Let me set the record straight

When my May 4 column about the murder of two students in a classroom at UNC-Charlotte was published in the Wilson Times, a reader commented on the Times' website by saying I obviously was not a veteran and knew nothing about the military.

It was irrelevant to the column, but I am a veteran, having proudly served in the U.S. Coast Guard for more than three years of active duty. Those years were among the most important in my life, giving me the honor of serving with some extraordinary individuals and learning far more about life, leadership and obligations than I had ever imagined.

I am proud of my service, but apparently what irked the commentator was that I objected to the recent trend of calling everyone who ever served in uniform a "hero." Wearing a uniform does not make you a hero. Serving your country, answering your nation's call does not make you a hero. It makes you an obedient, forthright citizen willing to sacrifice time and opportunities to serve the nation.

The real heroes are the ones with a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, a Distinguished Flying Cross, or other decorations signifying bravery beyond the call of duty.

I'm no hero, but I am a veteran, and I'm proud of my service. Just so you know.

Wouk's accounting of World War II lives after him

This post was first published in The Wilson Times May 25, 2019.

Herman Wouk died last week just days from his 104^th birthday. That’s exceptional, but what is extraordinary is the fact he was working on another novel when he died in his sleep.

Still working at his craft at 103! I was amazed to find out from a news article a few years ago that he was still writing well into his 90s. Writing fiction is not a physically demanding occupation, but it is a challenging, difficult and exhausting calling, especially to be writing with Wouk’s attention to detail and development of credible, memorable characters. A fiction author juggles multiple characters, avalanches of emotions, wholly invented scenes, and, often, a background of historical events. It’s a real challenge for even a youthful brain to keep all these matters straight. Imagine what it would be like for someone in his 90s.

It was Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of World War II, “The Caine Mutiny,” that first intrigued me. Wouk took his experience as a junior officer on a minor ship in the Pacific theater and turned it into a thrilling, intriguing novel examining personalities and relationships. Its naval setting had a special appeal to me as a former Coast Guard officer. From the Caine, I went on to “Winds of War” (1971) and “War and Remembrance” (1978).

Those two novels, which together comprise nearly 2,000 pages filled with historical and fictional characters, follow the adventures, difficulties and tragedies of the Henry family. At the beginning of the first novel, “Pug” Henry is a Navy commander assigned to a desk job in Washington. By the end of the second novel, Henry has earned the rank of admiral, has been involved in every theater of World War II, from London to the South Pacific, and has met Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. That would seem impossible in the hands of many authors, but Wouk’s narration dissolves doubts.

My illustration of how captivating a good book can be goes like this: My last act before leaving for a new job in a new city was to return the Danville library’s copy of “War and Remembrance.” One of my first acts of my first day in Wilson, our new home, was to go to the Wilson library, get a library card, check out “War and Remembrance,” then find the page where I had left off days before.

For a number of years, I have owned my own hardcover copies of the two novels, and I reread them not long ago. They hold up well; I was captivated all over again. Just as Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” has been called the best history of the Napoleonic Wars, I think Wouk’s two novels give readers the most comprehensive report of what World War II was like for Americans. His up-close account of the Battle of Midway, perhaps the key battle of the Pacific war, is awesome and inspiring.

Wouk steps aside from his novel and lists on three pages the names of the pilots and gunners in each squadron from the three American aircraft carriers involved in the battle. From the Yorktown, he lists 21 killed and three survivors. From the Enterprise, 18 killed and 10 survivors. From the Hornet, 29 killed and one survivor. Each name is accompanied by the flyer’s hometown, showing how widespread was the cost of the war in American lives. In only a few minutes of combat on June 4, 1942, they stopped Japan’s plan to rule the entire Pacific.

Anyone who prefers fiction over non-fiction and seldom reads histories, will find Wouk’s account of World War II too scintillating to put down while also providing intriguing details about the war and the people who fought it. Wouk makes FDR come alive with his expressive, eternal optimism and his cheerful friendliness. In my reading of biographies and histories of the fictionalized characters, it appears that Wouk has fairly captured their roles and personalities in these novels.

One subplot in both novels is the Holocaust. The girlfriend, then wife of one of the Henry boys spends hundreds of pages looking for a way to escape Nazi Germany’s “final solution.” Through her eyes, the reader sees the cruelty and the happenstance of the Nazis’ mass murder machine.

To make history close and intimate, to honor the courageous airmen of Midway, to show Nazi cruelty as repulsive and random as it was takes an extraordinary writer. Herman Wouk has captured the facts of World War II and shown them to readers better than any author I can think of, better than Norman Mailer (“The Naked and the Dead”), Joseph Heller (“Catch 22”) or Kurt Vonnegut (“Slaughterhouse Five”).

