Coming from a background of knowing more than average about World War II and the Air Forces involved, it is always interesting to run across a book concerning some facet which is perhaps, more overlooked. The Black Sheep is such a book concerning the marine aerial fighting squads of World War II. Though there was a TV show about the squadron who, as the book lets us know, had Robert Conrad star as the lead from the TV show The Wild Wild West most everyone agreed that it was inauthentic at best and “bullshit” at worst.
The book does not really offer us any additional consolation since one of the first quotes the reader is introduced to indecorously announces that “We are sociopathic liars.” in relation, one supposes, to the squadron. Indeed, the entire book could be summarized as “How much of this is an actual account, and how much of it is ego by any given side?” The author, Bruce Gamble, asks us to trust his scholarship on some level, and he does, it seems, try to straighten out fact from fiction. The continual problem, however, is confusion, drunkenness, the fog of war, and general chaos that leads to fatalities in the squadron in sometimes horrendous ways. Sure, there are those stories where this is not so, but the general rule in this book is a lot of guys go to be pilots and then with alarming frequency, die by some mistake not caused directly by the enemy. On the other hand, the people that are often the most reckless seem to escape with barely a nick.
The history of the squadron starts with a navy plane called a Wildcat and speaks about the birth of the “Black Sheep Squadron” out of its ashes. This former squadron is called the Swashbucklers, but dissolves at almost the same time it comes into any sort of solid existence. The military reorganizes the unit under a Greg Boyington who is one part inspirational to three parts alcoholic throughout the book. It is he who comes up with the name of the “Black Sheep” with him leading the squadron and he gets this opportunity after having previously gone AWOL.
Mr. Boyington, it seems, has some kind of death wish either in the air or by alcohol. This naturally makes him a great fighter pilot, and we learn through the course of the book that he breaks the record for his unit for numbers of kills. The problem with Mr. Boyington, however, is that he is a liar, and an opportunist who is also out to exaggerate in self-aggrandizing ways. If it were not for the war, Mr. Boyington would be, as the book he wrote about himself notes, nothing more than “A Bum”. One could say that even with the war he is STILL a bum, albeit one that gets unfairly promoted despite his less than reliable actions.
Mr. Boyington, is however, without a doubt, the glue that holds the unit together as he is 30 whereas the rest of his men are in their younger 20s. In the hell of the firefight that was Japan Mr. Boyington could lead and be a kind of hero to his unit, and so he did.
After the actual unit of the Black Sheep form, the type of plane switches from a Wildcat to the newer, fancier Corsair. Everyone has to re-learn their flying abilities in this plane, but for the most part these planes appear to be superior to the Wildcats. We learn of the conditions under which the pilots were stationed in their tropical locales, and that even when they were not taken in captivity which, if possible, provided worse conditions, everyone was miserable and sick often.
Eventually, the Black Sheep are dissolved as a unit, and we flash over to California where it is reborn with some new pilots that go aboard an air craft carrier called the Ben Franklin. Carrier landings are are new element and we learn that life aboard the ship is, as one might imagine, cramped. The ship is eventually targeted by a lone Japanese zero and because of all the ordinance it is carrying the ship explodes into a fiery furnace of death and concussion the likes of which break bones and in some cases simply “dissolve” those on board her. Here, three months before the end of the war, marks the end of combat for the unit known as the Black Sheep.
It is really hard to keep track of all those who died in this book, as often the writing style will mention a pilot long enough to kill him off in the next sentence. One supposes Mr. Gamble is trying to do the topic justice since the people reading it are going to be the people in that squadron. If he misses someone, it is likely some family is going to get angry or feel slighted. So, the solution, it seems, is to drop in certain names at certain times for their cameo before they are “played off the stage”. Occasionally a pilot sticks around long enough with other pilots that we have some sense of attachment to who they were. Most often, however, a leafing back must occur to remember who they were since the narrative of the unit as a whole collides with the people in it at any given point.
The book ends with some more of Boyington’s antics, and mentions what some of the men did after the war and tells us that the memory and participates are starting to fade. Since the book was written in 1987, it is probably true it is not better now and if anything is worse. The problem, of course, is, that the reader is hoping that the book has indicated some semblance of the truth, and of that there is no guarantee other than common consensus from other pilots and the military itself.
Boyington is credited, after returning from Japan as a prisoner in war in much better shape than other men who were taken prisoner, for his kills and is given a Medal of Honor and his life, predictably, self destructs. The book states that his life was better in prison since the Japanese kept him sober as a prisoner. The rest of everyone else? They go on to do things in various fields. What exactly is the lie? The War? Boyington? The kills? The squadron? The world? Apparently, whatever it was, it required a group of people in planes to go fight to try to “clear the air”. It is unfortunate that after that, the air promptly got stuffy again.
