Dennis Latham: Life, Fiction, and the Pursuit of Madness

A rocket attack at Camp Books. Read comment below  from Mark Harms about this and other attacks. Near the finish of my Vietnam tour, I was with B Company 7th Motors at the north end of a small firebase called Camp Books. We were separated from the main base by water, pretty much isolating our group except for an access road. I had it good by Vietnam standards, compared to when I was with the grunt battalion. We had plywood buildings to sleep in when we weren't in fighting holes. Every other building had a bunker. The problem was I spent most nights in a perimeter fighting hole. While with B Company, I was on the receiving end of at least 300 rockets. The 122mm rocket is a killer. The enemy still uses it on our troops in Iraq today. You just don't hear about it much. The 122 is six feet long and carries a 40 pound TNT warhead up to six miles, fired from portable launchers. The 122 is unstable and cannot be set to strike a specific target. They aim it in the general

Dennis and Dorothy Marino (Latham) Our Big Band Show features swing, big band, some torch songs, and high quality vocals. Music Is A Lot Like Writing Fiction About eighteen months ago I decided to sing again, doing music I wanted to perform. I didn't care that I wouldn't be popular with younger crowds. Our market is the older crowd who remember the music. I blew chances to be a big time singer while a young man. I turned down offers that could have made me rich to stay with a road band because I thought we would make it in Nashville. When that all fell through, my window to the big time had closed and I quit singing for years. Now, I'm going to make the best of the remaining opportunity. My wife has a beautiful voice that is perfect for the difficult songs of singers like Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald. Real vocal talent is something you inherit. It can't be taught, despite what some voice teachers say. They make their living that way. But, you either have it o

Three months after a benign bump was removed from my left parotid gland. I believe the stress on my immune system caused the shingle outbreak. Shingles       It’s been a bad year for me, or I should say the left side of my face and head. In April, I had the operation to remove a benign bump on the left side of my face, but they had to peel my face back to do it so the nerves wouldn’t be damaged. Then, my face swelled up for three months.   In August, I began to feel better and my face had pretty much returned to normal. On August 30, I had a headache that wouldn’t go away on the left side of my head and felt like I had a sty forming on my left eye or like I had something under the lid. (I never get headaches and I’ve never had a sty come out .)     Two days later, my left eyeball was bright red, my left forehead and scalp burned like a real bad sunburn when I touched it, and I had clusters of blisters on my left forehead and all through the left side of my scalp. I

The USS Iwo Jima from a helicopter. The Owenton, Kentucky newspaper did a story on The Bad Season  when it was first published. I used a fictional version of Owenton in my story. David Larkins, the lead character, is a Vietnam veteran. Lord of Homicides , the novel I finished a few years back has Nathan Bright, a Vietnam veteran. Maybe I deal with my own war experience through my characters. Vietnam combat doesn't appear in either novel like it does in my novel Michael In Hell , but the characters react based on their war experiences. War has a sneaky way of altering your personality forever. All combat veterans return home different. My mother used to look at me and cry because I was emotionally cold and hardened toward life. Basically, I was a young man with the mind of an old man. I had seen too much of the real world while too young. I could never go back to my innocent days. The picture above is an H-34 lift off from the deck of the USS Iwo Jima, probably in Decem

 Raves in the 90s were pretty much secret gatherings full of drugs.   The Secret Rave                My oldest daughter had flown in from Seattle to help search for her missing sister. She wasn't into raves, but she had been raised during the Grunge scene and could fit into the Rave crowd. We needed her for the secret Rave taking place in Dayton, Ohio the night after the Indianapolis Rave.               You had to find a certain website that contained a phone number. When you called the number, you would receive instructions to a location to buy tickets. You had to buy the tickets in person so you could find out where the Rave was being held. The location was in a strip mall in Dayton. The police were apparently kept in the dark because they could have made an entire year of drug busts in one night at these Raves.               We drove to mall and watched people line up in front of what looked like a record store. My oldest daughter got in the line, and af

This is one of my favorite Vietnam photos. The Marine in the photo is Bud Lemoyne from Florida; a funny guy who could make you laugh at most anything. I've always thought it would make a perfect poster or a Life Magazine cover for what the troops thought about the Vietnam War. A Marine Gives His View On The Vietnam War I don't remember the circumstance behind the photo, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he didn't have a magazine in his rifle. Somebody probably asked him if he thought he was John Wayne or Gomer Pyle. Most people don't know the Marine Corps had a strong dislike for John Wayne and Gomer Pyle. Actors playing Marines, who were never actually Marines, are never accepted by the Corps. Only Marines and Navy Corpsmen attached to the Marines can represent the Marines. That's how it is. It's not that the Marine Corps disliked the actors as people. They just did things real Marines would never do: pull grenade pins with the

If you start a line, they will follow    I had been glancing through World War Z . I read it a few years ago, and today I saw a part where one of the people interviewed mentioned someone lining up at a door and people lining up behind him, for no reason. (Based on the theory if there is a line they must be giving away something good.) I've seen that happen back in 1995 while in Indianapolis staking out a Rave in an attempt to find my youngest daughter who had been missing for a week. Raves were not fun group dances where kids drank healthy drinks and had a ball gyrating to electronic music. They were the haven of drug dealers, LSD, ecstasy, and anything you could name to get a child intoxicated or high. My daughter had disappeared at a Rave in Milford, Ohio after sneaking out of her mother's house. She was 13. We knew if she was alive, she would show up at a Rave again. I thought she was dead, but I had become something like a zombie in an attempt to find

 Something I couldn't see shared the house with me that summer. Origin of Ghosts: Part 9 The Bruce Avenue House Ghosts      I began to look at the house with a slightly askew perspective when I knew it had ghosts. I mentioned it to very few people. I never said much to Steve about it after Frank moved out. He just refused to believe anything about ghosts. I did ask one of the two girls downstairs. They spent a lot of time chanting and had meetings in their apartments each Sunday with several other girls. A few of them were what I considered very attractive. I just wasn't interested because they were all too weird, and that kind of weird meant trouble for a man. They all chanted, burned incense, and knocked things over. They also ignored where they parked and often blocked driveways so neighbors couldn't get out. They were always getting parking tickets, and a few times the police came to the door to make one of them move a car. They claimed to be a Buddhi