Phillip Jennings won the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society first prize in 1999 for his short story Train Wreck in a Small Town, leading him to believe he might be a writer. He's still trying to find out. He's flown helicopters in combat in SE Asia for three years managing to expertly lose five aircraft from enemy gunfire and poor decisions, chased spies and radicals for various intelligence agencies, created three companies reaching a billion-dollar market cap in industries he knew little about (including one NYSE company he founded in Beijing), consulted for a Saudi Arabian bank in the jungles of Colombia, drank tea with a king, and had breakfast with Muhammed Ali. A Mensa member for years, he is desperately trying to find the savant part of being an idiot/savant.
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This is the last in the three-book series begun years ago. It is, again, satire. The first book, Nam-A-Rama, came out in 2005. It was a satirical view of the war in Vietnam, of which I was a happy participant. The dual protagonists in the book were Jack and Gearheardt.
Goodbye Mexico was published in 2007. A black comedy featuring the same central characters, now employed by the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Mexico. I attended graduate school in Mexico.
Now Gearheardt completes the series. Jack and Gearheardt are still ostensibly working for either the government, Wall Street, or the CIA. The difference eludes them and probably the reader. (I am here to tell the reader it makes little difference). And their theater of operations is Wall Street and its annex, Washington DC.
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*A black and white Kodak photo of Queen Beverly the 2th dressed as an otter riding a naked Prince Pedoman to the Nth over a floor strewn with Leggos and avocados brought $2.3 million after her death.
From Publishers Weekly (starred review): “This highly entertaining, provocative lampooning of the Vietnam War is reminiscent of Catch-22 and David Mamet's Wag the Dog. Marine helicopter pilot Gerard Finnigan Gearheardt, in the Oval Office on CIA pizza delivery duty ("They don't let freckle-faced teenagers deliver pizza to the White House, you know"), overhears President Larry Bob Jones and the Joint Chiefs of Staff brainstorming the idea of escalating the American advisory presence in Vietnam into a full-fledged shooting war to enhance Larry Bob's image and beef up a flagging peacetime economy. To make sure the situation doesn't get out of hand, Larry Bob concocts a loony-tunes scheme to parachute Gearheardt and his buddy Lt. Jack Armstrong, along with antiwar movie sex kitten Barbonella, into Hanoi to meet with Ho Chi Minh and negotiate peace just in time to get Larry Bob reelected. The two hapless Marines rendezvous with Barbonella, but, thanks to the meddling of an American agent and a Cuban operative, the zany scheme goes haywire and Armstrong and Gearheardt wind up flying for the CIA in Laos. In this wonderfully irreverent novel, evocative of vintage Max Shulman, hearty belly laughs contrast with chilling insights into high level political machinations."
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A rogue CIA officer plans to arrange the assassination of Mexico's President and lay the blame on the Cubans, tricking the US into assisting in an invasion of Cuba and installing him as emperor and allowing his establishment of an international home for prostitutes who have been members of his own personal spy network- but is thwarted by a glamorous terrorist/nudist, the Pope who has similar designs on Cuba to get the Vatican away from the "wops," and the CIA officer's own longtime partner who has an unfortunate "lick of sense and an unhealthy common decency." If only a messiah-like, Jesus-centered CIA Chief of Station's personal battle with the Agency's pigmy-led assassination team had not complicated things, it might have worked.
Order Now!The Vietnam War was a tragic and dismal failure—at least that is what the mainstream media and history books would have you believe. Yet, Phillip Jennings sets the record straight in The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Vietnam War. In this latest “P.I.G.”, Jennings shatters culturally-accepted myths and busts politically incorrect lies that liberal pundits and leftist professors have been telling you for years. The Vietnam War was the most important—and successful—campaign to defeat Communism. Without the sacrifices made and the courage displayed by our military, the world might be a different place. The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Vietnam War reveals the truth about the battles, players, and policies of one of the most controversial wars in U.S. history.
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Set in a small Kansas town in the 1950s, Train Wreck in a Small Town is the story of young Eddie Askins startling passage from being a bicycle riding, dirt-clod fighting child through a sexual awakening and understanding of violence that will forever change Eddie and his community.
A passenger train speeding through the town of Clinton, Kansas one lazy summer afternoon, kills the son of the town's only black citizen, triggering a series of events that culminates in violence. As the train wreck and events surrounding it come out, Eddie starts to see the world through new eyes; his father, the Sheriff, the town druggist and grocery clerks are no longer just folks that serve simple roles in the town, but are rather men with prejudices, fears and regrets who are capable of irrational and violent action.
As Clarence, Eddie's old black fishing buddy, and father of the train wreck victim, fights to bury his dead son in the town cemetery, all of Clinton's unspoken fears and regrets are revealed.
The first chapter of Train Wreck was published as a short story which won the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society first place in that genre. The story is now a 300 page book being edited.