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Q&A With Gregg Jones

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Q&A With Gregg Jones 

I have the honor of doing this Q&A with author, historian & journalist Gregg Jones. Gregg has written the nonfiction historical books Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerilla Movement; Last Stand at Khe Sanh: The US Marines’ Finest Hour in Vietnam; Honor In The Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and The Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream; and his recent release Most Honorable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Fight Against Fascism and Hate During World War II.  What’s impressive is that Gregg has covered civil wars and insurgencies in Asia and Latin America, the fall of Asia’s two longest-ruling twentieth-century dictators, and the early months of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. 

Q: Gregg, would you please give a brief description of each of your books starting with your recent release Most Honorable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Fight Against Fascism and Hate During World War II? 

A: Most Honorable Son is a biography of Ben Kuroki, the first Japanese American combat hero of World War II. Ben was a Nebraska farm boy, the sixth of ten children born to Japanese immigrants, and he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) the week following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ben would later say that the attack on Pearl Harbor made him feel shame over his ancestry for the first time in his life, and he felt he needed to serve in combat to prove his patriotism and reclaim his family’s honor. Ben overcame a great deal of bigotry and racism in the Army in his quest to become a member of a bomber crew, but he eventually prevailed, and he went on to fly thirty combat missions as a B-24 gunner in Europe and North Africa and then flew twenty-eight combat missions as a B-29 gunner in the Pacific. He returned home a hero, the best known Japanese American in the country at that time. And then, he embarked on what he called his fifty-ninth mission: a nationwide speaking tour challenging Americans to “win the peace” by addressing socioeconomic and racial inequities at home. There are so many fascinating twists and turns to Ben’s story, including an extraordinary final decade in the public eye, before he finally died in 2015 at the age of ninety-eight.

The book that launched my career as an author was Red Revolution, which was praised by reviewers as a groundbreaking work of reportage and history on the communist revolutionary movement in the Philippines. It was published in 1989—I had just turned thirty—and the book was the culmination of the five years I spent in the Philippines as a correspondent for US, British and Australian newspapers. I covered the final two years of the Marcos dictatorship, the 1986 People Power Revolution that drove Ferdinand Marcos into exile, and the revolutionary government of Corazon Aquino that followed. Throughout that time, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its guerrilla force, the New People’s Army (NPA), was a rising contender for power in the Philippines, which was the anchor for US security policy in the Pacific at that time. This was only a little more than a decade after America’s Vietnam War had ended in a communist victory and the communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas had seized power in Cambodia. The Cold War was still raging around the world, so there was great interest in learning more about the CPP and NPA, the movement’s shadowy personalities and policies, and how they might govern should they win power in the Philippines or end up in a coalition government. My book was the first in-depth look inside this movement. It took readers inside a communist revolutionary movement as it waged a nationwide political and military struggle. The book was well-reviewed by general circulation and academic publications. It was an exhilarating experience, both as a young reporter and a first-time author. I knew I wanted to write more books.

My second book was a long time coming. I spent much of the 1990s investigating the disappearance of my uncle’s World War II bomber crew over Austria in 1943. My uncle—my mother’s oldest brother—was a poor Arkansas farm boy, not unlike Ben Kuroki. My Uncle L.H. had completed radio school and was assigned to a B-24 bomber crew flying out of England. He flew several historic missions, including the first raid on Rome on July 19, 1943, and the spectacular low-level raid on Hitler’s oil fields and refineries at Ploiesti, Romania, on August 1, 1943. My uncle survived those raids, but he was shot down on his tenth mission, on October 1, 1943. My mother and grandmother had talked about my uncle and the mystery of his disappearance since I was a child, and I first started trying to write about his story as a high school student. In the 1990s, I spent several years doing interviews with comrades of my uncle, doing archival research, and tracking leads down in the US and Austria. And then, in 1997, my journalism career took me back to Asia for another five years. I was based in Bangkok, Thailand, and covered half the world, from Japan to Afghanistan and all the way down to Australia. So, I had to put my book project on my uncle’s crew on hold for several years.

