A Huge Debt of Gratitude

By Mark W. Danielson

I’ve spent twenty years living in Texas in cities from the panhandle to the Gulf Coast.  Each city and region has its own special characteristics, but San Antonio is by far the most historical because of what is known as The Alamo.  Many know of its famous battle between Texan rebels and the Mexican Army, but few realize our entire western expansion is a result of the defenders of this small outpost.  While it’s impossible to discuss its significance in this blog, I can present a simplified timeline, and why Texas was governed by six countries.

When Spain assumed control from French in 1691, they named the new land Texas [pronounced Tey Has].  As with much of Spain’s western expansion, the Catholic Church established missions to aid in colonization and their interpretation of civilization.  In 1718, Mission San Antonio de Valero was established near a river where crops could be raised.  The hurricane of 1724 destroyed the mission, but the suitable location prompted the church to rebuild its lost structures.  The first stone church was erected in 1744. 

By 1793, the mission role had been fulfilled so secularization designated the compound as Pueblo [meaning town] of Valero.  Threats to Spanish Rule dispatched the Company of Alamo de Parras, later known as Alamo Company, to the compound to occupy it as a fort.  As time passed, the compound simply became known as The Alamo.

In 1806, famed outdoorsman Daniel Boone petitioned to settle in San Antonio de Bexar [pronounced Bay-Har] because of a land dispute in the U.S.  Settling there, Boone became a gunsmith for the Spanish until he was ironically killed by Indians.

1810 brought more war to the region as the Mexicans fought for their independence.  This goal was not achieved until 1821 when a Mexican flag flew over the Alamo.

In 1823, an effort to populate Texas led to the Mexican government offering land to U.S. citizens, granting 4,428.4 acres for a tax of $117.00, payable over a six year period.  Soon-to-be ex-patriot colonists eagerly took the bait and rapidly increased the population from 500 to over 30,000, with James Bowie being among them.   

Ever-present change led to a shift in government in 1824 when Mexico adopted a Federalist Constitution and divided Mexico into 18 states.  Texas was designated the Department of Texas and placed within the State of Coahuila y Tejas.  The political change led to friction between Centralist and Federalist supporters.

The Texas colonial expansion ended on April 6, 1830, when Mexico passed a law to stop the flood of Anglo Americans.  Tired of losing control of their lives, native and colonist Texans began organizing opposition to the Federal government.  Because of ongoing civil strife, the Mexican Army’s Alamo Company returned to The Alamo in 1832. 

As tensions rose, the Mexican Army attempted to reclaim a cannon loaned to the nearby town of Gonzales.  Rebel forces answered with a shot at Mexican forces, yelling, “Come and Take it!” waving a flag with the same words.  The beginning of the Texas Revolution is attributed to this October, 1835, incident.  The Mexican Army responded by fortifying The Alamo, but successful rebel attacks, particularly at the Battle of Bexar [now known as San Antonio] defeated the Mexican forces after a 56 day, door-to-door siege.  With the enemy defeated and sent back in shame, rebel forces claimed The Alamo for themselves.

Unamused by the defeat, President/General Santa Anna [elected to that position in 1833] issued the following orders on December 7, 1835:  “The foreigners who are making war against the Mexican Nation, violating all laws, are not deserving of any consideration, and for that reason, no quarter [mercy] I will be given them.  They have, with all audacity, declared a war of extermination to the Mexicans, and they shall be treated the same way.”  While the Texas Volunteers watched from a few hundred yards away, Mexican forces continued to build in San Antonio.  

Believing it impossible to adequately man The Alamo with volunteers, on January 17, 1836, Texas General Sam Houston wanted to level The Alamo and evacuate it to keep it from enemy hands.  The next day G.B. Jameson presented engineered plans to further fortify it and the compound remained intact.

On February 25, 1836, Colonel Bartes, Assistant Major of President General Santa Anna, demanded unconditional surrender of The Alamo.  Texas Colonel William B. Travis answered with a single cannon shot, to which the enemy responded with harassing bombardment.  Inside, Travis ultimately drew his famous line in the sand, offering open gates for anyone wishing to leave.  Most chose to fight and die as patriots of Texas.  

