Needham Veteran Explores Faith, Service

March 5, 2025
• Following the publication of his first book in 2019, Tom Keating shares memories of war, his first interactions with television and more in 15 short stories, real and fictional.

Tom Keating’s latest book opens with a familiar New England scene: a farm stand. Just as local farmers offer an array of goods and produce, Keating promises readers “a little bit of everything.”

In “Elephants, Secrets and Submarines,” Keating criss-crosses between fictionalized stories and real accounts that span decades in his life, from growing up in Connecticut to military service in Vietnam to adult life in Massachusetts. Keating, a Needham resident, shared excerpts from the collection at a book launch at the Center at the Heights Wednesday.

“Stories take you places. Stories help you remember things,” Keating said to attendees, “and that’s what I tried to do with this book.”

It’s not Keating’s first time sharing those stories. “Yesterday’s Soldier,” published in 2019, details his deployment to Vietnam following his life in the seminary, where he studied to become a priest. Keating serves as chaplain at the Needham VFW Post 2498.

Faith plays a central role in both Keating’s memoirs and short stories. He reminisces on his Catholic grammar school days — when the discovery of old baseball uniforms leads Sister Helena to form a team — and recalls an overseas friendship with a Vietnamese woman cultivated over a rosary. In “The Little Black Rose,” Keating sets readers at a fictional Irish wake in South Boston.

Keating’s service during the Vietnam War — and life afterward — is equally present in his writing. In one piece, he writes that, after returning stateside in 1970, the first time someone welcomed him home was in 1982 at the dedication of a veterans memorial.

“Soldiers in Vietnam called home ‘back in the world,’” Keating wrote. “For us, the world was real life, the war we were fighting was another planet.”

Writing came naturally for Keating. He worked in television, developing scripts and communications to “make the big cheeses sound good,” Keating described. His professional foray into memoir began when he retired, and he delights in the fact that there’s still more memories and ideas to put down on paper.

“Elephants, Secrets and Submarines” took Keating several years to complete, he said.

“I knew I needed to get another book out,” he said after the talk. Some stories sat in his head for some time. “The whole thing about nuns doing things other than praying and teaching was a great story, so I’ve always had that in the back of my mind.”

Delving into fiction lended Keating the freedom to explore, though many convey the “essence” of his personal experiences and observances, he said.

Writing is “wonderfully creative,” he said, but it’s not without its challenges.

“You go through the edit process, which is very painful,” he said, “but when you see the final product, and after all the work, the catharsis is there.”

Queen Elizabeth and Bob Hope make appearances — the former via a grainy black and white television, which mesmerized a school-aged Keating, and the latter in the flesh, though a little too far away for Keating to spot.

The titular elephants, secrets and submarines show up across two stories, both retellings of Keating’s real experiences. The elephants may not be living, breathing ones, and the submarines come in two forms: German U-boats and a “yellow” one.

Keating, a 40-year resident of Needham, is already onto his next project: a murder mystery set in Needham, complete with the Commuter Rail and local restaurants — none of which go by their true names, though Keating assures future readers they’ll recognize the spots.

He spends more than two hours every morning spilling words onto his computer, unrestrained by an outline or structure. Keating credits his editor with perfecting the final draft, though his writing process sometimes consumes him.

“I’m going to bed at night, I don’t count sheep. I go ‘Can I move this paragraph here?’ and I go write something in my notebook next to the bed,” Keating said. “And when I wake up the next morning, I can’t read a thing.”

That’s likely how his nights will go for the foreseeable future.

“I have stories to tell, and I want to tell them,” he said. “This is a way to do it.”