Episode 724: The Fictional Officer Corps: From Hornblower to Stark - with Claude Berube - Midrats

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:30):
Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander and
the Eagle One from Eagle Speak at seer Shure your
home for a discussion of national security issues and all
things maritime. And good day everybody. Thank you for joining
us for another edition of mid Rats. We really appreciate
you taking time to spend with us. And if you
are with us live, I'd like to do my usual

(00:51):
alter call. Come on over. You'll find the chat room.
Jump in the chat room if you are so inclined.
I know a lot of people who alive aren't, but
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(01:14):
in your ideas as we go forward. And as always,
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you anything, and that way we'll be waiting for you
at a time more to your convenience, and on today's
show this well, at least for me, this is gonna

(01:35):
be a fun show because it's a little different than
kind of the news of the day and some of
the larger things we have in the national security arena
and the maritime world. You know, we talk about ships,
we talk about readiness, we talk about reform, things like that.
Today we're doing something that seems all to the side
of it, but it's really a thread that's woven in

(01:55):
between all of these various areas that we talk about
here on mid rap And if I were designing a
course in English literature that I would like future naval
officers to take, whether they're Rozzi or whether the Naval Academy,
what we're talking about today, I think would be one
extremely valuable for these young men and women who may
or may not have a firm grasp of the intellectual

(02:17):
part of what they're going to be asked to do.
But also even the engineers, I don't think they're going
to fall asleep during the course of the show this
type of semester, if it's being taught properly, and what
we're going to look at today, I'm going to quote
from our guests substack. It's going to be the top link,
maybe the only link you'll find over on the show page.
This is from his substack at the end of last month,

(02:39):
the quote from the gun decks of the HMS Indefatigable
to the command chair of a future starship. The portrayal
of naval officers in fiction has evolved alongside society's changing
views of leadership, warfare, and heroism. The archetype of the
naval officer has been shaped not only by historical president
but also by the amount mative needs of authors responding

(03:02):
to their times and for regulars of mid Rats, You're
you're going to be very comfortable with our guests today.
Coming back to talk with us as he had has
for a very very very long time since twenty ten.
Is Doctor Claude Barrabee, Commander, USNR, retired naval historian and novelist.
In addition to working three times on Capitol Hill, he
was a defense contractor for NAVSE and O n R

(03:24):
in the nineties, and for almost twenty years he taught
at the US Naval Academy. Claude, it's great to have
you back on mid Rats. Welcome aboard.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Hey, thanks to both of you for having me on again.
Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
And it's for those who are listening, you know, feel
free to go ahead and grab the link and we'll
even put in the chat room here in a second
and you can read. As we're talking about it, Ark
and I we're talking about some future guests and this
came up as something, Yeah, this would be a great
conversation to have with Claude because it's fiction. Is a

(03:58):
unique tool to talk to you a bit about that
because you've written nonfiction, but you also have a long
running fiction novel series that has a comic character that
we're going to talk about today. But in your article,
you frame for people today who grew up with this,
from Horatio Hornblower, to those who haven't read the books

(04:19):
that at least most have seen Master and Commander Captain Aubrey,
to James Tiberius Kirk, and to Connor Stark with the
recurring character in your novels. And when I was looking
at that, Stir who created Horatio Hornblower, he was born
in eighteen ninety nine. He brought Horatio Hornblower onto the
scene in nineteen thirty seven. You were born in the

(04:40):
mid sixties. I'll give him an exact exact year, but
you and I are a very similar age. Connor Stark,
who is a central character in your novel, first came
on the scene for Everybody in twenty twelve, though you
did develop in thee in the late nineteen nineties. So
you have Forest who the core of his everybody in

(05:03):
his generation was the scalding experience of the First World
War and for those of your generation, and the experience
that helped develop Connor Stark was of course the Cold
War ending and the events of nine to eleven. And
when I was looking at that, and you know the
people who Gene Roddenberry and all that crew for Star Trek,

(05:25):
it was obviously the Second World War in the early
part of the Cold War. Is it really when you
look in at the writing of fiction and leadership and
what that has to tell us and have us think
about we're really talking about the even though it might
be stationed in the eighteen thirties or the twenty three hundreds,

(05:46):
We're really looking at how the experiences that the authors
saw in their first three to four decades of life
in the twentieth century, from the beginning to the end
of the twenty century, how that experience when they're writing
fiction has them look at leadership. So in many ways,
when you're looking at that type of study, you're really
studying about the development of the thoughts and experience of leadership.

(06:11):
And the naval captain one of the things I dug
into as well. For those that didn't fall asleep during
Sosio one oh one, you have the Dunbar number, which
is the ideal stable social network for human beings. It's
one hundred and fifty, which is why that's roughly when
you average them together in Western armies, an army company
is about one hundred and fifty, and a warship is

(06:33):
a couple of orders of that depending upon the size
of the ship, and so are a little bit smaller.
In the Connor Stark novels, that really it's a great
incubator to look at the human condition and something that
has dominated us from the dawn of time, and that's
our leaders and how we interact.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, and I should start with just two brief comments. First,
there were some really good comments and suggestions on that
particular substack post, and I hope that the people who
made those comments and suggestions would contribute to the discussion
as well, and calling in or others who are listening,
who may I have ideas about some of the series
that they've read over time that I clearly wasn't able

(07:13):
to get to in that short piece. So what I do,
and the second thing is what I try to do
on Substack, usually published three times a week. Monday's National Security,
Navy Maritime Issues, on Wednesdays usually Footnotes in History, and
then on Fridays it's a fiction slash science fiction Friday.
And that's I think I've realized over the past few

