Tom Glenn's Blog, page 137

Marine Corps Ball, November 1974, Saigon

Long ago in this blog, I wrote a post about the last Marine Corps Ball in Vietnam. I’ll never forget that evening.

The Vietnam peace accords of 1973 required the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces; no more than fifty U.S. military personnel could be in country at any given time. After 1973, there were more Marines in South Vietnam than any other service. That was because the U.S. embassy was guarded by Marines. And in fact the last person evacuated at the very end was a Marine.

Throughout my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam, my work with Marine units was the most satisfying. The Marines readily accepted and acted on the intelligence I was able to give them. And the Marines saved my life when Saigon fell. Readers of this blog have noted that I always capitalize “Marine.” That is my way of honoring them.

My novel set during the fall of Saigon, Last of the Annamese, opens with the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, preparing to attend the Marine Corps Birthday Ball at the Gia Long Palace in Saigon on 10 November 1974. One of his housemates, Sparky, is, like Chuck, a retired Marine officer; the other, Ike, is an active duty Marine officer, assigned to the embassy. All three will be at the celebration.

The ball is always held on the Corps birthday (10 November). Among Marines, a private joke is that 11 November, Veterans Day, is really a national holiday to allow the Marines to recover from the birthday bash. In my time working with Marines in Vietnam, the celebration was always major. During my last years in Saigon, the Marine Corps Birthday Ball was the social highlight of the year. As an office head, I was required to attend, but I also always had multiple invitations from the Marines I worked with. It was a formal affair. That meant a tuxedo for me and a full-length evening gown for my wife.

The ball described in Annamese is the last one I attended in Saigon, on 10 November 1974. It was formal to the nines, even though there were few Marines in country. All traditions were observed, even the cake-cutting with a ceremonial sword. Yet amid the festivities was a detectable unease—so many of us knew from intelligence that the North Vietnamese forces were growing stronger through massive infiltration of men and matériel. Some, myself included, doubted that South Vietnam would survive another year.

It didn’t. It fell six months later.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (8)

I’m glad I forced myself to watch the entire series on the Vietnam war again. It brought me face to face with my inglorious past. I observed so many others in the film who were, like me, permanently changed by what happened. We are damaged souls. But there is solace in seeing that I am not alone.

What the series didn’t emphasize was the healing that comes from pride. I, like some two and a half million others who served in Vietnam, put my life on the line for what I believed was the good the country. I was a volunteer, a civilian operating under cover, disguised as a soldier or Marine on the battlefield while really furnishing intelligence on the enemy. Nobody forced me to go. I could have said no. But I believed it was the right thing to do. I’ll always suffer from the wounds to my soul that those years inflicted on me. Only now, in the last quadrant of my life, can I judge the choices that the young man I was made. Now I believe they were the right choices. Now, at last, I can take pride in what I did for my country.

I’ve finished with the Burns-Novick The Vietnam War for now. I’ve learned once again from watching it. The series reminded me that I need to face my past head-on. I can never escape from it, and pushing into my unconscious doesn’t work. I’m a better man for what I did in Vietnam, and while the memories are the source of pain, I must own them. I have found an imperfect peace.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (7)

The last portion of the last episode of the Burns-Novick series was, for me, the hardest to get through. It told of the human wreckage inflicted by the war. It described the ravages of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) and the grieving of those left behind.

PTSI has a long and inglorious history. The ancient Greeks called it “divine madness.” During and after the U.S. Civil War, the term was “Solder’s heart.” In World War I, it was called “shell shock;” in World War II, “combat fatigue;” and these days the usage favored is “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).” I call it an injury rather than a disorder because it is the result of an externally inflicted wound to the soul.

Those who suffer from PTSI are sometime accused of cowardice and weakness. That adds insult to ignorance. Only the brave weather combat, and only the healthy respond with horror to the devastation of the battlefield. The unenlightened about the malady believe that those affected by their combat experience are a danger to others—they are prone to violence. That’s foolishness. The only danger PTSI sufferers pose are to themselves. Sometimes the unbearable memories are so bad that death is preferable to continuous suffering.

The last section of the series touched on what so many of us felt: shame. Vietnam was a dirty war, and all those involved had forfeited their honor. We hid our irrational rages, panic attacks, flashbacks, and nightmares from others. So many, like me, never spoke of our time in Vietnam. We suffered alone because we were outcasts.

