Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile Read Free Book Online

to a surprise attack.
    The Japanese finally surrendered. While his mother played the piano at a service of thanksgiving at the Methodist church on V-J Day, the eleven-year-old boy was permitted to climb into the steeple to ring the bells in triumph.
    Most boys his age did not follow the menacing transformation of America’s World War II ally the Soviets. Wilson had been thrilled when Stalin’s forces had turned back the Nazis at Stalingrad in late 1942. But with increasing alarm, he read and listened to the accounts of Stalin gobbling up Eastern Europe. When Churchill came to America in 1947 and warned of an “iron curtain” falling over Europe Charlie took his words to heart, and when the Communists tested the bomb Wilson was depressed for days, convinced that America had a new enemy every bit as dangerous as Hitler.
    This was the early shaping of an American patriot and, for Wilson, just the beginning of a lifetime fascination with war, weapons, public service, and something else—a curious conviction that didn’t come to him all at once but grew with greater and greater force and clarity as the war unfolded and the voices over the radio began to deliver a separate message to Charlie. As time went on, he would come to feel that one day, his would be the voice on the radio.
    Wilson’s father was an accountant for the timber company. They had little money but were better off than most people in town. They lived in a pleasant house and were pillars of their community. Charles Edwin Wilson had almost known despair when the mill closed down during the Depression and he was laid off. But the next day he had signed on with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal jobs program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he worked as a roads supervisor, intensely proud of the fact that he had never missed a day’s work.
    Wilson’s father had one fixed ambition for his son: to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. He insisted it would be a ticket to success. And so he lobbied his local congressman and, after two tries, got his son an appointment to Annapolis. Charlie flunked the first test because he was so scrawny. The second he passed only after wolfing down fifteen bananas, to bring his six-foot-four-inch body up to the academy’s 140-pound minimum.
    In September 1952 Wilson’s proud parents drove their boy to Houston in the family’s new Chevrolet and put him on a TWA flight for his trip across the country. Wilson remembers his first plane ride on the propeller-driven Constellation, which delivered him to the start of his military career. Wilson and his fellow midshipmen in the starting class of two thousand were warned that less than half of them would graduate; and over the years, it was always touch-and-go whether Charlie would make the cut. He was a classic military screwup, constantly reprimanded for talking in formation, not having his shoes shined, leaving his light on after curfew. But somehow he made it through, in 1956 graduating eighth from the bottom of his class and with the distinction of having more demerits than any other graduate in anyone’s memory.
    Because of Annapolis, Wilson missed Korea. But at twenty-five, as a gunnery officer on a destroyer sailing the world with the American fleet at the height of the Cold War, he felt that he was at last coming into his own. He was in command of the warship’s weapons, and his gunnery teams almost always won the mock battles, in part because he had his men practice more than anyone else. They always ran out of ammunition long before they could get back to their home port to be resupplied. Wilson did this to sharpen his men’s skills, but also to empty the ammo boxes so that he could fill them with cheap alcohol bought on shore leave in Gibraltar to smuggle back to the States. Wilson’s training style was unconventional, but he ended up with the happiest men and the best shots in the fleet.
    Wilson was now feeling the power of America, moving about sometimes with the entire