

In book II, when Richards has acquired a wife and two children, he decides to escape New York for Key Biscayne, bringing his family and sailboat along with him. In this book the mysterious island, or at least an island, is finally discovered.

There are several small color prints of Joe Richards' paintings in the book as well. The book cover illustration above is a fair example. Take a peek at the website JoeRichardsPrincess.com for more examples.

My Colombian War

A Journey Through The Country I Left Behind
Silvana Paternostrro
Henry Hold and Company
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7605-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7605-9

Silvana Paternostro is the daughter of a prominent, relatively wealthy family from Barranquilla, at the mouth of the Magdalena river on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. As a child she was sent to a boarding school in the United States, stayed here through college and became a freelance journalist, living in New York. My Colombian War is the story of her return to Barranquilla in an attempt to understand the half century of war with the FARC and it's effect on her family and her country. FARC is the acronym for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or in English, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

As a college student Paternostro had a Che Guevara poster on her dorm room wall. She was enamored of the romanticized image of the revolutionary freedom fighters, striking, out of the jungle, for justice. What she found in Colombia was a different story.

Her mother's family were large landowners, having a finca, a large farm, where cattle, then cotton and finally palm oil were produced. The relationship between her grandfather and the people who worked on the finca was feudal in nature. He was the patron and they the peons, yet it was also a kind of extended family, where the patron extended his influence and even wealth to benefit those peons. No social security existed, no retirement accounts, no health insurance. All this was provided, or not, through the generosity of the patron. Some members of the finca families still worked in Paternostro's grandmother's home in Barranquilla at the time of the visit described in the book.

Paternostro's uncle now manages the farm and is turning it into a modern agribusiness enterprise, with higher pay scales, retirement benefits, and medical insurance for the employees, all through the profits from the export of palm oil. He has to do so through hired managers, though, because the entire family is under threat of kidnapping by the FARC and he does not dare to travel out into the country. He and Silvana plan and execute a daring visit, flying in a small airplane, for a day on the farm, escaping again by air before the FARC can learn of their presence.

The FARC has two main sources of income, one is through taxing of the illegal drug trade, basically providing protection for the growers and dealers in cocaine and heroin, and the other is kidnapping for ransom. Silvana finds, when she arrives home that she is automatically a target for kidnapping because her matronymic surname is Montblanc, the name of her French descended grandfather. Any person associated by name with one of the large landholding families is a target. Spanish speaking people use both their father's and mother's surnames and those familiar with the system and the area can identify a person precisely by that persons two names. She is Silvana Paternostro Montblanc on her Colombian identity card.

The book My Colombina War is about the internal struggle Paternostro has over the differences between her life in the United States and the life of her family and friends in Colombia, about the feudal relationship she has with her grandmothers household staff, and with the woman who was given to her as a companion when they were both small children. It is about the romanticized ideal of the revolutionary in her head and the cruel reality of the drug dealing, kidnapping FARC, abut the fear they impose on everyone's daily life. It is about the highly stratified society she finds when she visits her parents in their home in Bogota and the relative freedom from class distinctions she has become used to in the United States.

Colombia is an oligarchic society, where the rich are richer and the poor are poorer, torn by war and crime, yet where people appear to be happy in their lives. It is undergoing change slowly, not because of, but in spite of the FARC. Sylvana Paternostro has become a Nortamericana, uncomfortable in the land of her birth, yet forever tied to it.

Six Word Memoir Meme

I was tagged by Book Calendar to write a six word memoir:

This is my memoir, posted in honor of Oprah and all her guest authors.

Don't believe a word I say.

This is an example of what Nancy Milford calls the false memoir and also of Epimenides paradox.

Here are the rules if I tagged you.

1. Write your own six word memoir.

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post.

4. Tag five more blogs with links.

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!"

I'm tagging:

Aunti Dar

Freida Bee

Mr. Grudge

Mystic Veg

The Galloping Beaver

I very politely request their participation.