Tom Glenn's Blog, page 120

Rerun: What the Guys Say

After I learned that the Naval Institute Press would be publishing my novel, Last of the Annamese, in 2017, I sent copies of the ARC (advance review copy) to men who had seen combat in Vietnam. I wanted to know how they’d react.

They fed back to me a little at a time. I was moved by the mix of pride and pain they showed in their responses—pride that they stood their ground for their country and risked their lives for what they believed was right; and pain at remembering the gruesome experiences they went through in combat and the ugly welcome they received when they returned to the U.S. They, like me, were met by mobs who cursed them and spit on them.

They’re all younger than me. Almost all of them were 18 or 19 when they arrived in Vietnam. By the time I got there in 1962, I was already 25 with a wife and my first child. I’d finished my military service and was a civilian operating under cover as military. Most of the guys I knew went to Vietnam after 1964. When Saigon fell in 1975 (I was 38), most of them were still in their twenties.

So I was more mature than the guys I served beside on the battlefield. I looked so young that they assumed I was their contemporary when I was actually old enough that I qualified for the name “Pops” as they called men serving with them who were already in their mid-twenties. Worse, in civilian-to-military equivalency, I outranked their commanders. Nevertheless, once they saw that I was going to be with them through it all, even in combat, they accepted me and we worked together.

What I came to understand is how rough it must have been on them. I was older, more experienced. By the mid-sixties, I’d already been through combat; they hadn’t. Besides, they were fighters. I was there to support them with intelligence and was armed, at most, with a pistol. They were there to kill or be killed. I struggle with my own memories and my recurring attacks of Port-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). How much worse it must be for them.

I do sense their pain, and I understand their unwillingness to talk about their memories. But I also feel—and share in—their pride. To paraphrase Ike in Last of the Annamese, they did what they had to do, whatever it took. I salute them and honor their pride.

 

Rerun: Could the U.S. Have Won the Vietnam War? (2)

When Creighton Abrams took over the command of U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1968, he altered the way the U.S. fought to stress working with the population, shifting the focus from body counts to population security, that is protecting the people from the Communists. He emphasized small unit operations aimed at defending villages and hamlets, forcing the North Vietnamese to attack U.S. forces in places and at times advantageous to the U.S.

His approach showed promise. But by then the U.S. population had turned against the war, and, after the peace accords of 1973, Congress eventually stopped even our air support to the South Vietnamese and withheld weapons, supplies, and funds from the South Vietnamese military, who were totally dependent upon us for resources. That assured that the North Vietnamese would win the war.

Whether the U.S. could have had the wisdom to shape Vietnamese politics so as to assure democracy and the rule of law in South Vietnam is another question entirely. And on that question hinges whether we could have achieved political victory. But militarily, we were turning things around when the people of the U.S. decided the war must end, even if that meant shame and defeat.

That said, if we as a nation have learned nothing else from our failure, let us learn not to abandon the allies who have fought at our side and leave them to the mercy of our joint enemy. Our actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—where we abandoned the Kurds who had fought by our side for years—suggest to me that we have not learned that lesson.

What does it take for us to learn the lessons of our failures?

 

Rerun: Could the U.S. Have Won the Vietnam War?

This blog post is the first of a series of reruns, reconsideration of texts from two to three years ago. All the reruns represent to me subjects well worth revisiting. I start with whether we could have won the Vietnam war.

To me, the final days during the fall of Saigon, before I escaped under fire the night of 29 April 1975, were hours of shame. Not only did the U.S withdraw from Vietnam in disarray, we also abandoned our allies who had fought at our side. Was that defeat inevitable?

Militarily, no.

Until 1968, the U.S. had followed the Westmoreland strategy of search and destroy, assuming that if we killed enough Vietnamese Communists, they would give up. We underestimated the will of North Vietnam to win the war no matter what the cost, and we failed to understand how the North Vietnamese fought the war. Ho Chi Minh had told the French, “It will be a war between and elephant and a tiger. If the tiger ever stands still, the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war of Indochina.”

More succinctly he said, “You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, and in the end it is you who will be exhausted.”

More tomorrow.

Vietnam Veteran Lapel Pin

I have and wear with pride the Vietnam Veteran Lapel Pin. It’s a small round pin less than an inch in diameter featuring an eagle’s head in the middle against a background of stars and stripes. Around the perimeter are the words, “Vietnam War Veteran.” On the back is embossed, “A Grateful Nation Thanks and Honors You.”