(07:34):
months that that's probably almost more for me than it
is for the readers. I'm trying to clarify and understand
fiction in a way as I'm going through the process
of writing this now forth Connor Stark novel. And I
think you're right. I think what I see is that
there are three factors when you're looking at some of
these characters, these naval captains or admirals. The first is

(07:57):
the author and their time. You know, you mentioned CS Forrest,
who's writing the nineteen thirty So he's not only shaped
by a world war, namely World War One, he is
shaped at a time where England is nearing the end
of its century plus domination of the High Seas, but
it's still very much in everyone's memory and a culture.
And now they're approaching in the nineteenth thre's another foe

(08:19):
on the continent. So when he's writing about this, he's
not just talking about the bravery of an officer a
leader at sea in the Napoleonic Wars. He's I think,
trying to inspire a nation that is about to undertake
a great endeavor against another continental power, in this case Germany. Again,

(08:39):
you see this with other authors as well, with the
Jack Aubrey series written by Patrick O'Brien in the nineteen eighties.
He's doing more of a riff I think off of
Horatio Hornblower and CS Forrester Or. He certainly had that influence,
but he writes it in a very different way. First,
Aubrey is more of a tactician rather than a strategist.
We never see an admiral. Jack got well, actually, wait

(09:00):
a minute, I think at the end of Blue with
the Mizzen, I think he was. He was definitely a
post captain. He may I think he was made admiral. Please,
if you guess remember or have that book Candy, the
final book in the series that was published. It becomes
an admiral, but he doesn't have an opportunity to command
squadrons of ships or great flotilla or fleet like cs
Forrester's character does, so you don't see that kind of development.

(09:22):
The second difference is that O'Brien is is what one
critic said, you know, writes it's a naval action for
along the lines of Jane Austen, and by what he
meant by that observation is that Patrick O'Brien is doing
a lot more research into the details of the era.
In addition, he's also writing about the political debates, and

(09:46):
he's able to do that because there is a significant
significant difference between the Horatio Hornblower series and the Jack
Aubrey in that Hornblower is very much an isolated character.
He does have William Bush, who he meets i think
in the third, second or third novel of the series
and dies before the end. That's really his only confidant,
but not to the level that Jack Aubrey has Stephen Matrein.

(10:09):
I think part of the reason is because Matrin is
the doctor he's out of more or less the chain
of command. He does serve on a ship subject to
his commands, but he is an equal. They played music together.
It's not just in the book in the movie, it's
also in the novel series. So they're able to explore
strategic issues and discuss them in a way that Hornblower doesn't.

(10:33):
When I was doing this, yeah, the first time I
started thinking about writing this novel was probably nineteen ninety
one or nineteen ninety two. So the character of Connor Stark.
I just a couple of years before written my senior
thesis on General John Stark of the American Revolution. I said, well,
how about if I do a character that's his descendant
in this current age. And now keep in mind, in

(10:53):
the early nineties, I was not a commissioned officer. I
just went to Capitol Hill in nineteen ninety one. The
naval officer Connor Stark that I envisioned back then was
very different than the one by the way that there
was a manuscript, but there was never published in the nineties.
That was the very first story. So by the time
that the first edition of the first novel came out
in twenty twelve, the character was very different because he

(11:17):
had been shaped. I had been shaped by the events
of the world. So when I say that there are
three traits that I'm looking at, There's the author and
the times in which he or her rights. The second
is the environment of the time that the characters are
living in. So in this case, Hornblower and Aubrey are

(11:37):
one hundred years or one hundred and fifty years in
the past, depending on which author it was. Those factors
shape the character, and then there's the character and their
individual traits, sometimes of which shape the environment themselves. So
I think that's how I saw it. But there were
other authors. You look at Herman Wolke, who was a
serving naval officer during World War Two, and he would
write a political prize winning book, Cane Mutiny. Sadly I

(12:02):
didn't read Winds of War. I remember seeing the mini
series when I was a kid, so maybe some folks
in comment on that particular series. But I've read Kane
Mutiney several times, you know, seeing the movie both versions.
I don't recommend the one that just came out on
Netflix or whatever. It was a couple of years ago
with Kiefer Sutherland. But Woke is definitely shaped by his
wartime experiences, not in this heroic aspect of a Navy commander,

(12:25):
but the internal strife on a ship that you have
seen I have seen. You know, every officer and sailor
who has been on a ship knows that there is
no perfect ship. There are human traits that sometimes counter
each other. There are sometimes arguments or disagreements or you
know it. As one of my shipmates on the bunker
Hill said, a sea deployment is the purest form of

(12:48):
humanity you will ever see, in all its various aspects.
And I think that's why literature about a Navy ship,
a Navy commander is so attractive, because it does represent
and that's why woke in the Cane Mutiny and his
realism and what happens in that it was so attractive.
But also he just wrote a damn good story. I mean,

(13:08):
there are so many others. I mean, you can go
to the science fiction side, sal you know, just to
mention a few. The Honor Harrington series by David Weber,
who spoke at the first Navy Con probably which is
based she was based on Horatio Hornblower, but said in
the future she this series is the most complex science
fiction series I think you will ever read because it
brings in economics and politics and technology. This is this

(13:32):
is kind of like Tom Clancy and science fiction on steroids.
But Honor Harrington also has this these principles that she
that she stands by and sometimes she sacrifices for Blackjack.
Gary and I think Eagle one you may have been
the one to point out that series. It was the
Lost Fleet series that I just went through earlier this year,
So I think that's maybe where we can start the discussion.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
I think one of the things that I found interesting
and looking at stuff to get ready for this show,
is that the series you talk about, the Hornblower, the
Honor Harrington, the Aubrey, we get to see the development
in most of those series, not initially with Hornborer, but
eventually he caught up with the development of young officers
or young men as they and women as they grow

