Okay… first things first… it’s pronounced Teer Na Nohg and it means the Land of Youth, which is a characterization of the pre-Christian concept of the afterlife, a land where time does not exist and all are in the full bloom of youth.

In the last chapter of my novel, The Violent Season, “The Bay, Part Two,” a man who is struggling to recover from the horrific experiences of war and combat in Vietnam, and shocked by the destruction wrought by time on the home of his youth, remembers stories of ancient heroes and the Tír na N’Óg that his Irish grandmother had told him as a boy, which now resonate in a way the man had never anticipated.

“His grandmother told him it was a magical stone. In Ireland, the “little people,” the tuatha dé danán she called them, used these moon stones to mark the entrances of the líos, their magical underground kingdom, a land of eternal youth where mortal time didn’t exist. She told the boy that only great heroes, Fionn mac Cumhail or the great Cu Chullain, dared to enter the líos. Once there, they were greeted by the léanan sí, three beautiful maidens, one red, one gold and one black, who

would love and care for them.

There, the hero was reunited with his comrades, who had fallen in battle at his side.

There, they all were young again, their battle-wounds healed.

There, they would feast and drink in the eternal strength of their youth.

There, the hero would be reunited with his loved ones, who had gone before him into the land of shadows.

There, all their joy, all their love, would be restored” (from, The Violent Season).

 

In the late 1970’s, some eight years after I had left the mountains and jungles of Vietnam, I was sitting on an American Airlines flight at the gate at LaGuardia Airport on my way to Chicago, the same flight I had taken every Sunday night for the last six months.

It was April, a New York City Spring; wet, sleet-laden rain was pummeling the thin skin of the Boeing 727, teetering the wings like a playground see-saw. I was strapped into an aisle seat with three tiny bottles of Bacardi rum and a can of Coke that the flight attendant at the door, who by this time knew me by name and had anticipated my arrival, had handed me when I flashed my boarding pass.

I was a nervous flyer. Surviving two helicopter crashes and a “rough” landing on a mountain runway under mortar attack in an Air Force C7A Caribou will do that. I figured my number was way overdo. So my coping mechanism was rum, coke and a spy novel to bury myself in while the flight crew and the fickle gods, who rule the folly of human flight in tin contraptions on stormy nights, decided whether we were going to land at O’Hare that night (and in what condition).

I was reading a passage in my book where the “hero,” a British secret agent-type, and his ally, an ex-IRA terrorist, who was now working for MI6, were trying to extract vital information from members of the Irish underworld in the slums of Belfast. Part of the conversation was in Irish Gaelic, which I suddenly realized that, as my eyes passed quickly over the text, I understood! Amazing stuff this Bacardi! But, when I went back actually to read these passages, the Gaelic was as obscure to me as Sanskrit.

Now, I would have attributed this entire phenomenon to pre-flight jitters and that miracle elixir bottled by that esteemed miracle worker, Don Bacardi, and just forgotten the whole incident. But, about a week later, I was on the phone with one of my more high-tone friends, a young woman, who boarded and trained horses out on Long Island. She was telling me about one of her new horses.

“… and his name is Capall Dubh…” she was saying.

“Oh! He’s a black horse?” I interrupted.

“Yes,” she answered, “That’s what his name means, but how did you know that?”

Well, I didn’t know how I knew! The English meaning had just popped into my head!

This being the 1970’s, and with my need for explanations, rational or not, I developed a number of theories to explain this linguistic marvel.

First, I was having a nervous breakdown that somehow manifested itself in the “gift of tongues.” Then again, the whole concept of a “gift of tongues” suggested to an Irish-Catholic a second Pentecost of the Holy Ghost (very unlikely considering my lifestyle at the time) or a demonic possession (The Exorcist was a very popular movie at the time… I haven’t been able to face pea soup since I saw it).

My personal favorite theory was that I had had a former life as an ancient Irish warrior. (We’re always someone famous in our former lives. That’s the way these things work as the character, Annie Savoy, in the movie Bull Durham, explains.) I was having flashbacks to my former life as an Irish hero.

A couple of days later, I was at a family wedding, one of those wonderful, New York, Irish blowouts (Q: What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake? A: One less drunk.) There, I ran into my older cousin. She and I had spent our summers together as kids; to me, she was more like my older sister than my cousin.

