Bob was seven years sober when he drifted out onto the lake, thought about turning his boat over. Seemed like a good idea and he didn’t feel like waiting for a better one. I drift now over his same lake, once a river canyon now dammed by industry and the needs of leisure. My skiff floats free above black moss skeletons of trees rooted in stone, their branched arms waving dead in the cold dark water.
”
“I thought you guys wasn’t supposed to pick up no hitchhikers.”
Now that they were in the diner, he looked older than he had in the parking lot.
“No, them days is past. Rigs now, well you just gotta see it. It’s like an apartment. Got a microwave, satellite TV. Even a bed.” He didn’t smirk when he said the last part. Jesi would have noticed if he’d smirked.
She forked up the last bite of pie. “You really going as far as Tallahassee?”
“I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon, sure as the sunrise. How old you say you were?”
“I didn’t. But if you must know, I’m nineteen. Why? You need to see my ID or something?”
He laughed, shook his head. He finished his coffee, pulled out his wallet. She saw it was attached to his belt with a chain. He dropped a ten on the table, slid out of the booth and stood. She got up too, a tiny thing who barely came up to his armpit. As they walked out to his truck, she pointed at the chain.
Lieutenant H. Hawes does not like his first name. His friends call him Hawser. He wants to be a pilot but does not make it in pilot school in the military, so he becomes the next best thing: a bombardier.
He is assigned to a crew on the B-17 in World War II. After extensive training they fly bombing missions into Germany. The odds are that six out of ten will die doing this job. And when they die, there are no funerals. They just don’t come back. Their bunks are empty and the next day a new soldiers move in.
Long before he can complete his 25 missions, after which crew members are sent home, he is shot down over Germany and becomes a prisoner of war. When he thought he has seen the worst of the horror at the hands of the Nazi captors, he is crushed by the realization that even worse atrocities lie before him when he ends up behind enemy lines.
I have read a lot of books about World War II. Just recently I re-read King Rat, which plays in a prison camp in the Pacific. Emaciated prisoners live in the tropics, bitten by bugs, suffocated by intense heat, sick with dysentery, abused by the Japanese. At the same time American prisoners like Hawser are kept in camps in Poland, in snow and ice, with arctic winds blowing through the floor board of their huts, where they never get warm enough, where they have to stand at roll call in the snow for hours, some of them without shoes and feet wrapped in rags.
Another World War II book about prisoners, in this case women, was A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.Five Chimneys– by Olga Lengyel is a harrowing account of life in a Nazi death camp. Just recently I read All the Light we Cannot See– by Anthony Doerr. It illustrates the lives of children growing up in the war in Germany. Then, of course, there is Unbroken – by Laura Hillenbrand, the riveting story of Louie Zamperini, the Olympian who flew in the Pacific and got shot down by the Japanese.
Hawser belongs with these books. The author takes us into the B-17 and we fly the missions with them. We feel the cold of the airplane at 30,000 feet and 50 degrees below zero. The lack of oxygen makes us dizzy. And the terror, the absolute terror of knowing that the next cannon bullet from a Nazi fighter could end it all, right there in the freezing sky high above the clouds, paralyzes us and the only thing we can do is become numb and shoot back with a vengeance. We endure eight hours over enemy land, hundreds of minutes of fear, tens of thousands of seconds of despair.
The story is reminiscent of the plot of the 1990 movie Memphis Belle. It’s the same plane. If I remember right, there was a scene where the ball (the bubble on the belly of the plane where a gunner was sitting) got jammed, and the landing gear was broken. The gunner could not get out because the ball was jammed, and the belly landing would surely crush him. What to do? There is an identical scene inHawser, which prompted me to wonder how common this situation was in the war.
The title of the book does not do it justice. It tells the prospective buyer nothing about what a ride he is in for. But don’t let that deter you. The author has researched the subject meticulously. It feels like he was a B-17 bomber pilot himself, even though that’s unlikely. He knows what life was like in a German prison camp. He knows how the country came apart at the seams in the last few years of the war. He shows us Germany from the inside, and how the Nazi machine not only ruined the lives of all the people it conquered and tortured, but also those of the Germans themselves. Generations were devastated, and Hawser tells the story about it.
Stories like this one, playing in Germany in WW II, bring home my ancestry. My father was nine years old in 1945. He hardly knew his father, who was a soldier stationed in Italy. He only came home for a few days of leave every year or so.
When the Russians overran Poland and eastern Germany in 1945, they raped women and girls indiscriminately before they killed everyone. To get away, my father, his mother and siblings left their home in Breslau, Silesia as refugees, heading for Bavaria.
Had that not happened, my own parents would never have met, and I would not be writing this book review. Hawser brings that time to life.
“Yes. The fourth floor. You cannot count the times your grandmother would carry the bags up those stairs. Hundreds. Thousands.”
The girl looked up the block. A group of Puerto Rican teenagers sat on a stoop, boys and girls both wearing the same white t-shirts and baggy khaki pants. A boom box thundered out Latin pop, broken and distorted as it echoed off the high walls of the neighborhood.
The old man saw her face, its alarm tinged with disgust.
“A different neighborhood then. We called it our shtetl.”
This historical fiction novel is highly recommended. War novels are not my usual go-to, though I do enjoy an Erik Larson historical fiction now and then. Hawserbrought WWII and the Air Force’s role in the American European campaign to life, as the protagonist arrives in Britain with the 1st wave of Americans and B-17s. Hawser, an Iowa-born, Arizona-raised bombardier, gives an inside perspective into the mindset of the war-wracked soldier and into the workings of the evolving planes of the war.
