The experience of caring for men dying of AIDS moved me so deeply that I had to write about it. The result was my novel, No-Accounts. It is the story of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS. It has received more critical acclaim than any of my other books. It was the first book I wrote that was not about war or Vietnam.
The success of No-Accounts encouraged me to write about subjects other than armed conflict and Southeast Asia. My newest novel, Secretocracy, published last year, is not about war. It’s a fictionalized version of the story of President Trump persecuting an intelligence budgeteer who refuses to fund one of Trump’s illegal projects.
I have graduated from the confines of writing only about war. But I have one more novel on that subject waiting to be written. It’s set during the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s western highlands, a confrontation I was very much involved in.
It’s a story I have to tell.
Next time: where the word compound “no-accounts” comes from.
Tom Glenn, Writer 