Thus Began My Journey

Photo by Abdullatif Mirza

Blog 1 – 06/10/2023    Thus Began My Journey

You might ask why I chose to set my novel, The Infidel and the Ghost of Moscow, in two distant lands, Kuwait and Russia, during a time before I was born. I enjoy reading historical fiction, particularly novels set during World War II. When I decided to write my own novel, I naturally gravitated to my favorite period. Kuwait was my final overseas post, so I felt comfortable in that setting. And who could find a better contrast to a summer in hot and arid Kuwait than a winter in cold and dreary Moscow?

The spartan beauty of desert landscapes enchanted me as a youngster during a family vacation along Route 66 though the southwest. Desert wilderness still fascinates me, and I envision future visits to Morocco or along the old Silk Road. Kuwait is all desert, so it was a natural location for my novel.

 A high school class trip took me to Washington, D.C. where imposing monuments and museums rivalled stately federal buildings and the White House. The bustle of civil servants working for the nation intrigued me, so remaining near family and friends in Indiana after college lost its appeal. I wanted a life beyond the Midwest, maybe even beyond our nation’s capital. It was a big world, and I wanted to see it.

In 1970, the U.S. Secret Service upgraded the title of its White House Police to the Executive Protective Service. The upgrade created new openings, including the protection of diplomatic missions throughout Washington, D.C. I signed on as an officer with the new service and left Indiana behind.

At the beginning of my career, I served at the White House, which is why I often placed the characters in my novel there. I could easily imagine FDR in the Oval Office or secluded in his Map Room hideaway where he plotted the war with maps and ribbons.

After a few years with the Uniform Division of the Secret Service at the White House, I grew weary of standing post in all kinds of weather at all times of the day or night. Suffering in a snowstorm at midnight beneath the lantern fixture swaying from the ceiling of the White House’s North Portico allows plenty of time for a man’s mind to wander.

What’s my next move? How do I retain credit for the years I’ve already served with the government? How about a transfer to a special agent position with the Secret Service? Protection of top U.S. officials and visiting heads of state sounds like a career advancement. And I’d get to travel.

My great transfer idea progressed until I failed the Secret Service eye exam. My eyesight was good enough to stand post at the White House with a weapon strapped to my belt, but it was too poor for the Secret Service.

In 1973, Secretary of State William Rogers traveled with a special agent detail from the State Department. He frequently visited the Nixon White House where I stood post. Would my eyesight pass muster with the State Department? Rogers’ team is with him around the clock and around the world. I knew other State Department agents secured our embassies and consulates in many foreign nations.

Fortunately, the Department of State was hiring and did not require a weapon’s eyesight qualification. I applied for a lateral transfer and began my twenty-four-year career with the Foreign Service.

At this time, the Nixon administration strove to normalize relations with China. While negotiations took place, Japan hosted the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships during which the U.S. and Chinese teams developed a surprising friendship. The unexpected goodwill between the two rivals became known as ping-pong diplomacy. Building on this development, American diplomats traveled to China. Later, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China paved the way for Nixon’s historic trip to that country in 1972.

In 1974, while I was still settling into my new career as a special agent, the department sent me and three others to China. We were tasked with the protection of our new Liaison Office in Peking. I lived there until 1975 when I returned to Washington, D.C., to begin Spanish language training for my next post in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I had found a career that took me to five posts on four continents: China, Argentina, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Kuwait. All at government expense.

Family and friends enjoyed my tales of the characters I had met during my travels. They encouraged me to write everything down, which I did. My mother had retained my many letters from all over the world, and I relied on boxes of slides and photographs to jog my memory. Newspaper clippings filled in the gaps. This memoir ran to 900 pages, single-spaced, a tome my friends and family undoubtedly used only as a doorstop. But it has served me well as a reference for the first drafts of my trilogy of novels set just before and through the end of World War II in Europe.

I began the prologue of my memoir with recollections of a temporary assignment in August 1991 at the U.S. Embassy in the tiny island nation of Bahrain on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula. Those memories captured the wonder of faraway destinations that I felt throughout my career. I sought whatever was special, unique, or new in my location or circumstance. In Bahrain’s capital Manama, I was disappointed to learn that falconers do not fly their birds in the extreme heat of summer in the Persian Gulf. Rasit, my local investigator at the embassy, suggested an alternative that I might find interesting. He gave me specific directions.

All I had to do was drive along a dual-lane motorway out of the city into the bland, flat, featureless sands until I saw a group of cars and pickups parked along the berm of a dusty embankment. Stop and get out of the car. Climb over the embankment and be surprised.

I drove on with the air-conditioning at full blast to combat the heat which was still in the nineties. The sun was setting through a thick haze on the horizon created by the oil fires burning in Kuwait to the north. I was about to turn around when I saw the vehicles and dozens of tire tracks indicating that this was a frequently used location. I parked and stood atop the embankment and marveled. Below me, several dozen young men milled about with their Arabian horses in an informal gathering of friendship and competitive spirit. When they noticed me atop the hill, they motioned that I should join them, displaying the typical Arab hospitality to a stranger. They appeared to enjoy showing their stallions to a camera-toting foreigner without a word of Arabic other than greetings and goodbyes.

The young men, in their teens and early twenties, wore T-shirts, blue jeans, and ball caps. Some of their horses were saddled. Occasionally, one youth challenged another to a race, and they would tear off into the distance, heads lowered over the flying manes of their compact mounts. Their friends cheered and hooted until somewhere off in the distance, an unseen mark had been reached and a winner was declared. The group was in a constant state of flux, as a rider and his horse would appear out of the haze as if by magic, while another youth rode into the dimming light. There were no horse trailers in sight, so each horse had to have been ridden to this rendezvous from who knows where. I had passed no buildings along the highway, and for as far as I could see, nothing broke the view.

One of the young men offered his stallion to me for a ride, but I wanted only a photograph or two. He proudly stood holding the reins while his spirited horse tossed his head and pawed the ground.

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A photo from that day. This stallion became the inspiration for Sharif.

Gradually, the group dispersed, and I returned to my car. I drove home along a ribbon of concrete over a dull white moonscape of sand lit by the surreal glow of Kuwait’s fires in the night sky. Desolate yet starkly beautiful. Undeterred by oil fires or political problems raging across the Arab world, these young Bahrainis, dressed in their Western clothing, had shown me a vision of their ancient lands. They lived in the modern world but were drawn to the old ways in their desert home where men gathered and talked, demonstrated their love for their desert mounts, and welcomed strangers into their midst.

This relatively minor experience in Bahrain led to the development of a major character in my novels, an Arabian stallion in the stables of the Amir of Kuwait. I named him Sharif. This loyal steed saved my hero from the hands of a marauding band of Egyptian zealots. Then the wounded Sharif carried a stableboy across the searing sands of Kuwait’s great An Nafud Desert to alert the palace of danger from a convoy of German army vehicles and the desolation of a royal caravan from a dust storm and the marauders. Sharif was modeled after the Arabian stallion in the photograph I took on that summer evening in Bahrain over thirty years before.

My career brought me to gilded cathedrals in Austria, along the canals of Venice, and to ornate palaces where I moved among ambassadors and royalty. But my novels are built upon the memories of the simple cottages and unheralded people I met along the way. I found the side streets and small gardens, the silver sellers and the coffee vendors, just as intriguing as the lights of Paris or the dignitaries of kingdoms great and small.

In my next blog, I’ll introduce my father-in-law. His journal, written during the years he served in the U.S. Army in the unknown Persian Corridor during World War II, provided much detail and atmosphere for The Infidel and the Ghost of Moscow.