Tom Glenn's Blog, page 124

My Wife in Vietnam

On my two PCS (permanent change of station) tours I had in Vietnam, my wife, who spoke Vietnamese and French (we met at NSA where we were both analysts), and my children were with me on what were called “accompanied tours.” In between were many TDY (temporary duty) trips, usually four to six months in length. These trips I took alone.

On the first accompanied tour, originally intended to be from 1963 to 1965, I had only one child, my daughter, Susan. Halfway through that tour, in 1964, the U.S. committed large contingents of military forces to the war, and my wife and daughter were sent home because it was no longer deemed safe for them to be there.

My second accompanied tour, beginning in 1974, ended in April 1975 when I evacuated my wife and now four children surreptitiously because I knew that Saigon was about to fall to the North Vietnamese. I got my family out of the country under false pretenses because the U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, had forbidden me to evacuate members of my staff or families—he didn’t believe that the North Vietnamese would attack Saigon even though I provided him conclusive evidence that an assault was imminent. I evacuated my 43 subordinates and their wives and children living in Saigon in the same way.

While my children for the most part disliked living in Vietnam, my wife loved it. On both tours, we had three servants (a cook, a housekeeper, and a nanny) which freed my wife from all duties. She attended coffees and teas and played tennis, visited with other dependents, and shopped to her heart’s content. On the second tour, when I was head of the covert National Security Agency (NSA) operation in South Vietnam, she was Mrs. Chief, a role she loved.

More tomorrow.

The Boots Photo

I’ve mentioned in passing several times a photo prominently displayed on the wall of my piano room. The artist-photographer Ann Gonzalez took it. It shows the last pair of jungle boots I wore in combat in Vietnam. Ann added a caption, the watchword from my novel, Last of the Annamese: “Do what you have to do, whatever it takes.”

During my many trips to Vietnam between 1962 and 1975, I spent most of my time  supporting U.S. military units, both army and Marine, with signals intelligence support on the battlefield. I was under cover as an enlisted man of the unit I was supporting. That meant I wore the uniform of that unit and combat boots. Over the years, I had many different pairs of boots, some all leather, some half canvas and half leather (jungle boots, as in the photo). I no longer have any of the uniforms I wore, and only one pair of boots survived, those in Ann’s photo.

The photo haunts me. Those empty boots with the words beneath them suggest that their owner did do what he had to do, and what it took was his life. Men and women in the military put their lives on the line to defend their country. I did the same thing when I went into combat with army and Marine units in South Vietnam. I survived, but Ann’s photo is a testament to those gave up their lives for their country. I knew so many who did. I will always grieve for them.

Writing (3)

The description of my writing process does not address the foundation of publishable writing. It is made up of two elements: knowledge of the craft and wide reading.

To write fiction, one must have mastered grammar, spelling, formatting, copy editing, sentence wording and structure, and dialogue. My class in fiction craftsmanship stresses the importance of these frankly boring practices. Until they are second nature and followed automatically, the resulting writing will not be publishable.

Continuous and wide reading is also essential. It exposes the mind to the writing of those already proficient in the discipline. It widens knowledge of writing techniques and methodology, sparks the imagination, incites the mind.

I read a great variety of books because I am a book reviewer. That leads me to volumes  I never would have discovered on my own and writers so different from me that I have to work to understand their writing style. In the process, I learn how they do it. I learn how to do it myself.

In my classes, I stress to other writers that the writing discipline is an unending learning process. I’ve been reading and writing all my life, but I’m still learning. So will any other writer who takes his work seriously.

Writing (2)

Once I have a first draft of a novel or story, I put it aside for some period of time and don’t allow myself to think about it at the conscious level. After that cooling period, I return to the story and, still in the creative mode, begin to revise it, sharpening some passages, reducing or even eliminating others. After a second cooling period, I return to the story once again and, still in the right brain mode, revise it a third time.

For the fourth revision, I switch to intellectual, left-brain, thinking and try to see the story as a reader would. I work on precision of wording and reshape paragraphs and chapters for balance.

Continuing the alternation between the creative and intellectual approaches, I go through as many as ten drafts before I’m persuaded that the story is as it should be, that I can’t improve it further. Then I start looking for a publisher.

My description makes the writing process sound more methodical and regimented than it really is. Sometimes I move from the creative to the rational and back while writing. I allow intuition to direct my decisions about wording, revising, cutting, or adding. But my final take on a piece of writing is always with the rational-intellectual side in command.

More tomorrow.

Writing

I am a full-time author. I give a class on fiction craftsmanship. When I offer that class, the participants invariably ask questions not about the craftsmanship but about the process I use when writing.

I tell them that, first of all, everything in my novels and short stories really did happen. I invent characters who go through what I myself have been through, and I sometimes set the stories in fictional places. But I don’t make things up. I write about the truth.

The writing of my stories and novels requires a shift between the creative mode and the intellectual mode, moving from the right brain to the left brain and back again. Achieving the creative state means that I must quiet my rational thinking (left brain) enough to allow imaginative (right brain) function to take control.

My writing process starts when there arises in my consciousness a moment or incident or memory that moves me deeply. I write down what happened in that moment. Then I speculate on how that incident came to happen—what led up to it. Next I imagine what must have followed. By the time all that is written down, I have the core of a story.

To discover that foundation incident, I sometimes need to put myself into a semi-meditative state and, in effect, allow my subconscious to feed thoughts into my conscious mind. The process feels as though an external being is communicating with me, feeding me the beginnings of a story. I see how the Greeks came up with the idea of the muses.

