Tom Glenn's Blog, page 114

The Vietnam War: Sacrifice for Nothing (2)

What did we get in exchange for those killed during the Vietnam war? Nothing. The communist North Vietnamese won the war and today rule all of Vietnam.

As regular readers of the blog know, I was in Vietnam for the better part of thirteen years. My job was signals intelligence support of U.S. troops in combat, both army and Marine Corps, all over South Vietnam. After the withdrawal of U.S. military forces in 1973, I headed the covert National Security Agency (NSA) operation in Vietnam and escaped under fire when Saigon fell in April 1975—as I have just detailed here in a series of blog posts under the rubric “The Sad Month of April.”

I will always be grateful that I was never wounded during my years in combat, during the fall of Saigon, or in any of my assignments after 1975 (still classified). Granted, coincident with my escape from Saigon, I came down with amoebic dysentery and pneumonia. Worse, I developed a malady we didn’t have a name for back then, Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). That’s a sickness that is never cured. The sufferer must learn to cope with the flashbacks, nightmares, irrational rages, panic attacks, and depression.

I wish I could look back in pride at what my sacrifice during the Vietnam war bought for our nation, but I can’t. We gained nothing and lost much. In the process, the war we engaged in caused well over a million deaths. The American people considered it a shameful war. And we behaved shamefully at its end, abandoning allies who had fought by our side.

Did we learn by our mistake? Not as far as I can tell. Following our military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, we forsook our allies and withdrew, leaving the men who were our partners to their fate at the hands of our enemies. Our sacrifice and theirs were far greater than any benefit gained.

So our wars have cost us greatly and achieved little. When will we ever learn?

The Vietnam War: Sacrifice for Nothing

I am constantly reminded of the American ignorance of the horror of war. No American now living remembers the last time we had war on out own territory, the Civil War, and a fraction of a percent have experienced combat.

According to one estimate from Wikileaks, only 1 percent of the U.S. population serves in the military. Of those, 10 percent see combat. So a tenth of 1 percent of Americans living today have experienced fighting on the battlefield.

And our knowledge of the Vietnam war is shallow at best. So often during my presentations, people ask me whose side we were on. Most people don’t recall when the war was or what year Saigon fell. Some are uncertain where Vietnam is.

But the Vietnam war, like all wars, took a huge toll of human life. Wikileaks estimates that allied forces suffered 282,000 killed during the Vietnam war. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong dead totaled 444,000, and civilian deaths were 627,000.

And why did we fight that war? What was our goal? Different Americans offer different reasons. My memory from the time is that our purpose was to defeat communism. But none of us could define communism.

More tomorrow.

The Sad Month of May 1975 (2)

When she returned to Maryland in July 1975, my wife was cool and distant. She acted as though the fall of Saigon and the end of her ideal life as Mrs. Chief (I had been head of the covert National Security Agency [NSA] operation in Vietnam) were my fault. She’d had an ideal existence filled with shopping and tennis and diplomatic teas and coffees. Now she would have to return to the life of a housewife and homemaker.

Her message to me was clear: my health and well-being and even my love for her were matters of no concern to her. At my time of greatest need, when my physical and spiritual illnesses were at their height, she turned her back on me. The marriage was over.

The divorce proceedings didn’t occur until several years later. Just as I took the witness stand to state my grievances against my wife, a neighbor of ours appeared in the courtroom with my daughter, Sarah. Their arrival was timed to coincide with my testimony. I clammed up. I wasn’t about to bear witness to my wife’s betrayals in front of one of her children. The end result was that I lost heavily. My wife was awarded sole ownership of the family house and a hefty monthly alimony.

The end of the marriage left me a poor man. I found a place to live in the attic of a mansion in northwest Washington, D.C. The house, which overlooked Rock Creek Park, was owned by a couple who rented out rooms to single men. I was one of six living there. At the time I was on assignment at the Intelligence Budget Staff located in the New Executive Office Building next to the White House, and I was able to get to work on the metro.

My time as an intelligence budgeteer and a tenant in a joint house form the basis for my latest novel, Secretocracy, but I set the story during the Trump administration because the fate of the protagonist—attacked by the president for refusing to fund an illegal operation—so closely matched what has actually happened since Trump became president. I’ll have more to say about that book and another one due to be published in July in future blog posts.

