Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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West Virginia Voices of War premiere set for May 28

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Next week, on May 28, I will be premiering the documentary West Virginia Voices of War and a companion book Common Valor. To say this is the biggest project I have taken on would be an understatement.  

You can see the opening to the documentary on my website.

The book, in both print and ebook format, is now available through Amazon.

I ended up traveling more than 2000 miles and collecting 50 hours worth of oral histories from West Virginia war veterans. I completed interviews with 46 veterans from every major conflict since World War II and a number of smaller peace-keeping and humanitarian missions.  It took 15 months and somewhere over 500 hours, although I really have no idea how much time.

 

This project began when I learned from the director of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, at the end of 2011, that only 20 or so oral histories from West Virginia war veterans were in the archives. I’m not a veteran, but I’ve always been intrigued by the comradery that soldiers feel toward each other. There is an esprit de corps among those in the military that is unmatched anywhere else. 

I started talking to friends and dropped in on a couple local VFWs and offered to record oral histories. I knew it would turn into a documentary of some sort although at the time I had no idea what the “story” would be. That is often the nature of documentary work. You don’t know what the story is going to be; you just have to collect the information and see what happens. About halfway through the project, I began to realize how remarkably similar the stories were, regardless of when the veterans served.

 

Along the way, a friend suggested I come out one evening and listen to a veteran sing. Jeff Ellis was singing songs from his album The Line. His record label actually released it while he was home on leave from Iraq. As soon as I heard the title song The Line I knew I wanted to use it in the documentary if I could and fortunately, Jeff graciously allowed me to do just that. 

West Virginia Voices of War is a multimedia presentation, combining audio recordings with still portraits of each veteran. I couldn’t use comments from all of the veterans in the documentary, so I also included edited transcripts from all of the interviews in the book Common Valor. I chose that title because I came to realize that “valor” isn’t necessarily about heroes. In my mind, valor is men and women putting their lives on the line, doing their jobs and doing their best to come home safe and sound. Almost every veteran I interviewed talked about having nightmares or drinking too much when they came home. And almost every one of them said they were proud of what they did and would do it again in spite of the problems.

 

This project would not have been possible if it weren’t for the donors who supported it and the sponsors who are supporting the premiere. The gang at WVSU’s DigiSo provided invaluable service as well.
The documentary will premiere at 7 pm at Emmanuel Baptist Churchat 1401 Washington St W in Charleston on May 28; the day after Memorial Day. The premiere is free and open to the public. Donations will be accepted for the Charleston Veterans Center on the West Side. Copies of Common Valor will be available for sale. Following the premiere, I plan to make the documentary available for local veterans groups and other organizations to show as fundraisers.

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Diving continues for Miskito Indians—and so does paralysis

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IMG_0854.jpgIn February of 2010, I began this blog by talking about a trip to Honduras to work with a doctor there as he treated Miskito Indians who dived for lobster on scuba. I ended up visiting Honduras four times as I worked on a documentary project about the situation, including one trip to accompany a news crew from NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.

My colleague, Dr. Mathias Nochetto, and I were stunned when we made it La Ceiba, Honduras to see the clinic run by Dr. Elmer Mejia. Dr. Mejia was treating more than a hundred Miskito Indians every year, most had been severely disabled by decompression sickness—“The Bends.” They dived between eight and 16 times a day to 100 feet or more for up to 12 days. Their living conditions on board the industrial dive boats were deplorable, living without even basic sanitation for nearly three weeks at a time on board in extremely close quarters.  They harvested the lobster as many as four days boat ride from shore. That meant if they were injured while at sea, they had to wait four days before they could see a doctor.

Douglas_Daylight-CDS_007.jpgOn my second trip, I met with members of the Handicapped Lobster Divers Association. They told me that they had more than 2000 members and knew of another 400 or so divers who had died from diving. To be a member of the organization, they had some level of diving-related paralysis. This is out of an estimated 10,000 Miskito Indians involved in the lobster industry.

