In the past week I’ve started a new book. The book is called Blood on the Risers. As a warning this book so far has a lot of language that wouldn’t be appropriate for school. This book is an autobiography about John Leppelman who fought in the Vietnam war. The main character's name is Lepp but you don’t hear his name very often. Most of the time they use either last names or an abbreviation of a last name that is easier to say and shorter an example of this Catozi is called Cat since it is shorter. He has signed up to be part of the airborne group. This means he jumps out of an airplane to go and fight where he is needed. My dad recommended this book for me since he knows that I like book like this and this is something that I would want to do in the military. Since I’ve started this book I’ve enjoyed it. It talks about what is happening to him and his friends along with his squadron in Vietnam. The book starts with him enlisting and going through his training. He doesn’t try to hide anything that is happening to him or what they’re saying. An example of this is “One had taken a head shot, and his brains and pieces of skull were splattered on the tree. His head looked like a watermelon that had been split by a machete.” this shows that he just says it like it happens and he doesn’t change it to make it more appropriate for readers. So far in this book Lepp has enlisted shortly after leaving high school which is similar to my story and he has gone through his training. During his enlistment the person swearing them in wishes them all luck and especially to the lunatic who has chosen to join the airborne. He describes some of the training that they do and that a lot of people don’t make it through all the training since it is so hard. The people who don’t make it through the training have to go back and go through normal training. Some of the people dropped when they had to learn to jump from an airplane. They started with a thirty five foot tower jumping from it on a line like a zip line. They learned the form they need to have while jumping. Then they went to jumping off a two hundred foot tower. The tower raised them up and dropped them with the parachute already open. The final step was actually jumping from an airplane. During each phase of training people dropped out. After they finished their training they shipped over to Vietnam, the person training Lepp told him on completion that he thought Lepp would be dead within two months of making it into the country. Once inside the country the Vietnamese people acted different then the people in America and they all had to get used to it. While they were waiting to get their assignment they new troops had to perform maintenance on the base that no one wanted to do. The first thing that they had to do was to clean out the toilet collector, they had to put the waste into fifty-five gallon drums and burn it. The whole time they’re in Vietnam it is well over a hundred degrees fahrenheit. At night it only gets down to about eight degrees. On the first actual mission that Lepp goes on he jumps out of an airplane and he lands in a tree and is dangling about twenty feet in the air and has to drop to the ground. Another person that was jumping that no one like had to be medivaced out since he broke his arm on landing while trying to take some pictures. I'm enjoying this book very much since it holding my attention and it is a story from someone who was actually fighting in the Vietnam War.
I've finished Flyboys in the past week. I wasn't a fan of the book the book the whole time so I tried to finish it quickly as I could. The book has changed tone once again. In the beginning it was boring and hard to read, in the middle it got interesting but dark and twisted making you want to read but also having what you were reading was disturbing. Then near the end the fighting has stopped and they start talking about all the losses from both the Americans and the Japanese. Some of the parents and people that new the Flyboys couldn't get over the loss that they faced or the people that convinced them to join in the first place. An example of this is “Already hard drinkers. Marve’s parents- Hoyt Sr. and Clarinda - and his brother Hoyt Jr., upped their intake to drown their sorrow. Hoyt Jr. suffered a special survivor’s guilt. He was the one who had talked Marve into enlisting.” this shows that he at first thought it was a good idea for him to join but after learning start had happened to him and that he died since Hoyt Jr. convinced him to join the military. There were stories like this from both sides but the Japanese were trained to stop caring for life and do anything they had to do, they would even give up their own life if it was required to complete the mission. Since last week the book continued to talk about the torture that was instilled upon both the Japanese and Americans. They also talked about how after the fires had stopped from the incendiary bombs that got dropped on Tokyo families were split up. One family that they talked about went back to where their house used to be so they all could get back together. The father and daughter were together and the mother got separated from them. She also had a baby on her back. The father and daughter went back to the house and waited a long time for the mother to return but they didn't realize that she was already their. They didn't recognize her since she had a fire blanket on from the military. She had burn marks on her back from where the baby was. There was worse burns where she was touching the baby like on her elbows. The baby belonged to the daughter not the mother carrying the baby. That night the daughter lost two of her sons in the fire. The rest of the book talks about the families is the fallen Flyboys and some I'd the hard times they went through. One mother went insane since the navy never told her what exactly happened to her son. Her husband had to have all the letters from the navy go to the local VA and have them call him when they got a letter about his son so he could spare his wife from reading the letters. Overall it was a different read from what I've normally been reading this year but it was still a historical book. It was a more difficult read since it was hard to keep wanting to read it but I enjoyed the challenge. I would recommend it but you would have to like history and be able to read a book that is slow in the beginning but knowing that it picks up and becomes interesting later on in it.
|
George RadashawArchives
May 2017
Categories |