HEREWITH A SHAMELESS PERSONAL PROMOTION

“Cactus Air Force” is published today.

This is the last book by my best friend, the late Eric Hammel. It is the product of 30 years of interviews he did with the guys who were there, starting back in the days when no one else was talking to them.

Eric was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2018, and decided that now was the time to get on with what he hoped would be his Magnum Opus. By 2019, he told me he was having trouble with his concentration to do the writing. I told him if he’d organize the research, I would do the “scutwork” of putting it on the page. He thought that was a good idea, and my publisher did too. But by January 2020, I had to remind him what we had talked about the call before, within a month, it was what we had talked about earlier in the conversation, and by April 2020 he told me he couldn’t remember what he had just said to me, and ended the project. His wife was forced to put him in a care home in June and he died at the end of August. I still miss the phone ringing and him being on the other end of the line to take up an hour of my time.

In 2021, Eric’s son Daniel found our email correspondence as he went through Eric’s stuff. He asked me if I would be interested in finishing the book, and I told him I was. Osprey liked the idea, and this is the result.

I thought I was very knowledgeable about the Battle of Guadalcanal, but going through the 3.5 GB of digitized interviews Eric had done, going back to his interview done in 1962 with then Rear Admiral Turner Caldwell, who 20 years earlier as a Lieutenant had led Enterprise’s “Flight 300” to reinforce Guadalcanal after the carrier was damaged at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. I was familiar with the story and there were things in the interview I had never known. And then it hit me: Eric was 17 when he did that! The rest of the interviews were of similar quality and scope, and I came out of the project with a better understanding of a topic many might think had been “done to death.” Now, it has been. Best of all, Eric interviewed not only the “names,” getting material from them no one had thought to ask before, he interviewed the young 2nd Lieutenants fresh out of flight school with maybe 200 hours in their logbooks, the ground crews, everybody he could find, the people who hadn’t been in the history books. Now they are.

If you’re interested, you can get it at Amazon here:

The Cactus Air Force