Tom Glenn's Blog, page 128

Medical Staffs

I continue to be annoyed with the way people working in doctors’ offices and hospitals treat patients. They seem to forget that the purpose of their work is to serve the sick and needy and help them to be cured. Instead, they treat us as inferiors who are a nuisance. And they often get things wrong causing inconvenience or worse for the patients.

More than once, I have stopped going to a doctor because his staff proved incompetent and rude. But my current primary care physician has a staff of one, his secretary, who goes out of her way to assist me in whatever I need. I’m grateful for her generosity and kindness. But she is an exception.

I believe that the attitude of medical staffs stems from the way doctors see patients. Typically, the doctor addresses me not as Dr. Glenn but as “Tom” and expects me to address him by his title and last name. It is a superior-inferior relationship. He forgets that his purpose in life is to serve his patients.

And doctors are by profession caregivers, not managers or leaders. They focus on treating patients, not managing their staffs. The end result is often that the nonmedical personnel are left to act as they see fit.

It’s well past time for physicians, like all the rest of us, to take responsibility. They must improve the way their patients are treated.

Writing Awards

Two sections of wall in my office are filled with certificates of awards my books have received. They range in date from 2004 to 2019. All four of my currently published books have received awards, the most recent being a “Notable Indie” from Shelf Unbound for my novel No-Accounts.

I take great pride in those awards. Writing well is not easy. It is the hardest work I’ve ever done. It demands great time and effort. I never settle for less than my best, no matter how many drafts or how long the writing takes. It’s gratifying to see concrete evidence that my sweat and tears have not been in vain.

Two awards especially please me. They are the ones for No-Accounts, my only published novel not about Vietnam. As I have explained before in this blog, I began volunteering to work with those in need to help me cope with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). I returned from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975 with a classic case of PTSI and found that when I was helping others, the unbearable memories of combat and death receded into the background. I worked with the homeless, the dying in a hospice, and, for five years, with AIDS patients. I had seven patients. They were all gay; they all died.

The experience of working with these men permanently changed me. My bias against gay men disappeared. I came to understand that tragedy is a part of daily life. I learned that compassion is one of the great virtues among human beings.

I gained new understanding of the words of Jesus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22, 37-40). No-Accounts is the story of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS. Focusing not on war and destruction, as my other books have, but on the painstaking, monotonous labor of caring for the dying, the novel is really about the love of one man for another.

So I look with pleasure upon the mementos of honor my books have received. My hard work is appreciated.

Guardians of the Year

In addition to naming Greta Thunberg the person of the year, Time magazine included a special section in their people of the year issue (dated December 23 to December 30 2019) titled “Guardians of the Year.” It’s devoted to the whistle blower and those public servants who agreed to testify during the impeachment hearings conducted by the House of Representatives. The article is subtitled “The Public Servants Serving Country Over Self.”

The text honors those who risked their careers as public servants when they agreed to speak openly to Congress about President Trump’s violation of law and precedent in seeking an investigation in Ukraine of his political Democratic rival.

The story reminded me of two occasions during my own career at the National Security Agency (NSA) when I bucked the top agency commanders to insist on doing what was right. Another time, on assignment to the National Intelligence Budget Staff, I refused to approve funding for an administration program I knew was illegal. On all three occasions, the powers-that-be eventually backed down but not until they had made my life miserable.

The American public owes a great debt of gratitude to career public servants who toil away, with no public recognition, to be sure that all of us are protected and cared for. Countless individuals daily work beyond all expectations for the good of our country. Some are military; most are civilian.

My sympathy extends especially to the whistle blower in the Ukraine scandal. He or she took a great risk in exposing presidential malfeasance. The president went so far as to hint that the whistle blower’s action was treasonous and deserved execution. Here’s hoping that law and order prevail and that the whistle blower’s identity is never revealed.

All of us need to honor those nameless thousands who labor away for our good year in and year out. God bless them and keep them.

Greta Thunberg and Climate Change

I am moved to the roots of my soul by Greta Thunberg, the sixteen year-old Swedish girl just named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. She has toured widely and spoken many times, including at the U.N., about the climate change emergency and the urgent need of nations to act before it is too late. She reminded me of a quote I copied recently, unfortunately without the name of the speaker:

“As I wrote at the end of last summer: ‘The climate news this summer was what has become routinely alarming. July was the hottest month on record. The United Nations just warned that climate change presents an unprecedented threat to the world’s food supply. The genetic diversity of Central Europe’s plants are at risk of collapse. Spy satellites showed that Himalayan glaciers have lost billions of tons of ice in just this century. Arctic permafrost is thawing 70 years earlier than was predicted. Ocean temperatures were the highest ever recorded, as were sea levels. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which just six years ago broke 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, in May hit 415 parts per million.’”

In short, we are faced with a worldwide crisis that demands immediate action. Yet the nations of the world are doing almost nothing to change human activity which is causing the disaster. Worst is the U.S. which should be leading the effort to combat global warming. Instead, President Trump is pushing in the opposite direction, terming the coming tragedy as a “hoax.” He also insulted Miss Thunberg in tweets.

