Tom Glenn's Blog, page 178

PTSI: The Trion Syndrome (6)

At the end of The Trion Syndrome, Dave, the protagonist, decides to leave Maine and return to Maryland to face the life he has abandoned and rehabilitate himself. As I wrote of Dave’s willingness to face his past mistakes and reestablish himself as an honorable and respectable man, I realized I was telling my own story. My own bouts with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) were as serious as those I described for Dave, and, like Dave, my reception when I returned to the states during the Vietnam war—being spit upon, called a “baby killer” and a “butcher”—aggravated my PTSI. But I was more successful than he: I faced my memories head-on. Dave drives his into his unconscious from whence they torture him.

As Dave rethinks the Trion story, both the original myth and the Thomas Mann retelling, he comes to understand that Trion was culpable for his actions: “Trion, like Dave, had a choice. Despite everything that had happened to Trion, despite everything he’d done, despite his genes and the y chromosome and testosterone, he was not condemned by fate. He could have lived up to the good in him.” Trion’s sin was surrendering, “not having the balls to be the man the gods made him to be. Settling for too little.”

Dave understands that the likelihood is that he won’t be able to recover the life his struggle with PTSI has cost him:

“What if Mary never took him back? She probably wouldn’t. What if [his children] Chip and Jeannie rejected him? They wouldn’t want the tramp he’d become for a father. What if he had to do construction work or teach German in high school or wait tables or pump gas? What if he landed in jail? What if the whole world turned against him, ridiculed him, spat in his face, called him a baby killer? If he wanted not to be Trion, if he wanted to be himself, he had to go home to Maryland no matter what else happened. . . .

“He’d grown a couple of notches. How many more notches lay ahead? Would they all hurt so much?”

Dave returns to Maryland, just as I did after the fall of Saigon, to face the reconstruction of the life he must live. To live up to his potential. To become, in the fullness of living, the man God made him to be.

The lesson of The Trion Syndrome, the lesson I learned while writing it, is that salvation means being all we can be.

Eric Hoffer General Fiction Prize First Runner Up

The Eric Hoffer Awards just informed me that Last of the Annamese is the first runner-up for its 2018 General Fiction Prize. The judges’ commentary reads:

“Last of the Annamese, Tom Glenn, Naval Institute Press – This compelling book tells the story of one of America’s darkest chapters, the fall of Saigon. We’ve all seen the news footage and read about what happened during the final years of the Viet Nam War, but to experience the pain of the fall through the eyes of several carefully crafted characters is another thing altogether. Your eyes may mist over several times during the reading, as you come to care for the characters. The descriptions bring forth the smells, voices, and tastes of this South Vietnamese city. Knowing what ultimately happened makes this a stolid and bracing read, but it is a period of American history of which all should be aware.”

​The wording of the commentary ​is especially heartening to me.  One of the most important reasons I wrote the book is that I want people to know what happened. I am fulfilled.

PTSI: The Trion Syndrome (5)

An important aspect of The Trion Syndrome I haven’t discussed up to now is the character of Mary, the wife of the protagonist. She loves Dave and wants to be with him but decides to leave him because of erratic behavior and, ultimately, his infidelity. Writing half the novel from a woman’s point of view was a major challenge. But I found that by putting myself into a meditative state, I could understand a woman’s way of seeing things and hear her voice. Over time, as Mary grew and developed in my mind, she became a force to be reckoned with. As I wrote her story, it felt as though she was dictating it. If I erred in portraying her, she corrected me.

Early on, I saw that I had to let Mary tell her own story. So I tried a technique rare in novels and one I hadn’t ever before attempted: I wrote Mary’s half of the story in the present tense and first person, while Dave’s story was in the past tense and third person. That approach somehow made her story flow.

But Mary withheld from me the ending: would she reconcile with a contrite and healed Dave? The novel ends with Dave, now making strides in coping with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, deciding he’ll return from his hideout in Maine and seek Mary’s forgiveness. Is he successful?

Mary never allowed me to know.

More tomorrow.

PTSI: The Trion Syndrome (4)

The disparity between me and Dave, the protagonist of The Trion Syndrome, hinges on our judgment of our wartime experience. Dave regrets his time as a soldier and is ashamed of what he did. While I am subject to a sense of guilt for what happened in Vietnam—why did the guys standing next to me get killed and I didn’t?—I am nevertheless proud of my years in the service of my country. I know my work saved lives. And during the fall of Saigon, I rescued others who would otherwise have died.

In sum, Dave and I are different, but I share enough of his pain that I was able to write the story of his downfall and ultimate salvation.

