Tom Glenn's Blog, page 36

My Awards

On both walls beside the stairs leading into my office in the lowest floor of my split-level house in Columbia, Maryland, are award plaques. There are 21 of them, mostly prizes my books have won, but also for my volunteer work over many years. Two books have received the most awards. They are Last of the Annamese (Naval Institute Press, 2017), set during the fall of Saigon which I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city; and No-Accounts (Apprentice House, 2014), inspired by my volunteer work with dying AIDS patients in the 1980s. Needless to say, I am proud of these tokens of my achievements.

But there is another wall displaying my most cherished awards. It is in my dining room. On it are five plaques, one each for my being named to the national Who’s Who, the worldwide Who’s Who, the list of Top Professionals (for my writing), Professional of the Year 2022, and the guy who saved lives. The last plaque, the one I treasure most and the subject of recent blog, was given to me by my 43 guys and their families whose lives I saved by risking my own to get them safely out of Saigon when it was falling in 1975.

I am immensely and I think justifiably proud of my awards. They reflect the causes to which I have devoted my life. As I grow old, I can look back with satisfaction on a life devoted to my art (writing) and to the welfare of those I have been responsible for.

Father’s Day

Now that Father’s Day is past and I don’t risk ruining it for anybody, I can express my true feelings. As a day to relish my relationship with my children, Father’s Day remains a time to cherish. But as a time to remember my relationship with my own father, it remains bitter.

My father was a successful lawyer working in the San Francisco Bay Area as I was growing up. But he embezzled $40,000 from one of his clients, was indicted and convicted, and served a number of years in San Quentin prison. After he had finished his sentence and was released, he was disbarred and could no longer practice law. My mother, an alcoholic, took him back. He engaged in various illegal practices and was sent to prison again. By the time I was in college, working twenty hours a week to support myself and pay expenses, he was back on the street. He found a way to get money by forging checks against other people’s accounts. He even wrote checks against my account. So, to defend myself, I changed my payroll signature to Thomas L Glenn III, a clumsy moniker I’ve been stuck with ever since.

As I consequence of my father’s chiseling, after I joined the army and was transferred to the east coast, I did everything I could to conceal my whereabouts from him. I was successful. One day, years later, I got a call from a police department in California telling me that my father had been killed in a bar brawl. My guess is that he started it because of his violent racial prejudice and antisemitism. The police asked me what I wanted done with the body. I said that I was estranged from my father and wanted nothing to do with his funeral arrangements. They told me he would be buried in a potter’s field.

Because of my father’s poor fulfillment of paternal duties, I continue into old age to have mixed feelings about Father’s Day. I treasure my relations with my children and am profoundly grateful for their honors to me on that day. But my bitterness toward my own father, his failures and even attempted exploitation of me, leave a fowl taste. Father’s Day remains a bitter day for me.

Professional of the Year

Strathmore’s Who’s Who Worldwide has just named me Professional of the Year 2022 “in recognition of excellence, dedication and success in publishing.”

This honor comes on the heels of announcements from the national Who’s Who (Marquis) and the international Who’s Who (Strathmore) that they are including me as an author in their 2022 list of luminaries. Marquis also named me as a Top Artist of the year.

Plaques for each of these honors now decorate my dining room wall. Along with them is the plaque that I cherish most: the “Last Man Out” award given me by my 43 subordinates after Saigon fell and I risked my life to get them and their families out safely.

I am humbled and honored.

Hunting a Sport?

Regular readers of this blog are all too aware of my opposition to American gun ownership. Because of my time in combat, I know firsthand the deadly effect of firearms. We in the U.S. are unique in the world for the number of guns we own—more than a hundred twenty guns for every hundred people. Thus far this year, as of June 18, according to the Gun Violence Archive, we have shot to death 20,315 people.

And we call hunting, an activity in which we find and kill animals, a sport. Oxford Languages defines “sport” as an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment. In other words, it’s something we do for fun. What does it say about us that we consider killing animals fun?

