Primary Colors is a strange beast of a political thriller, a novel based on the 1992 Clinton campaign, where the names have been changed and some events altered. Jack Stanton is a charismatic governor of a southern state, a new kind of democrat who blends populist politics with Ivy League credentials. Jack Stanton can light up a room, but he's got feet of clay. He avoided serving during the Vietnam War, and he can't stop sleeping around.

Our viewpoint is campaign manager Henry Burton, the grandson of a legendary civil rights leader (think Martin Luther King), and a consummate political staffer. Burton is brought on as deputy campaign manager, and joins the slog through the retail politics of the New Hampshire primary. Challengers arise, various flavors of strange cold Northeasterners, along with scandal, as Susan Stanton's hairdresser publicly accuses Jack Stanton of an affair, and the teenage daughter of the owner of Stanton's favorite BBQ joint accuses him of impregnating her. Burton, meanwhile has his own romance with media whiz Daisy, and teams up with the bipolar and aggressively queer "dustbuster" Libby (partially based on Vince Foster) to kill threats to the Stantons, and dig up opposition research on the other candidates, including a strange story of sex, drugs, and corrupt real estate deals.

When this book is good, it's very good, capturing the frenetic amphetamine rush of politics, the excitement of the game, and the larger-than-life quality of those who play it. Primary Colors gets the thrill of the great American experiment in democracy, what it means to be a Candidate, why people work such long hours for these people, the sordid deals and lies of what politics is, and the soaring ideals of what it might be.

But two things bring this down. The first is that the narrator is Black, and author Joe Klein so very White. I really do not need some white dude in TYOOL 2018 to pontificate about Blackness in America. And the second is that Henry is more a witness than a protagonist. I'm not sure if he makes a single real choice in the novel. He witnesses horrible things, he sees people destroyed by ambition, he finds love, loses it, regains it, but who is he? The political animal, a bag of reflexes watching C-SPAN, the ultimate empty suit.

A roleplaying game designed for the Vietnam War should be extremely my jam. Patrol is a 21st century spiritual successor to the Recon games, with modern mechanics designed to support a style of psychological realism in the vein of Platoon or Herr's Dispatches, rather than pure simulationist tactics.

The core of the game is a d6 dice-pool system. Characters have three attributes (Fortitude, Vigilance, Proficiency) which range between 5 and 10 and may be modified by equipment and situational bonuses. When you make a check, roll a number of d6s. 6s are successes (along with 5s, if you have a relevant skill), and if you beat the difficulty you succeed. If you get more 1s than successes, the result includes a FUBAR, something bad happening. Some basic probability shows that you need a lot of dice for reasonable odds of success on anything harder than about 2, and that unskilled characters can be expected to FUBAR about half the time.

Where this game gets innovative is that each character has one of four psychological profiles (idealistic, pragmatic, righteous, and egocentric), which describe the Doubt that your character takes doing or witnessing common situations, and the Victory Points gained for accomplishing tasks that represent winning your own, personal war. Every profile wants different things for the game, naturally pushing intraparty conflict. Turns are about 30 minutes long, representing a substantial chunk of activity, and each one pushes you further along various condition tracks. There's interplay between high levels of fatigue, which are required to unlock the highest VP generating conditions, and the ways in which fatigue becomes trauma as your characters wear down over the course of the tour.

The GMing section has some really good advice for getting the feel of the war, especially the barriers of communication. American NPCs speak in first person and have multilayered personalities. Vietnamese are narrated in third person, and should be described in stereotypes. This is not your country, GI, and you don't belong. The rules include a variety of weapons, vehicles, and opposing forces and allies. Anyone can show up, from Viet Cong guerrillas to Australian Special Forces and Korean Marines.

That said, this is a reading review, and there are some parts that I'm fuzzy on, and some areas where I think this game falls short of its ambitions. The interplay of personality, doubt, fatigue, victory points, XP, and trauma is not particularly elegant. This is an aggressively non-tactical game, but it still military-centric, and more could have been done to distinguish the options in a firefight and add some real weight to the choices. Finally, I think there should have been better or more explicit support for the idea that you're part of unit beyond your characters, and that individuals come and go, but the unit remains.

