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

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