Month: November 2021

The Lincoln Highway

On November 27, 2021

BY AMOR TOWLES ‧ RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 5, 2021

Amor Towles, former investment banker and now a best-selling writer, is not a prolific author. He has published three novels since 2010: Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and his latest release, The Lincoln Highway.

“I’ve read everything he’s written!” probably doesn’t sound very impressive…

But Towles is one of the few authors writing books I would read again. Normally, I plow through novels like a freight train through snow drifts—no turning back. Towles’s books, however, are extraordinary; representative of the time and thought he pours into them. For a reader who respects the classics but is more comfortable with genre fiction than The Great Books, Towles offers an alternative: literary fiction that feels like a classic but has you flipping pages like a USA Today bestseller.

When I read his Rules of Civility, I felt as if I was reading a cross between Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Funny thing, I remember little from those classics, but couldn’t put the Towles book down.

When I read A Gentleman in Moscow, Tolstoy came to mind. I have no idea why, because I’ve never read a Tolstoy novel (just a couple of short stories.) And you would think a story about a man who stays in the same hotel for thirty years would run about the same pace as Tolstoy, but that’s Towles’s genius. Another book I shouldn’t like but ended up loving.

I knew The Lincoln Highway involved a road trip, and I tried to picture how that “link to the classics” was going to work. Would I feel like I was reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Travels with Charley? I was hoping for something a little more upbeat and my level. Mark Twain and his iconic Huckleberry Finn, maybe?

My youngest boys wrote and illustrated a book for my daughter’s college graduation a couple years ago about her impending road trip from Durham, NC to Tacoma, WA. Structured like The Odyssey, it included a strange hitchhiker, stale jojos from The Flying J truck stop, and zombies chasing my daughter, moaning “Bras” (my sons were later horrified to discover they had misspelled “brains.”) This was the type of road trip I hoped Towles had authored!

I was not disappointed. The Lincoln Highway takes place over ten days in 1954 and ranges from the Midwest to New York City. The novel’s tone is much closer to Mark Twain and my boys’ masterpiece than Steinbeck. He seems to have done it again because when I finished, I felt like I had read a page-turner from Homer (my oxymoron.) He has put together unique and rich characters, each on a personal quest, with the road trip as the “coming of age” vehicle.

My only critique is a backwards compliment. Towles’s character development is so good, I invested myself in the minor players as much as the main characters. At the conclusion, he left me with questions as to the fate of those other players.

If you’re a reader of literature, then approach this book recognizing it’s more Twain than Steinbeck. If you’re a genre reader and rarely read anything that gets a book review, I encourage you to give The Lincoln Highway a go. Some good ol’ boys on a road trip! What could go wrong?

But if you read nothing older than 2005, prefer short sentences and lots of suspense (like me) then I’ll throw you another recommendation that’s nothing like Towles’s work. Try Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards.

The Things They Dropped

By Cam Torrens

On November 15, 2021

In Blog, Fiction, Writing

This is a work of fiction. Yes, there was a Camel Shoot. Yes, interesting things happened. No, they did not happen in the manner described below.

Morocco is an opportunity for extensive tactical airlift and airdrop training in a rugged environment, similar to what aircrews might encounter in probable future conflicts.

That’s the boilerplate. In reality it’s more like spring break.

A sanctioned “good deal” in the name of combat preparation. Everyone tries to get on the Morocco deployment and snagging a spot is somewhat competitive. Fortune favors seniority on this Morocco trip. Too old to take up one of the coveted pilot’s seats on an aircrew, I am just the right rank (a mid-level field grade officer) to be in charge this year. I’m fired up. Because the alternative is pushing paper back at the air base.

Here’s how it works. Our Germany-based unit deploys four US C-130 transport aircraft to Marrakech, Morocco, once a year. We get our foot in the door with the Moroccan government by cutting a deal. We will fly out of an old Cold War bomber runway an hour north of Marrakech that the US maintains for Space Shuttle emergency landings, and train Moroccan airborne troops by parachuting them out of the back doors of our planes. When we’re not dropping Moroccans, we’re on our own.

Rumor is the Moroccan leadership forbids their own Air Force from dropping their own Army paratroopers because they are nervous that cooperation between these two branches of their military might lead to a coup. So, when our unit calls up looking for a place to do some low-level flight training (Germany has effectively banned nap-of-the-earth flight within their borders because of civilian noise complaints) the Moroccans agree. After dropping their paratroopers during the day, we can do whatever unilateral training we want in Morocco during the night. After we launch them out of our aircraft doors at night, we get the country as our personal practice range the next day. Not like we’re allowed to buzz the souks in Marrakech or scare the sheep…but you get my drift.