Patrol is a good game, but it falls short compared to truly great games like Night Witches and Blades in the Dark

Flexner wrote a massive four volume biography of Washington, which he then condensed into this more approachable 400 page book. As the subtitle, The Indispensible Man indicates, Flexner places Washington in his keystone role in the history of America. Washington rose from the lower-ranks of the Virginia planter aristocracy through land speculation, and a minor military career in the French and Indian Wars. Snubbed by British officers, he focused on American independence in economic matters, and then when the Revolution occurred, became the leader of the Continental Army, and the first President, setting the traditions for the American republic.

Again and again, Washington's virtues are persistence and equanimity. At many points where others would have given up in despair, or resorted to personal attacks, Washington held firm to his course. He held the army together through desperate retreats and the bitter winter at Valley Forge. As President, he managed conflict between Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. Washington did not always choose wisely, and particularly in his old age, and following the break with Thomas Jefferson, he became more partisan, more paranoid, less able to unify the country and plot a wise course. In large part, he did what few others could, and well-earned his place in history.

Flexner deserves credit for earnestly engaging with the slavery issue at the end of the book, as I was waiting for it to come up. Washington was born into a slave society, but in Flexner's account, slowly turned against it. He wanted to end the slave system at Mount Vernor, but was constrained by the lack of alternatives. He freed what slaves he could, but many were property of Martha Washington (nee Custis), and would pass to the Custises. And while this is a good look at the man and the period, it lacks the vividness of a truly great biography.

"The Americans are dreaming their own dream. But they are walking in France's footsteps."

Embers of War is the last word on the First Indo-China War, with a hefty explanation of the circumstances leading to France's attempt to hold on to it's Asian colony, and the consequences of their painful exit. Conquered and colonized by the French in the 19th century, Indochina was lightly held by a few thousand soldiers and secret police when France fell to the Nazis in 1940. Vichy Indochina was absorbed by the Japanese, first with diplomatic illusions, and then in a sudden coup de main. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Ho Chi Minh's nationalist resistance group, the Viet Minh, declared independence. Independence lasted for a matter of months, as Charles de Gaulle's France regarded regaining its colonies as a key part of being a significant player in the postwar order, and sent in troops to enforce that decision.

What followed was the tragedy that we know so well. Ho Chi Minh was both a nationalist and a Communist, but the latter was because in the 1920s the Soviet Union was the only place taking anti-colonialism seriously. He was distrusted by Stalin, and looked to the United States for aid, going so far as to read the American declaration of independence when he took Hanoi in 1945. Truman, needing to keep France and the UK happy in Europe, threw Asians under the metaphorical bus. The hardening lines of the Cold War, particularly with Mao's victory in the Chinese Civil War, soon made it impossible to form a bridge between the Viet Minh and the United States.

France's war dragged on, toppling governments at home and increasingly becoming an American funded war, with the US providing planes, trucks, and ammunition by the tonne. As a consequence of the aid, America demanded a victory which France no longer had the heart to achieve. As villages turned against the government, and mobile columns were ambushed and cut apart, France looked to cut its losses and find some kind of political solution.

Logevall ably links events on the ground to diplomatic manuevering at superpower summits, and livens the book with a human interest chapter on Graham Greene and The Quiet American, and the book's influence on shaping perception of the war. Again and again, the basic incapacity of the French to understand the strength of the Vietnamese desire for independence, and the inability of the American government to think through the contradictions of their policy preferences to something that could actually exist, drive the war towards a terrible escalation.

The Viet Minh decisively defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, but that victory was far from inevitable. Viet Minh units were at the end of their morale and endurance, and Vo Nguyen Giap learned the high costs of frontal attacks only by bloody lessons in the Red River delta. Victorious on the battlefield, Ho Chi Minh was forced to accept a partition by Russia and China, who were looking to de-escalate the Cold War for their own reasons. The autocratic Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem would become the American backed President of South Vietnam. By 1960, and the election of JFK, America was fully committed to the bloody war.

All I can say against Logevall is that my electronic copy seemed to drag, but finding out the actual book is 900 pages makes a lot of sense. This is about as heavy a history gets, before it collapses under its own weight.