With thousands of Mexican troops surrounding The Alamo, the inevitable attack began before the sun rose on March 6, 1836.  Exhausted and severely understaffed, the first Mexican troops were able to enter undetected, but soon all hell broke loose.  Outnumbering the Volunteers nearly twenty to one, the Mexican Army promptly defeated the Texans with Travis, Bowie, and David Crockett among them.  Surprisingly, twelve survivors, including Travis’ slave, Joe, were released.  To clear the battlefield, Santa Anna had the rebel bodies burned.

Determined to rid the region of rebels, Santa Anna then marched his troops to the Goliad region where rebel forces were gathered, held in the mission, and then executed on Palm Sunday.  As with The Alamo, women and children were spared to tell the tale.

But rather than deter the rebel spirit, The Alamo and Goliad massacres rallied supporters from the United States.  On April 21, 1836, General Sam Houston’s troops made a surprise raid on the Mexican Army, capturing hundreds, and killing hundreds more.  Santa Anna, who escaped the battle, was captured alone two days later.  As supreme commander of Mexico, his capture led to his seceding the land that became Texas, New Mexico, California, Utah and Nevada.  As a result, Texas became an independent nation.  The Republic of Texas ended in 1845 when voters agreed to be annexed by the United States of America, but in 1861, it flew the Confederate Flag during the Civil War.  Texas flew the U.S. flag again in 1865.     

Again, there is no way for me to adequately tell the tale, but to understand The Alamo is to understand why Texans are proud of their heritage.  When visiting The Alamo, take the outside tour with a docent before going inside, and then take time to listen to the audio tour.  Then walk over to San Fernando Cathedral where Santa Anna raised his blood red battle flag and where the remains of the Defenders of The Alamo are interned.  Do this and you will barely notice the exploding city surrounding The Alamo as Santa Anna once did.

Into Thin Air

By Mark W. Danielson

I am writing this from Toluca, Mexico, at an elevation of 8500 feet.  The nearby volcano towering over the city is well over 15.000 feet.  This industrial town employs thousands, thanks to several US companies relocating here.  I am here because FedEx flies much of these products for them. 

The thin air affects the airplane as much as it does my body.  It takes a more runway to take off and land, and for non-acclimated pilots like myself, makes it more difficult to breathe    I have sported a low-grade headache ever since I arrived, and sleep is difficult.  But as with everything, the up side is character building.

Every author has heard, “Write what you know” and it is obvious when people fake it with stereotypes.  When I wrote I was in Mexico, images surfaced, and depending on one’s frame of reference, it could be luscious beaches, endless deserts, or beautiful chapels overlooking the city.  Like many countries, Mexico has a full range of topography.  Therefore, to write about it, one must visit it.      

To say Toluca represents Mexico is as foolish to think that Los Angeles or Las Vegas characterizes the United States.  The people here are polite, their city is clean, and the food and housing quality are good.  Unlike Mexico’s border cities, I have walked many parts of this city without concern.   

My point is to encourage people to write about their travel experiences so they can get a better appreciation for what they did.  Sharing them on your web site may also help people plan their vacation.  All it takes is a few minutes, and those moments will be forever locked in your mind.

Reseaching Foreign Settings

By Chester Campbell

While I worked on revising the third book in my Post Cold War political thriller trilogy, I was reminded of the lengths to which I had gone in researching the locations where the story takes place. I originally wrote the book in 1992, so some of the settings were more fresh in my mind at the time. Two of the central characters in the book, Overture to Disaster, were a retired Air Force Special Operations helicopter pilot and a chief investigator for the Minsk, Belarus city prosecutor.

Col. Warren "Roddy" Rodman settled in the Guadalajara area of Mexico following his court martial for supposed negligence that resulted in the crash of his helicopter on a clandestine mission to Iran. The area around Lake Chapala, 40 kilometers south of Mexico's second largest city, was home to one of the world's largest colonies of expatriate Americans. Digging around on the Internet, I found the editor of a community newspaper that served the group and got lots of information on the area and its residents.

I used AAA maps, guidebooks, and similar sources to augment my knowledge of Guadalajara and its environs. I had attended a convention in Acapulco a few years earlier, taking a bus tour from Mexico City to the coastal resort. We stopped at towns along the way and en route saw many miles of typical rural countryside. In Mexico City I got a good taste of the metropolitan flavor.

