One of the things that my friends find paradoxical about me is that I love military history, military fiction, and good war stories, in spite of the fact that I'm a liberal, dKos reading (and worse, participating) DFH. I'm usually good about putting aside the personal politics of authors of military fiction, particularly the more knuckle-dragging types like Tom Clancy.
I'm part of the Diary Rescue team, which is a great way to get exposed to a wider range of Kossack diaries. I pick time slots to read that I wouldn't normally, in the hopes of finding interesting gems. One that I found is Jeff Huber, a retired US Navy Commander, blogger, and I was pleased to discover, author of military fiction.
Wait a minute, a Kossack, a dang liburl who writes military fiction? I immediately shot over to amazon.com and bought his book, Bathtub Admirals. The book jacket says it's satire, but that's like saying that "Catch-22" is just a comedy novel.
Bathtub Admirals traces the career of Jack Hogan, from young LTJG through his retirement as a CDR. Hogan began his career as a "NFO" or Naval Flight Officer, flying in the backseat of E-2C "Hawkeye" planes, the Navy's "mini-AWACS." Knowing that there wasn't much of a future for a back-seat guy in Naval Aviation, Hogan becomes a qualified SWO, or Surface Warfare Officer. That extra studying and the extra ship duty costs him his first marriage, as the pressure to further his career during the Cold War took its toll on home life. The novel follows the now-bachelor Hogan through shore and carrier duty tours both as a SWO and as a part of flight squadrons, through an even more disastrous second marriage, culminating in his retirement as a Commander.
Huber's anecdotes on Navy life are priceless, but the overall theme of ineptitude and incompetence is what makes the novel so enjoyable. His Jack Hogan is, in many ways, the navy equivalent of Dilbert. Where Scott Adams' famous engineer is a cube-dweller in a nameless, faceless, corporate world occupied by various insane archetypes, Hogan encounters those archetypes on ships and shore bases. From "Admiral Fix Felon" (alleged to be part of an actual Mafia family) to "Senator Tailhook" (a woman senator who wanted to bring Naval Aviation down after the 1991 "Tailhook" scandal, to "Senator Ex-Prisoner-of-War" (the most blatant real-life reference, this time to John McCain), the Navy's top management and its political bosses are elegantly and humorously skewered.
Huber doesn't stop with Hogan's superiors, though. The ranks of Jack Hogan's contemporaries and colleagues also filled with characters that are worthy of Adams and Heller. From his "friend," Buzz, who more is more than willing to throw Hogan under the bus to further his own career to USNA grads with the connections and influence that Hogan, an AOCS (Aviation Officer Candidate School) officer, doesn't have, to officers who are just flat-out idiots and/or criminals, Huber's navy is indeed a "Dilbert Zone."
The theme of incompetence, while making for hilarious reading, is one that really should give us all pause. These are the men who fight our wars. We entrust them with countless billions of dollars and some of the deadliest weapons in the history of mankind. Still, many battles are, as Jack Hogan says, lost because "two of their admirals hated each other more than they hated us."
Bathtub Admirals is a must-read for fans of military fiction, and highly recommended for everyone.