The Gift: Foreseeing the Future

A blog reader questioned me about Chuck’s gift for foretelling what the North Vietnamese would do next. How could that be? How did it work?

In Last of the Annamese, I describe Chuck’s ability to foresee the future with the sentence  “. . . he’d let his consciousness rove over patterns and trends and the flow of events until he knew what was going to happen next.” That depiction is derived from my own experience. How does it work? I have no idea. I discovered how to let my consciousness blur while I studied events. I’d let my mind wander over the data. Then, sometimes suddenly, I’d know what would happen next. I don’t know how I did it. Others with the same gift were equally puzzled.

One result was that we developed over the years a series of indicators. When the North Vietnamese did x, y followed. The system was too vague to be called scientific; it was intuition at work. I’ve always thought that the best analogy was the sense of smell: it was almost as if when a certain combination of scents appeared, I’d foresee the next event. My guess is that the gift springs from an ability to be in touch with one’s unconscious. That ability dominates my writing.

3 thoughts on “The Gift: Foreseeing the Future”

  1. I honestly cannot describe my gift. I view it as more of a curse than a ‘special gift’, I don’t even what the bloody thing. Whoever gave it to me can take the thing back!

    Who wants to know when they are going to lose their job or when someone is going to die? I just ignore mine and it causes me grief, even though I ignore it.

    I wish someone could give me some advice to just be rid of it!


    1. Thanks for your comment, Thomas. I understand you feeling completely. My only defense is that my ability to see what was going to happen next saved many lives, including my own, during the fall of Saigon and earlier in the war. My curse was that my forecasts at times weren’t believed, and people died.


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