Beyond Valor

March 1, 2002
Recalling harrowing rescue missions, gun battles and the knee-deep swamp mud that forced soldiers to hold up their comrades' heads while they slept to keep them from drowning, veterans from elite WWII units relive the Pacific theater in Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat. Editor Patrick K. O'Donnell (Beyond Valor) interviewed hundreds of veterans for this oral history of the battles at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and other locations. Brief testimonies of horrifying violence and hair-raising close calls are sometimes described with emotion, other times in brutally honest deadpan.

March 1, 2001
Over a hundred individual veterans' vignettes are drawn from oral histories and electronically transmitted memoirs ("e-histories") in this assemblage of firsthand accounts of the WWII American Airborne, Ranger and other special units. Instrumental to the collection of these stories was O'Donnell's special-interest Web site, The Drop Zone (www.thedropzone.org), which functions as a "virtual museum" of vet experience. The book itself, after a brief introduction sketching the origins of the special units, is comprised of chapters devoted to a dozen operations in the European theater, from initial forays at Dieppe and North Africa, through Italy and Normandy, to final months in Holland and Germany. One chapter covers the home front experiences of African-American troops in the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion. O'Donnell furnishes a cogent introductory overview of each operation, after which a number of veterans describe their memories of the action. Most of these remembrances are work-a-day, telegraphic run-downs of key situations beach landings and marches to lines, a night in the cargo hold of a destroyer, a diversionary attack on a fortified town that leave a lot of emotional baggage under the surface, in favor of often mortal logistics (some of which involves atrocities on both sides). Most fail to make their situations vivid or compelling to the uninitiated. (Mar. 12) Forecast: While this title is a Main Selection of the Military History Book Club, it assumes a fair amount of interest in and familiarity with its subjects, and won't get much beyond the buff market. Nevertheless, scholars will find it a font of well-documented primary source material and developers might comb it for film or TV-worthy vignettes. Meanwhile, the Drop Zone, which has gotten press mentions in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and other papers, may generate further sales.