Category: Book Review

Anyone who has young kids knows that your book reading goes to damn near nil.  But I’m making an exception and writing and posting this book review because Kelly Crigger is a long time friend of the blog, and it’s worth your time to read it.

Once in a while a book comes along that’s educational and entertaining. Kelly Crigger’s The Comfort Station is that book. The culmination of twelve years of work, this is Crigger’s eighth book, but first foray into fiction and he wrote a winner. Crigger (a retired Lieutenant Colonel) first learned about the hot button issue of comfort women, who were abducted and forced into prostitution for the Japanese Army, while stationed in Korea in 2004 and decided to write about it.

The Comfort Station starts out in 1942 during the Japanese occupation of Korea when tens of thousands of young women were mysteriously disappearing from the peninsula. Our heroine, a teenage farm girl named Ki-Hwa, ignores her parents and brothers pleas to stay in hiding and befriends a Japanese officer. Before she knows it, she’s forced into sexual slavery as a comfort woman for the Japanese Army and is shipped to the South Pacific island fortress of Rabaul to be the mistress of a legendary Cavalry Officer.

“I wanted to shed light on the issue of comfort women,” Crigger says, “But there had to be a good fictional storyline too. So the main premise here is, what happens when you take the wrong girl? Up to 200,000 women were abducted from Korea. There had to be several with enough strength and defiance within them to fight back.”

That singular storyline is compelling enough, but what Crigger does that makes this a great read is take real history and bend it just a little so it’s believable and captivating. Rabaul was a massive Japanese garrison that MacArthur simply bombed the everloving crap out of and then went around, cutting it off and letting it die from inside. Including the comfort stations.

From the book’s summary: “Allied Forces pummel the island in preparation for an inevitable invasion. Paranoia grips the garrison when Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is killed in an Allied ambush shortly after leaving Rabaul and fingers are pointed in every direction. Within this chaos, life for Ki-Hwa and hundreds of others in the comfort stations is survival of the fittest. Once a farm girl afraid of her own shadow, Ki-Hwa discovers people are callous, sadistic, and deceitful and must find the strength to resist the mighty and unforgiving Empire along with her one true friend. But when an imposter threatens to unravel the group’s carefully laid plans she is forced to make an impossible choice between guaranteed security and a shaky promise of freedom.”

Just like the main character who decides to fight back, Crigger also developed an intriguing Japanese Imperial Soldier who questions the authority of the Empire and decides to do something about it. “I can’t imagine everyone had blind devotion to the Emperor so I decided to ask the question ‘what happens when you defy him?’ So then I crossed the paths of these two rebels and this story fell out.”

The Comfort Station is a great page turner with a few massive twists that leave you wanting more. The best books provide the reader with an escape from reality and The Comfort Station does just that.

Most of those who read TAH have a military background.

However, we’re not all from the same service.  And though we all know this, it bears repeating:  there is a distinct – and at times, frustrating and perplexing – difference between the services in terms of norms, goals, and objectives.  Each service has its own personality; each has its own culture.  Each prays at a different “altar”.

And to outsiders, those norms, goals, objectives, personality, and culture are a mystery.

If you truly want to understand the other services – their personality, their culture, what makes them tick – a book written in 1989 IMO holds the key.  The book was written by a RAND Corporation analyst, Carl Builder.  It’s called The Masks of War (ISBN-10: 0801837766; ISBN-13: 978-0801837760).

A short description of Builder’s discussion of service personalities may be found on pp. 9-14 of this document.  While this is a credible introduction, the book contains much more.  (Builder was asked after his book was originally published about the USMC – which he originally did not include in his analysis of service personalities.  His reply was that the USMC’s altar is “Honor”.)

From what I’ve seen over close to 40 years now, Builder is dead on target.

The book is relatively short –  256 pages, including index and bibliography – and its examples are now rather dated.  But if there’s a better source for understanding the differences in culture and focus that drive the different uniformed services, I’ve not found it.

It really IMO should be required reading for any Senior Enlisted or Officer going to a joint assignment, or who will be working directly with those of other services.

Do yourself a favor:  find a copy and read it. (Used copies can be had on Amazon for $10 or less; you might also be able to get it via inter-library loan at your local library.)  If you’re interested in how the military services really work and what makes them tick, I don’t think you’ll regret the time you spend reading it.

And if you know someone going to a joint assignment, maybe point them at a copy.  It could well make their life during that assignment much easier.

David sends us a link to a Stars & Stripes article taken from Cape Cod Online in regards to our buddy, Doug Sterner and his wife, Pam, and their new book due out next month, “Restoring Valor: One Couple’s Mission to Expose Fraudulent War Heroes and Protect America’s Military Awards System“. One story in the book is about Glenn Marshall, and an article in a Connecticut newspaper about the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council Chairman;

[Sterner] used his connections to do some research and quickly found Marshall’s story had the all-too-familiar whiff of a phony. He tried, with little success, to tell The Day reporter she’d been duped.

Six days later, the Cape Cod Times reported Marshall’s biography was littered with embellishments. He had indeed served in Vietnam, but for four months. His frequently told story about being at the Battle of Khe Sanh in the spring of 1968 — to Vietnam-era Marines what Iwo Jima was to the few and proud in World War II — was completely bogus. Marshall was a senior at Lawrence High School in Falmouth while Marines fought back against the 77-day onslaught, the Times reported.

Marshall’s lying, as well as a 1980 rape that was also uncovered by the Times, led to him initially stepping aside temporarily as tribe chairman and, ultimately, being ousted.

That’s just one chapter in the book due out February 4th. TSO and I were privileged to read excerpts of the book in draft form, we even get mentioned in the book. So make sure that you put it on your list of books to buy in a few weeks or pre-order it now from Amazon, so you don’t forget (and shipping is free for pre-orders).

I have this huge stack of books about SEALs that folks have sent me to review and I’m about half way through Rourke Denver’s Damn Few. You’ll probably remember Rourke’s face in the following video if you saw him star in “Act of Valor”, but his publicist folks sent us this video of Rourke on Conan O’Brien’s show;

I’ve had my share of hallucinations during training so I can completely identify with the clown on a bicycle thing.

ArmyJ writes to tell us that his latest book “A Line in the Sand” is available on Kindle today for free. The last time we advertised his book, he had 15,000 downloads. Here’s a synopsis of this novel;

The year is 2031. The US military has been gutted by an increasingly powerful and isolationist government after a series of unpopular and internationally condemned wars. Lieutenant Colonel Reese Sterling, a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iran, has been falsely imprisoned after tragedy occurs during a botched raid in his home. He is sent to the infamous Ridgeway Prison on trumped up charges, and while incarcerated, meets a mysterious man who has a plan for freedom. Across the country, a popular US President is assassinated, along with a high-ranking member of the Chinese military. Sterling manages to escape from prison, only to find that he is the man being hunted as the presidential assassin. Balancing his desire for revenge against the need to clear his name, Sterling must take on a conspiracy of global proportions that threatens to bring the very foundations of the nation crashing down. When war on American soil for the first time in over 150 years seems imminent, the fugitive officer must make a brutal choice; to fight against the government he had sworn an oath to protect, or do nothing and see the country torn apart.

So, help a brother out and make him famous.