conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Torrey, Japanese, Torrey\'s entitled In Harm's Way.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In Harm's Way: John Wayne stars asS.\nNavy Captain Rockwell "Rock" Torrey, a divorced "second generation Navy" son of a career Chief Petty Officer.\nA Naval Academy graduate and career officer, Torrey is removed from command of his heavy cruiser for "throwing away the book" when pursuing the enemy and then being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine after the attack on Pearl Harbor.\nTorrey\'s executive officer, Commander (later Captain) Paul Eddington (Kirk Douglas), is a wayward sort who resigned as a naval aviator and returned to the surface navy because of an unhappy marriage.\nHis wife\'s affairs and drunken escapades have become the talk of Honolulu and her death during the Pearl Harbor attack—in the company of an Army Air Corps Officer (Hugh O\'Brian), with whom she had a wild fling on a local beach—drives Eddington into a bar brawl with a group of other Army Air Corps officers, a subsequent stint in the Pearl Harbor brig, then exile as the ".\nofficer in charge of piers and warehouses.\n".\nin what he calls a "backwater island purgatory".\nAfter months of desk duty in Hawaii and recuperation from a broken arm he suffered in the attack, Torrey begins a romance with divorced Navy Nurse Corps lieutenant Maggie Haynes (Patricia Neal), who tells him that his estranged son Jeremiah (Brandon De Wilde) is now an ensign in the Naval Reserve on active duty, assigned to a PT boat, and dating Maggie\'s roommate, a Nurse Corps ensign.\nA brief and strained visit with Jeremiah brings Torrey in on a South Pacific island-hopping offensive codenamed "Skyhook," which is under command of overly cautious Vice AdmiralT.\nBroderick (Dana Andrews).\nOn additional information from his BOQ roommate, Commander Egan Powell (Burgess Meredith), a thrice-divorced Hollywood film writer and Naval Reserve intelligence officer recalled to active duty, Torrey guesses that the aim of Skyhook is to capture a strategic island named Levu-Vana, whose central plain would make an ideal airfield site for Army Air Forces Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress squadrons.\nMaggie informs him that her unit is to be shipped out to the same area in preparation for the offensive.\nMaggie\'s roommate, Ensign Annalee Dohrn (Jill Haworth), has been dating Torrey\'s son.\nJere is arrogant and conspiring with a superior officer, former congressman Commander Neal Owynn (Patrick O\'Neal), to do as little as possible in combat.\nDohrn\'s romance with Jere ends and Eddington develops an interest in her.\nIn the meantime, Torrey\'s loyal and resourceful young flag lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander William "Mac" McConnell (Tom Tryon), uses a 30-day leave to get reacquainted with wife Beverly (Paula Prentiss), a civilian observer for the Navy who worries that Mac will be killed in action and wants a child.\nCome the summer of 1942, Torrey is promoted to rear admiral by the Pacific fleet\'s commander-in-chief (Henry Fonda), who then gives him tactical command of Skyhook, an assignment requiring the same sort of guts and gallantry he previously displayed as commanding officer of his cruiser.\nTorrey personally selects Paul Eddington to be his Chief of Staff, and infuriates Broderick by immediately planning and executing an operation to overrun Gavabutu, an island to be used as a staging base for the invasion of Levu-Vana.\nOwynn is now Broderick\'s aide, with Jere still by his side.\nThe Japanese have withdrawn their garrisons from Gavabutu, making it an easy capture.\nBut as Torrey turns his undivided attention to Levu-Vana, his attempts to secure more material and manpower are frustrated by General Douglas MacArthur\'s simultaneous and much larger campaign in the Solomon Islands.\nReconnaissance aircraft prove especially difficult to come by, and surface combatant forces amount to little more than several cruisers and destroyers, including Torrey\'s former command.\nWhen the mission succeeds, Jere recognizes the disloyalty of Owynn and Broderick and gains a new regard for his father.\nEddington\'s instability drives him to rape Dohrn, who is now engaged to Torrey\'s son.\nThe traumatized nurse, fearing she might be pregnant, tries to tell him but he doesn\'t believe her.\nShe then commits suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.\nAs the truth is about to be revealed, Eddington—still a qualified aviator—commandeers a North American PBJ Mitchell patrol bomber and flies solo on an unauthorized reconnaissance flight to locate elements of the Japanese fleet.\nEngaged, shot and killed by Japanese Zero fighters, he goes down in a fiery death in a redeeming act of sacrifice, finding and giving advance warning of a large Japanese task force centered around the super-battleship Yamato, on its way to blast Torrey\'s much smaller force off the islands.