National Defense
Fallows, James
annually for bricks loosened by the winter cold; and so forth. The information is chunky, but never obtrusive, always blended with purpose into an exquisitely tangled plot, with an often lyrical...
...V j;j~ fl,f ]. J 1.1 V1...
...for a third, there is no dancing...
...He is an Air Force brat, a genuine Marine hero (Navy Cross), an Annapolis alumnus (1968), a law school graduate, sometime congressional staffer (House Veterans Affairs Committee), and occasional talk-show expert on his fellow Vietnam veterans...
...Is there any way to guns at who...
...It may be cause for relief...
...ly, dealing with all aspects of language...
...And all this is just part of what you get...
...he has no patrons at the New York Review of Books...
...Although one hopes the new administration will spend its defense dollars wisely, it is important to recognize as well that the domestic sacrifices entailed by higher defense spending are in some way linked to the preservation of a certain open international order, and therefore must be borne...
...Who should do the talking...
...See page 76...
...A critical mistake that can instantly turn a minor civil audit into a potential mminal cast...
...The result was a heavier, more complex, multipurpose fighter-bomber costing nearly twice the original price...
...See page 93...
...What it all leads to is the technicolor yawn, brain damage, death, and tales of Getting Really Sick at the Shore...
...And there are rock clubs...
...At once' See page 84 of The Taxpayer's Audit Survival Manual...
...In all seriousness, I have seen people light the things up with matches...
...On the other hand, he attacks civilian systems analysts with no direct experience of combat for setting procurement criteria divorced from military realities...
...He sets about to instill the same pride and spirit in Dean by bullying him into one harrowing A SENSE OF HONOR James Webb / Prentice-Hall I $10.95 Peter Braestrup 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981...
...3. The IRS tends you a form hatter queadonnaha on your return...
...its characters grew and developed...
...Fallow$ admits that he is not a professional defense specialist and, like many Carterites, was of the generation opposed to the Vietnam war and things military in general...
...defense spending...
...How to handle the aftermath The agent's objectives in "closing" the audit...
...So read it and enjoy it and place your bets...
...When it's probably O.K...
...Enter my subscription to Tax.4ngles for I year (12 issues) and send the :Manual FREE...
...Things that flag the IRS computer...
...Send The Taxpayer's Audi: Survival Manual postpaid...
...Although modern fighters are individually far If You Love Words, superior to their predecessors, it is quite legitimate to ask whether we would not be better off acquiring substantially larger numbers of more austere aircraft...
...The F-15 which Follows takes to task has unique characteristics-its range/ payload, look-down radar, and allweather capability-that will be absolutely critical in the central European theater for which it was designed, and no number of F-5s could ever duplicate them...
...Pg.744 11 Questions en 'Nax Audits How many of them can you answer...
...he has never snared a Guggenheim Fellowship, or a Fulbright...
...he thinks you're done...
...For one thing, they have cover charges, usually of three dollars...
...How not to get railroaded...
...And you may order the report at no risk...
...What records to bring to a desk audit...
...4. Should you take a professional to an audit...
...In Moscow half of Arkady'$ energies (and many of Gorky Park's most spell-binding ironies) are taken up by his intricate, sometimes comic maneuvers in, out, and around the ritual frauds of bureaucratic busybodies and the murderous shenanigans of KGB goons...
...Reagan's offer to take over the Veterans Administration because, it was said, he did not want young OMB super-boss David Stockman (a non-veteran of Vietnam) telling him how to run the agency...
...And you keep the manual FREE anyway...
...There may be - if you've taken one precaution...
...6. Should you attach "exptanadoar" to your tax reins...
...for another, most of the patrons arrive already drunk, having economically filled up at home or in cheaper places along the road...
...The simplest, cheapest way to appeal (but you must act fast...
...See page 57...
...The author of Taxpayers' Counteranack, he is also the editor of the advisory service, Tax Angles - and thus expert on shrewd, yet legal techniques for cutting taxes to the bone, avoiding audits, and coping successfully with the IRS if you do get tapped...
