The Palace File is an investigation of the end of South Vietnam from an internal perspective, written by Hung, a professor at Howard University and economic advisor to President Thieu, and Schecter, a veteran American journalist. The Palace File was a set of 31 secret letters between Nixon, Ford, and South Vietnam's President Thieu, pledging massive American support when necessary after the Paris Peace Accords. Even after the withdrawal of combat troops, when South Vietnam needed assistance, help would arrive; for American honor, for the blood of the dead, for the bravery of the South Vietnamese anti-Communists.  And as we know, as the situation collapsed in 1975, that help did not come.  With PAVN armored divisions moving in all from all sides, and ARVN in full retreat, President Ford and a democratic Congress delayed and ultimately did nothing, except perhaps a half-hearted evacuation.

The first topic of the book is Kissinger's secret negotiations paralleling the Paris Peace Accords. Hung and Schecter cast Kissinger's actions as an outright betrayal of an ally, and it's hard to disagree. Four years of negotiations, done without the participation of the South Vietnamese, gave North Vietnam two key points. First, PAVN forces inside South Vietnam would not have to leave. And second, American forces would depart within 60 days. Kissinger achieved his objectives: Americans home and a decent interval before another round of aggression. North Vietnam achieved theirs's; recognition of a defacto victory. And Thieu and South Vietnam only agreed with the secret promises in the Palace File.

The more interesting part of the book concerns Hung's work in Saigon between 1973 and 1975, and the strange dream of the last years of South Vietnam. Basic material conditions were very poor. PAVN and VC forces could interdict routes between cities and the countryside at will, and it doesn't take a lot of violence to convince farmers that it's not worth going to market this year. American aid dropped from over $10 billion annually to less than $1 billion, with the military taking the brunt of the cuts. ARVN, which had learned to fight with ample fire-support and air mobility, had to do without. And yet no one in South Vietnam's government seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

Hung describes weekly all-day cabinet meetings, none of which were solely focused on military issues. Large parts of the government, including the Vietnamese Joint Chiefs of Staff, were unable to make a decision, preferring to delegate to now absent American advisors or up to Thieu (also, the JCS ended their day at 4:30, even in the midst of the final North Vietnamese offensive). Thieu, suspicious of coup attempts, kept his intentions secret and gave vague intentions to subordinates. Corrupt and ineffective officials were maintained in power because Thieu needed their political support. 

Thieu clung to the secret letters like a drowning man, but also refused to reveal them to the world until days before Saigon fell, in a press conference organized by Hung. At this point, with PAVN artillery bombarding Saigon, there was nothing to do done. There's the usual orientalist nonsense about Thieu, with his Confucian outlook, could not conceive of how America would abandon its ally and its promises. I think simple cognitive dissonance is a better explanation. Thieu couldn't see how bad his position was, until it all came crashing down. 

Yeah, that was definitely a Commonweal book is my first and last reaction.  We're back to wizard school again, this time focusing mainly on Zora, the least powerful and least militant of the crew from the previous book.  Which merely makes her an unbelievably powerful reality bending mage.

The initial problem is that a unicorn shows up and befriends Zora.  Unicorns around here are one of several variety of obligate manavores, bred ages ago as part of a bad scheme to make battle-magic compatible cavalry, and they are not friendly and very deadly. This one, exiled, wounded, starving, decides that Zora is alright.  Now it's up to her to figure out how to keep it from getting killed, or killing a bunch of people in return.  This involves learning the language Unicorn 4, which is a cruel and vicious tongue, and eventually figuring out how to alter the unicorn (named Pelorius, with a bunch of accents I don't care to reproduce), a more human-like alternate for and a friendlier physiology.

There's a bunch of legal and ethical debate about how much a wizard can use magic to alter a creature, how much Pelorius can consent (he can talk, even if he's entirely socially dependent on Zora), and later, whether the two of them can have a romantic relationship, but it's all very clinical.  And I have to be honest, I'm not sure how much I believe all of the high and mighty ethics of the Commonweal--more on that later.

There's also some of the usual technical problem solving as well. A failing dam is solved by the simple expedience of reaching back millions of years into the past to fix the entire goddamn landscape. Similarly, when Reems attacks again with a biological weapon, our merry band undoes the disease and death with time-like wibbly wobblies and reaching out and causes the attackers to perish by fire and direct death. Fucking with the Commonweal seems like a bad idea.