(14:16):
into the position where they can be captains or admirals
for that matter. That is I mean, you have to
go back. I think even further, you have to go
back to something the guy named mister Midshipment Easy written
by Frederick Merriott back in the eighteen thirties. It may
be the first book that really dealt with the development

(14:37):
of a young person into a competent c officer, not
originally by his choice, but you know, the history of
this is you see development of these people. The other
side of that are the books where you have a
one off and your Connor Stark is sort of that
as a background. But as you develop it over the
last three books, you know, you get to see a

(14:57):
lot of growth there. The difference between that, it's say
The Good Shepherd George Krauss, also the which is also
the ground movie the Caine Mutiny, where you get introduced
to Quig and then the officers of that ship at
the one off, mister Roberts, you get it. There's a
leadership there that is different than you get in some

(15:18):
of the other other books.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
But those are.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Individual cases which and I you know, I hate not
to use those as an example of fiction worry because
the leaders big examples are so stark. The mister Roberts,
the excellent movie, of course, was based on a book
by a guy who served in a service for a
ship in the Pacific somewhere, so he knew what he
was talking about. You know, those those which which pattern

(15:41):
is is there a pattern that you can see where
you get to you know, you feel that the pain
of the commander of the of the destroyer in World
War Two and he's the first time commodore, first in
command of a destroyer, just happens to be the senior
guy passed over for for for higher rank, if not
feeling really great about himself. But he gets his job,

(16:01):
and he does it, and he puts himself through an
trendous amount of torture. You get Quig has already been
through that torture and then ends up in this mind
sweeping destroyer in the Pacific with a crew that isn't
necessarily the most supportive you could have. You know, how
does that? How does that fit into this this scheme
of developing these characters or understanding the command function of
some of these characters.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
In literature, here's the fundamental difference between Hornblower Aubrey versus
a captain Quig of the kne Mutiny and mister Roberts
the captain and command of that ship. And I forget
his name, I remember the actor, but remember that the
tension for the dramatic tension for the older two where
it was external, it was a great powers competition. Now,

(16:44):
those two books that take place during the Second World War, certainly,
I mean there was great power competition and a clear war. However,
in both cases, mister roberts ship never goes into battle.
He dies certainly later when he transferred to the Destroyer.
And the kne Mutiny, does that ever really have a
major action scene against the enemy. All the tension is internal,

(17:08):
and I think what the authors are trying to do
there is demonstrate that particular thing. I'm going to take
this on a different path. In the past twenty or
thirty years, something has changed in literature and in television storymaking,
and I think, but I'm not sure. It started with
what was the musical that the Wizard of Oz. It

(17:29):
was based on the Wizard of Oz. Well, anyway, the
three of us grew up thinking the Green Witch was evil.
So this was a battle between good Dorothy and evil
the Green Witch. Well, in the book series that emerges
out of the nineties and eventually becomes the musical, and
I think a recent movie What Happened Wicked, Thank You,
they have fundamentally changed the author inverted who was really

(17:52):
good and who was really evil. I think to some
degree that happened with Star Wars Boba Fett when you
with the three of us will grow growing up. He
was the bad guy, he was the bounty hunter who
got hand solo. But what happens is now Boba Fett
is a good guy. He's got his own he had
his own series. The same with Imperial Stormtroopers. They're not
this generic evil force working for Darth Vader. They now

(18:13):
have some of them who are now part of part
of the sorry not the Federation, the New, the New,
the New Republic. All right. Now, take mister Roberts and
the Cane Mutiny, and this is this is a This
is how I would put to a student in a
writing exercise if I were to teach the course that
Commander Salamander just mentioned, I would say, rewrite the Cane Mutiny,

(18:34):
in which Quig is the hero. And technically you already
have something to base that on, because if you look
at the at the very end, especially of the movie,
where the Jag comes in and he says, Quig wasn't
the one who was the problem.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
All of you were.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
You weren't loyal to him, and consequently all these things
happened if you had been loyal. This is a guy
who stood the line for all those those years while
you're in college or you're in high school. So turn
those things around and sometimes that can be the major
change that is completely unique in writing. Now, that is

(19:13):
something that I tried to do for the Connor Stark novels.
Connor Stark, in the very original book that was unpublished,
was a lieutenant commander already had his first command with
a small boat, was going off to another ship, and
he makes a decision and that is a not only
a life altering decision, but it is a professional decision
in which he is then court martialed and has to

(19:34):
leave the United States Navy. And so by the time
we pick it up with the very first book, he
is now head of a private maritime security company. He
has to do something else. So it's kind of like,
what would what would have happened to I don't know,
a Jack Ryan or somebody else if they had had
made a decision that was illegal but just and this
this idea of justice is something I've been playing around
with for this next novel because it's a question that

(19:55):
came up two years ago. One of my students at
the time at the Naval academy was from Romania. About
two months before graduation, she said, Sir, I don't know
how to find housing for my family. It'say, look, have
them come to my house. They're staying with me for
the week. It was absolutely a wonderful week. And her
dad was my age. Now take somebody from Romania and
take somebody from the United States who are of the

