Decent Thefts

Not much will keep me up very late like stealing and reading books off the internet. Pirate Bay is a great site if you want to violate copyright laws. Yeah, it's immoral, but so is charging college kids $150 for a text in any introductory 101 course. I say it all evens out in the end.

Books are like food texture in a way. Some are light and breezy, you tear through them in an hour or two. It would be like eating a bag of chips. Other books you have to chew and chew and slowly digest. Imagine eating a whole turkey, by yourself? Some books are like this too.

When I was 13 and full of smug pride, I picked up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. It was biography of his life as a Soviet dissident who ended up traveling through the worst prison system the Soviets had to offer. I thought I'd be able to breeze through this and once finished, I could cut another notch in my gun...and then bray about that accomplishment.

“Gulag” is like eating an entire cow. I was unprepared, too immature and lacked the requisite knowledge of Russian history to even grasp the slightest thing he was speaking about. Also this book is thick enough to use as a jackstand for a car. I put the book down at times because it was so “heavy” and then picked it back up because of the challenge it posed. Eventually I gave up and realized I was too 'tupid to “get it.” Would I read it again? Nope. That experience was ugly and prevents me from reading it now. To be honest, I found the book boring then, I suspect I'd find it boring now. Russian writers have a particularly depressing writing style that convinces you suicide is the only option.

When I was 19, at Rhode Island College and slightly, slightly more mature then, I would be seen carrying my usual class textbooks with the addition of something I was reading. I was showing off, of course. One book I toted around and was trying to read was Frank Snepp's Decent Interval.

Once again, I had chosen another book that was like eating an entire elk. It was beyond me and the prose was denser than lead. There are authors who can pack 5,000 calories of information into twenty words and you had better have the prior educational/grit to be able to comprehend it. I actually read through this one and of course, lost most of the ideas he was trying to impart. But it looked great sitting on my desk in class. I admit this! Young men, like I was then, are natural braggarts.

So...last night I stole another copy of Decent Interval and started reading it again. I swear, there are things in this world were you have to pack on decades of life's experience before you can understand. This book was one of them. This time around, I was walking right through it.

If you made it this far, here's a quickie synopsis of this book.

Frank's job in the CIA was to analyze North Vietnam's strategy, interrogate prisoners and produce policy actions from all the intell they gathered. In the end, it didn't matter as we lost the war. In late April of '75, we bugged out of Vietnam. If you're old enough, you can easily remember this photograph below. It was the last evacuation helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon. The North Vietnamese Army was a few blocks away and the embassy staff hung out to the near bitter end before being airlifted away. Every newspaper in the US had this blown up on the front page.  Frank is in that photo somewhere.

Apparently, the entire evacuation was run by clowns and we left behind friendly Vietnamese, intell, names and addresses who were then scooped up by the North Vietnamese. Guess what happened to them? He also said that the last days involved US Embassy officials, who were charged with burning every scrap of info and US currency held in the embassy, didn't. In fact, Frank testified that embassy workers stole and smuggled that money out of Saigon for themselves.

Frank at the time had a Vietnamese girlfriend who he failed to get out of Saigon during the ensuing chaos He found out later, when her name was discovered by the the North Vietnamese forces, that they went to her house and gunned her and her child down.

So pissed off was Frank, and being denied to write an after-action report to the CIA, who wanted to cover up the obvious failures, Frank then went to the publisher of Random House and spilled his guts to them.

The book, when it hit the streets, exploded throughout the media and gov't circles.

The CIA responded with a lawsuit against Snepp and won. Every dollar the book made had to be handed over to the CIA. Frank was left destitute.

At nineteen, I couldn't grasp this book at all, but now at 50 with the attendant background, I can. There are some perks with getting older, but getting fatter, grayer and crow's feet-ier aren't on the list though. That's the trade off for piling on some wisdom I guess.

I was up to 3 AM last night reading. I found the book that interesting.  

Frank and His Book