Book Recommendation: Drift

I'm currently reading Rachel Maddow's Drift, which I've wanted to read since it was published earlier this year. I even bought a copy with an Amazon gift card I received for my birthday, but it languished on my bedside table while I re-read Jane Austen this summer and then read 24 YA books for my YA literature class. It's not a particularly sad book (unless you consider the systematic dissolution of every structural, legal, and legislative impediment to war in the United States to be sad), yet at one point I found myself with tears in my eyes.

I realized the culprit was the following sentence fragment: "...and thanks to public relations triumphs like the Bush administration sparing us the sight of the flag-draped caskets of dead American soldiers deplaning week after week at Dover Air Force Base...the American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars" (Maddow, 2012, pp. 206-207). More specifically, it was the vision Maddow conjured of dead American soldiers being flown into Dover AFB. It's a sad image, but that's not what struck such a chord with me. No, what moved me to tears was the connection I drew between Maddow's words and a fact I just learned about my late grandfather.

My paternal grandfather was career Navy; he's even buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was a pilot. Later in his career he was a flight instructor, but he flew bombers in World War II and Korea. He mostly flew cargo planes during Vietnam. I've known all of this for years; what I just learned was that his cargo planes were flying in and out of Dover. According to my dad and aunt, he never told anyone that he was flying dead kids into Dover, but my grandmother could tell. How could she not? How could such an assignment not take a toll on anyone?

I'd never paid much thought to how those flag-draped caskets get to Dover AFB, but now I don't think I'm going to be able to see a picture of them without thinking about the flight crew that got them there.

I have not finished the book yet, but I feel very comfortable recommending it. Maddow makes her argument in a very compelling way. Some readers won't appreciate her argument, but I believe one of her goals in publishing the book is to inspire national debate about America's war-making capabilities.

Maddow, R. (2012). Drift: The unmooring of American military power. Crown Publishers: New York.