With so much attention focused, and rightly so, on events in Syria and Iraq, let’s not forget that there are still about 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And that Afghanistan remains a very dangerous place.
Those who regularly read this space likely realize that, but as a reminder, I pass along this message recently sent by Joe Maguire, a retired SEAL vice admiral who now runs the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which has just received its ninth Four-Star rating from Charity Navigator for being one of the nation’s top nonprofit groups.
“This recognition is sincerely appreciated because we still have much to do,” Maguire wrote.
On the morning he wrote the note, he had just signed another $3,000 check — one of SOWF’s signature donations for wounded commandos — to a 7th Special Forces Group warrant officer severely wounded in Afghanistan.
“As you know we lost a Brave SF NCO earlier in the week,” Maguire wrote. “He succumbed to his wounds and died in our Military Hospital in Germany. He was also a 7th Group Soldier. In the past two weeks the toll has been one dead and five Special Operators severely wounded and hospitalized. I don’t know if our Fallen Brother had children but we’ll find out soon enough.”
The casualty rate, said Maguire, “is evidence that our Special Operations Community is still decisively engaged in combat operations.”
The foundation received a nice boost Thursday from the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team, said Maguire.
“The Lightning honored my predecessor at the SOWF, John Carney, as their first ‘Hometown Hero,’” said Maguire. “The award came with a $50,000 donation from the Lightning to our foundation.”
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The bombs and missiles continue to rain down on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq, but still no name to the operation. Help change that. Send your suggestions to Operation Name That Operation, c/o haltman@ tampatrib.com, or for those without email, 202 S. Parker Street, Tampa, 33606. Winner will get a book from my fine collection of military books.
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And speaking of fine books, here’s one I highly recommend.
Given what’s going on in the world, I spend a good deal of time researching and writing about intelligence — how it’s gathered, how its used, whether overhead platforms are enough for the current campaign against Islamic State.
But long before there were satellites and drones and high-tech sensors that pick up electronic signals — and even before there were electronic signals to be picked up by as-yet-uninvented sensors — spies had little to rely on but good old guile, guts and the quest for glory.
Which brings me to “Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War.”
The book, by an old Philadelphia competitor of mine, weaves together the stories of female operatives during the nation’s bloodiest conflict.
As she spins her yarn, author Karen Abbott, the progenitor of a niche dubbed “Sizzle History,” also gives a pretty ground’s-eye view of the horrors of war and the resulting deprivation and desperation.
Abbott, who I first met when she was working for the Philadelphia Weekly, at the time my hated competition, presents a seamless narrative of four fascinating characters. Two supported the Confederacy, two supported the Union and all took matters into their own very able hands at a time when intelligence was amazingly ad-hoc, counterintelligence was shockingly undeveloped and men didn’t realize that women engaged in such matters.
Two of Abbott’s subjects, for instance, were society stalwarts whose sympathies, deep in enemy territory, were hardly hidden. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a fixture in the Washington, D.C., party circuit infamous for affairs with powerful Northern politicians, worked for the Confederacy in the capital of the Union. Likewise, Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy abolitionist from one of the leading families of Richmond, worked for the Union in the capital of the Confederacy.
The other two spies Abbott chronicles are no less intriguing.
Belle Boyd, all of 17, had a hot temper, was quick on the draw and shot a Union soldier in her home. She went on to become a Confederate operative, seducing men in both armies to get her way.
And then there is Emma Edmonds, who disguised herself as a man to enlist as a Union private named “Frank Thompson,” witnessing the bloodiest battles of the war and infiltrating enemy lines, all the while fearing that her past would catch up with her.
The secret of success to the book is that it is even better than the sum of its engaging parts, deftly telling not on the stories of the women, but the larger issue of the deadliest period in our nation’s history and the development of a more structured system of intelligence gathering.
Never comfortable as a strict book reviewer, I always try to reach out to the author. As the interview date approached, I raced to complete the book before our conversation. Given Abbott’s talents as both researcher and writer, it was not a difficult challenge.
I interviewed Abbot a few months back, but given the current operational tempo, I’m just getting around to the book now.
Abbott, 41, a native of Philadelphia, said the idea for the book germinated as the result of her move from Philly to Atlanta, where her husband had taken a job.
“I never thought much about the Civil War until I moved to Atlanta,” she said. “It was culture shock seeing the Confederate flags and hearing about the War of Northern Aggression. My husband was threatened by the KKK for being from New Jersey.”
(I had to explain to Abbott that down here, the world’s biggest Confederate flag wasn’t big enough, so it was taken down and replaced by a newer, bigger version, likely visible from the International Space Station.)
“I was marveling over the fact that the war is still so present 150 years later to many of these people,” she said. “The traffic was horrible and I would be stuck for hours behind cars with bumper stickers saying, ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Jeff Davis.’”
The Southern fascination with the war led Abbott to start digging into its history, especially what the women of the time were doing.
That led her to Belle Boyd, who had written a memoir of her exploits, a good deal of which was online at the University of Georgia library.
“But I didn’t want to just tell the story of one,” Abbott said. “I wanted to weave a tapestry. Get both sides. I wanted four very different women and get the cause and effect.”
The deeper Abbott dug the more she was able to not only find her four women, but also see how much their lives were intertwined. Not only did the women know many of the same people, but the actions of one had a direct effect on another.
As an avid researcher who loves digging through records, I asked Abbott about what it was like to look through the past.
“It was quite fun,” she said. “The research was relatively interesting. There’s nothing I love more than going places and looking through musty boxes of archives.”
There were some interesting lessons learned along the way.
“I was really surprised that the Union did not do more to seek out Northern sympathizers in Richmond,” she said. It wasn’t until the last stages of the war, after the Bureau of Military Information was established, that that happened, Abbott found.
Another surprise, she said, was how each general had his own espionage service that acted independently without sharing information. In some ways, that foreshadowed the stovepiping that helped the 9/11 hijackers avoid detection.
But Abbott said that “one of the most interesting insights to me was that men just didn’t expect women to wage war in any capacity.”
After letting that one sink in for a bit, we both had a laugh.
“Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy” is Abbott’s third book, cementing her role as the creator of what USA Today called “sizzle history” in a review about her first book “Sin In The Second City,” about brothels, later followed by “American Rose,” about Gypsy Rose Lee.
LIAR, TEMPTRESS, SOLDIER, SPY, was released Sept. 2 from HarperCollins.
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The Pentagon announced no deaths last week in support of either operations in Afghanistan, or those in Iraq and Syria.
There have been 2,339 U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, the nation’s longest war, and one death in the unnamed operation against Islamic State.