What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.T.S. Eliot
Author’s Foreword
THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER
The Book & The Movie
The Book
This book, on its most basic level, is a murder mystery that happens to be set on an Army post.
But on another level, it is a story about the unique subculture of the military, about military law, and about women in the military, and how all of these elements come together on a hot, steamy Georgia military base.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice is the law under which all the branches of the military—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard—operate. The UCMJ, as it is called, is based on American Constitutional law, but it is tailored to take into account the ironic fact that men and women in uniform, who are sworn to defend the Constitution, do not enjoy all the rights and safeguards they are defending. Military law also addresses military virtues, such as duty, honor, and loyalty—concepts which are rarely or never addressed in civilian law.
Thus, as we see in this novel, military law is more than law—it is the whole legal, social, professional, and even psychological matrix into which all members of the armed forces fit, or don’t fit, as the case may be.
I wrote this novel partly as a result of the Persian Gulf War of January and February 1991. Specifically, I was impressed by the role that women played in the war, and in the military in general. Like most Vietnam veterans, however, I was a little surprised and a lot annoyed at how the news media reported this war, as opposed to my war. Needless to say, the military came off looking a lot better in the Persian Gulf than they did in Vietnam. The reasons for this are too numerous to go into here, but one reason for this was the visible presence of women in the armed forces.
The military, consciously or unconsciously, put the media in a quandary; journalists look for dirt, for government bungling, for military incompetence. But here you had a situation where the military was at the forefront of a politically correct movement—equality of women.
The media personalized the Gulf War with endless interviews of women doing men’s jobs. This hype, I think, helped set the tone for the positive reporting of the war in general.
Of course, many male soldiers, sailors, and airmen felt a little left out, and certainly veterans of my generation felt totally disenfranchised and retroactively snubbed and unfairly portrayed.
Be that as it may, the net result was a “good war,” as opposed to a “bad war.”
Regarding the “bad war,” I served in the United States Army from April 1966 to April 1969. During that time, I took my basic combat training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, my advanced infantry training and leadership school training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and attended Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. After training troops at Fort Benning, I went to the Jungle Operations Come at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone, then shipped out to Vietnam and served as an infantry platoon leader with the First Air Cavalry Division.
My three years in the Army were very much a male/macho experience, as you can imagine, and I did not interact with too many female soldiers. In fact, the number of females serving in the military during the Vietnam conflict was fewer than the number who served in World War II.
In Vietnam, aside from military nurses, there were virtually no women serving in the war zone, except civilian Red Cross volunteers, known in the sexist jargon of the day as “Donut Dollies.” In any case, the American women in Vietnam were in the traditional roles of caregivers, and they were no threat to the men.
In 1969, my last year of service back in the States, I began to see female officers assigned to staff jobs that were traditionally male-only postings. This was an experiment that had mixed results. The feminist movement in America was in its early stages, and there was little pressure on the military from any source for gender equality or gender integration.
But the military was actually in advance of the social and political movements of the day in regard to gender integration, just as it was years ahead of the nation in racial integration when, in 1949, the armed forces ended racial segregation, albeit by presidential order.
The point is, the armed forces has a mixed, but mostly positive record in all areas of equality. This is partly a result of the nature of the organization. By that I mean, if you’re going to ask a black man to fight and perhaps die, then you can’t treat him as a second-class citizen. If you’re going to ask a woman to serve in a close-combat support group (but not in combat itself), then, again, you have to extend to her all the rights, privileges, and opportunities that accrue to the man serving beside her.
Some men, of course, would say, “We don’t need women in the military at all.” Others might say, “Women in the military are okay, but only in traditionally female jobs.”
But I believe we’re past those attitudes, and only two questions remain: Should women serve in direct combat roles? And, Should women be subject to the draft as men are?
Those are difficult questions, and they are not directly addressed in
When I set out to write this post–Gulf War novel, the first thing I decided was that this novel was not going to be a polemic. It was going to be as fair as possible to the men and women who serve in our military, it was going to be fair to the Army, and fair to the concept of a gender-mixed military. But it was not going to be a politically correct paean where all the sisters are terrific and all the brothers are male chauvinist pigs.
At about the time this novel appeared in the fall of 1992, the Tailhook scandal was rocking the nation. This was good for the book, but it wasn’t good for a sane, impartial dialogue on the complex subject of a gender- integrated military. Most of the news and entertainment media who interviewed me for this book wanted me to make some connection between
The incident in question—a party that got out of hand—was all of a sudden offered as proof that the entire military culture was corrupt and sexist. The fact that some men acted badly was never in doubt. But lost in the uproar was the fact that some men acted honorably, and some women acted badly. The same military that was idolized by the media in the Gulf War was now being pilloried.
The Tailhook incident was not typical, and the Navy brass should have made that clear and should have stood up for the Navy and prevented the good name and reputation of its entire corps of fighter pilots from being dragged through the mud because of one bad night that involved a relatively small number of individuals.
But the political climate in Washington, and the social climate in America, precluded any thought of fairness or truth or rational discourse. Instead, heads rolled, careers were ruined, and the male-female divide got about ten miles wider.
But long before Tailhook, I set out to write a novel that addressed the questions and problems of men and women serving together in the new Army. It was my hope not to pander to or exploit these headline issues; I wanted a novel that would deal with the more universal and timeless issues of men and women: jealousy, sex, honor, truth, and the human capability to love and hate, often at the same time. I’ve set all of this on an Army post, just to make things more complex and interesting.
This story
The Movie
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