Tom Glenn's Blog, page 123

Why I Have PTSI (2)

I called those who died by my side in combat men. They were really boys, eighteen and nineteen years old. Some had never before been away from home when were drafted or enlisted. Some looked to me like they had barely started shaving. They considered me, then in my late twenties and early thirties, an old man.

And then there was the enemy. The North Vietnamese soldiers were as young or younger than the American soldiers, and they looked like children. They were much smaller than the Americans. It felt like we were fighting and killing little kids. And their deaths were as gruesome as those of the Americans.

One incident I can talk about. Through signals intelligence, I targeted an enemy unit. Our side was victorious. After the clash was over, we went to the spot where the unit had been deployed. Most of the bodies were gone—the North Vietnamese made a point of taking their dead and wounded from the battlefield. But we found one body. It was a little guy—he wouldn’t have come up to my shoulder standing tall. In his pocket, I found a letter. Since I knew Vietnamese, I was able to read it. It was from his wife in North Vietnam. With it were snapshots of a tiny smiling woman holding a grinning toddler. I had been instrumental in killing a young father.

During the fall of Saigon, it was the ghastly deaths of civilians that stained my soul. People were trampled to death by panicking mobs. Others died from North Vietnamese artillery shelling. I was caught in the shelling. It damaged my hearing. Ever since, I’ve had to wear hearing aids.

More tomorrow.

Why I Have PTSI

I’ve just completed editing on an article on Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) by a former Navy corpsman who served with the Marines in Vietnam in 1967. In the article he describes what he went through on the battlefield that left his soul in tatters. During the final read-through of the edited article, I remembered questions readers of this blog have asked me: what happened to me that caused my own case of PTSI?

Most of it I still can’t bring myself to talk about. The events that wounded my psyche came from my repeated signals intelligence support to troops in combat, both Marine and army, all over south Vietnam, between 1964 and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1973; and from living through the fall of Saigon in April 1975, escaping under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city.

Men fighting by my side were killed in ways so grisly that only those who have experienced combat can understand. Sometimes so little was left of them that the survivors were hard put to find enough to put in a body bag.

One of the factors in my PTSI is that I was so emotionally close to the men who were killed. The strongest bond I have ever experienced is that between men who fight side by side on the battlefield. These were men I was living with, sleeping on the ground next to them, sharing C-rations with them, using their latrines, going into combat with them. To have them so hideously killed by my side shook my grip on sanity.

More tomorrow.

Corporations That Pay No Tax

At least 60 of the nation’s biggest corporations paid no federal income taxes in 2018 on a collective $79 billion in profits, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) reports. I have no figures for 2019, but the numbers haven’t gone down any.

ITEP reported that the following companies paid no federal taxes in 2018: Netflix, Amazon, Chevron, Delta Airlines, Eli Lilly, General Motors, Gannett, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Halliburton, IBM, Jetblue Airways, Principal Financial, Salesforce.com, US Steel, and Whirlpool. The complete list is at https://itep.org/notadime.

I reported a day ago that our national debt is now bigger than out gross national product. One reason that the well-to-do and corporations pay little to no tax is the $1.5 trillion tax cut of 2017.

Isn’t it time for the American people to do the math and elect a Congress and president who will take steps to correct this appalling situation?

The U.S. National Debt

An emergency I never hear about is our national debt. By the end of 2019, it had exceeded $23.16 trillion—federal debt held by the public at the end of the year was $17.26 trillion and intragovernmental holdings were $5.9 trillion. That means that our national debt is now bigger than our gross domestic product. That hasn’t been the case since the end of World War II . Interest payments on the debt are now estimated to be 8.7% of all federal outlays.

Part of the reason is the $1.5 trillion tax cut of 2017 that decreased the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Another reason is the continued addition of more and more spending.

Meanwhile, in less than 20 years, the Social Security Trust Fund won’t have enough to cover the retirement benefits promised to our aging population. That could mean higher taxes because the high U.S. debt rules out further loans from other countries, but a Republican Congress is more likely to curtail benefits than raise taxes.

In short, we Americans have a serious problem on our hands. The sooner we reduce government spending and/or raise taxes, the better. We’ll need to proceed with care.

