Tom Glenn's Blog, page 72

My Books—Again

I have talked several times in this blog about my six books, all novels or short story collections. But a new development raised the subject again. I checked out the local authors’ listing at The Palette and the Page and discovered that all five of my hardcopy books (one book, Friendly Casualties, is an ebook only available at Amazon.com) are listed.

The Palette and the Page is a combination book shop and gift store at 120 East Main Street in Elkton, Maryland. It is my favorite place to buy books.

That discovery spiked my pride in my achievements as an author. I retired from the government (I had been a linguist and a spy) as early as I could to write full time. Because I had spent the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam and spoke the three languages of Vietnam (Vietnamese, Chinese, and French) and because my work in later years was (and still is) classified, most of my writing is about Vietnam.

But the Vietnam conflict was exceedingly unpopular. Most Americans believed we never should have gone to war there. Our final defeat and withdrawal in 1975 were shameful. So for a number of years, my books didn’t sell. People didn’t want to know what happened in Vietnam. Then, half a dozen years ago, that attitude began to change. A new generation of Americans knew little about the Vietnam war and was curious. My books began to sell, and I was invited to do readings and presentations.

Now that the pandemic lockdown is coming to an end, I’m being invited to speak publicly again. Sale of my books will increase, and people will again want to know my story. Life won’t return to normal—the old normal is gone forever. But I’m ready to return to being with people in person again.

You can see my six books displayed at https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Glenn/e/B009GGNYUM%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

The Parade

Every year, the American Legion, of which I am a proud member, participates in the Fourth of July parade that starts in Clarksville, Maryland, and ends up in southern Columbia, a distance of a couple of miles. Last year’s parade was cancelled because of the pandemic, so I was pleased to be able march this year.

I especially enjoy marching beside my American Legion compatriots. We veterans are becoming fewer over time, especially those of us who saw combat. I sense a feeling of brotherhood among my fellow Legion members unlike any other bonds I have. These men and women put their lives on the line for the good of others. I feel singularly honored to be among them.

And yet I am unique among them. My time in combat came after, not during, my military service (army). During my many years of supporting U.S. and friendly forces in combat on the battlefield with signals intelligence, I was a civilian. Granted I operated under cover as military. I pretended to be an enlisted man in whatever unit I was supporting so that the enemy would never discover that they had a spy in their midst.

When I tried, some years ago, to join the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), I was refused membership because during my time in combat, I was not in uniform—I was a civilian. The American Legion, on the other hand, welcomed me with open arms. Members assured me that I was one their heroes because of my many times in combat.

So it is with the American Legion, not the VFW, that I march every Fourth of July. This year’s was beyond doubt the most difficult parade for me. For the first time, I had trouble keeping up with the pace of the other marchers. My eighty-plus years are catching up with me, whether I deny it or not. Next year, I’ll have to ride in one of the military vehicles.

So be it. My pleasure and my honor are to be there with my brothers and sisters in arms expressing my fealty to my beloved country. I’ll do it every year for as long as I can.

The Fourth of July

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, the date we celebrate as the anniversary of the day our founding fathers declared that the United States of America was a free and independent nation, no longer under the control of the king of England. But the day the Continental Congress decided to declare independence was July 2, 1776. That was the day on which the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress at Independence Hall in Philadelphia authorized the Congress to approve the declaration. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress at the time, was only person to sign the Declaration on July 4, 1776. Legend has it that Hancock signed his name so large because he wanted to make sure that “fat old King George” could read it without his spectacles. One result is that today, the term “John Hancock” has come to mean a person’s signature.

The majority of the signers of the declaration of independence, 41 of 56, were slave owners. One was Patrick Henry, famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death.” At the time of his death, he owned 67 slaves.

As Americans, we need to remember that our country, without question the greatest in the world, is not without its flaws. Even today the fallout of slavery remains with us in the form of prejudice that prevents Blacks from attaining equal status with Whites.

We still have a way to go in “forming a more perfect union,” as the preamble to the Constitution, drafted in 1787, puts it. That’s a project all of us need work on together.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

I have written several times in this blog about my writer’s block and my inability to work on either of the novels I’ve been writing since the death of my partner, Su, in March 2020. I was working on a story set during the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam, an event I was very much involved in. And I had been drafting a narrative drawn from the more than twenty years that Su and I had been together. Su’s death, in effect, put a stop to my writing.