I take fierce pride in my many years of service under cover in Vietnam between 1962 and the fall of Saigon in April 1975. But that’s a recent development. For decades, I never mentioned Vietnam or my service there. During the war and for many years afterwards, Americans considered Vietnam a shameful war. Those of us who engaged in it were denounced and shunned. When I came back to the U.S. with the troops, mobs met us. They called us “butchers” and “baby killers.” They spat on us. I was shamed to the depths of my soul.

That all started to change six or seven years ago when new generations of Americans born after the war ended wanted to know more about it—what happened and why? And in 2016, my work in Vietnam was declassified. I could speak openly about what I did there.

These days, in addition to writing about Vietnam, I do presentations about my experiences in-country. Most recently I have offered a talk with slides about Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). I very much want people to know how and why I and others who went through combat suffer from that malady. It is not a symptom of shame and weakness. If anything, it’s the opposite: only those brave enough to put their lives on the line for their country are subject to PTSI.

I also do a presentation on the 1967 battle of Dak To in the Vietnam highlands, one of the bloodiest battles of the war. But my most popular talk is on the fall of Saigon from which I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets.

The men who fought by my side and I deserve the honor the lapel pin conveys. I will continue to wear it with justified pride.

New Book Review

My review of The Mountains Sing, a novel set during the wars in Vietnam by a Vietnamese poet, is now available online. You can read it at
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-mountains-sing-a-novel

​I invite your reaction and comments.​

Vietnamese Children

Images that stay in my mind from my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam are of Vietnamese children. I saw them everywhere I went. They captivated me in part because of their tininess. On two of my tours in Vietnam, I had my wife and children with me, so I had examples of both races, the Vietnamese and the Americans, for direct comparison. Vietnamese babies and toddlers of the same age as my children were half their size.

The Vietnamese, on average, were much smaller than the Americans. Our GIs regularly referred to them as “the little people.”

Aside from their size, Vietnamese children struck me as being far cuter than American children. They smiled and giggled easily, and they were regularly frightened of westerners because we were so much bigger than they were. Time after time, I’d reach out to a little one only to have them scoot away to their parents for protection from what must have looked to them like a giant.

I know that many children died during the conquest of South Vietnam by the communists from the north. Some were trampled to death by the mobs that overflowed Saigon at the end of April 1975. Others were killed when the North Vietnamese shelled the city.

But many survived the war. It’s faintly shocking to me to realize that those little ones are now old enough to be grandparents.

Do What You Have to Do, Whatever It Takes

I heard those words in Vietnam from soldiers and Marines. I understood them to mean that a warrior must do his duty, even if it costs him his life. Those same words became the underlying motto of my novel set during the fall of Saigon, Last of the Annamese. They drive the actions of the protagonist, a retired Marine officer, and his housemate, an active duty Marine captain.

Hanging in an honored spot in my piano room is a large color photo of the last pair of combat jungle boots I wore in Vietnam. I wasn’t in the military in Vietnam. I was a civilian employee of the National Security Agency (NSA). I was there to furnish signals intelligence to U.S. forces. Between 1964 and 1973, when U.S. military forces were withdrawn, I was regularly on the battlefield supporting army and Marine units in combat. I was under cover as military. I wore the uniform—and boots—of an enlisted man assigned to the unit. I slept beside the troops on the ground, ate C-rations sitting in the dirt next to them, used their latrines, and went into combat with them. I know that my work contributed to U.S. victories and saved lives. I did what I had to do.

That picture of my boots is captioned with the words, “Do what you have to do, whatever it takes.” The message implied is that the owner of the boots made the ultimate sacrifice and gave up his life on the battlefield. So many men I stood beside on the battlefield did just that. And they were just kids. The average age was nineteen. They died in ways so grisly before my eyes that today I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). That disorder is with me for life.

So those words, “Do what you have to do, whatever it takes,” are sacred to me. They, like my PTSI, will be with me always.

Saigon, April 1975: Mobs in the Streets (3)

When I escaped from Saigon on the night of 29 April 1975, the Air America Huey I was on—a small bird that could only carry a maximum of 14 people—was hit repeatedly by ground fire. I thought we’d crash, but we didn’t. In the pitch black and pouring rain, the little bird carried me out to the South China Sea where the U.S. 7th Fleet was cruising. The pilot flew straight to the Oklahoma City, the flag ship of the fleet. Above it he circled and circled, then finally, very slowly went down to land on the flood-lit helipad of the ship. He told me afterwards that he, a civilian Air American pilot, had never before landed on a ship.

I learned later that I was part of the largest helicopter evacuation ever attempted. It lasted 19 hours, involved 81 helicopters, and moved more than 6,000 people.