The series ended with the Wall, the Vietnam memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I, like so many Vietnam veterans, avoided the wall for years. I couldn’t bring myself to face the memories it would spark. When I finally worked up the courage to visit it, I went alone—like Robert McNamara—to confront my past. I stood in the grass by the wall and wept.

More tomorrow.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (6)

More about how the Vietnam War series misidentified the sources of GI slang in Vietnam and terms the series didn’t mention:

“Number one,” “number ten,” and “gook” were just the beginning. GIs used “dinky dow” to mean “crazy.” It’s a corruption of the Vietnamese điên cái đâu (down tone on the last word) which means “crazy in the head.” From “dinky dow” came “dink,” meaning a Vietnamese. Then there was “chop-chop,” meaning “fast,” borrowed from Chinese; “deedee mow,” meaning “hurry” from the Vietnamese đi đi mau which means “go fast;” and many others. We also used “zip” as a pejorative term for a Vietnamese. And we called them “slopes,” referring to the oriental slanted eye.

The Burns-Novick series is not alone in its misinterpretation of the sources of American military slang in Vietnam. For reasons I don’t understand, histories of the war and otherwise well-founded documentaries frequently fail to comprehend how we Americans created the terms we used during the Vietnam war. I suspect our misunderstanding is a symptom of America’s superiority complex. But that’s a subject for another day.

More on the Burns-Novick series tomorrow.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (5)

The Burns-Novick The Vietnam War series, like many others, misidentifies the source of U.S. military slang referring to the Vietnamese. It’s easy to see why.

American troops were in Vietnam for so many years that soldiers and Marines over time attributed to the native Vietnamese words and expressions that they themselves had actually introduced. The Vietnamese, who learned American English from the GIs, incorporated the lingo into their own speech in English. Their use of these expressions looked like proof of their native Vietnamese origin. These linguistic somersaults made me laugh.

Three examples, taken from an earlier blog, will illustrate.

During the Korean war, soldiers and Marines heard Koreans say “미국” (miguk) which in Korean means “American.” The words are derived from the Chinese mei guo (美國) which also show up in Vietnamese as Mỹ quốc. The first word in all three languages literally means “beautiful,” but it was used to mean “American” because of the similarity in sound to the letter “m” in “American.”

The U.S. military misunderstood and thought that the Koreans were referring to themselves, saying “me gook,” meaning “I’m a gook.” The term “gook” came to be a disparaging word for Koreans and, eventually, for any member of an Asian race. When U.S. military personnel arrived in Vietnam, they called the inhabitants gooks. The term is so commonly used that it’s now in the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries. I heard more than one GI say that “gook” was the Vietnamese word for a native.

During the occupation of Japan following World War II, Americans picked up a number of terms from the Japanese. One of them was “number one,” a not-quite-accurate translation of the Japanese “Ichiban” (一番) (which really means “first). The Japanese, like the Chinese and other Asians, used “the first” to mean “the best.” Americans assumed that if “number one” meant the best, “number ten” must mean “the worst.” Both expressions became common military slang. The military carried those terms with them to Vietnam and eventually came to believe that they were native Vietnamese terminology.

Also during the occupation of Japan, GIs frequently heard Japanese use San, an honorific added to the end of a name or title to express respect. The soldiers and Marines invented the term mamasan, to refer to a woman in a superior position, especially a madam—the owner or proprietor of a whore house. Once again, the term stuck in GI slang and got carried to Vietnam where it came to mean any older Vietnamese woman. By the late 1960s, military personnel assumed the term was Vietnamese.

More tomorrow.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (4)

The last DVD of the Vietnam war series, episode ten, tells the story of the fall of Saigon in April 1975 almost precisely as I have told it in my writings and presentations (see my article at http://atticusreview.org/bitter-memories-the-fall-of-saigon/). It recounts the withdrawal of U.S. military support and assistance and finally the cessation of financial aid to the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), the death knell for that country. It details the North Vietnamese conquest of Phuoc Long Province in January 1975, the fall of Da Nang in March, and Ambassador Martin’s insistence that no evacuation was necessary. Then the chaos of the final days and escape by helicopter under fire of those like me who stayed behind so that others could leave the country.

I was all the more moved by the appearance in the film of so many people I knew during those tragic days. I was on a first-name basis with at least a dozen people quoted, interviewed, or shown.

