In Review: A Voice for the Dead
A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave
ISBN: 0399152253; 304 pages; Putnam Adult (February 17, 2005)
Professor James Starrs is a Professor of Law as well as Professor of Forensic Science at the George Washington University, Washington DC. His work Scientific Evidence in Civil and Criminal Cases is a standard text in its field. Starrs is probably best known for his 1995 exhumation of Jesse James, done in order to verify that the body found in that grave was indeed James. Throughout the years, Starrs has participated in a number of exhumations and subsequent forensic research, and this is the story of five of them, including the James exhumation.
He begins, naturally enough, at the beginning, with the story of his first exhumation, the victims of Alfred Packer. Packer was convicted in 1883 of five counts of murder, then eventually retried and convicted in 1885 of five counts of manslaughter. It was widely believed that he had committed cannibalism, though he was never charged with that particular crime. As with each case discussed the in book, Starrs discusses how he came to hear about the case, and what drove him to take it up. He also talks about the legal hurdles to such an undertaking (pardon the pun), such as finding a relative to secure permission from for the actual exhumation. Equally important, though, are the technical issues, like making sure one finds the right grave, and covering the gravesite with a sunshade during the exhumation, to prevent the sun from drying the bones.
The book reads somewhat like a college lecture, which is unsurprising given Starrs’ professorial background. The reader can almost picture him strolling around the front of a classroom, a piece of chalk carried loosely in the hand as he briefly saunters off on a tangent before returning to the case at hand. In other chapters, the reader might feel as though Starrs is discussing the case at a dinner party, complete with occasional asides regarding different people or aspects of the case.
The cases themselves are fascinating, running the gamut from victims of a 19th century cannibal to Jesse James, Huey Long’s accused assassin Dr. Carl Weiss, and Mary Sullivan, the apparent last victim of the Boston Strangler.
Starrs even manages to include a case where the people he wants to talk to conveniently start dying off just before their appointments with him. Was the CIA involved in the death of Frank Olson? If not, how did he get enough of a running start to push himself through a closed 13th-story window, when the room was too short to allow even a professional athlete to reach the requisite speed? And why was a suicidal man being held in a 13th story hotel room when there was a CIA safe house just a few minutes away?
The final chapter touches on cases Starrs tried to take on and how he was thwarted. Why isn’t Gouverneur Morris, the author of much of the US Constitution, buried in the casket that is in his tomb? Did explorer Meriwether Lewis die by his own hand? Why is the National Park Service preventing an exhumation that could answer that question? What about Lizzie Borden’s parents? Why did the Falls River Historical Society stymie his efforts to learn more about their deaths?
This book is a great read for those who watch every episode of CSI, or anyone who wishes they could. Starrs does a wonderful job of conveying the human side of exhumations, while conveying just enough scientific knowledge to whet the appetites of those who enjoy the technical side of CSI as much as the human drama.
In Review: Masters of Chaos
Masters of Chaos, Linda Robinson
ISBN: 1586482491; 388 pages; Publisher: Public Affairs (October 30, 2004)
Many books talk about what the U.S. Army Special Forces do, but few detail how they do it. Their mission certainly includes direct combat operations, but their primary mission is unconventional warfare, which revolves around teaching guerrillas or insurgents how to fight. (Just as important, but often overlooked, is the opposite end: “de-escalating” those same people after the armed conflict ends.)
Linda Robinson has spent years covering wars, rumors of wars, and plenty of SF operations. In 2001, as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she began researching the Special Forces, and developing the credentials that would eventually allow her to be embedded with SF ODAs and other special operations forces from Umm Qasr to Basra, Nasiriya Kut, and beyond. She combined that experience with interviews at Fort Bragg, Macdill AFB, and Fort Campbell along with time in Columbia and return trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to create an intense, informative lesson about what the Green Berets have gone through since Vietnam, what they’re doing in military operations worldwide now, and what their future is.
The connection she has with these soldiers is obvious in the second chapter as she takes the time to tell us about how each man came to the career he chose. The gut-check stories from the Q course are not something freely shared with people outside the special operations forces community. She takes time to talk about how one soldier was blessed by his battalion and company commanders to try out for SF after he completed his Ranger training, but then points out that his sergeant major felt that he had “forsaken” that same Ranger training.
From there, she leads us first through four years of operations in El Salvador, Just Cause, Desert Storm and Somalia. She spends two chapters talking about CONUS ops and training, then uses most of the rest of the book to talk about Afghanistan and Iraq with each chapter generally covering a mission. Each report is detailed enough to give the reader a firm understanding of what went on, filtered through the screen of operational security. She carefully skirts discussing anything that might prove useful to any miscreant hoping to glean something useful.
She wraps up with two solid chapters; “Coming Home” is the counterpart to “Leaving Home,” the opening chapter, and talks about what the featured SF soldiers are doing now, and what it’s like for some of them to hang up the gear, and move from the field to the office as support staff.
The final dozen or so pages talk about the future of SF, giving emphasis to the writing of MG Geoffrey Lambert, former commandant of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. Lambert also led the U.S. Army Special Forces Command for two years, as well as the Special Operations Command. During and after his tenure, Lambert spent plenty of time brainstorming with his command staffs, historians, retired generals and special operations forces operators and others with broadly divergent perspectives.
Robinson wrote a solid operational-level discussion of what’s been happening in the U.S. Army Special Forces for the last thirty-plus years, but kept focused on the men who make it happen. This book will give you a better understanding of what’s going on right now in places most people don’t even have nightmares about, and of the men who stand there and say, “Nothing’s going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch.”