The Dak To story was to have been about the situation I found myself in before and during the battle. I forewarned the commanding officers of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and the 173rd Air Borne Brigade that a large North Vietnamese force was hidden in the hills to our west preparing to attack. I wasn’t believed, and one battalion from the 4th Infantry Division was badly mauled. What followed was one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam war. At the end, no territory had changed hands.

The novel based on my relationship with Su was to have been named Josh at the Door. It was to have been the story of a man and woman in their sixties who have an affair that lasts well into their eighties and beyond. When Su died, the story changed to that of an older man mourning the loss of his beloved. The title became Love in the Time of Coronavirus, in imitation of Love in the Time of Cholera, the great novel by Gabriel García Márquez.

Since Su’s death, even though I know what I want to write, the writing won’t come. I sit at the keyboard and wait for the story to flow, as it always has in all my other books and short stories. Nothing happens. Instead, I find myself thinking of Su and the good times we had together.

I believe that my only choice is to wait for my soul to heal and start again pumping out stories that demand to be written. In the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with silence.

The Supreme Court Polluted

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have done serious damage to the 15th and 24th Amendments to the Constitution and to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, all of which deny the right to vote on the basis of race. In a case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court’s six conservatives—three of them put in place by Donald Trump—declared that an Arizona law which enacted voter restrictions could stand. One restriction outlawed “ballot harvesting”—which is Republican nomenclature for someone giving their mail-in ballot to somebody else to walk it to the drop-off location. The other allowed the state to discard votes accidentally cast at the wrong polling place. Both restrictions affect voters of color disproportionately.

We are now seeing the Trump effect writ large. The Supreme Court is no longer a neutral arbiter guaranteeing equal justice for all. It has become an instrument of the minority party—Republicans are greatly outnumbered by Democrats—which will assure that the interests of the well-to-do are protected.

The court’s judgment, enunciated earlier this week, has renewed the calls to expand the court and to limit the term of a judge so as to restore its progressive-conservative balance. I don’t claim to be enough of a legal scholar to know if the proposed changes would help or hurt the court. The only thing I can be sure of is the Trump’s presidency has left behind it permanent damage.

The Place Where His Glory Dwells

I’m an agnostic. I want to believe in the divine, but I can’t quite persuade myself. All the evidence I know of suggests that God is a myth. And yet I do not doubt the existence of the largest and most important segment of human life which is the noncorporeal. It is obvious to me that the human brain is the tool we use to think with, but our thoughts and especially our creativity—the work of the brain—exist in a world that has no physical being.

In hopes that the deity exists, I pray every night. One of the lines I recite comes from Psalm 26:8: “I have loved, oh Lord, the beauty of thy house and the place where thy glory dwells.”

Meanwhile, I have a deck on the back of my house that looks north over a pond, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, half filled with water reeds and surrounded by majestic trees more than twice the height of my house. The view is breathtaking at all hours of the day and night.

But I just discovered the time when it is most beautiful. Some days ago, on a night with a full moon, I ventured out on the deck. I could hear the frogs in the pond doing their occasional croaks. The begonias in full bloom atop the entire deck rail glowed faintly. The lights from the houses built around the pond were completely obscured by the heavy foliage in the trees. It felt as though I was alone in the world.

But there was a new element I wasn’t expecting: fireflies. They twinkled on and off all over the pond and throughout the trees. And the words came to me: “I have loved, oh Lord, the beauty of thy house and the place where thy glory dwells.”

I realized what I should have known: the beauty of God’s house is with me always. All I have to do is look, and I will find it.

Tom Glenn, Skinflint (2)

After NSA hired me, I found, for the first time in my life, that I had more money than I knew what to do with. But by then, parsimony was an ingrained habit. I was generous with tips (I knew what it felt like to depend on them) and gave freely to charities (I knew poverty intimately) but scrimped on daily expenses.

So here I am long since retired with a substantial annuity and no money problems. But from a lifetime of habit, I still search for bargains, put off purchases until sales come along, and buy at the cheapest stores. Old habits die hard.

For all that, I have to thank Lady Luck for my good fortune. I didn’t seek well-paying jobs; they fell in my lap. Granted, I was blessed with rare talent for languages, but that was just luck, too. And I did work hard most of my life, and I was willing to put my life on the line for my country during combat. But almost without exception, I loved my work and believed it was my duty to risk my life for the good of others. Had I not done the very best I could, I would have failed to live up to my own standards. Worse, I would have failed my country and put the lives of my fellow warriors at risk.