Yuri Shumakov, the chief investigator, moves about his hometown of Minsk, with junkets to Brest on the Polish border and Kiev, the capitol of neighboring Ukraine. This was the period just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose confederation of the former Soviet states. Belarus was the old Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. To get information about the country, I corresponded with the American Embassy in Minsk. I went this route with two of these early manuscripts and found it quite helpful.

I sent a list of questions concerning particular points I needed to clarify. My Embassy contact provided details on such items as soccer teams, locations of government buildings, the status of the old KGB, all items I used in the book. I turned to guidebooks and other sources to get the flavor of Brest and Kiev.

The Special Operations helicopter mission to Iran provided an interesting bit of research. I had a book on Army Special Forces (in which my younger son had been an officer) that told about U.S. Green Berets helping victims of an earthquake in a mountainous area before the mullahs took over the country. I picked that area for my mission as the people would still be friendly to American troops. Since I had been an intelligence officer in the Air Force and Air National Guard, I felt I had a little entree to the active duty force. I read extensively about the MH-53J Pave Low III helicopter and talked to an operations officer at Hurlburt Field, Florida, home of USAF Special Operations Command. He read the section of the book detailing the clandestine flight and offered some suggestions.

I used outside reading to fashion my chapter that takes place in Zurich, but when revising the manuscript twenty years later, I called on my memory of visiting the city during a European trip in 2000. The descriptions still sounded good, though I added a couple of features gleaned from my personal experience.

Visiting foreign locales can certainly improve an author's views, but extensive research can achieve almost the same end. If you love research, as I do, either route can be exciting. And by the way, Overture to Disaster should be out in March.

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Sarin Gas Attack Stirs Memories

By Chester Campbell

In Dr. Doug Lyle's The Writers Forensics Blog last Saturday, he wrote about the terrorist attack in a Tokyo subway on that date (March 20) in 1995 using sarin gas. It was headline news fifteen years ago as the first case of a CBW (chemical and biological warfare) agent being used in a major city.

The blog brought back memories for me of what might have been. I started writing end-of-Cold-War spy thrillers when I retired. I finished the first one in 1990, the second in 1991, and the third in 1992. Book three brought me a contract with a well-known New York agency. It was the last of a trilogy featuring Burke Hill, a former FBI agent who runs an international PR agency that's a CIA front.

In this book, which has the working title Overture to Disaster, Burke doesn't appear until midway through the plot. It starts out in the Ukraine just before the demise of the Soviet Union. A group of KGB officers steal several mortar shells filled with nerve gas from an army unit, killing a young army captain from Minsk.

At about the same time, a USAF special operations mission to extract a defector from Iran goes bad and the helicopter pilot is falsely accused of responsibility. He is court-martialed and discharged.

The story picks up a couple of years later with the murdered captain's brother, a chief investigator with the police in Minsk, the Belarus capital. He uncovers a plot by the ousted KGB officers to organize dissidents in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, a move designed to usher in a new Soviet-type state. Knowing the U.S. is committed to supporting the independence of the former Soviet republics, the plotters plan a diversion to keep the Americans occupied at home.

A team of Shining Path guerillas is trained in Mexico, where the former Air Force helicopter pilot now lives. This is where Burke Hill joins the story. It all winds up on the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., where the nerve-gas shells make their appearance.

The agency let the manuscript gather dust on the shelf for a couple of years. When it finally went out, a Tor-Forge editor liked the story but said it was dated. What makes it so sad is that if they had found a publisher early on, the book would have come out about the time of the Tokyo subway incident Dr. Lyle wrote about. With that hook, the book could have really taken off.

Maybe (probably) I'm dreaming, but it just goes to show how the luck of timing enters into this peculiar business. I pulled up the the manuscript today (I still have all my old unpublished stories in the computer) and I still think it's a great story. I think I'll do a little revising and try it again.

Maybe my luck will change this time around. And the title? It refers to the 1812 Overture played by the National Symphony on The Mall behind the Capitol at the climax of the Fourth of July celebration. Makes for a rousing finish.

Chester Campbell's Website