• The Thirtymile Fire:  A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal — On July 9, 2001, the hot exhaust of a state vehicle on fire patrol ignited the major Libby South Fire in the North Cascades Range in central Washington State.  When a smaller blaze broke out later that evening some miles to the north in the narrow Church River canyon near the Canadian border, resources were already stretched, and only a small, rookie-laden crew was deployed.  This Thirtymile Fire should have been a simple operation, but instead it blew up into a towering inferno of double fire-plumes spinning tornado-like in opposite directions, scorching 9,324 wildland acres.  In two weeks, 1,000 firefighters and dozens of helicopters, bulldozers and other heavy equipment were deployed, costing $4.5 million and the lives of four fire fighters.  A controversial official investigation claimed that the firefighters defied authority and bore responsibility for their own deaths.  This is a gripping book written by an author who has done his research.  It was recommended to me by Tim Anderson and makes clear that mistakes are made in other professions besides law enforcement and can be every bit as catastrophic.  While the book is out of print it is still available and is well worth the extra effort to read it and include it in any risk management library for the safety services.  It is especially useful in that it includes a section at the end of the book identifying the industry standards and comparing the mistakes made.  

John N. Maclean, The Thirtymile Fire:  A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal, Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York, 2007 (205 pages, excluding appendices)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War — Military failures have long been studied piecemeal, but there are few scholarly attempts to quantify and systematize them. Here, two professors of military history reduce the study of command blunders to a science. Several intellectual shortfalls, such as the failures to learn, to anticipate, to adapt, are analyzed. Each is then followed by the study of a pivotal battle or campaign which easily could have turned out differently, but for the “pathways to misfortune” which intervened. The work is painstaking, detailed, and thoughtful. This was one of the most systematic books on a study of failure I’ve read.
Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, Vintage Books, New York, New York, 1991 (246 pages, excluding appendices)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

Military Blunders: The how and why of Military Failure — The book describes in detail the various problems attributed to failure. Using examples and providing interesting summaries, chapters are focused on misplaced confidence, failure to perform, unfit for command, planning for trouble and others. With examples such as Custer at the Little Big Horn, the Battle for Kasserine Pass and Dien Bien Phu, the author instills the lessons with irrefutable historic examples. The book is well-written and thoroughly documented and most of all interesting and easy to understand.
Saul David, Military Blunders: The how and why of Military Failure, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., New York, New York, 1998 (364 pages, excluding appendices)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

The 64 A.D. burning of Rome during the reign of Nero . . . Winston Churchill’s ill-conceived and disastrous World War I plan to invade Turkey at Gallipoli . . . the Maginot Line, built in France in 1929-34 in a foolhardy effort to prevent the feared German invasion . . . the 1950s thalidomide pharmaceutical disaster that resulted in at least 20,000 babies born with deformities . . . the 1989-91 misappropriation of company funds by publishing executive Robert Maxwell, and the collapse of his financial empire . . . the Enron scandal of 2000 that brought down a yet larger business empire. Chronicled in these pages are stories of corporate chicanery, poor military decisions, engineering disasters, diplomatic blunders, and other appalling, large-scale mistakes that resulted in ruin and misery for countless innocent bystanders. Here are baleful tales motivated by false hope, anger, greed, pride, lust, and many other instances of erratic human behavior. A selection of approximately 50 disastrous decisions are presented, each grim account summarized in a report of roughly a half-dozen pages and enhanced with sidebars and thumbnail-sized cartoon-style illustrations. Each account opens with its cast of characters, and then sets the story’s background before reporting the grim details and concluding with the unhappy moral. Here is a page-turner of a book that recounts some of history’s most dramatic-but also catastrophic-moments.
Stephen Weir, History’s Worst Decisions, and the People Who Made Them, Fall River Press, Quid Publishing, New York, New York, 2008 (251 pages, excluding appendices)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