More tomorrow.

The Artwork in My House

My house is decorated with art from around the world. The pieces reflect my life of travel, mostly as a signals intelligence operative. I enjoy them daily.

My living room is dominated by a large painting from China of a tiger, hung over the fireplace. On the wall to the right are an American Indian painting from the southwest U.S. and a depiction in oil of the Saigon central market in the monsoon downpour. The wall to left features two oil paintings of landscapes from Vietnam.

The piano room where my Steinway grand is center stage is where I have hung a brass tray from India, a watercolor of a Japanese nobleman, and another watercolor of a church in Kiev. But the attention-getter is a photo taken by an artist friend of my combat boots from Vietnam with a quote from my novel Last of the Annamese: “Do what you have to do, whatever it takes.”

Over the fireplace in the adjacent sunroom is a painting that appears to be a copy of an Aztec circular decoration with a face in the middle. On the wall by the door to the deck is a copy of the head of the virgin from Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome.

Strategically placed throughout the piano room and sunroom are four ceramic elephants from Vietnam. Close by are ceramic and wood-and-marble garden seats from Asia.

In my current life as a fulltime writer, I no longer travel. But I am surrounded by memorabilia that recall my rich experience and spark my imagination. I couldn’t ask for more.

The Year of the Rat

Yesterday was lunar new years, the beginning of the year according to the Chinese zodiac. And the year that has just begun is the year of the rat. That makes it my year. According to my birth date, the rat is my zodiacal sign. I am a rat. That makes me clever and resourceful but not very brave.

In Vietnam, the beginning of the lunar year is also the start of spring. The Vietnamese call the day Tết. It is far and away the biggest holiday in the Vietnamese calendar. The celebration  lasts for days.

We Americans know the word Tết because the North Vietnamese in 1968 launched a country-wide offensive coincident with the Tết holidays taking the South Vietnamese and U.S. forces by surprise. As I have reported elsewhere in this blog, the National Security Agency (NSA), my employer, had, at my behest, put out a series of reports starting five days before the first attack warning that a country-wide offensive was coming. The reports were largely ignored.

The offensive was a military failure. The North Vietnamese were repulsed with great losses. But the offensive was a political success. The U.S. government had been telling the American citizenry that the North Vietnamese were losing the war which wouldn’t last too much longer. The Tết Offensive proved the opposite was true. U.S. public opinion turned against the war. We ended up withdrawing from Vietnam and ceding the country to enemy. It was the first war the U.S. had ever lost.

So every year, toward the end of January or the beginning of February, when the new year, according to the Chinese zodiac, arrives, I remember the Tết Offensive. I can never forget it.

Prison Rate and Gun Ownership

The United States prisoner rate (number of prisoners per 100,000 people) is 737, the highest in the world, followed by Russia at 615. We have well over two million people behind bars.

And, as I reported here recently, “In 2017, the most recent year for which complete data are available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a death rate of more than 10 per 100,000 people. At the same time, our number of guns per hundred people was 120.5—we have more guns than people in the U.S. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we have about 46 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns.”

Is there a relationship between these two extreme figures? What does it tell us about our country that we have more people per capita in prison that any other nation and the highest rate of gun ownership among the developed countries of the world?

I conclude that we must find a different way. Are we really a nation of jailbirds and gun toters? I request comments from readers of this blog.

Presentations (3)

What I find hard to explain is that I enjoy all these presentations. I am normally rather shy. In groups, I tend to be quiet and listen rather than speak. But put me in front of a crowd with a microphone, and my personality suddenly changes into that of an actor. Granted, I was trained as an actor and public speaker many years ago. That doesn’t explain why I revel in speaking to a group and watching the reaction.

And my audiences are focused and attentive. They follow each word and gesture. Every eye stays on me. My sense is that their rapt attention results from two factors—the intensity of the stories I have to tell and my own emotional stress. Every time I give the fall of Saigon presentation, for example, I get tears in my eyes at three different points in the story I’m telling. I’m so moved that I have trouble controlling my voice. The audience is as moved as I am.

The problem has become that my presentations are so popular and I enjoy them so much that I have too little time to write. And writing is my calling in life.

So this year, 2020, will be the year in which I spend the majority of time writing. I’m currently working on two new novels. I’ll get to them just as soon as I get through the current spate of presentations. Or maybe the one after that. Or maybe . . . time will tell.

Presentations (2)

My presentations with slides are on three subjects—Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) (which I suffer from as a consequence of my time in combat), the 1967 battle of Dak To in the Vietnam highlands, and the fall of Saigon.

As this is written, I haven’t yet given the PTSI presentation. As noted earlier in this blog, I’ve been hesitant to speak publicly about my malady but came to realize that I can help others with the affliction by telling publicly how I’ve coped with it. I’m now scheduled to give the presentation twice in the next two months.

The Dak To presentation recounts my experience in supporting the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade in one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam war and tells of how the intelligence I provided on the North Vietnamese wasn’t believed, resulting in severe casualties. My next scheduled presentation on Dak To will be in February.

Far and away my most popular presentation is on the fall of Saigon. I’ve now done it more than 60 times, most recently on 17 January, and I’m scheduled to do it again on 26 January. It tells of my desperate struggle to get my 43 subordinates safely out of the country before the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon in April 1975 and my own escape under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets.

More tomorrow.