My Eric Hoffer Book Awards

I recently noticed that some time ago—more than a year—I left unfinished the story of my books that have received the Eric Hoffer Book Award. That award, among the many my books have received (I have a whole wall in my office dedicated to literary awards), went to two of my books, No-Accounts and Last of the Annamese.

No-Accounts received the award, an Honorable Mention, in 2017. That novel drew on my experience in taking care of AIDS patients at the height of the crisis. Over a period of five years, I had seven patients—all gay, all died. Their lives and deaths moved me so much that I wrote a novel about straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS. It is my only published book not about Vietnam.

Last of the Annamese was awarded the runner-up Eric Hoffer Book Award in 2018, that is, the second-place prize. Annamese is another fiction-in-name-only novel. It tells the story of the fall of Saigon. Every event related in the book actually happened.

Evidence to date suggests that in my novels telling stories of events that really happened works well for me. Good thing. I’ve never been able to make up a story. I depend on my memory of the facts.

I’ve believed since I was six years old that I was born to write. My career has taught me that I can only tell the truth disguised as fiction. The awarding of the Eric Hoffer Book Award to my books suggests that I’m doing it right.

Vietnam and the U.S.: 1973-1975 (2)

During the last week of April as I hunkered down in my office on the northern edge of Saigon amidst the artillery shelling of the North Vietnamese, statements from the U.S. government were at best noncommittal, at worst upbeat. Were my bosses in Washington reading what I was sending them? Did they even know what was going on?

The U.S. military knew. Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) at Pearl Harbor had dispatched the 7th Fleet to the South China Sea to evacuate Americans and some Vietnamese. Aboard were Marines, commanded by Colonel Al Gray, an officer I had known since he was a captain. Al and I had kept running into each other in South Vietnam starting in the early 1960s. In late April 1975, Al flew into Saigon from the 7th Fleet by helicopter and found me holed up in my office. He told me his mission—to evacuate friendlies—and assured me he’d get me safely out of the country. The evening of 29 April, he saved my life by getting me safely out of Saigon. He went on to become Commandant of the Marine Corps. Al Gray is a hero to every Marine I’ve ever met.

The ambassador never did call for an evacuation. He was countermanded from Washington in the predawn hours of 29 April 1975. By then it was too late to rescue the 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers that had worked with the NSA organization. They were all killed or captured by the North Vietnamese. Those captured were sent to “re-education camps,” really concentration camps, where the death rate was very high.

Throughout those hideous days at the end, the U.S. government had little to say publicly and expressed mild surprise when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. I’ll always be grateful to the military side of the government, and especially to the Marines. Without them, if left to the civilians, I’d have never survived.

Maybe readers will understand why I always capitalize Marines.

Vietnam and the U.S.: 1973-1975

Knowing full well that the North Vietnamese would eventually conquer South Vietnam, the U.S. government nevertheless signed the peace accords with North Vietnam in January 1973. That agreement required the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam but left North Vietnamese forces in place. President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger, in preparing for the agreement, discussed what they needed to do to delay the fall of South Vietnam long enough that the U.S. public would not blame the them for the eventual debacle. They shaped the agreement for that purpose.

I was in Vietnam in 1974 and 1975 as head of the National Security Agency (NSA) covert operation whose purpose was to monitor the North Vietnamese. Working with the South Vietnamese, we intercepted North Vietnamese communications and reported the ever growing threat to South Vietnam. The U.S. government’s placid response alarmed me. Then, in April 1975, as the North Vietnamese pushed their attack on Saigon, American government officials said all was well, not much fighting was taking place. The city fell on 29 April, and I escaped under fire.

Some of the false optimism about Vietnam came from the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin. For reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, he was certain that the North Vietnamese would never attack Saigon. He reported to Congress in mid-1975, in the aftermath to the defeat, that he had been approached by the Hungarian member of the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) who assured him that the North Vietnamese had no intention of assaulting Saigon. Rather, they wished to form a coalition government with all the patriotic forces in the south and rule jointly—this from a representative of a communist government allied to North Vietnam. At the same time, I and other intelligence sources were reporting to him our overwhelming evidence that the attack was at hand.

Why didn’t Martin believe us? Certainly the unreliable assurances of a North Vietnamese ally could not have persuaded him. I can only surmise that he could not accept the loss of the war because his son had been killed in Vietnam and he couldn’t face the prospect that his son had died in vain.