The story opens on the starving shell of Lt. Hawes amid the grinding routine of an Air Force officer’s POW camp hoping to make it another day, another hour. Then, the story flashes back to his arrival into the new world of war and the various men and women he’d met along the way.
Stress is high, camaraderie is true and romance is a warped thing doomed before it begins.
It was an odd unhinged emptiness. I felt like a kite with a cut string, the wind still blowing hard but in no particular direction, no thread of resistance to guide me. I wouldn’t have been surprised to float off my cot and into the tent ceiling, continue higher still with canvas shroud until I was as far above the camp as I had been over Hamburg or Schweinfurt.
Nobody’s approach to the war and their role in it is the same. Hawser and the richly developed secondary characters feel very real, with superb use of regional accents and military jargon enjoyably appropriate.
I received my copy of the book when the author contacted me directly through The Book Review Directory, a blog.
I could tell from the look on his face that he couldn’t fix it. He held it between his blackened fingers, turning it this way and that.
“This,” he said, “is junk. Not worth repairing.”
I swallowed. “But my father gave this to me. He said it had been his father’s. It’s an heirloom.”
“Nonsense,” said the old man. “Cheap Chinese junk. Come here.” He crooked the finger at me. “Behind the counter.”
He picked up a small caseless watch from the work table, handed it to me along with an oversized magnifying glass.
“Look at this one. This is a Hamilton. Made in Pennsylvania in the 1930s. You see the quality? That ring on the outside, it’s called the balance. You see the center?”
“The ruby thing?”
“It’s a jewel. Not a ruby, but similar. Fine watches use jewels at the axis because they don’t wear out. You see how precisely everything fits together? How it moves? This is a beautiful thing. This is a—what did you call it?—an heirloom.”
He handed my watch to me. “Now look at this one.”
The gears were plastic painted to seem like gold, the movement wobbly and uncertain. It looked sloppy and cheap.
“How much did this watch cost, you think?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Twenty dollars. Maybe less. That it ever kept time is a miracle.”
My eyes stung. “My father told me something different.”
Every writer knows that it is unwise to show a first draft to anyone. They often learn this by bitter experience.
But at some point you have to show it to someone. I mean, that is the reason for all of this. We want to connect with our readers, and the only way you can do that is by writing something that they will read (otherwise you can’t call them “my readers,” can you?).
If you’re lucky, you have an agent, a mentor, an editor, a copy editor, a proofreader, a publisher and an infinite amount of money and time while your readers anxiously await the next piece of driftwood you set before them. But chances are you probably don’t have any of these things, let alone all of them. What you have is confidence. The Great American Novel is a thing, and you know it because holy crap YOU ARE SO GOOD.
So you give this polished piece of work to somebody to read. Maybe this isn’t your first lap around the racetrack and they read something else you wrote and are eager for your next thang. This was my experience–not a lot of people have read Hawser, but those who have enjoyed it enough to ask when my next one is coming out (plug plug).
As luck would have it, I started it almost immediately. I wrote the first draft in three months and never showed it to anyone until I had revised it. It was a different bird than my first, more a noir mystery type of book. I didn’t know how it would turn out, but I wrote my way through it to what I thought was a successful conclusion. I got excited, designed a cover and had every intention of self-publishing again because it was easy and I COULD DESIGN THE COVER (which I really like):
but then I started thinking it might be nice to actually get it published for real.
To that end, I printed up a few galley copies and gave them to some friends to read.
And there my troubles began.
It’s–um–pretty good, I guess.
I didn’t really understand the ending.
Well, I managed to finish it. Honestly? It’s not as good.
Ouch. But they were right. I wrote it as I went, leaving vast amounts of detail unresolved. Characters would appear with Chekhov’s pistol and never show up again. You didn’t know why anyone was doing anything. I probably knew this because I tacked on a violent denouement in the hopes it would tie everything up.
It didn’t. It kinda sucked.
It kinda majorly sucked, because it wasn’t merely bad. It was disappointing. They were right.
I didn’t want to chuck it, but something had to give. I opened it back up and really took a solid look at it. There were definitely some good things about it. One of my readers told me there was a lot of sag at the beginning, so I pruned that out. Another said that the ending was unclear, so I made a new ending chapter. But by far the best critique came from a buddy of mine who is a comedian, TV host and general smartass–he said he had no idea why the characters did what they did. He reminded me of the famous Vonnegut quote: Every character has to want something, even if it’s a glass of water.
It was time for major surgery. Names were changed, Motivations of certain characters were altered. The whole Harper Lee debacle gave me confidence that you can, if you’re willing to chuck everything into the fire, take work you’ve already done and make something out of it that really works well, even if you need to start from scratch.
I’m only about halfway done with this massive surgery, but I have already found a few nice little pieces I wrote previously that tie in well with the new beginning. I also have left a lot on the cutting room floor. All in all, I think it works better.
“Well, I sure ain’t sorry to see it go.” The old man sipped his beer, wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve. “Even if they just put up something worse. Which they will.”
Jessup moved his knight. “Ha! Bet you didn’t see that.”
He ignored the board. “That goddamned mural always reminded me they never did fix the lights in the stairwell. Spend the city improvement money on a goddamn seascape.”
“Quit your bitching and move, old man.”
The old man took the knight without comment.
“Shit!” said Jessup.
“See what you miss when you don’t keep your eyes open?”
”