If nothing else, the book is an interesting read about how the Navy likely operated in World War II. Whether or not it is historically the final word, well, the jury is still in deliberations.
Stars On The Earth is almost brilliant. Richard Leviton has a knack for finding mythologies and stories that are not often told. When it comes to tables with sacred spots and different deities and mythologies, I dare say that one would be hard-pressed to find a better book than this. However, there is a massive downside.
Mr. Leviton describes something in this book that is a “wide-open” field. This “wide-open” field concerns the light grids that some believe illuminate the Earth and are the cause or the “struts” of its existence. The fact that many ancient cultures around the world built solid objects along certain lines suggests that this aspect of the book is more than a theory. That these lines also often aligned with certain stars is also factual.
Star domes, ethereal creatures, and secret galactic histories, however, are notoriously hard to determine where fact starts and fiction begins. At the very least, Mr. Leviton develops a hybrid science that is plausible in many regards.
However, the area where Mr. Leviton fails terribly is at the point he tries to convince or insist that Lucifer is just a misunderstand angel along with all the giants that used to roam the planet. In his version of events, apparently, Lucifer is an “okay angel” that really is all about making a “beautiful sacrifice”. Of course, one of his “grid line events” happens five days after 9-11 in Tennessee, and one wonders if that was also one of those “beautiful sacrifices” Lucifer is somehow implicated within. Mr. Leviton makes no connection between that, and the fact that Tennessee is also home to people with political power who might have had direct bearing on how the events of 9-11 unfolded and “all the dead trees that look like evil has destroyed them” in the area of Tennessee he happens to be pondering and observing.
He also mentions that the Cherokee Indians believed in a group of astral bears that lived in some kind of townhouse, which I think is also suspect since Cherokee Indians would not be likely to understand what a townhouse was. A lodge or tipi, perhaps.
As it sounds then, this book has a lot of brilliant insights punctuated by insanity. It is more of a “ride” than it is “a read”. At one point, Mr. Leviton says that his angelic “assistors” depict themselves “tarted up” within the guise of a blazing star that he describes as a " black bowling ball“. I am not entirely sure Mr. Leviton got the full memo on angels, but in the cliff notes of most angelic existences there is not an allotment made for”tarting up." Fallen angels, sure. Angelic angels in the heavens? No way.
This glaring oversight makes the rest of the book suspect particularly since Mr. Leviton says he is working with Archangel Michael at another juncture. He jumps through world mythologies seemingly not understanding that most of those mythologies are full of cultures that are now as dead as the trees he views as being destroyed by “evil”.
On the other hand, Mr. Leviton has been at this for a long time, and started doing what no one was yet doing in the 80’s so perhaps some leeway should be granted.
On the other hand, as opposed to referring to the Adam Kadmon as being the etheric template of man he refers more often to Albion which is a distinctly English monarchic way to relate to the subject. Especially telling is that the phrase that most often precedes Albion in the old literature is “treacherous”. Mr. Leviton omits this descriptor.
Where Glastonbury Tor is at the head of the light grid, Jerusalem apparently does not even constitute a “navel”. That area that takes care of that is also, not surprisingly, in England. Also, at the very end, he mentions that Judeo-Christian beliefs have “lied” about Lucifer as indicated, and that there is “nothing wrong” with his “misunderstood” rebellion.
A lot of the rest of the book discusses stars/stargates and the relation between stars and the Earth as the book title would indicate. Again, much of this material indicates a sort of Babylonian lean. Egypt and Babylon may or may not have had star gates that gave people access to the Gods, but it seems this proved to be a “bad thing generally” and one infers that probably this is because mortals are crunchy. Indeed, both Egypt and Babylon have a long history of eating people at varying rates for different festive occassions.
The verdict of the booklight then? If you want to read a book that courts madness and outright lies to you at fairly regular intervals mixed in with pretty good research on Native American beliefs, this is a book for you. If you want a book for how the light grid works or doesn’t work, I’d treat this book with a lot of caution. If you want a book that does not have any sort of Luciferic agenda, this book is right out. If you can understand that many books in the world have a lot of things in them and not all of them are beneficial, then you can make it through this book and the madness it represents mostly intact with the feeling that Mr. Leviton probably has had all the experiences he says he has, but he has not yet understood his own end, or how he is being used by powers and entities that he does not comprehend. In that specific regard, it is a scary book since it shows how far down a rabbit hole one can get without ever knowing they are in such a rabbit hole with which to begin.
