The Story Behind Grown Men Cry Out at Night and How It Came to Be
I never set out to write an espionage novel. When I told close friends I planned to write after I retired from my freelance writing gig of 15 years, the first question they would ask me was, “So, are you writing a cookbook?”
My friends know that I am a passionate amateur cook and they know how I love to create menus and prepare meals for them. Like many of my earlier writing projects, I had started a kind of cookbook / memoir titled “My Mother’s Table.” I even turned it into a podcast for awhile until I lost the passion for it and ran out of steam. I lost focus and could no longer feel the arc of a story.
Then there was another book idea, a coming of age story set in 1968. That book is tentatively titled, “Angela and Tommy” and tells the story of three friends whose lives are changed when they decide to take a road trip together to view Robert Kennedy’s funeral train. For those of you who lived through it, 1968 was a tumultuous year and I still believe there is a story there to be told. I have tens of thousands of words written for both these projects. They sit in various folders on my laptop, waiting for the day when I will give these ideas the attention they deserve. Or not.
But during the summer of 2021, another story line came to me out of the blue. It was around that time I began to hear stories of “The Ritchie Boys,” a band of intrepid, largely immigrant warriors who were trained in the darker arts of combat and formed the nucleus of the Army Counterintelligence Corps, the OSS, and other service counterintelligence organizations during Word War II. Their work during the war was honored by a congressional resolution in August 2021 and one estimate reveals that more than 60 percent of all credible intelligence gathered in Europe during the war could be attributed to them. I also had firsthand experience working with U.S. Army Counterintelligence when, many years ago I supported their work as a targeting analyst.
Another impetus to write the story came later that summer when I learned of the existence of a submarine factory housed in an enormous bunker in Bremen Germany. The Valentin Bunker is a place which figures prominently in my book.
I have visited Bremen many times and like Caspar Lehman in my book, my family comes from there. But the bunker was unknown to me and that is a surprise in itself. The sheer size of the bunker and the fact that thousands of slave laborers housed in camps located in Bremen’s suburbs died building it, make the structure impossible to ignore. While its intent and purpose may not have been known by the local population, its existence had to have been known by most of the locals. It’s just too big to miss. Thousands died there and will forever remain unknown. So, I thought their story needed to be brought out into the light.
Celebrating the Mundane and the Ordinary
One of my pet peeves is the way in which the intelligence services are portrayed in popular culture. While characters such as Jason Bourne and James Bond make for great storytelling, the intelligence community is not dominated by “solo operators” running around the world, blowing things up, and saving the world from destruction. On the contrary, the intelligence community as noted by CIA director Anthony Blinken in the premiere edition of the CIA podcast, The Langley Files, is a “team sport.” Every day, thousands of ordinary people go about their jobs collecting, analyzing, preparing, and disseminating intelligence to their consumers in government. In the nearly twenty years I spent in military intelligence and later working with and at various “three-letter” agencies in Washington, D.C., ordinary people showed up each day and did their jobs.
And that is what I’ve tried to write about in Grown Men Cry Out at Night. I try to celebrate what is ordinary and mundane and the chapter which I share with you today extols the ordinary. Having sat through hundreds of them, I can tell you that within the intelligence community, there is nothing more ordinary than an “intelligence briefing.”
My friends know that I am a passionate amateur cook and they know how I love to create menus and prepare meals for them. Like many of my earlier writing projects, I had started a kind of cookbook / memoir titled “My Mother’s Table.” I even turned it into a podcast for awhile until I lost the passion for it and ran out of steam. I lost focus and could no longer feel the arc of a story.
Then there was another book idea, a coming of age story set in 1968. That book is tentatively titled, “Angela and Tommy” and tells the story of three friends whose lives are changed when they decide to take a road trip together to view Robert Kennedy’s funeral train. For those of you who lived through it, 1968 was a tumultuous year and I still believe there is a story there to be told. I have tens of thousands of words written for both these projects. They sit in various folders on my laptop, waiting for the day when I will give these ideas the attention they deserve. Or not.
But during the summer of 2021, another story line came to me out of the blue. It was around that time I began to hear stories of “The Ritchie Boys,” a band of intrepid, largely immigrant warriors who were trained in the darker arts of combat and formed the nucleus of the Army Counterintelligence Corps, the OSS, and other service counterintelligence organizations during Word War II. Their work during the war was honored by a congressional resolution in August 2021 and one estimate reveals that more than 60 percent of all credible intelligence gathered in Europe during the war could be attributed to them. I also had firsthand experience working with U.S. Army Counterintelligence when, many years ago I supported their work as a targeting analyst.
Another impetus to write the story came later that summer when I learned of the existence of a submarine factory housed in an enormous bunker in Bremen Germany. The Valentin Bunker is a place which figures prominently in my book.
I have visited Bremen many times and like Caspar Lehman in my book, my family comes from there. But the bunker was unknown to me and that is a surprise in itself. The sheer size of the bunker and the fact that thousands of slave laborers housed in camps located in Bremen’s suburbs died building it, make the structure impossible to ignore. While its intent and purpose may not have been known by the local population, its existence had to have been known by most of the locals. It’s just too big to miss. Thousands died there and will forever remain unknown. So, I thought their story needed to be brought out into the light.
Celebrating the Mundane and the Ordinary
One of my pet peeves is the way in which the intelligence services are portrayed in popular culture. While characters such as Jason Bourne and James Bond make for great storytelling, the intelligence community is not dominated by “solo operators” running around the world, blowing things up, and saving the world from destruction. On the contrary, the intelligence community as noted by CIA director Anthony Blinken in the premiere edition of the CIA podcast, The Langley Files, is a “team sport.” Every day, thousands of ordinary people go about their jobs collecting, analyzing, preparing, and disseminating intelligence to their consumers in government. In the nearly twenty years I spent in military intelligence and later working with and at various “three-letter” agencies in Washington, D.C., ordinary people showed up each day and did their jobs.
And that is what I’ve tried to write about in Grown Men Cry Out at Night. I try to celebrate what is ordinary and mundane and the chapter which I share with you today extols the ordinary. Having sat through hundreds of them, I can tell you that within the intelligence community, there is nothing more ordinary than an “intelligence briefing.”
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