 and welcome to Books, Books, Books, where we discuss reading, writing, and everything in between and beyond. I'm Dr. Rita Forsyth, coming to you from Maui through the live streaming network Think Tech Hawaii. Our topic today is making history come to life with Major General retired John Scott Harrell. John was the California Deputy Adjunct General Army from 2009 to 2011. In this capacity, he commanded and provided operational training and guidance for the California Army National Guard, a force of over 17,000 soldiers. His active military service began in 1975, and he retired in 2013. John's civilian titles included California Deputy Attorney, and he is currently a commissioner for the Boy Scouts. He and his wife, Colonel Linda Harrell, retired, are part-time Maui residents. Welcome, General Harrell. Thank you. Thank you for having me, and it's good seeing you again, Rita. John, you and I have had dozens of conversations about history. I've heard you say many times a skilled writer of history can entertain while they educate. Why is this important? Well, first off, I'd like to point out I'm dyslexic, and writing is very difficult for me, and I have to work at it. And I found that a lot of writers are dyslexic, and we all kind of gravitate to writing because subconsciously we are trying to prove to the world, yes, we really can read based on our experiences in elementary school. But when it comes to history, most Americans will say, well, I don't like history. And that's only partially true, but they read a lot of romance novels set in historical periods. They read cowboy western movies, things like that. And what happened to most Americans when they went to school, they had four years of American history. When they first had it in elementary school, it was exciting. They were learning about Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, and Thomas Jefferson, and Chief Joseph, and Geronimo, Molly Pitcher, and a lot of American heroes. And of course, many of these were partially myths that we admit today. But it was fun. It was exciting. It was about people doing exciting things. But then we had to grow up and go to middle school and high school. And all of a sudden, the pendulum of history shifted. We went from where history was fun, overdo history was boring and over analytical. In the ancient world, that wasn't the case. In the ancient world, history was there to teach, but it was also to entertain. And in the civilized world, historians would write history that were part of entertainment at a big feast. And they would read their histories to the emperor and to senate members and things like that. And so part of it had to be entertained. They had to put people in. Now in the barbarian world, they didn't have history. They had sagas. And Bard would stand on a table and sing the exploits of his warlord and his followers and history and myth and legend with the intermingles and everybody enjoyed it. And that's kind of why I call it the pendulum of history. Because on one side is where Pitt pulled the graft up. During the pendulum of history, on the interesting fun side, that this entertainment, we have the Bard's. And I like to use Greek names because the Greeks invented history. And so let's talk about the Bard. And of course, who's the Bard? We all know as Homer. We all had to read Homer in middle school in one form or another. So we're kind of familiar with the, the Trojan War was a fabulous movie, was accurate to this story, probably not, but it got people interested in history. And we have a guy named Herodotus, the true father of history. He's also the father of liars. Because what makes history different than a true story is asking a question. That makes it history, not a true story. So what Herodotus did, he asked the question of why did the Greeks and Persians fight? And then he's told this marvelous history interwoven with third hand hearsay with myths and legends and gods, not as bad as Homer, which is almost all myth and legend, but it was a really good story and some of it was true. Then on the other side, we had Thucydides, who actually says in his writings that he's not going to be like Herodotus. He's only going to give you one or two levels of history hearsay. It's going to be accurate. The gods aren't going to be in there. There's going to be no mess. And it's boring. If you're not a professional historian, you wouldn't read it. Then in the middle, in the right spot, we have a guy named Xenophon. And he was a historian between the Persian Wars, the Greeks and Alexander the Great. And he found himself caught in the middle of Persia with 10,000 buddies who had been mercenaries for a Persian prince and they had to fight their way out. So his question during this true story was, how in Hades are we going to get out of here? And so through his entertaining story, he intermeshed the history of Persia, the Greeks, the traditions and cultures that he marched through. And it's a great story. Now, why do we suffer through the boring history? It's because there are historians that write for historians and then there's historians that want to make sure you read our book. So we have to interlace the real life stories of people into a history to make it interesting. Just like the novel you're going to