Tom Glenn's Blog, page 117

A Quiet Cadence

I’ve just finished reading and reviewing the novel A Quiet Cadence by Mark Treanor (Naval Institute Press) due for publication on 15 June. I’ll post an announcement here when the review is published.

Treanor clearly meant his book for those in the know. The text is filled with Marine slang, military terms, and argot of the Vietnam war which the author never explains. Several times, he uses that fatalistic sentence that so characterized the outlook of those of us who fought: “There it is.” It means, that’s the way this war is, and we can’t change it. Even the meaning of the book’s title will be lost on those who don’t know life in the military. “Cadence” is the rhythm of military march.

More than half the text is devoted portraying combat. Treanor pulls no punches in describing the grisly damage to the human body inflicted on the battlefield. I grimly welcomed his gory depictions because I want people to know how unspeakable ghastly combat is. I want people to know what they are sending their young men to face when they decide we must go to war.

Because of the specificity and accuracy of Treanor’s portrayal of combat,  A Quiet Cadence aroused in me again the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) from my years in Vietnam. I recognized and remembered the smells, sights, and sounds of men fighting each other to the death. And, along with the protagonist, I lived through the shame and rage of crowds meeting us when we returned, calling us butchers and baby killers and spitting on us. I relived the tragedy of the fall of Saigon. My nightmares returned.

I’m giving the book a good review. I’m sure that even those among us who never spent time in Vietnam and never engaged in combat can profit from reading this novel. They will learn the horror of combat. We’ll all benefit from that.

The Shame of Vietnam

The U.S. loss of the Vietnam war was shameful in several ways.

The first was that the most powerful nation on earth, the U.S., could have been defeated by North Vietnam, called by Lyndon Johnson “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country.” As I’ve noted before in these pages, “we were baffled when, time after time, we set out to attack the enemy but found that he’d decamped before we got there. We never understood the North Vietnamese fighting strategy, summed up by Mao Tse Tung: ‘Enemy advances, we retreat. Enemy camps, we harass. Enemy tires, we attack.                   Enemy retreats, we pursue.’

“It’s telling that we won every major battle we were able to engage in during the war, but for the first time in our history, we lost the war. “

The second way the loss was shameful was our abandonment of our South Vietnamese allies during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. That desertion was personal to me. Some 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers worked with my organization. I was evacuated safely, but they were left behind to the mercies of the conquering North Vietnamese.

The third was our helter-skelter flight from Saigon as the North Vietnamese closed in on the city. The U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, refused to accept the evidence I gave him from intercepted North Vietnamese radio communications that we were about to be attacked. He never did call for an evacuation. By the time he was countermanded from Washington, the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city.

I fear that history will show that the U.S. is vain enough not to learn by its mistakes. Our withdrawals from Afghanistan, Iraq, and, most recently, Syria threw honor and trustworthiness to the winds.

Wisdom (2)

I have known since I was six years old that I was born to write. Not to write would be to invite damnation.

And in recent years, the importance of helping others has become dominant in my mind. All my life I have volunteered to work for the good of others. For five years during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, I worked with men dying of AIDS. Over a period of five years, I helped seven men, all gay. They all died. Then for several years I worked with the homeless. Next I spent seven years working in a hospice helping the dying. Through it all, I discovered that, unlike most people I knew, I could face death and minister to dying people. I had, after all, repeatedly faced death on the battlefield in Vietnam.

Then for a period of years, as my books began to sell, I was so busy with writing and presentations and readings that my volunteer work came to an end. I, in effect, stopped helping others and devoted all my time and strength to writing.

Now it’s time to return to helping others. I’ll certainly go on writing, but I’ve also volunteered to work in a hospice with the dying.

Wisdom, an active virtue, dictates that I use my remaining years for the good of others. One way to do that, strangely enough, is to write. People can learn from my stories and novels and improve their lives. Equally strange, helping others in the hospice will enrich my writing with experience and, most important, wisdom.

