I have a story I want to tell, but I'm not sure how to do it

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’d like to share the story of my Dad’s military service with the world somehow. I’m sure that most people’s fathers shared plenty a tall tale with their children, but my father’s tales are the stuff of novels and movies. (Sure, I freely admit my bias :))

He served in the US Air Force during the Vietnam War as a KC-135 pilot, but his knack for finding himself in bad situations began in flight training.

The US Air Forces uses the T-38 for its advanced flight training. Picture a pen with a tail and two short stubby wings and you’ve captured the aerodynamic wonder that is this aircraft. The wonder being that the aircraft actually generates enough lift to actually fly. On one of my father’s early solo flights, one of his engines exploded. This would have been of only minor concern, the T-38 has two engines, but the explosion also ruptured the aircraft’s hydraulic lines so severely that it wasn’t possible to lower the landing gear of the aircraft. The flight tower suggested he eject, but my father wasn’t excited about the idea of igniting a rocket under his butt. Additionally there is some mystical force that controls pilots, convincing them that as long as there is any aircraft left to fly to stay with it. My father decides to belly land the aircraft.

Now another less than enviable trait of the T-38 is its high landing speed of 130 knots. So with all the grace of a wheeless dragster, the aircraft shed most of its fuselage in a shower of sparks before coming to a rest on the runway. My father was fine. The $756,000 dollar aircraft was not so good.

Skip forward in time to graduation. My father and his class are now full fledged pilots and with an air of celebration put on an air show for their wives and families.

Having finished his flight, my father is down on the ground, watching a group of his classmates put their aircraft through maneuvers. Suddenly, there is a puff of smoke as one of the T-38’s loses an engine. The pilot, remembering my father’s dilemma a few weeks earlier, quickly puts his gear down before his aircraft loses all of its hydraulic fluid.

Meanwhile my father finds himself next to the spouse of the very pilot who is in trouble. He assures her that he had the same problem a few weeks ago and that he came through it with no problems. He leaves out that his aircraft was destroyed in the incident.

But the pilot with the problem is feeling pretty good about the situation. He has his gear down and locked, a second engine that is running fine, and the entire incident occurred right over an airfield. He declares an emergency, gets clearance, and sets her down.

We can only speculate at his facial expression when he realized that the loss of his hydraulics also meant the loss of his wheel brakes. In any case, my father and the rest of the crowd only got a brief glimpse of the aircraft as it speed past them at 130 knots (remember that high landing speed?), down the runway, off the runway, and through the base fence. Picture now a crowd of several hundred people trying to chase down an airplane as it proceedes to cross a highway and then enter a corn field.

Following the trail of crumpled corn, the crowd was able to locate the aircraft with its quite shaken but otherwise intact pilot.

After my father began his service in the skies over Vietnam, his life only got more insane.

-An anti-aircraft shell passed between him and his co-pilot.
-An F-4 once came up for fuel with the message “Quick! Just give me a few hundred pounds, I got a Mig on my tail!”
-Another F-4 hooked up before realizing that a Sidewinder missile attached to his aircraft had armed itself and hung up on his racks.
-VC attacked my father’s airbase
-A tiger attacked my father’s airbase. The tiger was more successful.
-My father was nominated for a medal and threatened with court martial for the same mission.

The list goes on for quite a bit. I’m certain that all of this would make a great book or an even better movie. The topic of tankers has never really been covered very much and it presents quite a few amazing visuals. This story has drama, explosions, firefights, and comedy in the face of frightening situations

My problem is I hardly know where to begin. Should I make a script? Should I write it down as a novel? I’d like to have a real chance of getting this out to the public somehow.

There is a ton of research that I would like to do. I know that a certain amount of fiction is inevitable in retelling such stories, if nothing else than to fill in the gaps of dialogue that no one can remember. But I would really like to keep the story as true as possible.

Well anyway. That’s my dilemma. Sorry for rambling on so much, but the thought of getting my father’s story all down within his lifetime has consumed my thoughts as of late. I often feel that I have contributed little to the world that will be remembered when I am passed. I’d feel better if I could keep this small bit of history from disappearing.