\nDespite the new seaborne threat, Torrey nevertheless mounts the invasion of Levu-Vana and proceeds with a nothing-to-be-lost attempt to turn back the enemy force.\nTragically, his son Jere is killed during a nighttime PT boat action when he is rammed by a Japanese destroyer.\nThe following morning sees a pitched surface action off the shores of Levu-Vana, with the Americans drawing first blood and the Yamato decimating much of theS.\nforce in response.\nMany lives are lost, Powell\'s among them.\nSeverely injured at the height of the battle, resulting in the amputation of his left leg, Torrey is rescued by his flag lieutenant, LCDR McConnell, and is returned to Pearl Harbor aboard a Navy hospital ship under Maggie\'s care.\nExpecting to be court-martialed, Torrey is instead congratulated by CINCPAC for successfully repelling the Japanese advance and allowing his Marines to take Levu-Vana.\nAlthough Torrey has lost a leg, he is told by CINCPAC he will get a peg leg and then command a task force and "stump his way to Tokyo" with the rest of the Allied forces.\nCINCPAC and McConnell leave Maggie and a drowsy Torrey.\nMaggie pulls the blinds which slightly surprises Torrey who calls out "Maggie.\n".\nShe responds in a calming voice "I\'ll be here, Rock" and Torrey lapses into sleep.\nThe last shot is of Maggie warmly smiling back at him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In Harm's Way
  So why Bosnia? In my own case I talked about it because I knew about it. If I had been the BBC's man in Tibet or Tanzania I might have done the same for them, but somehow I doubted it. The fact that war and genocide on a large scale returned to the continent of Europe within fifty years of the last war and the last genocide brought to the conflict in Bosnia an extra urgency and resonance. It was not, as some misinterpreted it, a racist argument, that the victims in Bosnia were white and the victims in Rwanda were black. It was a neighbourhood argument, that this was happening in our own backyard. It threatened the security of all of us, and we ignored it at our peril.
  The second question was rather harder to answer. It is, why did I do this for a living? And having done it for longer than was prudent and reasonable, why did I not give it up? I could see many arguments for an early retirement, and only one for carrying on, which was that I had to see this thing through. Yet after four years of living dangerously, it might have been the time to walk away. War reporting is a daft way to earn a living, but it provides the survivors with a privileged view of history in the making as well as a chance to contribute to its first draft, which is the news. And the Bosnian war, if it was nothing else, was history in the making – or, as I have argued, the remaking. I believe that events in Bosnia, and the failure of the rest of Europe to address and influence them until so late in the day, had a greater effect on the continent and its institutions, and on the world beyond them, than the political decisions taken in any of its capitals. That so much was at stake was another reason to stay. I felt like adapting St Augustine: O Lord make me distant and indifferent, but not yet.
  I am further asked, am I not by now a total pessimist about these war zones, and what they tell us of human nature and the human condition in general? The answer is no, not at all. For in war there is also heroism, and not only the bravery of soldiers. In Bosnia it brought out the best as well as the worst in people – the courage of individuals who stood out against the savagery of the times, of Muslims who helped their Serb neighbours and Serbs who helped Muslims. There were also the volunteer heroes from many countries who were willing to serve in dangerous places and who saved lives against all odds. It was one of the privileges of war reporting to get to meet such people, and to learn what not to take for granted. The Bosnian war foreshadowed all our futures both in the way that it was fought and in the way (if there was one) that it was dealt with.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The break in the stalemate was also the hinge on which other events could turn. A ceasefire was agreed and, after a faltering start, took hold. A serious negotiation began for the first time in two and a half years. The Americans arrived with a hard-driving diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, to bang heads together – chiefly those of their own clients in the Bosnian government who had a habit of backing away from concessions already made. Holbrooke reinvigorated the language of diplomacy. 'Mr President,' he said to Izetbegovic, 'you are shooting craps with your country's destiny.'
