The Book: Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival, by Norman Ollestad

The Story: Yet another survival story.  That’s kind of been my “thing” for the last month or so, no idea why.  I don’t have any more in my pile, so this may be my last one for awhile, but I’ve probably read 5 or so recently. Weird.

Anyway, in this one, the narrator (who was 11 at the time), his father, and his father’s girlfriend are all on a small airplane when the pilot slams them into the side of a mountain.  There is a pretty bad storm going on and Norman is pretty much left on his own to get out of this thing.  His survival and his journey down this mountain make up about half of this book.

The other half is the story of Norman’s life up to that point.  He grew up in this spontaneous, crazy surf culture in Malibu and his father pushed him into surfing and skiing from a very young age.  His parents divorced when he was younger but he maintained a decent relationship with both his mom and his dad.  The relationship with is dad is focused on a lot and the lessons that his dad taught him come to his mind over and over as he gets down this horrible, snowy mountain.

While this is a story of survival, that kind of takes a back seat to the story of  Norman’s life and the relationship that he had with his father.

What I Thought: Ok, so I know that the father-son relationship was an important part of the story, but it is bad for me to say that I just really didn’t care? I thought that his dad put him in pretty scary situations from the time that he was very young just so that he could live vicariously though his son.  To be honest, his dad’s “drive” is what got them smashed into the side of a mountain in the first place- flying all over for skiing and surfing that Norman, at that point, wasn’t even super enthusiastic about.  Meh. It made me not really like his dad, so those father-son parts just kind of irritated me.

The other thing that kind of made this a harder read for me was all the skiing and surfing terms that were seriously everywhere.  I am not at all familiar with either sport and I had a hard time picturing what was happening about 90% of the time.  Even when he was coming down the mountain, there were tons of skiing terms and I never did really develop a picture in my mind of the area that he was trekking through.

These two little issues aside, I did enjoy this book.  I thought that the survival story was completely crazy and even though I knew going into it that it was survival story, I kept crossing my fingers that Norman would live.  I thought that he did a good job of keeping the story short and concise and not adding a ton of filler for the sake of making a longer book.  I kind of have a thing for honest, bare-bones writing and Noman Ollestad pulled it off oh so well.

Conclusion: A decent survival story, but not the best.  You will probably get more out of it if you are at least vaguely familiar with surfing and skiing, which I am not. If you want some serious mountain survival, I’m going to have to point you to Into Thin Air.

The Book: The Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and The Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, by Marcus Luttrell

The Story: A team of four U.S. Navy SEALS was sent out to an area near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border to check out this village where an al Qaeda leader was rumored to be staying and building up a Taliban army.  For these guys, the mission actually seemed fairly cut-and-dry, the kind of thing that they did pretty frequently.  They were all good friends and were comfortable going into a potentially dangerous situation together.  Just a few hours into the mission, something goes terribly wrong and they are soon in the middle of this firefight with over 100 members of the Taliban.  They fight hard and do well, but after 4 or 5 hours, Marcus is the only member of his team that has survived.  He has no real way of communication and he’s wounded pretty bad.

What follows is Marcus’ story of survival.  He crawled miles and made it to a village where  the people nursed him back to help, kept him safe, and fought for him.  The Taliban fights hard and even manages to crash the rescue helicopter that comes to save Marcus.  Back home his family is starting to mourn his death, but Marcus uses his wits, not to mention quite a bit of luck, to get out of this thing alive.

What I Thought: Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: Marcus is totally full of himself. It is clear throughout the book that he genuinely thinks that he and other Navy SEALS are the end all be all of the whole world.  To be fair, I think that that is probably part of their training. Had he not thought that he was tough and that he could survive anything and that he was the smartest person in the country and on and on, he may not have survived this situation. I found myself, several times, kind of rolling my eyes at him talking about how strong he was, how smart, how great… but after awhile I just figured that most SEALS are probably like that and let it go.

The other thing that got on my nerves were the intermittent rants about the “liberal media.”  The first time I just kind of grinned and thought, “Well, I guess we know which way he leans,” but after paragraphs and paragraphs about how the liberal media criminalizes soldiers for doing what they were trained to do and yadda yadda, it really did become distracting for me.  I don’t really know what his goal was with all the ranting, but for me it just served to make me like him a little less. Not for having these views, mind you, but for feeling like he had to bring them up every chapter. So you know, I totally disagree with him.  He talked a lot about how the troops were made out to be bad guys and that the liberal media’s sympathies seem to lie with Afghanis and Iraqi people. Huh? I would say that any criticism is usually directed at military higher-ups or on crazy atrocities like Abu Ghraib (which Marcus said was justified and said that they deserved much worse than what they got…).  So.  That’s my rant on his rants. The end.

Other than those two little things though, I really did think that this was a great book.  I tend to shy away from books about the military just because I’m not familiar with their terminology, ranks, and have a hard time picturing combat.  This book was written in kind of a “user friendly” way that made me feel totally comfortable.  I liked how he kind of chronicled his journey from Texas, through SEALS training and into combat-zones.  The SEALS training had me reading with my jaw hanging open.

When he got to the actual mission and how everything went down, I thought that he presented everything in this really clear way and was great about putting his guts into it. Instead of the “this guy shot this guy and this guy took position and yadda yadda,” I really felt like he told how he was feeling, how everything was playing out and kind of just how he was taking everything in.  I am sure that to write such a detailed description of these hours was just horribly painful, but he did a great job and those chapters were the best written in the whole book.

The chapters, however, that got to me the most were the ones of Marcus’ family back home just waiting to hear news on him.  His twin brother said all along that he had a connection to Marcus and that he was still alive.  Their mom was totally beside herself with hope and grief, and watching their family, their town, friends and members of the military just gather around her and the rest of Marcus’ family was just gut-wrenching.  When they got the call that Marcus survived, I cried real, actual tears.

Conclusion: If you can just get used to the cockiness and ignore the political rants, read this.  It seems like more of a guy book (what with no kissing or anything), but it really isn’t.  It is bloody and the guns have nicknames, but there is also real heart here.