When I told her what was happening with the Gaelic and my Irish warrior theory-we were well into the wedding celebration by this time-my cousin just laughed and said, “When you were small, you and Nanny used to sit in the front room every afternoon, sipping tea, watching The Kate Smith Show and Queen for a Day, while Nanny jabbered away at you in Irish and you just sat there saying ‘Tá, mamó,’ “Níl, mamó,’ ‘Tuigim, mamó.’ We were never quite sure you spoke English until you were about five, Skip!”

I remembered the tea-hot, sweet and thick with canned, Carnation condensed milk; my grandmother would pour a bit in the saucer to let it cool for me. I remembered sitting in the front room in the late afternoon with muted sunlight glowing behind heavy drapes, softening the noises of the city street, as Nanny and I sat in large, over-stuffed, high-backed chairs watching the tele.

But I didn’t remember the Irish! So, I asked my cousin, “Then why don’t I remember Nanny speaking Irish to me, Sock?”

“When you started school… what were you… about six… Nanny refused to speak Irish in front of you anymore,” my cousin explained. “Nanny believed if you wanted to get anywhere in this country, you had to speak English without an accent, like an American. That’s why she never spoke Irish in front of any of her own kids. My mother had never heard her speak Irish! She wanted her children to sound like Americans. They couldn’t sound like they had just gotten off the boat. Barry Fitzgerald sounds quaint in a movie, but no one in America’s going to give him a decent job. So, she never spoke Irish in front of you since that day.”

Well, in a way, I was kind of bummed that in a former life I hadn’t been a fénnid, a doughty warrior of the king’s fianna, but I had quite enough on my plate trying to deal with having been a grunt in Vietnam. Yet, I began to remember the tales my mamó had told me while we sat in the front room sipping our tea and listening to Kate Smith on the tele.

My grandma had been born in Mayo, so she wasn’t a big fan of Cú Cullainn and the Ulaid. Being a Connaught woman, she was partial to the legendary Queen Maebh, if her daughter, my Aunt Mae, was any evidence, bean fíochmhar rua dearg, a fierce, red-haired woman. But, she loved the tales of Fionn mac Cumhall and the Fianna.

One of my favorite tales that she had told me was how Fionn saved Tara on the Samhain from a fire-breathing demon, Aillen, who lulled his opponents to sleep with a magic spell before he attacked. Fionn manned the ramparts of Tara alone, with his spear placed under his chin, so if his head nodded in sleep, the point of the spear stabbed him. (I would have tried this one to keep students awake in my Monday, first-period classes, but I’m pretty sure bringing spears to class is illegal in Indiana.)

 

Her favorite tale, though, was that of Derdriu and her tragic love for Naoise. “Deirdre of the Sorrows,” she called the tale in English. In fact, I remember she once told me that derdriu, not brón, was the true Irish word for sorrow.

  So, these many years later, I now play the role for my readers, that my mamó had played for me, a seanchaí, a teller of tales. These echoes of the Irish language spoken on sunny afternoons over sweet, thick tea and the myths of Irish heroes of course find their way into my tales.

 

In my novel, The Violent Season, a man, haunted by the horrors and combat and lost friends, and horrified by the devastation of the places he had loved as a child, wants to escape back into his past, where he can be innocent again; where he can again be with those who had loved and protected him; where his childhood dreams would again live.

“Somehow the man believed that, if he dared the dark, twisting path, broke through the brambles and brush of the years and climbed the hill, when he reached the top, all would be restored to him. The waste lands would be restored, would live again. He could again run along the secret Indian paths, brave the valley of the Iroquois, sit under the shady maples in the place of watching over the broad, grey-green bay of Lake Champlain near the fort of the English.

When he reached the top of the path, there before him would appear the white bungalow, framed in red. His grandmother would be there standing on the back porch, calling him.

His beautiful, red-haired aunt, would be sitting at the patio table next to her radio playing “Deep Purple.” She would look up from her magazine, take off her sunglasses, and her bright, green eyes would flash a welcoming smile.

His uncle would be behind the house polishing the Green Hornet, with its spotlight and police radios, into a deep, boundless, green luster.

And Janey, his sweet Janey, would run to him, her arms wide in welcome. ‘Why did you take so long to get home, squirt? Don’t you know how much we missed you?’” (from, The Violent Season).

