John Connoll on Ruins of War

Today JRW welcomes John Connell, who provides a bookend to Memorial Day week. His first novel RUINS OF WAR features Chief Warrant Officer Mason Collins—former Chicago homicide detective, U.S. soldier, prisoner of war, and now U.S. Army criminal investigator in the American Zone of Occupation in Munich. At a time when the worst horrors of the war are coming to light, there is another horror that is running rampant in the street. Welcome John!

JOHN CONNELL: I can be counted in the first wave of baby boomers. When I was a young boy, World War II was still a recent event. Fathers and mothers were veterans. During the war, one of my uncles was in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, another flew B-24s as a bombardier, an uncle on my mother’s side was marine in the Pacific, and my father was a Navy pilot. I salute all war veterans, but because of my uncles’ and father’s involvement, I have a deep emotional attachment to World War II.

I’ve read war memoirs and watched every WWII movie that has hit the big and small screen. I felt I knew quite a bit about the years leading to war and the war itself, but while I was researching the backstory of a villain in an earlier—now defunct—novel, I discovered the startling and dramatic history of the war’s aftermath. Germany was devastated by three years of constant bombings. Every city and most towns, bridges, railroads and factories were all in ruins. A majority of German men between 18 and 50 were either wounded, killed or in allied POW camps. It was the women who had to clear the rubble and scrounge for food for their families by any means necessary. The Allied occupiers had no idea how to deal with a country in such chaos and deprivation. Most wanted revenge, to reduce Germany to nothing but farmland. A typical American or British soldier could barter for almost anything with a single pack of cigarettes. The black market thrived, and gangs of deserted allied soldiers, former POWs and corrupt DPs roamed the countryside. I just had to create a story during that turbulent time, and what came out of that idea is “Ruins of War.”

I imagined a war veteran in that post-war cauldron of chaos and deprivation. U.S. Army criminal investigator Mason Collins not only experienced the brutal fighting on the front lines, but also suffered as a prisoner of war at the hands of the Nazis. He is of German birth and bitter towards the German people for supporting an evil regime. But when a psychotic killer begins butchering innocent civilians, Mason now feels compelled to protect these same people from another kind of evil, one spawned from the horrors of war. I wanted to watch him squirm when he has to work with the German police, or when he steps into the gates of a former Nazi concentration camp to coax information from Nazi doctors who conducted inhuman medical experiments on camp inmates. I wanted to push him to his limits and see if comes out intact at the end. I kept a Hemingway quote in mind for inspiration: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

Just as the allied armies struggled with peace, I wanted Mason to go through a similar transformation. To be forced to question his prejudice, to recover from the mental wounds of war, to struggle to find a way to survive in peace as much as he survived in war. Warriors must become citizens once the fighting has ceased, but many times that transition is difficult. My father and uncles made it home, but one did not survive the transition. And Mason won’t and shouldn’t resolve all his mental wounds—what we know as PSTD today—in the short span that occurs in this story, but he will, at least, have been shown a path to recovery.

May all veterans find their way home and survive in peace as they did in war.

QUESTION for readers:

What book, fiction or non-fiction, have you found that best illustrates a veteran’s struggle to transition from warrior to citizen?

John A. Connell is the author of the historical fiction thriller “Ruins of War” published by Berkley/Penguin Books. He
has worked as a cameraman on films such as Jurassic Park and Thelma & Louise and on TV shows including The Practice and NYPD Blue. He now lives with his wife in Paris, France, where he is at work on his second Mason Collins novel. Read more at his website.