C D B Bryan

C. D. B. Bryan, a successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction, had not read the familiar yellow-bordered magazine for 20 years when he agreed two years ago to write a book on the National Geographic Society's 100-year anniversary. Bryan had, of course, read the National Geographic magazine "as a kid. It was the kind of magazine your grandparents gave you."

C. D. B. Bryan, a successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction, had not read the familiar yellow-bordered magazine for 20 years when he agreed two years ago to write a book on the National Geographic Society's 100-year anniversary. Bryan had, of course, read the National Geographic magazine "as a kid. It was the kind of magazine your grandparents gave you."

Peg Mullen, an author and former Iowa farm wife who hounded the U.S. military to find the truth about her son's death in Vietnam, has died. She was 92. Family members said she died Friday at a nursing home in La Porte City, Iowa. Mullen wrote "Unfriendly Fire: A Mother's Memoir" after her son Michael died at age 25 when a U.S. artillery shell fell short and killed him on Feb. 18, 1970, near the South Vietnamese village of Tu Chanh. "This is the first book you've got from the family side of a Vietnam story," Mullen told the Associated Press in a 1995 interview before the book was released.

It was only recently that many of us were predicting that the Persian Gulf crisis would become our first television war. It still may. Yet, since that initial glut of Scud alerts and gas masks, sterility has set in, and encountering the war through TV has become like viewing the Gulf through the wrong end of a telescope and hearing bombs faintly in the distance.

With only four years of flying experience (totaling 2,000 hours in the air), 24-year-old Charles August Lindbergh managed to persuade nine St. Louis businessmen to aid him in purchasing an airplane. They did so by adding $13,000 to his $2,000. His goal: become the first to fly non-stop from New York to Paris and collect the Orteig prize, worth $25,000. Lindbergh's inquiries to major aircraft companies proved unfruitful.

My heroes have always been doughboys. Or anyone else in military uniform, since gliding through childhood on the wings of World War II movies that glamorized combat and had my pals and me aching to grab our toy guns and join John Wayne, even though Hitler and the Japanese had already been defeated. And now, with a stunning allied victory in the Persian Gulf to push America's emotional buttons, the spirit of Duke in the South Pacific lives again.

A glum front-line Marine commander said Friday that at least some of the first Marine ground combat casualties may have been the result of a missile fired by a U.S. battle-support aircraft--but only because of desperate, close-range fighting.

Meanwhile, back at Da Nang . . . . "Tour of Duty" airs at 8 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8). It's American TV's first drama series about the Vietnam War. Nice production. Nice performances. Watch it. You could do a lot worse. But, well, you know, it's like this. There was a time when a weekly drama series about the Vietnam conflict seemed a bright idea.

As I first flipped through the stack of books on the Persian Gulf War, my son looked at the pictures with me and kept asking, "Is that what it was like, did it look like that?" Most of the time, I could safely say that I didn't know, I hadn't been there, but I realized that even the places that I did see at more or less the same time as the photographers looked very different on my coffee table.

Desert Storm is over and now the magazine reports and analyses are piling up like allied convoys gridlocked on the road to the front. Overall, the tone is celebratory, with a few embarrassingly stale predictions colliding head-on with blustery hindsight. The first thing readers will notice in scanning the verbiage is that the word war has largely been replaced by new terms such as turkey shoot, rout, cakewalk and nature hike.

For a brief moment, nature gift books foundered. After a generous decade, publishers retrenched in 1986. This year, they are back in force with a brave and handsome array of titles begging to be wrapped in decorative paper and placed under the tree of your choice. The most striking offering is not a nature book, per se. The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery by C. D. B. Bryan (Abrams: $45; 484 pp., indexed, 425 illustrations) is a friendly retrospective.