Courage

London MIRROR: A fearless Gurkha who single-handedly fought off an attack by up to 30 Taliban soldiers has been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross. Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun, 31, above, fired 400 rounds and launched 17 grenades to thwart the assault on his checkpoint in Afghanistan. He also beat away an insurgent with the tripod of his machine gun when the weapon stopped working. The Gurkha ran out of ammunition but detonated a mine to repel the final two Taliban fighters.

I've been in awe of these amazing warriors for some time--check out this earlier post. A Nepalese Ghurka plays a key role in my current novel-in-progress, THE LOTUS ASSASSIN. For more pix and details on Sergeant Pun, click HERE.

The American Dream --Version 3.0?

This ever-renewing American myth is explored by Walter Russell Mead in a fascinating series of posts called The Death of the American Dream:

"This isn’t the first time the American Dream has died. The old dream — your own farm rather than your own home — once dominated American culture, politics and family life as much as the family home ever did. The slow and painful death of that dream was one of the country’s core preoccupations in the first half of the twentieth century. The death of the new dream is likely to be a big deal as well."

"That dream is timelessly valid, and it is still the thing that people around the world admire most about the United States. We are going to have to re-imagine and re-engineer the dream to keep it alive in the decades ahead, but that shouldn’t daunt us. America is a nation of dreamers; building the future by following those dreams is what we do best."

Do Not Go East

Do not go East: satori is at hand.
In shifting shells, in sea shelves seeing is
believing: more than all beliefs unshelved.

Do not go up: here heaven has a hold.
Air there is thin, too thin for breathing in,
and yet there is a rapture in the deep

beneath the light: green, dark and wonderful.
And dark is where the dreams are; past things, too:
the place we see ourselves unselved,

and find an ocean, opiate enough
to drown all doubt. Go down, then, if you will,
and sink into intoxicated sleep.

Shells shift and speak tomorrow and afar.
Tomorrow is the place where rumours are.

--Philip Quinlan

Philip Quinlan was born, and lives, in the London area but spent many years in the North of England. He has published two (so far narrowly circulated) slimmish volumes of poetry (illustrated by the artist Annie Ovenden): True North and Leaves and Limnings. [from The Chimaera, March 2010]

photo by Barbara Cole

Memorial Day 2011

JOPLIN, MO: Crystal Kilpatrick plants an American flag on the house of a family friend after the home was destroyed when a massive tornado passed through the town killing at least 132 people.

Lunch with a couple Thrillers

David, Tim, Brett

Had lunch at Farmer's Market yesterday with fellow LA writers Tim Hallinan and Brett Battles. Brett is a scarily prolific author with three (!) novels written in the last twelve months. I just finished his breathtakingly paced THE SILENCED, the 4th book in his Jonathan Quinn series. Quinn is a professional "cleaner" whose job is to dispose of bodies and clean up loose ends after a hit. He's usually hired by the good guys (CIA, MI6) but then, of course, you're never really sure who the good guys are...

Tim Hallinan spends half his time in LA and half in Bangkok, where his acclaimed Poke Rafferty series is set. Tim's latest novel, The Queen of Patpong, was nominated for an Edgar as best novel of 2010 by Mystery Writers of America.

Tim is currently working on a novel about the God's Army guerrilla group in Burma, led by the legendary 12-year-old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo. I can't wait to read the book--just look at this amazing photo of the twins:

Bang!

M1911 A-1 semi-automatic pistol

Jack Duran, the reluctant hero of my mythic thriller series, is currently in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan about to engage in a gunfight for the first time in his life. To research the scene, I asked my attorney pal Norman Boxley--a former Infantry Commander in Vietnam--to give me a lesson in firearms and shooting. Together with his son Will and Will's Vegas buddy Rob, Norm drove us up to the Angeles Shooting Range in Tujunga Canyon just north of LA.I'd never been to a shooting range before. Guess what? It's loud! You're required to wear ear plugs and eye protection, and even though the shooters are all aiming toward the hills, the random, incessant BLASTS of the guns made the whole canyon feel like a war zone. I kept thinking how in a real firefight, with the barrels pointed at you, the noise would be a major fear factor.

Here's a sequence of Norm loading and shooting his trusty Glock, an Austrian designed semi-automatic that's very popular with U.S. law enforcement agencies. In the last shot you can really see the recoil; also note the shell ejected as the bullet is fired. [Click to enlarge]














Here the expert Will takes aim with his father's M-1 rifle. The lightweight M-1 was a standard weapon in the U.S. Military from WWII through Korea and Vietnam. It's very user-friendly. I hit a dish-size target at 100 meters on my very first shot, which made me understand how easily a soldier could come to love his rifle.

I liked Norm's 1911A-1. It takes a .45 caliber bullet; a single shot in the right place could easily kill a man. I was finding it hard to hold it steady.

Will says I'm leaning back too much and helps adjust my stance. You need to put your left foot out front, he says, face the target more, and form a kind of triangle with your body and your arms, leaning into the shot to balance against the recoil. It's a very aggressive stance.









Will shows how it's done.

Landscape of Time

Check out the marvelous photo gallery of reader Shaun Mazurek. His long-exposure landscapes exude a kind of timeless quality that borders on the Transcendent.