Thomas Lucas
Raging Mice
Press Release
has completed his new book, “Raging Mice”: a thought-provoking
novel about the Vietnam war brings readers into an emotional and meaningful story.
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Thomas Lucas’s New Book, Raging Mice, is a Compelling and Impactful Novel about a Young Man Fighting During the Vietnam War.
“Raging Mice” from Newman Springs Publishing author Thomas Lucas is a reflective and intriguing fictional story about the life of a young man who is fighting for the United States in Vietnam. Thomas Lucas, a father, husband, Veteran, and professor, has completed his new book, “Raging Mice.” This thought-provoking novel about the Vietnam War brings readers into an emotional and meaningful story.
Through a Soldier’s Eyes: The Untold Vietnam Story
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The Book
Overview
In my eighteenth year, I was shipped to Vietnam, where I performed a variety of duties as a lower-ranking enlisted man from October 18, 1966 through October 25, 1967. My aim in this novel was to convey in a fictional account something of the truncated experiences I, and others like me, endured. Like millions of other young men, I submitted to the draft laws of the day. Like many of these young men, my motivations and attitudes were mixed and reflective of the conflicting cultural crosswinds of the time.
For many of us, there was a lack of that political and psychological clarity reminiscent of past wars such as the American Civil War and World Wars I and II. Many of the younger men, so recently boys, experienced an air of dislocation as well as surreality that sporadically punctuated the dull routines with unexpected events for which one can never quite be prepared.
By design, this fictional account offers no storybook consolation nor reassuring solutions. I tried to convey the attempts by young men from diverse backgrounds to cope and survive in an environment defined not by winning a war of “good versus evil” but by the steady clicking of an alarm clock, which measured each day of a twelve-month tour of duty.
Feeling little organic connection to a war officially described as a conflict, we were united not by any global imagination of East versus West or communism versus democracy but by the humble focus on staying alive until our personal “alarm clock” rang out the end of each soldier’s twelve-month sentence. We, like other generations of soldiers, doted on packages and letters from home while imagining a return to a world little changed despite the increasingly ominous snippets in the news to the contrary.
Our dislocation from the familiar begins abruptly when the arriving jetliner plunges through monsoonal clouds above Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Disembarking from the plane and from social upheavals at home, Rob plunges into a world that is foreign to his experience, full of jarring sights, sounds, and smells more akin to the kinds of dreams that awaken us in the night. He already understands that he has made the biggest mistake of his life. More unsure of himself than he has ever been, he must now submit to powers and controls far beyond his abilities to mediate.
Meet the Author
At age eighteen during the turbulent 1960s, the author volunteered for the draft and served a year in Vietnam, receiving a Combat Infantryman Badge and a Bronze Star for service. Upon returning home, he resumed his music career and his studies, eventually graduating summa cum laude and receiving the college-wide award in creative writing at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges. At the time, he began working on a manuscript titled “Idiots on Parade,” drawing on his experiences as a drafted soldier during the great buildup of American troops in 1966 and 1967. Plans at that time to sell his antiwar novel to a filmmaker broke down, suddenly raising questions that would be left unanswered. Lucas decided to shelve his controversial story and moved ahead with his career as a singer-songwriter. In the following years, he composed, recorded, and released four albums of original songs reflecting his hard rock roots: “Red Letter Day,” “Lifeboats,” “Millennial Sequence,” and “Rock Psalter.” While he pursued his music career publicly, he continued to devote his creative energies to fiction, poetry, and a one-act play, The Spectral Wedding, which was staged in Buffalo, New York, by the SUNY Buffalo actors’ workshop while Lucas was completing a master’s degree in creative writing. Working as a college professor of writing and literature for twelve years, he mentored numerous students while continuing to perform publicly. While teaching, he met and married his wife of thirty years, Lisa DeMarco, a math instructor. They had two children, Bianca and Blake (deceased), losing their beloved son Blake in a tragic MVA when he was eighteen and about to leave for his first year of college. Their daughter Bianca is a talented musician currently enrolled at Boston University. Lucas and his wife left teaching and studied at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where they
completed their master’s degrees in psychology and psychotherapy. For twelve years, he and his wife worked as psychotherapists in positions in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Throughout his life and career, Lucas supported numerous causes involving human rights and social justice. This included a stint working as a boycott organizer in New York City for the United Farm Workers in 1975. Since then he worked actively on other causes including the environment, nondiscriminatory housing, and equal educational opportunities for all. His second novel is finished and due for release in late 2023 or early 2024.
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Get in touch
- au.tomlucas@gmail.com