Tom Glenn's Blog, page 135

Why and How I Write (2)

The way I write is mysterious. I don’t pretend to understand it. I put myself into a meditative state and let the story come to me, as if someone other than me (a muse, for example) is telling me what to write. That means that the characters (who appear to me as if from the void) sometimes do things I’m not expecting. I never know the end of a story until I write it.

In that meditative state, my unconscious talks to me. It brings into my conscious mind memories I have forgotten or suppressed. I relive the unspeakable experience of combat during which men by my side were killed in ways so grisly that I can’t talk about their deaths, even today. I see and hear people from my past. Events long forgotten reappear.

What inspires a story is a vivid moment that captures my imagination. I envision what must have led up to that moment and what followed it. As I write, the story unfolds before me as if some force outside myself were dictating it to me.

Once I have a completed first draft of a story or novel, I put it aside to cool. My mind needs time away from the text so that I can return to it with fresh eyes. With a short story, the cooling time can be as little as a month. With a novel, it is longer, as much as a year.

Up to that point the writing process has been using the right side of my brain, the creative, intuitive, emotional organ. Then comes revision. That’s the province of the left side of the brain, the rational, intellectual, even mathematical function. Revising consists of cutting unneeded words, finding more succinct ways of expressing an idea, replacing long sentences with short ones. I rearrange paragraphs, reshape chapters, look for natural breaks in the story to see if it needs to be divided into sections.

More tomorrow.

Why and How I Write

I write for a variety of reasons. Any one of them would be sufficient to push me toward writing. Their combination makes writing inescapable.

First of all, I write because I have to. I discovered at age six I was born to write stories. Not writing would invite damnation because I would be refusing to accept my mission.

I tried to escape my fate. Early in life, I tried my hand at other callings. I trained to be a dancer. I took a BA in music because I wanted to compose. I studied acting and theater. I learned foreign languages and became a spy. As it turned out, spying pays well, while writing doesn’t. I had a way to support myself and my family while I wrote.

Another reason I write is that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury as a result of the combat I went through in Vietnam and from other experiences after 1975 that are still classified. The only way to cope with PTSI is to bring into the conscious mind the unbearable memories and force one’s self to react rationally. That means training the emotions not to overreact. I learned early on that writing down what happened was the best way for me to face my memories. Over time, that led to my novels and short stories.

A third reason to write is to tell people the truth about subjects of great importance to me. I wrote Last of the Annamese because I wanted the American public to understand what really happened during the fall of Saigon. I wrote The Trion Syndrome because I wanted people to know what PTSI is. Friendly Casualties tells the dark side of the Vietnam war. And No-Accounts tells the truth about men dying of AIDS at the height of the crisis.

Reviewers note that my books are fiction in name only—everything in the stories I tell really did happen. I don’t know how to create a tale that isn’t true. Fantasy is not my thing.

More tomorrow.

Lucky (3)

This is the last of a series of blog posts on how luck shaped my life:

I had a natural talent for leadership, not management. Leadership felt normal to me. Management felt foreign. In other words, I knew instinctively that my job was not to manage—that is, control—my subordinates but to uplift them and give them all the support they needed to do a superior job. They loved me for that and rewarded me with astonishing achievements. As a result, I moved quickly through the executive ranks until I was an SES-04, only two steps down from the top civilian rank, SES-06, given only to the deputy director (the director was a lieutenant general or vice admiral).

Meanwhile, I wrote stories. I’d learned at age six that I was born to write. Writing didn’t pay. I had a wife and four children to support, so I continued to operate as a spy to earn a living. And my writing didn’t sell. Nearly all of it was about Vietnam, for decades considered a dirty war. The less said about it, the better.

Nevertheless, I retired as early as I could to write full time. Because I had been promoted to a high executive rank, my pension was generous. I didn’t have to get another job to survive. Luck was with me again.

Then the American attitude about the Vietnam war changed. A new generation of Americans wanted to know what happened in Vietnam. Gradually, my writing began to sell. I now have four books and 17 short stories in print with two more books to be published early next year. Once again, I was lucky.