An obituary I read said that perhaps the most amazing thing about Wouk’s literary record is that at the time of his death, all of his books were still in print. An Amazon search listed 17 books by Wouk, including less known novels such as “Marjorie Morningstar,” “Youngblood Hawke,” “A Hole in Texas,”and “Beneath a Scarlett Sky” as well as two theological books about his Jewish faith.

Maybe the next Wouk book I should read is “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-year-old Author.” Something more to aspire to.

Board of Elections Democrats cast their vote

This post was first published in the Wilson Times May 18, 2019

Events this week have made it clear that it’s party affiliation (or even suspicion of partisanship), not competence, that matters in North Carolina government. On Monday, the recently reconstituted State Board of Elections summarily fired its executive director, Kim Strach, and replaced her with a reliably Democratic director, Brinson Bell.

The vote was 4-3; four Democrats voted to oust Strach, a veteran investigator and administrator, who is registered as an unaffiliated voter. Three Republicans on the board opposed Strach’s ouster.

It was Strach who investigated malfeasance in office by former Speaker of the House Jim Black, former Commissioner of Agriculture Meg Scott Phipps, and former Gov. Mike Easley, all Democrats. She proved herself to be a thorough and tenacious investigator and a protector of North Carolina’s voters. More recently, Strach led the effort to uncover a surreptitious and illegal absentee ballot scheme in the 9^th Congressional District, which resulted in the nullification of the 2018 general election vote and nationwide headlines leading to a do-over election this year.

Apparently some Democrats had been lying in wait for the opportunity to pay Strach back for the party’s embarrassments of the Black, Phipps and Easley cases. All three of the Democrats Strach investigated are out of politics, and all three paid the price for their misdeeds. Strach caused some Republican embarrassment last year in the 9^th District, where the leading Republican candidate hired a consultant known for his ballot stuffing work. She resisted GOP pressure to back off the investigation of the absentee ballot scheme.

You would think that both Democrats and Republicans would welcome anyone who could get to the bottom of crooked politics and punish the perpetrators, thereby improving the reputation of public officials.

But that’s not the way politics work in this state in the 21^st century. The GOP leadership in the General Assembly made it clear that they would up the ante on the usual “spoils” system of electoral politics. With a veto-proof majority in both chambers, Republicans attempted to redefine the role of governor, stripping the state’s highest-ranking official of most of his traditional powers. Republican leaders decided they should take over the governor’s appointment powers for state boards and commissions, including the State Board of Elections. Even former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, along with other former governors, opposed the GOP legislature’s power grab. A long court fight ended with restoration of the former rule that the SBOE would have a majority of members of the governor’s party. That led to Monday’s vote to fire the state’s most successful and recognizable elections official.

Less than 50 years ago, when the Democratic Party dominated state politics, and the Democratic primary was “tantamount to election,” the spoils system was not as blatant. Each new Democratic governor got to appoint his supporters to various boards and commissions and oust the former Democratic governor’s cronies, but there was not the rancor that has taken over the simplest decisions of today. One-party rule was not a vibrant democracy, but the gerrymandered super-majority in the legislature has not been an improvement.

As another national election approaches, North Carolina voters should have confidence that the people in charge of elections are acting in a fair, non-partisan manner to protect their sacred right to vote. The public must have confidence in the outcome of elections. The widely condemned firing of Strach, whom SBOE chair Robert Cordle (a Democrat) praised for doing an excellent job, tells voters that party labels matter more than accomplishments.

Monday’s vote didn’t need to happen that way. If Democrats on the State Board of Elections had viewed the elections director decision as a test of good governance and protection of election integrity, rather than an opportunity to slap down the opposing party, they would have kept Strach as director of elections.

President Trump wages war against news media and is winning

This post first appeared in the May 11 Wilson Times.

In my 33 years as a newspaper editor, I became accustomed to people complaining about press coverage or the “Mainstream Media,” a phrase popularized by Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, as if the media (a plural noun) were one massive news organization promulgating one-sided views of the world. Instead, it was (and mostly still is) a variety of thousands of news outlets in cities and small towns across the country.

Although newspapers have changed drastically with big news corporations and even hedge funds buying up independent newspapers in hopes of making profits by consolidating production, cutting jobs and reducing pay, most smaller papers (about as “mainstream” as you can get) are still largely independent.