This book is so comprehensive it is nearly a tactical work in its own right. The author, Dave Cullen, was a reporter who covered the Columbine school massacre and then stayed with the story for the next decade interviewing people, visiting the crime scenes, trying to understand what happened, how and why. It is clear from the onset that the author is completely familiar with the circumstances and the response. He provides much information from other school shootings and a number of lesser known figures that will definitely affect tactical planning and decision making. Drawing on extensive interviews, police reports and his own reporting, Cullen meticulously pieces together what happened when 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 13 people before turning their guns on themselves. The media spin was that specific students, namely jocks, were targeted and that Dylan and Eric were members of the Trench Coat Mafia. According to Cullen, they lived apparently normal lives, but under the surface lay an angry, erratic depressive (Klebold) and a sadistic psychopath (Harris), together forming a combustible pair. They planned the massacre for a year, outlining their intentions for massive carnage in extensive journals and video diaries. Cullen expertly balances the psychological analysis—enhanced by several of the nation’s leading experts on psychopathology—with an examination of the shooting’s effects on survivors, victims’ families and the Columbine community. This book is also available on audio cassette but the volume of detailed information, to include timelines, statistics, and so forth, make a hard copy version an extremely valuable edition to any tactician’s library.
Dave Cullen, Columbine, Twelve, Hachette Book Group, New York, New York, 2009 (358 pages, excluding appendices)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

Silent Knights: Blowing the Whistle on Military Accidents and their Cover-Ups — Although this book is out of print it is still available, especially through Amazon.com. It provides a comprehensive treatment on the subject of military accidents and their immense social and economic cost and goes behind the scenes to explain how Pentagon blunders and tragic circumstances combine to cause accidents that kill. The author is a former senior safety scientist for the USAF and explains in detail how accidents are investigated and hushed up. It is especially useful for police investigations because it not only provides a description of the methodologies used by the enormous pressure that can be brought to bear by superiors who are afraid of adverse findings. Just as importantly, it describes how uncorrected mistakes lead to further tragedies and emphasizes the critical importance of thorough investigations and candid and truthful findings.
Alan E. Diehl, Silent Knights: Blowing the Whistle on Military Accidents and their Cover-Ups, Brassey’s, Inc., Dulles, Virginia, 2002 (309 pages)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

Outliers are people and events that occur so rarely that they are nearly impossible to predict. Notwithstanding, recognizing one provides an ability to identify the circumstances in which it occurred with the idea of recreating and exploiting the same opportunities. Of particular value for risk management is Chapter Seven in which plane crashes are examined with a special focus on why they occurred, what was learned from them and what was done to prevent their reoccurrence. Similarly Chapter Two explains what is needed to develop expertise and how it has impacted those who have attained true excellence with knowledge skills and abilities. While the entire book is worth reading, from a tactical and risk management perspective, these two chapters are more than worth the cost of the book.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, New York, New York, 2008 (285 pages)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2

The author is an award-winning writer working on homeland security issues for Time Magazine. She offers a compelling look at instinct and disaster response as she explores the psychology of fear and how it can save or destroy us. Surprisingly, she reports, mass panic is rare, and an understanding of the dynamics of crowds can help prevent a stampede, while a well-trained crew can get passengers quickly but calmly off a crashed plane. Using interviews with survivors of hotel fires, hostage situations, plane crashes and, 9/11, Ripley takes readers through the three stages of reaction to calamity: disbelief, deliberation and action. The average person slows down, spending valuable minutes to gather belongings and check in with others. The human tendency to stay in groups can make evacuation take much longer than experts estimate. Official policy based on inaccurate assumptions can also put people in danger; even after 9/11, Ripley says, the requirement for evacuation drills on office buildings is inadequate. Besides the information value, this is a most interesting book and an “easy read.”
Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes-and Why, Crown Publishers, New York, New York, 2008 (223 pages)

Recommended by Sid Heal in Episodes 1 & 2