11/10/2004 11:41:00 AM 'Maybe you can help me write my book someday'
Karen Driscoll of Chimacum turned her uncle’s World War II reminiscences into a book, “Not as Briefed: From the Doolittle Raid to a German Stalag.” – Photo by Shelly Randall
When Karen Driscoll of Chimacum started to write up her uncle’s World War II experiences 50 years after he had lived them and 40 years after his death, it was ostensibly “for the family records.”
Not that Col. Ross Greening’s service in the U.S. Army Air Corps didn’t merit wider recognition. The Tacoma native piloted a B-25 in the famous 1942 Doolittle Raid on Japan and designed the “20-cent bombsight” used in the low-level attack. He “walked out of China” and flew 27 more missions out of North Africa before his plane was shot down over Italy, then escaped lengthy captivity when Allied bombers blew up the prison train he was riding in.
For six months, Col. Greening and two companions evaded recapture by hiding in a mountain cave. He finished out the war in a German stalag (prison camp), using the watercolors supplied in YMCA aid parcels to paint a record of his own war experiences and those of other POWs who related their accounts to him.
Although he produced a treasure trove of diaries, letters and a lengthy recorded interview in addition to these illustrations, Col. Greening tragically died at the age of 42 before he was able to shepherd his story into print.
Ultimately, it would take the patience and the passion of one of Col. Greening’s kin to turn this remarkable veteran’s oral, written and pictorial record into a book. “Not as Briefed: From the Doolittle Raid to a German Stalag” was finally published in 2001.
Letter from the past
Driscoll, now 62, was only 15 when her mother’s brother died, but she had always remembered her uncle telling riveting wartime stories. Not until the mid-1990s did she find a dog-eared, type-written transcription of Col. Greening’s interview and realize the written material revealed countless untold stories.
“Then I started wondering, ‘Who will remember these stories?’ I realized my children didn’t know them.” The answer came to her in a flash. “For gosh sakes, I’ll make a clean copy. I don’t want the family to lose this.”
Col. Greening’s widow, Dorothy, then in her 80s, was thrilled to have Driscoll transferring her husband’s stories to a word processor, and she passed along wartime diaries, letters and military reports to complete the record. Although she “felt uncomfortable editing someone else’s diary,” Driscoll started making small corrections in tense and grammar as she wove the sources together.
In the midst of this project, Driscoll and her husband, Andy, sold their house on Bainbridge and purchased land on Eaglemount Road in Jefferson County. As Driscoll was removing pictures from frames from the walls to pack them up, she came across a picture photo of Col. Greening her mother had given her and was surprised to find a letter taped to the back.
As Driscoll explains in the book’s acknowledgments,
[The letter] was sent to me when I was 13 years old. Ross was very ill at the time and mother had urged me to write him a letter.
Ross had answered my letter, complimenting me on my writing, and adding, “Maybe you can help me write my book someday.”
“At that moment, ‘Not as Briefed’ became a book rather than just a project for the family,” Driscoll says.
Five years to publication
Identifying her task as an editing rather than a writing project, Driscoll used her uncle’s words exclusively, cutting and pasting from her primary sources. “I made a rule for myself that I never changed his sentences,” she says. “All I’d do was smooth out the rhetoric, which tended to ramble.”
Incredibly, there are only two places in the 280-page, first-person narrative where she had to insert a phrase or sentence to bridge a gap in chronology.
The five years Driscoll worked on this project spanned the last four years of her career as a land-use planner, the sale of her house, the marriage of two daughters, the birth of a grandson, the death of her mother, her husband retiring, the move to Jefferson County, and the building of a new house – during which she worked out of a temporary office in a travel trailer, on a computer powered by a generator.
Finally she had a manuscript of 400 double-spaced pages. But, Driscoll claims, “I didn’t know anything about getting a publisher and I had no idea this story was worthy of publishing.”
Fortunately, a publisher came to her. A classmate of Col. Greening’s from Washington State University read a manuscript passed on to him by Dorothy Greening and pitched it to WSU Press. Col. Greening’s status as WSU’s most highly decorated WWII veteran – he received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Silver Star, the Air Medal and others – sealed the deal.
With strong sales, the book has been an extremely successful title, according to the press’s marketing coordinator. “‘Not as Briefed’ stands head and shoulders above the recent deluge of published WW II accounts,” reports "Military Heritage Magazine."
Dorothy Greening, whose name joins Driscoll’s on the book’s cover as co-compiler and editor, died at the age of 92 shortly after publication.
Other family stories
Driscoll is now working on her father’s life story, which she admits is easier because he’s still living. “I can ask him what he was thinking; I can go back and ask if I got it right,” she says.
At age 90, her father is the same age Col. Greening would be had he lived. “If Ross were alive, I would’ve liked to ask him lots more questions about what it was like when he was an escaped prisoner,” Driscoll muses. “I would’ve said, ‘Paint me this. Show me what this looked like.’”
And for the first time her voice catches and her eyes brim with tears.
“I don’t want these people to die, and when their story goes away, they do.”
But not Col. Greening. “Now that his story is written, he’s immortal,” she declares.
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