By Tom Young
People often ask me when I started writing fiction. I could give several answers: In creative writing classes in college, maybe. Or in a fiction workshop. Or when explaining to a teacher why my term paper was late.
But I really started writing fiction—by that I mean actually writing my first successful novel—when a C-5 Galaxy decided to give me a bad day.
In 2007, when flying as a flight engineer in the West Virginia Air National Guard, I was with a C-5 crew taking a load of cargo into Osan Air Base, South Korea. On the way into Osan, we suffered multiple malfunctions. A generator failed. We lost a hydraulic system. My panel lit up like a pinball machine. I used up all the English curse words and made up new ones. If I’d spoken Korean, I’d have used up their curse words, too. Other problems cropped up; I can’t remember all of them now. But the situation got bad enough that we declared an emergency on approach into Osan.
The red flashing lights of the crash trucks greeted us as we touched down. We landed safely, fortunately. The trucks escorted us as we taxied to the ramp, the aircraft dripping a trail of hydraulic fluid like a wounded pterodactyl. After we shut down the aircraft and wrote up all its maintenance problems, we learned we’d be stuck at Osan for days, waiting for parts.
So then I had time to kill at Osan. The idea for a novel set in the Afghanistan war—where I had flown earlier with my unit—had been rolling around in the back of my head for some time. I’d just never had a chance to set it to paper. But the day after our emergency landing, I woke up in the quarters for transient aircrew at Osan, and I walked to the Base Exchange. I bought a yellow legal pad, and then I went to the coffee shop. I got a large cup of strong mil-spec coffee, sat down in the lobby of the transient quarters, and wrote at the top of the legal pad: “Chapter One.”
Thus began the manuscript that became my novel The Mullah’s Storm, published by Putnam in 2010. After that, lightning struck. I got connected with a great literary agent, Michael Carlisle of InkWell Management, and The Mullah’s Storm led to a six-book series set in present-day conflicts. When that series ended, I turned to historical fiction set in World War II.
That period of history had always interested me. My grandfather served in the legendary Eighth Air Force, and I grew up hearing his stories from the war. Those stories made me want to fly, and to write.
My latest novel, The Mapmaker, is my third World War II novel. The Mapmaker, like all my novels, has a connection with military aviation. One of the main characters is a French pilot who flies with a British Royal Air Force unit following the fall of France.
Funny how life takes its twists and turns. Perhaps there’s some cosmic logic that all my books connect to military aviation. It all started with an airplane that tried to kill me—or at least really annoy me.