Ray Bradbury was a major talent, and this collection showcases his style of melancholy fiction to its fullest extent. Bradbury's specialty was the liminal, the moment of phase transition between the last golden summer of youth and the weary cares of adulthood, or the release of the accumulated tensions of life into the quiet of the grave. These stories are moody, painterly, and yet, even as I write this review, they fade from my mind. Bradbury is strong wine, and not to my taste.

Scout pilots were a special kind of crazy. One Vietnam War joke went something like "How do you find the cavalry? Easy, just follow the burning Loaches." Scout pilot and author Hugh Mills demonstrates that in spades. He was shot down 16 times and wounded three times, earning three Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, four Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Bronze Stars, not to mention the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star and Palm, the Vietnamese Honor Medal First Class plus 93 lesser decorations. But he also truly loved the mission, and that love come through in his stories of hair-raising escapades.

In Vietnam, scout pilots flew the OH-6 Loach, a tiny egg shaped helicopter that normally flew with a pilot, a crew chief hanging out the left side, and a 7.62 mm minigun. The mission was descended from the ancient job of a cavalry scout, getting out in front of the main force, locating the enemy, getting word back to HQ, and fixing the enemy long enough for heavy firepower to arrive. The job required intelligence and sharp eyes, to read trailsign and spot hidden bunkers through triple canopy jungle while orbiting at 70 knots, and stone-cold bravery to troll the enemy, and let their own fire reveal them. Then it was a matter of doing what damage you could with the guns, marking a target with smoke, and getting out of the way of the Cobra gunships rolling in with rockets, and finding an LZ for the aerorifle platoon.

When the mission went well, scout pilots could have an outsized impact. When it went poorly, it meant that helicopters went down in hot LZs, the aerorifles engaged way over their heads, and Mills having do crazy stuff, like land and evac wounded pilots in overloaded birds, drop blood to men who couldn't be evaced, and generally going the kind of things that get you three Silver Stars.

Mills seemed to enjoy his war, despite the extreme personal danger, and I think this was because as a pilot he felt like he was in control of his destiny. Infantry faced dangers like mines and bullets which felt very impersonal, an illusive enemy, and a command structure which demanded more than they could give. Scout pilots had the illusion that they could evade danger. They had a mobile edge over the ground-bound VC and NVA. Their war was still very personal, close enough to look into a man's eyes as the minigun strafed him, but once the day's flying was done, they were safe enough behind the wire. Of course, only the most aggressive pilots volunteered for Loaches, and an elite force is going to do better than the reluctant draftees on the line.

And as always, I enjoy the lighter bits. Like when the scouts were entertaining a couple of new Rangers, who spent the night bragging about their snake-eater credentials, and then had them put to the test when a pilot brought a toad. The Rangers gagged, but one of the scouts ate the thing alive, and kept it down long enough for the Rangers to be laughed out of the O-club. Strange times in II-Corps.

Captain Rodman adapted his MA thesis into this book, but don't let that but you off. This is a carefully constructed and researched account of the development of attack aviation, using the overlooked Fifth Air Force in the South West Pacific Theater. General Kenney, who served as General MacArthur's air commander, faced many difficulties when he assumed command in the dark days of 1942. US airpower in the theater had suffered massive losses in the Philippines. Reinforcements would be sporadic, as Europe and the Central Pacific took priority. The sheer scale of the theater, with thousands of kilometers separating islands, meant that strategic targets were out of range. And finally, Army Air Corps doctrine was based around massed formations of heavy bombers operating from around 10,000 feet, but in practice accuracy from that altitude was abysmal and bombers simply could not hit stationary targets, let alone moving fleets.

Kenney reorganized local forces under his unified command, and began developing tactics of low-level bombing using field made expedients. Legendary pilot 'Pappy' Gunn mounted up to 12 .5o caliber machine guns in the noses of medium bombers, turning them into scything strafers. Crews developed daring tactics of mast-level skip-bombing, making their runs in at about 100 feet, and using short salvos to ensure a hit by skipping one bomb off the sea and dropping another directly on deck. Small parachutes attached to bombs created parafrags, parademos, and daisy clippers, deadly against soft targets like air bases. Even 75mm cannons were mounted on planes, though ultimately pilots preferred more machine guns, which were better at suppressing flak.