Wisdom

What is wisdom? According to Webster’s International Dictionary, wisdom is the intelligent application of learning. It is defined as the ability to discern inner qualities and essential relationships. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct. According to Wikipedia, wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence, and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.

The definition of wisdom is important to me. I’m in the last quadrant of life. What I do from now on will shape the importance and relevance of the life I have lived. I want this time to be defined by wisdom rather than knowledge.

The definitions of wisdom stress not only knowledge but action—doing something useful with the knowledge garnered earlier in life. I’ve spent much of my life gathering knowledge. I’ve earned multiple scholastic degrees including a doctorate. Now is the time for action.

In short, what do I do with all this knowledge and experience acquired over a lifetime? Two answers immediately spring to mind: write and help others.

More tomorrow.

The Sad Month of April (2)

On 9 April 1975 in Saigon, I loaded my wife and four children onto a plane headed for Bangkok. They were supposedly off for a vacation in Thailand. In fact, they were headed back to the U.S.

I was forced to employ the vacation ruse because the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, had forbidden me to evacuate my people. He insisted that no evacuations were necessary despite the overwhelming evidence I was supplying him from intercepted North Vietnamese radio communications that an attack on Saigon was imminent. The Hungarian member of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS) had told the ambassador that the North Vietnamese had no desire to assault the city. They wished, he assured Martin, to form a coalition government with all patriotic forces in South Vietnam and rule jointly. The ambassador believed the Hungarian representative and rejected my incontrovertible intelligence of a looming assault even though the Hungarian was a representative of a communist government allied to North Vietnam.

Prohibited by the ambassador from evacuating my 43 subordinates and their wives and children, I was determined to do it anyway lest they be killed when the attack on the city was launched. I used every ploy I could think of to get them out. I sent my people out on phony business travel, fake home leave, and imaginary vacations. By the end of April, I had evacuated 41 subordinates and their families. The last two of my guys were still with me. They were communicators who had volunteered to stay with me to the end.

My wife didn’t want to leave Saigon. She enjoyed to the hilt the role of Mrs. Chief (I was the head of the NSA clandestine operation in South Vietnam). Because we had servants, including an amah to look after the children, she was free to go to coffees and teas, shop, and play tennis full time. She even used my limousine and chauffeur. When I first told her in early April that she and the children must leave, she was not persuaded. That morning, she had been to a coffee at the embassy. Officials has assured her and the other dependents that rumors of a forthcoming on Saigon were false.

She finally agreed to go on three conditions she named: First, she could choose her own date of departure. I said fine, as long as it was within the next five days. Second, she and children would tour the world on the way back to the states—take a month, two months, however long she wanted. I agreed. Third, when she got home, she wanted to buy a brand new Buick station wagon. Once again, I agreed.

When I saw that plane carrying my family headed out of Saigon on 9 April 1975, I was greatly relieved. My wife and children were safe. I turned my full attention to facing the fall of Saigon.

I’ll post more as we move through April.

The Sad Month of April

This month is the 45th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Most days this month recall to me the events that led up to that calamity.

Today is no exception. As I reported earlier in this blog: “On 8 April 1975, a South Vietnamese pilot, who was secretly a North Vietnamese agent, flew his F4E Phantom fighter jet out of the formation that had just taken off and headed into Saigon. He bombed the Dinh Độc Lập (Presidential Palace), not far from our villa.

“My wife was at that time preparing herself and my four children to leave South Vietnam. It was already clear to me that the North Vietnamese would assault Saigon soon as the last step in their conquest of South Vietnam, and I was rushing to evacuate all my subordinates and their families as well as my own wife and children. Our villa was close to the Presidential Palace in downtown Saigon. My wife and the children were terrified   . . .

“As I learned much later. the pilot who did the bombing was Nguyễn Thành Trung. He was a North Vietnamese plant in the South Vietnamese Air Force. He had trained in the U.S. All through his time in service he was waiting for an opportunity to avenge the death of his father at the hands of South Vietnamese troops. After bombing the palace, he escaped to a safe zone held by North Vietnamese troops in Phước Long Province.”

That bombing was just the first blow. Many more would follow.

