War stories

Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail

by Rick Newman ’88 and Don Shepperd

(Ballantine Books, 2006)

The Search for Canasta 404: Love, Loss, and the POW*MIA Movement

by Melissa B. Robinson ’84 and Maureen Dunn

(University Press of New England, 2006)

The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam: Changing Visions in Politics and on Screen

by Gordon Arnold, Ph.D. ’94

(McFarland and Company, 2006)

In his foreword to Bury Us Upside Down, U.S. Senator and former POW John McCain urges readers to “heed the lessons” contained within. Actually, Newman, a Boston College graduate and U.S. News & World Report writer, and Shepperd, a retired two-star general and CNN military analyst, serve up few lessons. Rather, they tell the story of one fleet of Air Force flyers, and especially of Lt. Howard Williams, who was shot down in 1968, leaving behind, in Steubenville, Ohio, a wife and six-year-old son. A self-taught artist who played trumpet well enough to score paying gigs at nightclubs in Steubenville, Williams volunteered for the mission dubbed “Misty” (after the Johnny Mathis song that was the commander’s favorite), a secret and nearly suicidal operation that involved flying so low above the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a pilot could be brought down by pistol fire. Carrying no bombs or missiles, their objective was to mark out enemy supply lines and then call for fighter planes to stem the flow to the south. “Every day was an asymmetric duel between men in the air [the Misty pilots] and men on the ground [the Vietcong]. They had different guns and different advantages, yet the fight was as personal as if they were facing each other with bayonets,” Newman writes together with Shepperd, who flew 58 missions with the squadron. Of the 157 pilots who served with the all-volunteer unit from 1967 to 1970, 34 were shot down. Bury Us Upside Down (the title comes from an old fighter pilot ditty) is a thrilling read, and the story stretches to portray the “peculiar torment” of loved ones like those of Howard Williams, who was finally buried in an almost empty casket in 1992, his sparse remains having been recovered the previous year. The “best and the brightest,” as the late newsman David Halberstam described the White House’s engineers of the war, are not much evident in Newman and Shepperd’s account.

But one Vietnam-era senior advisor, Robert S. McNamara, makes an iconic appearance at the end of The Search for Canasta 404, by Melissa B. Robinson, a Boston College graduate and Associated Press reporter, and Maureen Dunn, a Boston native and wife of Navy Lt. Joe Dunn, last seen on Valentine’s Day 1968, falling from his propeller plane into the China Sea, in an open and filled parachute. Twenty-seven years later during a talk at Harvard, former Defense Secretary McNamara is confronted by Maureen, who holds up a once-classified document about an Oval Office meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and his top advisors, including McNamara, on that February 14, 1968. Plane number 404 in the Canasta squadron—Joe Dunn’s plane—had just been shot down by the Chinese after straying into their airspace, and the inner circle was nervous: Ever the wonk, McNamara calculated that an effort to rescue Dunn carried a 60 percent chance of armed conflict with China. He advised against a rescue attempt in Chinese territory, even if Dunn were to be located (he wasn’t), and his position prevailed. Fast-forward to April 1995, as Maureen steps up to the microphone at Harvard and tells the man, “I just want you to say, ‘I am sorry.’” McNamara equivocates, before saying he is more than sorry; he’s “absolutely horrified,” though by what, it’s unclear. The Search for Canasta 404 (the title is a misfire, since there was barely a search) is partly about betrayal by people in power. More than that, it is a beautiful, sad, and rejuvenating story about Maureen, Joe, and the national POW/MIA movement—which Maureen, then a young mother working as a hairdresser and taking political science courses at BC, helped kindle almost three decades ago.

The book has the makings of a motion picture, which, if made, would take it into the purview of Gordon Arnold’s The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam. Arnold is a professor of social sciences at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, and in this study of media images he looks at dueling messages about the “lessons of Vietnam.” In the “contest of meaning,” says Arnold, the upper hand still belongs to John J. Rambo, Holly­wood’s Vietnam veteran/action hero portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in a trio of films beginning with First Blood (1982). Rambo’s rage against the perceived abandonment (figurative and literal) of America’s combat troops in Vietnam resurfaced in 2004 with the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who helped keep U.S. Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran turned antiwar protestor in the 1970s, out of the White House.