Through it all, I have consistently sought to do what interested me, not what might profit me. I never considered how to get ahead. I worked as hard as anyone I know, but I did it because I loved what I was doing.

In other words, I didn’t plan and pursue a career. The career came to me unbidden. I was lucky.

Lucky (2)

More about how luck shaped my life:

In 1961, when my army enlistment ended, I was already comfortable in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam. The National Security Agency (NSA) immediately hired me as a GS-11, a high grade for a new hire, and sent me to Vietnam in 1962. I had, almost by accident, become a professional spy.

None of my decisions up to that point had been for the purpose of establishing a lucrative career path. In fact, I hadn’t made any decisions. I was simply pursuing what interested me, mindless of what the future might hold. I didn’t seize opportunities. Opportunities seized me. I was lucky.

Once in Vietnam, I loved the work. I was unique among NSA people there in that I spoke all three languages commonly used in Vietnam and was adept at intercepting and exploiting North Vietnamese radio communications. For the next thirteen years, I was in Vietnam at least four months every year. I had two PCS (permanent change of station) tours there and so many TDYs (temporary duty trips, lasting four to six months each) that I lost count. My job most often was on the battlefield supporting army and Marine units in combat with signals intelligence against North Vietnamese forces. My last job there, starting in 1974 as a GS-15 (the highest rank in the GS system at that time), was to head the covert NSA operation. For my work during the fall of Saigon, I was awarded the Civilian Meritorious Medal, one of the few medals given to civilians.

I can’t speak of my assignments after 1975. They’re all still classified. Suffice it to say that I spoke or read Vietnamese, Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Latin (Spanish came later). You’re free to guess where I might have been assigned. Once again, opportunities came looking for me. I was lucky.

More next time.

Lucky

Tuesday’s Washington Post featured a column by Richard Cohen, one of the op-ed writers I have always enjoyed. It’s titled, “This is my last Column. I’ve been lucky.” Cohen reports that this is the last column he will publish and talks about his career and how so many opportunities resulted from happenstance. His history made me think of my own and how luck rather than planning shaped my life.

I came from an impoverished family. My mother was an alcoholic, my father in prison. We lived in Oakland, California, and when college time rolled around, it didn’t seem that there was any way I could continue my education. Then I found out I could enroll in the one of the finest colleges in the world, the University of California in Berkeley, a bus trip away from where I lived, for a tuition of $58.00 a semester. I worked twenty hours a week to earn money to live on and graduated four years later. It was as if an affordable college education was a gift from heaven.

The draft was in effect when I graduated in 1958, so I enlisted in the army to go to the Army Language School at Monterey, California, the best language school in the country. I was already a budding linguist back then—I’d taught myself French and Italian as a child, taken four years of Latin in high school,  and studied German in college. I wanted to learn Chinese, a language that had always fascinated me, but when I got to the school, the staff told me that the army had decided I should study not Chinese but Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of—back then we called that part of the world French Indochina, not Vietnam. The army’s decision  about which language I would study reshaped my life.

Glum at my loss of an opportunity to learn Chinese, I nevertheless spent a year of intensive study of this unknown language called Vietnamese and was then assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland. Once there, I discovered that Georgetown University offered a master’s in Chinese and that the army would pay my tuition. I enrolled.

More tomorrow.

Do What You Have to Do

I return today to an idea I first explored several years ago in this blog, the sense of devotion that a service member or government representative must have in a crisis: the willingness to do what is required no matter the personal cost, even it means giving up one’s life.

That devotion was one of the principal themes in my novel, Last of the Annamese. It appears at the beginning and the end of the novel and is a motto for the each of the main characters: “Do what you have to do, whatever it takes.”

Those words were my guiding principle during my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam supporting both army and Marine units in combat. It was an honor to be on the battlefield with the troops, but it also meant that I had to be willing to give up my life if that’s what it took.

