Tom Glenn's Blog, page 147

Book Reviews

One of my duties as an author is to review the work of other writers. I’ve been writing reviews for more years than I can remember. It’s a job I enjoy, and it’s been immensely helpful in improving my own writing.

Being a reviewer means being required to study the writing of other authors I might otherwise have never encountered. Because of my background, I’m usually asked to review books on Vietnam and war. As a result, I’m rarely assigned fiction—novels and short story collections. Yet fiction is my medium.

Whether I am given works by first-class authors or inferior ones, I learn about writing from reading their work. From the unpolished, I discover what to avoid—long sentences, strings of sentences with lengthy present participial phrases tacked on the end, over dependence on complex vocabulary drawn mostly from Greek and Latin origins.

From excellent writers, I learn simplicity. I study their alteration between short and long sentences and their dependence on words with Anglo-Saxon roots. I come to understand their reliance on word choice, the exact right word to convey what they want to say.

Beyond writing skills, the books I review open my mind to new worlds of which I previously knew nothing. I came to understand the British and Irish time of trouble that lasted for many years. I arrived at a new appreciation of espionage. But mostly, I learned facts new to me about the Vietnam war and what it entailed.

I’m fortunate to be able to review books. I’m a better writer as a consequence. But mostly I am enriched with new knowledge. That’s the gift to the reviewer.

Thurston Clarke’s Honorable Exit

One of my jobs as a writer is to review other authors’ books. I do reviews for the Internet Review of Books and the Washington Independent Review of Books. A few weeks ago, I came across an announcement that my friend, Thurston Clarke, has a new book coming out. It’s Honorable Exit: How a Few Brave Americans Risked All to Save Our Vietnamese Allies at the End of the War (Penguin-Random House, 2019). I immediately volunteered with the Independent to review it only to discover that my friendship with Thurston disqualified me. But I learned that we can do an interview. I’ve now finished the book and drafted questions for Thurston. I’ll post the URL of the interview once it’s published.

As I began reading, I was shocked to discover that Thurston included stories about me in the book. My work in Vietnam was classified for so long that previous volumes on the history of the war made no mention of my involvement. But Thurston covers my whole story.

As I read the book, I repeatedly come across events I watched happen. Thurston writes about dozens of people I knew. It’s like living through the fall of Saigon all over again.

I don’t know Thurston’s motivation for writing Honorable Exit, but he stresses the bravery of so many Americans who risked their lives to save South Vietnamese at the end of the war. I hadn’t understood that so many of us went to extremes to rescue our Vietnamese brothers and sisters as Vietnam collapsed. The book is one more testament to accomplishments we can be proud of after decades of being shamed for our participation in the Vietnam war.

So many of us who have struggled to find peace of mind can now take pride.

You can learn more about the book at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246218/honorable-exit-by-thurston-clarke/9780385539647/

Madama Butterfly

I’m currently preparing to show a video of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. I’ll be introducing the opera and offering a commentary before the showing begins and between the acts. So I’ve been studying the opera to prepare.

I’ve known Butterfly since childhood. Early in my career, I spent the better part of thirteen years in Asia during the Vietnam war and saw Butterfly’s story played out in real life. The opera captures reality.

While going through the score at the piano, I was struck once again by Puccini’s genius. For episodes involving primarily American characters, he relies on the standard major and minor scales, typified by the “Star-Spangled Banner” which is his leitmotif for Americans.

But for sections of the score dealing with the Japanese, he uses at least ten authentic Japanese melodies and several other themes that might be adaptations of Japanese folk tunes. To depict Butterfly herself and the Japanese that surround her, he employs modes, scales different from what we are used to—the Aeolian mode, the pentatonic scale, and the whole tone scale. The effect is to create a unique musical world inhabited only by Japanese.

Puccini portrays the Americans in the story as shallow, rough, and ruled by a superiority complex. He got that right. As I’ve noted here before, the Americans I’ve observed in my many years working abroad act as though they are a cut above people of other cultures and nationalities. We don’t even bother to learn other languages; people from other countries should learn to speak English.

My sense is that Puccini captured the American character in his portrayal of the American naval lieutenant Pinkerton. His superficiality and scorn for the Japanese lay the groundwork for the tragedy that ends the opera.

Fathers and Children

My recent posts about my father brings to mind a change in culture I’ve been observing lately—how often I see fathers with their children.

When I was growing up and during the years when my children were young, we believed that a man’s family role was to earn the living, and the woman’s role was to keep house and care for the children. Men were supposed to be strong, women gentle. It was unmasculine for a man to be caught looking after the little ones.

