Tom Glenn's Blog, page 140

Time to Rethink the Second Amendment

The text of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Supreme Court has interpreted the amendment to mean that we can legally have no limits on the number of guns American citizens own.

As a result, we have more firearms than people in the U.S., almost 400 million of them. Those numbers exclude weapons in the hands of law enforcement and military forces. We have more than 120 guns for every 100 of us. That ratio is higher than for any other nation in the world. We own 40 percent of the guns in the world, but we account for only 4.27 percent of the world population.

We also have the weakest gun laws of any modern nation on earth. We do almost nothing to control who can own a gun.

Our death rate from firearms is the highest among the western democracies. Every day, 100 Americans are killed with guns and hundreds more are shot and injured.

The spate of mass shootings in the past few weeks—most prominently at Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton—force us to confront the issue: Is the Second Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, to continue? How many deaths by shooting will we tolerate before we change the rules?

My sense is that we must act at once. We can either reinterpret the Second Amendment to mean no restrictions on guns for militias or we can repeal it in its entirety.

The argument that guns are and always have been a key part of American culture doesn’t move me. Better to change our culture than to allow the killing of a hundred of us every day.

The time to act is now.

My Novels (7)

My books to be published next year are not the end of the story. I’m currently working on two more books.

One so far untitled is drawn from my experience during the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s western highlands. It tells the story of a growing friendship between three soldiers, very different from one another, and a civilian there to provide intelligence assistance to the 4th Infantry Division and 173rd Armored Brigade. I have had to do considerable research into that battle, one of the bloodiest during the Vietnam war. My New York Times article on the battles (you can read it at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/opinion/vietnam-tet-offensive.html) doesn’t begin to deal with all the actions on both sides. This is going to be tough going.

The other book, called Josh at the Door, is the story of a torrid affair between a man and woman both in their eighties. I am repeatedly irritated by the assumption of younger people that older men and women are no longer capable of passionate lovemaking. I wanted to set the record straight. I leave it to the reader to decide is this book, like all my other novels, is fiction in name only.

As readers have commented, none of my novels and short stories end happily. But all, without exception, end with hope. If I’ve learned nothing else during my long life, I know that travail brings with it learning and the possibility of a better future. I don’t write tragedies—stories that end without hope. I write stories with sad endings that offer a view toward a better future.

My Novels (6)

My other book to be published in 2020 is a collection of short stories titled Coming to Terms. The book’s forward describes its content:

“Coming to Terms tells the stories of men and women confronted with pain as a consequence of love and hate, goodness and evil. Each finds a way to go on living, however imperfectly. None is left unscathed.

“All these tales come from my life, as a husband, father, soldier, and caregiver to the dying. Each major character is drawn from people I’ve known. My hope is that you and I, both, can learn from the choices these people made.”

Once again, the book is fiction in name only. The events described are all ones I lived through or knew of. The characters range from mature and virtuous to seriously misguided. They all struggle to come to terms with the life they live. Not all of them are likeable, but I love each of them. Like so many people I’ve known in my long life, these people break my heart.

This book, too, has its roots in Vietnam. I grew into the man I am today by virtue of what I went through during that war. I came to understand and feel for people I would otherwise have condemned or dismissed as unworthy of my time and attention. It was because of Vietnam that I volunteered to care for men dying of AIDS. And it was the effects of the war on me that led me to work for seven years in a hospice taking care of the dying.

One of the life lessons I learned from the war and my experience caring for others is that the only acts of significance in life are those undertaken for the good of others. What I do for myself is trivial. What I do to help others makes life worth living. Hence, Coming to Terms.

More tomorrow.

My Novels (5)

Early in 2020, two more of my books will be published, both my Adelaide Books of New York. One is a novel, Secretocracy; the other a collection of short stories called Coming to Terms.

As with all my fiction, Secretocracy is based on events in my life. It tells the story of an intelligence budgeteer, Gene Westmoreland, who refuses to fund an illegal program being pushed by the administration. He is stripped of his clearances and banished to a warehouse in a dangerous part of D.C. The administration does not want risk firing him because he might sue. It hopes to make him so miserable that he will resign. He is given no work to do and left to vegetate. But Gene is stubborn. After the 2018 election, he finds help from a senator and is restored to his job. The Congress kills the illegal program.

I set the story during the Trump administration because events like that told in the novel have become commonplace. But I lived through the story told in the book during the Reagan administration. My agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), assigned me for a tour with the Intelligence Budget Office, an independent staff directly subordinate to the Director of Central Intelligence. It’s job is to review and approve budgets proposed by the seventeen intelligence agencies before they are submitted to Congress. I refused to approve intelligence support for a highly classified program the administration was launching on the grounds that it was illegal and violated our treaty agreements with other nations. The administration was furious. It took away my security clearance and assigned me to the warehouse I described in Secretocracy. I was isolated there until a new administration took office and reinstated me.