The whole thing is a win-win for our militaries. We can fly low and slow (a high-speed low-level for a C-130 tops out at about 270 mph) throughout the country and Morocco can hone their Army’s parachuting skills without fear of a government takeover.

You’ve got the scenario. This is the environment in which the short-lived but infamous Camel Shoot is born.

If Morocco allows us to train as close to the “edge” as anywhere we’ve ever trained, then why not a competition between these participating aircraft taking us closer to that edge and honing our flying skills? A competition that is also…how might you put it?

Fun.

They have built a similar competition back in the States for transport and tanker aircraft. Awards for the best “spot” landings (where you try to land on a target on the runway,) the most precise airdrop, the best time-on-target accuracy. This stateside event, The Rodeo, culminates with a trophy for the number one aircrew.

Our little Camel Shoot is all The Rodeo is—and more. Besides the standard contests, we add a few more: the most creative item dropped under a parachute, the most interesting radio call at airdrop slowdown (you have to slow an aircraft before you parachute a load from it—otherwise bad things happen), best bribe for the judges on the ground, and the most poetic limerick to accompany the airdrop. And so it goes.

We traditionally save the Camel Shoot for the final day of flying. Not only does this delay allow aircrews to finely hone their aviation skills to a cutting edge, but also allows time for the fliers to procure supplies. In the back of every pilot’s mind is the knowledge that the timing and precision competitions exercise the skills most relevant to preparing for future war. But I’ve talked to Camel Shoot vets before. No one goes around bragging, “I had the best time-over-target in last year’s Camel Shoot.” No, it is these sidebar competitions, the ones requiring planning, teamwork, and artistic liberty, that motivate our crews.

My deployment command ends tomorrow. The hotel staff is still smiling at me even though they are weary of the off-duty maintenance and aircrews wheeling beer through the lobby on luggage carts. Who would’ve guessed you couldn’t get a pizza delivered to your hotel in Marrakech, but if you greased the right bellhop, beer deliveries were a thing? But my airmen have kept it under control. The booze stays mostly in the room, swimming trunks stay mostly on, and officers and enlisted aren’t sleeping together. Oh wait…I’m in command. Therefore, I really have no clue about that last one. Bottom line (and knock on wood)—we’re looking like we’ll make it through this deployment OK and secure an invitation to return next year.

While the support team is packing things up at the runway, our aircrews are fighting it out in the Camel Shoot. Ignoring the obvious fact that there might be something wrong with the deployment commander judging the “best bribe” competition, I find myself as chief judge, standing on the drop zone next to my ops officer, Deke, and the RAM. RAM stands for “Raised Air Marker”—the orange aimpoint the aircrews use for their airdrop. Yes, we in the military were onto acronyms long before social media claimed the market on LMAO, ROFL, etc. If you hit the RAM, which sits in the middle of the DZ (the drop zone,) then you’ve scored a PI (point of impact)…which makes no sense because where ever your drop hits will be the point of impact, right? I digress.

The first plane is only three minutes out when we hear the radio crackle with a Muslim call to prayer, followed by the English, “CAMEL 51: slowdown, Slowdown, NOW.” Not the most politically correct broadcast our aircrew could transmit in a predominantly Muslim country, but if you haven’t figured it out, political correctness is still a nascent concept in our Air Force at this time. So kudos to CAMEL 51 for creativity. The plane looms overhead, maybe 800 feet above us, and suddenly a human figure tumbles out of the tail end of the aircraft.

I feel like my intestines are lunging up my throat.

“Someone fell,” I cry, turning to Deke. But my fellow judge just stands frozen, head tilted, mouth agape.

The small training parachute pops open and the stiff body pirouettes toward the ground at high speed. I hear a whoosh of air as Deke exhales.

“Major Cunningham. Sir, it’s just a mannequin,” he says and I let out my own whoosh of air.

The lovely lady thuds to the ground 75 yards away and we stroll over to check out our new arrival. The woman wears a hijab and lacy lingerie, a combo neither of us has seen before. I glance at Deke. Well, maybe he hasn’t seen this before. At least not on a mannequin. Our frozen lady has a Casablanca Beer strapped to her wrist with an Ace bandage and a note pinned to her brassiere. I unpin the paper and read it aloud:

You might judge my attire odd

Like my name, Shahrazad

But you know what I need, Major Cunningham

Just a quick “wham bam, thank you, ma’am.”

You’ll find me much better than the cod

I look at Deke and he’s already laughing. I drop my hands to my knees and join him, and soon I’m laughing too hard to stand up.

