Christina’s Common Sense

I promise, this is my LAST non-post. Finals are almost over. 

When a baseball team wins the World Series, it has two options for next season: win again or do worse. And everyone will be comparing its performance in the next season to its performance last season. Such is James Bradley’s predicament in Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Having hit a grand slam with Flags of our Fathers (which is really awesome, and it’s a good movie too), he can either repeat that performance or not quite hit the mark. And all his readers are watching his every move wondering if he can do it.

He can’t. Flyboys is not all bad—in fact, most of it is quite good. Bradley’s way with words leaves nothing to be desired. It’s no small feat to keep your readers interested when narrating the ins and outs of a battle. If you didn’t know it was real, you could be tricked into thinking Flyboys was a novel.  And Bradley does repeat some elements of his epic Flags of our Fathers performance. He does a marvelous job of showing the stark differences between the Americans and the Japanese and why that made the Japanese such a vexing enemy. How do you fight an enemy who doesn’t want to get out alive?

Unfortunately, Bradley also takes some pretty serious pitfalls. The first few chapters of the book are various moral equivalency arguments that the Americans were just as guilty as the Japanese. He does point out legitimate things that our side did wrong, but the idea that they are equal to the Japanese’s treatment of POWs—heck, their own guys—is patently absurd. Bradley poses the question “how do you fight an enemy who wants to die?” and then argues with how it’s done: killing the lot of them. He should know better, especially considering that his father was a Navy Cross recipient on Iwo Jima. 

Bradley’s second pitfall is his completely blatant bias. When he refers to the Japanese he interviewed, he attaches the suffix “-san” to their last names. This is a Japanese sign of respect. However, when referring to Gen. Curtis LeMay, Bradley calls him “Curtis.” One who fancies himself a military historian does not call high-ranking officers by their first names. It doesn’t take a particularly astute observer to see that the Japanese are getting the bigger share of Bradley’s respect allotment. 

However, Flyboys still has plenty to recommend it. I particularly enjoyed getting new insight into George HW Bush’s experience as one of the flyboys. Bradley does have a keen eye for detail and a unique way of telling a story. It’s pretty impressive, especially coming from a guy who, to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a darn thing in his life before Flags of our Fathers. It’s definitely worth the read, as long as you’re not expecting the home team to win another World Series.

And as for my misbehaving layout, I have discovered that this is remedied when I use Internet Exploder Explorer instead of Firefox. So if you have Firefox and my blog looks like a bomb just went off in it, try Explorer. I’m still working on fixing this.