(20:17):
same age. This is somebody who grew up behind the
Iron Curtain. I grew up in the United States. We
were having these great discussions and one of the questions
he asked me is what is liberty? What is justice?
I mean, these are very profound questions in a way.
So that's why I've been trying to deal with what
is justice in this fourth novel with Connor Stark.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
In your article, this leads right into an issue that
I seems in the weed, but I think it applies
a lot because and again depending upon your confession, some
people might get upset at me saying this, but I
think they understand where I'm going. Here is the oldest
work of literature that we know of. Though a couple
of Indians might argue with us. Here go to the

(20:59):
Bible and throughout the Bible, the New Testament. In the
Old Testament, there's the parables. There are stories that are
told that maybe fiction, might be stories that just passed down,
might be things that are actually happened. But and there
are people who spend their entire lives studying these things.
But they tell lessons about philosophical concept philosophical ideas. But

(21:22):
you use fiction, you use stories to help a broader
audience understand some of the deeper issues of the human condition.
And in your article, in the part that you were
talking about James Kirk, you talked about the moral dilemmas,
you talked about moral relativism, and you know, coming to
twenty twenty five, one of the great things that you
can ask AI to to give you a quick answer

(21:43):
that might take you days to do. Kind of in
line with the opening question, I went over to Grok
and I asked them what schools of moral philosophies is
best outlined by C. S. Forrester, which is the bookend,
And then I asked the same question about the issues
raised in the with the character of Connor Stark in

(22:06):
the series of books by Claude Barrabay. It's very interesting
what they came up with is for Forrester's character for
Ratio Hornblower, he mentions a little bit of stoicism, but
it really came in about Kantian philosophies about and I'll
just do a little quick quick quote on it, because
Kantian deontology, it really focuses on duty as a moral foundation,

(22:28):
categorical imperative reasons for persons in moral absolution, and just
as little summary, it puts up that Kantian deontology is
well represented in CS Forrester's Hornblower series, particularly in Horatio
Hornblower's unwavering commitment to duty, adherence to principles that could
be universalized in respect for others as ends in themselves.

(22:49):
His actions, driven by naval codes, honor, and a sense
of moral obligation, often mirror con emphasis on doing what
is right out of duty or personal gain or consequences. However,
the harsh realities of war introduced pragmatic deviations, himpering a
pure continent stance and for our friend Connor start but

(23:09):
I'm glad that this wasn't the majority vote. But there's
a little bit of Nichean philosophy and pragmatism. But when
it comes to Connor Stark and how the issues and
the responses that are raised that series of novels. It
came up. It said that existentialism best captures Connor Stark's
essence character fit you know, dishonorably discharged Officer Stark has

(23:31):
alienated from structure, choosing this path in a chaotic world,
embodying existential freedom of self criticism, and Connor Stark navigates
this world through choices and actions and the piracy, terrorism,
geopolitical strife. Pragmatism also is a supporting role in the
pragmatic problem solving, so people will take an entire semester

(23:52):
and kant and it can be taught in a way
that doesn't work out really well for most people because
you get lost real fast and big words that aren't
well exp But when you have naval officers who the
majority of which don't have a broad liberal arts education.
Most are by design from the stem areas. They're engineers,
they're mathematicians. They're working with, especially today, highly technical items,

(24:16):
so they may not have that background. And in leadership,
to get back to the topic at hand. In leadership,
there are no easy answers. There are often decisions that
have to be made where you are picking the least
worse of a series of bad decisions, and it can
be a very lonely place. We all know people who
have gone into command or come out of command broken

(24:39):
in a lot of ways because they did not have
the intellectual tools to help them get some perspective and
inform their decisions and to help them be at peace
with some of their decisions. Is fiction a way to
kind of, you know, a spoonful of sugar making the
medicine go down. If we encourage and we properly instruct
people on these types of fictional leaders that are well written,

(25:03):
that we can help our leadership that through no fault
to their own, they just don't have the educational background
to understand that others have been in this situation you
are before and these are the tools they use to
address it.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, it's really interesting And coincidentally, I have a chapter
coming out should be out later this year in an
anthology with an academic press. Folks on the West Coast
reached out to me to submit a chapter comparing the
naval at US Naval Academy to Starfleet Academy and the
pitfalls of both of them. What they both need you
know where they are some positive aspects obviously as well,

(25:39):
but recommendations, and one of the recommendations I make is
more case studies because you have so many, particularly admirals
and some captains in Star Trek who are deeply flawed
make major ethical errors. You know, in Kirk's case is
I won't say he's morally ambivalent, but he just makes
choices that are highly risky and result in the deaths

(26:01):
of many, and he doesn't seem most of the time
to have any effect on himself, except I think once
when Edith Keeler dies because he was in love with her.
That's usually the only time we see Kirk caring about
the death of a character. But you don't see that
with a Picard in Star Trek next generation who's very
aloof and the idea of an Aubrey or a horn
Blower or even an Honor Harrington has to maintain that

(26:25):
distance from the crew. It's a very old British gentlemanly
tradition in the services, I think fundamentally changes as you
get into the post nine to eleven environment where there
is no clear battle between major powers. That that moral
the black and white that we see in these major

(26:45):
conflicts is no longer there. You're looking at enemies or
potential enemies. Are they enemies? Are they not? Are they criminals?
All these questions you now have to ask in this environment.
And I'd be interested to see, say, in thirty or
forty years, what literature will appear from this period and
how they portray captains of this period in an era

(27:06):
where we have yet to have. Certainly we fought the
who thi's and a Captain hill who's been I think
now on two carriers probably demonstrated that better than anyone else.
But that lends something else to this discussion, because where
would Hornblower or Aubrey have been had they served in
the Royal Navy from say eighteen sixty five to eighteen hundred,

