Major Smith's Box
A cold war
by
Book Details
About the Book
The Cold War must be the least deeply understood struggle of the 20th century. With operations concealed within a labyrinth of secrets, marked by sabotage and terrorism, it was an era the military participants called "peacetime" with no sense of irony. When one day in one hundred took them far from any peace, their memory of it seemed to vanish in a matter of hours. They went home at the end of those days on the edge, smiled at the ones they loved, spoke about the trivial, and revealed nothing.
The soul of Major Smith´s Box is a young Dutch woman, through whom the emotional toll taken by years of secrets is revealed most clearly. The knowledge of mortality rarely evidenced in the military characters is voiced honestly through her. Her partner is a German-American assigned to the Belgian Air Force as a maintenance officer, an assignment directed by the intelligence community to provide the Belgians a reconnaissance systems operator who understood both German and Russian. His role in reconnaissance flights over Eastern Europe remains secret for several years until a mission goes badly.
True to a time of personal and military lives being tightly intertwined, Major Smith´s Box is a love story indicative of the era, as much as a novel unveiling a little known aspect of history. The book paints an intimate picture of life in the Low Countries during some of the darkest days of the Cold War.
About the Author
After graduating from the Stanford Creative Writing Program in 1971, Klaus Brauer served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force – including nearly four years attached to the Belgian Air Force. He now lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and their two children; his older daughter lives in Holland.