I came back to the US in 2002 and wrote for the Los Angeles Times for a couple of years before I went to work for the Dallas Morning News as an investigative projects’ writer and editor. I tried to interest a couple of literary agents in my uncle’s story, but I didn’t succeed. One of the agents was very interested in another idea I had: The story of a war-crimes scandal involving US troops in the Philippines in 1902, during the first year of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. That idea became a broader look at TR’s place at the forefront of a US expansionist movement, which culminated in the Philippine-America War spanning 1899-1902. That’s the backstory of my book Honor in the Dust, published in 2012 by New American Library/Penguin. 

My third book was Last Stand at Khe Sanh, and the backstory is straightforward. I had been fascinated with the Vietnam War since I was a child growing up in the 1960s. As we approached the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 siege of Khe Sanh and the communist Tet Offensive—two watershed moments in America’s war in Vietnam, I pitched a book on the siege of Khe Sanh and began interviewing US veterans who had fought at Khe Sanh. That project was published by DaCapo as Last Stand at Khe Sanh in 2014. My aim was to turn a spotlight on the life and death of young Marines—the so-called grunts—in one of the war’s signature moments, the seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh.

Q: You’ve mentioned that while you were doing research on your uncle, 93rd Bomb Group veterans told you about Ben Kuroki, this Japanese American farm boy from Nebraska who was a B-24 gunner with the 93rd at the same time. That was in the 1990s. Why tell Ben’s story now? 

A: I first came across Ben Kuroki’s story as a child, when I picked up a book my grandmother had bought, a 1962 book about the low-level Ploiesti raid, I mentioned earlier. Twenty-five pages into the book’s photo insert I came across a photo of Ben Kuroki. The caption described Ben as having flown missions in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. I never forgot Ben’s story, and I kept bumping into it over the years as I continued to do research on my uncle’s case. I made another sustained effort to interest a publisher in the story of my uncle’s crew in the late 2010’s, but the publishing industry had consolidated dramatically, and I found even less interest in a book about my uncle’s crew. I started thinking about Ben Kuroki’s story. By telling Ben’s story, I could tell the stories of some of his comrades in the 93rd Bomb Group, and that would allow me to turn a smaller spotlight on stories like that of my uncle and his crew. Ben’s story had an epic sweep to it, so I was able to find a publisher for Most Honorable Son. Ultimately, I was able to tell pieces of my uncle’s story in the book, although I didn’t mention him by name in the narrative. 

Q: What lessons do you hope readers learn after reading your books?

A: I’m drawn to stories that have been lost to history—the overlooked characters and stories that give us a fuller and more nuanced sense of our story as a nation. I’m also drawn to complicated, nuanced characters. My mission as a storyteller is to foster thought and reflection on our history by telling forgotten or overlooked episodes from the past. I don’t see my role as that of a proselytizer or evangelist from a particular point of view. I want people to think and reflect and hopefully reexamine their views. I want readers of my books to walk away with a greater sense of the complexities of life and the complexities of our national story. 

I hope to encourage or challenge readers to go beyond the surface myths that we’ve often been taught in school. In the case of Honor in the Dust, the Philippine-American War is one of those painful chapters that has been all but wiped from our history. It barely appears in the massive biographies and documentary films on Theodore Roosevelt, and that’s doing a disservice to the cause of good history. We need to know what our nation’s leaders have done in our name, and under our flag, to more fully understand where we’ve lived up to our ideals, and where we’ve fallen short. With Last Stand at Khe Sanh, I wanted people to see the young Marines and soldiers who fought the war as the well-intentioned young Americans that the vast majority of the men in uniform were—not as feckless political pawns or the caricature of “baby killers” created by some individuals in the anti-war left and even some historians and journalists. 

As for Ben Kuroki, I think there are two important takeaways in his story. First, we need to remember those moments in our history when we have reduced people or entire groups of people to stereotypes. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there was a tremendous backlash against people of Japanese descent in this country. They were characterized as sneaky and untrustworthy, as spies and saboteurs, and that resulted in the unjust incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry in what were essentially prison camps. About two-thirds of the people incarcerated were US citizens, stripped of their civil and constitutional rights without due process. Ben wasn’t incarcerated, and neither was his family, but they came under intense suspicion and were the objects of fear and distrust. The mass hysteria that led to those injustices isn’t unique to America—I saw this phenomenon occur again and again in countries in Asia, where there would be a backlash against a certain minority group based on fear and half-truths. But to live up to our promise as a nation, we need to remember the moments in our history when we betrayed our highest ideals and succumbed to fear-mongering rhetoric.

