Boydmania

Air & Space Power Journal, Fall, 2004 by David R. Mets

Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

PITY THIS POOR reviewer! Idiots rush in where apostles fear to tread. In response to another reviewer who took issue with his view of Col John Boyd and the latter's acolytes, Robert Coram writes, "As the author of seven novels and three nonfiction books, I know better than most the truth of the axiom, 'A book is like a mirror. If an idiot looks in, you cannot expect an apostle to look out.'" (1) Here I reject the company of the apostles and rush in to review Coram's book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. (2)

The 10 books Coram offers as his credentials for expert status on airpower and war include three novels on drug smuggling; four police novels set in Atlanta; and nonfiction works on Antigua, on an Irish woman of Saigon, and on fishing. Indeed, he has a fine writing style, honed during his long experience as a teacher of writing at Emory University and demonstrated in a sensitive essay about prostate cancer on his own Web site. (3) He describes his original motivator:

   [Ralph] McGill's writing and Daddy's reaction
   showed me the power of words and caused a
   dream to stir in my breast. I was still in elementary
   school when I resolved that one day I would
   go up to Atlanta and write for the Atlanta Constitution.
   This was a lofty dream for a country
   boy. But for me and, I suppose, for hundreds of
   other young people in small towns around
   Georgia, Atlanta was a mythical place where
   anything could happen, a place where dreams
   can come true. From as far back as I can remember,
   Atlanta and the Atlanta newspapers
   were one and the same to me. (4)

I know that I am virtually alone looking into the mirror and coming away with a negative view. Coram proclaims on his Web site that he is practically buried in glowing reviews of the Boyd book. He is right. Seldom is heard a discouraging word in the dozens of reviews there. Is it possible that I am alone in my idiocy and that dozens of journalists are right? Or could it be that Coram's prominence in the world of journalism results in reviews that constitute taking care of one's own? Or could it be that the periodical reviewers value writing style above substance--perhaps very few of them have any expertise in airpower and war anyhow? (5) Or could it be only the power of the publisher's marketing machine? Woe is me; when I gaze into the mirror that is Coram's book, I see many impressive things. But I don't see anything at all in the way of experience, education, or research and writing that would yield expertise on either war or airpower. Perhaps it is only another "mirror crack'd" wherein the imagination runs wild.

The book's subtitle, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, is neither the last nor the most extreme of the wild superlatives, undocumented assertions, or purple prose one finds between its covers. One of the grossest examples occurs on page 74, where Coram declares (without a footnote) that "inside flight ops [at Nellis AFB, Nevada], as the [fighter] pilot filled out the paperwork, bomber pilots or transport pilots looked over and saw the [Fighter Weapons School] patch and the black and gold checkerboard scarf and their manhood shriveled." I spent more time on flying status than did John Boyd--briefly as a "light bomber pilot" and later as a transport pilot--but I never noticed that phenomenon. In fact, since the last time this light bomber pilot filed out of Nellis flight ops, he has fathered three more children. Coram's naive acceptance of foolish aircrew banter alone is enough to disqualify his book as a serious study. But let us note one more example: "This all boils down to one thing: Marines are utterly contemptuous of the Air Force." (6) That statement is insulting to both the Marine Corps and the Air Force. Upon his recent retirement, an Air Force colonel--one of my most distinguished colleagues at Air University--was hired to teach at Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia. And this is only one of the many instances of the mutual respect that exists between the two services. (7)

Coram and Boyd's other biographer, Dr. Grant Hammond, the object of the former's angry defense cited above, share a number of traits. (8) Both of their books are hagiographies although Hammond's is less extreme, and its author, who actually knew Boyd, has more background in the airpower world as a professor at the Air War College. Both seem to indulge in the common literary device of increasing the sales appeal of their stories to editors and customers by setting up a David (Boyd and his acolytes) to slay the Goliath (the Air Force establishment and numerous unnamed careerist generals). Nobody ever got rich by saying the US government did a pretty good job. Hammond, for example, has been known to appear first in the postwar markets with such pieces as "Myths of the Gulf War" that focus on what Goliath did wrong. (9) I therefore use the same technique to discuss the "myths about John Boyd, his acolytes, and the military 'reform' movement" of a quarter century ago. (10) (Don't get me wrong. Anyone who can survive many years of flying in the F-86 and F-100, including ejections, cannot be all bad. What I see in the mirror crack'd has less to do with Boyd himself than with his biographers and acolytes.)