...1. What should you do If you're cared on by an IRS "Spatial Agent" (One thing - and one thing only...
...But it's surely a scary time for the writer, when he produces something like Gorky Park, an eight-year labor that wavers beyond a consistently expert craftsmanship toward genuine art...
...Read 3 issues...
...What dancing there is is usually done between bouncers on vacation from the Green Bay Packers and fist fighters whose egos have been abused...
...740 pages of vital information, formatted as an 8 Yr " x 1 i " typewritten special report...
...The ground attack capability added to the F-16 by the Air Force was demonstrated by the Israelis in their attack on the Iraqi nuclear facility last June, with devastating results...
...If not pleased with Tax Angles, you may cancel for a refund on all unmailed issues upon request...
...34 St., New York, N.Y...
...Suffice it, then, that Gorky Park is, by his own approximate count, Martin Cruz Smith's thirty-first novel-and, by his own evaluation, Mr...
...I may cancel and request a refund on all unmailed issues...
...His discussion of the highly technical problem of bias in missile accuracy in the chapter on the MX seems to reflect nothing more than the views of the last expert he spoke with when researching the book...
...The absence of the educated middle class 11 you don't know the answers to questions like those above (and few taxpayers do, even those who are otherwise sophisticated), then in today's tax climate, you're living dangerously...
...it told a tale of men at war that not only engrossed the reader but made him think...
...It is easy enough to accept Fallows's contention that the United States at all times ought to spend money thoughtfully...
...Sec page 142...
...O war's bloodiest sectors-the An Hoa basin southwest of Danang-in 196970...
...Should you take an IRS agent to lunch...
...But while there have been successful programs such as the U-2 reconnaissance plane and the Polaris missile system which have bypassed the service bureaucracies, there have been others like the F-111 which ended in disaster...
...The Cranford Athletic Club, for one, has paid some $250 in assorted fines...
...The F-16 was the brain child of the Fighter Mafia-a light, maneuverable, austere fighter pilot's fighter, which was supposed to be a low-priced complement to the Air Force's preferred but expensive F-15...
...ESSEXOCT 06426 USA A'" AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading subsidy book publisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly and juvenile works, etc...
...This has in effect turned the military into a civilian occupation, in which married soldiers can live off base and commute to work, and be fired or quit their jobs...
...Smith's first truly good novel...
...No amount of quibbling over the CIA's dollar cost accounting methods can mask the fundamental shift in the global balance of power that has taken place in the past two decades, or the difficulties the United States will have in defending its vital political interests in the eighties...
...When not to...
...it was neither confession nor sermon...
...An agent stops his audit without good reason - a sign he may suspect you of cfimlnal fraud...
...Who shouldn't...
...it is harder to condone his omission of any serious discussion of the international trends which have made American defense policy a major political issue recently-namely, the steady, acrossthe-board modernization and expansion of the Soviet armed forces since the early sixties, during a period of either stagnant or declining real U.S...
...The ads, on the other hats 1 ire primarily intended to dupe wealthy and impressionable Arab sheikhs into buying sophisticated weapons systems-successfully, it would seem...
...I I I 1 1 1 Signature 'came _ Address , Slate' 7'p , `1~~I~~rrr~rr~~Ir~~sarrt~rrr~~rltrl~~l>t~ Alexandria House Books Wfll .S...
...Smith's portrait of the main character, Arkady Renko, we also learn something of what it's like to live in the Soviet Union...
...if there's a second agent with your auditor...
...New authors welcomed...
...This could be critical to your whole future...
...Charge my order to: American Express MasterCard LISA Card Number...
...Box 177 Freeport, Maine 04032 James Fallow$, a former Carter speechwriter who had the sense to leave the administration early, has written a short book of U.S...
...What happens then...
...And at one point or another in this vigorously compassionate novel, just about every characterwhether downright evil or merely tormented-literally or figuratively wants to kill Arkady Renko...
...How choosing the wrong tax prepares could bring you up for audit...
