Pilot's Log

Do you remember that turning point when you came to a fork in the road of your destiny at a moment when your personal power wasn't strong? And do you recall how you couldn't muster the potency to make the most courageous choice, but instead headed in the direction that seemed easier? Well, here's some intriguing news: Your journey has delivered you, via a convoluted route, to a place not too far from that original fork in the road. It's possible you could return there and revisit the options -- which are now more mature and meaningful -- with greater authority. Trust your exuberance.

I find that difficult to believe.  If I had been "courageous", I would have found a way to stay in Florida, where I would have had a better possibility of starting a career.  Granted, I'm only here in Tennessee because of my love for my parents and my hope to see them well.

A couple weeks ago at the Knoxville IPMS meeting, a fellow member was clearing out his closet of old periodicals and some of us got to divvying the pieces among them.  When I saw that he had old issues of War Monthly and True War among them, I shamelessly scooped up as much of those as I could.

Both those magazines were influences on me, and perhaps more than I'd care to admit.

War Monthly was the product of the Marshall Cavendish publishing powerhouse, and (I felt) a good value for the combination of artwork, writing and layout work.  The articles would get repurposed into volumes, and from there sometimes into whole coffee table books.

True War, on the other hand, was the product of the notorious low-budget tabloid schlockmeister and pornographer Myron Fass at Countrywide Publications.  The only color content was on the cover, and the interior was made up mainly of archival or press-release photos and cut-to-the-bone prose.  True to form, their presentation on the Battle of Arnhem (for an example) was slimmer in both page count and journalist prowess as the photo spread of Cornelius Ryan's book A BRIDGE TOO FAR!  I got a replacement copy of an issue of True War I thought I lost in 1978 and now that I think about it, I think one of my parents could have thrown mine out in disgust.

To make a long story short, I couldn't afford as a kid to subscribe to War Monthly, and even if the option were available my folks probably wouldn't have condoned me subscribing to True War.  My main go-to publisher of magazines from then was Challenge Publications (Air Classics, Air Combat, Air Progress, Military Modeler, etc.).

But I'm glad to get back these.  And then I found a bunch of online sources for .pdf versions of War Monthly, so one way or another I have all the content from the get-go through to Issue 49.  The series lasted much longer than that, but the later ones are very hard to find because they were subscription-only and most went to library collections.

FP