Most Vietnam memoirs have the same structure based on the year long tour of duty: bootcamp, cherry, old salt, short, home. 364 days and a wakeup. What we forget is that going home after a year was a luxury only afforded to American troops. For the Vietnamese, far more of whom fought and died, the war ended when it ended. Their stories have mostly not been told.

Ben Cam Lai is the exception, and this is his memoir. He spoke a little English, and when he turned 18 in 1965 he volunteered to be a military translator because he'd be safer with an American unit than with the ARVN. Cam served for 6 years with the 101st Airborne, where he met the author Thomas Taylor (Taylor, by the way, is a fascinating figure in his own right. He was a Captain with the 502nd Infantry Regiment in 65 and 66, left the army and earned a Masters in Sociology at Berkeley in 68 and 69, and then went on to write books and run triathalons. His father is General Maxwell Taylor, who was Ambassador to Vietnam immediately prior to the introduction of American ground forces). Cam spent time in the field, dodging bullets on hot LZs, and then commanding the small army of intelligence translators back at base. When the Americans left, he was commissioned as an officer in ARVN and assigned to the Delta, where he was gravely wounded while commanding an infantry company. The surrender of South Vietnam brought a decade of horror and misery for Cam. He spent 5 years in Reeducation Camps, doing hard labor on a starvation diet as the Communist government exacted its revenge. Cam escaped, and spent 4 more years as an outlaw, undertaking 18 failed escapes before finally sailing a boat to Malaysia. Then it was another year or so in refugee camps, and with the help of a officer from the 101st, General Hank Emerson, ret, Cam and his son made it to America.

The human story is incredible. I cannot even begin to contemplate the strength of character it took to survive the war, reeducation camps, and years on the run. Communist Vietnam ran a program of extermination by starvation in its reeducation camps and New Economic Zone villages, which is not widely known only because of America's collective amnesia over the war, and the historical accident of being overshadowed by the Great Leap Forward and Khmer Rogue. Merely starving a few hundred thousand people on the losing side of a civil war and turning millions into refugees kinda gets lost in the clutter of people being horrific to each other.

I do have some quibbles with this book from a literary standpoint. Taylor injects his own opinions too much, rather than providing historical context. As might be expected from a memoir covering two decades and emotionally raw experiences, the thread of the story is sometimes dropped. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good book. I just feel that there's a great book in the vein of A Bright Shining Lie in the material, which doesn't quite make it through.

There was one moment in the Vietnam War FUBAR-fractal that stood out. As an officer in the Delta, Cam's unit captured Viet Cong prisoners on multiple occasions. His commander back at headquarters would order Cam to interrogate the prisoners for tactical intel and then 'convert' them--illegal executions in the field. Cam did so, since disobeying orders like that was a good way to have your commander assassinate you. Much later, he ran into his former commander in a reeducation camp and ask why he'd been ordered to execute the prisoners. The commander replied that he'd been selling his mens' weapons on the black market to these very same Viet Cong, and he was afraid if they were sent to a prison they'd inform on him. Extrajudicial killings to cover up a criminal conspiracy to sell weapons to the enemy! Welcome to ARVN in 1973.

By tonnage, mines sunk more ships in World War I than guns and torpedoes combined. They diverted submarine missions, damaged dreadnoughts, and killed Lord Kitchener. The slow industrial-attritional warfare of mines and minesweeping is a far cry from the usual milHist topic of battles and strategies, but this detailed book reveals the quiet heroism of naval mine warfare. Civilian volunteers combed the North Sea in trawlers, precisely maneuvering heavy and awkward sweeps through rough seas to clear channels for more valuable transports and warships.

This book is comprehensive, if somewhat disorganized, and well-explained with diagrams and personal accounts. It's a niche topic, but if you've ever wanted to read a book about mines in WW 1, this is a solid choice.

Broad knows what's up with missile defense. As the New York Times science correspondent during the 80s, he was close to many of the principles in various stabs at Star Wars during the Reagan administration. The prime mover was Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, founder of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the conservative doyen of nuclear scientific clientage. For all his successes, Teller had a checkered record as a scientist. The mainstream academic community had turned against him in the 1950s over his betrayal of Oppenheimer during the Red Scare. He hadn't made a major scientific contribution on the order of his Manhattan Project peers. And the public regarded him as a Dr. Strangelove-esque madman who's plans for peaceful hydrogen bombs had come to nothing.