So despite my tortured memories, I have found an imperfect peace by taking on my soul damage and working through it by writing about it. Dave’s not so lucky. His salvation comes through the help of a son he didn’t know he had.

Despite our differences, Dave and I are brothers. I experienced enough of what he went through that I could tell his story. And writing The Trion Syndrome was cathartic. It helped me come to terms with my own devils and find peace, however flawed.

More tomorrow.

PTSI: The Trion Syndrome (3)

A reader asked, does Dave, the protagonist of The Trion Syndrome, go through the same struggles I went through? That was the case with Last of the Annamese—I attributed my own experiences to that novel’s protagonist, Chuck.

The answer for Trion is mostly no. I learned early on that I had to face my memories and learn to live with them. Dave in Trion does not. He tries to run away from them. The result is the nightmares and flashbacks he suffers. I went through those, too, in the beginning, but then I forced myself to write down what had happened to me and brought the memories into my conscious mind. I escaped most of what Dave goes through.

What I didn’t escape—and what Dave endures as well—was the collapse of my marriage. In my case, a major factor was my wife’s indifference to my illness and needs. I ponder thirty-odd years after the fact the possibility that she never loved me. I wonder if she was even capable of love. I’m now relatively sure that she was emotionally damaged from childhood.

Dave’s story is different. His wife, Mary, genuinely loves him, and he returns her love. But in his soul-struggles, Dave questions whether he, like Trion in Thomas Mann’s short story, is even able to love. Because Mary is sexually unresponsive, due to being raped as a child, Dave, who knows nothing of her childhood trauma, comes to believe she doesn’t love him. He has an affair with a very responsive woman. That ends the marriage.

Another difference between Dave and me is that he suffers from aquaphobia, whereas I enjoy the water and am a good swimmer. The contrast between us comes from our very different childhoods.

The biggest difference between me and Dave is his flirting with suicide. He loses everything—his job, his family, even his self-respect. His memories of what he did in Vietnam and his profound sense of guilt make him want to end his life. He considers doing it in the way that most terrifies him, drowning.

More next time.

PTSI: The Trion Syndrome (2)

The protagonist of The Trion Syndrome, Dave Bell, is a professor of German, a language he speaks as well as English—his mother was a German war bride. He specializes in the writings of the German author Thomas Mann (one of my favorite writers) and finds an unpublished Mann story based on the Trion myth which I quoted in yesterday’s blog. From the novel:

“This story, more than any other of Mann’s, touched Dave’s soul. Trion Kretzschmar’s struggle between his desire for dominance and his craving for love, his horror when he finds that he cannot love, the climax when he sends his son to his death, his sickening suicide by drowning—all of it lived inside Dave’s skin. ‘Evil has no understanding of love,’ the old exorcist tells Trion, but was Trion really evil? He just settled for less than he could have. He chose dominance over love. Or maybe his evil was camouflaged by its banality, as Arendt had said of Eichmann. Maybe he sold his soul for dominance. Mann’s ambiguity, Trion’s ‘questionable’ motives.

“So many similarities with Mann’s Doktor Faustus. The name Kretzschmar—the same name he used in Faustus—the issue of the evil being unable to love, the equivocation, dependence on a myth as the basis for the story. The best guess was that Mann put aside Trion and rewrote, ending up with Faustus.”

The story of Trion haunts Dave, but he doesn’t know why. At the same time, he struggles with murky and incomplete memories of a clandestine mission in Vietnam. Dave senses a connection between the myth and his vague recollections. And he finds it chilling that he shares with Trion a fear of water and what he perceives as an inability to love. Did something he did in Vietnam make him evil?

More tomorrow.

Eric Hoffer Award

The Eric Hoffer Award just announced that Last of the Annamese has been short-listed for its grand prize which will be awarded later this year. Needless to say, I’m delighted.

An earlier novel of mine, No-Accounts, was short-listed last year.

PTSI: The Trion Syndrome

Today I want to continue my discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) by shifting gears and writing about my novel, The Trion Syndrome. The book’s dedication sets the stage for the story: “To all combatants who suffered damage to their souls while serving their country.”

In blog posts over the past week, I’ve described my struggle with PTSI. The Trion Syndrome derives from the struggle.

The novel tells of the battle of a Vietnam veteran, German professor Dave Bell, against PTSI. His marriage fails, his children won’t talk to him, and he loses his job. Rather than fight back, he runs away to northern Maine, where he gets a job in a gas station and lives in a storage shed while he contemplates suicide.