2

how about adding a UFO coverup. America would buy it.

3

What are you really asking here? Whether we think it’s a
better novel or movie? Which one is your best shot at
getting it out to the public? If one of us knows an agent?

It’s going to be a lot of work. It sounds more like a movie
to me, but, on the other hand, you could ensure a book gets
made by selling it yourself if nothing else works.

Both are hard as hell to sell. If you do sell the movie,
chances are the movie made would no longer be your father’s
life at all.

So you have to ask yourself, what do you want out of this,
really? A good record of your father’s life for your
family? A story that becomes famous? A secret desire to
make scads of money off this?

If you write it as a novel, your best bet to get noticed
is in contests, and in writing programs. No book publisher
is going to buy something ‘over the transom’ anymore. If
you make it clear it’s a biography, you might have a bit
better luck.

If you write it as a movie, learn how to write scripts by
taking classes (and again, your best bet to get noticed is
through being in writing programs and contests). You can,
occasionally, get some agent to read, and then represent,
a first-timer, but you have to have the product first.

Having said all that, the only way to make it worth it is
for you to write it how you want. The odds of selling
something are small enough that thinking practically about
whether to write a novel or movie makes a lot less sense
than you writing it how you want to.

4

You could start with trying to get the bare bones down on paper or taped. Your father would probably remember additional details as he goes over the stories a few times.

anyway, a start…

5

It might be better to focus on your source material. Get the stories from your father first. Get it down in whatever format works best: tape recording, writing, typing while your father talks. Just get it down.

You can always worry about shaping the material after you get it down.

As for the success of selling it, I’m afraid the answer will be “it depends:”

  • It depends on how well the book is written. Check the e-book and self-publishing sites and you’ll see a lot of memoirs out there. Read an excerpt, and you’ll see why they may be of limited interest (although I must admit I’ve seen some good stuff there as well; maybe their ambition stops once they see the finished product).

  • It depends on finding an agent who sees potential in the book.

  • It depends on a publisher who gets excited by the book.

  • And it depends on a public interested in reading the book.

The only thing you have control over is the first one, and that step begins with getting the stories down. Now. Before your father dies.

Sounds like some great stories there. You could sell it as another Chuck Yeager-type tome.

6

I think the first step is to, very kindly, ask Scylla to write it.

7

I don’t want to discourage you, but your best bet would be to make a family journal for the family to read years from now. My great grandmother wrote a very interesting family history and had it published. It includes stories of how her mother killed a rattle snake with her bare hands after it bit her two year old sister (who died from the bite), cougar attacks, freezing winters when the family almost starved to death (they lived in a ranch in Southern Utah), and when her youngest son died and was laid on the kitchen table for 4 days until the fire built on the ground unthawed the dirt enough to bury him.

Very interesting stories - to the family.

I am a veteran’s counselor. I see numerous military records and hear numerous war stories during counseling sessions every single day. There have been more than a few that were so outrageous that I wouldn’t have believed them had I not seen military documents to support their story.

Before he retired from our office, I worked with a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient whose story would blow you away. Many of my clients were POWs, Purple Heart recipients, front line soldiers, and downed pilots. Others are multi-war combat vets. Some were wounded in the attack on Pearl Harbor, others stormed the beach on Normandy, and still others battled for Iwo Jima (including the Congressional Medal of Honor recipient), others the Battle of the Bulge. I have had more than a few who survived the Bataan Death March, others who are barely surviving today with PTSD.

In spite of the many years I have been counseling, I haven’t lost the ability to be utterly amazed and moved by some of the experiences of these people, sometimes to tears, other times I must go for a long walk to regroup before I can see my next client.

Again, I don’t want to come off as sounding negative or to discourage you, I do think his experiences should be recorded, especially for his family. However you should understand that there are many, many amazing tales out there. Sadly, most will never be told, those that are told won’t be read by most (do a websearch for war battles or check other book sources and you will find MANY memoirs written by veterans), and you would have a better chance of winning the lottery (yes, I have my tickets :D) than finding someone to turn his experiences into a movie.

Still, it never hurts to try, but I would concentrate more on the family history and less on Hollywood.