For the good of my children and grandchildren, I’m doing all I can to alert people to the danger inherent in climate change. That and my other grave concern, gun violence in the U.S., threaten my family in ways I could never have foreseen when I was younger. We must move heaven and earth to confront these two perils before they harm the people we love.

So I thank Miss Thunberg from the bottom of my heart. May the world hear her and act.

Government Misinformation: Afghanistan and Vietnam (2)

Correction from yesterday’s post: The Washington Post article series on Afghanistan continued through Sunday, 15 December 2019.

Washington was genuinely surprised when the North Vietnamese launched an attack on Saigon. It hadn’t believed its own intelligence but chose to accept the ambassador’s predictions instead.

One outcome of the U.S. government’s blindness was that I was not evacuated but instead survived by escaping by helicopter under fire on the night of 29 April 1975, after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of Saigon. Another was that we left behind to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese many thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked side by side with us. Among them were 2700 soldiers who worked with my organization. They were all killed or captured by the North Vietnamese.

The U.S. essentially did the same thing in Iraq and Syria, withdrawing and leaving behind vulnerable allies, including translators and interpreters. We are about to do it again in Afghanistan. No wonder people of other countries are reluctant to work with us.

As the Post article emphasizes, the decision makers in the U.S. government had little knowledge of and never understood Afghanistan. The same was true with respect to Vietnam. During my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam, not a single senior military or civilian official spoke Vietnamese. They regularly mispronounced (and sometimes couldn’t remember) the names of high-ranking South Vietnamese government leaders. Their knowledge of the geography and culture of the country was superficial at best—they frequently didn’t know the names of provinces, then mispronounced those names when they read them.

The tendency of our government to misrepresent what is going on in the wars we are involved in springs, in my opinion, not from a desire to deceive the American public, but from our inborn optimism. I’ve written in this blog about our can-do attitude and its underlying bias that Americans are superior to other nationalities. We don’t bother to learn the languages of other nations; we expect others to learn American English. In any conflict we are in, we tend to see the bright side, emphasize the positive, downplay or ignore negative indicators. The end result is abandoning to their fate those who have worked with us.

When will we ever learn?

Government Misinformation: Afghanistan and Vietnam

The Washington Post has published a series of six articles ending yesterday about the U.S. government’s efforts to deceive the American public about how the 18-year-long war in Afghanistan has gone. The first article began: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The first article in the series compared the government’s dishonesty with what it did over the 14 years we fought in Vietnam. As a veteran of 13 years in and out of Vietnam, I found the comparison apt.

My job in Vietnam was intelligence. I knew what was going on. And I knew when the U.S. government’s pubic statements distorted the truth. It both infuriated and depressed me. As the end drew near in April 1975, I was astonished by pronouncements put out by Washington expressing optimism about how the war would play out. The U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, was persuaded that the North Vietnamese would not attack Saigon. The Hungarian member of the International Committee for Control and Supervision (ICCS), a group established in 1973 to monitor the so-called ceasefire (which the North Vietnamese never observed), had advised the ambassador that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking Saigon. Rather, they wanted to form a coalition government with all patriotic forces in South Vietnam—this from a representative of a communist government allied to North Vietnam. The ambassador believed the Hungarian in the face of overwhelming evidence from me and others that the attack on Saigon was imminent.

The civilian side of the U.S. government accepted Martin’s judgment and offered optimistic pronouncements on the forthcoming settlement in Vietnam. Fortunately, the U.S. military was under no delusions about what was happening and prepared forces to evacuate those of us still in-country. The U.S. 7th Fleet was dispatched to the South China Sea where it cruised out of sight from land. Aboard were Marines with helicopters.

More tomorrow.

Why and How I Write (4)

Almost everything I write is in the literary rather than the journalism style. The casual reader may not notice the difference, but for a writer the distinction is crucial.

In broad terms, the literary style leans toward beauty of expression while the journalistic stresses the provision of information. Where the literary is creative, the journalistic is factual.

The literary is dominant in most published books. It is the only style used in fiction. But the journalistic approach is the sine qua non in newspapers and periodicals, even when the topic may be something artistic. Characteristic is the rule that the first paragraph of a story—ideally the first sentence—should state the essence of what is to follow. The literary first paragraph, on the other hand, can start anywhere. The text then leads the reader to the subject matter by any route the writer chooses.

Granted, there’s a good deal of room for each style to borrow from the other in day-to-day writing. But the mechanics of each cannot be deviated from.

And those mechanics are subtly different. For example, in the literary style, a series is separated by commas, with the last comma before the connecting word, usually “and” or “or.” For example, “Humans, birds, insects, and reptiles are covered.” In the journalistic style, that last comma is omitted. That same sentence would read without the comma after “insects”: “Humans, birds, insects and reptiles are covered.” In the literary style, the em dash (—) has no spaces before or after it: “Humans, birds, insects, and reptiles—including snakes—are covered.” In the journalistic style, the sentence would read: “Humans, birds, insects, and reptiles — including snakes — are covered.”

