My Legacy

I don’t have children, so I have no legacy that way. When I’m gone, my wife will probably return to her village in Thailand. She’s 57, sixteen years younger than me, so she’s still working, but I doubt she’d stay here alone.

I thought my legacy might be my writing or what comes out of that, but now I’m not so sure. My publisher has a new author consultant who’s willing to talk, so I made a thirty-minute phone appointment for April 27th. I’m not selling any books on Amazon, but I might be selling some kindle books. At least my ranking on Amazon went up last week from four millionth to 260,000th. But now it’s going back down.

I may not have been in the military or Vietnam during that war, but I thought I learned some things in Thailand which were of value. And then when I learned a movie called Volunteers was coming out, I really thought it was mine, but, since I wasn’t involved in the production, I knew it must have been changed.

My need to get out the truth was surely a motivating factor, especially when I learned the idea for the movie had originated in 1979, the same year Bob Shanks in Hollywood suggested I send him my manuscript. So the movie, starring Tom Hanks, John Candy, and Rita Wilson, was comedy movie about some Peace Corps volunteers who were building a CIA bridge in Communist infested Thailand, and my story was also about how the CIA shut down my Peace Corps projects in Communist sensitive Thailand. The movie was a farce, but pretty much everything to do with what I write about seemed like a farce. Even I tell people this, they might want to see the movie, but they don’t want to read about what really happened. People want to be entertained, and I can’t entertain like Mr. Hanks. Still, I have to believe that God was and is in control.

As a missionary to Thailand told me in 1985 “Thais love lies.” Now that sounds a bit ethnocentric and/or maybe like cultural bigotry, but I finally had to admit that what he said was true. Of course, Americans lie as well, but I think we lie in a different way. The Thais often lied to avoid causing loss of face, either their own or someone else’s, and, when American’s lie, they often believe they’re fighting for the truth. That is, If I can make some gross generalizations. And I think a lot of us lie to ourselves about our motives.

So I wrote this all down, and it seems kind of rash.

lying, Tom Hanks, Volunteers