My Washington Times Review Of 'The Last Stone'

The Washington Times published my review of Mark Bowden’s true crime book, The Last Stone.

Mark Bowden is mostly known as a writer who covers military conflict in such nonfiction books as “Black Hawk Down,” “Killing Pablo,” and “Hue 1968.” But he also wrote true crime books based on his journalism while he was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire,” was about a University of Pennsylvania dental student and later a practicing dentist who was the head of Philadelphia’s “Yuppie Conspiracy,” a major drug operation. “Finders-Keepers: The Story of a Man Who Found $1 Million,” was about a hapless, drug-addled South Philly man who found $1 million dollars that fell off an armored car — and lived to regret it.

Now Mark Bowden has returned to the scene of a crime he reported on in 1975 when he was a cub reporter for the Baltimore News-American. In “The Last Stone,” he offers a look back at a horrendous crime and writes the sad ending to the story.

On March 29, 1975 Katherine Lyon, age 10, and Sheila Lyon, age 12, went missing from a Washington, D.C., suburban area shopping mall. Despite full press coverage from Richmond to Baltimore and a full-court police effort, the two children were never found.

The book opens a week after the girls went missing and Lloyd Welch, an 18-year-old, seventh-grade dropout with a headband over long, thick brown hair parted in the middle and a sad effort at a mustache, walked into the Wheaton Mall in Maryland and told a security guard that he knew something about the missing girls. The security guard called the police and two detectives quickly showed up to question him.

“He was scrawny and acned and mean; life had treated him harshly, and it showed. And, man, could he talk,” Mark Bowden writes. “Lloyd was a con artist. Words tumbled from him pell-mell, as if their sheer number and urgency could persuade. Whatever was true in what he said came wrapped in slippery layers of guile.”

After the two girls vanished, area children were placed on lockdown. The case was given even more notoriety as their father, John Lyon, was a local radio personality. A week after the girls were reported missing, past the point most experts agree diminishes greatly the chance that the victims will be found alive, the cops in Montgomery County, Maryland, were desperate for information and a break in the case. They were flooded with tips, but none were useful.

Lloyd Welch was taken from the mall to police headquarters and questioned. Once a tape recorder was turned on, Mr. Bowden tells us, Lloyd did what he did best. He lied.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/14/book-review-the-last-stone-by-mark-bowden/

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine interview with Mark Bowden about his book Hue 1968 via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/12/my-q-with-mark-bowden-author-of-hue.html 

Sifting Truth From Lies: An Interview With Mark Bowden, Author Of True Crime Book, 'The Last Stone'

Publisher’s Weekly offers an interview with Mark Bowden, the author of a new true crime book, The Last Stone.  

In Bowden’s The Last Stone (Atlantic Monthly, Apr.), detectives try to find out what happened to 13-year-old Katherine and 11-year-old Sheila Lyon, sisters who vanished from a Maryland mall in 1975.

What surprised you the most about how the case unfolded?

The duration and difficulty of the interrogation was far beyond anything I imagined, and it fascinated me. With no physical evidence and, initially, no witnesses, every bit of information about the crime had to come from the suspect himself. And the suspect, Lloyd Welch, was so compulsive a liar that his behavior bordered on comical. He also had every reason in the world not to tell the truth. Building the case against him meant traveling down a long path of deliberate untruths, stories designed to mislead. The detectives had to somehow sift the truth from a mountain of lies.

You can read the rest of the interview via the below link:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/79338-sifting-truth-from-lies-pw-talks-with-mark-bowden.html 

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine Q&A with Mark Bowden concerning his book, Hue 1968, Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo, and his other books, via the below link 

 www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/12/my-q-with-mark-bowden-author-of-hue.html

My Q&A With Mark Bowden, Author Of 'Hue 1968' And 'Black Hawk Down'

My Q&A with Mark Bowden, author of Hue 1968, Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, appears in the current issue of Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the piece below:

Note: You can click on the above to enlarge 

Conversation With Mark Bowden, Author of 'Hue 1968,' 'Black Hawk Down,' And 'Killing Pablo'

I had a long telephone conversation today with Mark Bowden, the author of Hue 1968, Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo and other outstanding non-fiction books.

A former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, Mark Bowden spoke about how he came to write Hue 1968, his visits to Vietnam, and some of the interesting people he spoke to for the book.

He also spoke about his career in journalism and offered the backstory to Black Hawk Down and his other fine books.    

My interview with him will appear in the upcoming issue of The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International. I’ll post the interview here when it come out.