...How to get this manual FREE with trial of Tar Angles For continuing guidance on audit avoidance and survival - plus smart, legal ways to slash taxes in general - marry thousands of executives, business owners, professionals and investors rely on our Tax Angles advisory report...
...The Chief Investigator is a Communist, of course...
...His book is not polemical and a number of his conclusions are quite sensible, but others are more confused if not downright misleading...
...here would be no problem in accepting Fallows's conclusion if he simply maintained that the Air Force should buy a mix of high-cost, high performance planes and less expensive, austere ones...
...10001 The writer may believe it, and his writing may consequently go to hell...
...At times, these gentlemen show the unruly the door even for such minor offenses as breaking glasses and singing louder than the band...
...Roam the world 1st class by freighter or cruise ship at tremendous savings...
...These authors know the questions that worry you about audits...
...Don't do it before reading page 197...
...Allow 6 weeks...
...How an auditor acts if he's suspicious...
...FREE OTTER: I enclose 545...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 r Company 3 Esp...
...At times the thing is made with gin, but in all cases it is meant to be dropped down the chute, not sipped...
...There's much more as well...
...O professing Sunday-morning Anglicanism: a .professional sleuth, mildly cynical, vulnerable under the calluses, utterly competent at his work -and utterly bewildered by the universe outside his work...
...10 vital rules for any audit...
...Yet Webb's best talents are not as a curmudgeon but as a story-teller...
...Give Ta.rAnglesa fair trial...
...It is not even an actual drink, but a method of getting drunk, not to say sick, in a hurry, sort of a liquid hand grenade...
...They make superb Molotov cocktails when thrown...
...When it may mean big trouble...
...What should you rear do - ever...
...The pattern is familiar: Hack writer hones skill into craft and then, maybe, transcends craft with art...
...The Air Force was not a little embarrassed to discover at Red Flag that in engagements involving more than two airplanes a relatively simple F-5 costing approximately $5 million would often "shoot down" sophisticated F-15s costing $25 million...
...The answer to this may be a real eye opener...
...Virginia 223/4 , I I I I 1 1 1 I enclose $35...
...11...
...A n essential part of Shore drinking is watching the passing show, particularly the summer police, who patrol their beats as assiduously as lawmen sitting in speedtraps...
...In a totalist police state, the ordinary policeman is no less oppressed than the hapless citizen, and one of the minor feats of Gorky Park is that it exposes-incidentally and therefore powerfully-the very core of the totalitarian social order: a system that tacitly encourages its captive people to hate each other...
...W'hy the way you list your jolt may increase your chance for audit --- and how to list it so it doesn't...
...The -tniih of the matter is that the CIA estimates which underlie U.S...
...9. Should you concede arguments early In an audit...
...Now, help is at hand in The Tatpayrr's Audit Survival Manual...
...Smith is "currently at work on a novel about New Mexico...
...Indeed, the heart of the problem is the premise that a military career is just another job and must compete with the civilian economy on its own terms...
...The information is chunky, but never obtrusive, always blended with purpose into an exquisitely tangled plot, with an often lyrical expression of setting and mood and character...
...There are no great American saloons on the Jersey Shore, because they are neither necessary nor appreciated...
...What will happen if you can pay...
...How you're picked for audit - and how to minimize your chances...
...Tax Court, is now a Washington tax attorney (with an impressive client list...
...O MYSAK (continued from page 27) selves to death, the same way Eskimos will during a party pull the pin on a grenade and grin, Tibetans commit self-immolation, or South Carolinians repair stock-car engines while pulling on corn cob pipes...
...There are two: the velvety concoction known as the Kamikaze, which might be better known as the Kiss of Death, and the Screwdriver...
...The wrong answer on this could cost you...
...What to do if questioned on the records you left home...
...Dangerously because you may unwittingly and needlessly be risking a tax audit...
...Money back if not pleased...
...This led the Navy to establish its Top Gun and the Air Force its Red Flag program designed to give pilots realistic combat training...
...Smith's dramatic stitching is astonishingly plausible-neatly tailored to the grim reflections of Solzhenitsyn and to the grimly hilarious observations of Voinovich...