  But there was something here that eluded and troubled me – some missing element that I couldn't pin down. It didn't help that because of the momentousness of these events I was withdrawn from the war zone and turned into a sort of pundit and instant historian, shackled to a desk in head office and set in front of a computer that meant about as much to me as an Egyptian hieroglyphic. (I never used a computer at all from the start to the end of the war.) The editorial conversations would go something like this:
  But Vance-Owen was not an American plan, and was rejected by the Americans for just that reason. Lord Owen recalls that at the critical meeting to explain it to the new administration, the Secretary of State Warren Christopher was 'dismayingly equivocal' and 'appeared as if he had not had the time to read even a short factual information sheet on what was the essence of our plan'.* The Muslims were encouraged to hold out for a better deal.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There were other and coincident reasons for leaving Bosnia behind. For five years I had reported nothing but wars; but during this period I had earned the dubious distinction of being the BBC reporter most shot at, and it was time to hand this over to someone younger. I was well on the wrong side of fifty-five. The joints creaked under the weight of the body armour, so heavy that even the soldiers were astonished by it; the life-saving turn of speed across open ground was not as fast as it used to be; and the fifteen-mile hike with backpack through enemy lines (even if it was wise, which I always doubted) would have tested my endurance to the limit.
  This proposal was met with the silence that it doubtless deserved. I realized then that a journalist could be typecast just as much as an actor. Expectations prevailed. Chronicling the conflicts and commotions of the world would continue to be what I did for a living, because it was all that I had ever done that anyone had noticed. (No one ever said, weren't you the one who reported on Princess Diana in Canada entirely in rhyming couplets?) So the alternative to the war zones would be... more war zones.
  My plans for a lingering farewell to Bosnia were brought to an abrupt and tragic end by the death of the American Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown, in an air crash near Dubrovnik in Croatia. We left at midnight in a great hurry, driving south and west through broken villages and the fiercest of Balkan storms. The roads and rivers, as so often in Bosnia, seemed confused about which was which. I concentrated on distinguishing between them, but with an inner eye on the times I had been through and on the friends I had left behind: Tuna who had been killed by the Serbs, Brian Hulls who had just died of cancer, and many others who had no memorial. I thought also of those wonderful old soldiers of the Suffolk Regiment, of the peace in Europe which they had fought for and which had prevailed until these wars, and of how we should have to continue to fight for it in one way or another – or at least not to take it for granted; for if we took it for granted we would surely lose it. I knew that the wars had changed me, I hoped for the better, but could never really be sure.
  On returning home some days later I found a bottle of champagne waiting for me and a message with it. The message said: 'Another war over. Here's to the next one.' And then they measured me up for a new flak jacket.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There were other and coincident reasons for leaving Bosnia behind. For five years I had reported nothing but wars; but during this period I had earned the dubious distinction of being the BBC reporter most shot at, and it was time to hand this over to someone younger. I was well on the wrong side of fifty-five. The joints creaked under the weight of the body armour, so heavy that even the soldiers were astonished by it; the life-saving turn of speed across open ground was not as fast as it used to be; and the fifteen-mile hike with backpack through enemy lines (even if it was wise, which I always doubted) would have tested my endurance to the limit.
  This proposal was met with the silence that it doubtless deserved. I realized then that a journalist could be typecast just as much as an actor. Expectations prevailed. Chronicling the conflicts and commotions of the world would continue to be what I did for a living, because it was all that I had ever done that anyone had noticed. (No one ever said, weren't you the one who reported on Princess Diana in Canada entirely in rhyming couplets?) So the alternative to the war zones would be... more war zones.
  My plans for a lingering farewell to Bosnia were brought to an abrupt and tragic end by the death of the American Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown, in an air crash near Dubrovnik in Croatia. We left at midnight in a great hurry, driving south and west through broken villages and the fiercest of Balkan storms. The roads and rivers, as so often in Bosnia, seemed confused about which was which. I concentrated on distinguishing between them, but with an inner eye on the times I had been through and on the friends I had left behind: Tuna who had been killed by the Serbs, Brian Hulls who had just died of cancer, and many others who had no memorial. I thought also of those wonderful old soldiers of the Suffolk Regiment, of the peace in Europe which they had fought for and which had prevailed until these wars, and of how we should have to continue to fight for it in one way or another – or at least not to take it for granted; for if we took it for granted we would surely lose it. I knew that the wars had changed me, I hoped for the better, but could never really be sure.
  On returning home some days later I found a bottle of champagne waiting for me and a message with it. The message said: 'Another war over. Here's to the next one.