Birds Got To Fly

by John Halachis


Formats

Softcover
$11.95
Softcover
$11.95

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 1/1/2000

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 5x8
Page Count : 332
ISBN : 9781585003075

About the Book

Birds Got to Fly is fiction based upon more or less recollections and related experiences of the author. The upshot of these events with a dramatic degree of embellishment lent themselves for an intriguing literary piece that provided a general road map for the core theme. Birds Got to Fly portrays the story of Zack a teenager who sped through his teens and into a revelation that he was not a kid any more. For Zack it was an irresistible time as an adolescent to hit the road and to engage head-on into capricious adventures with little knowledge of the outcome.

Zack embarks on an uncharted adventure that takes him from an unpaid train journey to Times Square where he encounters Damon Runyonesqe like characters and the start of his scholarship on the way to 'hit the top of the mark.' Following a precarious stint on Broadway Zack joined the Navy and was thrust into a naval test aircraft as an alternative to a career as a croupier withstanding bittersweet experiences in the process. Moving toward the top of the mark the next stop is to the ancient land of Greece and the environs of Mount Olympus, home of Zeus the fabled Grecian sovereign and where the maturing process takes place amidst a painful civil war.

Along the way Zack unexpectedly acquires a clandestine mission that preempts a romantic tryst during an R and R in Paris. Zack returns to the civil war struggle in Greece and to his honcho and mentor, Colonel Wayne Maxwell, US advisor to the Greek military staff. As a team the colonel and Zack in his role as enlisted driver and communication technician, are heavily involved with the armed communist insurgency in Greece.

Led by a maniacal communist Brigadier Petros Voyagis a small but important hamlet nestled in the mountainous regions of northern Greece is ravaged and destroyed. The conflict was symbolic of the Soviet Union's stealthy expansionist polity. Field Marshall Josef Stalin's support of armed insurgency using dissident anti-nationalist cadres in Greece following World War II was an effort to control the important southern regions of Europe and to establish Soviet presence in the Mediterranean region. It is in this environment that Zack becomes embroiled with part of this milieu caught in striking and tense situations as he undertakes a clandestine mission.

Birds Got to Fly has two paths that enjoin; that of an adolescent who was not afraid and maybe unaware of the hazards of breaking away from the norm and into the accelerated maturity that takes place when a youth pursues an unwitting destiny. Birds Got to Fly is a human account of a youth in transition to adulthood. Birds Got to Fly also depicts the degree of inter conflict and tragedy that can occur between fellow countrymen when lack of understanding, foreign intervention, political rivalry and corruption dilutes the real dispute and its harmonious resolution.


About the Author

John Halachis retired from the United States Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel where his career was divided between flying as a weapons officer/navigator in F4's and in the field of human intelligence gathering assignments. In the span of this career he was assigned to Germany (Potsdam), Vietnam and Greece on three occasions mostly in the capacity of Air Attache. But, before all this began he had a four-year tour in the United States Navy where he was assigned to the Joint Military Advisory Group in Greece at the outset of the Marshall Plan.

The motivation to portray some of these experiences in Birds Got to Fly had roots in personal reminiscences throughout the decade of the 1940's. It was an era when America's horizons stretched beyond the shores of Boston brought about by a global war.