I grew up to become a talented drunk; after flunking out of college in Detroit I matriculated through the auto factories. Initially I wouldn’t enlist for Vietnam because I was opposed the war. But I was nagged by the question of service. I knew who was fighting the war—I watched them leave the factories month after month while I hid out behind my invalid student deferment. So I volunteered for the Airborne because jump wings were a guaranteed ticket to a combat slot in Vietnam.
And so one of my childhood goals had been realized: I was an Army paratrooper assigned as a radioman to a small advisory team in Vietnam. [Broker makes a profitable return to Vietnam in THE PRICE OF BLOOD. Sorry to say, that episode isn’t biographical.]
One moonless monsoon night in 1969 I was crossing flooded rice paddies in northern Quang Tri Province, going to the aid of an embattled Vietnamese militia unit. We hit a VC blocking force. As I dived for cover I split my lip and when I rolled over in the water, in the light of a flare, I saw that the paddy was full of corpses. The unit we were going to relieve had made a run for it and had been annihilated. There I was, face up to the rain, floating in muddy water, blood in my mouth, surrounded by the dead in an eerie replay of 1953.
Having such experiences recommends storytelling as a personal form of expression.
Several inpatient stints in drug dependency wards later I found employment doing art & graphics at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Somewhere around this time I was asked to do a book review. After it ran, some of the reporters asked me who’d written it for me.
Hmmmm. My chances of becoming a writer were about one in a million. I liked the odds and set to work. Fortunately, I had the encouragement of a remarkable editor at the paper, Deborah Howell, and the example and guidance of John Camp, aka John Sanford, friend and former colleague at the Pioneer Press. John was writing thrillers full time. Several false starts later, I sold my first book, Hunter’s Moon, which was a rehash of many of the dark themes from my earlier life. But it was time to get on the with the second half of my life which included 25 years of stone cold sobriety, a successful marriage, a beautiful daughter and the geography and climate of northern Minnesota. The result was my loner character, Phil Broker. He has been described as a fugitive from modern psychology who believes in monsters because it requires old—fashioned heroes to catch them.
And now it seems that Broker, having driven the backs roads long enough, might be getting some legs. During the 1980s and ‘90s that soldier service stuff was for “other people”. But then the world got more real than virtual. Maybe in this post 9/11, post Enron world, the one percent of us under 65 who’ve actually served in combat, like my guy Broker, are coming back into style, to stand alongside cops and fireman.
Acknowledgments
Gary Siegrist, dealer in heavy construction equipment, Montrose, Michigan
George W. Crocker, North American Water Office, Lake Elmo, Minnesota
Sheriff David Zeiss, Cavalier County Sheriff’s Department, Langdon, North Dakota
Chief Deputy Greg Fetsch, Cavalier County Sheriff’s Department, Langdon, North Dakota
Dana R. King, North Dakota Highway Patrol
Cameron Sillers P.C., Attorney at Law, Langdon, North Dakota
Harold and Nancy Blanchard, Grafton, North Dakota
Sgt. Lawrence R. Rogers, City of St. Paul Police Department Bomb Squad, St. Paul, Minnesota
Sgt. David Prois, Fridley Police Department, Fridley, Minnesota
About the Author
CHUCK LOGAN, called “one of the best new thriller writers” by the Chicago Tribune, is the author of six novels, including Vapor Trail, Absolute Zero, and The Big Law. A veteran of the war in Vietnam, he lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, with his wife and daughter.
www.chucklogan.com
Available from HarperAudio and as an e-book from PerfectBound
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Also by Chuck Logan
Vapor Trail
Absolute Zero
The Big Law
The Price of Blood
Hunter’s Moon
Credits
Jacket design by Will Staehle
Jacket photograph © Stockbyte/Veer
Copyright
AFTER THE RAIN. Copyright © 2004 by Chuck Logan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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