About Tom

ABOUT TOM

Tom Glenn was born into a California version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald world of soirées, days at the races, and upscale cocktail lounges. When he was four, his older sister died bringing together his estranged parents. At six, he realized that he would have to take care of himself—his alcoholic mother and playboy father were otherwise engaged. At the same time, he discovered both writing and language and taught himself French and Italian. Six years later, the imprisonment of his lawyer father for embezzlement left the family impoverished. His high school days were spent in Oakland’s ghettos where he raised money with a paper route and a job as delivery boy. He got through college (majoring in drama and music and adding German to his languages) by working as everything from a dishwasher and service station clerk to a barista in an Italian-speaking coffee shop.

Upon graduation from the University of California (Berkeley), he enlisted in the army to study Chinese but was sent for a year to study Vietnamese—a chance event that reshaped his life. For the next twenty-five years, Vietnam was the focus of his attention. After he left the army, he worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Embassy in Saigon, spending the better part of thirteen years shuttling between the U.S. and Vietnam. (the operation he headed was declassified in 2008*). He was evacuated under fire during the fall of Saigon in 1975. In subsequent years of working for the government, he became an expert first on Korea, later on China (he had been studying Chinese, first in night classes at Georgetown, later in Vietnam). As he moved into the executive ranks, he published more than twenty articles on management and leadership and took a doctorate from the George Washington University in Public Administration. Meanwhile, he married and fathered four delightful children.

In 1984, he volunteered to care for AIDS patients, in the nineties worked with the homeless and, beginning in 2001, administered to the dying in the hospice program. Meanwhile, he began studying Spanish and volunteered to work with immigrants.

Through it all, he wrote. All his writing is haunted by AIDS and the hospice experience. Vietnam looms large in his stories, and nearly everything in his work is, in one way or another, about fathers and children. His stories have appeared in many publications and won numerous prizes (see writing credits), but for the last several years, he has concentrated on novels, none so far in print.

* See Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series: Nothing Left to Give Up: SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April, 1975. Fort Meade, Maryland: National Security Agency, undated; and Robert J. Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975. Fort Meade, Maryland: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002. Both documents were declassified in 2008.