One of the things that worries me as a writer of historical fiction and social commentary is the absolute correctness of every plot I develop or assertion that I make. I am not backed by publisher provided fact checkers and must rely entirely on my own research. Most of this is done with my stacks of books and reference materials bought at great expense over decades from bookstores and garage sales. I read them in the bathroom, and they sit on my night stand. Some await a plane trip or a long sit in the doctor’s office. The bibliography for One Man Stand is extensive, but it is not exclusive of other sources… modern, questionable ones.
So picture yourself writing away about some battle or skirmish, and you hit a sentence that requires a certain fact. It might be a place. It is likely someone’s name. Worse still, I might need a minor detail about how deep a submarine can dive or how fast an airplane can roll. Lord help me, but I might have to make a judgement call on which war machine was mightiest or which soldier was the bad ass of all bad assery. For those of you who do not have a passion for stories, creative writing is like a cresting wave ridden by a keyboard. So, in the interest of riding the historical curl, I sometimes take the easy way out… I Wicky it. I mean, you can trust it for the small stuff, right?
Turns out, most of the time, one can. But, every once in a while, I trust someone who is wildly off, biased, or just plain nuts, and I have no way of knowing in that instant that my book just took a hit in the one department that really counts: veracity. Then we have the author “getting on in years” factor. At 63, I am still sharp as a tac, but every once in a while, I get something inexcusably wrong. I catch these 99.5% of the time in proof reading, but the computer sometimes auto corrects my spelling just to screw me. For example, I wrote a bit about the air attack at Taranto, Italy, where British Swordfish torpedo planes staged a Pearl Harbor like attack that actually inspired the Japanese to pull their Tora, Tora, Tora moment December 7, 1941. The computer decided that I must have meant Toronto… as in Canada and “corrected” my spelling. As I reviewed the draft, I read Taranto despite the change. My aging brain was just trying to help. Oh sure, I caught it much later, but I was stunned at my intellectual frailty and perilous faith in my mastery of the proper noun.
I made other errors. I mixed up various hills in various battles because they started with the same consonant. I called Harry Truman a colonel instead of a captain. All-in-all, I caught a half dozen “good ones”. In every instance, the common denominator was a focus on the imagery or the sweet taste of irony that distracted my internal historical monitor.
But why confess? Well, to call your attention to the sad state of correctness in what we watch and read and take as Gospel from YouTube and other internet related morasses. Some of the short pieces I watch with my morning coffee are breathtakingly off, particularly when referencing firearms. Nothing makes me cringe, however, more than an Artificial Intelligence narrator that cannot pronounce names correctly. Today I watched a piece about the F-106 fighter where the narrator called it the “F One hundred and six” over and over. Airplane junkies just don’t pronounce marks like that. As the explanation droned on, the visuals did not match the narration. Many different aircraft that were depicted. The visuals told different stories that had nothing to do with the exposition. It would seem that the F-106 was a Navy fighter and that pilots were constantly ejecting from the machine. The worst offenders in this cyber category, however, are videos derived from video games. I am not a gamer and to me they look for all the world like real footage. Until my son explained what I was seeing, I believed the weapons system’s capabilities were verified by shredded terrorists and burning tanks.
It would seem that there is no longer any great compulsion to make a righteous and correct representation of history or technology. It is more important to churn out new, splashy content that will hold our attention through several five second commercials. Even still, there are a few YouTube sources that I do trust, and I acknowledge them in One Man Stand. I still worry though that when it comes to things that we cannot know for certain, like which side of Henry the Fifth’s face was struck by an arrow, that I will stoke the ire of an expert whose great, great, great, however many greats it was, was at the battle, saw the hit himself, and wrote the details down on a cocktail napkin which is still pressed in the family Bible. Or maybe my assertion that the A6M Zero fighter was hot shit for a minute there but not the wonder weapon we have been taught to revere, will ignite the grandson of a grandson who flew against it. His email will state-- for a fact-- that it was the single greatest flying mousetrap of them all. And there will come the accusation that is meant to silence me. “You are not a pilot. Who are you to speak?”
Well. I’ll tell you.
I am a story teller, a narrator, an actor in words and turn of phrase. My agenda concerns the emotion of the battle, the character of the soldier, and the righteousness of the action. I create in a world beyond video and Wikipedia. I paint mental pictures to grab the reader by the gut and make’m feel the flames or hear the ricochet that takes a young and precious life in the name of a philosophy we have all but forgotten. My mission is to take the reader up the hill or beneath the waves, and I do so with all the realism I can muster from other authors whose experiences I often have to trust simply because, to me, their observations ring true. I laugh or gasp and say, “That’s the stuff of a story that needs to be told lest we forget… and forgetting lessens us all.”
We live in a society of hair triggered armchair experts who are over stuffed with Monarch Note versions of history, and I am the driven artist who seeks to write an entertaining book for military enthusiasts who sometimes miss the point. To these people I say, I did the very best I could with the references I thought best. I do understand that which irks you. Believe it or not, I share that itch. You have a point. We do need to get back to a time when we all had higher standards and the pulp from which we plucked our facts was more gold mine than coal slurry. Sadly, those days are all but gone and history may be blurred as a result, but it is not yet beyond recognition. There is nothing to be done but to say, be careful in your judgmental ecstasy. The story must be told.