Interview with Max Ibach
Courtesy of Erica House
Publishers
What was
your greatest inspiration for writing The Castaway?
I could give you some sort of grand answer, but the truth is
simpler. I saw a couple of survival epics in video form and
knowing what I know, immediately determined that they were
composed mostly of bovine scat. Following that observation, I
established a personal goal of writing a survival book. The
Castaway was simply my best effort in that direction. I chose
Young Adult Fiction as my level of achievement, because one of my
rejection slips indicated there is a better market there.
By the way, The Castaway is not my first
novel. My first novel is The Song of Mannheim.
Unfortunately, it is too long for the publishing houses, (588
pages). The problem lies in the fact that I am an unknown author.
Once I understood the rules, I wrote a shorter book. The
Castaway succeeded in finding a publisher.
In this work, a young boy named Sheldon finds himself
lost in the wilderness, and must rely on his wits and survival
skills to make it out alive. It is clear from these vivid
sequences that you have an extensive knowledge of these skills.
Could you tell us how this knowledge developed?
Through military survival schools and by being a childhood member
of the Boy Scouts of America.
I grew up as an only child, in rural Oklahoma in a twenty-three
house oil field camp. The only kids my age in the camp, were
girls. They didn't much interest me until I was about fourteen.
Following their later discovery, I thought of little else. Before
that time, there wasn't anyone for me to play with, so I spent
the winter months trapping fur bearing animals and either hunted
or fished the rest of the year. Although it wasn't in the Yukon,
my trap line was about five miles long and I had to run it every
morning before going to school. I used to literally run the
entire distance, cross country, as fast as I could manage, so I
would be home in time to catch the school bus. I had a pack
frame, and a lot of sparsely settled country around me, so I did
a lot of hiking and camping mostly by myself. When I was twelve,
I joined the Boy Scouts of America. I learned a lot there, while
ascending to the rank of Eagle Scout.
When the Korean war broke out, I was of draft age. I
instinctively knew I didn't want to go hup-towing across the
Korean peninsular with the Army, so I joined the Air Force. That
proved to be a marvelous decision. I enjoyed military service, so
much I made a career of it and served in the United States Air
Force for twenty-one years. The first three of those years were
spent as an enlisted man. I took some competitive exams, and the
remaining eighteen were spent as a jet fighter pilot.
Continuation training as a pilot involves attending survival
schools. Military survival schools are incredibly good. I also
thought the food was great, too. Of course I'm probably not a
good judge of food, since the worst meal I ever ate was wonderful.
I imagine the military survival schools are even better now than
when I was in service. Over my career, I attended a basic two
week course in Nevada, winter survival in Alaska, Water survival
in Japan and jungle survival in both Panama and the Philippines.
The survival schools also taught the knowledge of former POW
experiences and escape and evasion tactics as a part of the
general survival mission.
The basic act of flying high performance aircraft is incredibly
dangerous, all by itself. Especially when the airplanes are newly
minted and always made by the lowest bidder.
After fifteen years of service I made the scene in Vietnam.
There, I flew 175 combat missions while piloting an F4 Phantom,
during a ten months period in 1966.
You'll notice that the boy in the story not only has to survive,
but has to escape and evade a grizzly bear during his twenty-eight
day hike out of the wilderness.
Your writing style is unique in that the images you
construct with language are poetic, yet not in the traditional
sense. Are there any authors that have influenced your style?
I read a lot, but I've never come across another author who
writes in first person, present tense. When I began writing, I
didn't realize my tenses were odd, until a friend with four
university degrees pointed it out to me. Until that point, all I
was trying to convey was first hand knowledge of what was
happening in the story. I wanted to tell it as though it was
happening immediately in front of the reader, at the moment of
occurrence.
There are many instances in The Castaway that depict
detailed sequences of aircraft and flight, written in an
informative manner that is also easy for the layman to understand.
Would you share some details of your flight experiences with our
readers?
I have only about 5,400 hours of jet fighter time, which is not a
lot of flying hours in comparison to a commercial air line pilot.
However, the experience I have is unique, mostly because it
involves a lot of danger and first hand hazardous experiences.
When I first began flying, we were at the dawning of the jet age.
Commercial airlines were still flying prop-driven airplanes. If
we saw a contrail in the sky, it was being made by a military jet
fighter. Not long after that, the airlines transitioned into
jets, but that took an extended period of time for the change to
occur.
My first jet fighter after advanced flight school was the F-86
Saber Jet.
We were being groomed for Korean service. The F-86 is the fighter
that flew against the MIG's in skies above Korea. My initial
sequence of hair raising experiences began with that machine.
They included having the engine quit during flight in two
different airplanes. The silence that followed resulted in two
dead-stick landings, without power. That was about the time when
I attempted to acquire life insurance for myself to benefit my
family. The insurance actuarial tables claimed that a jet fighter
pilot was the second most dangerous occupation on the planet.
Number one was a steeple jack. I limped along without major life
insurance for a number of years until something I could afford
came along.
My next airplane was the F-100 Super Saber Jet, which we all
considered to be an incredibly dangerous airplane. It killed a
lot of pilots before all the bugs were ironed out f it. After
that, it killed off the unwary because it had some very dangerous
flight characteristics. I ejected out of one of those when the
engine fuel manifold ruptured in flight. The engine quit and it
got real quiet again. While my trigger-like mind was busy
digesting the problem, the airframe caught fire from the wings
back and I nearly swallowed my tongue. When all this started
happening, I was flying at a hundred feet and five hundred knots
as I prepared to perform a practice nuclear weapons delivery
maneuver. Smoke came into the cockpit, both fire warning lights
suddenly came on and things started going to hell in a hand cart.
