Peter Van Buren

Hooper's War by Peter Van Buren is an alternative history of World War II with a deep message about war. Peter Van Buren is a former foreign service officer, author, and first amendment rights defender by circumstance. His previous book The Ghosts of Tom Joad; The Story of the #99 tells a very realistic story of the fall of the rust belt cities that took me back to my days of growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.

Hooper's War is an interesting book for reasons beyond it being a good war story. It runs along the lines of Philip Caputo but not as in your face as Dalton Trumbo. Van Buren sets his story in 1946 as the war has reached mainland Japan. This twist is particularly interesting because the atomic bombs are not mentioned in the story. To many, WWII was when the United States wore the white hat and took the high moral ground. The atomic bombs were perhaps the only recognizable scar on that victory. Since then we fought Korea to a draw. Vietnam brings to mind My Lai and the evacuation of the American Embassy. Iraq and Afghanistan were left unfinished. World War II was America's just victory.

Hooper is an infantry lieutenant, far from his hometown in Ohio. He is leading a group of mostly inexperienced men in combat on mainland Japan. His unit was a mix of inexperienced soldiers with a few experienced NonCommissioned Officers who help lead and help the fresh lieutenant. The violence of the landing and coordination are well done. Van Buren brings an important aspect of the war with Japan to light. In the novel, Kyoto is fire bombed.

In real history, the fire bombing of Dresden was devastating; the German city was completely destroyed in a precision bombing raid. In Japan, precision bombing was abandoned and fire bombing was even more destructive. Cities there had an industrial center and were surrounded with wooden housing. Bombs were dropped near the target and the fires spread inward. The fires burned toward the city center trapping the population. Emergency services were overloaded and unable to prevent the spread of fire. Essentially, the entire city was burned to the ground and that included much of the civilian population. The 1945 firebombing of Tokyo produced more immediate casualties than the atomic bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The story works its way mostly backward through the fictional history and for a large part takes place near the firebombed city of Kyoto. This is where the majority of the principles and morality of war take place. Through Hooper's words, he tells the reader what he and his men experienced. There is also a Japanese soldier, Eichi Nakagawa, telling his story and a civilian woman, Naoko, with a connection to both Hooper and Nakagawa. Through the perspective of these three people many questions about war and who is right, if anyone, is raised. The immediate leadership on both sides comes into play with the strict discipline and idea of duty and honor to the average Japanese soldier. The Americans see themselves as liberators and question the resistance to freedom. Hooper's men are given ice cream for completing their mission against the enemy, while Japanese civilians starve. There is a Major Moreland who hopes to wear down the resistance by limiting their supplies and demoralizing the enemy. His attitude is strikingly close to a Vietnam War general with a similar name.

Hooper's War is an excellent war story and what makes it such is that it is not about the glory of war and the killing of people. It is about what war really is for those who fight it and those who experience it. There is a complexity that escapes many people and even those fighting. Hooper asks Naoko to the effect of "Why don't you give up and except freedom?" He does not understand that he is now seen as an invader, not a liberator. Decades later people in power and fighting in Iraq would ask the same questions of Iraqi resistance. Van Buren uses alternative history to present questions asked in probably every war in history. He portrays war as two forces fighting, both believing they are right.… (mais)

UPDATE: I found this link today

http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/02/review-ghosts-of-tom-joad-a-story-of-the-...


There were pieces of machinery from the factory left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization, droppings of our failure. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. I think God owes us an apology.

Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the # 99 Percent by Peter Van Buren is a story of modern America’s Rust Belt. Van Buren is retired from the State Department. His career took him to Asia and Oceania. Van Buren also worked closely with the military including the Marines at Camp Lejeune.

The title of the book caught my attention mainly from the Bruce Springsteen album of the same name. It seems the author was more influenced by Rage Against the Machine version. I had to look up the Rage version and in the process found Springsteen performing the song with Tom Morello. The story is about Earl, a man growing up in a small, fictional, Ohio town of Reeves that survives off the glass factory. Aside from the draft or volunteering for the military most people work at the factory. The economy is starting to turn in the late 1970s. Slowdowns, overseas competition, and new technology attacked the American dream. America felt invulnerable and did too little too late to compete. Manufacturing was sold to foreign investors or simply moved overseas. It wasn’t a sudden collapse. There were signs. No money to pay for college. Wives working outside the home to help make ends meet. It was a slow collapse that no one wanted to see.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio around the time this story takes place. I could see some of this happening, and on my 18th birthday I signed up for the Marines. Industry was on the decline. There was no way I could afford college working as a cook at Howard Johnsons. Ghosts of Tom Joad brought back many memories of the city I left more than thirty years ago.