A child lost

Every Visible Thing

by Lisa Carey ’92

(Morrow, 2006)

At the start of her fourth novel, Lisa Carey portrays the Fureys as they were in 1975, an ordinary family with a mom who enjoys the laughter of her three small children and a dad who rings the doorbell when he arrives home from work because he thinks it’s funny to pretend he’s a visitor. The next chapter picks up their story 10 years later, in the narrative voice of daughter Lena, now a high school sophomore who begins by saying, “The first time I tried killing myself, nobody noticed.” In the intervening years, the Fureys of Brookline, Massachusetts, have imploded as a family after the loss of the eldest son Hugh, an amateur photographer who went missing when he was 15 and never turned up. Having spent three years in bed, mom is absorbed in her new life as a medical student; dad, who had been writing a book about angels tentatively titled “Every Visible Thing,” is absorbed in himself after losing his job as a theology professor at Boston College, along with his faith. Lena takes on a dangerous double life masquerading as a punk boy (this is 1985), hanging out with drug dealers in Harvard Square and searching for the truth about Hugh’s last days, seen hauntingly through Hugh’s own eyes in an old roll of film she discovers at home and develops in photography class; meanwhile, 11-year-old Owen explores his sexuality and faces life-threatening homophobia in the fifth grade. The Fureys are a train wreck, as are nearly all characters in this tale of devastating grief. I usually put down novels at a point where families begin to resemble freak shows, but Carey has a way with children’s voices; her young characters are compelling (more so than the adults) and worthy of our concern. Her graceful prose and magical turns add light to the bleakness, encouraging readers to hang in there until the end, when there is hope, there is love, and there are angels waiting in the wings.

The ancestors

Arthur and Rose: The Caponi/Mosca Union, October 21, 1915 . . . In Search of My Italian Roots

Ernest S. Caponi ’58

(AuthorHouse, 2006)

In this self-published book, Caponi goes in search of his roots in two regions of central Italy, Marche and Abruzzo (formerly Abruzzi), and he does not let genealogical research stand in the way of fun or appetite. He devotes one chapter ostensibly to finding out if he’s related to Blessed Nunzio Sulprizio, an orphaned blacksmith’s helper who was beatified in 1963, but he quickly digresses and tells of his pilgrimage to Brandi, a pizza parlor in Naples that can trace its roots to 1780. When he asks for a Pizza Margherita (named for and sanctioned by Italy’s first queen) with anchovies, the waiter tells him, “You want Pizza Romana.” Then, Caponi looks up, sees a tall man walking by, and says, “Hi, Brian.” Thus begins a chance encounter with an acquaintance from near Leominister, Massachusetts, where Caponi and his wife, Annette, have lived for 40 years. Caponi closes the chapter by saying, “We are still trying to establish whether or not we are related to Blessed Nunzio.” For Caponi, who calls this book “my fifth career” (having worked in engineering, higher education, environmental services, and manufacturing management), it was hardly all play and no work. He amassed a skein of birth, death, marriage, and immigration documents from sources including the National Archives and Records Administration and its little-known regional outpost in Waltham, Massachusetts. Documents comprise most of these 390 pages, together with items like letters between the author and his cousin Mario in Rome, written in Italian, which Caponi taught himself for the purposes of genealogical discovery. He allows that his special audience is his six grandchildren and the ones yet to come. I felt privileged to be a reader, not just because my paternal grandfather came from Abruzzo’s rugged hills, but also because I could see a profound and personal gift passing from one generation to another.

William Bole

A list of recently published books by alumni, students, and faculty is maintained at bcm.bc.edu/readerslist. Publishing houses and authors are invited to send books or book announcements to the editors.

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