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Document created: 1 March 2008
Air & Space Power Journal - Spring 2008

Fiction

A Higher Form of Truth?

Dr. David R. Mets

The Art of Uncontrolled Flight by Kim Ponders. HarperCollins Publishers (http://www.harpercollins.com), 10 East 53d Street, New York, New York 10022, 2005, 192 pages, $19.95 (hardcover); 2007, 208 pages, $13.95 (trade paperback).

The Last Blue Mile by Kim Ponders. HarperCollins Publishers (http://www.harpercollins.com), 10 East 53d Street, New York, New York 10022, 2007, 320 pages, $24.95 (hardcover).

I seldom review a fictional work, and the Air and Space Power Journal seldom prints such essays. But The Art of Uncontrolled Flight is special. So is The Last Blue Mile—a sequel of sorts. Both are about the current Air Force, a main interest of this journal, and both are by Kim Ponders—a major in the Air Force Reserve. She graduated from Syracuse University, went through Officer Training School in 1989, and then served as a weapons controller, flying in the back end of an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) early warning aircraft. She did so in various parts of the world, gaining credit for combat flying time in Operation Desert Storm during the process—one of the first women to do so. Along the line, she met her husband-to-be, Bill Ponders, also an Air Force AWACS officer; they now live in southern New Hampshire with their two children. She remains a major in the Air Force Reserve and serves as a speechwriter for its chief, Lt Gen John Bradley.

The author’s first novel, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight proves successful. I have sometimes thought that novels can embody a higher form of truth than, say, biographies or histories. Many of us think that some concepts defy documentation—but we strongly hold them to be true by virtue of our intuitive judgment. Thus, a novelist can put them into his or her work, but the historian or biographer cannot because of the documentation issue—they cannot be proven in court. Clearly a better-than-average writer, Ponders nevertheless sometimes comes close to using purple prose. In this book, she writes largely from her own experience, which gives the novel some credibility, though whether it reaches the level of a higher form of truth remains open to question.

Annie Shaw, the heroine, has a tough childhood, living with a father who moves from lover to lover after her mother dies at a young age. She worships her father and has a guilt complex about her mother’s death that complicates her journey in the Air Force. An AWACS copilot, Annie is married to a good and true man—a civilian in the petroleum industry—but falls in love with her aircraft commander. In keeping with current style in the novel business, she sleeps with him on their various travels. On their combat tour, when the commander leaves the cockpit and she has charge of the aircraft, she makes a serious blunder, and an enemy missile hits the plane. After the crash landing, Annie is the last one to leave the aircraft, helping a male crew member extract himself in the process. Ponders does not polish the image of her heroine, ironically relating that both she and her aircraft commander receive the Distinguished Flying Cross even though their mistake caused the loss of the airplane in the first place. She also realistically depicts the media crush that makes a spectacle out of Annie’s medal while ignoring that of her commander. Still, the incident leads to the end of her Air Force career and her retirement to a Texas ranch with her husband. The story is not altogether fantasy, and though the Air Force has lost only one AWACS to an accident, the idea of crew members receiving decorations instead of a deserved court-martial is not limited to the world of fiction. Not very heavy, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight nevertheless makes for fair entertainment during an evening’s read.

The Last Blue Mile (the name used by cadets for the corridor leading to the Air Force Academy commandant’s office) is more substantial. Many academy graduates who read this journal will be interested in a tale about their alma mater; again, however, whether this book can lay claim to a higher form of truth than histories is open to question. In this case, Ponders finds herself more removed from personal experience (since she did not attend the academy), which limits the novel’s credibility in some ways. She spent a couple of weeks on site interviewing a number of people, including serving cadets. Clearly, she also gained a good deal of her knowledge of the institution from the press—which colors her work to some extent. She claims that the fact that she is not a graduate does not necessarily disqualify her from writing about the institution with authority—on the contrary, in some ways it may enhance her capability. Like Ponders, I did not attend the academy, but I lived on the campus for four years and can testify that she has most of the physical description of the place right (with a couple of possible exceptions: for most of its history, Fairchild Hall has not housed the superintendent’s office, and if there are mountain sheep in the vicinity, I never saw any).

The book flows quickly. Ponders seems to capitalize on her reading of newspapers, building her story around current events starting in 2003. She focuses less on the sexual-assault scandal of that year than on the religious issue that hit the headlines a couple of years later. The story builds on assumptions that the older, conservative-Republican people who had dominated the development of the academy had come under pressure from a far-right evangelist group, the Cadets for Christian Fellowship, that threatened an extreme reaction to the events of 2003. This organization had a friend in court in the person of Col Silas Metz, the vice-commandant and a rigid martinet who answered to the commandant, Brig Gen John Waller—a conservative but flexible pragmatist and the traditional fighter pilot, himself a graduate. Presiding over them both is the first female superintendent (and the first female three-star general), Susan Long—an engineer/bureaucrat still on the march for higher rank, using as her vehicle something Ponders calls “Culture for Transformation” (evidently meant to bring to mind the “Agenda for Change,” a program the Air Staff brought to the academy in reaction to the sexual-assault scandal of 2003).*

The heroine among the cadets is a Massachusetts girl, Brook Searcy—basically honest if a bit naïve. Another cadet, Paula Snowe, daughter of a senator who went to college with General Long, is not so honest and in fact emerges as the principal figure in a cheating scandal. The male cadets, for the most part, have secondary roles in the story. One, however, a third classman by the name of Bregs, indulges in Neanderthal-like hazing of the new cadets. (The depiction of him stomping his boots on a prone fourth classman over a religious issue seems unrealistic to me though.)