...You'll learn...
...it had a plot...
...defense planning have consistently underestimated the Soviet strategic buildup over the past two decades...
...2.8 signs of possible criminal fraud...
...The Manual is mine FREE even if 1 cancel...
...What should you do If you're caught breaking a tax rule...
...On the one hand he argues that the "culture of procurement" has distorted the true mission of the officer corps, which is to lead men and adapt resources to the uncertainties of war...
...As ever, the real reason for visiting such places is to savor the choice libations regularly served up...
...His first novel Fields of Fire (1978) dealt with the severe experiences of the Marines in one of the Vietnam Peter Braestrup is author of Big Story, editor of the Wilson Quarterly, and a former Marine...
...7. Should you "round off" figures ore your tax return...
...evidently exhausted his talent with Slaughterhouse-Five and should have stopped, as Walter M. Miller, Jr...
...If not, what should you do...
...The cost: a modest (and lax-deductible) $35...
...On the other hand, Balzac kept writing after Le Dernier Chouan, and the dustcover tells us that Mr...
...Kurt Vonnegut, Jr...
...The tale is set at the Naval Academy during February, 1968, against the background of the Tet offensive, and growing antiwar, antidraft sentiment on civilian campuses...
...Who should talk to him...
...The final problem with National Defense is more serious and has to do with the curiously ahistorical character of its discussion of the current defense debate...
...Implementing Fallows's recommendations in any systematic way would be difficult, moreover, because he appears confused about what the root of the problem is...
...A new development in certain technologies will make the previous generation obsolete virtually overnight, as in the interaction between surface-to-air missiles and the electronic countermeasures used to evade them...
...See page 88...
...And although a sermon can be discerned in Webb's shorter, second novel, A Sense of Honor, it is neither stated nor the core...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 the services to absorb such lessons, as in the case of the F-16...
...if not pleased, I may return it in 30 days for a full refund...
...Spare yourself trouble...
...Despite the difficulties of implementation, the services accepted this concept during the early seventies and have more or less stuck with it...
...Maneuverability, when combined with tactics and pilot skill, often proved to be more important in air-to-air combat than maximum speed or ceiling...
...Your lawyer...
...In this debate Fallow$ comes down on the side of the so-called "Fighter Mafia" in the Pentagon-men like John Boyd and Pierre Sprey who have consistently argued that such cost increases have been driven by excessively abstract and demanding performance criteria which are mostly irrelevant to real-world combat requirements...
...The bureaucratic inertia which he so aptly describes in his account of the M-16 rifle is real enough...
...defense policy designed for the general reader...
...rather, it is the byproduct of the novelistic craft that conceals it...
...5. Can your accountant he made to testify against you in a tax arse...
...Seepage 33...
...We wait, then, as I shinny out on a critic's limb to note a scintillating creative flair about Gorky Park: not a single constipated sentence, not a trace of the intrusive artistic temperament, not a page lacking that telltale suggestion of the effortless, which, for the writer, follows only on great effort wed faithfully to minute detail...
...When to agree with an agent on the spot...
...or $8.50 (elsewhere) for a one-year subscription, starting with the current issue...
...Three things to always avoid like the plague...
...With every precise question of detection he formulates, Arkady aches vaguely with the cosmic "Why...
...What not to bring...
...102.5...
...35 has changed the human chemistry of the Army in subtle but perceptible ways, as revealed in discipline problems and poor relative performance at NATO war games...
...Indeed, to most of those in the orbit of the Literary Life in America, Webb comes from another planet...
...The men in blue are an essential part of any Shore summer...
...Caution: they could bring on instead of preventing an audit...
...Since World War II the real cost and complexity of first-line combat aircraft have been increasing at a phenomenal rate, such that the mili tary will be buying only 250 this year as opposed to an annual average of nearly 3,000 in the 1950s...
...A few misguided souls think they can go to such places as the Osprey Hotel in Manasquan and Jimmy Byrne's Sea Girt Inn in nearby Sea Girt to pick up girls, but this is a myth...