The Sad Month of May 1975

A reader asked what happened that led to the collapse of my marriage following my evacuation from Saigon in April 1975. Here’s the train of events:

When I arrived back in Maryland in mid-May 1975 after my evacuation under fire from Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the city, my wife and children weren’t there. They’d been touring the world, all through Asia and Europe since their evacuation from Saigon on 9 April and had just arrived back in the states. They were staying with my wife’s father in Massachusetts.

From the motel where I was staying, I telephoned my wife and asked her to come to Maryland as soon as possible. I needed her desperately. I was sick with amoebic dysentery and pneumonia, my hearing was damaged, and I was going through the worst stages of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI).

She told me she wouldn’t return to Maryland until our house, in Crofton, Maryland, was ready for her to move in. We had leased the house for three years to another family when we began our tour in Vietnam in 1974. I contacted the people living in our house and negotiated their departure at considerable expense to me. My wife and children finally returned to Maryland in July 1975. Meanwhile, I was left to cope with my illnesses on my own.

More tomorrow.

The Sad Month of April (19)

As irony would have it, Bob, Gary, and I were in more danger during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 than we realized. In 2010, the author George Veith interviewed me for information to include in his history of the loss of Vietnam, Black April (Encounter Press, 2013). At the time, my work in Vietnam was still classified, so there was little I could tell Veith. But he gave me new information I hadn’t been aware of. He had newly translated North Vietnamese documents. They revealed that before dawn on the morning of 29 April 1975, as Bob, Gary, and I waited at Tan Son Nhat to be evacuated, the North Vietnamese 28th Regiment was en route to attack us. But as the unit’s tanks passed over the last bridge into to Saigon before dawn, the bridge collapsed. The regiment was forced to take a detour and didn’t arrive at Tan Son Nhat until the morning of 30 April. By then, we were gone.

Had the regiment reached us on schedule, my communicators and I would have been at worst killed, at best taken prisoner. Because we were intelligence personnel—spies—torture and long incarceration would have been inevitable. That was the fate of a CIA employee, James Lewis, captured in mid-April when the coastal city of Phan Rang was overrun.

There, but for the grace of a fallen bridge, went I.

This post ends my series on the April 1975 fall of Saigon. Much of the text was drawn from my article published several years ago in the Atticus Review,  http://atticusreview.org/bitter-memories-the-fall-of-saigon/

The Sad Month of April (18)

As long as I live, I’ll suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) from my years in combat in Vietnam and the horrors I went through during the fall of Saigon. I still have occasional nightmares, and I can’t abide Fourth of July fireworks. But I’ve learned to cope. These days, on the whole, I’m rational.

On the positive side, for my work during the fall of Saigon, I was awarded the U.S. government’s Civilian Meritorious Medal. And a year or so after we were all safely back in the states, my guys invited me to a dinner in D.C. where they presented me with a plaque. Across the top are the words, “Last Man Out Award.” Below is a brass eagle and the following:

“The fall of Saigon will always remain a monumental tragedy in U.S. history. This is to finally recognize your exceptional leadership while safely evacuating all your employees and the closing down amid the danger and chaos of those final days.”

“[Signed] The Women and Men and Dependents of F46”

End of quote. “F46” was our unclassified designator.

That plaque now hangs in my dining room. I see it and remember every day.  The love I bear those men—and the feeling is too strong to call it anything short of love—has never weakened.

More next time.

The Sad Month of April (17)

None of the 2700 Vietnamese who worked with us escaped. All were killed or captured by the North Vietnamese when they took Saigon. Many could have been saved but for two factors: (1) The ambassador failed to call for an evacuation—by the time he was countermanded from Washington in the predawn hours of 29 April 1975, the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of Saigon. And (2) the general in command of those 2700 abandoned his troops. He was safely evacuated without doing anything to protect the troops subordinate to him. They were still awaiting his orders when the North Vietnamese attacked them.

