Meet me in St. Louis tonight!

Well, really I mean, meet my grandfather. I couldn't blog about my trip earlier because it was a surprise, and I do believe my great-aunt and I pulled it off!

My grandfather, Norman Bussel, is reading tonight at Left Bank Books in St. Louis (which I'm told is the only indie bookstore in St. Louis) from his memoir My Private War: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A World War II POW's Journey.



“Big B”

I was the last one to bail out of our B-17 bomber alive that day. It was around noon on April 29, 1944 and our target was Berlin. “Big B,” we called it. It was probably the most heavily fortified city in Germany, with thousands of effective and deadly 88mm guns pointed at the sky. Pointed at the Allied planes that came to release their bombs on Hitler’s glorious city.

The mission started out very badly for my crew and continued to get worse as the day progressed. First, there was the problem with Flt. Officer Sherwood Landis, our navigator. Sherry’s face was ashen as we rode in the truck to the flight line. The day before, Lt. Sokol, also in our bomb squad, and a close friend and former classmate of Sherry’s in navigation school, had been hit in the neck by schrapnel while on a mission. His crew was unable to stop the flow of blood and Sokol died on the flight back to our base in Rattlesden, England.

As our crew’s radio operator, it was my job to pick up our intercom headsets before every mission. I walked into the radio shack with our co-pilot, Lt. Benedict and hurriedly hung the ten headsets over my left arm while Benedict signed out for them. When we reached the hardstand, where our plane was parked, I began passing the headsets out to my crew.

You can read the rest of the first chapter at Memoirville.

Here's a photo of him and his wife Melanie at a recent signing:



Please join us if you're in town! I'm still pretty sick, was woozy and almost delirious this morning but managed to not only make it to LaGuardia two hours early (a practically unknown feat for me), but had no trouble with the TSA with my expired-by-two-days passport. It's gonna be tricky cause I will now send it back on Monday to get a new one, and pray that it arrives by January 28th, since I'm supposed to fly to San Francisco on the 29th. I was going to wait but I don't know how great the TSA will be about a passport that's been expired for three weeks.

I will be writing soon about my misadventures in traveling in 2008, which I'm hoping don't spill over to this year, especially since I'm going to Italy sometime in the next few months to visit my mom before she moves back to the States.

I'm in St. Louis until Sunday, have some writing to do and books to read for work but am mostly going to be spending time with my family; my uncle is here from Oregon as well. And, of course, I'll be sampling the city's cupcakes!

Wish my grandfather at Happy 85th Birthday!

Today is my grandfather's 85th birthday! Isn't that awesome? I'm going to see him tonight and hear him speak at West Point tomorrow.

Do YOU want to wish him a Happy Birthday? Well, if you do, you can email me (rachelkb at gmail.com) your birthday wishes and I'll pass them on.

But you know what would be really awesome? If you pre-ordered his memoir My Private War: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A WWII POW's Story. (out next month) or sent it as a gift to someone. It's really extraordinary and I'm so proud of him. Much more on that in the coming months, and I will of course let you know when he's reading in NYC.



You can read an excerpt at Memoirville. Here's the start of the excerpt:

On April 29, 1944, my B-17 Bomber crew flew a fatal mission from Rattlesden, England to Berlin. Four members of our crew were killed that day. Six of us survived and became prisoners of war for a year.

I promised myself that if I were lucky enough to return home, I would write a detailed account of this calamitous event so that the families of those who were killed would know exactly what happened to their loved ones on that fateful day.

More than 60 years have now passed, but I have been unable to set forth a single word about that mission, although the minutiae are still as vivid in my mind as ever.

Keep reading

Great review of my grandfather's WWII POW memoir

Check out this AWESOME review from Kirkus of my grandfather's memoir! Which you can pre-order now. You can read an excerpt at Memoirville.

Bussel, Norman
MY PRIVATE WAR: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A World War II POW’S Journey

One of the Greatest Generation writes affectingly of a long life spent wrestling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Prisoners of war, Bussel notes, suffer disproportionately from heart attacks in old age, as well as various autoimmune illnesses—all maladies attributable in some measure to stress and anger. Shot down over Germany in 1944, Bussel, then 19, was shipped off to a POW camp on the shore of the Baltic Sea and was subjected to the usual indignities. His Nazi captors never discovered that he was Jewish, though, and he had something of a protector in a fatherly German guard who “made some everlasting changes in the way I look at the world.” The early pages of this memoir echo the work of Neil Simon, if with a slightly more exacting view of military medical inspections. Bussel writes with good humor about life in boot camp and specialist training, of minor insurrections and tensions among the enlisted and of his coming of age courtesy of a Florida ballerina turned stripper. (He ruefully reflects that he had forgotten to take along the lucky bra she had given him on the day his bomber was brought down.) Bussel told his family that he would return if the military sent them a notice that he was missing in action, and he lived up to his word. Yet he returned changed—and to a nation that was ever so slightly afraid of him. (He was turned down for a job for which he was perfectly suited because, the interviewer said, “my boss reads that you were a POW, he’s going to think I hired a loony.”) Bussel writes clearly and authentically about the various manifestations of what used to be called shell shock: anger, irritability, confusion, claustrophobia and years of attempts at self-medication before finding support and sobriety.

An honest account of matters once considered embarrassing—and much more common than civilians might realize, as a new generation of veterans is discovering.