Like an angry Greek god
dusk crashes swiftly on the sea
powered by a lightning rod
Hermes prophecy for all to see

Deflation of sacred cultural cows
black towers silhouetted by the sky
wars destructive force ebbs and flows
the sovereign mind rules the third eye

Procreant body fluids splash on Venus thighs
as war turns the green land fused in bloody rain
pirouetting she sails through purple evening skies
her progeny awaited in this culture of lies and pain

High society filled with impudence and self destruction
they worship self indulgence and wanton pleasure
ignore illuminists the prophecy of the volcano of sedition
caveat emptor, the revolution will plunder your treasure

The privileged and titled indulge in tasteless bling
snort cocaine, smoke cigars and binge on claret
manicured fingers pimpled with diamond rings
poisoned tongues wagging like jungle parrots

Among ice floes and the bitter Arctic snow
breeds and hunts the noble polar bear
ursus deus, he kills so his progeny may grow
sated the ivory beast returns to his lair

He is not blind but the truth can not see
society has imprisoned him on Death Row
as man conspires and plots ecological heresy
ursus deus wanders in Antarctic snow

Tread softly, vain anti-intellectuals, the die is cast
the revolution will abolish the tyranny of rich over poor
oer Mammons treasure chest a flag flies at half mast
beware the prophecy, the revolution will plunder your treasure

Antonio Pineda (2011)

In 1990 Nelson Mandela emerged, like a genie from a bottle, from Victor Verster prison. He went on to work his political magic, fashioning a rainbow nation that arcs, at times, above the murk of South Africa’s history. Seventeen years after Mandela’s release, years that I had spent trying to fathom the criminal violence that blights our democracy, I returned to that same prison. I was one of a group of writers invited by the Franschhoek literary festival to attend a prize-giving ceremony for poetry written by inmates and to spend an hour with them. At the end of the event, a shy young murderer asked me if I would come back. I said I would. It was quickly organised and I did, returning every Friday to teach creative writing to a group of 15 maximum-security prisoners.

The first time I drive out to the prison I am afraid. Afraid of what it will mean to work so intimately with the men who fill our newspapers with broken bodies and turn our dreams into nightmares. The guard waves me through the prison gates and I drive past the lawns, the beds of roses; the public face of the prison.

It is only when I turn past a stand of blue gums that I see the prison itself. It is made of mesh, a giant aviary, three storeys suspended between metal poles. There is bedding hanging from the steel bars. Thin brown hands extend through the bars rattling spoons against the mesh.

A gate opens and a group of men in orange surge towards me through a tunnel of razor wire.

“Your guys from maximum,” says the education officer who has made this mad scheme possible. They are tattooed and hard-bodied, bigger and tougher than the denim-clad juveniles coming towards me from the opposite direction.

I follow them into the gym. There are weights at one end, basketball hoops at the other. I have been allocated a corner and the 15 men I will be working with cluster desks around me. Other men – 50 or more, all in orange – file in after me. They pick up weights, watch me, ask the men with me what we are doing; only drifting off when the wardens insist.

Where to start unravelling the threads that twinned these men with me?

Childhood seems like the time in their lives that we can manage together. Glimpses of the boys they once were emerge in anecdotes of casual deprivation. A beating with a belt; a fishing trip on a boat with a father briefly sober; angry mothers with blackened eyes and too many children; school attempted and failed. For one man, though, there was a blue-and-yellow bike for his ninth birthday.

It is hard not to touch an arm here, a hand. Touch is a language that comes easily to me, but how does one speak it in a men’s prison? A headache pulses, twisting and lumping the muscles on my scalp, knotting my shoulders. I do not have a way to integrate the humanity of these men, what we share, with what they did that brought them to this place.

We take a break halfway through the three hours. I need the loo but there are no facilities for women. An armed warder leads me to a bathroom. He searches it. There is nobody hiding, but the door does not lock so he stands guard outside. In that moment, silence falls in the gym.

The workshops settle into a rhythm. I go out every Friday, we talk, we work, we write. We read poetry together. “My Papa’s Waltz”, a clean-lined beauty by Theodore Roethke, is about fatherhood and fear and yearning. For these men, there is an umbilical connection of form and subject matter. For the first time most of the men read their poems about absent, or feared, or longed-for fathers.

Then a tattooed gangster stands up and reads aloud for the first time. I suggest that he sends his poem home. Some weeks later, he tells me, his ex-girlfriend brought his six-year-old son to visit.

“I held him,” he points to his chest. “I can feel him in my heart.”

I think of that little boy who has a poem from his father telling him how he wanted to be a father to him, even if he failed; telling him that he loved him even if he did not know how. It is more than many boys have. It was more than the 15 men I worked with had.

One dropped stitch caught, perhaps, in an unravelling social fabric.

At the end of the year I had piles of handwritten stories and poetry on my desk. The paper carries with it the unique smell of the prison: a dusty grey hopelessness of lives turned to ash. It turns the stomach, but working with these men has helped me understand why South Africa is so violent. It also taught me to find a connection between those we discard through fear, through revulsion at what they have done, the families they have shattered, the violence they perpetrate.