...Bill Fogarty, a First Clansman (senior), is big, strong, and totally committed-eager to follow his immediate predecessors into battle for his country and the honor of the Marines...
...But the stamps on Arkady'$ Party card seem always to show him a few months behind on his dues, and Arkady professes Communism with the intensity of a George Smiley ingsley Amis once remarked that a critic should resist the temptation to call a fine writer a ''creative artist.'' you'll love VERBATIM, The Language Quarter...
...It is also why you rarely hear of anybody drowning in the gentle Jersey surf...
...He points out that the problems with the volun leer army go far beyond its inability to reach recruitment goals, and cannot be solved simply with more money...
...They are mixed with some kind of rocket fuel liquid vitro, camouflaged by just enough orange juice to turn the thing not orange, but a kind of grey...
...Screwdrivers at rock clubs at the Shore are not Among critically acclaimed "young novelists," James Webb is something of an oddity...
...Send $7.50 (U.S...
...Some think they go to hear the band-this can hardly be avoided, for the sound level of a Shore bar can best be approximated by standing in a closed hangar at Newark International Airport with your head resting against the engine cowl of a 747 revving up...
...But the major feat is the characterization of Arkady Renko-whose misty entanglement with Irina, a dissident Mosfilm actress, is no less futile than his early tortured efforts at salvaging his paper marriage to Zoya, an unloving would-be Party apparatchik-and who runs into a different order of trouble in New York City, where, even without his principal conflicts, his energies are half drained by sheer cultural anomie: The houses are too roomy, the cars too mottled, the roads too paved, the lights too many, the people too starched and perfumy, and his detective counterparts in the NYPD: They're so damned independent...
...Gorky Park invites more than one reading, and reads as if there's more and maybe even better to come...
...But what Follows does is to take a respectable argument from the narrow field of airto-air combat and apply it across the board, not only to the Air Force but to technologies and weapons systems he knows little about...
...The bas[ and worst times to file if you want to cut odds of an audit...
...There are saloons, such as Legget's Sand Bar in Manasquan, which serves up bottles of the Pride of Old Latrobe, Rolling Rock, for a dollar, and whose premises are usually suitably filled with tanned and toothsome young wenches...
...Or sample this deft brushstroke for a psychological portrait of a devious minor character: "A figure of white or black painted by his own winks, supported by the names he dropped...
...Recognition of this problem began in Vietnam, where the Navy and Air Force found that hot new planes like the F-4 were getting shot down by Korean-war vintage MiG-17s and -19s...
...A simple way to make your return look more unchallengeable to IRS screeners...
...Send for tree, illustrated 40-page brochure H-80 vantage Press, 516W...
...A maverick Republican, he turned down Mr...
...See page 29...
...Check the box in the coupon and send $45 bra 1-year Ill issue) subscription, and we'll send you our 535 manual FREE...
...Fallows's reduction of the defense problem to a matter of resource allocation in an inflationary economy in a way reflects the selfabsorption of the Carter administration that he so ably diagnosed elsewhere...
...he is not pursuing an "Alternative Life Style" in Vermont or Idaho...
...F119, 163-09 Depot Flushing, NY 11358 NOVELS by J. lnchardi $11 each Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse Jehovah Mafioso Saturn Maru Order by mail from Sinus Books, P.O...
...Fallows's treatment of remaining defense issues, unfortunately, is again uneven...
...And they spell out the whole audit story for you in detail in The Taxpayer's Audit Survival Manual...
...Timing's critical...
...If you'd like to see why, here's a great offer...
...TravLtiPs , Dept...
...NATIONAL DEFENSE James Fallow$ / Random House / $12.95 Francis Fukuyama SAVE YOUR GAS...
...Beyond the conceptual problem lies a bureaucratic one of persuading Francis Fukuyama is on the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State...
...See page 193...
...89, 91...
...When to stop cooperating...
...A good example of how Fallow$ mixes sensible ideas with confused ones is his discussion of aircraft procurement...
