Book Report by Dave Wood, ABC Newspapers.com

January 27, 2010

My great uncle Jim was the only guy in my hometown who went off to fight the Spaniards in Cuba back in 1898. He left town a strapping farm boy and returned a year later the shell of his former self.

He never got a shot at a Spaniard despite the letters he wrote home about giving those Europeans “what for.” Instead, he got food poisoning in Camp Poland Tenn., and never got past the U.S. border. Still, I’ve been proud of his perhaps misguided patriotism and stand tall whenever his name is read during Memorial Day services in Whitehall’s cemetery.

A new element has been added to my understanding of the Spanish-American War and its aftermath in a book by Elkhorn, Wis., writer John Durand. It’s “The Boys,” by John Durand (Puzzlebox Press, P.O. Box 765, Elkhorn, Wis. 53121, $17.95).

Durand had a grandpa named Tom Stafne who kept a journal of his exploits after joining the 1st North Dakota Volunteer Regiment to go and show those Spaniards “what for.” He ended up in the Philippines to help liberate the Filipinos from the yoke of Spain.

Stafne ended up fighting the very Filipinos he had gone to help liberate, in what Durand calls the bloodiest battleground for Americans since the Civil War.

Durand dips into his grandad’s journal, which he later transformed into a “Short History,” and the diary of a fellow soldier, John Kinne, whose work Durand discovered in his research to tell the story of the Philippine misadventure.

Although Stafne had a minimal education he wrote very well, as does his grandson, who has done a marvelous job setting the stage for the 1898 war and the consequences for the Philippines.