It’s a kind of flashback to the Air Force we entered: topless dancers (well, pasties) in the Officers’ Club; cigarettes in the cockpit, but no women; and calling those troublemakers in the Middle East “ragheads.” Not funny. We know we’re a better force now. Better people. But both the “brown shoe days” déjà vu and the incongruity of a partially clad poetess parachuting in to deliver us beer in the desert is too much.

“What the hell do they mean by the cod in that poem?” I choke.

“Got me,” Deke says. “I’m still trying to figure out which is harder to find in a Muslim country—lingerie or a mannequin.”

A female voice interrupts our hilarity. The next plane is coming. Roxanne, one of only five female crewmembers on this deployment, is calling CAMEL 52’s slowdown call from the copilot’s seat.

“Slower, slower…” she breathes, in as sultry a voice as I’ve heard broadcast over a military radio.

“Oh, God, right there. Uh, huh. Uh, huh.”

My eyes whip over to Deke, who has his handheld radio pressed to his ear. I turn back to the run-in course and turn up the volume on my set.

“Oh, yes. There! That’s perfect. Now slowdown…slowdown…now, baby.”

I angle my body away from Deke, hoping he won’t notice the chubber popping up in my desert flight suit. I glance over my shoulder and see him angled the other way.

“Oh my God,” I call to Deke. “Did you hear that? Like straight out of a porn movie…”

Deke shakes his head, staring at the lumbering aircraft pointed our direction.

“I’ve never seen a porn movie,” Deke deadpans. “But I don’t see anyone else beating them out for the most interesting slowdown call.”

Deke’s right about that and I check my watch to see how they are doing for time-on-target. On the one hand, I wish we had recorded the call, because a) none of us can imagine Roxanne agreeing to do it—she’s too much of a straight arrow, and 2) no one will believe us without the evidence.

But I know we can’t document certain aspects of the Camel Shoot. Tossing unauthorized material out the back end of military aircraft with dirty poems and alcohol is not a practice looked upon favorably by the higher ups. And in an Air Force where women are already outperforming men in many areas, we can’t have a recording like this—one that falls under the “old school” mentality and validates male stereotypes that we adopted in our 20s and are habits we are struggling to drop like chewing Copenhagen tobacco or smoking Marlboro cigarettes.

Time-on-target is looking pretty good—maybe just a tad late. Suddenly a flash of silver slips over the lip of the aircraft’s rear ramp. As the shape flops through the sky, I see a piece of material flapping in the slipstream and realize this load won’t land with a functioning parachute.

As it nears the ground, I shout to Deke. “It’s a fish.” He doesn’t reply. Based on its size in relation to the streaming chute, I’d guess it’s at least 30 pounds, a flatfish with eyes on one side. Of course, I can’t see its eyes from this distance, but the fish is so flat, the eyes must sit on one side or the other.

The load hits with a sound that doesn’t translate to words. Like a projectile penetrating thick flesh at high speed, the giant fish slaps the sand and disintegrates. We stroll over to the shiny remains, counting the paces from the PI. 150 yards at 3 o’clock. Not the best score.

A plastic grocery sack lays among the fish guts which I gingerly extract with my finger and thumb, trying to avoid the fish juice sheen covering the plastic. Inside, I find a package of dried seaweed and a small tube of wasabi.

“Must be the bribe,” Deke observes. “They’re bribing us with sushi.”

I shake my head. “Sashimi,” I correct him. “There’s no rice.”

I dig deeper into the bag and extract a sandwich bag protecting an index card. The limerick. I pry open the bag and hand the card to Deke. “Your turn to read.”

Deke accepts my offering and studies the writing before speaking.

The most sensuous things are slow

We hope you enjoyed our show

Generations will laud

Our parachuted cod

You know where the trophy should go

“Nope,” Deke says, shaking his head. “No first place for them.”

“Why not?” I ask. “That slowdown call got me. I’m still all hot and bothered.”

Deke gives me a stern stare. “No one will outdo that call—you’re right about that.” He pauses, then continues. “But they were twenty seconds late, 150 yards off target, and their poem demonstrated an inexcusable lack of knowledge.”

“What do you mean? What was wrong with the limerick?”

Deke waves at the remains of the fish. “It’s not a cod, Mr. ‘It’s Sashimi, Not Sushi’ expert” Deke pauses again, then adds, “Sir,” to the end of his sentence as if he’s worried his sarcasm is going over my head. He continues. “This is, or was, a halibut. I don’t know where they found a halibut in Morocco, but this used to be one. I caught them as a kid with my grandfather in Alaska.”

I shake my head. Deke’s likely right. I’m not an expert on fish species, but I recognize the difficulty the word ‘halibut’ presents when writing a limerick. Salivate? Maui butt? I might have gone with cod too if I found myself under similar creative pressure.