I grant you there was a day when hunting was necessary to provide sufficient food. That time ended well over than a hundred years ago. Today hunting is in no sense a necessity. It’s done for fun.

A tiny fraction of U.S. hunters use bows and arrows. But most hunting in the U.S. employs firearms. And it is often given as a reason for owning guns.

There are hunters who don’t use weapons but instead photograph wild animals in their native habitat. I have nothing but praise for these hunters and the wonderful pictures they produce.

Logic forces me to end up opposed to hunting to kill, especially that which employs firearms. That we enjoy killing for fun, particularly when we use guns, does not speak well for us as a nation.

Let’s bring it to an end.

Republican Disasters (2)

Per yesterday’s promise, here are recent Republican misdeeds not initiated by Donald Trump:

—According to the Washington Post, more than a hundred GOP candidates who back Trump’s false election fraud claims have won primaries—Republican voters are buying the Big Lie for which there is no evidence.

—Republicans in Congress have used the filibuster to block every bill in Biden’s agenda.

—147 Republican lawmakers, including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, voted to overturn the 2020 election results.

—Republicans are pushing 425 voter suppression laws in 49 states.

—121 House Republicans and 7 Republican Senators helped Trump try to overthrow our democracy by voting against certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

—43 Republicans voted to acquit Trump of all charges in the Senate Impeachment Trial.

—Nearly every Republican in the Senate voted against forming a commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection.

—Republicans have sworn to impeach President Biden if they win Congress in 2022.

Because Republicans are greatly outnumbered by Democrats, the GOP is trying to win elections, as it has in the past, by making it more difficult for people to vote. Country-wide, they are using every voter-suppression tool available to them. As a result, polling experts are saying that the GOP is likely to win the House and Senate this year.

Polling evidence notwithstanding, I cannot believe that Americans will support a party which has allowed itself to become so obviously corrupt and openly antidemocratic as the GOP. My forecast is that the Democrats, for all their ineptitude, will win most of the local, county, state, and national contests.

Let’s talk again in November and see how things came out.

Republican Disasters

I find myself wondering how it is possible for any responsible American to be a Republican these days. The party, under the leadership of Donald Trump, has abandoned every principle associated with patriotic Americanism. Look what Trump, the acknowledged leader of the Republicans, has done:

— Encouraged Russian interference in our elections

—Threatened Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponents

—Cozied up to Kim Jung Un and other foreign adversaries

—Abandoned our closest allies

—Defunded the Post Office

—Proposed $30 billion in cuts to Social Security

—Caged migrant children at the border

—Attacked freedom of the press

—Tried (unsuccessfully) to building a racist border wall

—Incited the January 6th Capitol Insurrection

—Threatened state officials to rig the 2020 election

—Imposed a transgender military ban

—Denied the severity of COVID-19

And we’re learning about more misdeeds each time the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th meets. That doesn’t include actions Republicans have taken on their own, aside from Trump’s leadership. I’ll list those offences tomorrow.

Introvert

I am an introvert. Merriam-Webster defines me as a person whose personality is characterized by introversion: a typically reserved or quiet person who tends to be introspective and enjoys spending time alone. In other words, I’m a loner.

The word introvert is made up of two Latin-based roots, intro meaning inward, and vert meaning to turn. Its opposite is extrovert, whose intrinsic meaning is outward turning. In groups, I tend to be the last to speak but listen carefully to others. One result is that I learn far more than other group members who would rather speak than listen.

And I am a writer by vocation. No profession is more inward-turning, solitary, and isolated than writing which must be done alone. One writes so that others may read, but one does not have to be present during the reading.

My guess is that I am an introvert because of my harsh childhood. As I have reported here before, my mother was an alcoholic, my father in prison. Of necessity, I had to do for myself. I became leery of others and went out of my way to avoid having to depend on anyone else. That made me fiercely independent, a quality that served me well on the battlefield.

