Well, I suspect we’re not where you thought… I’m referring to the June 17th, 2009 meeting of the Sarasota Florida Writers Association - except that this meeting took place in the Nokomis, Florida Volunteer Fire Company’s nicely air conditioned meeting room here in the good ol’ USA. (A former meeting place in one of the Sarasota Public Library rooms had become too cramped and the available hours unworkable.) If I mention air conditioning it’s only because the temperature throughout the Venice-Nokomis-Sarasota area had been running 101 degrees, accompanied by 85% relative humidity, resulting in a (dis)comfort index reading of 115.

I was pleased to be the guest of the meeting’s moderator, Susan Haley, who most capably handled an enthusiastic (may I say fired-up?) firehouse roomful of writers. After the regular business of the group was conducted, the readings began; prior to each such meeting four or five people will have been preselected to give a five minute reading from some portion of their ongoing work. Each reading that night was notable, but I feel compelled to comment on the particular reading given by Bart Stamper.

Bart is a Vietnam Veteran, a “LURP” - who experienced some 40 long range reconnaisance patrols. Bear in mind that recon men in Vietnam bore an 80% casualty rate, and that few of them, be they Rangers, Special Forces, or Seals, were ever called on to do more than 20 recon missions. Bart did 40 - and survived - to read to us this night.

Because I had written of a similar character in my own novel, I could scarcely contain myself when Bart began to read. My character, Abner Weaver, was fictional, though couched in realistic detail borne of extensive research. But here was the real thing - words from a man who had experienced the actual events.

You could have heard a pin drop in that room as Bart Stamper read his account of a recon mission gone wrong. The pain in his voice real, as he recounted radio transmissions from the patrol he had originally been assigned to. Because of that first patrol’s planned inserted distance from the command center, Bart had been reassigned as a radio relay station to pass the ambushed patrol’s transmissions back to command center. A new man had replaced Bart and filled his spot at the last minute - that man now slowly dying along with the rest of the patrol which was in the process of being ambushed by the NVA.

The fear, the anguish, the torment of the man on the other end of the radio as he watched his buddies die, was unforgettable. Bart had crafted every word to the reality of the situation. His own torment, in that he was not there to help, and the building tension as he pleaded for a chopper to extract the doomed patrol was as unforgetable as it was masterfully written and read.

If Bart Stamper publishes this material in story or book form, you must not miss it.  That’s the reason for this brief blog and what I wanted to tell you.

In World War I it was known as SHELL SHOCK; in World War II they called it BATTLE FATIGUE.  Today we know it as a problem of the mind: PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is defined as a psychological condition affecting those who’ve experienced a traumatizing or life-threatening event such as an accident, rape, natural disaster, a violent personal assault, or  wartime combat.

When I conceived 3 ACES I intended to set down a story about the long haul trucking industry. At the time, I was a long haul driver piling up nearly a million miles over U.S. and Canadian highways. To my surprise, I would encounter Vietnam veterans hidden away out there, quietly driving eighteen wheelers, estranged from a society they had found alien upon their discharge from the service. My hero, Abner Weaver, is such a man - like several I got to know - a Vietnam veteran beset with PTSD. Researching the symptoms of and treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I slowly began to see that I was writing about myself. Seriously injured at the age of three, I realized I had been living with PTSD all my life, with no understanding of how it had affected my life choices and behavior. Trucking and card games fell to the background; Abner’s recon assignments in Vietnam and his lingering PTSD became the book’s guiding story. My heroine, Dawn Carlisle, is likewise afflicted. How these two people overcome their problems and acknowledge their need for each other is the real meat of 3 ACES.

The war in Vietnam produced a PTSD casualty rate of about 10 %…in Iraq it looks to be 16-17%, probably higher. As with Vietnam, there’s no front in Iraq. The same problem in distinguishing civilians from the combatants: your enemy might be a man, woman or child in street clothing. How easily do you identify the suicide bomber? - or detect a planted IED?