I was put to the test multiple times during the war. The hardest came at the very end, in April 1975, when it was incumbent upon me to get my 43 subordinates and their families safely out of the country before the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon. I had to stay until the attack was underway. I had to lie, cheat, and steal to get my people on flights because the U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, forbade me to evacuate them. A representative of the government of Hungary, a communist nation allied to North Vietnam, had assured him that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking Saigon. Signals intelligence—the intercept and exploitation of the radio communications of the North Vietnamese, my job and the job of all my guys—made it blatantly clear that the North Vietnamese were about to launch a blitzkrieg against the city. The ambassador believed the communist representative instead of acting on the intelligence I was giving him.

The result was the worst days of my life. At the very end, I and two communicators who had agreed to stay with me were isolated at our office during the final assault against the city. The enemy used rockets and artillery against us as they prepared to seize Saigon. The building we were in was hit repeatedly. The building next to us was destroyed, and two Marines at our gate were killed. On the afternoon of 29 April, my two communicators were extracted safely. I escaped that night under fire.

I’m justifiably proud of my service to my country and especially of my willingness to stay to the end during the fall of Saigon to assure that none of my guys or their wives and children were killed. I did what I had to do, whatever it took.

Hallucinations

Returning again to my thoughts posted in this blog from more than two years ago, I write today about hallucinations I might have suffered from during and immediately after the fall of Saigon.

I spent 30 April 1975 on the Oklahoma City, the flagship of the U.S. 7th Fleet, sailing in the South China Sea. I had escaped under fire the night before from Saigon as it fell to the North Vietnamese. I slept most of that day, but when I was awake, I was badgered by recollections. I began to suspect that some of them were of things that didn’t happen.

The background: For the better part of a week toward the end of April 1975, I and two communicators who had agreed to stay with me to the end as the North Vietnamese laid siege to the city, Bob Hartley and Gary Hickman, had been isolated in our office suite at Tan Son Nhat on the northern edge of Saigon. We had run out of food and were on an alternating schedule of one guy resting for two hours while the other two worked. We couldn’t sleep because of the small arms fire and the shelling. Our compound was hit with rockets and artillery—the building next to us blew up and two Marine guards at our gate were killed.

After I got back to the states in mid-May, I was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery, ear damage, and pneumonia due to muscle fatigue, inadequate diet, and sleep deprivation. But at the time, all I knew was that I had to keep going. My driving motivation was to get Bob and Gary out alive. Nothing else mattered.

Bob and Gary were evacuated safely on the afternoon of 29 April. I went out that night in the pitch black and the pouring rain of a monsoon that struck early that year. The helicopter I was on was hit by ground fire, but we managed to escape.

I have memories I can’t verify. Were they waking nightmares or did they really happen?

I don’t write about them. All that gets recorded here and in my books and articles are events I’m sure really occurred. Yet these pseudo-memories still haunt me. They’ll remain with me for the rest of my life as leftovers from a brain sick from hunger and exhaustion.

I’ve never read of anyone else suffering from memories of things that might not have happened. I’m unique in a way that’s embarrassing.

Mourning

One of the reasons I wrote Last of the Annamese was to anesthetize memories that refuse to leave me in peace. It worked up to a point. But the memories themselves remain undiminished.

One memory I’ve mentioned several times in this blog is of a South Vietnamese signals intelligence officer I worked with. I can’t tell you his name because it’s never been declassified. He delayed escape for himself and his family waiting for the evacuation order that the ambassador never issued.

Despite the chaos as the fall of Saigon loomed, I risked a trip to check on the officer. I wanted to be sure he and his troops knew where to go when the evacuation order was given, something I couldn’t discuss on an unsecured phone line—by that time, the North Vietnamese were already monitoring my phone.

Always a model of Asian politeness, the officer invited me into his office and served me tea. He told me that his wife, who worked for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, had been offered the opportunity to leave the country with her family. That included him. But he wouldn’t go because he was unwilling to abandon his troops—no evacuation order had been issued—and she wouldn’t leave without him. Alarmed, I asked him what he would do if he was still in Saigon when Communists tanks rolled through the streets. He told me he couldn’t live under the Communists. “I will shoot my three children, then I will shoot my wife, then I will shoot myself.”

