Racelines Observations on Horse Racing's Glorious History Book

A great biography of an exemplary soldier.

The formation of 6th Army’s Alamo Scouts during WWII propelled American armed forces into unconventional warfare and eventually evolved into elite special forces units such as the U.S. Navy SEALs and the U.S. Army Green Berets. The Alamo Scouts demanded elite, adventurous men for difficult and dangerous missions, often behind enemy lines. Much of the Alamo Scouts’ subsequent reputation was built upon two missions—both of them efforts to free prisoners of war from the Japanese. Galen Kittleson was heavily involved in these efforts.

Charles W. Sasser puts you in Kittleson's life subtly inserting facts in a wonderfully illustrated story so that the details did not become a list of events in his life but a story in which you felt you were there living Kittleson's life. A gentle reminder of the deaths and horror of war reminds the reader that Kittleson's life was not easy or fun, but one involving determination, will power, and risks for something he cared about; lives of the POWs. Sensory details and vocabulary properly lace a tapestry of detail in the horror of the conditions in prisoner of war camps, and the emotion Kittleson and the freed prisoners felt.

Galen was among the initial volunteers. His first POW mission in late 1944 went behind enemy lines in New Guinea where a small contingent of Alamo Scouts freed 66 Dutch and French civilians being held by the Japanese at Cape Oransbari.

Four months later, in January 1945, Army Rangers and Alamo Scouts liberated 513 American and Filipino survivors of the Bataan Death March being held at the Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines, a feat celebrated in a number of books and in the movie, The Great Raid. Galen’s mission was to help blast open the front gates of the prison.

In 1968, there were 1,463 U.S. POWs and MIAs listed in Southeast Asia. In spite of all U.S. efforts, not a single American had actually been rescued from a POW camp. Notices appeared on bulletin boards throughout the U.S. Army Special Forces section at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The Son Tay Raid was one of the most elaborate ever devised to recover American POWs. In November 1970, six helicopters with 50 specially-selected and specially-trained Green Berets landed at the camp in North Vietnam in the middle of the night. The raid left a large enemy body count behind, with only one American wounded—but Pappy Kittleson and his teams faced disappointment again. The prisoners had been moved north to the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” within the past several days.

Where the book really goes wrong is the subject, it doesn't pick a path, history or biography, and stay on it. The book doesn't provide more history than a chronology of asymmetrical warfare, or more biography than the months of WWII and Vietnam. It ends up skirting both and suffering for it.