In Iraq, body armor is saving lives but does not spare limb, head, or internal injuries - especially where IED explosions are concerned. Present at an IED scene and confronted with the mutilation of a buddy, a soldier records more than just one more ugly trauma in his memory bank. Such incidents are liable to put anyone over the brink.

In THE LAST TOUR - an article in the September 29, ‘08 NEW YORKER - Travis Twiggs and his brother Willard are described as having attempted to purposely drive their Toyota Carolla over the edge of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Travis Twiggs was a highly decorated Marine Corps Staff Sergeant - four combat tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan - a weapons and martial arts expert and an expert tracker. Days before, he’d been in the White House, shaking the hand of President George W. Bush.

Instead of plunging into the Grand Canyon, the Twiggs’ Toyota got hung up in a small fir tree just below the rim of the canyon. Uninjured, the two Twiggs brothers extracted themselves from the vehicle and hid in the surrounding forest, later commandeering a tourist’s car at the point of a .38 revolver. Doing 100 mph near Yuma, Arizona, the Twiggs brothers were pursued by a police helicopter and a fleet of cruisers until they ran over a row of state police spike-strips and ground to a halt in the desert. Travis Twiggs then fatally shot his brother and himself. Interviewed at home, wife Kellee admitted: “…he left us a long time ago…tried to come back, but he couldn’t. That was not my husband out there.”

With the draft abolished, there are no fresh troops to replace men who have become emotionally and physically exhausted. Three, even four successive tours are being forced upon our servicemen. Reserve units at home have been depleted until there are simply no replacements available. The armed services, and particularly the Army, are placing a strain on our fighting men and women that never existed in the Vietnamese war.

On Monday, May 11th, 2009, Army Sergeant John H. Russell - another highly decorated man, about to finish 16 years of service in the Army and a third tour of duty in Iraq - had a violent argument while visiting a stress clinic at Camp Liberty, Iraq. Forcibly disarmed and escorted outside the clinic at gunpoint - and apparently having been harassed by several officers - he returned with a borrowed weapon, shooting and killing five fellow soldiers.

Attacking fellow soldiers, known as Fragging, while common in Vietnam has proven rare in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russell’s situation was an obvious mishandling of a man at the breaking point - and he broke!

While I was signing copies of 3 ACES at a local Barnes & Noble, I was approached by an Army man on leave, about to return to Iraq. We chatted about the book’s subject matter. He grew tense, took a few steps toward the sidewalk door and looked back at me. He had just confessed that he couldn’t wait to get back to his unit, but dreaded what awaited him. He feared being stationed again in specified solitary posts out on the desert - night and day - no one available to relieve him. His pained look asked me if I understood what that can do to a man’s mind.

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a woman living along Florida’s west coast. She had read and reread my book, 3 ACES.  What she said made the entire effort of researching and writing the book totally worthwhile. She had been engaged to an embittered Vietnam vet. who could not express to her - nor could she understand his obvious frustrations - what he’d gone through during his time in Vietnam. He died of Agent Orange complications before they could be married. This woman had been in torment, for years, over her inability to understand and share her fiance’s grief - hard as she’d tried. After reading my book and reliving the war in Vietnam through Abner’s eyes, she at last understood what had happened to the men who had served there - and to her fiance.

That woman’s letter was all the thanks this writer ever needed.

In the last of three April blogs I touched on a type of book known as the serious novel. Not a genre in itself, the serious novel refers to any work in which the author deals with a more weighty theme, something of undeniably genuine substance. Such a work often takes the form of a literary novel.

I happened to reread Susan Haley’s RAINY DAY PEOPLE last week and am pleased to report, despite the considerable turmoil embodied in its two intense main characters - recently widowed Amber Allyson and Ben Riley, a divorcee dying of cancer - that this carefully wrought tale of an evolving relationship is a joy to read.  When a writer chooses to draw together “two ships passing in the night” in a seemingly inconsequential bookstore collision, then sets about peeling back their personalities - intricately exposing their innermost thoughts, their deepest inner conflicts and failings one to the other; couching it all in a narrative about coping with the loss of a life partner and getting beyond it - then you have, indeed, a most serious novel.

