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Ravens on a Wire

By John Ketwig (reviewer)

Ravens on a Wire
by Andrew Bacevich
(Falling Marbles Press, 2024)

Andrew Bacevich is a Vietnam veteran, a graduate of and former instructor at West Point. He retired from the Army at the rank of Colonel. He received his PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton, taught at West Point, Johns Hopkins, and then Boston University, where he is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History. Bacevich is the author of more than a dozen books, including Breach of Trust: How Americans failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (2013); The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008); The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (2005); and Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Forever Wars (2022). His essays and op-ed articles have appeared in The Nation, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times.

He is a regular contributor to Tom Dispatches. Bacevich is the president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that advocates for a more peaceful and non-interventionist US foreign policy. In May of 2007, his son, 1st Lt. Andrew Bacevich, age 27, was killed in Iraq.

I have met Bacevich and heard him speak at the Vietnam Peace Commemoration reunion conference held in Washington, D.C., in 2020 to contradict the pro-war stance of the federal government and Pentagon's 50th-anniversary "Commemoration of the Vietnam War," a heavily-funded event lasting from May 28, 2012, to November 11, 2025, that has carefully and systematically ignored any reference to the Vietnam Era peace movement. An exceptionally clear thinker and spokesperson, Bacevich's ability to make a presentation to a large audience is every bit as effective as his writing, and off-stage, he is wonderfully articulate and a very nice guy.

Now, significantly, he has followed up his dozen non-fiction books with, of all things, a novel. The story covers ten days in and around a US army outpost located at Rotz in Germany, close to the Czechoslovakia border. Famous since the Civil War, the 16th Armored Cavalry Regiment is known as the Ravens. At the beginning of the story, a helicopter reports that a jeep has flipped near the Czech border, and a GI is lying nearby, unmoving and wounded ... or worse. It is February and intensely cold with heavy snow. Many roads are clogged, so it takes a while for a rescue party to arrive at the scene. Two soldiers are dead, and it is difficult to rig the jeep and haul it up out of the snowy ravine.

From the beginning, Bacevich's story is populated with a strange group of American soldiers. As a former soldier and Colonel, he has created a cast of key characters featuring officers and high-ranking Sergeants, the crowd with which he is most familiar, and a smattering of low-ranking enlisted personnel tossed into the mix occasionally. His officer staff, or cadre, contains a colorful group of individuals. Barton Caldwell, known as "Quickdraw 6" to his peers and "Beancounter 6" or BC6 to his men, is a forty-one-year-old colonel in charge of the 16th Armored Cavalry Regiment. He expects to be promoted to brigadier general soon. General Aloysius "Big Al" Patterson is known as the "Lion of the Ravens." He oversees the Ravens regiment from his headquarters in the city of Nurnberg. Appearances are all-important.

Patterson's daughter is married to Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Massey, the commanding officer of the 3rd Squadron, a career military veteran with a reputation as a leader who gets things done. Patterson and Massey have no use for each other. Massey's wife, Connie, is on base and usually drunk. Further down the ladder of ranks comes Major Tobias Hicks, or "Tubby." A Black Vietnam veteran, Tubby is seen by his peers as someone who has failed to live up to his potential and will probably never see another promotion. He is a nonconformist, reads poetry, is soft-spoken, cerebral, and a talented basketball player, and he has just learned that his wife Isabelle, back in New York, has suffered a miscarriage. They had hoped the baby might reinvigorate their marriage, but Tubby has no intention of ever leaving the Army. Captain Sydney Marks is the first and only Black in the regiment to be named a Troop Commander. Placed in this position by Hugh Massey ahead of several better-qualified candidates, Mark seems lackadaisical and bewildered, misunderstood by everyone but his pregnant German girlfriend. First Sergeant Dennis Chisholm is a swaggering veteran of many years in the Army. He is a loud and boastful professional soldier loyal to the Army far more than to the enlisted men he oversees. The regimental chaplain is Reverend Francis Xavier ("F.X.") Scanlan. Tubby and F.X. are close friends. A freelance civilian reporter, Zaid Muhammad, was kicked out of the Army for political activism but stayed in Europe. He changed his name from Terrence Atkins and began to specialize in articles that were embarrassing to the American military in Germany. Larry Kaplan is a veteran New York Times foreign correspondent assigned to investigate the suicide of a Black US Army officer near the German border with Czechoslovakia.

When the crashed jeep and two dead soldiers are discovered, this cast of characters goes into action. Since the Vietnam War, the Army has been desperately intent on restoring the American public's respect, and no one likes bad news. Hugh Massey's immediate reaction is to relieve Sid Marks from his command. Marks drives through the swirling snowstorm to the wreck site, then proceeds to a remote forest trail where he parks his jeep, takes out his pistol, and commits suicide. The skeletal plot of this story involves all of these characters' interest in preventing any negative association from damaging the image of the regiment or the US Army overall. Again, since Vietnam, the Army has labored to reclaim its image, and the reader can only assume that the book's focus upon this aspect must reflect Bacevich's long years of service surrounded by fellow officers obsessed with restoring the Army's reputation. Through his characters, he paints a transparent picture of the American military, completely missing the point of the public's rejection of its military after the debacle that was the Vietnam War.

Yes, it is a pretty good book, tense and entertaining as the mysteries slowly unravel. However, much as I admire Andrew Bacevich's writing, a few observations must be offered. First of all, having spent his adult life in close company with the American Army, the author probably thinks we will all be familiar with the makeup of that institution. Maybe the Army was different when I was in Vietnam. The 16th ACR is a regiment, but I am unfamiliar with an Army squadron or the L Troop. Ravens on a Wire would have been much more understandable and enjoyable if the author had included two flow charts, the structure of the Army components, and a chart of the various military characters as a cascade of responsibilities and who reports to whom. Finally, I assume the author has been assigned to Germany and is somewhat familiar with the language. I have some German ancestry, but I don't know a Zigeunerschnitzel from a Kartoffelsuppe, a Suddeutsche Zeitung from a Standartenführer, or a Hauptbahnhof from a Spetzi. Most readers won't.

The author of a novel has two primary goals. He seeks to create a work of art that will entertain the reader while making a point. Bacevich's writing is clear and descriptive, and the characters have a variety of human attributes. There is a strong sense of mystery about Captain Marks' suicide, and that leads to the discovery of a conspiracy in which Americans smuggle luxury goods like bibles, cigarettes, and booze across the border to the "enemy" Communists in Czechoslovakia. I don't want to be a spoiler. I enjoyed the book and am fascinated by the broad hints it reveals about the Army Officer Corps' obsession with re-examining the Vietnam tragedy and determining who was NOT at fault. "Whereas US military leaders were alive to the crippling deficiencies in ARVN leadership, they were blind to their comparable shortcomings." It is a theme reported from various vantage points throughout the story. As a veteran, I recognized several threads, and I am grateful to Bacevich for writing about issues still damaging America's military today. The basic attitudes of America's military hierarchy have not changed, and they have not scored even a moderate victory since World War II. That can only be the fault of leadership. As long as they continue their unrealistic attitudes toward the soldiers on both sides of a conflict and the innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, America's reliance upon the military to solve international conflicts is doomed to failure. Andrew Bacevich has done an outstanding job portraying the attitudes that define that doom, and I encourage you to investigate this important book.

John Ketwig is a lifetime member of VVAW and the author of ?and a hard rain fell, A G.I.'s True Story of the War in Vietnam, and Vietnam Reconsidered: The War, the Times, and Why They Matter. He is hoping to find a publisher for his 1st novel.