So it came as something of a surprise to me to read in a column by Charles Blow of the New York Times cite this statistic: “A Quinnipiac University poll last week found that Republicans say 49 to 36 percent “that the news media is the enemy of the people. Every other listed party, gender, education, age and racial group says the media is an important part of democracy.”

This tells me that President Trump’s strategy of crushing the news media, regardless of what the First Amendment says, is succeeding. Trump has attacked the news media and news reporters viciously and repeatedly since he began his presidential campaign in 2015. He calls reporters “the enemy of the people” and gets away with it. He tells his followers that you can’t believe what you read or hear in the news. His followers are so loyal that I have to assume they don’t believe weather reports or details of new laws state legislatures or Congress passes or reports of forest fires or wars. It’s all “fake news” until they read about it in a tweet from their leader.

Trump seems determined to undermine the First Amendment. He wants the public to distrust the news media. He wants to limit the ability of news organizations to report on his administration. He has banned certain reporters and certain organizations from press briefings. He has threatened to launch a federal investigation into “Saturday Night Live” because it has mocked him. He has said he wants to change libel laws to make it easier for political figures to collect damages because of honest errors or disputed facts in news reports.

Trump has succeeded at least this far: A poll last year found that 43 percent of Republicans polled agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” When the president can shut down news outlets, there is no freedom of speech or of the press.

The Founding Fathers had a reason for including a free press in the First Amendment. They knew that the new nation’s future depended upon an informed electorate who would choose wisely based on a diversity of sources. A free press allows anyone to report on what they know or have witnessed.

Freedom of the press is an extension of freedom of speech. Editors and publishers have avoided special protections for the news media, depending instead on every citizen’s right to be informed through public records laws and open meetings laws. Notice that when an authoritarian regime takes power, one of its first moves is to shut down all independent news organizations, thereby limiting the information the public receives to the information the government wants the public to have. This strategy has been used in Bolshevik Russia, in Nazi Germany, in Franco’s Spain, and more recently in Iran, Egypt and other authoritarian countries.

Knowingly or not, Trump is following the playbook of oppressive regimes, and at least some American citizens are following along.

Hal Tarleton is a former editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

Not all heroes wear uniforms

This post originally appeared in the Wilson Times May 4, 2019.

             Remember this name: Riley Howell. A college student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Howell was in his classroom Tuesday afternoon when a former student barged in and began firing his handgun at students. Instead of sitting, paralyzed by the incongruous scene in the classroom, Howell ran at the gunman, tackling him.

            Howell died for his effort. The gunman shot him, point blank, and killed him. He was 21 years old. Another student was also killed, and other students were injured.

            Howell is being lauded as someone who always wanted to help, who would always put others first, who would rather be hurt himself than to see others hurt.

            The gunman, whom I will not give the dignity of a name here, faces two murder counts and other charges. His motivation seems vague. He told police that he just went into the classroom and started shooting guys.

          There is little doubt that Tuesday’s shocking news would have been far worse without Riley Howell’s heroism. He turned what might have been a massive death scene into a tragedy that could have been far, far worse. Courageously attacking the gunman, Howell knocked him off his feet and gave law enforcement additional moments to respond to the “active shooter” alert.

            The National Rifle Association likes to say that a “good guy with a gun” is the best defense against mass shootings. How much braver is it for an unarmed hero to attack an armed maniac? Maybe what you need is a good guy or two, even without guns. Remember the brave good guys on Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001. They rammed their way into the hijacked cockpit of the airliner and disrupted a plot to crash the aircraft into the Capitol or the White House.

            Let us applaud the heroes like Riley Howell and the passengers of Flight 93. America loves heroes so much that some people call anyone with a military service record a hero, although most veterans never faced hostile fire. Those who did, who attacked a machine gun nest or risked their own lives to save comrades under fire, have earned the title of hero. So has Riley Howell. He won’t win the Congressional Medal of Honor, but he is a genuine hero who deserves recognition and memorialization.

            Shootings like the one in Charlotte or any of the dozens of others over the past few years raise the question of why do young American males, mostly white and “privileged,” feel a need to shoot someone with a gun whenever things don’t go their way. “Something went wrong, so I gotta kill a bunch of people” seems to be the twisted logic of the mass killers.

            Where does this come from? From overly permissive parents? From video games featuring gunfire and other awesome violence without consequences? From an epidemic of mental illness? From society’s cuddling of children against disappointments or failure, all in the name of “self-esteem”? From the crumbling of moral standards?

            Whatever it is, we need to study the problem, study the offenders and figure out how to prevent these horrific acts. We don’t have enough heroes to stop all the killers.

Hal Tarleton is a former editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.