In this climate, Teller grabbed onto the scientifically advanced bomb-pumped X-Ray laser as a way to defeat the Soviet nuclear arsenal, shield America from mutually assured destruction, and ensure his place in the history books. Theoretically, the X-ray laser could amplify an H-bomb into beams of coherent light billions of times brighter than the blast itself, shooting 100,000s of independently targetable beams at a nuclear strike. Theoretically. Engineering this thing would be a nightmare, as the whole apparatus existed for only a nanosecond next to an exploding hydrogen bomb.

Teller's optimism, vision, and passion were his greatest assets as a scientific leader, but in this case they lead to his downfall, as Teller oversold Reagan on the potential of the X-ray laser. The narrative mostly follows Roy Woodruff, the nuclear scientist in charge of the X-ray laser program, and his attempts to properly inform the Reagan administration and the public about the serious limits and uncertainties around Star Wars in the face of Teller's PR campaign and scorched earth bureaucratic warfare.

The story of Star Wars is bigger than just Teller and Woodruff, but Broad's framing is essentially correct, and provides a gripping and technically accurate account of some of the most fraught science politics in recent memory.

I'll preface this by saying that it is impossible for me to be objective about this book. As a descendant of the Oklahoma Slaners, I went to Grodno with "Cousin Felix" and the rest of his relatives when I was in kindergarten. I saw the old synagogue, the remains of the ghetto, heard the stories. So I knew I was related to this great man, and the outlines of his story of survival, but the details were filtered through years and the inevitable distortions of family legends. This is the authoritative version, in black and white.

This is really three books in one. Felix Zandman grew up in interwar Poland, in the city of Grodno with 30,000 Jews. He lived in a luxurious apartment building, owned by his Grandfather Freydovicz, a successful construction magnate. His grandmother Tema was a one-woman philanthropic organization. On his father's side, Grandfather Zandman was a poor religious scholar, married to a radical feminist. His family was a microcosm of the community, full of splintering arguments over socialism, Zionism, business, and bound together by love. It was a rich, fulfilling, world. The culmination of centuries of Jewish life.

All this ended with the Operation Barbarossa, and the Nazi invasion. (milhist note: Nazi Germany and the USSR were allies for the invasion of Poland. Grodno was in the Soviet Zone, and things got better for the Jews for a year or so). The Jews of Grodno had heard how bad things were in the German Zone, but only a few believed it and had the resources to flee. The Germans invaded, and began the "liquidation" of the Jews of Grodno, a years long horror of being forced into ghettos, arbitrary beatings and execution, and mass transportation to the death camps. Young Felix survived by the skin of his teeth, dodging random death and escaping the transports by hiding and running. When the ghetto was finally liquidated, he needed some place to hide, and remembered Janova Puchalski, a Polish woman who was the groundskeeper for the Freydovicz dachas. Felix managed to walk there, dodging patrols, and found his Uncle Sender and two other Grodno jews, Mottl and Goldie Bass. They excavated a shallow hole beneath the bedroom, and for 17 months the four of them survived in darkness, with Janova smuggling down a pail of a food and up a pail of excrement. To stay sane, Felix practiced an imaginary violin, and learned math from Sender, visualizing complex equations and geometric principles in the dark.

The hole was indescribable. 17 months of darkness, almost no motion, body parasites, and fear. Sender laid down an iron law. No sex for anyone, all food shared. These moral rules took on a very concrete reality, as the bedrock of the survival of the community. Somehow, they made it through, even when the Soviets pushed back, and the Nazis requisitioned the house. After a few days, they slipped out, managed to convince Nazi patrols they were refugees from the Soviets, and survived in another abandoned cottage till the war moved past.

Part two covers the immediate aftermath of the war. Felix and Sender lived as smugglers in Soviet-occupied Danzig, helping move refugees and guns to Israel as the Iron Curtain came up. They managed to get out, taking a trainload of refugees to France. There, Felix enrolled in the Sorbonne, making up for lost time. He specialized in optical coating for stress measurement, a technique with a wide variety of engineering applications, and eventually wound up as a consultant in the United States. He reconnected with the American side of his family (relatives of Grandma Tema's sister-my people). Felix recognized an opportunity in the electronics market for very precise, temperature-insensitive resistors, and with some funding from Alfred Slaner, set up a small electronics company, Vishay, which grew slowly on the basis of technical merits through the next few decades.