The rules on the mechanics for the two styles have been collected and published in two books that govern what is acceptable. The literary rule book is The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press). That for journalists, referred to as “the newspaper bible,” is The Associated Press Stylebook (Associated Press). The most recent edition of the Chicago manual, the seventeenth, came out in 2017; the Stylebook appears to have a new edition every year—the 2020 edition will be available soon.

Ironically, I write for one online periodical, the Washington Independent Review of Books, which requires journalistic rather than literary style. Even writing about books doesn’t absolve me of the obligation to write like a journalist.

This post and foregoing three on why and how I write may explain why I always laugh when someone says, “You know, I should write a book.” Writing is lifetime vocation, not an afterthought.

Why and How I Write (3)

Shifting back and forth between the intuitive and the rational, the meditative and the intellectual, right brain and left brain, I often go through as many as ten drafts before I’m persuaded I can’t improve my story any further. Then comes the mechanical checking. I read the text aloud from the computer screen, then print it out and read it aloud from the imprint on paper. I check for sentences so long that I can’t read through them without taking a breath. I listen for the musicality inherent in words. I feel the rhythm in the word order. Once I enter corrections, the text is finished and ready to be submitted to a publisher.

This process works for fiction but not for nonfiction. Nearly all my published writing is fiction, but I do occasionally write articles. The nonfiction requires an entirely different approach.

For an article or essay, I start with an outline and jot down some ideas to fit in somewhere. I continue to fill out the outline until I have an idea for each paragraph. Then I start writing.

Once the draft is complete, I start revision. I allow myself to slide into the intuitive, right-brained mode for the first review. In other words, I check out the aesthetics, looking for verbal beauty. For the next review, I shift back to the intellectual, left-brained approach, judging the logic of the text. I continue revising until I’m satisfied that I can’t improve the text any further, then I proceed with the mechanical check described above.

As will be obvious from the foregoing description, something like 10 percent of my writing time is spent on original drafting and 90 percent on revision and polishing. I am a slow writer. It takes me literally years to complete a book, months to finish an article or short story. I have no complaints. These days, I am a fulltime author. I take whatever time required to get it right.

More tomorrow.

Why and How I Write (2)

I experience the writing process as if I were the passive recipient of signals from outside me. A dramatic moment comes to me, an awareness of an incident that moves me to the core. I write down the story of that moment, then consider what must have led up to it and what followed it. The full story flows from there.

The fictional characters who people my stories also come to me as if from an external source. They are already fully formed when they arrive, though they sometimes withhold from me some aspects of their personalities until I am writing about them. At times they come into my consciousness as part of the story that is revealed to me, at others I purposely insert them into the story. Occasionally they surprise me during the writing by doing things I wasn’t expecting. It is as though they are independent of me and will not allow me to dictate their actions or behavior.

Once a draft is finished, I start revision, still in the intuitive mode. As I work my way through the text, I might see that I failed to include relevant episodes or that the incidents I have recounted were the wrong ones. The text becomes more focused. I follow the same approach for the third draft. When I am persuaded that I have the story right, I put the draft away to cool for a week or two, so that I can return to it with fresh eyes. I don’t look at it or think about it.

When I return to the story, I switch modes to the intellectual or left brain. I try to see the writing as a reader or editor would, looking for ways to improve not the story but the writing itself. I reduce the girth by cutting or economizing. I look for variance in sentence type and length. I replace vague vocabulary with precise words. I sharpen and polish.

For the next revision, I go back to the intuitive approach and study the text for emotional precision. Is the overall feel right? Are the shifts in feeling properly placed? And I begin to ask myself: is this the story I really want to tell? Have I got the emphasis right? Does the structure and rhythm work to enhance the story?

More tomorrow.

Why and How I Write

Readers are endlessly curious about a writer’s motivation and technique. I am so often asked, why do I write? How do I go about it?

One answer to the why question is that I want people to know what happened in Vietnam and during the AIDS crisis in the U.S. Another is that I have to write because that’s my mission in life. But it’s also true that I write to vent.

My time on the battlefield in Vietnam scarred my soul. My work with men dying of AIDS changed me permanently. I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). To cope with that disease, one must bring into the conscious mind the unspeakable memories accumulating in the unconscious and confront them. One of the most effective ways to do that is to write down what happened.

So all of my writing is about what actually happened to me. I’m no good at making up stories. But it’s also true that my vocation is fiction. The result, as critics have noted, is that my writing is fiction in name only. The events in my novels and short stories really did happen.

In sum, I write to vent my soul of unbearable memories. Because my discipline is fiction, I attribute my experiences to fictional characters. I write from multiple points of view so that I can show the reader what was going through the souls of the different characters confronting the insufferable.

My novel, The Trion Syndrome, for example, is about a Vietnam veteran with PTSI. Throughout the story, the point of view alternates between the protagonist and his wife. The reader sees the PTSI victim recovering the excruciating memories from his unconscious, his struggle to come to terms with them, and his start on the road to peace.

That novel, in short, is my story told as fiction. Writing it forced me to take a hard look at myself and come to terms with my own memories. It allowed me to vent. I am more at peace as a result.