Book Review

SANDINO, SOMOZA AND OLD GIMLET EYE

David Haward Bain is the author of "Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines" and other works about American foreign policy. He teaches creative writing at Middlebury College, Bain, David Haward

1989

Overview

The guerrilla leader who bedeviled our Marines for those six years was the charismatic mestizo Augusto Cesar Sandino. In the spirit of amity he affected between the American retreat and his murder in 1934, Sandino would have been pleased and amused to see that he is a major character in ''A Few Good Men.'' As Mr. [William Overgard] has imagined it, the American consul's teen-age daughter is kidnapped by Sandino, who is on a secret reconnaissance when he stumbles on her outside the coastal town of Bluefields. With Sandino is an American correspondent, Carlton Wills (modeled on the real-life Carlton Beals, a reporter for The Nation). Wills unabashedly admires the wily young guerrilla. He doubts that the kidnapped girl can be converted into a propaganda tool, as Sandino hopes. Despite Wills's better journalistic judgment, he accompanies Sandino on a wild cross-country dash to evade the inevitable pursuers. The Sandino of ''A Few Good Men'' is pale in comparison to the real McCoy, who, to correspondents like Beals and in flurries of press releases, turned invective into high art, to the fury of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and a host of military commanders. Also subdued are Sandino's nutty philosophical beliefs (such as that mysterious psychic ''waves'' connected him with his followers), which contributed to his legend among the campesinos and which would have made him an even more fascinating fictional character.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: BAIN, DAVID HAWARD / Butler, Smedley D / Overgard, William / Sandino, Augusto Cesar / Wills, Carlton