Ten minutes pass before we hear the call from the last plane of the day. They’ve changed their call sign. The final aircraft is supposed to be CAMEL 53, but the radio blares with a different identification. DADDY 53. I look at Deke and he looks back at me and shrugs.

“Got to be them. Who else could it be?”

I raise my handheld to my ear, then jerk it a foot away as the slowdown call blasts.

“DADDY 53, Baaaaa…Baaaaa…Baaaaa.!”

“What the hell was that?” Deke asks.

“Sounded like a sheep,” I reply.

We look at our watches as DADDY prepares to drop. They are exactly on time, and unlike CAMEL 52 with the fish, they are perfectly aligned to account for the prevailing winds. I crane my neck and watch the load release.

“What the hell…?” I start.

“That’s not a training chute…” Deke adds.

A large crate tumbles out of the back of the plane and stabilizes under a parachute twice the size as the training chutes used by the other two planes.

I mumble, more to myself than to Deke. “They must have gotten a hold of one of the Moroccan personnel chutes. If that’s one of ours, they’re in some serious shit.”

“What’s in the crate?” Deke asks. “It’s alive.”

I arch my head further back and start shuffling to the side. The load is descending directly upon us.

“I can’t tell. But you’re right…I can see it moving. And it’s not happy.”

Some kind of animal is visible through the crudely constructed crate and its side-to-side movement is aggravating the pendulum arc of the drop. The crate swings back our direction and we scramble away. We pause as the load swings back toward the RAM marking the bullseye.

Then the RAM disappears from sight as the crate smashes into the ground. The bright orange nylon flashing reappears as the wooden crate flattens like a giant desert pancake.

Bullseye.

PI.

I scan the remnants of the crate and spot it. The prone figure of a goat—not a sheep—laying on its side. Deke and I step closer. The goat isn’t moving. I spy a collar circling its neck with a note attached to it. The limerick. The remains of a plastic grocery sack—identical to that used by CAMEL 52—dangle from the collar. Miniature plastic bottles of Jack Daniels lay fully intact, scattered around the body of the goat.

Our bribe.

Deke and I stand about five feet away, staring at the dead goat. I think of the witch’s monkey bodyguards on The Wizard of Oz.

They killed her, I say to myself.

Deke shakes his head and kneels next to the goat. As he reaches for the note on the collar, the goat’s front leg twitches, then reflexes forward, striking Deke’s kneecap. Deke jerks away and jumps to his feet, while the goat does the same.

“Baaa!” the goat bleats…and then it bolts. Deke turns to me, shaking his head.

“Did that just happen?” he asks.

Relieved by the goat’s sudden resurrection, I’m already backtracking what led to this situation and have no time for Deke’s rhetorical question. I get DADDY 53’s new call sign now—who’s your Daddy?—but struggle to process how the aircrew acquired a goat in a foreign country. Well, not so much that, but how did my maintenance team allow them to load it on the plane? Which crewmember harbored this hostage goat last night? Most important—who cleaned up the inevitable goat shit that must have decorated that hotel room?

So, when Deke asks his question, I’m not surprised at the tinge of awe in his voice. What just happened?

Even without the benefit of hindsight. Without the knowledge that this is the last Camel Shoot. That towers will fall tomorrow. That in 48 hours we will move a battalion of Marines from Kosovo to Sigonella, Italy, where they will board helicopters to meet an aircraft carrier already steaming for the Persian Gulf. That nothing will be the same.

Even without all that, I heard the mixture of nervousness and respect in Deke’s question. The are we all going to be in deep shit for all this? mixed with can you believe what DADDY 53 just pulled off?

“Did what just happen?” I ask “Did one of our crews just drop a live animal out of the ass end of their plane, or did we just watch a goat rise from the dead?

Deke looks me straight in the eye and replies. “Neither.” He smiles, his head shaking, and points toward the splintered crate. “Can you believe they shacked it? They PI’d the son of a bitch.”

I nod at the crate, then turn in time to watch the goat dash across the runway, heading for the desert and the Atlas Mountains forming the horizon. Deke follows my gaze and steps to my side.

I open my mouth to speak, then pause. What I want to do is steal a quote. Michener. Reagan. I’m unsure where I’ve heard it, but it captures the moment. Deke and I so proud of our crews’ efforts that our chests feel like they might explode.

Where do we find such men and women?

I don’t say it.

And now, after seeing what they did next, after loving them as they flew east to fight, after losing some—how randomly they fell—in the skies and sands of Afghanistan and Iraq, after bursting with pride again at how they persevered. After all that…

I wish I’d said it.