You can read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of his previous book Three Battles of Wanat below:

Hue 1968: Urban Warfare, Then And Now

Bing West, an author and Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, offers an interesting and enlightening piece in National Review on Mark Bowden’s new book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam and the comparisons of Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1968, more than 500,000 Americans and 800,000 South Vietnamese troops were fighting 400,000 Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese (NVA) soldiers. In early February, the enemy launched a surprise attack against dozens of cities and bases throughout the 400-mile length of South Vietnam. While most of the offensive was beaten back within days, it received enormous press coverage and badly shook the confidence of the military and political leadership in both Saigon and Washington.

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, the new book from Mark Bowden of The Atlantic, tells the tactical narrative of these events splendidly — albeit with a dubious epilogue focused on broader questions of strategy and foreign policy.

The most savage battle occurred inside the historic city of Hue in the northern part of the country. Ten thousand NVA seized the heart of the city, including the ancient citadel enclosed by stone walls 20 feet thick. For 25 days a confused, chaotic battle raged up and down the city’s streets. When it ended, most of the city was destroyed, and the death toll included approximately 250 Americans, 500 South Vietnamese and 5,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, plus 6,000 civilians killed in the fighting and another 2,000 executed by the NVA.

Bowden has stitched together dozens of riveting squad-level firefights, writing from individual points of view collected via dozens of extended interviews over four years of research. Via this accumulation of short stories depicting love, sacrifice, gore, madness, valor, blood, and horror, the reader follows the battle down the deadly streets day by day.

… In the book’s epilogue, Bowden writes, “the battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. . . . As some of the nation’s more recent wars have helped to illustrate, ‘victory’ in Vietnam would have been neither possible nor desirable.” This exculpation by blanket denial is both mystical and bewildering. It does not fit with the focus (one significant 25-day urban battle) or the deep research of the book.

Yes, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are comparable to Vietnam in two particulars. First, in all three cases America insisted upon democratic nation-building that was resisted by the indigenous cultures and eventually exceeded politically sustainable resources. Second, in Vietnam, we conceded a vast sanctuary to our enemy; in Afghanistan, we similarly allowed Pakistan to provide aid and refuge to the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

However, unlike North Vietnam, the Islamist terrorists pose a continuing danger to America. Defeating them cannot be dismissed as “neither possible nor desirable.” There must be “victory,” narrowly defined as an end state that is tolerable to our security interests. Tell me where we are in three years if I follow your strategy should be the directive the commander-in-chief issues to his generals. And most certainly Bowden’s aversion to nation-building should be heeded in regards to our future role in Syria.

… Bowden has written a classic narrative about the role of grit and the individual soldier in urban battle.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448934/hue-1968-review-key-vietnam-battle 

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on the Vietnam War and the lessons learned for Iraq and Afghanistan via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/02/look-back-at-vietnam-war-and-lessons.html

Note: On one point I disagree with Mr. West. The North Vietnamese were in fact a threat to America. They were a communist client state of the Soviet Union, a nation that had dreams of communist world domination. This is a fact - the Soviet leaders said so, many times. The Vietnam War was but a battle in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And America won the Cold War.   

Hue 1968

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel, offers a review of Mark Bowden’s Hue 1968 for the Washington Times.

A few years ago, I was lecturing my students on strategic surprise. I asked each of them to write paragraph on how surprise was used at Hue in 1968 based on what they knew of it. With few exceptions, the reply was that Hue was the battle where the Viet Cong won the war in a general uprising. These were graduate students, and their woeful knowledge of the Vietnam War was gained through the state of education in our high schools and undergraduate college programs. Their ignorance is more a comment on the “liberal” in liberal arts than in any defect in my students.

Today, we are chronologically as far removed from Vietnam as my generation was from World War I in 1968; and its lessons are in danger of being lost. Mark Bowden tries to remedy this with his excellent new book, “Hue 1968.”

Mr. Bowden points out that the Tet Offensive campaign, of which Hue was the major battle, was a strategic surprise that ranks along with Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 as a colossal American intelligence failure. However, it was not planned and fought by peasant Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas. It was planned by the North Vietnamese general staff and political leaders in Hanoi and fought largely by regular regiments of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA); the VC were relegated to being scouts, guides, suicide sappers, and cannon fodder.

The NVA and Viet Cong lost every tactical engagement and failed to achieve their primary objective, a popular uprising that would topple the South Vietnamese government and force the Americans out of the war. However, Tet was the turning point of the war because America’s leaders were discredited by the surprise and lost the confidence of a significant portion of the American public. Tet ruined Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. There was no “light at the end of the tunnel.” Although the last U.S. bombs would not fall until 1973, the North Vietnamese had irretrievably gained the psychological advantage.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/30/book-review-hue-1968-a-turning-point-of-the-americ/