...Lord Peter could have adjusted easily -not Investigator Arkady, whose routine flashes of brilliance are powerless to illuminate his own angst...
...Hut only if you handle it just right...
...In the beginning, John Dean, a plebe freshman, sympathizes with the civilian protestors, gets high academic grades, is overwhelmed by the Navy's constant high-pressure harassment, and wonders what this crap about duty and pride and honor is all about...
...10...
...When you're required to show the IRS your records...
...8. The tax sudltor't in your office...
...How can you protect yourself...
...It takes quite an imaginative leap, but, given the suppleness of the human spirit and the imbecility of the police state, a character like Chief Investigator Arkady Renko follows...
...Charles Schoeneman, formerly with the U.S...
...Unlike most first novels, his book transcended the autobiographical...
...Sample this trope: The walls wept...
...How to use a court suit to force the IRS to compromise...
...II ashington Street .Alexandria...
...In the morning they give summonses to those who refuse to buy beach badges, those who sleep on front porches, and those unfortunates who insist on breaking the town ordinances on overoccupancy of bungalows...
...Tour" him through your business...
...The constabulary, who are rumored to be responsible for 77 percent of many Shore communities' budgets, nightly write tickets for drinking on the sidewalk, flaunting controlled substances, making too much noise, parking in five-minute parking zones, and carhood riding...
...Not surprisingly, he ranks at the bottom of his company, in "leadership...
...The authors of this book are two of the nation's top authorities in the field...
...Follows notes that of the 100,860 men who were serving their first term in the combat arms in 1980, only 25 had college degrees...
...Vernon Jacobs is a CPA, and a nationallyknown lax consultant...
...And dangerously because if you do get audited, you may unintentionally get yourself into much more trouble than you started out in...
...If not delighted, just send it back in 30 days, and your payment will be refunded in full...
...Is this cause for dram...
...See page 93...
...The civilian leadership in the Pentagon forced the F-16 on a reluctant Air Force, which proceeded to write new requirements for a more powerful radar and a groundattack capability...
...They know the answers, too...
...The bartenders get mad if you finish one and ask for another, and those who do are acknowledged by all to be Really Asking For It...
...Save money...
...When to cooperate during a desk audit...
...The Quantity-Quality debate is by now an old one in the Air Force...
...If not pleased after 3 issues of Tax Angles...
...made with vodka...
...Who then should make procurement decisions...
...The Kamikaze consists of two ounces of vodka, a dash of lime juice, and a touch of Triple Sec...
...Follows is on firmer ground in his criticism of the All-Volunteer Force, however, and he makes a strong pitch for restoration of the draft...
...When you're not...
...But that is what it's all about...
...stopped writing after producing the well-nigh perfect Canticle for Leibowitz...
...In other cases his arguments are just silly, as when he maintains that the drive for sophisticated weapons is fueled by overestimation of the Soviet threat, which aerospace companies exploit to the fullest in their ads...
...Besides surface rivers, ancient underground rivers burrowed through the city, blind and unseen currents with lost directions...
...My money's on Martin Cruz Smith...
...How to protect yourself if you're picked The very first thing you should always do when approached levy an IRS agent...
...Such an army can never attract the more ambitious or better educated, and as a result is now composed almost entirely of rural whites, urban blacks, and Hispanics-an army of the poor...
...That is what happened, has happened, happens, and will happen...
...The Screwdriver is not the obvious potation familiar to all...
...5 things to do if you can't...
...And though National Defense is a readable and at times absorbing introduction to certain select defense topics, it unfortunately seems destined to become the gospel of the late-night talk show crowd...
...And in Mr...
...BEAT INFLATION...
...199 The one kind of return that's always screened for possible audit...
...These will never figure prominently in a hit movie, unless it be called Saturday Night Dead Drunk...
...He does not teach Melville or, better, Kurt Vonnegut at a small liberal arts college...
...It all depends...
...Sometimes in winter half the basements in Moscow cried...
...2. True or fahe: the IRS hat no good way of cheddag out those 1099's on your dividends, Interest, etc...
Vol. 14 • September 1981 • No. 9