Dr. Mejia has had great success treating the divers. In spite of the delay to treatment, a large percentage of the divers leave his facility able to walk again after being carried inside. He has had to fight government obstruction, crime, unsafe working conditions and an overall lack of interest from the community carrying out his work. On that first visit, Dr. Mejia told us that there was a motion to suspend scuba diving for lobster in 2011. It didn’t happen. The government decided to continue diving and leave the markets open, in spite of the problems.  That last two year extension was set to end on June 30 of 2013.

National Geographic News Watch just called for Honduras to stop diving, but it didn’t happen. They have already decided to continue diving for another two years.

I’ve had people ask the question why they should care. “It’s not as if they have to dive.” Nearly all of the lobster hand caught on scuba comes to the United States in the form of lobster tails. That is hundreds of tons of lobster tails per year. We, the people of the United States, have created this market and we need to understand where our food comes from. There is no difference in this than sweat shops in third world countries churning out cheap shirts and jeans. Whenever a there is a fire in a building housing these workers, killing them by the hundreds, we are morally outraged—at least for a brief period. I see lobster advertised nearly daily on the television. It isn’t just a luxury food anymore.

I really don’t want the lobster industry to go away. There is nothing else for the Miskito Indians to do. I have been to their homes and seen where they live. I simply want us to harvest them in a safer manner. There is no excuse for killing an entire sub-culture of people simply to feed our appetite for cheap lobster. As a diver, I hate to see my chosen sport used to destroy lives. This is something many of us do as a recreation.

Watch the documentary video For Cheap Lobster I prepared two years ago. It follows three diving populations, but focuses on Honduras.

Visit my website for more information, photos and links to other stories on the topic, including from National Geographic, NBC, the New York Times and CCTV. It focuses on three populations of divers, but focuses on Honduras.

I didn’t have anything to do with this project, but some filmmakers created a documentary on the situation from the Nicaraguan side of the Miskito Coast: My Village My Lobster..

Voices of War/Common Valor Documentary Premiere Scheduled

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Cover art to the book. It includes the
face of every veteran interviewed.

Valor is supposed to be the stuff of legends, of heroes who sacrifice everything, of people who die to save friends or strangers. After interviewing 46 veterans who served their country in times of war, I find that valor is actually more common than we think it is.

Initially, I became interested in interviewing West Virginia war veterans when I first heard about the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. I had just finished up a documentary project on the lobster divers of Honduras and moved back to West Virginia after being away for nearly 14 years. When I heard there were only 20 or so oral histories in the Library of Congress archive from West Virginia veterans, I realized it was time, and a perfect opportunity, for me to focus on my home state.

I’m not a veteran. The military was not something that interested me. I was fortunate to be able to go directly to college after high school and then I began my career as a journalist. Over the years, though, I have always been interested in, and intrigued by, the camaraderie of those who did serve.

As I worked on the project and interviewed more veterans, I was struck by the similarity in their stories. Whether they served in Afghanistan or in World War II, their stories were very much alike. They talked about home, family, comradery and doing their duty. They loved their fellow soldiers and felt guilty if they had to leave them behind. If not for the timber of the voices and the accents, dialects and pronunciations, you might not be able to tell the difference between one veteran and the next.

After logging more than 2000 miles and collecting 50 hours worth of oral histories from West Virginia war veterans, the West Virginia Voices of War documentary is ready for its premiere.

West Virginia Voices of War will premiere at Emmanuel Baptist Church, 1401 Washington St W, Charleston, WV 25387 on May 28, 2013; the day after Memorial Day.
Donations to the Veterans Center on the West Side will be accepted at the premiere. l will be selling a book called Common Valor that includes longer histories from every veteran I interviewed.
You can watch the opening to documentary here.

Voices of Warsynopsis: West Virginia Voices of War is a documentary complied from the oral histories of 36 West Virginia war veterans who served from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. West Virginia sends more of her sons and daughters to war than any other state, per capita. This documentary captures their thoughts on service, on war and on returning home.

Common Valorsynopsis: Common Valor includes the stories of 46 West Virginia war veterans with their thoughts on service, on war and on returning home. These veterans served from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Common Valor is the companion to the multimedia documentary West Virginia Voices of War and it includes the complete story from the documentary as well..