(27:30):
would they have become the heroic figure? Is it that
you need a war to be this literary heroic figure
or to have that tension. I think that's one of
the reasons why, particularly in science fiction, we see these
leaders who are not in that particular situation, who are
on these episodic quests and can still have that heroism

(27:54):
be demonstrated. I'm not sure you can have that without
a major conflict.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
Well, it's an interesting question too if you were to ask,
if you were to ask if Hornblower or Aubrey were
in today's modern navies, would they would they be able
to do it? I mean, they lived in it as
far as I'm concerned. When I read these things. They
lived in a magical time. You could see your enemy,
you had to close within a few hundred yards of
the enemy. You know, they were swashbuckling heroes. They got

(28:21):
to do a lot of stuff in our technical world.
And as you point out, I think they did get
to know a lot of their crew, the Coxin's, the
a lot of the people who were with them for years.
You know, they they did. You get to know them
as characters in those books too, and a lot of
the other books of the era. But if you fewer
to take and put them in a on a modern
DDG today, or if they were flying jets off an

(28:44):
aircraft carrier, what you know, would they be the same
kind of heroic figure Because we do everything technically now.
They who were the heroes on a ship? Is it
the is it the CEO, who's who's or is it
the is it the the radar intercept people who are
seeing the you know there who was fighting the back

(29:05):
and is it is it the same kind of heroic
you know, we're obviously if your life is thread and
it's heroic and you save people, But the world changes
the characters. You know, what really matters in these things,
seems to me, given Star Trek and all that is
the relationships that exist between the people and the books.
Without those relationships, these are just you know, these people

(29:25):
are virtually unknown. You know that the os so who's
sitting there at the radar screen is not necessarily going
to come across as the same as a as a
gunner who's you know, is really rapidly loading a muzzle
loading cannon so they could get back to get shoot
at a ship that's one hundred yards away. So you
talk a little bit about that because as we go forward,
is this technology overwhelming the glorious days of the of

(29:48):
the sailing ship and we kind of lose some of
these heroic figures when we go to start converting to
steam and we get the turred ships like the Monitor
and and move forward from there.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
I think you can still tension in the current environment. Certainly,
like with my first novel Aboard the cruiser Uss Bennington.
You do see the captain and the tension with the XO,
the other officers, the chiefs, and one of the Bosun's
mates becomes one of the late heroes of the novel
because he's comes up with an idea that he read once.
So you can do this in the similar to the

(30:21):
Knemutiny or Mister Roberts. You can have those single ship
actions and a lot of the A lot of the
movie for Sorry, Greyhounds with Greyhounds, which you mentioned earlier,
A lot of that takes place on the bridge and
you're seeing the dynamics there and that the stress that
Tom Hanks's character is undergoing. The cruel see probably the
best novel about World War Two, I think, and it

(30:44):
takes place on one ship with a convoy excuse me,
two ships. There is the second ship that they take
command of later on. You don't need this great expanse
of geographical area and the great powers to show what
any story tells. And it's about the human condition, good,
bad and ugly. So a part of that actually does

(31:04):
that any Sorry does that answer your question?

Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah? I mean I again. We used to laugh about
Star Trek because when I was in terms of transactional analysis,
which I studied for a while. We always thought Kirk
was like a free child. Spock was the adult, and
Bones was always the critical parent who kind of kept
things in the rain, you know. And it was just
fun to think of it that way, but it was
it kind of spoiled watching the show for me for

(31:27):
a while.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
So this goes back to the author in this case,
Geene Roddenberry, and Gene Rodberry does not create the character
of Captain Kirk. What he does first is he tries
it with Captain Christopher Pike. And who is Christopher Pike?
He is somebody who has been in combat. He is
somebody who has lost people. There's a fantastic scene between

(31:48):
the original and the original pilot between the character of
Captain Pike and his doctor in his quarters talking about
these moral issues. But what do I do now? I can't.
I can't handle leadership anymore because I don't want to
lose any more people. And that again comes out of
Gene Ronberry's own experience not only in successfully in television
with The Lieutenant and other programs, but also the fact

(32:08):
that he had been in the United States Army Air
Corps during World War Two, he had seen combat. So
how Star Trek would have developed had Pike and that
original pilot continued is very different than what was envisioned
as a leader on the starship under Captain James T.
Kirk when William Shatner portrays him. And that's why I'm
really glad that Strange New Worlds is portraying Pike, somebody

(32:31):
who is very close to his people, somebody who suffers
when they suffer, but is also trying to develop them
as officers in a way that you don't see with Kirk.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
One of the things that we talked about when you
look at you look at Aubury, you look at Horatio Hornblower,
you look at Kirk, you look at Connor Stark. These
are good leaders to emulate. But another good thing about
about leadership in fiction is you also give an opportunity
to talk about the other side of the coin.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
I kind of laughed.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Again, I'll try to give you ideas, but I am
you know, you talked about Wicked kind of turned the
angle on the Wizard of Oz and the task which
would be fun to write a Fremit shipman, you know,
make Captain Queed the captain I don't know whether the
Connor Stark series or might be a side gig of
kind along the lines of the C. S. Lewis's screw

(33:20):
tape letters for Rosberg. You know, have Rosberg explain why
he's actually the good guy. That might be fun to do.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
That actually would if I can inter it for just seconds. Style.
First of all, I don't think young naval officers should
emulate the character of Connor Stark. He's too flawed, and
he botches his career, and he has to make decisions
that are sometimes really bad in order to get a
greater good douns. I'm not sure if they should emulate him.
I would say probably somebody like James and I tried