I personally violated those rules. When I was home, not in Vietnam, I often fed the children, bathed them, got them into their pajamas, played with them, and put them to bed. I did that in part because their mother wasn’t very good at those jobs and wasn’t interested in doing them, in part to make up for the fact that I was so often absent because of my many trips to Vietnam, and in part because I loved doing it. But I didn’t share with other men that I took care of the children. It wasn’t a man’s job.

Nowadays, wherever I go, I see men with children, often with no women in sight. I watch them furtively, to see how good they are at the job. I’m impressed with their gentleness and the closeness of their attention. I see no signs of embarrassment or shame. They’re doing what they want to do. I sense their pride in what they are doing.

Our society has changed the way we think about the roles of men and women. The change has come in part, it seems to be, from the progress we’ve made in liberating women from the inferior and submissive role we used to assign them to. These days, both men and women have jobs to support the family. Soon, the wages women earn will equal those of men. Housework and childcare of necessity are now shared responsibilities. And the men, God love them, have proven themselves competent caregivers.

Society has changed for the better. Both men and women are the beneficiaries.

My Father (2)

Early in my college years, I got a bank account so I could write checks for tuition and other expenses. One day, I noticed that several checks were missing from my check book. When my bank statement arrived, I found one of the missing checks. It was made out to cash and signed with my name. I recognized the handwriting. It was my father’s.

When several more checks showed up, I changed my payroll signature from Thomas L. Glenn to Thomas L. Glenn III. That stopped the forgeries.

At age twenty-one, I graduated from college and enlisted in the army to go to language school. I asked my mother not to let my father know where I was or how to get in touch with me. After I graduated from language school, the army assigned me to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. When I finished my enlistment, NSA hired me. By then I was married. I settled my family in Maryland. For the next ten years, I saw to it that my father didn’t know how to reach me.

When my mother collapsed with stage three alcoholism, I flew to Oakland, closed down her apartment, and took her to West Virginia to live with her family while she recovered. I saw no sign of my father.

A year or two later—I don’t remember how long—she was diagnosed with lung cancer from her heavy smoking. Not long after, she died with me close by.

Two months after her death, I got a phone call from the Oakland police. They had somehow tracked me down. They told me that my father had been killed in a bar brawl and asked what to do with his body. If I didn’t claim it, he would be buried in a pauper’s grave. I told them to go ahead. To this day, I don’t know where his grave is.

As I look back on my father’s life, I’m forced to conclude that he was mentally unbalanced. I know that he was dependent on impressing others with his importance and success. But I still can’t imagine what motivated him to do the things he did.

I learned from him. I swore that if I ever had children, I’d take good care of them so they’d never have to go through what I did as a child. My three daughters and my son are all now healthy adults.

I kept my promise.

My Father

When I posted my piece about my callsign in Vietnam, TG-3, I mentioned that my father forged checks against my bank account. A reader found that hard to believe. Here’s the full story.

My father was a lawyer in Oakland, California. When I was twelve or so, he sent my mother and me on a trip across country to West Virginia to visit her mother and family. We came home on a luxurious train trip through Canada.

Years later, I found out that my father got the money to pay for that trip by embezzling $40,000 from one of his clients. He was indicted and convicted, debarred from practicing law, and spent the next few years in prison. We lost everything—our house, the cars, our savings. My mother and I moved to the Oakland slums where we rented a small flat. She got a job as a telephone saleswoman in a jewelry store. Her dependence on alcohol became more pronounced.

When my father got out of prison, he lived with us and became a bum. As far as I know, he never, in those years, had a regular job of any kind. Shortly thereafter, he went back to prison. I don’t know what for.

I honestly don’t remember how many times he was imprisoned. From my early teenage years on, I became more and more self-reliant. My mother became completely addicted to alcohol. I was forced to take care of myself. In my teens, I had part time jobs as a paperboy, working as a delivery boy for various stores, and waiting on customers. I went to college at the University of California in Berkeley because I could afford the tuition. I worked twenty hours a week while in school and did the best I could to avoid my father.

More next time.

My Addictions (2)

Continuing my catalogue of addictions:

Early in childhood, along with music and piano playing, I discovered reading. I learned that books offered information, insight, entertainment, and a means to grow intellectually. I read everything I could lay my hands on, and the local library got to know me. I was most attracted to fiction. I knew instinctively that even though I was reading stories that never happened, these tales gave me insights into real life in a way non-fiction couldn’t.

Reading has stayed with me all my life as a favorite pastime. It has led to book reviewing which I now do regularly. That craft also taught me to read more carefully, knowing I’d be called upon to tell other readers about new books.