At the end, the ambassador never did call for an evacuation. He didn’t believe my warning that the North Vietnamese were about to attack Saigon. By the time Washington countermanded the ambassador, it was the predawn hours of 29 April 1975, and the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. We couldn’t get to that officer. He didn’t escape. I have no doubt that he carried out his plan to shoot his family and himself. So many other South Vietnamese officers did precisely what he described.

This was a man I greatly admired. I’d worked with him for years and knew him to be a fine leader for his troops and a superb technician. I’d met his wife and children when I was a guest as his house for dinner. They laughed at my northern dialect Vietnamese—they were all southerners and made no attempt to speak the northern dialect favored by high-level officials—but were immensely flattered that an American spoke their language.

I mourn the death of this officer and his family to this day. Some memories can’t be anesthetized.

Thank You and Welcome Home

Another post from long ago that warrants updating:

For years, when I returned from Vietnam with the troops through San Francisco, we were met by crowds who yelled “butcher” and “baby killer” at us. They spat on us. I was shamed to the depths of my soul, not for the troops who had fought bravely and followed commands even at the risk of theirs lives, but for America. Our people, the people we fought for, were blaming us for what they saw as an unjust war. I was sickened.

For literally decades, I never mentioned my Vietnam experience. My Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) was worsened by my silence. No one wanted to talk about Vietnam. The war was shameful, and I was one of the perpetrators.

But Vietnam was bursting my seams. It dominated my writing. No one would publish my stories and novels. Vietnam was anathema.

Then, six or seven years ago, I was invited to something I’d never heard of: a welcome home celebration for Vietnam vets. I was suspicious. At first, I decided not to attend. But then my curiosity got the better of me. When I got there, I found a room full of happy people greeting us Vietnam veterans. They hugged me and said, “Thank you for your service. And welcome home.”

I cried.

My Vietnam writings are being published now. I have four novels and seventeen short stories in print. These days many people thank me for my service. But I still choke up when I hear “Thank you for your service. And welcome home.” Those were words I yearned for. I grieve that so many of my comrades in arms did not live long enough to hear them.

The Intelligence Professional

Continuing my revisiting of earlier blogs, this one about how I earned my living before retiring so I could write full-time.

Chuck Griffin, the protagonist of my novel, Last of the Annamese, is a professional in the business of collecting and analyzing information from all sources about the North Vietnamese. He uses data from signals intelligence, aerial photography, interrogation reports, captured documents, human intelligence (spying), and even transcripts from the Liberation News Agency, the propaganda organ of the North Vietnamese, to determine what the enemy is up to. And he has the rare gift of being able to forecast what’s going to happen next.

Chuck’s profession is based on my own experience. I, too, was a professional. Most of my career I worked only with signals intelligence, but when I was supporting the troops on the ground in Vietnam and when I was working at Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), I was, by necessity, an all-source analyst. Like Chuck, I had the gift.

But I’ve discovered over the years that many Americans view intelligence with suspicion. They believe there’s something sneaky about it, and they distrust those engaged in it.

They’re right that intelligence is a sneaky enterprise. It has to be. If the target knows of efforts to collect information about him, he can usually put a stop to it. So the sources and methods of intelligence must remain secret, or intelligence will not succeed.

So many Americans cite intelligence failures. It’s an imperfect discipline and not always successful. But I posit that for every failure one can name, there are literally hundreds of spectacular successes about which the public knows nothing because sources and methods must remain secret.

To me, intelligence is an honorable profession. Its purpose is to uncover and reveal the truth. I take great—and to me completely justified—pride in the work I did in Vietnam. I saved many lives by discovering what the enemy was up to. I could have saved many more had the decision-makers listened to me when I warned them about what was about to happen. I called that the Cassandra Effect and have written about it elsewhere in this blog.

So I plead with Americans to honor spies who risk everything, even their lives, to provide the truth to our leaders. And I ask our leaders to listen to their intelligence experts before they act. I worry that our current president may court disaster by ignoring his intelligence professionals and sabotaging the U.S. intelligence agencies. But we have no way of knowing because all intelligence work is secret.