(33:49):
to do this. I was kind of hoping that this could.
At the end of each book, I would have leadership questions,
and one of the things I want to say was,
what are the leadership aspects of Connor Stark. His cousin
Janie Johnson, who's also she's been head of a captain
of a merchant ship, she's been head of one of
Stark's private security ships, two of them, and she was
in command of us S. Charles Stewart a DDG. A

(34:09):
for a period of time, so you see her as
a leader, and I think she's the one really to emulate.
She's the one who gets her her hands dirty in
the engine gree She's the one working alongside her sailors
to uh. I don't want to say, said, can I
say mother them along but not quite mother in law,
but guide them into the right path, and she does
make good decisions. The third character study and leadership is

(34:33):
this Admiral Rosberg, and we see him as an unnamed
captain of the US S Bennington in the first novel.
And I have to say that when I developed that character,
it was inversely based on somebody I knew, and I'll
say his name because it's in the book and the acknowledgements.
Teryl Hancock is probably the finest officer I ever served under,
and I served under him twice. He was an active
duty naval intelligence officer, retired as a captain, and I

(34:56):
served with him under him in England and again when
we were on deployment. What I did with Rosberg is
I took every positive character trait of Daryl Hancock and
I inverted them. And that's how the character of Daniel
Rosberg was created. Now over time he eventually became somebody slightly.
I adopted some of the traits of a reserve captain

(35:17):
I knew, and it'll appear again in the next book.
But I want to show three different styles of leadership,
to show that there isn't one path, but try to
choose the right path, try to avoid these errors. Don't
be Rosberg who shouts at his people and demeans them
all the time, or who takes all the glory or
the supposed glory for himself. Share the success with your crew,

(35:40):
but take responsibility for what goes wrong. So in that way,
I think there are some teaching lessons there, as I
do with say, Captain or Admiral Adama in the reboot
of Battlestar Galactica. You can't find I think better leadership
under more stressful circumstances than a captain in command of
a fleet trying to escape certain death, and I think

(36:01):
there are a lot of leadership lessons from from that
particular character. I like rock Tory from In Harm's Way,
which I've seen many times, probably the best World War Two.
I didn't read the novel, I read that, I watched
the movie many times, but his leadership style. He's calm,
he's experienced, he looks after his his junior officers.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Yeah, a great question that I just I know, have
you ever heard of Pt. Duderman? I have?

Speaker 1 (36:26):
You know?

Speaker 2 (36:26):
I think he was a Naval Academy graduate as well.
And you know, getting back to Sal's originally original comment
that you know that maybe there should be a course
on literature there when you look at the long line
of Naval Academy graduates who have published I'm thinking back
in the day, especially who you know runs Silent, Run
Deep with Ed Beach. There's a bunch of others. But yeah,

(36:48):
I think I think he is an Academy graduate. John Hemery,
who wrote the Lost Fleet series, is a graduate. But
there are a lot of them.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yeah. Well, one of the things about Uderman is he
was an active duty officer asually from the Academy, as
you said, wrote, has written a bunch of books, but
a lot of them again are these individual stories about
being in command. You know, he has one a book
called the Commodore or really excellent book, and he has
another one that anyway, his books deal with the experience

(37:19):
of being in command by a guy who had command.
He was CEO of the Tattnaum back in the eighties,
and so you know, he has that kind of experience.
And I think one of the good things about and
Ned Beach is another good example of the people who've
had command, who've done things, do tend to have a
greater understanding of the pressures and the what drives some

(37:44):
of these the CEOs of ships. I think that's an
important thing to have if you're teaching this kind of
material to young to young officers, is you know, don't
don't just listen to a guy who who read about
this and then didn't know had never been to see himself,
but feel what it's like to be in the shoes
of the guy who's been there.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. But that's a long
standing tradition in US literature. I mean, even James Fenimore Cooper,
who was a midshipman just for a couple of years
at least, was able to parlay that experience along with
his friendship with so many of the future Navy captains
and commodores that he could write about it more in
a nonfiction standpoint in the eighteen thirties, but he did

(38:24):
write two maritime novels if I recall, But yeah, you're
right that experience at sea, and I certainly my experience
on the bunker Hill was instrumental in helping me understand
some things that I could never have written about otherwise.
And there's actually a couple of incidents. There's a palette
in that first novel that from a helicopter doing an

(38:44):
unrepped e seese me doing avert rep, and that actually happened.
But those little things like what happens day to day
on a ship that you wouldn't know about if you
hadn't experienced it. So there's a really important aspect to
bringing one's life experiences into into fiction. And again, you know,
going back to something sal said as regarding the bringing

(39:07):
some of the topics in in a way you can't
with with nonfiction. As you guys know, I've written a
lot about non governmental organizations, nonstate actors, et cetera at
sea for the past fifteen twenty years, and I try
to bring those into the novels as well, Because what
I had hoped for is a with a different audience
that is more inclined to read fiction. I could try

(39:30):
to inform them in a way that they could then
go off and ask questions, well, is this really true?
What are there Somili pirates? Or what is this Tamil
tiger thing? Or what are the Chinese doing with the
Philippines in the South China Sea, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
When you were discussing in your article about Edward Beach's
Run Run Deep, you mentioned that it explores command under pressure,
rivalry and moral decision making, and want to pull the
thread a bit about that middle item rivalry that can
be and we're not talking about external rivalry where us
versus the Soviet Union are the enemy, the other ship,

