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Exposing HypocrisyBy Sanford Kelson (Reviewer)TDY
Sooner or later members of the armed forces learn not to volunteer. Doug Valentine's new book, TDY, is a based-on-fact story about a US Air Force photojournalist who volunteers for what he believes is a relatively safe TDY (temporary duty) mission in the Philippines. But the mission is actually someplace else, and is full of violent death, and during the course of the mission the photojournalist nearly loses his life on several occasions. By the end of the mission, Pete (as he is known in TDY) also has lost forever the comfortable social blinders that so many of us wear. Pete, a Vietnam veteran whose true identity will be revealed on Mike Levine's Expert Witness radio show (WBAI, NYC) later this year, remained silent about his experience for over thirty years. We are fortunate that this individual trusted in Doug Valentine to convey his important story - a story every citizen, especially those preparing to join the armed forces, should read. In 1965 Pete drops out of college due to bad grades, and to prevent being drafted into the US Army, joins the Air Force. After basic training he is assigned to a southwest airbase as a photojournalist. Boredom prompts him to put in a request for an overseas assignment, and in early 1967 one is offered. However, the assignment is shrouded in such secrecy (and, unknown to Pete, a web of lies) that he really has no understanding of what he is volunteering to do. After their training for the mission and their travel to the Far East, Pete and the other members of the team realize, just when there is no turning back, that they have been deceived. The team soon finds itself not in the Philippines, but in the jungles of southeast Asia, photographing and recording on audiotape a clandestine transaction. If disclosed during the escalating Vietnam War, the fact of this transaction may have caused American troops to turn their weapons on their own leaders. Had the US been a just society, public knowledge of the transaction certainly would have resulted in high government officials being tried for treason. But none of that was to be. There is, however, a bloodstained thread that Pete discovers in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and later in Saigon, that directly connects W.W.II with the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. That thread weaves together the fact that Standard Oil sold fuel to Germany during W.W.II, and only one US oil tanker was lost to the Germans in all of the war; and the fact that in Vietnam, Shell stations were never attacked and not one American oil truck was ever sabotaged. That thread moves through the past two decades as well. With American blessings, Indonesia invaded East Timor, in substantial part for access to oil reserves which were granted to America's allies. But when Iraq invaded Kuwait, again in substantial part for access to oil, the US said it could not allow a big country to occupy a small country, and thus we had the Gulf War. Exposing the hypocrisy of American foreign policy is not in vogue these days, which is all the more reason to read TDY. Pete's sanguineous jungle experience and subsequent revelations about the amorality of our government is not only a thrilling combat story, it is the type of book that may help motivate Americans to take their country back from multinational corporations and the bought-and-paid-for politicians who cynically use our children's love of country to further their own financial interests. TDY is a good read and an important book. Doug Valentine is also the author of The Hotel Tacloban, a widely-praised account of life and death in a Japanese POW camp, and The Phoenix Program, a shocking account of the CIA's most secret and deadly operation of the Vietnam War.
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