the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not reflect those of the mc or the town of belmont b mc welcomes your comments call us at six one seven four eight four two four four three four email us at access at belmont media dot org hello and welcome to off off the page my name is kelly matthews and i'm your host for our show about writers and writing today we're joined by connecticut state university professor edward hagen who is the son of irish immigrants and who served as a u s army intelligence officer in vietnam his memoir to vietnam in vain discusses his one thousand nine hundred sixty nine tour of duty as a u s advisor to the south vietnamese regional and popular forces in the mekong delta as well as his upbringing in what was the largest irish neighborhood that you chose for the memoir in that it's a series of short yes and in some ways can you can give us kind of a fragmented story about growing up and going to war and i wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you decided to structure the book this way well it's not just there's chapter headings but there's no there's no chapter numbers and i actually the chapter headings was where the insistence of the publisher because i had written the whole thing as one i put breaks in the text for them except that it's sort of the jumble of my consciousness about my well my upper being but also that the that year in vietnam which was really the probably the central event my life and  so it's you know and obviously i wrote it so many years after the fact that it's been jumbled around in my brain for that long so i thought that the the actual writing itself should try to mirror that and rather than and i also happen to think that we tend to think of wars and in a kind of narrow traditionally narrative sense and once upon a time there was a war and and then and then you know and then there was peace and everyone lived happily ever after and and i think that's a fairy tale i thought it was very reminiscent of the book the things we carried by tim o'brien which is also about the vietnam war and which is also fragmentary and in that book tim o'brien argues it may actually be impossible to tell a true war story and so i wonder is your book a true war story well of course i think o'brien is being very funny and and before he dies he gets to say what why didn't someone says what you do that for and he says starting my life man and then he dies have never checked this but but it was reputed to be the largest irish neighborhood in new york city at the time i grew up with i was the son of irish immigrants and and all my friends had parents born in ireland and yeah and was very common to to hear people on the street speaking in irish accents and if you didn't read again you might say you were in ireland and it was that irish and you know the center of life was the church gaelic sports like hurling and irish football for neighborhood kids so all of us ever learned how to play any of this and so there was you know we were supposed to play baseball and basketball that's what we did and  you had to deal with the fact of military service and everybody in my generation did something that determined his later life based upon the fact that there was a draft you know what if by that i mean if they decided there's no way in heck i'm going to be an uncle sam's military well i'm going to do something that gets me out of it and that just might be a career step you know for example when one of my best friends is actually instituted a lottery system for their but by that time i had been spoken for by my uncle sam so when did you find out that you would have the title of adviser when i got my  military operations but if you got something to actually as an intelligence officer you were almost certainly going to be an advisor but i think there's a great shrewdness in the militaries of appointment advisors you know there was not not any you know we were just able bodies that they were putting in certain places and presumably because we had college degrees and we should be smarter than the average bear but i don't know you know a draftee and i don't think any advice at all about the military i think it was struck your shoulders and do what you got to do and that's it you know it was there was no  strong anti communists that some people or they were i think every actually talked about it much you know and that's despite the fact that godless communism was all the rage in the fift s and and great fears about it and and that was certainly the impetus for service but for some people in my neighborhood in new york city which was that you know the got that the crusade against godless communism showcase province for all the wonderful things that were supposed to be happening in terms of winning the war so i was in on that province team wow so what exactly was your role can you give us some examples of the b burns who was my boss who spent his life being a political science professor and at south dakota state university and that's my boss i was the oh i'd say sixty to seventy people in this in the city itself and we were involved in it and everything we had said it was on the team there was an agricultural advisor there was a medical advisor there were  officers for example when i was in charge of psychological operations it was the psychological operations advisor and he was i think some sort of retired or former journalist pulled in tight security around those bases because obviously they were a major target for the for the of a calm them so what we did was focused on making sure that the plains state shot down yes yeah would you be willing to read excerpts transcribes that episode i think it's quite chilling as well as beautifully written to that's the first time that i ever said love and i put on my headset and started talking to him and i could tell he was from the ark and before you know it we were talking about barzan in wood which is our was in every silence for a few minutes the range of the v c in their bunkers and the choppers coming to our rescue were minutes away with a place that should have been flush with rice ready for harvest the war didn't like affe thank you so what made you decide to write this book and when did you start talking about vietnam you know over the years i tell my wife a story a tale here and there and she always said you have to write that down you have to write that down i say yeah  maybe maybe you know i'm actually happy to something got into me i'd say five years ago six years ago one of my colleagues john brags about my case about this for years to to write this to me and  because i tell him a story here and there and i know it's just to save the time to do it i couldn't have written this book after the war because a lot of what's they were confidential documents declassified so i certainly could have written it written this five years afterwards they were probably declassified sometime i would guess twenty years ago and so forth so i was able to get access about my fellow advisors was that they were equally skeptical about what we were doing you could advise her and think we were really winning the war well well listen it's a fantastic read i really recommend it to all our listeners thank you for being with us today and again the book is to vietnam in vain memoir of an irish american intelligence advisor one nine hundred sixty nine one nine hundred seventy at hagan thanks so much for joining us thank you for having me christine thank you