Equally remarkable is that, as far as I know, no helicopters were lost during the operations. The North Vietnamese, by that time in and around Saigon, had plenty of weapons that could shoot down helicopters, so why didn’t they shoot us down?

I’ve concluded that they had no desire to kill more Americans and invite retaliation. They just wanted us gone.

But then who shot at the helicopter I was on?

It must have been the South Vietnamese military. We Americans were abandoning them to their fate at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Furious as being left behind, some of them turned their guns on us. They were among the mobs filling the streets of Saigon and surrounding the U.S. compounds.

I find the rage of those deserted understandable. They had risked their lives to fight by our side against the communists, and at the end we flew away and made no attempt to rescue them. The North Vietnamese killed many of them outright. Others they sent to “re-education camps,” really concentration camps where the death rate was very high.

So when I remember the terrified mobs in the streets as Saigon fell, I remember, too, the Vietnamese soldiers who fought next to us. I still grieve over their loss.

Saigon, April 1975: Mobs in the Streets (2)

On my last foray through the streets of Saigon in late April 1975, to go to the embassy to plead in vain with the ambassador for an evacuation, I got mobbed. I was driving the black limousine provided to me as an office head—I’d already evacuated my Vietnamese chauffeur. The mob that filled the street to overflowing blocked my way. They pounded on the car and screamed at me. I had with my .38 revolver. I pointed it out the windshield and bared my teeth. Those in front of the car backed off just enough that I was able force me way through.

That was my last trip out of the office. From then on, those of my subordinates still in Vietnam never left my office except to board a plane out of the country.

The compound that housed the DAO building—where our office was located—was surrounded by a chain link fence about two stories high that tilted out at the top with barbed wire. The mobs surrounding the compound outside that fence grew daily until they were ten to fifteen people deep. They wanted the Americans inside to get them safely out of the country.

Just before sunset on 28 April, five South Vietnamese pilots, who had defected to the North Vietnamese side, bombed the runways of the airport. That meant that fixed-wing aircraft could no longer take off; we’d have to depend on helicopters for evacuation. The North Vietnamese then began shelling Saigon—and our compound. Shells fell inside the fence. The building next door to us blew up. The Marine guards at our western gate were hit; two were killed.

The shelling frightened away the mobs surrounding us. Ironically, the North Vietnamese action achieved for us something we had not been able to do for ourselves: it cleared the mobs from around the compound allowing us to escape to the helicopters waiting to carry us out of the country.

I got my last two subordinates on a helicopter about 1400 (2:00 p.m.) on 29 April. I escaped under fire on a helicopter that night in pouring rain after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of Saigon.

My heart still goes out to all those people who tried so hard to escape the North Vietnamese and failed. They were the desperate mobs pleading with us. We flew away and left them behind.

More tomorrow.

Saigon, April 1975: Mobs in the Streets

As the North Vietnamese pushed their conquest of Vietnam further and further south in March and April of 1975, the people of Vietnam fled from them. Refugees by the tens of thousands abandoned their farms, villages, and cities and moved south ahead of the North Vietnamese. They looked to what was left of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and the U.S. to save them from the communists. They looked in vain.

I was in Saigon at the time heading the undercover U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) operation. As the streets of the city became more and more crowded with the fleeing refugees, I struggled to get my 43 subordinates and their wives and children—and my own wife and four children—safely out of the country. I knew it was only a matter of weeks at the most before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.

The U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, forbade me from evacuating my people and their families. He didn’t believe that the North Vietnamese would attack Saigon. I was intercepting North Vietnamese radio communications and knew that they intended to assault the city as soon as they could. Prohibited from sending my subordinates out  of South Vietnam, I decided to do it anyway.

So I lied, cheated, and stole to get my people out. Some I sent out on phony business travel, others on fake vacations, still others on trumped-up home leave. Fortunately, our office was in the Defense Attaché Office (DAO) building at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon adjacent to the airport. Even though mobs surrounded our compound, we were still able to force our way through to get to the terminals servicing outgoing aircraft. Getting my people from downtown Saigon, where they lived, to the airport four miles away on the northern edge of the city, was another story. It was tricky, difficult, and dangerous. But we did it.

Day by day, as the fleeing refugees flowed into Saigon, the streets were becoming more and more crammed; getting a car through grew riskier and more difficult. We were able to get people to the airport despite the mobs, but we knew we couldn’t do it much longer. By 20 April or so, we had gotten all our people out of the city. Most had left the country, but a few were still sleeping in the office.

More next time.