The third part of the book concerns a dizzying series of corporate deals, as Felix used leverage buyouts to snatch up distressed competitors, opened outsourcing plants in Israel, and expanded Vishay to a Fortune 500 company specializing in the whole range of electronic components. And of course along the way Felxi got married, had children, got divorced, re-married, was a witness at the trial of Gestapo Officer Kurt Weise, destroyer of Grodno, and brought the Puchalski children and grandchildren to Yad Vashem to see their family commemorated among the khasidei umót ha'olám.

Subjectively, this book is five stars for family reasons. Objectively, if you're interested in the holocaust, technology, or business, it's a good read although there are more classic books in each of these areas. Still, a fascinating biography of a man who passed through immense adversity, survived, and triumphed.

As I dimly recall from early in the Kickstart campaign, author FitzGerald said something like "I am frankly a little alarmed by how many people are contacting me along the lines of 'I teach at {Distinguished Military Staff College/Diplomacy Program}, and I'm looking forward to this book so I can assign readings that my students will actually do.'" Yikes!

As you might expect from the title, The Children's Illustrated Clausewitz is an illustrated summary of On War. FitzGerald compresses the chapters down to a few pages while retaining their essence. Her thoughts on Clausewitz's demarcation of law, theory, doctrine, and practice are worthwhile even for small pacifists. Learning to tolerate ambiguity and the contradictory constraints of the real world while still striving for general truths and excellent are key parts of growing up. And you don't have to be continuing policy by "other means" to be reminded that divided efforts are frequently wasted efforts, and that the surest path to success is to identify the key center of gravity and commit everything to it.

Unfortunately, there are so choices which I don't much care for. The book is structured as a lesson between Hare Clausewitz and his woodland friends, with their dialogue denoted in colored block letters. The woodland friends supposedly have distinct personalities and points of view, but that doesn't come through. The artwork is also... not as good as I wanted. Children's books don't have a high bar for aesthetics, but the less said about the pictures, the better. Which is a shame, because Kyle Ferrin (artist on fuzzy-woodlands-creatures-in-brutal-asymmetric-warfare boardgame Root could have done something incredible with concept.

But hey, I backed the kickstarter and I enjoyed the book.

NOVA's design goals can be summarized as follows.

1. You are a badass!
2. See point one

In the future, the sun exploded and humanity survives in cities built around fragments of the shattered sun continuously threatened by the weird monsters and hazards of The Dusk. You are a Spark, piloting a cutting edge combat exosuit equipped with a suite of powers to shine a light in the darkness. The style is incredible, with great art and design throughout.

The game isn't tactical so much as cinematic, providing a framework for badass stunts and attacks. The GM is strongly encouraged to switch up the circumstances of the fight every round, a much more cinematic option than counting squares and trying to stack another +2 to hit.

The game is simple enough to explain in a few minutes, and has enough content for short campaigns, though players looking for epic builds and lots of crunch will be disappointed. This isn't a system to be mastered so much as to be enjoyed.

Field Guide to Suldan is a fan made expansion to GOTY Lancer. Of course, "fan-made" is an unfair description for a 250 page book with gorgeous artwork and full COMPCON integration. This would easily be a $30 sourcebook if it were for D&D 5e.

Suldan introduces a planet where prior Union efforts comprehensively failed, with the previous Administrator teaming up the planetary despot. There was a coup, and the world is now wracked by rebellions and private corporate armies while under partial blockade from the faltering planetary defense grid. This is the kind of place where a small team of skilled mech pilots can make a difference. Suldan is a mishmash of gamable ideas, with a cultural heritage of mech dueling and gladiatorial combat to add to the fun. While this book does have a campaign included, there are lots of example situations that build towards a final confrontation for the fate of Suldan. But at the end of the day, Lancer is a tactical game, and I think there's a market for a book of encounters with excellent maps.

Players have an entirely new line of mechs to enjoy from Chandrasekhar & Herschel. C&H is a little less tightly themed than the other companies, and none of the frames really grabbed me. The good news is that it means that there's nothing obviously broken in there, munchkin that I am. Suldan extends the base game with new variant licenses, which give bonus systems and weapons not associated with a specific frame if you've bought far enough into one mech manufacturer. There's also a cool rock-paper-scissors dueling substem, as well as a number of interesting enemy mechs that do fill in gaps in the base game.

Blades in the Dark and classic cyberpunk are two flavors which seem like they would go great together. And yet the community loves their weird fantasy and historicals, with a paucity of cyberpunk. Well, Neon Black is the cyberpunk hack you've been looking for, deeply inspired by classic Gibsonian cyberpunk stories, and with subtle mods to the BitD core to align rules with setting.