 

Of course, entry into the Tír na N’Óg is not possible. The man must remain in the land of mortals. But, life renews itself, because love survives all things, and it is his wife who calls him back into the world of light, as his violent season ends.

Recently, a reviewer of The Violent Season, Ray Voith, asked me this question, “I meant to ask you – did you talk to North Vietnamese soldiers to get a perspective on their part in the war, or did you base your segments about them on the (valid) assumption that we are all in this life together?”

First, a little about Ray  before I get to his question. We’ve never met, but he and I have shared a significant, formative experience. We both attended a Roman Catholic seminary for the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, known as Maryknoll. Since Ray is older… much… much… older than I am, we weren’t there at the same time, but we were both nurtured in the humanity, social justice and the life of the spirit  which is Maryknoll.

Maryknoll’s hope for us was, “To raise up sterling men for God.” I sincerely hope I have not disappointed them and my Maryknoll brothers and sisters,.

 

Now to Ray’s question.

No. I haven’t spoken to any former members of the People’s Army of North Vietnam (PAVN), except to trade insults across a battle field.

“Hey, GI! You got American cigarette?”

“Smoking’s bad for your health, Charlie!”

“My name not Charrie!”

“And my name’s not GI! I have a mother!”

 

Although I have read intelligence briefs and transcripts of the debriefings of defectors and POW, my general inspirations for the characterization of the North Vietnamese soldiers in The Violent Season, is Erich Maria Remarque’s novel,  All’s Quiet on the Western Front, which I read shortly after returning home from Southeast Asia.

This book was breakthrough for me in a number of ways.

First, I was brought up in a generation that vilified Germans. My grandfather had fought them in the First World War, and my father and uncles had fought them in the Second. In every war movie I had watched as a kid, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were portrayed as brainless, clumsy, evil automatons, who spoke English badly with thick accents. “Sooo… vair are your papers… hmmm?” They were the enemy!

So, I was surprised and quite impressed by Remarque’s characterization of German soldiers, Paul Bäumer and his comrades. I immediately recognized in them myself and the guys with whom I served in Nam. Despite being Germans, and therefore the “bad guys,” they became human for me. I recognized their plight and sympathized with them. They were me!

Second, the book helped me understand my own sense of alienation. When I got home from Nam, everything seemed superficially pretty much as it was before I left. Although my brothers and sisters had grown a bit, and mom and dad were a little greyer around the edges, my room was still in the basement, (I had to kick my brother out of it). My favorite shows-Bewitched (Oh! Elizabeth Montgomery!), Dean Martin (Oh! The Ding-A-Ling Sisters!), Mission Impossible, Get Smart (Oh! Barbara Feldon!), and Monty Python-were still on the tube. My favorite rock station, 77-WABC, was still blasting out the tunes. And most of my friends were either back from the war or had never left.

But, something seemed “off.” I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. Everything seemed pretty much the same, but something dark was lurking around the margins of my perception… some discordant note in every chord.

Then, I read the passage in All’s Quiet on the Western Front where Paul goes home from the front on leave. He finds his hometown has not changed since he went off to war. However, he also discovers that he does “not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.” He feels disconnected from most of the people he had known before going into the army. In the end, he concludes that he should never to have come home, and returns to his comrades at the front before his leave expired.

In The Violent Season, I wrote a chapter, “Coming Home,” telling the story of Pat Green’s coming home and his struggle with his sense of “not belonging” in a society that was not welcoming to returning soldiers.

But, back to Ray’s question.

In writing The Violent Season, I wanted to break the typical “good guy / bad guy” convention of the genre. So, I adopted the premise that “the enemy,” the North Vietnamese, were as human as were I and my comrades.

Of course, my other hurdle in achieving a connection with North Vietnamese soldiers was cultural and racial. I remember statements about the North Vietnamese made to me by other soldiers, while I was in Nam that “they weren’t like us”; or “they don’t put the same value on human life that we do”; or, “they’re fanatics because of communism.”

Right after leaving the army in 1970, I had my “ex-patriot” experience, but instead of heading off to Paris like Hemingway, I headed to Taipei. I had no intention of returning to the States any time soon. I immersed myself in the Chinese culture, even learning to speak Guoyu, and enough of the Taiwanese dialect to order lunch.