The only path open to many township boys is so hard, so brutal that it annihilates the young and vulnerable self, the “bud” self, if I can call it that, that desires community, family and love.

Rashied Wewers, the oldest man in the class, wrote this for me as a farewell note:

I am

A book with a damaged cover, but what is

Written between the lines could save a country

From a disaster.

Margie Orford is a crime writer, journalist and film director. This article first appeared in the Guardian on 16 May 2010.

Introduction

Has an important source for your book lied to you?

If the answer is yes, and the book is published, then what happens? Ask Charles Pellegrino.

Charles Pellegrino’s “Last Train from Hiroshima” was receiving rave review and racing up the amazon ranking like the bullet train. Then the publisher, Henry Holt Company, pulled the plug and announced it was recalling the book as if it were a runaway Toyota. The reason was that the one of the sources may have been a fraud and another “character” in the book might not have existed. A non-fiction book which has built a story structure based on what turns out to be an imposter, is no longer non-fiction. It becomes fantasy. This has to be an author’s worst nightmare. His source material is tainted. His publisher is demanding an explanation and the author fails to satisfy the publisher as to authenticity of his sources.

The case is right up dark alley of the International Crime Author’s Reality Check. As a group, we have our radar out for reality lapses.

“Last Train from Hiroshima” is a non-fiction book. It is supposed to be based on fact. The stuff that happened was supposed to have happened. The characters involved were supposed to be actual people who lived through and participated in World War II. It was supposed to debunk the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. One of the author’s sources turned out to be an imposter.

The press had a field day with the circumstances surrounding the writing of the book, the author’s response to questions about his research, and the publisher’s dramatic decision to withdraw the book. Not to mention that James Cameron optioned the book for a major Hollywood film.

The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/books/09publishers.html

The Telegraph (UK): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7361952/Hiroshima-book-pulled-from-shelves-over-doubts-about-sources.html

The Mercury News: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14498194?nclick_check=1

I asked veteran author Bob Bergin to give us his views, based on his research experience. Bob is the right author to talk about these matters. For years he’s researched material for a number of books about the World War II Flying Tigers and has interviewed many of the survivors of that small group of pilots. He has first hand experience about talking with people who participated in events that happened sixty years ago. Bob has also come across some imposters.

In the essay below, Bob shares his experience of the difficult research stage that all writers must proceed through and what dangers to look for on the way.

————————————————————————-

On Being Duped by a Source:
Thoughts on Interviewing Airmen – and Anyone Else

Bob Bergin

Christopher Moore and I both like a good war story – particularly when it’s told by a man who was there. When Publisher Henry Holt pulled back The Last train From Hiroshima, it quickly got our attention. A source told untruths to the unfortunate author – and the author built a good bit of his book around them.

Now that is an awkward thing to happen – and happen it does. It could happen to any one of us who does interviews. It makes one think. Can a writer protect himself from being had? And how does an author keep from becoming a dupe? I think there are two ways: one can be lucky, or one can go into an interview prepared.

The interviews I’ve done over the years have involved a variety of military types, but in my earliest efforts I was a specialist of sorts – and that taught me something.

My focus was the American Volunteer Group (AVG) Flying Tigers. Fewer than 100 pilots and 200 support personnel comprised the group. They existed as a combat unit for only the first seven months of World War II. In that time they were credited with destroying 297 Japanese aircraft in the air and another 150 “probably destroyed,” which makes the AVG Flying Tigers one of the most effective units in the history of aerial warfare.

I had an affinity for the Tigers from my earliest youth. They were a colorful lot, rowdy on the ground, exceptionally effective in the air. And they operated in the skies over Burma, Thailand and southwest China, the part of the world I would become much involved with. Through one of those quirks of fate, I found myself involved with a Thai aviation foundation when it came across the only wreckage ever found of one of the AVG Flying Tiger’s 100 original P-40 aircraft. My long and close association with the Flying Tigers stemmed from that.

By the time I did my first formal interview of a Flying Tiger I already knew the group well. I had arranged their visit to Thailand to see the P-40 wreckage, joined them on two trips to China and attended their reunions. Two of the pilots lived near me and became good friends. When an editor suggested a formal interview of one of them, I had already heard all the stories and read their history – several times. But for that first interview I did a lot more reading. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about the man I would interview. When I started asking questions, I wanted to know as much about his AVG career as he did.

I may not have reached quite that stage, but knowing as much as I did, made that first interview a reasonably smooth process. That was the way to go, I decided, and from then on, solid preparation preceded any interview I did, be it of airman, soldier, or spy.

All the Flying Tigers I knew had good, vivid memories. The events we talked about had taken place 50 years before, or even longer, but there were few problems. A forgotten name or place was no big deal. It was misremembered situations that I had to be careful of. One pilot told of strafing passes he made during a raid on a Japanese airfield. Years after he was gone I located the combat reports of that day. Under “ammunition expended,” he had written: “none.” He had flown top cover and was not one of the shooters. There was no intention to deceive, I’m sure of that. He said what he believed. He had been on many raids and his mind had probably transferred the vivid details of one raid to another. But there were few instances of that.

