It was a Christmas present, sort of. During our Christmas holiday in Fargo, the postman brought me a book, one that traveled across two oceans from its printing in England to the Philippines where the author signed it, and then across the Pacific Ocean again to my home in Fargo.

Regular followers know that I don’t usually do book reviews here, but I do have a precedent. In January 2014, I posted a review of a book I read, a historical novel set in Viet Nam called Village Teacher. You can check out that review here. But I digress from my digression, which obviously happens to be another book review, this one an insider’s perspective about a real series of events in Great Britain that led to the capture and breakup of one of the world’s largest drug rings.

The author, Stephen Bentley, and I became acquainted through an online blogging course he and I attended. We connected on Twitter and Facebook and through a bit of luck, I won a promotional copy of his book. Before you get the idea that this review is payback for gifts received, I don’t review books generally, and I don’t write about negative things in my blog. There is enough negativity in the Interweb. I enjoyed the book, and I don’t mind sharing that.

I am a fan of the James Bond style of novel, and Stephen Bentley is probably as close to a real James Bond as I will ever meet. Prior to his retirement in the Philippines, he worked as a police officer and a barrister (lawyer to us U.S. folk). Through a bit of luck and some effort, he was selected, along with another officer, to go under cover long term to infiltrate a drug ring. In the mid-1970s, the “hippie generation” discovered LSD and there was a new market for a new and dangerous drug.

I have no recollection of the outcome of their work, not even the term “Operation Julie,” but Operation Julie was big news, especially in Great Britain when the drug ring was eventually broken up. In the long run, it wasn’t just about the LSD. In the process of breaking the LSD connections, they also unearthed a plot to smuggle huge quantities of Bolivian pure cocaine into the UK via Miami. The Operation Julie team handed over the principals in the cocaine trade to the DEA in the United States so team efforts could remain focused on the LSD operations. The story unfolds in short chapters from Stephen’s perspective. I don’t have a personal frame of reference regarding the events described as I might have with something that happened in the United States, so the telling of this story is completely new to me. Yet, the backdrop of the hippie era and the music of the day was familiar. Indeed, Stephen mentions in the book about the connection between the British LSD and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love made (in)famous by such characters as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey.

Steve and his partner, Eric changed their last names and they were given alter-identities and appropriate official documents. In true “spy” fashion, public records were created so that should someone get inquisitive, their cover story would match public documentation. Stephen and Eric lived and worked day-to-day for several months directly with suppliers and dealers in the drug underworld. How they lived and what they had to do to protect their cover kept me reading.

I hesitate to provide any great detail about their surreptitious life for those many months, I leave that for you to discover in case you decide to read the book yourself. The book is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions. In fact, it was number 1 on Amazon’s Best Seller List in Great Britain. Search Amazon.com for “Operation Julie”, and there are several books that come up. The one you want is Undercover: Operation Julie – The Inside Story, published September 14, 2016 by author Stephen Bentley.

John Steiner

This week, in this post, I am doing something different, focusing on the written word rather than images. Every so often, I get the urge to write about something other than travel or photography. This is one of those times. Awhile back, I got an email from my blog host, WordPress, that another person registered to follow my blog. As usual, I clicked on the sample links on the WordPress email that are designed to introduce me to that follower’s blog. The blog site was identified as “Village Teacher”. It turns out that the blog’s author, Nguyen Trong Hien, who writes under the name ‘neihtn’, is a published author as well as an IT specialist and photographer. You can read his “About” page here. From there, you can navigate and explore the rest of Hien’s blog.

Village Teacher is Hien’s labor of love, and after four years of “spare” time writing, his historical novel is now available on Amazon.com in eBook and in paperback formats. A resident of Princeton, New Jersey; Hien would like to continue to write and publish. If his first book is any indication of his tenacity in this regard, we can expect to see more of his work in print. After he and I visited via blog comment/response and email, I was offered a review copy of Village Teacher. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I accepted graciously. After finishing what was, in my opinion, a very good read; I decided (with no prompting by Hien, by the way); to write a review of the book for my blog.

I don’t read a lot of fiction, my taste tending more toward technical books, technology, aviation or photography. However now and again, I take some time to read fiction. I have a small library full of novels, both physical and virtual, that I have read and many that I never finished. Most recently; my completion rate for my favorite author of fiction, J A Jance, is 100%. (I’ve finished every one of her books that I started, not that I’ve read every one of her books.) Given that background, you might surmise that had I seen it in the library or book store, Village Teacher is probably not a book that I would have chosen to read. You would have been correct. Hien’s novel takes place in late 19^th century Viet Nam, while my genre of choice is mystery fiction, tending toward good old fashioned American detective and cop stories. Passing over Village Teacher, however, would have been my loss.

In the novel, we meet Teacher Tam, a young scholar who has taken leave of his teaching assignment to travel to the Capital to sit for examinations that, if successful, could enhance his social status and provide him with a leadership position either in his home region or maybe even at the national level. During the several weeks of assessments, Teacher Tam rescues a “damsel in distress” who ultimately becomes the love interest in the novel. The book is filled with lots of political intrigue, civil unrest, corruption and greed among the antagonists, and a collection of bad guys who would just as soon have Teacher Tam taken out of the picture.

Along the way, Hien coaxes the reader through the lifestyles of the classes and the masses in 1890’s Viet Nam. The historical background is provided to allow the reader to understand the forces that are affecting Teacher Tam in the world in which he lives. I learned a lot about the history of Viet Nam in the French colonial period. Prior to reading about Teacher Tam, my only personal knowledge of Viet Nam came to me as a college student in the Viet Nam war era and succeeding years. Village Teacher provided for me a greater understanding of the people of Viet Nam and their historic culture.

I can recommend this book to anyone who has a love of history, especially Asian history and culture. The historical portions may be a bit too detailed for the casual reader, but having said that, those passages provide the necessary background for the reader to truly understand the story of the life and times of Teacher Tam.

John Steiner