More tomorrow.

My New Book Coming Out in March

The following is the text I’m using to announce my newest novel:

So it had come to this. August 2018. Trump in the White House, and Gene Westmoreland out on his ass.

Thus begins Tom Glenn’s political thriller, Secretocracy. Set in Washington, D.C. in 2018, the novel is about what the Trump administration does to a government executive who challenges it.

Senior budget reviewer Gene Westmoreland refuses to approve funds for a Trump administration initiative called Operation Firefang—building clandestine nuclear missile sites world-wide—on the grounds that it is illegal and violates treaty agreements. The administration attacks him. A general and a senator rebuke him, his phone is tapped, his car is tailed, and his adult son is trapped into a dangerous relationship. His boss, Clem, who opposes Firefang and refuses to fire Gene, is blackmailed and commits suicide. Now without protection, Gene is stripped of his security clearances and exiled to a warehouse to await termination. If he discloses what he knows, he will be prosecuted for revealing classified information.

As the administration does everything it can to force Gene to resign—to avoid firing him and risking a court case—his estranged wife, another woman he has rejected, and a hate-sick house mate join forces against him. The woman he loves and his son pull back from him as the threat against him grows and his reputation is tainted with stories of debauchery, circulated by the administration.

Then comes the November 2018 election. Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives. Gene’s luck changes.

Adelaide Books of New York will publish Secretocracy in March 2020.

My Wife in Vietnam (3)

After the evacuation of my family, things in Saigon went from bad to worse very quickly. After being holed up for days in my office without food and unable to rest due to North Vietnamese shelling, I finally escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. When I got back to the states in May 1975, I was a physical and mental wreck. Suffering from amoebic dysentery and pneumonia and with serious ear damage due to the shelling I was caught in at the end, I was also going through the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI)—panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares, irrational rages, and depression. Because I held top-secret codeword-plus clearances from NSA, I couldn’t seek psychological help. If I had, I would have lost my clearances and my job, not something I could risk with a wife and four children to support.

When I reached Maryland, I telephoned my wife. She was in Massachusetts staying with her father. I begged her to come to Maryland. I told her I was ill and needed her. She said no. She and the children would not return to Maryland until we were able to occupy our house, leased to another family for three years, the presumed length of my Vietnam tour. I finally arranged to reoccupy the house the following July. Only then did she and the children return.

My wife’s refusal to help me when I was seriously ill demonstrated how little she cared for me. That was the beginning of the end of the marriage. We were divorced a few years later.

My wife could have been (and should have been) an asset to me in Vietnam. Instead, she was a liability. Other Americans found her superiority offensive. Although she taught school briefly during our second tour, she spent most of her time in leisurely pursuits, regaling herself as the boss’s wife. And after the fall of Saigon, she left me to struggle with my physical and mental maladies on my own.

She had so many opportunities to excel and do good. She ignored them. Her children and I suffered the consequences.

My Wife in Vietnam (2)

By March of 1975, it was clear to me that South Vietnam would soon fall to the communist North Vietnamese. Even though the U.S. ambassador had forbidden me to do it, I evacuated my staff and their families under various ruses. In early April, I told my wife that it was no longer safe for her and children to remain in Vietnam. She was incredulous. That morning she had attended a coffee at the embassy, and officials had told her and other dependents that there was no substance to rumors that Saigon was about to be attacked. I couldn’t persuade her to leave.

Finally, she agreed to go on three conditions she laid down: 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 the children would tour the world on the way back to the states, taking a month, even two months, to go all through Asia and Europe. I agreed. Her third condition was that she could buy a brand-new Buick station wagon as soon as she got back to the U.S. Frantic, I said yes.

Desperate to have her and the children safely out of the country, I got them tickets for Bangkok on 9 April. But the day before, a renegade South Vietnamese pilot bombed the presidential palace, very near our villa. My wife and children were terrified. Now she was more than ready to go, but on the morning of 9 April as I drove my family from downtown Saigon out to the airport on the northern edge of the city at Tan Son Nhat, I ran into multiple roadblocks. The South Vietnamese government had declared a curfew in response to the attack of the previous day. I finally had to pull rank to get through all the obstacles and get my family on a plane out of the country.

More tomorrow.