The flight controls stopped steering the airplane and I pulled
the handles.
Unfortunately, I fractured two vertebra in my lower back at some
point during the ejection sequence. Those fractures have caused
me major difficulty late in life.
Do you have plans for future books in the works?
The first book I wrote, The Song of Mannheim,
has not been published yet.
It is Mainstream Adult Fiction about several serial killers who
are plaguing an area along the Texas Golf coast during the late
1940s. High school age girls have been disappearing for the past
ten years and the local sheriff claims they are runaways seeking
a better life in the big city. The book follows the lives of two
incredible seventeen year old boys and their families who are
hired by an organization called the Ironstone Group. The families
move to Southern Texas and begin to gather information. Along the
way, the boys manage to free one of the captive women and take a
terrifying night time canoe trip down a local river to rescue
another.
I have two other books in writing. One is Shadow
Warrior. This is Young Adult Fiction about a pair of
undersized, fourteen year old boys who are onboard a research
vessel off the coast of Irian Jaya when modern day pirates
capture the vessel. The boys hide in the ships ventilation system
and eventually succeed in taking the vessel away from a band of
fourteen armed pirates. That book is about two-thirds finished.
A third book is The Cardinal Number. It also
is about two-thirds finished. This one is a continuation of The
Song of Mannheim, using the same main characters. This
novel involves locating and identifying a group of assassins for
hire who live on a large remote ranch in the Big Bend country of
Southern Texas.
When you aren't writing, what other interests do you
pursue?
I retired five years ago from a second, lifetime career. My days
are generally devoted mostly to golf and writing. I frequently
begin writing at 0300 in the morning using one of my three
computers that utilizes an older word program that is not Y2K
compliant. I changed the date in that sucker so it wouldn't
malfunction when the new year began.
I find instrumental music to be inspirational when I write, so I
listen to a stereo system while working.
What is the most important piece of advice that you
would like to share with our readers, especially the younger
ones?
Get a college education and don't ever stop learning. Your future
life is going to revolve around continued education. Someone
smarter than me said, "When you drop out of school, you drop
out of life." Who ever said that, knew what he/she/or it was
talking about.
The most important portion of my life came when I was in military
service.
Nobody can do now, what I did then, with only a high school
education. I went from being a Private First Class enlisted man,
to Lt/Col in twenty-one years.
How important is education today? Just to be a pilot in today's
armed forces, requires not only that you be a superb physical
specimen, but you have to have a degree.
Seven years after I flew in Vietnam, I retired from service and
became a stone carver. My wife and I bought a small company in
Denver, where I spent the next twenty-three years designing and
carving cemetery memorials. I had an artistic talent (also
previously untapped) that allowed me to succeed as a creator of
art objects. Those cemetery art objects will survive long after I
am dead and gone.
My education remains high school level, but with a lot of
personal, first hand living experience thrown in.
When you fly jet fighter planes for as long as I did, and live
through the experience, you become a survivor. In looking back at
my life, I can see that there were life altering portals that
opened for me, rather mysteriously. I happened to be in the right
places at the right times and was able to achieve some limited
degree of success through extreme good fortune.
In today's world, education is everything. People who don't
educate themselves, will not succeed at any level of the modern
world.
I got most of my initial writing experience investigating
airplane crashes in the USAF and fabricating the voluminous
reports required of that effort. Because of that particular and
previously unknown skill, I also became the editor of the Fifth
Air Force Flight Safety Newspaper. To that point, I had
absolutely no experience in writing articles for anything. I was
the original square peg in a round hole.
My only salvation was that I did, however, seem to have a natural
talent for determining the cause of an airplane crash. I also had
a unique ability to express myself so clearly, that accident
investigations almost became my primary career.
In case you weren't listening the first time; Once again, get the
best education you are able to afford, and above all else, never
stop learning.
If lost in the wilderness, what is the one thing that a
person should know?
Knowing one thing, probably won't cut it unless you can walk a
hundred yards to a farm house. Being lost requires a lot of
knowledge in order to survive any extended stay in a wilderness
area. Everything out there eats and drinks, and has fangs and
claws and its parents taught it how to catch something to eat.
You don't have any personal equipment for finding anything but a
grocery store. While you are in the wilds, you become part of the
local food chain. A carnivore doesn't care if you are human or a
pork roast. I suspect we may even taste about the same to a
cougar or a bear or a great white shark. Even with knowledge, in
order to remain alive, you have to be physically fit, equipped
for the climate and able to keep your wits about you. Nothing in
ordinary life prepares a person for being lost and miles from
help.
My dad made me recite his essentials for survival while being
lost, until my mind hurt: Stay calm, don't panic, let the first
wave of fear pass so you can think clearly, get warm, find food,
make shelter, signal for help. He also taught me other stuff.
Things like, how to build a fire with only one match; and "If
you're in a dry place and you need to find water just look for an
animal trail.
Walk it until another trail intersects the first and the point
the trails make where they come together will point toward water."
When I went to my fist military survival school at Stead AFB,
Reno, NV, I discovered that I already knew what the instructors
were teaching. That knowledge had been acquired by living in the
country, being naturally woodsy and having a great father. What I
learned from him and the country around me, was further amplified
Boy Scout involvement.
As a youngster, I also had something else going for me. I had the
greatest set of parents God could ever have created. When I left
home for military service, I took part of my father with me that
has served me an entire lifetime. The words are simply, "What
would dad say?"
For most of 67 years, I've been comparing situations to, "What
would dad say?" Those simple words probably kept me out of a
lot of trouble, no matter how old I was, or wherever I happened
to be. My dad died a long time ago, but I still use his four
words for guidance, even today.
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