V C Angell

You may wonder about my initials. My name is rather long and does not fit well in many places, so I use V C Angell. Okay, my name is Valentine Chauncey Angell. I earned the nickname in Vietnam of, "VC,” and almost everybody addresses me by that nickname. You are welcome to as well. It came about because I could speak a little Vietnamese, and my buddies enjoyed calling me VC in front of the natives. The natives were not too sure what to make of American G.I. by the name of VC. I am a disabled veteran not because of Vietnam, but because of an extremely hostile pile of logs on an obstacle course in Fort Sill Oklahoma. The original accident left me temporarily paralyzed. It was only many years later that accident caught up with me. The doctors explained to me that the spinal cord does not like to be mistreated the way I did mine.

After the Army, I worked 12 years in a postdoctoral lab at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a great job, but one day I found myself doing work on a project for DARPA called the "Automated Battlefield." As a veteran of Vietnam, I knew in good conscience I could no longer work there.

However, I did not give up my love of electronics, and I am still an amateur radio operator with the call KCØEM. The strange character, Ø, is that way to indicate the character is a number and not a capital O.

I am married with one son who is also married. He and his wife own a local store and also raise Arabian horses on their farm.

I have written everything from ad copy to novels. A poem from Vietnam earned me an award and has appeared in several anthologies of poetry from that era. I enjoy writing poetry, but writing poetry requires a real job someplace if you are to eat. The novel I republished in Kindle format is one that got good reviews, but sales have dropped to almost zero over the years. I thought it would be a good time to try the Kindle format.