The Charm School

central premise of
The Charm School.
    The book was well received when it was published in 1988, and became a bestseller. The publication of the book also added some fuel to the fire of the MIA controversy, raising this new possibility of the Soviets being part of a conspiracy.
    I received hundreds of letters asking me where I’d gotten this idea, what further information I had, and if I had any solid proof of what I’d written. Some of these letters were from families of MIAs and they were heartbreaking to read.
    I worked for a while with some POW/MIA groups, and without going into agonizing detail, we made little headway in discovering anything concerning the fate of the MIAs. But I, like others, was convinced that there were at least some MIAs being held in the Soviet Union.
    Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in the aftermath, there
were
some hints that Americans—not only from Vietnam, but from Korea as well—had been kept prisoner in the Soviet Union. But these sketchy reports from the former Soviet Union did not seem to pan out.
    I would have to say that after all this time since the collapse of Russian communism, and the relatively open society that now exists, that if a significant number of U.S. servicemen had been imprisoned or are still imprisoned in the former Soviet Republic, we would have known about it by now. Or would we?
    So, once again, is
The Charm School
relevant? I think, yes, if only because it accurately reflects those dark times when we all thought we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation. It is an insight into how we thought about the Evil Empire and how paranoid both sides were about the intentions of the other.
    In 1986, I went to the Soviet Union to do research for
The Charm School.
After spending all my life living under this real or imagined threat—air raid drills in grade school, Civil Defense shelters, Dr. Strangelove-type movies, and so forth—I had no idea what to expect.
    The reception at Moscow Airport was every bit as bad as I’d expected—too many questions, bag searches, bureaucracy, and general unpleasantness. I felt like I was in a Grade B Cold War movie.
    But after about a week in Moscow, I realized that the people and the system were more to be pitied than hated. I remembered an expression I’d heard or read that went something like, “Russia is a Third World country with first-class weapons.” The theoretical danger of a world war was real, but the actual possibility that the Russians were willing to roll the dice seemed somehow remote.
    By week two, in Leningrad, I became an instant expert on the Soviet Union and decided—either presciently as my reviewers would later say, or optimistically—that the Soviet Union had about ten years left before it imploded. I even made references to this in my novel, and without giving any page numbers where I said so, you can read for yourself where some of my characters make this prediction. As it turned out, the Soviet Union in 1986 had less than three years left to live. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Republics and eastern Europe sort of surprised me, but I wasn’t shocked.
    In retrospect, we can all be experts now and say we saw a wave of freedom sweeping the globe in the late 1980s—a new era of global information and communication and economic codependence, an unacceptable spiraling of weapons costs and an unwillingness of the people on both sides of the Iron Curtain to die in a needless war.
    We can spend the next decade analyzing the reasons for the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, but that may not be as important as trying to figure out where we’re all going from here.
    Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I’d written only two Cold War novels—
The Charm School
and
The Talbot Odyssey
—and my career and reputation weren’t tied closely to the continuance of the Cold War. Yet among some writers and some Cold Warriors, there is a certain nostalgia for the good old days when their services were needed and appreciated.
    And maybe, on a certain level, the old Us versus Them thrillers can be enjoyed and appreciated as nostalgia. On another more important level, a book like
The Charm School
can be read and appreciated as a warning that the past is often prologue to the future—because if we forget what we all went through between 1945 and 1989, we are likely to repeat it some time in the not-too-distant future.
    In any case, there must be something about this book that appeals