The personal drama of the book is whether Zora et al will achieve Independent status, moving much of their mind and physiology out of the physical and into the magical. The more interesting issue is that Parliament points out that even though they're students, the amount of work that the team is doing is enough to completely wreck the economy if accounted for in conventional terms, and that basically whole new branches of economics will have to be set up to manage how they interact with everyone else.

Okay, so back to ethics. The whole point of the Commonweal is that even though there are these nigh-godlike wizards walking around, they do not rule. Though everyone is bound by the Shape of Peace to be honest and not use violence or compulsions to get their way, no one is a slave, and no one goes hungry or unsheltered until everybody starves.  There does seem to be a lot of meetings and paperwork, but life is pretty good given the horrific lethality of the landscape. Yet the obliging duty to all is taken very straightforwardly, with only a little criticism. This is no The Dispossessed.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is hints that the whole Commonweal is part of a debate between Halt (spider-god, grandmotherly) and unknown entities comparable to power in Halt about how wizards and mundanes should co-exist.

I'm going to keep reading, but these two books are no The March North.

The Vietnam War was in many way a platoon and company-level war. Larger units were administrative, a battalion or division smeared across miles of jungle outposts and patrols linked by helicopters. As such, 1st and 2nd Lieutenants were primary leadership of the war.  Milam is a Vietnam veteran, one of those tens of thousands of lieutenants, and this book is a serious study of training and leadership in the field during the Vietnam War, an attempt to correct the impression that these officers were poorly trained and not up to the task, and a morally pointed, if logically diffuse, rejection of Lt. Calley and the My Lai massacre.

On the first part, as the United States embarked on an escalation of the Vietnam War, senior leaders knew that more infantry platoons would require more lieutenants to lead them. Officers enter the army in three ways. An influential but decided minority are graduates of West Point, 4 year specialists in the profession of arms.  The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) combined traditional 4-year college with military classes and summer training, creating citizen soldiers. And Officer Candidate School (OCS) picks up the best of the enlisted, and in six months turns them into officers.

As Milam explores, West Point contributed between 500 and 800 lieutenants per year to the Army, but only about 25% of these chose combat arms in Vietnam as their first assignment. ROTC enrollment dropped from a high of 140,000 in 1966 to 42,000 in 1972. OCS had to fill the gap, and could be rapidly scaled. While a man had to volunteer to become an officer, contemporaneous surveys revealed that most candidates choose to do so only under the pressure of being drafted otherwise. And while OCS expanded, Milam argues that quality was maintained: attrition was consistently between 25% and 30%. Personally, I find it easy to believe that the OCS candidate pool in say, 1969, included people who would not be in that pool in 1963. Yet there was not the wholesale abandonment of standards associated with the shameful Project 100000.  A majority of OCS graduates had some college education, and I do believe that the system as a whole did a solid job generating competent leaders.

The latter half of the book brings this notion of competence up against the realities of Vietnam. The simple fact is the much combat was on the Viet Cong's terms, ambushes and booby traps as balanced against American firepower. The infantry's job was to locate the enemy so he could be obliterated with air and artillery, and these search-and-destroy tactics were crudely executed.  Similarly, the American military comprehensively failed in its "hearts and minds" efforts. In defense of Milam and his fellow veterans, I'm not sure any military force in history could have succeeded in these missions. Jungle warfare is punishingly difficult. There is no kind or easy way to expel an entire village from its home, even if you speak the language and share a culture.

A second matter was one of maintaining discipline, the balance between grunt and gentleman. Lieutenants lead from the front, sharing the exact same conditions as their men. They suffered proportionally higher casualties.  Six month combat rotations, as compared to a full year for the enlisted, was the major benefit officers assumed, though this came at the cost of combat efficiency as new lieutenants had to learn the hard lessons repeatedly. Combat leaders were never spit and polish soldiers.  Milam argues that much of the breakdown that the army experienced in Vietnam: drugs, race riots, fragging, was a rear echelon problem and that combat troops could and did keep it together in the field.

My Lai and Lt. Calley loom over this book like a phantom. Milam regards Calley's murderous rampage as a personal stain on his honor. Officers are supposed to direct and unleash violence, and it is profoundly unfit to do so on women and children. Yet, as Browning's Ordinary Men demonstrates, massacres are never far away from the soldier. Calley bore ultimate responsibility for his choices, but he was primed by his superiors, thirsty for a body count, confident that My Lai was a VC village, and hungry for blood. Lieutenants were not responsible for the "mere

gook

" (racial slur) ideology of the war, but neither did they as a group stand against it.