Ambassador Graham Martin’s career was effectively ended by the debacle he authored in Saigon. He retired not long after the fall of Vietnam. Bob and Gary, my two communicators, survived and went on with their careers. Bob died about eight years ago, but as far as I know Gary is doing fine.

And me? Besides the pneumonia and dysentery, I sustained ear damage from the shelling, and I’ve worn hearing aids ever since. Worst of all, I suffer, even today, from a condition we didn’t have a name for back then—Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). It resulted not just from the fall of Saigon but from earlier experiences in the war. When I got back to the states, my marriage crumbled. The home I yearned for didn’t exist, and I was afraid I was going to lose my children, my reason for staying live. I knew I needed help, but my job was intelligence, and I had top secret codeword-plus intelligence clearances. Had I sought therapy, I would have lost my clearances, and therefore my job. I had to grit my teeth and endure the irrational rages, flashbacks, nightmares, and panic attacks. As it happens, my vocation and my need to help others saved me.

I have always been a writer, and I wrote and wrote and wrote about what had happened in Vietnam. That eventually led to three books, Friendly Casualties (2012), The Trion Syndrome (published in 2015 by Apprentice House of Baltimore), and Last of the Annamese (2017, published by the Naval Institute Press). I found out much later that one of the most effective therapies for PTSI is writing down the searing experiences. So to some degree, I healed myself.

Instinctively, I knew I had to help others who were worse off than I was. So I volunteered to care for AIDS patients during the years of that crisis, worked with the homeless, ministered to the dying in the hospice system, and finally worked with sick and dying veterans in the VA hospital in Washington, D.C. I learned that when I gave all my attention to suffering people, my unspeakable memories receded into the background. Compassion heals.

More tomorrow.

The Sad Month of April (16)

More about my time aboard the Oklahoma City after the fall of Saigon:

The sea, between and among the ships of the 7th Fleet and to the western horizon as far as I could see, was filled with boats—sampans, junks, fishing vessels, commercial craft, tugs, even what looked like large rowboats, each overloaded with Vietnamese waving and calling to the ships, wanting to be evacuated.

Someone found out I spoke Vietnamese and asked me to broadcast a message on a common frequency telling those in the boats that the ships of the 7th Fleet were already jammed to the rafters and couldn’t take any more onboard. It was true. The decks and stairwells were filled with people. Numb to the implications of what I was saying, I repeated the message four or five times before my voice gave way from coughing and I had to quit. Only later did I understand the consequences of what I had done. Many of those boats were so far from shore that they couldn’t make it back. Many didn’t make it back. The people on them perished at sea.

After circling for days, we finally set sail for Subic Bay in the Philippines in early May. Once there, I booked a flight for Hawaii because I knew I’d be required to brief Commander-in-Chief, Pacific—CINCPAC—about what had happened in Saigon.

When I arrived in Honolulu, still carrying the two flags from my Saigon office, an NSA official met me at the airport. Rather than congratulating me for getting out of Vietnam alive or asking if I was all right, he took one look at me and said, “You can’t be seen around here looking like that.” I was still in the clothes I’d been evacuated in and hadn’t shaved for days. I knew I’d lost weight, and my face was a map of lines. He assigned a subordinate to gussy me up. That guy took me to a barber and a good men’s clothing store to get a decent suit to brief the brass at Pearl Harbor.

That briefing didn’t go well. I couldn’t talk. I was coughing constantly. I couldn’t focus my eyes. I was sweating and felt like I was running a fever. When I sat down, I passed out.

I finally admitted to myself that I was suffering from more than exhaustion. For days, as the ships of the 7th Fleet circled, I’d done nothing but sleep. Despite that, I was getting worse. Any sensible person would have gone to a doctor immediately. But I didn’t. I can’t tell you how much I yearned to go home. Dressed in my new suit and tie, I booked the earliest flight possible for Baltimore. During the stopover between flights in San Francisco, I tried to find a doctor. But a physician’s strike was in progress, and no doctor would see me. I flew on to Baltimore. The day after I landed, I found a doctor who diagnosed me with amoebic dysentery, ear damage from the artillery shelling, and “pneumonia due to sleep deprivation, muscle fatigue, and poor diet.” He relished adding that heavy smokers are more susceptible to pneumonia than “normal people.”

