SERGEANT NIBLEY, Ph.D.: MEMORIES OF AN UNLIKELY SCREAMING EAGLE, by Alex Nibley and Hugh Nibley, Shadow Mountain, 368 pages, $24.95.
Hugh Nibley, the iconic Mormon scholar who left an indelible mark on Mormon scholarship, was treated three years ago in a fine biography by Boyd Petersen, a son-in-law. Now one of his sons, Alex Nibley, a filmmaker, has produced what could be considered a companion volume to the biography — an edited collection of Nibley's diary entries and his World War II letters.
To his great disappointment, the son was never able to convince the father to write his memoirs — so in one sense, with respect to wartime, this book serves as a memoir, "not necessarily the war exactly as it was, but as Hugh Nibley remembered it."
It is especially interesting that the son read the entire draft to his father before he died in 2005 — and even though the father had been uneasy about a number of things he had written when he was a young man — things he considered arrogant, or opinions about the Germans he no longer held — he approved his son's manuscript and agreed to have both his name and Alex's name attached to it.
Alex also interviewed his father on camera several times from 1998 to 2005. He sprinkles that material throughout this fascinating volume. Alex, by his own admission, is not a scholar, but he has demonstrated the care and sensitivity of a scholar in his approach throughout.
He is also a naturally gifted writer who intersperses helpful and perceptive commentary to accompany the diary entries, the letter excerpts and the pictures that bring this volume to life. He does not hesitate to differ with his father's account whenever the bulk of evidence suggests he was wrong about a place, a date or a person.
Hugh Nibley was a master sergeant in intelligence, an assignment he thought would keep him away from the battlefield — but he was attached to the 101st Airborne Division and carried the well-known "Screaming Eagle" patch on his shoulder. Alex determined that his father was with the 101st during its 72 days of steady fighting in Holland.
When Hugh Nibley speaks, whether in letter or diary entry, it is predictably thoughtful and incisive, the sort of meaty comments you don't expect from a young man. But Nibley was 32 when he enlisted, so he was considerably more educated and seasoned than the average soldier would have been.
In May 1944, he wrote his mother, thanking her for "parental advice" containing "that unfailing power of imagination which so often in our childhood introduced an element of glad surprise into otherwise prosaic situations." He promised "never, never to break the spell. For one thing it's not permitted. To remind me to see, for example, Hugh Brown, is much the same thing as suggesting I drop in at the Mexico City Zoo next Thursday, or borrow the Grand Lama's toothbrush. ..."
Hugh Brown, who in later years became a counselor in the LDS First Presidency, was at the time the president of the British Mission of the church. He was a family friend Nibley's mother had known in Alberta, Canada. Alex points out that Brown had no missionaries to preside over at the time — but he did spend much time with soldiers.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com