WWII Assignment Guides Writer's 60-Year Career
by BEN CALLOWAY

In 1943, 18-year-old A.B. “Bud” Feuer, an Indiana native, was not about to let World War II pass him by without making a contribution.

He enlisted and was assigned to a night vision unit of the U.S. Navy, where his work included installing infrared signal lights on submarines. The lights could be seen only with special goggles used by U.S. commando units making raids on Japanese shore positions.

Feuer’s travels took him all over the Pacific theater. The people he met and the stories he heard provided a foundation for a 60-year writing career. Feuer has published 11 books of military history and more than 500 newspaper stories and articles. His articles have been published in magazines such as “America’s Civil War,” “Military History,” and “Sea Classics.”

His books include “Coastwatching in the Solomon Islands: The Bougainville Report” and “General Chennault’s Secret Weapon: The B-24 in China.”

The excitement of beginning a new story, and the constant satisfaction of curiosity he gains through his research, bring him to his desk each writing day, he says.

Feuer began the full-time writing of military history when he retired to Roanoke in 1987, although he had begun work on his first, “Bilibid Diary,” several years earlier, after the material he needed was declassified. The book took five years to write. His other subjects range from the Spanish American War in 1898 through World War II, some of the material available nowhere else in print.

“Two things won World War II for America,” Feuer said. “Infrared night vision and radar, and the enemy didn’t have either one. Even with the goggles, some people in our unit still couldn’t see in infrared. They had to be given other duties.”

The night vision equipment was very new, and the Navy didn’t know what to call the members of his group, so Feuer was made a pharmacist’s mate. “Our only pharmacy training was in how to give shots and maybe some procedures for dealing with emergencies,” he says.

The Navy also gave him an ambulance driver’s license, although he could not drive at the time. To learn, Feuer said, he drove up and down the runway on the base, where he wrecked two ambulances worth $40,000 before he learned to drive.

Feuer was in Australia installing night vision equipment on submarines when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima in August 1945. He soon returned to the U.S. and was discharged on July 4, 1946.

“I enrolled at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., where a priest liked my writing and suggested that I write for the university paper, ‘The Scholastic.’”

That encouragement and his father’s connections as a distributor of the Chicago Tribune helped Feuer land a job as a freelance writer and the newspaper’s correspondent for northern Indiana.

“The newspaper business was just too much fun,” Feuer says. “I didn’t finish at the university.”

When Feuer retired he decided to bring together the war experiences he had collected in a more substantial way. “I was getting along in years and there were hundreds of them. I wanted to get them in order,” he said. “It is much easier to get started in nonfiction than in fiction, so I thought I would give it a try.”

Feuer went through a succession of three agents before he decided to become his own agent. “If you’re going to be a nonfiction writer and you use an agent, you’re nuts,” Feuer said. “Agents are the curse of the writing business.”

To further control the editing of his work, Feuer does not accept advances from his publisher. “When they give you a cash advance, they become the boss,” he says. “This way, if they go over the line in editing my work, I can let them know about it.”

Due to the classified nature of his wartime service, Feuer met many generals and admirals who became valuable sources for his later work. Part of the strength of his books is that the stories come directly from the officers and enlisted men who served in events of great military importance, Feuer said. His books remember the sacrifices they made, both by telling their stories and on the books’ dedication pages.

Feuer’s strategy to gain the attention of publishers is to choose topic areas where little or no writing is available and to take a non-traditional approach to the topic.

“For instance, I add accounts from the Germans, which others did not,” Feuer says. “It made my work look different and provided a balance that may not have been present elsewhere.”

In his early days of writing books, Feuer did preliminary chapter outlines to help sell his book concept. Now he has been with the same publisher, Praeger, for 15 years and can avoid much of the justification required of less experienced writers.

“A sentence describing what I plan to write is enough to make the deal now,” he said. His next book will be on the Dardanelles Campaign of World War I, which almost ended Winston Churchill’s career. The campaign was the origin of the “digger” nickname applied to Australian troops, Feuer says.

“The Turks had the high ground and the Germans had the airpower. When an Australian general on the ground radioed to a command ship offshore that his troops were being decimated, the reply was ‘Dig, dig, dig.’”

Feuer’s most recent book is “Packs On!” The 155-page volume, published in late 2004, tells the story of the 10th Mountain Division and includes a foreword by former U.S. Senator Bob Dole, one of its members. The division was formed as an infantry counterforce to the elite ski and mountain troops common to the European nations. Cowboys, forest rangers, woodsmen and world-class skiers joined the division, Feuer says.

“The experiences of the 10th Mountain are in a way the experiences of all military units in wartime,” he says.

When Feuer began writing books, he produced about two a year. As his output grew and he became more visible, he said administrative work began to take a toll on his time. He produces about a book a year and still writes with a typewriter. He has someone else convert the manuscripts to digital form for submission to the publisher.

“Once you have a lot of books written, the flow of phone calls and correspondence begins to eat away at your time at the typewriter. Now I sleep a little later because I know I will be doing other work in addition to research and writing,” Feuer says. Under consideration by Praeger is a paperback reissue of all his books, perhaps in sets for each war or topic area.

He also maintains memberships in professional organizations, including the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Military History.

Feuer writes in the comfortable brick home in Southwest Roanoke that he shares with Millie, his wife of nearly 20 years. Both are 79 years of age. He has a child in Maryland and two in Indiana, and she has two children who live in Roanoke, all from previous marriages.

When they moved into the house at Christmas in 1987, it was Millie who led the renovation, paintbrush in hand. She still cooks, cleans and manages a substantial vegetable garden, where Feuer says he is “very much in the way.”

The two met in a bookstore in Washington, D.C., where they were introduced by a friend. Although military history is not a strong interest for Millie, she said she has read several of her husband’s early books.

Millie Feuer said she enjoys church life and making homemade bread and is learning to paint in oils.

“We live a private life and are very independent,” a smiling Millie says. “Yes,” Feuer responds, “She refuses to have a housekeeper, and I refuse to have an agent.”

Ben Calloway is a Roanoke-based freelance writer.