It’s probably why a “Great Man” said “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Whether the Father forgives Mr. Leviton is between Mr. Leviton and that Great Presence, but I would say offering a defense of Lucifer is poor grounds for such forgiveness. It certainly is not going to help repair the light grid of the Earth any faster, since Lucifer is, quite often, busy trying to tear that down so that he is the “brightest thing around”.
The Art of Her Deal by Mary Jordan was a surprising read. The best analogy might be how once in ancient Egypt, every Pharaoh would depict himself with abs that were like six-packs, and arms like small tree trunks while holding a spear showing how he subdued some other foreign nation. After awhile, though, a reformer by the name of Akhenaten came into view and demanded that the artists depict he and his wife as they actually were which included a Pharaoh with a bit of a pot-belly and some sinewy looking arms that were anything but muscular. Trump projects the former in his book, Melania’s book is the latter.
Perhaps if Melania had written it herself, the tone would be different. Maybe she would have told the story from a slightly different perspective than the one adopted here. This book starts off right into the thick of some of Donald Trump’s worst character flaws–having affairs and so on. It is not so much that one cannot discuss the foibles of a given person–if anything the odd thing is the magnification that happened(s) with the Trumps in general of whatever is perceived as a “bad trait”.
There are plenty of presidents who had affairs that had zero coverage of the issue, and some that only had coverage of the issue because they were reckless. Still others seemed to somewhat relish having the coverage and mystique of bedding certain people. JFK, for instance, bedded nearly the entire female population of DC.
While the candor is refreshingly honest, it is also curious. Why this angle and why so quickly?
This book does cover a lot of other interesting behind-the-scenes happenings in the White House that make some sense of what the news coverage was mirroring. Some of it makes perfect sense, and some of it feels a bit like paranoia that everyone is out to “get” the Trumps–although it is not as though the feeling is without ground. There is plenty of material in here to make one wonder exactly why the Trumps are treated as they are by the media and otherwise.
Even more interesting is the fact that the Trumps are what America usually aspires to be in its collective psyche. Melania was a model if not a supermodel, and Trump was as rich as Solomon. Usually America loves its celebrities as people that hold these positions are in some way living out the dream of what it means to be an American. Add in the fact the Trump’s father was an immigrant and came from “nothing” and you have the pieces of what are usually considered to be a “fairy tale”.
Not so in this book. Everybody is seemingly pissed alternatively at each other and then collectively against those who are trying to manipulate the Trump’s to some agenda or another. The feelings that jump off the pages are assuredly both “stress” and “pressure”. The media is a constant background noise which is seeking, it seems, to try to exaggerate or make mountains out of anthills. Sometimes they get just enough of the truth to do some damage, sometimes not.
There is a feeling here that one gets in reading this book whether intentional or not, where one starts to feel “Bad” for Melania in the sense that she is an immigrant and she is going through this meat-grinder we call America mostly while being silent and considered “foreign”. To be sure, this is not at all what she wants anyone to think. She wants people to see she is strong and tough and is more than just a pretty face. She surely has those qualities, but nonetheless, one feels bad as an American that Melania as someone “outside” of the US rises to the level of first lady and gets treated as she does by the entire country.
It is also interesting to see how much influence the First Lady has when she occupies the White House, and how that influence places Melania in a lot of difficult diplomatic positions. It seems like everyone is trying to assert their right to being an “influence on the King and Queen” and Melania does an admirable job of making sure the power rests back upon her, and her alone, where such power makes sense to be attributed as such.
While I am sure Trump has weaknesses as a man sitting in the top positions of power, it seems to me that if the Trumps were as ABUSIVE of power as everyone and everything else suggests, the book about Melania would have never covered a single controversial fact about either herself, or Trump.
Much emphasis is placed on how “cold” and “business-like” Melania is, while also in at least one case showing how nobody really fully respects her work or business skills even enough to figure out how to properly spell her name. I would imagine, after reading this book, if Melania is cold, it can only be a way of dealing with a world that is, most often, rather cold. Her response is to, it appears, go silent, and focus on the business at hand. There are certainly worse coping mechanisms.
If this book crosses your path, it is worth the read simply to fill in the blanks of a lot of missing information. While a certain suspicion should be cast on the motives of the author, it still fills in enough detail to allow the reader to understand a lot of the decisions being made in the Trump White House, and no, they were not as “crazy” as the media made them appear. In most cases, it seems more of a “sane response” to an “insane establishment”.