Before beginning this book, you needn’t fortify yourself with a Scotch and water and a box of tissues; you’ll find more pepper and humor between the covers than tears. Susan Haley writes with a light but caring touch - both through highly descriptive prose and in her spot-on dialogue. There is the touch of the poet throughout much of this book, no doubt due to the fact that Ms. Haley’s prior publication was FIBERS IN THE WEB - a finely wrought collection of poetry you would be remiss in failing to pick up.

What most fascinated me as I watched the relationship between Amber and Ben solidify was the eerie control Amber’s deceased life partner continued to exert on this couple. Ben and Amber are forced to overcome barriers Amber’s deceased husband “Jeff” has seemingly placed in their way. Not only is Amber driven to despair  trying to step out from under Jeff’s past influence, but Ben senses the dead husband’s spirit haunting every step he takes toward Amber.

There’s an air of mysticism in Amber’s attraction to Ben. She’s a naturalist, a believer in vague powers that must physically appear and show her how to love again. So we are treated to the symbolic reappearance of such things as a fox, a sea gull birdfriend, double rainbows, various coincidences, and the odd intermingling of people’s names and initials throughout the story. None of this careless; all of it done by the sure hand of a strong writer.

It is during the pair’s escape from Amber’s Florida treehouse to fresh  surroundings and a clean start in Maine that Ms. Haley’s descriptive skill truly shines. The passages about Amber’s former life in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina and the night she and Ben spend in Otter Creek are exemplary. In Maine, during an excursion on a converted trawler, they are caught at sea in a violent squall. I felt every heave and surge of the vessel in the mountainous swells, my pulse racing along with theirs until the boat found safety back in the harbor. Seldom have I read a more beautifully crafted and descriptive action sequence.

The intensity of the novel’s final chapters is skillfully heightened by the use of a series of what might best be described as filmic cross-cuts. Let me just say that the resolution of Ben and Amber’s final conflict is exciting, swiftly paced, and in the end completely satisfying.

Amber may be a complex, overly analytical, lovingly defiant woman - ornery when things prove wrong or she fails to get her point across; and wise-cracking Ben is stubbornly locked in fear and anger over his cancer. Yet this diametrically mismatched pair are hopelessly drawn to each other.

This strange and wonderfully written tale will keep you turning pages; the reward is watching Amber Allyson and Ben Riley leap the hurdles lining the way to the finish line.

“…In a Detective Story you never know more than the detective; but in a Thriller you never know less than the villain!”

What does the mystifying definition above imply for the would-be writer of a thriller? Simply, that as the writer, you must keep that terse, but most apt statement before you at all times: bearing in mind that the reader must be presented with the innermost plans and thoughts guiding the actions of the villain. Conversely, the hero - and the reader along with him - must stay in the dark about what is befalling him as he wades through the action. The thriller hero functions as detective-in-the-dark, trying to figure out who or what is opposing him - often in the middle of a life-death struggle. The writer is freed from the secretive, game-playing detective story format, and this opens up a vastly greater story horizon. Read the rest of this entry »

What is it about the novel that creates such mystery and fascination? Certainly, the non-fiction chronicles, memoirs, and how-to books have their sometimes fanatical adherents; but, in my opinion, only the novel - given a truly well imagined work of fiction - can send our minds and emotions spinning into the ether.

Let us suppose you are a novelist wanna-be.  Of what subject will you write? In what style, or genre, will you couch your story? And have you formulated a plan for commercial success? - if, in fact, any such concrete plan is at all  possible.  Weighty questions all, and twisted paths to the answers, every one of them.