My experience of the Chinese people was consistent with the “Theory of the Universal 20–80 Split.” There were certainly some cultural differences, but that was the just the twenty percent of the experince. As far as the other eighty percent went, the Chinese and I shared the same sense of humanity. They desired security and happiness. They laughed at funny movies and wept at sad ones.  They loved their children. They were cautious with strangers… just like me.

So, when I attempted to develop the characterization of the North Vietnamese soldiers in The Violent Season, I assumed about them the eighty percent. My characters are attached to and concerned about their families; they want the war to be over so they can go home; they’re terrified by the dangers of combat. The other twenty percent-army routines, cultural beliefs, communist ideology-I constructed from research and imagination.

Another of my assumptions in constructing my characters was that, as in our army, there were some “good guys” serving in PAVN and some real jerks. So, essential questions for me as a writer were, “How would a NVA grunt behave?” And, “How would an NVA cultural or ideological martinet behave?” This approach defines the essential difference in characterization between Sergeant Major Trinh and Sub-Lieutenant Tran Trung Thanh, who appear in my story “A Very Bad Day.”

Trinh, who in his essence is a poet and teacher like his long-dead father, whom he continues to mourn, is of course severely damaged emotionally by a lifetime of war against the Japanese, the French, other Vietnamese, and now the Americans. Tran, on the other hand, is an FNG-a “F’ing New Guy”- still a boy really, “high” on the propaganda he was force-fed as a university student in Hanoi. Tran forces a fire fight with an American patrol near a place in the highlands called “The Volcano,” despite Trinh’s advice that the engagement is unnecessary. Of course, the results are tragic for both the Vietnamese and Americans involved.

The characterization of Colonel Tran Van Dung in the final two “Chu Pa” stories of The Violent Season is based my conception of how a North Vietnamese career officer, trained as a staff planner along the lines of the US Army’s Command and General Staff School, with pronounced Meyers-Briggs “Thinking” and “Judging” inclinations, would have behaved.

Dung is essentially a good man; he wants to serve his country and believes that his actions serve to reunite his people. But, not only is he faced with a powerful enemy that seeks to destroy his command, but he is also constantly forced to deal with internal “political” influences and ideologies, which at times, albeit potent and dangerous, are not constructive. These I represent by Lieutenant Colonel Dai and his black notebook.

Dung is one of my favorite characters in The Violent Season for a good reason. When I read the sections of the book dealing with Dung to my wife, Jan, she responded, “So! He’s you!” Ironically, she was absolutely correct. Dung is me! And he’s every other soldier-American, Vietnamese, Korean, Australian, and Degar-who fought that war.

One of the stories that I didn’t write for Season was Dung being invited to address a group of American veterans long after the war had ended. At first the Americans are hostile to him; he’s still “the enemy” in their minds. But, as they begin to realize that they share more with this man than they do with many of their own fellow citizens, they come to embrace him.

This potential for empathy between American soldiers and their former enemies, was expressed in my first book A Grunt Speaks,

“NVA. This was an abbreviation for the North Vietnamese Army, also known as the Peoples’ Army of Vietnam (PAVN). These were bad guys on testosterone. They were typically well-trained, well-equipped and motivated, unlike the Viet Cong whose training and sub-standard weapons were as much a danger to themselves as they were to any grunts they might encounter. The NVA could be recognized by their pith helmets, tan or OD uniforms, red collar tabs (if you got that close, you were about to have a bad day) shiny, clean, Czech-made AK’s and bad attitudes. Grunts’ attitude toward the NVA was a combination of hate, fear and respect. The “hate” and “fear” part is obvious—their job was to kill us and they were damn good at it. The “respect” is harder to explain. First, like us they were “good grunts”—they were trained, tough and determined. Second, these guys were sharing our experience—putting up with the same crap, living in the dirt amidst the bugs and reptiles, losing friends, missing home—and putting up with their own version of lifer—the political cadre (I’m sure more than one of these blokes wound up with a frag in his blankets). Ironically, the NVA were the closest thing to us we had in Nam.” (from A Grunt Speaks).

Thomas Hardy, in his poem, “A Man He Killed,” had it right, I think, “Yes; quaint and curious war is!”

