Faith Colburn skillfully weaves her complex WW II plot into an absorbing fiction about both the European and Pacific theatres of War. The book follows adventurous farmer Connor William Conroy (See Willie See) through his training and fighting in the army. In a creative author choice, to better dissect her protagonist’s character, (hero?) Colburn uses flashbacks of the Depression, when Connor explored our country’s western attractions by riding the rails. Carrying a camera and camper pots and pans, he finds himself shaped by events and fellow hobos. Back on the family farm in the 40’s, a thoughtful Connor deliberates at length about the war. As the Nazis march toward France, he signs up to protect his sister, in Paris with the U.S. State Dept. Colburn represents this side of the war with her letters since in a twist of fate, Connor is assigned to head east, serving with the Army’s Bushmasters regiment. He ends up in an unlikely platoon of Native Americans, Hispanics and cowboys. In this era of pervasive discrimination, Connor as a leader and others around him are confronted by feelings toward other races in this unlikely band of brothers. With language sometimes poetic, sometimes realistic and hard, Colburn is adept and authentic in her colorful descriptions of crops, farm land, jungles, mountains, and encampments. In high style, she captures the essence of season end harvest, long boring ocean trips, high temperature sweats, and cruel, grueling battles. Throughout the book, Colburn takes the reader on a bobbing and weaving global ride based on thorough research as well as a family connection.
Faith Colburn’s See Willie See is living proof that something new really can be done with a familiar story. Among the familiar here, World War II stories and scripts of soldiers in training, in battle, coming back to what may or may not still be home. The stuff of the war movies I took in at matinees as a kid.The something new is how Colburn turns all that to address crucial and contemporary issues of character and values and how we read our own story.Set in America’s heartland, Colburn weaves together letters between the main characters, allusions to newly emerging chronicles through photography (think Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange), and the recall of memory to tell an engaging story.She takes readers to “Willow Grove,” a rural community near the actual Hastings, Nebraska (even the building of the ammunition dumps near Hastings gets into the story) and anchors her story in the Conroy family, theirs and their neighbors’ farms, their struggles in the Dust Bowl, Depression, and WWII.Connor William Conroy is the C. Willie C. of the title pun. The novel unfolds principally through his adventures and those of his sister, Nora. In turn, their two adulthoods, equally distant from one another and from home, situate the farm on which they were raised as the hub of a larger world.Like many stories of that time and place, this is a story of dreams deferred—college delayed, living between two wars, a present that makes the past and future seem ephemeral. “So Connor, did you see any ghost lights?” he’s asked about an old prairie story. “No lights,” Connor responds, “Just ghosts.”Colburn successfully draws together memories, hopes, and happenings, and connecting them to real history, one that includes allusions to Gene Krupa and Lawrence Welk, Luther Burbank and the invention of nectarines, the famous botanists for whom NU’s Bessey Hall is named, and even to the Charge of the Light Brigade as it competed to shape plains culture at the time.The Conroy’s world, however, encompasses lots of the American West in Connor’s years hoboing, takes us to Panama, Australia, and New Guinea in his military service, and to Paris and the war in Europe through Nora’s time with the Foreign Service just as the Nazi’s are first threatening, then overwhelming France.Along the way, Colburn draws together the impact of the farm years and the hobo travels, with the impact of training and battle with the Arizona National Guard/158th Infantry, not by accident a unit of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds.Readers will meet men trained for jungle warfare but serving instead to offload boats along a coast, soldiers spending Christmas on a front line, and a world of Cob stoves, old highways, girls who are fetching, harvest crews, and wheat dust. Some will recall the novel’s allusions to the government killing livestock to boost prices, or sending Japanese who posed a supposed security threat back to Japan, or how enlisted men seemed always to have beefs against the brass.But all these familiar moments anchor a less familiar territory: the moral anchor of the home front, the reminder of how peace-minded the inhabitants of the farming frontier were, the insight into how a farm boy has to rehearse what he says to his intimate friends, the possibilities and limitations of even our virtues—patriotism, family, work, in a world where concern for the degradation of nature pre-dates the more contemporary concern for global sustainability.“The time for contentment is rarely when you’re young” mother Claire tells Nora; “you’re chewing on a lot of cud” father Henry tells Connor. And the nub of the discontent, the worry is Claire’s parting wisdom to Connor as Part I closes—that he and his mates and the enemy are all real human beings, that forgetting this would be a person’s ruin.Moral and emotional issues, then, abound; Connor weighing a duty to serve against his girlfriend Pauline’s warning she won’t wait for someone who might come back dead, the family’s dilemma of wanting to protect their son but aware that father Henry serves on the local draft board, Nora’s desire to escape danger against her desire to help refugees, Connor’s Uncle Harry, ruined by WWI, who’s “eyes had gone somewhere he couldn’t reach.”Lesson succeeds lesson. His fellow soldiers challenge Connor to see why Natives Americans and immigrants might be suspicious of a white kid; their joint experience in battle teaches them all how much, at heart, we are all the same, not despite but even because of our different stories.As Pauline tells Connor, “You should write a book.” Like most stories, Colburn’s is a story about stories and their power. This story will resonate especially with readers of Cather, or Steinbeck, or (more contemporaneously) Ted Genoways. It is the story of “how to keep the big dust storms from happening again”—the storms of war and heartbreak, of moral struggle, as well as the clouds over the heartland.