read. We have a question from a viewer. What inspired you, John, to become a writer of historical nonfiction? Basically, I was raised in the 50s and 60s when I was a kid. Basically hunting and fishing, Boy Scouts were the normal thing that we did in those days. But it was also the time of the blockbuster movies of Anthony and Cleopatra, Ben Hur, The Robe. So there were a lot of these stimulus around me to get me interested in the ancient world. And then on Saturday morning, there was The Sword and Sandal Movies coming out of Italy, probably C or D grade. They talked about ancient history kind of in a novel way, more story than in fact, and they got me kind of hooked. And then when I was eight, I found a comic book version of Caesar's War Commentaries. And at 10, I found a version in English of the War Commentaries. And then when I was 12, my sister gave me an underbridged version of Plutarch's Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, which is about this thick. And that kind of got me hooked into history along with hunting and fishing and the normal things that a boy would do in those ages. Well, honestly, that's not what I was reading at that age, but I'm glad somebody was. So let's talk about your first published book, The Nicibus War, which took place many, many years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in Roman history in general, and this little known war in particular? Well, it has to do with education. And basically, when I was growing up, my grandfather was a master stone mason. And he was a moonshiner and a chair copper in the 20s and 30s, but he thought education was important. So he encouraged to stay in school, read books, things that he didn't have, you know, opportunity to do when he grew up. And so that basically kept me interested in that area. So needs to say, next thing you know, I'm going to junior college, I'm going to college, commission, military career. And now I have a group of staff sergeants and sergeant aides with me. And I thought education was important. So I kind of harassed them to get their bachelor's degrees. And I harassed them to get their master's degrees. And then they told me, sir, you don't have a master's degree. So they kind of shamed me to get me back in school. And so I guess I had a doctor at the time. But I went back and earned my master's based on the little bit of the shove of my my sergeants. And since I'd fallen in love with ancient history as a as a kid, kind of naturally flow that I went back into history for a master's, ancient history for a master's. Well, let's talk a little bit about your military career. How did that begin? Well, going up in the basic the 50s and 60s, all my scout masters were veterans of Korea or World War Two. I was interested in the out of doors and basically exciting things. So I always kind of wanted to go into the military. Of course, the Vietnam War was going on at the time. And so I wandered into the Marine Recruiting Office did very well on the test. And the next thing you know, I'm a Marine officer cadet and Marine reservist enlisted man, going to junior college and earning my commission in 1975. I then went on active duty for five years with the Marines, got married, transferred to the Army National Guard and went to law school and GI Bill. So that's kind of got what got me into the military as a career. And I loved working with the people, you know, doing important things, keeping society safe. Well, thank you for your service. Can you tell me maybe one of the highlights of your military career? Sure, there are many, many highlights. But the ones that come to mind are a lot of times I was deployed, especially as a guards, guardsman, to help basically California in emergencies. Los Angeles riots, I commanded the battalion during the 94 earthquake. I was part of the operations that made sure that we put support and help to the small communities, tent cities for those that were displaced and that sort of thing. The highlight would have been my command in Kosovo where I commanded a multinational brigade peacekeeping for a year. And then of course, working continuously during the LAPDIS current war with training my soldiers and getting them ready for deployment. So you talked about this a little bit already, but I know from having chats with you in the past how important an education is. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Basically, education is what gets you from whatever your background was, whether it was good or bad, and allows you to succeed into whatever you want to do, whether you want to be the best plumber or the best historian or a teacher, the only way you can do it through education. The key is I'm lucky I live in California. Education is basically free. Junior colleges cost next to nothing, still does. State colleges cost next to nothing. So I basically encourage everyone, no matter what your age, to get educated. And as a writer it becomes even more important because there's different forms of writing. What I wrote for the Attorney General's office, that was war and former writing. What I wrote for the military, it was a different form of writing, simpler, shorter, more analysis. When I realized when I wrote my first book, which it never got published that way, thank God, my Soviet