More tomorrow.

The Sad Month of April (15)

More about the fall of Saigon forty-five years ago:

It was pitch black and pouring rain as the little huey carried me from Saigon to the U.S. 7th Fleet in the South China Sea on the night of 29 April 1975. I was conscious when we approached the USS Oklahoma City, flagship of the fleet. The pilot circled repeatedly before coming down very slowly on the ship’s small floodlit helipad. He told me later that he, a civilian employee of Air America, had never before landed on a ship.

As we got out of the slick into the lashing rain, flashbulbs went off and someone took my .38. But I wouldn’t give them the two flags I carried—the stars and stripes and the gold and orange flag of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) that had stood on both sides of my desk in my Saigon office. Those flags are now in Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Sailors immediately tipped our huey over the side and dumped it into the sea to make room for the next incoming helicopter. I faintly remember some kind of processing, answering questions and filling out forms, but I was only half there. The next thing I recall clearly is shivering—I was very cold. I was in a berth, a sort of canvas hammock, in a room lit only by a red bulb on the bulkhead. I could hear the ship’s engine, low and far away, and men above, below, and on all sides of me were sleeping in suspended berths.

I managed to get out of the berth and down to the deck. I discovered I could walk and found my way to the latrine where, still shivering, I brushed my teeth and showered for the first time in weeks. Somebody directed me to the wardroom where I ate a breakfast and a half, surrounded by the scruffiest mix of Vietnamese and Americans I had ever seen. Their clothes were torn and filthy. The men were unshaven, the women disheveled. In the midst was a distinguished older gentleman in a ruined suit, but his tie was still knotted at the throat.

When I’d eaten my fill and went on deck, it was daylight—I must have slept a long time. South Vietnamese helicopters flew close to the ship, cut their engines, and dropped into the sea. The pilots—and sometimes their families—were rescued and brought aboard as the choppers sank to the bottom.

More tomorrow.

The Sad Month of April (14)

Continuing my series of posts about the fall of Saigon in April 1975:

After I dispatched my last message to the director of NSA, General Lew Allen, Bob, Gary, and I destroyed out comms gear and crypto and locked the door as we left for the staging area.

The remaining events of 29 April are confused in my memory—I was in such bad shape from lack of food and sleep that I was starting to hallucinate. I know that, as the North Vietnamese shelling of Saigon continued, I begged Al Gray to get Bob and Gary out as soon as possible. I couldn’t tolerate the idea that, after all they’d done, they might be hurt, captured, or killed. Sometime in the afternoon, when finally they went out on a whirlybird en route to a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea, my work in Vietnam was finished. The last of my 43 subordinates and their families were safely out of the country.

I recall being locked in a room alone and told to wait until I was called for, trying to stay awake in my chair as the building pitched from artillery hits. I didn’t want to board a chopper until I got confirmation that Bob and Gary were safe on a ship of the 7th Fleet. And I wanted to get to a telephone to confirm that our Vietnamese counterparts were being evacuated. As far as I knew, they were still at their posts awaiting orders. But there was no telephone in the room, and I couldn’t leave because the South Vietnamese air force officers were still on the prowl in the hallways demanding evacuation at gunpoint.

The next thing I remember is being outside.

It was getting dark, and rain was pelting the helicopters in the compound. I protested to Al Gray that I wanted to wait for confirmation that my two communicators were safe, but he ordered me, in unrepeatable language, to get myself on the chopper now. I climbed aboard carrying with me the two flags that had hung in my office—the U.S. stars and stripes and the gold-and-orange national flag of the defunct Republic of Vietnam.

The bird, for some reason, was not a CH-53 but a small Air America slick, a little huey. As soon as we were airborne, I saw tracers coming at us. We took so many slugs in the fuselage that I thought we were going down, but we made it. All over the city below me, fires were burning. Once we were “feet wet”— over water—the pilot dropped us abruptly to an altitude just above the water’s surface, and my stomach struggled to keep up. It was, he explained to me later, to avoid surface-to-air missiles. All I remember of the flight after that is darkness.

More tomorrow.