The book’s theme of religious conflict appears overstated—even more than in the newspaper reports of 2005 and far more than in the report of the investigators the chief of staff sent out that summer to look at the problem. Ponders makes it into a three-sided conflict with Waller arguing a principled but pragmatic approach, Metz representing the far-right evangelists, and General Long keeping a careful eye on her chances of making a fourth star by keeping a lid on the situation. Complications arise when the senator’s daughter is caught cheating. General Waller wants to apply the honor code and expel her, but Long prevents that outcome—partly for selfish reasons of promotion and partly for the greater good of the feminist cause at the national level (the senator serving as an asset in the latter).

The Last Blue Mile contains a couple of explicit sex scenes, one involving General Waller and the other Cadet Searcy, that seem obligatory in today’s novel market. Aside from appealing to the gallery, their purpose in developing the plots is a little unclear to me, especially the Waller case. As for Searcy, the circumstances of the incident seem somewhat bizarre but not beyond the realm of possibility. What happens to her certainly lies within the definition of sexual assault and date rape; furthermore, her reasoning in refusing to report the offense rings true and does help one to understand why those offenses represent the most underreported crimes in our society.

Ponders expends a number of pages on the glories of unpowered-glider flight, perhaps based on interviews, that come into play again toward the climax of the book. Our heroine-cadet, along with the senator’s daughter, goes off base to a party in which bad judgment causes the consumption of too much liquor. One of the two male cadets who accompanied them crashes a glider the next day, and the autopsy reveals alcohol in him, resulting in much grief all around.

The climax itself involves both Searcy, in an unauthorized soaring flight that endangers her survival, and General Waller, who dashes after her in a powered glider. I’ll leave it to those who read the book to discover whether he prevents her from following her classmate to the grave in a mountain crash.

What, then, are the messages of The Last Blue Mile? One, I suppose, conveys that officer education is no cakewalk. The young have minds of their own. Politics are important. Personal ambition is alive and well. Another theme suggests the existence of a built-in contradiction between the Air Force’s need for technical specialists and the requirement for warriors. Still a third implies a need for an honor system—one not always observed (at several levels). Maybe one can capture all of this in the idea that an eternal conflict exists between traditional values (some of which are valid) and modern ones (some of which are also valid). Unhappily, the author’s tendency to lapse into diverse descriptive excursions that do not seem to have a direct connection to the development of these messages detracts from the work.

Why should a warrior-scholar bother with this novel? Granted, it offers an evening’s entertainment. But beyond that, academy graduates will not find much that is new to them and will also judge parts as unrealistic—not a higher form of truth. Those who did not attend should exercise caution because of the novelist’s need to exaggerate in order to build drama—and to use popular stereotypes to do so (also not really a higher form of truth). Ponders’s first book, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, is preferable because it more closely reflects her own experience. Readers seeking a realistic view of the academy would do better with a history such as George Fagan’s The Air Force Academy: An Illustrated History. Although a coffee-table book and somewhat dated, it ­nevertheless offers proper documentation and a candid treatment of such events as the cheating scandal of 1965 and the integration of women. Those seeking entertainment along with military insight should consult the huge list of military fiction that would provide more help than the present work. C. S. Forester, a favorite of mine (Captain Horatio Hornblower, Sink the Bismarck, etc.), covers more than the naval aspect of things. The American Civil War offers a great set of works—Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, for example. Readers who want fiction that involves airpower need only turn to World War II, which yielded a vast, worthy literature—such as John Hersey’s The War Lover. In the end, though, one must conclude that there is no higher form of truth—higher truths perhaps, but all views, whether from the likes of Ponders or Fagan, can never be more than approximations of the truth. Again, we recall the blind men, sent out to examine and report on an elephant, who produce different descriptions—all of them true and none of them the whole truth. Some are better approximations than others, but none are perfect. In their study of war, aspiring air warriors can only hope to make their professional reading program inclusive by studying as many diverse descriptions of war as possible, thus moving their own approximations a little closer to reality.

*The real-world Air Force currently does have a female lieutenant general, Terry Gabreski, but the academy has not yet had a female superintendent.

Contributor

Dr. David R. Mets (USNA; MA, Columbia University; PhD, University of Denver) is a professor emeritus at Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies and a military defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He studied naval history at the US Naval Academy and taught the history of airpower at both the Air Force Academy and West Point. During his 30-year career in the Navy and Air Force, he served as a tanker pilot, an instructor navigator in strategic airlift, and a commander of an AC-130 squadron in Southeast Asia. On another tour there, he was an aircraft commander for more than 900 tactical-airlift sorties. A former editor of Air University Review, Dr. Mets is the author of Master of Airpower: General Carl A. Spaatz (Presidio, 1988) and four other books.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University

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