Instead, I shade my eyes and squint at the disappearing goat.

“Those guys are some crazy-ass fuckers,” I say.

“Goat fuckers,” Deke says.

“Right,” I agree. “Crazy-ass goat fuckers.”

You’re Foolin’ Yourself If You Don’t Believe It…

By Cam Torrens

On November 4, 2021

In Blog, Ruminating

I returned this morning from a Boy Scout campout on the Upper Arkansas River Valley, just north of Salida. We had eight or nine scouts with us throughout the weekend as the Angel of Shavano looked down upon us from a tad over 14,000 feet. Beautiful weekend, despite having to chip through the ice on our drinking water in the morning.

I helped our Scoutmaster lay out an orienteering course while the Scouts hung around the campfire, swinging sticks at each other. I’m sure he assumed my 30-year military career gave me plenty of experience in this area and since the adult who had prepped the Scouts on compass use (a retired Green Beret) was out of country, he was hoping for some help.

He was right about my experience. Wrong about my aptitude.

Turns out, it had been a few years since I’d been through my aircrew survival
training refresher, and I was more than a little bit rusty. OK—lots of years.

“What’s your pace?” he asked.

Now I’m not bad in the jogging department and usually train in the 8:10-8:40 minutes for a mile. But even as I silently nodded, I knew that wasn’t what he was talking about.

He must have sensed my hesitation. “You know, how many paces does it take for you to go 100 meters? So we can set this course.”

OK. It was coming back to me now. If you’re going to follow a 270-degree bearing for 150 meters, you need to know how many steps that is. “About
a 100, I guess.”

He gave me a dubious look. “Let’s pace off a 100 and see what it looks like.”

I started walking, taking what I figured was 39-inch steps, and stopped at 100. He pulled up next to me and shook his head. “I still got ten to go. Are you counting every step or every other step? We were taught to count every time your right foot hits the ground.”

Shit. And so it went. By the time we pulled the compasses out, I had recovered my sense of bearing (get it?) and could shoot an azimuth. But I quickly realized that the last time I’d used a compass in this manner was
before I started using reading glasses. How can you read those tiny numbers? I was pulling out the IPhone to check my work (this, after I pulled out my GPS to check my 100 meters.)

It all worked out. Within minutes, I had my 100-meter pace (60 steps for me) and was reviewing orienteering skills with the Scouts. By the end of the hour, the Scouts were setting up their own courses. I had fun. The Scouts had fun (not as much as swinging dead tree branches at each other, but how can you compete with that?)

Driving home, the scent of my two boys tea-bagging campfire and body odor throughout the Subaru, I reflected on what I had learned.

“How to use a frikkin’ compass…again” said my dominant side (the smart ass.)

But it was more than that.

The first thing is that not every skill is like riding a bike. Sure, after 4,000 or so flying hours, I can keep an airplane from running into the ground. But unless I’ve been operating its flight computer for a couple hundred hours (ie practicing and training), I’m going to have a hard time getting us where we need to go and talking to who we need to talk to. The same held true for my compass skills. If I really want to be able to land navigate with magnetic north, I need to practice those skills more than once every twenty years. And before you say, “Why not just use the phone?” I’ll remind you that the freezing temperatures in the Rockies can take down IPhone and GPS batteries rather quickly.

And reading about these skills isn’t enough. You’ve actually got to “do” the skills you think you remember, if you want to perform them at crunch time. That’s why CPR training is an annual requirement for many organizations.
Maybe it should be semi annual. Physically “doing”; whether it’s pressing a pen to paper, snowboarding, or using a lensatic compass, will burn the skill into your brain much faster and deeper than reading about it.

Finally, exercise these skills in public. If you’ve maintained your proficiency, you may have the opportunity to teach others. And there’s no better way to hone your craft than by teaching. If you haven’t kept up with your skills, exercising that in public is the best way to ensure you’ll get it right. Most people don’t like to fail, but no one likes to fail in front of others. You’ll pay more attention, try harder, and learn better if you’re doing all this with or in front of others.

It’s not about the compass. It’s about reviewing what you need to know and refreshing those skills. If you’re a writer, it means mixing in “Character” or “Setting” seminars with your “How to Make Your Website Sizzle” class. Going back to the basics.

Readers of fiction should throw in some non-fiction. You had to read and analyze that stuff in your past. Have you lost those skills?

If you’re a runner, it means getting out there for a race or group run and pushing the edges of your comfort zone. To be a better runner.

As Tommy Shaw of Styx wrote:

“Get up, get back on your feet. You’re the one they can’t beat and you know it…”