The action is set around Prime City, a corporate controlled megalopolis in a future devastated by climate change and out of control capitalism. Your characters have a chance to fight the powers that be and build a community. Prime City owes a lot to its inspirations, but it's not generic cyberpunk: the locations, NPCs, and factions are specific, alive, and eminently gamable.

So as to the changes to base BitD. The biggest is that Stress has been replaced with Luck, and there's no downtime action to get more. Instead Luck regenerates on crits and with the engagement roll. Running out of stress hits one of four calamities, and when you've used them all your character is burnt. Playbooks are also a little more narratively fixed, with special abilities replaced with milestones that have narrative requirements as well as an XP cost. Playbook items are also limited to ones you've unlocked, making characters feel a little more resource constrained to start. And getting three action dots requires cyberware, with the Get Chromed downtime action. Overall, this isn't a game about criminals struggling to make a name in a dark underworld. It's about misfits finding a family while dancing along the edge of catastrophe.

But the real genius, from a GMing perspective, is the series of downtime scenes, moments when the community and the city changes. Scenes aren't ordered and they aren't repeated. It's not a fixed campaign, but it's all the pieces that you need to make sure you hit the game's themes.

This is just the rules, no art and minimal layout. But the rules are are well worth the price. I've checked out a lot of Blades hacks, and this is one of the finest! I can only hope that Elliot finds an artist and a publisher to elevate this game to the level it deserves.

Stealing the Sky is a fast paced heist novella in the style of Donald Westlake. In a world much like ours, but a few years more advanced in terms of private spaceflight, Starman is a very specialized high end thief, a renegade aerospace engineer who steals satellites and related gear for people who want a short cut to a space program. He's trying to earn enough to boost off this Earth.

An ordinary job has Starman also grabbing a strange orb with weird anti-inertial properties, but there's no time to study the ORB, because he's being chased by the Feds and is hired to do a job in Russia. A separatist republic wants a Soviet heavy lift booster for their own purposes, and Starman has to heist the obsolete rocket and deal with the inevitable betrayal from his employers.

Is this high literature? Definitely no, but it's an amusing diversion and well worth your dollar. The big scifi ideas with the ORB hint at a series.

Defiant is a roleplaying game about being powerful sexy supernatural nobility. It's the end of the world, and various supernatural beings (angels, devils, dragons, pagan gods) have returned to Earth. You play rebels against the apocalypse, living in cities protected by powerful arcane seals. Part of what powers the seals is living life to the fullest, so your characters party, compete, have affairs, intrigue against other nobles, and generally have a good time.


The cast of Lost Girl, my guilty pleasure show about sexy supernatural nobility

I like how the rules of the game explicitly support the premise. Your character comes with a consort and a court, of group of other nobles you can order around, and who's flaws will get you in trouble. You're also bound by the principles and commandments of your society, and the general need to advance your reputation. While you aren't at the very top of the ladder, with a Princepas above your district, house elders, and a handful of officials at the top of the city, you're powerful enough that you can't easily be pushed around, and most lesser beings have to do what you say.

Sessions are similarly structured, with court scenes at home, and then two threads, major events which change the setting. NPCs are built with secrets and an agenda. Character creation is card based, shuffling out origins and roles, and then picking options from a list for customization. The system is a simple dice pool, starting at 3d6 and bumping a dice up by one size per bonus based on applicable words on your sheet until you max out 3d10, with anything rolled over 5 being a success. A consumable resource called Shards lets you gain a bonus d8 to any roll or ask a powerful theme question to tilt the story in your direction.

Defiant is upfront about its goals and successfully achieves them. This is a game about drama and characters, and your characters are very much at the center of the story. The rules are simple and get out of the way. I've never been a World of Darkness guy, but my sense is this game is Vampire as it's played rather than as it's written, and well-refined by decades of design advances. I like a lot of the setting material, though I could have used some more guidance on what kinds of arbitrary rules are imposed from above, since it seems a major way that the play experience is shaped, how supernatural beings relate to the mortal world, and if there are any magical or occult forces characters can call upon.

The writing is a little lengthy and repetitive in places, but the player and GM advice is top notch, and while the book is over 600 pages on my screen friendly copy, the text is generously sized and easy to read. Art is modified stock photos, cast to a dream-like orange and purple blur with added supernatural elements like horns and wings, and does a solid job getting across what the game is about with consistency.

This isn't the type of game I typically play, but it's so well-done I'd consider playing it.