Customer Reviews

The Bombing Officer

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I came to this book expecting to read about espionage in Laos. I know from other reading that the largest covert operations in history ran in Laos as an offshoot of the Vietnam War; the story of the Hmong clandestine army, the Raven FACs who supported them, and the Air America expatriates all excited me.
As it turns out, this dramatic backdrop serves as the background of "The Bombing Officer". Unfortunately, it serves as the setting for a tale of bureaucratic backbiting in which a weak protagonist loses out.
There are wasted opportunities for dramatic impact within the story. The misplaced bombings that are supposed to be a key part of the plot never develop any dimension of blood and horror. In one specific case, the pilot who misses his target basically says, "Ooppss!" and flies away. His off-course bomb kills a woman, who is presented only as an indigenous name. It may be valid that her death is just seems an idle accident to the bureaucrats, but the validity would be strengthened by reader empathy with the woman.
There is also the germ of an interesting idea in the love interest in the book, that of a weakling falling for a beauty who is cut off from him by cultural differences. However, her viewpoint isn't presented until so late in the book, that the love affair between the bombing officer and his maid is essentially meaningless. Thus her suicide has little impact. The major character, supposedly deeply in love with her, doesn't discover her suicide by hanging until he stumbles across her funeral. He then imagines her distorted face in her coffin. Imagine instead the impact of his discovery of her dangling body in his living room, her swollen tongue lolling from her empurpled face.
There are just too many things wrong with this book. I am not just talking about the letdown of discovering that a colorful era is tangential to the tale. It's difficult to feel much sympathy for a wimpy main character that never develops any backbone. As for the idea that the process of waging war is represented as canny paper-shuffling and advancement in government service as brown-nosing? It's just another boring day at the office unless the reader sees that human beings instead of widgets are harmed by the process.
I recently read another book on this same subject which was also written from a somewhat peripheral character's point of view; however In the Black by Joe Lerner is a much more enjoyable book.