Calvary book, when I finished it in 2008, I hated it. It was something wrong. I didn't know what, because I was used to writing in the military format or a legal format. I wasn't used to writing a historian. So when my sergeants encouraged me to get back to school, I took a master's in history. And the history master's teaches you how to write history because you write, read hundreds of books from good historians to really boring historians and everything in between. And you start seeing how you can make history come alive. And again, that my second, our first one published, The Necipus War, was that product of learning how to write history. It was my master's thesis that my faculty advisor, Frank Petite, basically after I submitted it, he says, now you need to turn it into a book, add a couple hundred pages, make a story out of it. So education is continued. So why then were you so interested in late antiquity? Well, that's Frank Petite's fault. Dr. Frank Petite, my faculty advisor at Cal State Northridge, as I was studying history and ancient history and going through the requirements, he kept dropping hints and says, you know, the fourth century has just as many primary sources as Julius Caesar's time, but very few people have written campaign analysis or about the military operations of that period. And so he kind of over a couple years nudged me into writing one paper for a class on this, one paper on another subject on Julian the Apostate's campaigns. And then when I came to my master's thesis, and I tried to figure out what I was going to write on, he says, well, your master's thesis is 90% done. If you add those last four papers together, there's your master's thesis. So completed that, loved it. And then he said, okay, now turn it into a book. Perfect. And now it continued to write. And we appreciate that. Let's switch gears and circle back to your latest book, your Soviet Calvary Operations book. You write, and I find this fascinating, how the second world in the Second World War, the Soviet Calvary adopted military tactics used in the American Civil War. I never knew that. Yes. And also we need to clarify when we're talking cavalry, we're talking about horse cavalry, not tanks, not armored personnel carriers like they talk about cavalry today. They were still using horses up until 1950, because horses were versatile in Eastern Europe. While I was standing on the lookout in Western Ukraine with my former Soviet staff officers, and we were discussing the American Civil War, come to find out they knew a lot more about it than I did. And this started me thinking, why do they know more about the American Civil War than I do? Not just one of them, but there were five of them. They all did. They were tank officers like myself. And so then I started doing a little bit of research, and I found out that during the American Civil War, the Russians had sent observers. And they noticed how we use cavalry versus how the Europeans did. Europeans used it in battles and charged cannons and half a leg and, you know, the charge of the liper gate thing. In the American Civil War, we didn't use cavalry for that. We used it to raid in the rear and cut rail lines to basically cut off the food supply to an army, normally Union that was invading the south. But the Russians took that concept, took it back to Russia, and they started developing it with the Cossacks. And they trained the Cossacks in these type of tactics. And then as time progressed, when we get to, by the time we get to the Second World War, we have corps and armies of horse cavalry that survived the German Blitz and then turned the tide and start raiding the rear of the German army during the second half of the war. And basically taking out their supply lines where the tanks were hitting them in the front. So then these tactics developed in the Cold War. And so the tactics that we were looking in the operations, we're looking at that the Soviets were going to do to us and NATO was basically have the tank army punch through the lines, get in our rear and attack our supply lines in our airfields and things like that. Direct link from that concept to Jeb Stuart, and Forrest, and Morgan, and Sheridan in the American Civil War. And in Russian military writing, they give credit to the development of this theory to the Americans, which I always think is fascinating. It is fascinating. So how might your historical viewpoint influence today's political climate? Well, the problem with the historian, we have Cassandra's curse. And remember, Cassandra was the priestess who warned the Trojans about not trusting the Greeks bearing gifts and bringing that Trojan horse into the fortress. The the curse is, we can give you an analysis and tell you this is probably going to happen and pretty much everybody ignores us. Now, when you look at the Russians today with the problem we have in Ukraine, you have to understand Russian mentality and the Russian mentality is in concrete. The West invades Russia. Russia doesn't invade the West. And it starts with the Mongols, the Teutonic Knights, the Polish, Lithuanian Confederacy, the Swedes, Napoleon Bonaparte, the British and the French at the Crimean War. Then you got the Germans twice and the Austrians twice during World War II. The