And that brings me to my greatest addiction: writing. By age six, I already knew that my vocation was writing. Throughout the first third of my life, I tried to escape from it. I studied dancing, acting, music, languages, and leadership. By my early twenties, I had a family and needed to support my wife and children. Writing didn’t pay, but signals intelligence did. I studied Vietnamese for a year, then spent thirteen years constantly in Vietnam, exploiting North Vietnamese communications in support of U.S. forces. After escaping under fire when Saigon fell in 1975, I went on to other escapades that I can’t discuss because they’re still classified.

Through it all, I wrote. I retired as early as I could to write fulltime. Most of my writing was fiction about Vietnam, a subject not popular among American readers after 1968. So much of my output never saw print—until 2012. As a new generation of Americans came along and wanted to know what happened during that war deemed so shameful, my writing started to sell. Now I have seventeen short stories and four novels in print with two more books due out next year.

But I don’t write to get published. I write because I have to.

So there you have my addictions—weight lifting, music, piano, reading, and writing. Each has enriched my life.

My Addictions

I have in my life activities that I find so fulfilling that I am addicted to them. They feel to me as though they are critical to my health, survival, and sanity. Without them my life would be drab and incomplete.

One is weight lifting, sometimes called weight training. For many years, I’ve had my own weight bench, barbells, dumbbells, and an exercise bike. I was also a runner until several years ago when I had knee replacement surgery that went awry. I haven’t been able to run since.

I didn’t run or lift weights for health reasons. I did it because I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nothing matches a runner’s high or the sense of sheer vitality that comes from a good, hard session of lifting weights.

Unfortunately, as injuries and illnesses affected me, I became less able to engage in my favorite exercises. I haven’t been able to run at all for several years. Then a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. I underwent chemotherapy and radiation and finally has the upper lobe of my right lung removed by surgery. I have tried several times to resume weight lifting but haven’t had the bodily strength. I’ll try again this spring.

Another of my predilections is music. I discovered classical music as a child, and my fondness for it soon grew to love. For years, I composed and even took a BA in music from the University of California. These days, I have less free time than ever before, but I still squeak out an occasional hour for listening to my recordings. My all-time favorite composer is Bach, with Brahms not far behind.

My love for music led me to teach myself as a child how to play the piano, even though I didn’t own one. While in high school, I scraped together the money to buy the cheapest piano I could find, an ancient upright that lasted me all the way through college. Today I have a Steinway grand, a gift from my daughter, that doesn’t get the attention it deserves because I’m too busy writing and doing readings and presentations.

More tomorrow.

My TG-3 Desk Name Plaque

On my writing desk in my office, I have a name plaque made of black stone, presumably marble. It’s a triangular wedge, a foot long and three inches high, an inch and a quarter wide at the bottom and pointed at the top. On the back of it is a fanciful black dragon among white clouds. On the front is a long white rectangle with “TG-3” in black in the center, surrounded by dragon fins.

The plaque has a crack in it. Years ago, I dropped it and broke it, then carefully cemented it back together. I had to repair it. It’s one of my prized possessions from the Vietnam war.

Army troops I was working with in the Da Nang area of Vietnam in the late 1960s gave it to me. They told me they had paid a craftsman to carve it from marble quarried from Marble Mountain, close to the seashore not far from Da Nang.

They were especially pleased with the plaque because it memorialized my radio callsign, TG-3. The troops came up with that letter-digit combination. They took it from my payroll signature, Thomas L. Glenn III, which they found hilarious.

I didn’t explain to them that I used that silly moniker because my father, Thomas L. Glenn, Jr., had forged checks against my personal account, under the name I used, Thomas L. Glenn. I added the “III” to my payroll signature to foil him. It worked, but I have been stuck all my life with a ridiculously pretentious name. I reduced it to “Tom Glenn” for my author’s name.

My presence among the troops was already the source of mirth. Here I was, a civilian who outranked some of their officers, pretending to be an enlisted man. I lived with the troops and dressed in their uniform and went into combat with them. The disguise was to prevent the enemy from discovering that they had a spy in their midst. When I finally got the guys to call me “Tom” and not “Mr. Glenn” and “sir,” I knew I was a member of the team. When they gave me the TG-3 plaque, I knew I was one of them.

Some of the men who gave me the plaque were killed close by me on the battlefield.

I’ll never forget them. I’ll never cease to grieve over those who were lost. And I will always treasure the plaque they gave me.

Latest Book Review

My latest book review is out. You can read it at

http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-league-of-wives-the-untold-story-of-the-women-who-took-on-the-u.s-government-to-bring-their-husbands-home

Let me know what you think.