(40:07):
your opponent, but there is internal rivalry that often can
be one of the most challenging people, not necessarily in command,
anybody in the navy, and especially on a small ship.
You're competing. It's a highly competitive environment. You're competing against
your peers, some of who may be your friends. You
also have personality conflicts with some people, and there are

(40:28):
some people who are just they're not good people. They're
your rival. They may not be trying to pull themselves up,
they might be pulling everybody else down so they look higher.
But dealing with these rivalries internally is something that if
people don't have good tools to work with, and we've
all seen it, it can manifest itself in some very

(40:48):
very unhelpful ways. How have you seen different examples of
these leaders in the internal rivalries that they've had in
their own ship or their own organization, and how they've
dealt with it to their betterment.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
You don't see the rivalries so much if it's a
good captain, somebody who engenders the support of their wardrobe,
you know, including all those we named. You see it
more with a captain Quig, you see it with certainly
with Rosberg. Here's a different take on it. So try
to write tension. If you're captain of a ship and

(41:23):
the other ships in your squadron are all unmanned ships,
where's the tension? I mean, maybe it's something like the
old Star Trek episode of five and I think it
was called the Ultimate Computer where basically a computer takes
over the starship Enterprise during war games. But how do
you deal with that? Most of the stories and I
mentioned this during when I kicked off the first Navy

(41:44):
con except people aren't going to necessarily read stories about
the adventures of an unmanned craft, whether it's a warship
or a spaceship, they're going to read about the tensions. Why,
Because we're all human. We all understand, to varying degree,
the human condition. We all understand the positive emotions we have,
the negative emotions, and all the conflicts that can emerge

(42:07):
from those. It is understandable, and it is in some
ways the best way to portray the human condition is
through fiction. Fiction could be very influential to us. I
mean again, I write both, but I think I tend
to prefer writing fiction because of the storytelling aspects and
the way you can get into people's minds in a
way you can't with some of the historical figures. And

(42:29):
that is something that's going to affect people. And I
think I may have mentioned it's on the show before,
but in fifty or sixty years from now, his naval
historians are going to have a very difficult time understanding
the mindset of say midshipman or naval officers. Because everything
is electronic. You're not going to have a piece of
paper like I used to show them, you know, in class,
here's a letter by Stephen Decatur or Charles Stewart or

(42:52):
somebody else. This is what they were saying. Who is
going to be able to understand what you thought because
we don't have pen and pay for anymore, by and large,
so that history is going to be lost in a way,
that or that ability to properly assess history.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
Yeah, that's a that's a really good point. One of
the things I took it back to what we were
talking about in a minute a while served on in
the Navy, his characterizations. I was thinking of Tom Keeler.
Is that the lieutenant who kind of uh set in
motion the Cane mutiny.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, he's the one who wants to be a novelist.

Speaker 3 (43:27):
Yeah, oddly enough, No, but he's you know, you get
these people who are you know I call bomb throwers.
You know, they're always fomenting something. Anybody who's served on
active duty knows that there is someone like that. He's
either angling for his own benefit or he's just is
that kind of personality that that is has to has

(43:48):
to stir things up. And I think we did a
really good job and in capturing that, and I think
that's really important. By the way, if you haven't read
Winds of War, read Winds. It's an excellence.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Put it on the list as soon as I finished
this next book.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
There you go. That brings up a good question. Is
I'm just just now looking up I want you all
to talk another forty five seconds, so it would sound
like I had this question prevent set. So we're talking
about the k mute need it. That was a The
book came out in fifty one, and it was the
movie was in fifty four, and.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
There was a fifty two price Pilotier Prize winner I think, yeah,
came out in fifty one, but it won this a
fifty two Pileter Prize.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Yeah, So nineteen fifty one. Herman himself he was born
in nineteen fifteen, so he was forty six when that
came out. Again, we keep seeing.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
This, No, nineteen fifteen to nineteen fifty one, he would
have been thirty thirty six.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Thirty six are very similar to Forrester when he put
out the Ratio Hornblower series. So here we have, you know,
thirty to late thirties guy, and you know you came
up with your character about the same age. So we're
talking about people who are you know, just at senior
O fours oh five's maybe baby six is depend upon

(45:17):
when they came on active duty, people that want to
write and you're looking towards the future there. You know,
we've interviewed a few people here who are authors. I
know that Seth Folsom who we've had on he started
writing as a Marine Corps captain. He started pretty young.
But it's and when all you need is access to

(45:38):
a keyboard and you can hop on substack or any
other things and start writing. It is still a challenge
to find young writers young to find as people who
are under what do you say, mark under seventy or
under fifty.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
I don't remember either of those ages.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
So well. They will say authors under under fifty, but
definitely under under forty that are writing about these issues.
Is this in art that we just have very few
people that are writing at or are people finding other
avenues to address these issues that were just not seeing
the books come out because I don't read everything that

(46:16):
comes out, But it's it's a challenge looking for good
fiction books related to this area that help explore explore.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
That's an interesting question because the two aspects I can
think of is that there's a writing and a reading
aspect to this. The first is back in the day
long before substack. In the long ago, before time, before blogs,
even before the Internet, you had these things called magazines
and newspapers where there would be editors and there would

(46:45):
be literary agents and they would vet so there was
fewer material. There was much fewer, much less material available,
but it had been vetted for quality. But also you
had a lot more readers back then again, going back
before the time of you know, the mirrorish TikTok phase
and philiate fads and the Internet and all these things

(47:07):
which are distracts to the ability to pick up a
book or now even an article and read it. The
readership among young people now, I think is the lowest
it's ever been during the modern literary phase of our history.
You have a difficulty even with short pieces. I know

