Sunday, September 15, 2019

Sea Stories by William McRaven

Sea Stories by retired Four-Star U.S. Navy Admiral William McRaven was an excellent book that has the subtitle My Life in Special Operations and details stories from his career.

It’s remarkable how many high profile events McRaven was involved in, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, killing of Osama bin Laden, and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from the Maersk Alabama.

Along with stories of these events, McRaven starts with his childhood as part of a military family, with his father an Air Force officer, and then Navy SEAL training after graduating the University of Texas. This part was particularly compelling reading, with the depiction of SEAL Hell Week, featuring six days of no sleep and constant encouragement from superiors to ring the bell and walk away. Out of this, don’t ring the bell was the mantra, don’t ever quit.

Additionally in the book was a number of other interesting stories, ranging from those that very well could have killed him, with McRaven thrown from a raft in heavy surf at Morro Bay, California and tearing his pelvis apart in a skydiving accident, to attempting to rescue U.S. citizens held hostage in the Philippines and searching for and finding the shattered pieces of a Navy plane that crashed in remote British Columbia in 1948. The book was a really fast read that featured some great stories, including some very much a part of the historical record.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert was a novel that felt to spend quite a while building a backstory, and which then finished very strong.

It's a first person account by a woman named Vivian Morris, who as a nineteen-year-old left college for New York City in 1940 to go live at her Aunt Peg's theater. Morris is telling her story to a woman named Angela who wrote Vivian to ask about her relationship with Angela's father, Frank. Vivian and Angela interacted first in 1971 when Vivian made her wedding dress at the request of her dear friend Frank, then in 1977 when Angela wrote to tell her Frank died, and then in 2010 when Angela wrote inquiring about the relationship, and Morris replied with the story told in the book.

The close friendship between Frank and Vivian didn't come until quite late and Gilbert wrote beautiful prose of the interactions between them. In relation to Gilbert's usage of language in the book, there were some quotes that particularly stood out...

- Reference to British Army engineers during the Great War, who used to say "we can do it, whether it can be done or not."

- Vivian's Aunt Peg upon picking her up to return her back to New York City following young Vivian's abrupt and shame-filled departure... "once I like a person, I can only like them always."

- How after Vivian's business partner, close friend, and roommate Majorie gave birth and became a single mother, the two of them raised together "beautiful, difficult, tender, little Nathan," someone who Majorie spoke of by noting how hard it was to raise him, how much she loved him and how he evidence that "not everyone is meant to charge through the world carrying a spear."

- The partner of Aunt Peg, Olive, who said to Vivian after she ran away from Angela’s father Frank upon meeting him... "the field of honor is a painful field," and "an adult can make the choice to be in that field."

- Frank's words to Vivian that "the world just happens to you sometimes, and people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can."