I don’t know if the Reagan administration’s highly classified program was ever launched. When I returned to NSA, I no longer needed the security clearances for that program and therefore had no way of knowing what became of it. For all I know, it may have been successfully executed and may still be operating today.

In Secretocracy, I based the characters of an amalgam of characteristics I’ve observed in administration officials working for President Trump. But the humiliations Gene is subjected to are based on what happened to me.

More tomorrow.

My Novels (4)

My most recently published novel, Last of the Annamese, came out in 2017. It tells the story of the fall of Saigon. As critics have noted, it’s fiction in name only. Everything related in the book really did happen. Even the love story is based on a real relationship I knew of. The characters are all based on amalgams of real people who lived through the catastrophe and the decisions they made about what they would do, including whether they would survive. It is the most true-to-life of all my books and stories.

I always get questions about the title: what does “Annamese” mean? It comes from one of the previous names for Vietnam, An Nam. Whereas “Viet Nam” is based on the Chinese meaning “troublemakers in the south,” “An Nam” comes from the words meaning “peace in the south.” One of the principal characters in the book, a South Vietnamese Marine colonel, dislikes being considered a troublemaker, so he prefers the name An Nam.

The book’s protagonist, Chuck Griffin, is a retired Marine who fought in Vietnam. He returns after the withdrawal of U.S. troops because he wants Americans to win the war. His son, Ben, died in the war, and Chuck can’t tolerate the idea that his son’s sacrifice was in vain. During the visit of an American delegation, Chuck learns that his son did not die in combat. Another soldier murdered him following exchanges with strong homosexual overtones. Chuck’s reason for going back to Vietnam is now meaningless. As Chuck watches denial of U.S officials, led by the ambassador, that Vietnam is about to fall to the communists, his disillusionment is complete.

I wrote the novel for two reasons. One was that I wanted the story of what really happened during the fall of Saigon to be told. Few Americans know the details of that tragedy or how it came to pass. The other reason was to vent my own soul. The unspeakable happenings during the fall were festering inside of me, contributing to my Port-Traumatic Stress Injury. I needed to bring to the surface all those memories tormenting me. I had to face them, to make them public.

Annamese is my most successful book so far. Many readers who were in Vietnam or lived there through the last few months before Saigon fell have contacted me to express their thanks to me for telling the story of what happened at the end. And Thurston Clarke, in his Honorable Exit (Doubleday, 2019), relates some of the same events told in Annamese. Readers and I, together, have found some measure of peace in putting the story of the fall of Saigon to rest.

More next time.

My Novels (3)

My third novel, The Trion Syndrome, came out in 2015. Unlike No-Accounts, it grew directly out my experience in Vietnam. It is the story of a Vietnam veteran, Dave, who can’t find peace. He has nightmares and flashbacks, but he can’t remember the event that’s causing them. For reasons he doesn’t understand, he’s fascinated by the myth of Trion, a Greek demi-god who disemboweled his own son to demonstrate his ferocity. As a punishment, Aphrodite cursed him—he could never know love. The Eucharides, three female monsters, trapped him and drowned him.

The book starts with Dave’s failed attempt to drown himself. He excoriates himself for his involuntary reflexes that saved him. Over time, he finally remembers his crime: he inadvertently killed a child.

In telling Dave’s story, I was really telling my own. Just like Dave, I had to struggle to bring into conscious memory the events I participated in and witnessed on the battlefield in Vietnam. To find peace, I had to force myself to face my unspeakable remembrances.

When Dave remembers what he did, he runs away. He is finally helped to cope with his unbearable past by a young man who turns out to be an illegitimate son he didn’t know he had.

I wasn’t so lucky. I had to cope on my own. I turned to writing as a way to unburden my psyche. The greatest help was telling Dave’s story. It forced me to face my own past and my attempts to deal with it. Dave finds an imperfect peace in the long term. So did I.

More tomorrow.

My Novels (2)

My second novel, No-Accounts, published by the Naval Institute Press in 2014, is the only one of my books that does not deal directly with Vietnam. But it was the result of my Vietnam experience.

When I returned to the U.S. in May 1975 after the fall of Saigon, I was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery and pneumonia due to being cooped up without food or sleep for days on end as the North Vietnamese laid siege to the city. Worse was the disease I’ve written extensively about here, Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), a spiritual/psychological malady. One method I found to help me cope was working with others worse off than I was. I volunteered to care for men dying of AIDS during the height of the epidemic. I learned that when my attention was focused on people who needed my help, my PTSI symptoms and the memories that caused them faded into the background.

Over a five-year period, I worked with seven men with AIDS. They were all gay, and they all died. I was so moved by the experience that I wrote a novel about a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS. That was No-Accounts.