Every so often I pick up a book to review that not only wakes me up with a slap to the face but also beats me down and makes me realize how one decision put me where I am today and not unemployed, working for minimum wage, and a step away from being homeless. I felt very much like I could have been Earl if I had stayed. The story is very realistic and typical of the environment.


I highlighted and noted almost as many passages from this novel as I would from a nonfiction book on an unfamiliar subject. Some of the highlights are facts and others the author’s opinion in the words of a character.

"The economic word “flexibility” came in my lifetime to be a stand in for lower pay and fewer benefits. The system had been in place for my grandpa and and my dad: Put something into the factory and get something back from the factory… The rich men always had more but the working men had enough."

"Rock bottom ain’t a foundation."

“We had a Dairy Queen, a Catholic school and four Protestant churches” and a bowling alley. This like many lines in the book sound exactly like the town I left.

Reeve could be reduced down to this: “I was a boiler operator. So was my dad, Went to work everyday bit Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and two weeks in the summer. Bought a car. Bought a house. Sent one son to college, gave one to the Marine Corps. Have a decent pension. Living quietly in the same house. Own it.”

Became this:

"I clean floors and stock warehouse shelves and deliver things you buy online and serve you food. I don’t have health insurance. I get sick, I don’t work, a bulls who balls have given out, I don’t get paid extra for working overtime or holidays because an hour is and hour no matter when I work it and I am not eligible for unemployment because I technically never had a real job in the first place to be unemployed from."

Things happen to cities when industry leaves. Drugs move in. Meth is mentioned in particular in this book, but two years I read that heroin was in my old hometown. This was a town where the marijuana was green when I went to school. In Reeves, drugs move in and are in demand. It is something to break the monotony and is cheaper than drinking. It comes to a point where the worker finally breaks down and says “Why not.” It is a sign of hopelessness.

More than just foreign investors move in; foreign corporations move in. We become the cheap labor for European and Asian automobile manufacturers. They build factories the same way we did in the third world. Towns fight for these factories with infrastructure improvements and tax breaks. “Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII and Dresden looks like Detroit before WWII.” Now, a nation of immigrants looks at other immigrants as the enemy: They take our jobs. Americans are forced to work as day laborers for a few dollars an hour or beg to work at a minimum wage big box stores, part time and without benefits.

Ghosts of Tom Joad is a book about the 99% but told from a very personal level. I needed to remind myself throughout the book that this is fiction, but it is also so many people’s real life story. It could have very well been my story. Van Buren laces factual information throughout the book, but it fits into the story. It does not read like a collection of statistics or a leftist/union propaganda brochure. It reads as real life. The only character in the story that seems to preach revolution/radical change is a preacher at a homeless shelter. Even the preacher's words seem to capture the message of Jesus and not the dogma of a church. This book is very well done on so many levels. The story and the message are both appropriate and accurate in America’s former industrial centers. Even though I left long ago, it is not something I, or anyone else, can run from forever. It is spreading across the country with every business that closes, every job that goes away and is replaced with a part time dead end job…”and you can’t build a nation on the working poor.”
… (mais)

This is a very difficult book to review. Taking the author at his word that this is a true account of his year in Iraq, one is struck by the disconnect with what we know and what we think we know. While he seems to have been against the war, this is not a rant. Indeed, it is a revelation of just how low we as a nation expect of our citizens in a foreign environment. This is all about the civilian, not the warriors, we sent there. Since when has it been proper behavior to avoid eye contact lest someone criticize. Money was everywhere. Who started the thinking that wasting money was a skill to be mastered? Why would anyone want to be part of futility? The debate should not be endless about whether we should have been there; the debate must center on what we are doing there or anywhere for that matter.… (mais)

I received this book from Netgalley for an honest review.

This is a depressing book. I grew up in Ohio, and while I never experienced what was related in this book, I see it in small towns not just in Ohio, but across the country. Officially, our government says we are seeing marked improvement in all sectors of the economy, but they aren't revealing the truth: the poor and lower middle class are no longer hanging on, and rest of us are barely scraping by.
Obviously, the title is an ode to the Grapes of Wrath, one of the greatest, and saddest, books written. The Ghosts of Tom Joad captures well the people's futility and desperation just like the Joad family heading from Oklahoma to California.
Not sure who I would recommend this book to, not because it was poorly written (it wasn't), but because of the shear depression-causing ability of the subject matter.… (mais)