(47:28):
in the beginning of teaching at the Academy twenty years ago.
It changed a lot over the next nineteen years where
it was tough for them even to get through a
couple of pages and concentrate. And I didn't blame them.
I think it was simply the culture that where you're
getting so much information from so many different media outlets,

(47:48):
it's tough to discern what do I read and how
can I spend twenty or thirty minutes to read. And
that's why even today I always have a book somewhere
and I make sure that I am reading from a
book twenty to thirty minutes a day. I read other
things too, but something where I am completely concentrating on that.
So if you're going to have a course like this,

(48:08):
you have to be aware that a lot of the
information might not get to them if they're not actually
reading the books in that class or even some of
the articles about it. And again, I don't blame this
current generation. I blame technology, which is changing a culture
that isn't allowing us to think in a way that
we used to.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Yeah, I think you're right. My mother was a professional
writer who sold short stories to you know, Saturday Evening
Post and Common, holl And Read Book and all these
other magazines over the years. And that skill set to
write a story than which you have to introduce characters,
make them likable, and do it in a very short
space is I think is being lost by not having

(48:52):
more venues for that type of writing. That aside, let me,
I want to go back to the Wicked Thing, because
I've sent her looking at mutiny on the Bounty, which
was a true story. Order from Hall made it. You know,
they wrote the book that was made into the movie,
so you get their side of what happened. And in
the movie, I believe Electric Christian comes off as a
as a hero because Bly was such a tyrant. But

(49:13):
then there's the other side of it, which Bly wrote
a response to or he wrote the true story the
Mutiny on the Bounty, and he know he's he did
one of the most amazing feats of navigation ever an
open boat. You know, you get that it's not is
it fiction? Is it? Is it? Is it history?

Speaker 1 (49:31):
And who who decides?

Speaker 3 (49:32):
At what point you you because we're talking about the
wars and all that. The the reality is, you know,
the Napoleonic Wars and the Great Britain was involved in
World War II, World War One, not so much in
the in the literary world that I'm aware of at sea,
but who you know? Where do you where do you
begin to blend these things so that they are they

(49:53):
are actually factual but nonetheless interesting for readers to go for.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Part of that lies with historians and making these stories known,
getting the facts out so that the novelists can then
take the facts and build from that. I was just
rereading the old story about the Mary Celeste, the lost
ship from eighteen seventy two, and most of the information
that was propagated for well over a century simply wasn't true.

(50:20):
They didn't go back to the original records, so a
lot of suppositions about what happened to the captain and
his family and the crew, you couldn't really work off
of that. So I'm putting my historians cap on for
a second and saying, get the facts out and then
let the novelists take hold of that.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
Get the facts out. That's a great way. And this
has just been a great pleasure Claude for the last hour.
I really appreciate you you coming on board, and for everybody,
I would check the show links. If you haven't read
the article, and if you didn't get it there in
course of the show, please give it a read. I
think I'll also put some links on some of the
books we've talked about, most of which were in the article,
but there are a few extra ones, and I know

(50:59):
Jerry over and also mentioned a couple of other books.
I'll make sure and save the chat so we can
put those in as well. It's summer's coming up, so
if you're looking for a book to read, that would
be it. But Claude for those that aren't familiar with
or where's a good place for people to track on you,
or is there some things that you're working on right
now that everybody should keep an eye on.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Sure, I'm over on Twitter and at substack. I'm at
Claude Berrabete at substack dot com, so I post generally
three times a week. There they can purchase my novels.
The first one is Pariah. That's the the Paria and Privateer,
the second editions of my first novel. They had to
be retitled and there were changes in them. The third
one is The Philippine Pact, and I'm currently working on
my fourth one, hopefully hoping it'll be ready for either

(51:42):
Christmas or more likely next summer. And yeah, just go
to Amazon. I've got history books there. There's an edited
volume on Rickover's papers. Missus Rickover bequeathed all of her
husband's personal papers to me and my then position as
museum director, I was the second as the archivist was
going through I I then went through them and found
what I thought with the most salient things so that

(52:03):
you'll learn a lot about Rickover that you would not
have expected. On White, CEA's about Jacksonian era and the
Navy and other books. So i'd see those are the
big ones. And I very much appreciate the comments. By
the way over on my substack, I've taken note of
several of these that I'm going to take an opportunity
to read as soon as I'm finished this next novel.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
Yeah, thanks so much, Claude.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Always interesting and now thanks guys, I appreciate and I
really appreciate having me on. Thank you very much for
inviting me.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
Pleasures always in Claude, I'll pop you an email White.
Just while we're talking about used, AI asked AI to
generate for me what they would have as an image
of Connor Stark, and I'll email that to you. Bet Again, everybody,
thank you very much for joining us for another edition
of mid Ratch. I really appreciate. Until next time, I
hope everybody has a great Navy day. Cheers.

Speaker 4 (53:03):
Molly Rod replied, Wiry Paddy all name Mike, my lonely
want to marry me and all leave a friend of
becaudily for you being to blame my love fly, love me,
silly faulting, you're the tame.

Speaker 5 (53:26):
It's a long way to dipper really, it's a long way.
It's a long way to dipper. Army through between.

Speaker 4 (53:44):
Gorb becdi Farewell left Twell.

Speaker 5 (53:51):
It's a long long way to dipperate. But my lie,
my two

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Episode 724: The Fictional Officer Corps: From Hornblower to Stark - with Claude Berube

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 724: The Fictional Officer Corps: From Hornblower to Stark - with Claude Berube