Autobiography
Stories…Self
Journey Into the Cold War
I grew up on a impoverished Wisconsin farm in the 1950s. Slavic and German immigrants told stories drinking whiskey and playing pinocle. With a child's ear, I listened as they told tales and hinted at war, starvation, and massacre.
A pause, a glance, a shake of the head; these were the fragments of truth they shared, teaching me early lessons in deception and the silences that speak volumes.
,We fought
The Townsends are Scots-Irish, rednecks, if you will, 'born fighting,’ winning and losing battles, into the dim past, before ancestors had last names. I am not big on genealogy; Perhaps, one day, when I’ve finished the novels…the fiction within, I will become more interested in reality.
The first written records (I’ve come across) note my great-grandfather, Lott Townsend, Company H of the 50th Georgia Infantry Regiment, known as the "Colquitt Marksmen.” The company was organized in Moultrie, Georgia — the county seat of Colquitt County — in early 1862.
The 50th Georgia Regiment participated in more than 45 engagements during the war. and included South Mountain, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. His TDY orders reflect a great deal of time convalescing, though whether disease or wounds is not noted.
Family oral history tells Lott Townsend's return from prison, walking from a camp on Lake Erie, barefoot and on foot, in winter (uphill both ways?). He married five times, had twenty-seven children, and became a Baptist preacher.
My grandfather was in France on his way to the front when the Armistice was declared, stole his issue rifle, and returned to northern Florida doing this and that, and was murdered for some minuscule amount.
My father, Ernest L. Townsend, fought in the Pacific from Guam to Okinawa and was perched on the beach to land on Kyushu when the A-Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He didn’t talk much…none of them did…save among themselves: a pause, a glance, a shake of the head, a tattered Bronze Star commendation. We children lurked in the doorway. There was the medical corpsman conscientious objector who was a Medal of Honor winner(It was Desmond Doss, around whom Mel Gibson made the movie Hacksaw Ridge), the Japanese women leaping from the cliffs to their deaths…the destroyers in the straits blowing sky high under suicide bomber attack. The veterans shared fragments of truth, filling in the details silently, from their own fragmented experiences, teaching me early lessons in deception and the silences that speak volumes.
I, of course, went to Vietnam, and perhaps we’ll talk about that some other time.
My daughter served in the First Gulf War, and has suffered since from outdated inoculations and the befouled air from blown oil wells.
(This page will always be a work in progress.)
In 1965, I left the farm for the University of Wisconsin (UW Alumnus Interview ). My world expanded dramatically, from 200 miles to a new reality of brilliant New Yorkers, intense political debates, and anti-war riots.
I chose to study the Russian language, hoping to fill in the unspoken pauses of my childhood visitors. Football was replaced by books, and my simple worldview was challenged by the complex philosophies of Malraux and Dostoevsky and the harsh history of Robert Conquest. My certainties began to dissolve in the tear gas and debate of campus life.
The Long War Within
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A Worldview Evolves:
My studies and the tumultuous world taught that truth was a fluid, shifting concept. I came to know that the Communist and Fascist ideologies were two sides of the same coin. Both implemented industrial-scale genocide.
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Serving in the Shadows:
In 1969, I joined the Air Force intelligence and became a Soviet specialist, serving in posts along its long perimeter. My specialty was KGB/GRU deception and maskirovka. The role fit my unique perspective on truth and lies.
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Revisiting the Battlefields:
…and left the military in 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. My writings revisit these battlefields of the mind, characters navigating amongst deceits and truths compromising between survival and conscience.
The Long War Series
The Long War series follows four lives through this shadowed struggle. It is a story told not only on the battlefield, but in the secrets, lies, and hearts of those caught between nations. It is a tale of an American soldier, a Canadian classical pianist, a Soviet GRU agent, and a Russian storyteller.