Kenney's reforms paid off. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, his squadrons destroyed a major Japanese convoy, killing thousands of enemy soldiers at sea and leaving those already in New Guinea without supplies. The subsequent raid on the airbase at Wewak caught Japanese bombers fueled up and minutes from take-off. That attack ended the offensive threat against Kenney's forces. As pilots rotated home, the hard-learned lessons of 1943 were forgotten, and losses rose in 1945 as the Fifth Air Force moved towards Japan.

Rodman makes a strong case for tactical flexibility in the face of field conditions as key component in air power. This perspective was elided post war, with the 8th Air Force over Europe and the new atomic bomb serving as models for airpower. And as a bonus, this book is available as free pdf courtesy of the USAF, and has some incredible pictures of attack planes in action!

Yours To Reason Why takes an interesting approach to military history, focusing on decision points in battle. In campaigns stretching from 1066 (Hastings) to 1944 (Anzio), Seymour offers his analyses of the options facing commanders, and the consequences of the choices that they made.

It's an amazing idea, but it doesn't quite jell. With so many battles to cover, Seymour can't really give any one battle of period comprehensive coverage. I was hoping for a full Duffer's Drift style CYA, but at each point, Seymour goes with what actually happened and discards his counterfactuals.

But the broader point is that if what matters in battle are commanders, then there must be differences between Great Captains like Napoleon (and Napoleon at Waterloo), and mediocrities like General Burgoyne at Saratoga. There are platitudes about energy, boldness, and inspiring troops, but not enough insight. And with a sweep of centuries, there should be something to say about command beyond "it gets more complex". Napoleon's forces were capable of tactical evolution which William the Conqueror's knights only have dream of, yet tactical brilliance in a Napoleonic sense could not avail General Lee victory in the civil war, where industrial might over years proved superior. And General Clark at Anzio had to command infantry, artillery, armor, navy, and aviation units as part of a World War, with infinity more complexity than what Grant faced.

New Worlds #2 is a random sample of New Wave science fiction, without much distinction. You'll recognize the authors, at least some of them, but these are midlist works. J.G. Ballard delivers a faceted paranoid story that pushes the limits of the form, Thomas M. Disch has a nice little trio, and Roger Zelazny has a beautiful meditation on supremely powerful robots attempting to find humanity. I can't remember much about the rest of the stories.

The Rightful Place of Science series is an interesting attempt at a new form of scholarly writing; short, handbook-like pieces on a single topic-energy, climate, change, or in this case, politics. They're more permanent than a think piece in a major magazine, more readable than an academic monograph, short introductions for rookies and developments.

Politics is about science policy first and foremost, and opens with a manifesto against the rather stagnant and indirect measures by which science policy is conducted in America. The lobbying efforts and rhetoric of scientific advocacy groups is all about marginal budgets--if they're growing science is healthy, if they're not, science is unhealthy. However, it is a matter of historical fact that Federal R&D expenditures closely track 10-12% of the Federal discretionary budget, and are driven more by inertia than any good idea. Likewise, the idea of the "social contract between science and society" obscures more than it illuminates. In a world that is defined by planetary limits, and attempts to work around them or near them via large technological systems, the proper governance of science and technology should be a major priority.

However, a plan for that proper governance is lacking. Science is done by human beings (to paraphrase Clausewitz), and while human beings might not notice if the aggregate budget is $240 billion or $250 billion, scientists will notice if they're working for mission-driven agencies like NASA, center-driven agencies like the NIH, or grant-driven agencies like the NSF. For a book titled "politics", major political issues involving science are entirely avoided, such as the use of scientific knowledge to settle policy questions, and the unsettlement of major issues such as climate change and GMO safety. While the book assumes a bipartisan consensus that scientific funding matters, even to Newt Gingrich's 1994 Republican wave, partisan polarization and identity politics has only grown, and scientists (who tend to cluster around major research universities and innovation districts like Silicon Valley and Route 128) are being reduced to just one part of the Democratic coalition on purely demographic grounds. This is a short book, and there are good reasons to just stick with a conventional to scientific budgets, but for the series flagship and one approaching a topic as messy as the rightful place of science in politics, I was hoping for something a little stronger, more along the lines of Allenby & Sarewitz's Technohuman Condition.

((Disclosure: I am a grad student with CSPO and know pretty much all the authors. However I paid for this book myself, and as you can see, I'm not terribly kind.))