So here I am, the old skinflint. I can think of worse fates.

Tom Glenn, Skinflint

I never, during my adult life, have had money worries, even though I never took a job or accepted a position because of the pay that it offered. When I joined the army a pauper straight out of college, I was sent to the Army Language School to learn Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of. Back then (1959), we didn’t call that part of the world Vietnam—it was French Indo-China. When I graduated first in my class, I was assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA) and on my own enrolled in part-time classes at Georgetown University in Chinese, a language I had always wanted to study. I already knew French; I had taught it to myself as a child. So by the time my army enlistment ended, I was comfortable in the three languages of Vietnam (Vietnamese, Chinese, and French).

NSA hired me, not at the normal starting grade of a GS-5 but as a GS-11, and immediately sent me to Vietnam. I kept adding to my languages until I spoke seven, and NSA kept sending me to assist on battlefields and kept promoting me. Put in charge of a group at NSA, in imitation of the military I’d spent so much time with, I chose to lead them rather than manage them and was phenomenally successful. The promotions kept coming until I reached top of the executive ranks. Then I retired with a more than generous pension.

But as a child, I had known penury. With my father in prison and my mother drunk most of the time, I often found myself hungry with nothing to eat. I got part-time jobs to assure that I’d have food. For a good many years, right up to my college graduation, I worked as much as twenty hours a week while in school and fulltime over the summer to keep myself housed and fed.

As a result, I became a first-class penny-pincher. I taught myself to stretch each dollar to its limit. The perfect miser, I bargained when possible, ate what was on sale, and frequented the Dollar Store and Goodwill. But by the time I was in high school, I had started waiting on tables and depending on tips. I promised that if I ever had money, I’d be generous to servers.

More next time.

More Republicans with Covid-19

President Trump and his Republican supporters early on dismissed the covid-19 pandemic as a hoax. As a consequence, the pandemic and defenses against it became politicized. Nationwide, more Democrats than Republicans wore masks, maintained six-foot distancing, and avoided indoor close contacts.

And areas in the U.S. with the lowest vaccination rates tend to be heavily Republican. In U.S. counties that voted for Donald Trump, only 34 percent of people are fully vaccinated, according to New York Times data. In those that voted for Joe Biden, the share is 45 percent, and the share that has received at least one shot is higher.

The outcome is that sickness and death caused by the coronavirus is substantially higher in Republican-dominated areas than in Democratic-dominated areas. The per-capita rates of new COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 deaths became much higher in states with Republican governors by mid-summer and through 2020. The most significant difference between blue and red states occurred from late June to early August 2020. On August 5, the risk of death in red states was 1.8 times higher than in blue states. I have no figures for 2021, but I see no evidence that the trend has changed.

Donald Trump and his Republican base deserve censure for politicizing the pandemic and discouraging their followers from taking precautions. The higher death rate for Republicans calls for condemnation of the leaders who caused it.

Global Warming Upon Us

In the four and a half years I’ve been blogging, I have written several times about the dangers of oncoming global warming as a consequence of the way we live our lives. Our industry and transportation regularly emit greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, and synthetic fluorinated gases—that collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation bouncing off the earth’s surface. Normally this radiation would escape into space, but the pollutants, which can last for years or even centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter.

The time we’ve been warned about is arriving. The effects of global warming are now starting to damage the earth in the ways predicted. Thanks to the rise in temperatures, states in the western U.S. are experiencing the worst drought in decades. Wildfires are raging in Montana and Utah. In Arizona and Nevada, doctors are warning people that due to the extreme heat they could get third-degree burns from the asphalt. The water levels in the largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which supplies water for millions of people, are at their lowest since the 1930s.

The good news is that President Biden is pushing measures that will reduce the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If Congress moves quickly enough, we can stem the tide and avoid the worst consequences of global warning.

The bad news is that Republicans, some of whom still call global warming a hoax, are resisting Biden’s proposals. They don’t seem to realize—or maybe they don’t care—that if global warming continues unchecked, some parts of the world will become uninhabitable. That includes areas in the U.S.’s south and west.

We need to move fast. The time for political bickering is past. Too-late is already upon us.