The end result is that I was very good at my job—supporting friendly forces with information about the enemy derived from signals intelligence, the intercept and exploitation of his radio communications. That job, for the better part of thirty-five years, left me with a treasure trove of stories I could weave into my fiction.

Sometimes, nature and luck work together for human benefit.

Fiction Is Truth (3)

The more serious the fiction, the more urgent it is that the writing be honest and truthful. Fiction that is primarily entertainment—the funnies (comics), light comedy, tales of adventure, and whodunnits—can get away with some frivolous dishonesty about human nature. But fiction in its most serious form, literary fiction, must portray human beings honestly or it will go unread.

Sometimes the truthfulness of fiction derives from the insight of the writer into human values and how they determine behavior. And often, the moral of the story, even if it is never stated specifically, is the final testament of fiction’s value. The moral of my Last of the Annamese has been expressed in various ways by readers, but it usually goes along the lines of “go on living and loving even in the face of death.”

Hence my conclusion that the fiction writer must tell the truth. Ultimately, my job as a writer of literary fiction is not to entertain but to inform, instruct, and illuminate. If I do my job well, readers will learn to live better lives.

Fiction Is Truth (2)

Equally true to life is my novel set during the fall of Saigon, Last of the Annamese. I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. But my motivation for sticking to the facts in Annamese was sparked by an additional need: to vent. Thanks to my time in combat on the battlefield and especially due to my living through the bombardment and attack on Saigon by the North Vietnamese, I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), a mental disorder that can never be healed; the victim must learn to cope. But because I held multiple top secret codeword clearances, I was forbidden from seeking psychological therapy. I had to learn to deal with the disorder on my own. I found that to come to terms with my unbearable memories, I had to bring them into my conscious mind and face them head on. The easiest way for me to achieve that goal was to write down what happened. So I did. That became the novel, Last of the Annamese.

So it was with all my books. One of my most recent, Secretocracy (Adelaide Books, 2020), tells of President Donald Trump’s persecution of an intelligence budgeteer for refusing to fund an illegal operation. Trump in fact did do that. And another president—who will remain unnamed because of the high level of classification of the operation he was pushing—also did that to me while I was assigned to the budgeting office of the Director of Central Intelligence. So Secretocracy is also factual. But the name of the president and his victim have been changed to protect the guilty.

I could go on, but you get the point. What I write is fiction in name only. All that points to an aspect of fiction that usually overlooked: fiction, to be successful, must tell the truth. Put differently, even though fictional stories are not factual, they must convey the truth about human beings accurately, or readers will cease reading them.

More next time.

Fiction Is Truth

According to Merriam-Webster, fiction is defined as something invented by the imagination or feigned, whereas nonfiction is writing or cinema that is about facts and real events. My writing is all novels and short stories, fiction by definition. Except that everything I depict in my writing really did happen.

Because I have lived a life overflowing with adventures, nothing I could invent would equal the real experiences I have had. So I tell true stories, but I turn them into fiction by attributing the true events to fictional characters rather than to myself or someone I have known.

Typical is my novel No-Accounts (Apprentice House, 2014). It tells the story of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS, also known as human immunodeficiency virus or HIV). Every event described in the book really did happen. In the early 1980s, men suffering from AIDS were dying on the street because no one would touch them—everyone was terrified of this fatal disease that was decimating the gay community, and no one knew how the AIDS pathogen was transmitted. Because I couldn’t tolerate watching men die abandoned and because I had already faced death numerous times on the battlefield, I volunteered to care for the dying. I spent the next five years looking after seven AIDS patients, all of whom were gay, all of whom died. I loved every one of my patients and grieved over every death. I was so moved by the experience that I wrote a novel about it.

 The author Juris Jurjevics described the resulting book, No-Accounts, as follows: “Tom Glenn lived his novel seven times as a volunteer assisting HIV infected men to die. This is fiction taken from life written by a hero who accompanied the terminally ill as far as any mortal could, devoting himself body and soul to their comfort and helping them make their exit with dignity.”

More next time.