Putting war into words - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Putting war into words

Air National Guard Senior Master Sgt. Tom Young hunkers down in a hastily fashioned snow cave in the Hindu Kush and peers through his night-vision goggles for any sign of the insurgents.

They’ve taken hostage a female Army sergeant, an interpreter escorting the prisoner that Young’s downed C-130 was carrying.

Wearing winter camo and wielding an air-dropped M40 sniper rifle, he’s slogged through snow for days. And he’s angry.

Wait, hold on ... that’s not Young.

It’s fictional Maj. Michael Parson, the hero of Young’s debut novel, “The Mullah’s Storm.”

But the parallels are clear: Both are seasoned crew members of the C-130 Hercules — Parson, a navigator; Young, logging nearly 4,000 hours as a flight engineer, now flying on C-5 Galaxies with the West Virginia Air National Guard.

That experience, including combat missions over Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and elsewhere, allowed Young to craft his novel with little research, he says. Now 71,000 copies are in circulation, according to G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Young’s high-profile publisher.

The book is being received well.

“It’s a terrifically well-narrated addition to contemporary war fiction,” says the Dallas Morning News.

“A novel of relentless pace and constant surprise, not only in the turns of its plot but in the strength and fleetness of its prose,” according to Bookmarks Magazine.

Similar praise has been cropping up all over the Internet since the book’s release Sept. 7.

Military Times sat down with the Alexandria, Va., resident to find out just how such a successful first effort came about.

Roots

As a young man, Young was torn between journalism and the military, and in the beginning, journalism won out.

The son of North Carolina tobacco farmers, Young attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went to work as a radio news reporter and anchor in Durham, N.C., before joining The Associated Press’ broadcast division in Washington, D.C.

Then came the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He saw people his own age heading off to combat, in particular a fellow broadcaster and flier.

So nearly 18 years ago, Young joined up.

His interest in fiction writing goes back to his college days, but it took an “in-flight event” to get him started on the novel — mechanical problems with a C-5 that stranded him for several days en route to Osan Air Base, South Korea, in 2007.

Young picked up a yellow legal pad and went to work.

Flying and writing

When Young’s not flying, he’s writing. You might say he’s living a dream.

He’s chosen to stick with the yellow legal pads, crafting words in longhand in the early morning — a page or so a day.

“It slows me down, and that’s a good thing,” he says. “It gives me a chance to put thought into every word.”

Young attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee in 2008. “I had about 100 pages and workshopped it in a class,” Young says. “The workshop leader said, ‘When you finish it, let me read the whole thing.’”

Young did. “He said, ‘This is great. May I recommend it to my literary agent?’ Within four weeks, I had a contract with Putnam.”

It’s hard to tell which character is Young’s favorite: Parson, a composite of himself and other military men he’s known over the years; or the highly professional Sgt. Gold, the captured interpreter (we never learn her first name), “sort of a shout-out to the real-life military women that I’ve known.”

One thing he can say with certainty, though, is that he’s working on a new book — and Parson and Gold will cross paths again.