The Use of Smell in Fiction

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and am finishing Mark Treanor’s A Quiet Cadence, a novel I’m reading for review. I’m struck by how often both authors depend on aromas to create an emotional effect. Treanor’s use of smells is particularly effective for me because his story is about Marines in Vietnam. More than half the text describes combat. Treanor’s descriptions match my memory: the odors of the battlefield—smoke, gunpowder, sweat, churned dirt, burned flesh, human waste—were overwhelming.

My first reaction to the use of smell to invoke an emotion was to find it strange. After all, we humans first and foremost depend on sight to determine what is going on around us. Hearing stands in when we can’t see. The sense of touch gives us data about textures and surfaces. Smell seems to be our weakest link with physical reality.

What I overlooked was what seems to me to be the close link between smell and emotion. I have no data to base my belief on, but it appears to me that scents spark emotions more quickly than sights or sounds do. I can report about myself that a smell spurs a feeling more readily than something I see or hear. So often these days, for example, when I step outside, I smell smoke from a wood fire. I’m immediately alarmed, afraid that a house is burning. When my reason kicks in, I realize that what I am smelling is somebody’s fireplace. I instantly intellectualize stimuli seen or heard, but I can’t do that for aromas.

At the same time I was reading the Atwood and the Treanor novels, I was doing a final read-through of the finished text of my novel, Secretocracy for publication. I was surprised to discover that I, too, rely on scents to trigger emotions. How odd that I was never consciously aware that I was doing it.

Once again the way the human mind works amazes me. So much in the creative process goes on in the unconscious. As an artist, I am better off to let that process play out without too much directed attention on my part. I already know that to release my creative juices, I need to put myself in a meditative state so that my unconscious can feed inspiration to my conscious mind. Turns out that’s happening even when I don’t try to do it.

Another Book Review

My review of Benjamin Runkle’s Generals in the Making has just been published. It’s posted at https://internetreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2020/03/generals-in-making.html  Please let me know what you think.

Two Quotes

The Washington Post of 5 April features two articles on the front page about the disaster that resulted from President Trump’s failure to react forcefully to the coronavirus pandemic. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.”

“President Trump downplayed the coronavirus threat, was slow to move and has delivered mixed messages to the nation. The federal bureaucracy bungled rapid production of tests for the virus. Stockpiles of crucial medical materials were limited and supply line cumbersome. States and hospitals were plunged into life-and-death competition with one another.”

I avoid political opinions in this blog, but this is beyond politics. It’s a matter of huge numbers of Americans dying. We are heading toward an unparalleled disaster largely because of the indifference and incompetence of our president. His apparent view is that restoring the economy and particularly avoiding problems in the stock markets that might hurt his chances of re-election are more important than saving lives.

The Republicans in Congress continue to support Trump. That makes them complicit in Trump’s deeds and guilty of damage to the U.S. leading to unprecedented death rates.

Trump and his Republican supporters must be removed from office. Apparently the earliest we can do that is next November’s election.

Let’s do it.

Rerun: My Brothers

It’s now April, always a sad month for me. It’s the 45th anniversary of the month that Vietnam fell to the communists. I’m spending time these days remembering my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam and the men I served beside on the battlefields.

I call them men. The soldiers and Marines were so young that, in my memory, they seem more like children. Yet they died on the battlefield. Does their death in combat qualify them as full-fledged men?

My kinship for veterans seems to grow stronger each year. Most vets I meet are so different from me that we have trouble finding things to talk about.

I’m a retired spy, a writer with a PhD., with four books in print and two more coming out this year. I have been comfortable speaking seven languages other than English. I hold a BA in music and play Bach on the piano.

The vets I meet at the American Legion and veteran events are every-day guys, many of them blue-collar, down-to-earth, unassuming. They don’t have much money and don’t need much for the lives they lead.

We couldn’t be more dissimilar. And yet the bond I feel for them and from them is deeper and stronger than our differences. They know what it is to serve selflessly. These men have a quiet nobility that outshines any other qualities they may have.

These men are my brothers, and I will always honor them.