A second take away from Ben Kuroki’s story is that patriotism can take many forms. In Ben’s case, he felt that the only appropriate way to respond to the distrust being directed at people of Japanese ancestry in this country was to serve in the military and to fight for America. Ben was very critical of the men in the incarceration camps who resisted the military draft after it was reinstituted for Japanese American men in early 1944. But the situation was more complex than Ben viewed it. Japanese American draft resisters offered to serve in the military, but only if their rights and the rights of their family members had been restored, and they had been released from the camps. The Japanese American draft resisters felt so strongly about this that they refused to back down, even when they were arrested by the FBI for violating federal draft laws. Several dozen draft resisters served time in federal prison. Only much later in life was Ben willing to see the position of most of the draft resisters for what it was: a principled stand against an egregious injustice. Without question, Ben Kuroki was an extraordinarily brave American, and an extraordinary patriot. But I would argue that the draft resisters were also patriots, because they were willing to go to prison rather than accept the violation of their constitutional rights. 

Q: What is your advice for anyone wanting to be a journalist, author and historian? How do you juggle all three careers?

A: I think I need to answer this question on philosophical and practical levels.

On a philosophical level: These are vital and noble professions. We need committed journalists, authors, and historians—people with curiosity and integrity and a commitment to inquiry. We need principled journalists, authors, and historians committed to creating fact-based stories and narratives, particularly at this moment of political distrust and division, when so many people have retreated into ideological silos that reinforce a particular partisan view. 

On a practical level: It’s difficult to find work in these professions these days. But if you have a passion for something like this, prepare yourself. Read deeply and broadly. Be curious. Ask questions. Develop your skills as an interviewer, researcher/reporter, and writer.  The wonderful thing about writing is that there are a thousand levels, and you can always get better. Another wonderful thing about writing is there isn’t a shortcut: I teach journalism and storytelling to high school and middle school students, and I constantly tell them: There isn’t something I can whisper in your ear to make you a better writer. You get better by reading deeply, and then writing as much as possible, and rewriting, and rewriting. There’s no shortcut. Get something down on paper, then make it better. It doesn’t miraculously happen. It’s hard work. But hard work and discipline will take you a long way in the writing world. If you only dabble in research or writing, it’s hard to improve. 

I would also say: Embrace the challenge. Between the publication of my third book in 2014 and my fourth book in 2014, I faced rejection after rejection. I developed seven or eight book proposals, none of which got bought by a publisher. In some cases, I wrote half or more of the book, only to be turned down by an agent or an acquiring editor. But I refused to quit. Because I love doing this. I love doing research, and I love learning so much about people and events as I’m doing this research. I love the challenge of taking the material I gather and transforming it into a narrative that people want to read. I plan to keep doing this until I depart this life.

Q: Would you say your career as an investigative reporter helped when it came to your researching and writing your books?

A: Absolutely. There is a lot of overlap between my work as a journalist and as a historian and nonfiction author. I first learned to do research as a journalist, and those skills were useful when I shifted to archival research for history projects. Journalism also allowed me to develop and sharpen my interviewing skills, so that helped tremendously in my work on three of the four books where principal characters were still alive and available for interviews. As for the writing side, journalism gave me my first taste of writing longer narratives. A book chapter is roughly analogous to a long piece of newspaper journalism. Over time, newspapers have shifted much more heavily into publishing narratives, so journalistic writing has moved away from the old-style “inverted pyramid” storytelling to a narrative style that is more closely related to writing contemporary nonfiction books. I had a lot to learn, and I’m still working to get better as a storyteller. But work in journalism was great preparation.

Q: Can you reveal what the topic of your next book will be about?

A: I’m under contract with Tuttle Publishing to deliver a 100,000-word history of the Philippines by August. It’s part of a Tuttle series of country profiles. Beyond that, I’ve soft-pitched three nonfiction narrative ideas to the editor at Kensington Publishing who acquired Most Honorable Son. I’ve written quite a bit on two proposals. All three are biographies. One is a World War II story; one is a Vietnam War story; and the third is a story about America’s war in Afghanistan, the beginning of which I covered in 2001-2002. That’s as much as I’m willing to say at this point, so, stay tuned!