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I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World By Trevor Paglen ( Melville House )
Release Date: 2008-01-28
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Product Description
They’re on the shoulder of all military personnel: patches that symbolize what a soldier’s unit does. But what happens if it’s top secret?
Shown here for the first time, these sixty patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “None of Your Fucking Business,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches—which are worn by military units working on classified missions—are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known. By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume one of the best available surveys of the military’s black world—a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11. Trevor Paglen is a geographer by training, and an expert on clandestine military installations. He leads expeditions to the secret bases of the American West and is the author, with A.C. Thompson, of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, which The New York Times praised as “the real thing . . . and not on the evening news.”
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 Quck fun read ( novadupoglax )
Enjoyable look at the various military "skunkworks" projects that go on beneath the public surface. The explanations, especially translations from Latin, provided for each of the project or group patches are a bit variable. Some are fairly detailed (but almost always shorter than half a page), while some are very superficial at best. Book would have been even better if it dealt with similar now-declassified projects in the Army or Navy; they must exist. Virtually all the examples cited are from the Air Force. But overall an illuminating vignette about how people who work on these projects view themselves - usually in a humorous, irreverent manner.
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 Good pictures, little commentary, no organization ( brian_d_foy )
This is a nicely bound book with a patch embedded into the front cover. On the inside, it's mostly pictures with light commentary, so it's mostly a one-time read with little reference potential. The content is mostly speculative, and the patches aren't organized by symbology. I would have liked to see some patches from less secretive units using the same symbology for comparison.
It's a nice conversation starter, though.
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 Amusing and entertaining little book ( carolerosenberger )
If you are at all interested in the military, insignias, secret projects, or just good conversational pieces, buy this book. Then take it for what it's intended. The author doesn't promise a comprehensive or even consistent summary of military patches or black ops; he's picked some of the more interesting emblems and thrown a few program tidbits in where he could. It's surface level insight into the secret world of black ops, and if we all knew about it, it wouldn't be very secret or black, would it? The photos are great, the back stories are interesting, and we enjoyed it so much I'm buying more as gifts for my the history/military buffs in my family (i.e., all the guys.)
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 Not Revelatory
Although some of the patches are visually interesting, the book reveals no secrets. A quirky disappoint that has gotten a lot of press.
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Quirky book delivers shadows and questions ( stephenflanagan4 )
I'm not entirely sure what I expected with this book, but whatever it was it's not what I got. There's a short introduction about the world of black-ops, and from there we move into the structure that takes us through the rest of the book: an image of an emblem from the 'black' world, and some text outlining what we (the outside world) know about it. Usually, that's not very much.
The emblems themselves are often teenage in tone - they feature wizards and lightning bolts and basic Latin, and it's not hard to see them springing from the imagination of an adolescent military-crazed boy. That's a bit hard to reconcile with the world of extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay, but the book itself casts no judgment on the morality of the world it seeks to represent.
In the end, all we get are questions. Some of the explanatory texts state that we know nothing about the emblems represented, others are open about the fact that they are purely speculative. It's a fascinating look into an other-world or under-world existing beside our own, and the only difference between it and the imaginings of speculative authors is that this one is real.
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