Looking back, the AVG interviews were easy. I was dealing with known quantities, the real McCoy. But there were others out there: impersonators, fabricators, the ones who wanted to be Flying Tigers. I met one of those only once, at an air show. He was regaling some young people with his tiger tales, but vanished quickly when he learned that I had a bit more knowledge of the AVG than those to whom he usually told his stories.

I was well into my relationship with the AVG, when a friend passed me a paperback, China through the Eyes of a Tiger. “Must be one of your friends,” he said. “Do you know him?” The author’s name was not familiar. He could have been a pilot with the 14^th Air Force, I thought. They came after the AVG, and were also called Flying Tigers.

I started reading. The book purported to be an account of an AVG Flying Tiger pilot. It took only minutes before I was sure: The man was a fraud, not a Flying Tiger. It’s hard to describe, but given my familiarity with the real tigers, what this man was saying simply did not feel right. This was not the world of the Flying Tigers I knew. His was a different reality. And I suddenly realized what I had. I had heard about him so long before, that I had already forgotten: Captain Incredible!

Captain Incredible first came to prominence in 1990, after he started selling his book. One of the AVG pilots, R.T. Smith wrote an expose for a popular aviation magazine. Captain Incredible was a veteran, and he had served in China, but he was an enlisted man, not an officer, and he had never been a pilot or in any way associated with the AVG. Yet here he was, claiming to be an AVG pilot, to have shot down at least four Japanese aircraft, and probably seven more – and he had the chest full of medals to prove it. He spoke at VFWs, schools, air shows and other venues to which grateful citizens frequently invited him and where he sold his book. After he was exposed he didn’t go away. He ducked under the radar and continued with his book selling and speaking engagements. A second expose, a lengthy newspaper article in 1999, got considerably more attention and apparently finally did him in.

Captain Incredible was a charming and convincing man, so much so that no one ever bothered to check his credentials. Even in years gone by that would have been easy enough. In today’s world of the internet, it’s unforgivable.

But I never crossed paths with the Captain. My interests in aviation expanded and I went off to do other things: to Burma to explore a mysterious shoot-down of a World War II bomber on the Thai-Burmese border in 1961; to China for the first interview of a Korean War era Chinese Mig ace, and much more recently to interview the pilot who dropped China’s first h-bomb. Investigating the fate of two AVG POWs in Thailand, I became interested in what happened on the ground in WWII’s China-Burma-India theater. I focused on the operations of the Free Thai and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). It was a series of new worlds, each requiring a lot of research before I felt competent to do interviews. But that was all part of the fun. And somewhere along the way I met the Me 262 thief.

An acquaintance who knew my interest in aviation history told me he had met someone I really had to talk to: an American WWII pilot who had been shot down over Germany, then stolen a German airplane to get back to friendly lines. The airplane was a Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter. Now that was worth a telephone call.

My prospective interviewee was eager to tell me all about it. He had been attacking an airfield when his aircraft – a twin-engine P-38 fighter, as I recall – was hit by ground fire. He bailed out and reached the ground unobserved. Realizing he was close to the airfield, it struck him that he might just be able to steal an airplane to get back to friendly lines. And indeed he found an unattended Me 262. He had never seen one of these before, but from briefings he knew they existed. He managed to get into the aircraft, took off and made his way back to friendly lines – concerned all the way about being shot down as an intruder by Allied aircraft. But of course he wasn’t. This was the first example of the Me 262 to fall into American hands.

I didn’t know much about Me 262s, but after hearing him out, I said the first thing that came to mind: “How did you even know how to get the engines started?” A jet would have been so different from the piston engine aircraft he flew.

“Ah, well,” he said. “I can’t tell you. That has to remain secret.”

I replied to that with an astonished, “What?”

“When I was debriefed back in England, I was told that knowledge of this new airplane had to be restricted, and that I could never speak of it – even after the war was over.”

“But the war was over fifty years ago,” I said, “And you have been telling people that you flew it.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t been telling the details. I can’t tell the details. They’re still secret. ”

And there my interview of the Me 262 thief ended.

I’ve had several similar, if more mundane encounters, usually with individuals who were vets with great war stories, told with great gusto, but which came apart on close examination. On the whole, the people I choose for interviews are known quantities. They’re in the history books, or otherwise well known. Often members of the same unit could confirm their legitimacy – even when clouded by the fog of espionage like the Free Thai Movement or the Office of Strategic Operations (OSS).

In the end it all comes down to knowing your subject matter – and knowing it well. Alexander Pope said it: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Beware that your incomplete knowledge could make a charming fabricator’s tale sound credible. Know your stuff, check your facts – all of which is just part of your job as a writer – and in the end you will be smarter than the bad guys.

Bob Bergin is a former U.S. Foreign Serve officer who writes about the history of aviation and OSS operations in Southeast Asia and China. He has written three novels set in Asia. His most recent, Spies in the Garden, was released in February 2010.