The title comes from the term one of the two protagonists, Peter, the gay man with AIDS, applies to his straight caretaker, Martin. He learned the term from his southern mother. She used it to designate worthless men, non-achievers. Martin accepts the judgment. He has largely failed at everything he tried to do during his life—he has a dead-end job, his marriage has failed, his daughter won’t speak to him.

Peter, in an entirely different way, is a no-account, too. Intelligent, handsome, and charming, he has wasted his life on frivolous pursuits becoming a star on the gay bar circuit. When he gets sick, his gay admirers abandon him.

No-Accounts is the story of two failed men who come together and help each other to find decency in their lives. As Peter, near death, tells Martin, “We’re not no-accounts anymore. We’re men now.”

No-Accounts has not sold as well as my other books, but it has been the greatest critical success. I have heard from many people damaged by the AIDS crisis who thanked me for telling their story.

More tomorrow.

My Novels

Something like three years ago, I blogged about my books. And I’ve mentioned them in passing when discussing other subjects. I think it’s time I let my readers know a little about each book, including two that will be published next year.

My first published book was Friendly Casualties. It came out as an ebook on Amazon.com in 2012. It’s in a form I’ve never seen used by another author. The first half, called “Triage,” is a series of eight short stories in which characters from one story sometimes show up in another story. The second half, called “Healing,” is a novella that weaves together the tales told earlier and lets the reader know what the outcome was for many of the characters mentioned in the first half.

All the stories center on the Vietnam war and its effects on people involved in it. And all the stories are drawn from my own experience and people I knew during my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam. None of the stories has a happy ending, but at the end of the book a woman who is a diplomat in Vietnam (and lost the man she loved, an army officer) and a wounded solider (who has lost an arm) come together reluctantly and agree to try to comfort one another. The ending, despite the tragedies, is hopeful.

The title, Friendly Casualties, is a military term that refers to those hurt or killed by fire from their own lines, that is, casualties from friendly fire. The point of the title, and indeed of the book, was to stress that everyone involved in war is a casualty, even those who suffer no physical wounds. Every man and woman I knew in Vietnam was damaged. Two killed themselves after the war. We were all friendly casualties.

More tomorrow.

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (3)

As noted here before, I’m still subject to nightmares and sometimes to weeping. But otherwise, I manage. The process of learning to keep my feelings in check was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to take on. And my gradually growing pride in my service has alleviated some of the strain.

More than twenty veterans commit suicide each day. Why? The sources I know of don’t specify the cause, but I have no doubt that PTSI is a major component. I understand their plight. I know what it’s like to feel that I can’t tolerate another day of fighting and flying from insufferable and never-fading memories. I know the profound shame of having participated in ghastly events. I can’t block memories of men dying by my side in ways so macabre that I can’t talk about it.

I believe that we can help veterans cope by stressing to them two aspects of their lives. One is the gratitude of our country for the sacrifices they made on our behalf. The other is emphasizing the pride they can take in having risked everything for the good of their country.

And we can express our love for them. I love other veterans. I know, men are not supposed to love one another, but my feeling for these men is too strong to be described as anything but love. Sometimes, I shake their hands and thank them. Sometimes I give them a bear hug. I tell them that I and all Americans are in their debt. I express my profound respect for them.

In short, I do everything I can to make them feel their own worth. When I see a glimmer pride, I know I’ve helped and PTSI has been defeated, at least temporarily.

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (2)

The classic symptoms of PTSI are flashbacks, panic attacks, nightmares, and irrational rages. A fleeting sound, smell, sight can cause a memory flash and trigger an episode. I’ve learned over the years to be on the watch for stimuli that spark an attack. And I’ve trained my emotions to restrain themselves in the face of unbearable memories.

An insidious aspect of PTSI is the human tendency to bury intolerable memories in the unconscious. Once there, they act like ghosts that haunt us, coming upon us when we least expect it. Many men and women who survived combat banished the recollection of the horrors to the subconscious where they lurk and attack without warning.

The unconscious aspect of PTSI is one of the reasons that it can lay dormant for years, then arise, decades after the events that instilled it. Many men who fought in Vietnam, for instance, have only begun to suffer the more serious symptoms of PTSI in recent years.

As I have explained here before, I was not able to seek therapy for my PTSI. I had top secret codeword-plus security clearances from the National Security Agency (NSA), my employer. Had I gone for psychotherapy or even counseling after my time in Vietnam, I would have lost my clearances and my job. Because I had a family to support, I didn’t dare risk the loss of income. Fortunately, NSA and other intelligence agencies have long since abandoned the policy of forbidding psychotherapy. But in the 1970s, that was their way of handling clearances.

I figured out that what I had to do was bring my hideous memories into my conscious mind and face them down. I had to train myself not to get hysterical at remembered scenes of gruesome deaths during combat and other unbearable experiences. It took all the discipline I had. I schooled my emotions for restraint.

More tomorrow.