As a dissertation, this book has the weaknesses of junior scholarship, but it also offers a valuable systematic examination of an aspect of the war that I've usually seen treated in individual memoirs.

Eyes of the Void definitely suffers from the sophomore slump.  It's a fine story, don't get me wrong, but we don't see much that dramatically expands on either the setting or the characters. There's a few more weird planets, the most notable being the world of Criccieth’s Hell, a radiation-bathed deathworld that contains a functional Originator ruin.

The setting continues to swirl closer to catastrophe. The Hegemony's relics no longer appear to hold off the planet-killing Architects, corruption at the center of Council of Human Interests is bringing a multisided war that will make only losers. And Idris and the crew of the Vulture God again are the best chance anyone has of figuring out what the hell is going on, and how to survive. 

The center of this book hinges on unspace. And while FTL is mandatory in space opera, there's a little over-egging of the mystery box, and what exactly it all means.

The authors make a strong, evidence backed case that roughhousing is important, and the basics of consent and safety within reasonable bounds. I'm not sure that the illustrations or descriptions of what to do help, or what to do about the key problem that my boy's endurance far outmatches mine for rough play.  I was hoping for something that'd help wear him out, and leave me standing.

Ockwell-Smith is one of the leading proponents of gentle parenting, and this short book focuses on the specific challenges of potty training. She leads off with the physiology of waste, kidneys and colon, and the development of sphincter control at about 24 months of age. Of course, physiological control doesn't mean psychological control, and learning to listening to your body and then going to the bathroom is something children have to figure out for themselves.

Some of the practical advice is good. Potty training is messy and there will be accidents, so carry spare clothes and waterproof everything. The foot supported squat is the natural excretory posture, which means little potties are probably best. Constipation is a frequently undiagnosed contributor to potty-training problems, both directly, and also because loose stools leak around the constipated mass, and the the mass presses on the bladder decreasing its effective size. Night potty training has additional challenges, as children have both uneven circadian rhythms are irregular levels of vasopressin, which suppresses urine formation in adults, and not enough experience to wake up when they do need to pee. The path is long, and there will be reversals. 

The psychological advice is where I am less convinced. I'll buy that ease is a necessary condition for potty training, and that enticement and punishment are not particularly effective. Sticker charts, small treats, big presents, getting mad, none of that works. But what do you do when you ask your kid if he has to use the bathroom, he says "No thank you", and he then pees himself five minutes later?

I know patience is the acme of gentle parenting. But my patience has limits.

The Body Keeps the Score is an absolutely magisterial examination of the role of trauma in mental health, and the necessity of healing both body and mind. Van der Kolk has had a fascinating career, getting started in psychiatry treating Vietnam veterans with PTSD in the late 1970s, and then moving through the great pharmacological and neuro-imaging transformations of the following decades into advocacy of unconventional treatments for complex PTSD.

In van der Kolk's theory, being faced with annihilation creates longstanding neurological changes that trap a person in the moment of trauma, a permanently elevated stress response that has innumerable health and social consequences. The signs of trauma are many, and range from patterns of fMRI that indicate issues with speech and memory, to signature low levels of heart rate variability, to sunken body language. 

There are many kinds of traumatic events: combat, violent accidents, but van der Kolk focuses mostly on domestic violence and sexual assault. Children are utterly dependent on their caregivers, and a shockingly high percentage, perhaps 10%-25%, are simply unfit for the role, disinterested to outright abusive. Without having a healthy relationship to pattern onto, childhood victims of trauma are set up for a life of bad consequences. Adverse childhood events are strongly associated with everything from addiction, to depression, to criminal activity as both victim and perpetrator. 

There are ways through trauma. While van der Kolk does not discount traditional talk therapy, including its more stressful exposure therapy variations, or psychotropic medication, he argues that trauma is basically a pattern of activity encoded in the body, and that the somatic signs of trauma have to be met head on. Victims of trauma have to be taught to breath and feel their own bodies before they can face their memories and rebuild trust. 

Reading some other reviews, I can see that van der Kolk has garnered a fair deal of criticism, especially for arguing in favor of repressed memories in court, and for pushing some treatments without a great deal of peer-reviewed evidence, including EMDR, emotional family systems, and theater-based therapies. Repressed memories are a complex subject. The converse, that victims of trauma accurately recall details of happened to them, is definitely not true. Emotional memories focus on some sensations, and leave context and sequence in disarray. Yet, how can we do justice when it is the word of a victim decades later against an alleged abuser? Even if van der Kolk has served as an expert witness, that judgement is outside of the scope of this book. 