Throughout the story, which begins in March 1996, Dave is haunted the Greek myth of Trion, quoted before the narration begins:

“Ares, the god of war, beheld a beautiful maiden washing herself in a stream. Overcome with lust, he plunged into the water and ravished her. The girl bore a male child, Trion, who throughout his days would be afraid of water. Bent on revenge, the girl carried the infant Trion to the city of Thrace to confront Ares. To her surprise, the god doted on the boy and taught him the secrets of war.

“Larger and stronger than other boys, Trion grew to become a fierce warrior, renowned for savagery in battle. Indifferent to pain, given to brute force, and addicted to dominance, he earned the enmity of Hera because of his cruelty to the vanquished. He fell afoul of all the gods when, as the leader of Spartan forces, he disemboweled his own infant son to demonstrate his ferocity. Aphrodite cursed him—he could never know love. At the peak of his success, Hecate sent the Eucharides, three female monsters, to destroy him. Trion fled to Delphi and consulted an oracle but refused to heed her warning to change his ways and make penitential sacrifices. The Eucharides trapped him at the mouth of the Strymon River, where it meets the Aegean Sea. There they drowned him.”

More tomorrow.

Why Fiction?

A number of people have urged me to write a book about my experiences in Vietnam, especially during the fall of Saigon. I am a writer by profession, after all, so why not?

One reason is that I’ve already told the Saigon story in a long and detailed article called “Bitter Memories: The Fall of Saigon.” It appeared in the December 2015 issue of Studies in Intelligence, was reprinted in Cryptolog and again in the Atticus Review.  You can read it at  http://atticusreview.org/bitter-memories-the-fall-of-saigon/ When you arrive at the end of the first section, click the “2” to read part two. If you read the article, you’ll see that much of the story I told last month detailing the end of the Vietnam war appeared first in that article.

Other Vietnam experiences, including some I can’t even bring myself to talk about, show up in my other novels and short stories. As one review observed, much of my writing is fiction in name only.

And Last of the Annamese, my most recent novel, documents in detail the fall of Saigon. Although the book is nominally fiction, it is historically accurate and complete, even including some details still classified until 2015.

I wrote Annamese as fiction because I wanted to tell the story of the final collapse from multiple points of view. I couldn’t do that in nonfiction, but in a novel I could recount how the disaster affected five different people, three Americans and two Vietnamese. So I told the story as seen from their eyes. That way, I was able to focus on the decisions each of us had to make at the end—including whether to survive or stay behind to face the victorious North Vietnamese.

And fiction is my genre. I’ve been writing stories since I was six years old. It is mammothly more difficult to write than nonfiction. It requires the writer to inhabit the bodies and souls of other human beings and see life from their perspectives.

And finally, the purpose of fiction, for writers like me, is not to entertain but to instruct. I never state the moral of the story. I leave it to the reader to draw her own conclusions. It works. So many readers have said to me after reading Last of the Annamese that we Americans made so many mistakes in Vietnam. It could have ended differently. By decisions we made through our political leaders and the Congress, we designed our own tragedy.

Last of the Annamese

Over the past month, I’ve written of what happened forty-three years ago during the fall of Saigon and the Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) I suffer from. I tell the same story in my novel, Last of the Annamese.

I wrote the book as a novel in part because I wanted to narrate the stream of events from five different points of view, three American and two Vietnamese. Those of us who suffered through the final collapse in Vietnam were faced with choosing who and what we’d try to save, including our own lives. The five characters make different choices.

The novel’s protagonist, Chuck Griffin, goes through the same disasters I did, but he is not me. He is a retired Marine officer who lost a son in combat in Vietnam. He goes back after the cease-fire of 1973 and the withdrawal of U.S. forces to try to win the war so that his son’s death will not have been in vain. He learns that his son did not die in combat but was murdered by another soldier. His purpose for returning to Vietnam loses its meaning. And he loses the war.

Chuck is like me in his despair at the end. In May 1975, I returned to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon emotionally shattered. Shamed by all for my involvement in the war in Vietnam, tortured by PTSI, physically ill with amoebic dysentery and pneumonia, I was alone. My wife refused to return to Maryland from Massachusetts where she and the children were staying with her father. She would come back only when I could recover our house, leased to another family for the length of our three-year tour in Vietnam cut short by the North Vietnamese conquest. She finally returned the following July.

Doctors eventually cured me of my physical illnesses, but I couldn’t seek psychotherapy for the PTSI because I held top-secret-codeword-plus clearances. In those days, cleared personnel lost their clearances (and therefore their jobs) if they sought psychotherapy. I had to handle it on my own.

I stopped Chuck’s story before the PTSI sets in because I had already told that story in a different novel, The Trion Syndrome. In that book, as in my own story, the protagonist learns to cope with his PTSI. He, like me, finds peace—he through his son, me through writing.