Russians are always defending and expanding Western Europe. Today in the Russian mentality, now that they're buffer of all Poland and everything else is gone, they're looking at the expansion of European Union into Eastern Europe and into Ukraine, expansion in NATO into those areas as a direct threat to their survival. Whether it's true or not, that is how they believe it, based on 500 years of history of the West invading Russia. John, you're in the process. I hear of writing two more books. What advice would you give to budding novelists? Well, especially if they're historian novelists, you have to know your period. You probably noticed my coffee cup has the long ranger on it as I was coming in taking drink. There's a reason I picked that cup today because if you're going to write a novel about ancient Rome, you have to understand how the Romans lived, how they socialized, how they fought, how they loved, how they ate, all these different things. But the one thing you'll learn really quick is there is no individual in a Roman novel. Your hero or your protagonist is always surrounded by slaves, by friends, by family members because in the ancient world you were never alone. You lived in a group. There's a story about Horatio at the bridge. Everybody knows the reference. Somebody defending something while people are running away so they can get away. But Horatio at the bridge, Horatio wasn't by himself. Horatio had his friend Titus and Spurius with him. They were standing in the middle of the bridge in the Tiber's. The legionaries were cutting the bridge out from underneath them. They were fighting back the invaders from crossing the bridge until Spurius and Titus got wounded. Of course, they were dragged off by the other legionaries and only at the end was Horatio by himself. They were always with somebody. So if you were going to write a novel about the ancient world or pretty much the world before 1850, people weren't by themselves. They were doing great things. Long Ranger and Tonto, who guys together, Jean Autry, there's always three guys in his movies together. They were in a group and they were leading. The second thing I would tell the buddy rather is, as I made a reference earlier, was educate yourself. There's a style of writing to be a novelist. If I wanted to turn the Nespus War or the stories in the Nespus War into a novel, I would have to go back to school and learn how to write as a novelist. And that's part of the key is know your subject backwards, forwards, know the environment they lived in that you want to put such a story and then learn how to write the style that you need for that style of writing for a novelist or a historian or a lawyer or a soldier. Well, I know you've said that writing history is like writing a true life romance novel. How do you bring this about in your books? Well, because I'm writing nonfiction, it's hard to actually follow a complete romance story. But in the Nespus War, to give you an example, there's a siege of the city of Amida. There's a noble woman she's captured by the King of Persia, and she's taken off while the army is fighting the Roman army in the city. He convinces her that she either has to marry one of his nobles or convinced her husband to defect and join her. So in this particular case, she convinces her husband, she sends her slave, has the message tattooed onto his head. He comes in, convinces the husband to defect to the Persians and give pertinent information to the King of Persia. It didn't work. But did I need to put that story in because of what I was writing? No, I did. I'm doing a military analysis of a campaign, but made people alive. As an emperor, it's credit for taking a city, right? Did he climb the wall? No. There are some legionary or centaur in, like Titus Polo or Lucius Veranis from the Rome series that actually went over that wall first. By the way, those are two historical characters that they made a story around. I don't mean to cut you off, but we only have a few minutes left. So I think people are curious about what you read for fun. What's on your bedside table? Well, right now I have two or three books sitting there. One is, of course, on Kindle. It's basically Diamond Hunter's Centaurian series. It's a four-book series about two young men that become centaurians and fight during the time of just after Nero, this patient's time. I have another one on nonfiction on Great Britain during Arthur's time, King Arthur. We're getting a little in the mists right now. And then just to make sure I'm in the midst, I have a sword and sorcery books sitting around in science fiction books. The Lost Fleet are sitting there also being read all at the same time. Sounds like fantasy and escaping into novels. So that's interesting. I want to tell our viewers that your books are available on Amazon or directly from your publisher Pen and Sword in book and electronic format. Well, that's all the time we have today. I want to thank John for being my guest, our broadcast engineer, our floor manager, and Jay Fidel, our executive producer. A special mahalo to our sponsors. And thank you for joining us. Books, books, books will be back in two weeks with my friend and host Elaine Galant. I'll see you next month. Until then, read, write, and create your world.