 

So, to my friend, Ray Voith’s, question, did I interview any North Vietnamese veterans for my book, the answer is no. They were within me. Now, they are brought to life in The Violent Season.

 

On Wednesday, 13 February, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the new Distinguished Warfare Medal (DWM), which will be awarded to individuals for “extraordinary achievement” related to a military operation that occurred after Sept. 11, 2001. Why did an innocuous announcement, and one that seems to seek to recognize the achievements of service members, cause such a crap-storm with veterans and veterans’ groups?

No sooner had the ink dried on the announcement, than my colleague at school, “The Major,” walked into my classroom and denounced the whole thing as a complete boondoggle orchestrated by that madhouse on the Potomac! “The Major” and I are “old school,” from the old “black-boot” army. We’re veterans of Vietnam-era light infantry operations, in the boonies, up close, personal.

What really stuck in The Major’s craw, I believe, was that the DWM ranked higher than the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, awards that we both hold and awards that a soldier has to get “up close and personal” with the enemy to earn. The Major suggested that next the DOD would start handing out Purple Hearts and GI Insurance for guys whose avatars were “WIA”or “KIA” in cyber war games.

One issue is that the DWM is characterized as a “combat medal,” but it doesn’t require the recipient risk his or her life. In fact the soldier doesn’t have to be in the hemisphere as the “enemy.”

This seems to be in response to the changing concept of “combat” from the dirt, smoke and blood of a physical battle field, to fighting for dominance in cyber space and the ability to apply combat force by the use of missiles and drones, while the operator is hundreds of miles away operating from a high-tech console, seated in a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned facility, surrounded by the sounds of elevator music, wondering what’s going to be served for dinner at home or at the club after quitting time at five.

An essential question is whether the “cyber / drone” scenario is “combat.”

I believe the answer is yes. It’s offensive and defensive operations in support of a military mission, in which a soldier may have to apply deadly force against an enemy in order to achieve the assigned mission. Dirty or clean, dangerous or not, that’s “combat,” folks.

A second consideration is whether such combat poses any danger to the soldier / operator. How much “valor” is required in blocking a cyber-attack? Does the operator of a flying drone put his or her life on the line like an infantryman assaulting an enemy held position, or patrolling an area where there is a danger of ambush or IED attack?

The answer to that is no! As my colleague, “The Major,” quipped, if a drone operator falls out of the chair or gets a paper cut, what next? A Purple Heart?

Before I go any further, let me put a stake in the ground on one thing. I support any deserved recognition of the service of soldiers. Those who dedicate their lives, or a few years of it, to the service of their country and to the safety and welfare of its citizens deserve to be recognized.

Now back to the DWM issue.

First, I cannot support the DWM being a higher ranked award than the Purple Heart. Literally, a soldier has to be injured by enemy action to be awarded the Purple Heart. I’m with The Major on this. By sacrifice and valor required, the Purple Heart ranks higher than the DWM.

Second, what about the Bronze Star Medal (BSM)?  This is a bit more complicated because the BSM is really two different awards, one for service, the other for valor.

The BSM for service is an Army Commendation Medal on steroids. It’s the army’s way of saying “thanks a lot,” usually to officers and senior NCO’s. Its award does not necessitate valor, or even combat. Most officers who served a basic combat tour in Nam, twelve months in country, got one of these, regardless of assignment. So, subordinating the DWM to the BSM for service doesn’t ruffle my feathers one little bit.

The BSM with a “V” Device, for valor, is a different story. This meant valor in combat, something “above and beyond.” I won mine in 1969 for slugging it out with an NVA company for six hours while part of a four-man ranger team… and getting all my guys home safe. Try that sometime from a drone console! So, subordinating the BSM with V to the DWM… no way! Doesn’t make sense.

So, here’s what I think!

Definitely keep the DWM! Whacking bad guys with drones and not having terrorists using my credit cards to buy stuff is highly desired. If soldiers do that well, pin on the DWM’s!  Throw in a few Oak Leaf Clusters. That’s successful and meritorious Cyber-Combat!

But, subordinate the DWM to the both the Purple Heart and the BSM with V. Whether the DWM ranks above the BSM for service (no V device), is max nix to me.

I could live with that. So, could The major, I imagine… as long as they don’t start giving out awards for paper cuts, eye strain, and missing Happy Hour at the club.