You will find that acceptance of your work by the old guard New York City trade publishing cabal is extremely difficult. They seem to be bound to the agent fraternity, to celebrity personalities that will create instant book sales, as well as those genres holding current financial sway. Not that you shouldn’t spend a few years submitting your polished manuscript to New York agents and/or the acquisition editors at the various major trade publishers. But unless a lot of good luck and circumstance surrounding that book fall into place, you will meet only with rejection. Trade publishers do not need unsolicited material; they have enough requested and agented material to wade through.  You may have a piece of quality work, but it will not be greeted with instant adoration. Others stand in line before you. They will not be easily pushed aside. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few days I’ve been pondering - dismally - my income tax.  If everyone else’s returns resemble mine this year, Uncle Sam will be sorely disappointed with the haul.

I shouldn’t be so down in the dumps, for suddenly I note that almost every news report has some upbeat item displaying the economy in slightly more glowing terms than expected. This month’s non-farm job report, for instance, was down less than many feared - shedding a mere 660,000 souls. But if you’d searched through the data a little more carefully, you found a cryptic notation revising January’s job loss numbers upward to something over 740,000, a depressing increase from the prior release! Cute trick- shrink the current release figures, then a couple months later, when everyone has forgotten the old release, come out with what it really should have been. Read the rest of this entry »

As we continue to plow along in the same rut regarding the bailout of the U.S. banking system, Detroit, and AIG, it becomes clearer to me that both the country and our new President seem caught in the clutches of an oligarchy.

This small pack of interwoven elite figures is unequally derived from four sources: Wall Streeters; banks of the “too big to fail” variety; top U.S. Governmental figures; and a smattering of U.S. Congressmen. The names of the particular persons, by now, should be quite familiar to you - they have made no effort to conceal themselves. Quite the opposite. Read the rest of this entry »

Normally, I’d never think of attempting a poem. Seldom do I tangle with poetry. But when the third ‘ace’ of my novel 3 ACES found himself in terminal trouble and was finally laid to rest, I felt that mere prose would do neither the noble animal nor the moment justice.

Maybe that’s how poems come to bona fide poets. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing several prize-winning authors of poetry. Supremely unique people - they’re not trying to be different, they just are. Oftimes they’ll knock out a wonderful poem in the space of a few minutes, seemingly without effort. I suspect, however, that the product of those rushes of emotion have lain gestating in their craniums for some time before the births ultimately take place, the apparent speed of creation entirely in the eye of the beholder. By that, I don’t mean to say such creation is not spontaneous, just that it filters through the subconscious until, suddenly, it begs to be set down on paper. Read the rest of this entry »

Having received the gift of a one-year membership to the Florida Writers Association - a result of 3 ACES having received the Book Of The Year award from Dahris Clair at The Infinite Writer - a brutally cold Pennsylvania winter made it even easier for me to ponder, then schedule - an exploratory February trip to Florida.

Some twenty years ago, I had briefly considered living in Florida to begin my first novel - the manuscript of which still gathers dust on my shelf. On that trip I ran into Harry Crews at the University of Florida and received some invaluable tips on the writing of dialogue, as well as an excellent list of literary works to read and ponder, and an introduction to Sally Morrison, supervisor of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings estate at Cross Creek. On my way further south (to do research among the “cowboys” of aerial drug smuggling reknown) I spent a day visiting the Rawlings historical site, while alligators growled beyond the old orange groves and a light rain sifted onto the roof of the Rawlings farmhouse - memories still fresh in my mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in early January I made a promise that I’ve been late keeping - how to cope with this current financial situation. Let me assure you I hadn’t forgotten. I wanted more time to judge what was - or has not been -  happening. In the confusion of billions and trillions being thrown at us by the papers, magazines, and TV newscasters, a few plain truths pop out of the coverage.

Firstly, we are in a major financial crisis…don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. It’s as bad as any in the history of the country - and it could get much, much worse. There’s simply no way to know! It’s a time NOT to be carried away with a few days good news, a short-lived uptick of the stock or commodity markets, or the siren promises of politicians - local, state, or Federal. You’ve got to search inside YOURSELF - decide what’s best for you, then stick to that until it proves wrong. Failure? Then try the next best plan you came up with.

Here are my personal observations: Read the rest of this entry »