Voices of War coming soon

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For a little over a year, I’ve been working on a documentary on war veterans and I’m excited to say it’s just about ready for primetime. The documentary project will be in two parts: a semi-traditional documentary and a companion book.

All together, I logged more than 2000 miles and captured nearly 50 hours of interviews from 48 veterans. Two of the interviews are incomplete so I won’t be able to include those two veterans in the project, but the other 46 will be in the book, the documentary or both.

I call it a semi-traditional documentary for two reasons. In a more traditional documentary, I would have picked a veteran from each major conflict and weaved a single story from those six stories. Instead, I chose to take individual comments and stories from most of the veterans I interviewed and combined them into a single piece. In all, there are 36 individual voices in the documentary. They cover every major conflict and some of the smaller conflicts and peace-keeping missions like Kosovo, Somalia,Grenada and Haiti.

The second way this project is different from a traditional documentary is a focus on the voices themselves.  I didn’t shoot video of the veterans being interviewed. Instead, I used an audio recorder and then captured a portrait of each person. The advantage to an audio documentary is people typically find an audio recorder less intimidating and they are less self-conscious than with a video. I wanted the veterans I interviewed to be relaxed and to forget about the recorder completely. I also wanted the viewer to focus on the words and the stories and less on the expressions and mannerism of each veteran. The documentary will include the photograph of the individual veteran as he or she speaks, but it won’t be moving images.

The stories cover a number of different topics including their reason for enlisting, emotions of leaving for war, losing friends, getting wounded and the comradery that comes with serving.

I will release the documentary in time for Memorial Day this year. I am planning a live premiere along with a web page. The book, to be called Common Valor, will be available at the same time. Stay tuned for more details as I lock everything down.

I’ve posted excerpts of several different veterans speaking on this blog. You can see several of them:

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Rest in Peace Eugene Lusk

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I’ve seen a series of different numbers but somewhere between 600 and 1000 World War II veterans die each day. Less than 10 percent of the men and women who served in that war are still alive. So, it shouldn’t come as a great shock that one of the men I interviewed for the upcoming Voices of War documentary project has just died.

Eugene Lusk was born January 18, 1925 on Bud Mountain, West Virginia. He died over the weekend at 88 years of age. I met Mr. Lusk last August at his home in Herndon, WV. He was a warm and gracious man and I instantly liked him. He had the easygoing manner of a country boy who was at home in his environment. I wrote about meeting him last summer in the blog post The people you meet ARE the adventure.
Mr. Lusk left for Europe on March 23, 1944 after loading ships. He liked to tell the story that he was sick 10 of the 12 days he spent crossing the Atlantic, living on peanuts and Coca-Cola. After spending months in Europe training, he boarded a troop ship (again getting sick) and eventually touched mainland Europe on June 6, 1944. That was D-Day. He found himself in the middle of Utah Beach. He was relatively lucky as Utah Beach was less heavily fortified than Omaha Beach. That was good as far as he was concerned because he wasn’t an infantryman, he was a stevedore trained to load and unload supplies for the invasion. That was his description for himself, but it was mostly him being modest. He saw combat, survived air raids, guarded prisoners and survived to come home.
Just after he was discharged and returned home to West Virginia, he met the young lady who would soon become his wife, Ethel. He said he saw her in church singing at an evening revival and thought she was beautiful. He walked her home that night and never looked back. They were married about a year later and made it 66 years together before he passed away.
Interviewing West Virginia war veterans for the Voices of War documentary has been an honor and a privilege. I have met so many gentle and honorable men and women who served their country and then came home to build a life—not just in World War II, but in every conflict. Some stories, of course, touch you more than others and Mr. Lusk was one of those people. After we had talked a while, he insisted I join him and his wife for lunch: brown beans, corn bread and all the fixin’s. Just what you would expect.
I’m in the final editing stages of the documentary. I am working on the final release details right now, but it will be out in time for Memorial Day. My one hope is the men and women I have interviewed for the project (and others who served) say that I got it right and the other people who see it say “I never knew” and then look for a veteran to say thank you.
Rest in Peace Eugene Lusk and thank you for your service.

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