But I am firmly in agreement, as someone with a PhD in the social aspects of mental health, that psychopharmacology and the DSM are simply not living up to the requirement of reducing suffering. I'm not sure trauma is the be all, but there are a lot of damaged people walking around.  And van der Kolk is persuasive in his argument, that historically from Freud forward, trauma-infused psychiatry was always slapped down when it asked the awkward question of "So who exactly is hurting these kids?"

Shards of Earth puts some twists on the standard space opera plot of "small ship and crew against the universe", and executes its story extremely well.

First, that universe. It's a supremely hostile one, defined by the destruction of Earth and many human worlds by the Architects, moon-sized entities that use gravity weapons to turn ships and planets into abstract sculpture. Two of the characters, Solace and Idris, were key to humanity's survival in the Architect War.  Idris is an Intermediary, a space wizard who can directly tap into unspace and who reached the mind of an Architect and convinced them to withdraw, and Solace is a genetically enhanced super-soldier of the Parthenon, an all-female guardian angel.

50 or so years after that victory, humanity has taken its survival and as per usual turned to squabbling. The Parethenon and baseline colonists are on the brink of war. Human worlds are defecting to the Hegemony, an alien empire ruled by possibly divine clams that claims to offer protection against the Architects.  Solace has spent much of the time in cold sleep between missions, and Idris is the navigator on the Vulture God, a deep space salvage craft.

Independent Intermediaries are extremely rare, most are slaves owned by the colonial government, and are one unique advantage the colonies have over the Parthenon.  Solace is given a mission to get Idris to join the Parthenon by any means necessary, and then Idris and the crew of the Vulture God stumble into interstellar intrigues way above their paygrade, and have to do whatever it takes to maintain their precious independence. 

There's world-building, action, some great characters, and a real cosmological mystery. One thing I appreciated was how lethal the setting is. Humans spent 80+ years running from unkillable planet destroyers, and both ships and unspace FTL travel are deeply inimicable to human existence. Life is cheap, death is always nearby, and characters standing up in a gunfight go down fast. 

Shards of Earth doesn't transcend the genre, but it does it extremely well, and I'm excited to see how the rest of the series goes.

Titanium Noir is an absolute triumph of vibes.  Cal Sounder is a private eye who specializes in a very special field: the affairs of the Titans, the tremendously wealthy, immortal, and large biomedical elite of society. So when Roddy Tebbit, seven feet tall and 91 years old, is found shot in the head in his apartment, it's Cal's job to find answers. Justice is not a thing that happens.

The noir detective is a classical liminal figure, standing Janus-faced at the boundary between civil society and the criminal underworld. Cal's liminality is doubled since he also stands between Titans and humans.  He wanders through his winter city on an alpine lake browbeating various unfriendly contacts and trying to assemble the pieces of Roddy's life and death. Nothing involving the lives of Titans is clean or easy or just, and Roddy's murder is tied up with an ancient sin of the Titans. Because the basic rule of noir is that the very powerful are also very human, and their human weaknesses (sex, dominance, oblivion, kindness) are their undoing.

Titanium Noir also follows Raymond Chandler's dictum, "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." There's plenty of violence, and fortunately for Cal he's a preternaturally gifted dirty fighter. Some of the secondary characters sparkle:  Stefan Tonfamecasca, creator of the titan process, house-sized, capable of laughing a man to pieces. Athena, Stefan's daughter and right-hand, and Cal's ex, the two of them joined by longing and separated by Cal's lingering humanity. Victor, a bar owner who runs a Titan-focused establishment where anything can happen, and does. Many of the less memorable characters have a perfectly tuned weariness and cynicism. Harkaway's dialog and description is like lightening.

Yet there's a weak spot in this book, a gap that vibes can't bridge, and that's the character of Doublewide, a criminal boss of oddly delicate temperament and trust, and also a freak of the titanization process, who became much wider but not taller. Doublewide wore out his welcome in about five pages, and absolutely fails to serve as a counter to Stefan Tonfamecasca in any narrative sense, and yet provides the vital clue that sets Cal along the path towards answers, through ancient Titan history become fairytale. 

Vibes are good. Greatness needs more.