Silent Generation No Longer Silent: A Blessing, Not a Lack of Patriotism

BEYOND PELELIU
By Peter Baird
Ravenhawk Books, 2006

Reviewed by John Kane for the Denver Post (Permission given to reprint by the reviewer.)

In September 1944, 45,000 U.S. marines and soldiers attacked the tiny Japanese held island of Peleliu in the Palau Islands. The attack served no useful military purpose and was based on faulty intelligence that the island was lightly defended and its capture would take just days. More than 13,000 Japanese troops fought with suicidal intensity for over a month; fewer than 2,000 of them survived. Eighteen hundred American troops were killed and another 8,000 wounded.

BEYOND PELELIU is the fictional story of one American who returned. More than that, it is the story of how the carnage of war resonates through generations to affect the son he barely knew, and his son’s eventual relationships with his own wife and children. Peter Baird’s powerful and sensitive tale exposes how the Greatest Generation and its successor, the Silent Generation, were affected by a war from which even those who returned in body never really came home.

Tom McQuade is a surgical resident in Boston married to an exotic woman, Virginia, with a newborn son, David, when Pearl Harbor ends their idyllic life. Drafted and made a captain in the Army Medical Corps, Tom goes ashore at Peleliu. He returns to his family crippled in body and spirit. With his hand shattered, his promise as a surgeon becomes a bitter memory.

To Virginia’s consternation, Tom refuses to discuss what happened at Peleliu, but it has changed him irrevocably. His anger and frustration lead to drinking and an inevitable divorce. Virginia and David move on with their lives.

Forty years later, David is a successful trial lawyer in San Francisco. Like his father he is a warrior, but his battlefield is the courtroom and it, too, is strewn with casualties.

After Virginia dies and Tom has entered the early stages of dementia, father and son reconnect. For the first time, the jaded lawyer with a briefcase full of courtroom triumphs and failed relationships learns the awful secret of what happened to his father on Peleliu and experiences the liberating force of truth.

What became of the sons of the Greatest Generation? Although the Silent Generation did not go to war, many of its members were indelibly shaped by the effect of war on parents who tried to pick up the pieces of shattered lives and couldn’t. All boys develop an ideal father – a hero who rescues them, a template for their own development into men. Those whose fathers go to war create particularly potent ideals for the absent parent, who rarely measures up if he indeed returns. Until a boy comes to grips with the reality of who his father is, without the need to idealize and the consequent betrayal of that ideal, he cannot become a man. David McQuade’s reconciliation with Tom enables both men to become fully realized.

BEYOND PELELIU goes far beyond the faulty intelligence of a disastrous battle and the psychological carnage that afflicted a father and son. It is the story of redemption that comes from embracing the truth that lies at a parent’s core. It is also the story of practicing a profession with external success, but devoid of meaning. Only by embracing truth in all circumstances can David become more than the shell of a man. Indeed, only by embracing the truth can he himself become a hero.

Baird’s style is spare and clean, expressed in short paragraphs blissfully free of adverbs and adjectives. His prose is characterized by strong nouns and active verbs reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. His attention to detail in describing every scene and event make the development of each character natural, credible and consistent with the plot. His use of dialogue is masterful.

It is not surprising that Baird, a prominent trial lawyer, describes the work of lawyers with such authenticity, but the medical aspects and the battle scenes are equally well done. The demons of war infuse them all. There is not a dull passage in the narrative; it moves like a rocket to its thudding and entirely human conclusion.

Readers of any generation will understand themselves better and share in the experience of real and memorable characters. In BEYOND PELELIU Baird speaks to and for the Silent Generation. We can be grateful that it is silent no more.

Fate: Here's Why We All Believe In It, Even If Just a Little Bit

The Simple Touch of Fate:
How the Hand of Fate Touched
Our Lives Forever
Edited By Arlene Uslander and
Brenda Warneka
ISBN: 0-595-30283=1
Website: www.thefatesite.com


Reviewed by Glenda A. Bixler,
Independent Press Book Reviewer


Do you believe in fate? Fate, “the supposed force, principle, or power that predetermines events,” as defined by the dictionary, is known under many names¾destiny, kismet, predestination, foreordainment, foredoom, luck, or just coincidence¾and is often described by individuals around the world. Arlene Uslander and Brenda Warneka have experienced acts of fate in their lives. In The Simple Touch of Fate: How the Hand of Fate Touched our Lives Forever, they share not only their own stories but have gathered over fifty real stories by real people, in a thought-provoking anthology, that leaves you with one question: if it wasn’t fate, how and why did these events happen?

As a lover of suspense and mysteries, I enjoy reading or hearing about events or activities that leave us wondering and questioning. I especially enjoy “little” acts that happen. For instance, was it a coincidence that one of the authors chosen for this anthology, Patricia Patteson, had also been included in an anthology, Mist on the Mon, that had sat on my bookshelf for many years, unread, but was immediately pulled and enjoyed when it was included in this book?

Or was it fate that a daily newsletter I read before I began to write this review, covered a mysterious life-saving event, but in that story, the writer attributed her story to guardian angels? Personally, I no longer question such things. In fact, based upon a book, As You Wish by Christine Massot Simpson, a resident of Canada, for whom I had the privilege to help edit and publish her book, I now use her phrase, “A God Incident” whenever I confront such events.

Let me share a little about my favorites from The Simple Touch of Fate. If you don’t believe in fate, then these short stories just may force you to reconsider­is there something or someone, somewhere that controls events in our lives?

Jacob! Jacob! Reborn. The date was September 11, 2001. Jacob Herbst often traveled by plane; however, work-related activities prevented his taking a scheduled flight from Boston’s Logan Airport at 8:45, American Airlines, Flight 11, to Los Angeles. How do you thank a man who could not make an important meeting, causing an unexpected delay, for saving your life?

Desert Boomerang. Two soldiers meet in Iraq; one is standing guard at a barren traffic control point and helps the other by giving him directions. Months later, the same two soldiers meet at the site of an accident on a deserted road and the favor is returned. Only this time, lives are saved! For the man just happened to be part of a medical unit...

We all Cross Paths for a Reason. A birth mother and her now-grown daughter are reunited through an automobile accident and a woman’s willingness to work overtime. Just a coincidence?

Time for Life. A man and a woman, members of one family, but located in different places­both trying to catch the train­fail in their efforts due to various reasons. They missed the most disastrous train crash in the United Kingdom in 42 years.

“Honor, Courage, and Commitment”: Saving Jack Roush. When a small plane is in trouble, it happens to hit near the home of an ex-marine, specifically trained “to save a pilot in an upside-down plane from a watery grave.”

Grandmother Spirits. In a time of family distress, a woman prays to the spirits of grandmothers for the needs of a family. Was it a coincidence or a direct response to prayer that allowed a son just arriving in Hiroshima to be able to make a free call to his mother?

The Angel That Couldn’t Fly. My favorite! A wonderful answer to why the chicken crossed the road...

Uslander and Warneka have created an excellent, well-diversified anthology that provides heart-warming, happy, life-saving and sometimes-unbelievable tales. They are presented with an interesting continuity, yet broken with small offerings of people’s own definitions of fate. I found it informative, flawlessly presented to allow readers to form their own conclusions regarding these stories from “real people.” For those who continuously wonder... and search... I found this a must-read!

This books can be purchased for $16.95 on Amazon.com and other online bookstores, or ordered from the publisher 1-800-288-4677 or any brick-and-mortar bookstore.