So many people have asked me why neither I nor any of my people appeared in the story. The same question could be asked about why none of us showed up in the histories written during the time the series was being researched. The reason is that we were under deep cover. Few Americans and even fewer Vietnamese even knew we were there. The presence of any employee or unit associated with the National Security Agency (NSA) in Vietnam during the war was deeply classified. We were not at the embassy but hidden in an inconspicuous office suite at the Defense Attaché Office (DAO) building at Tan Son Nhat on the northern edge of Saigon. We went out of our way to avoid contact with other Americans so as to remain invisible.

Our cover was that we were the office of the Department of Defense Special Representative (DODSPECREP). That made us sound distant enough and so harmless that no one paid us much attention. My contacts at the embassy were strictly limited to the ambassador and the CIA chief of station, Tom Polgar.

NSA’s presence in Vietnam was still classified through the end of 2015. The only publications that mentioned any of us even in passing were Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval (1977) and volume II of Scott Laidig’s Al Gray, Marine (2017). It was not until Thurston Clarke brought out his Honorable Exit in 2019 that our story began to be told.

More tomorrow.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (3)

I’ve now completed my viewing of the Burns-Novick series on the Vietnam war. I found it overwhelming.

The series offers plentiful evidence that the U.S. government early on knew that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. The State Department’s George Ball warned in 1965 that we couldn’t win. A Rand study of 1966 reached the same conclusion. President Johnson knew we were headed toward defeat. Nixon and Kissinger cynically decided to keep the war going for political purposes even though they knew winning was impossible.

What kind of people are we that our leaders repeatedly lied to us about the war and, until 1968 and even later, we believed them?

The series showed how the war went on and on. Bestiality and chaos. People, including civilians, killed hideously by the thousands. Monstrous things done by American commanders and troops. “Free fire zones.” Shoot anything that moves. Kill anyone who runs away. Unspeakable atrocities by the North Vietnamese.

The battle of Huế during the Tet Offensive of 1968 was among the worst for murder of innocent civilians by the North Vietnamese. The estimated death toll from the battle is between 2,800 and 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war or 5 to 10% of the total population of Huế. Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes buried alive. Many victims were also clubbed to death.

Both sides, in other words, were guilty of naked barbarism. As several soldiers interviewed in the series reported, in war the natural human repugnance for brutality becomes muted, then disabled. It’s worse than animals. Tigers, for example, kill to eat. Humans at war kill for the sake of killing.

War is nonjudgmental. The innocent and the guilty are destroyed without prejudice or distinction. The killers are vicious murderers who are the same time respectable family men known for their civility and charity. War makes monsters of us all.

More tomorrow.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War (2)

An aspect of the Burns-Novick series captured my admiration: the production makes no effort to conceal the grisliness of combat. That sets it aside from the majority of films about war. Since my time in Vietnam, I have believed that if we Americans understood how gruesome combat is, we would be less likely to rush into wars.

Scene after scene in the Burns-Novick shows human bodies ripped to shreds, turned into pulp, burned beyond recognition. Blood is everywhere. Broken bodies strew the scene. Those sequences awoke my memory of time in combat and the ravaging of the human body I observed. I remembered the smell—a mix of smoke, gun powder, and the stink of evacuated bowels from the freshly killed mixed with that of decaying bodies.

One American former fighter interviewed in the series says about combat: “No one can really understand it until they have done it.” He’s right. But only a tiny percentage of the American population have actually done it. In 2016, 7 percent of U.S. adults were veterans, down from 18% in 1980, according to the Census Bureau. Of those veterans, something like 2.5 percent saw combat. Few of us have the slightest glimmer of how unspeakably horrifying it is.

The Burns-Novick series at least takes a step toward waking up us to the horrors of war.

Another step it takes is to reveal Richard Nixon’s lies to Americans. In 1968, he secretly tried to scuttle the peace talks with North Vietnam because he was afraid they’d give his opponent, Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge. Later he ordered bombing in Cambodia and withheld that information from the American public. Throughout the rest of his life, he lied about both actions.

And the series shows that Johnson and McNamara as early as 1963 recognized that the U.S could not win the Vietnam war. So did those who replaced Johnson in the White House. But they kept the war going for political reasons, costing untold thousands of lives.

More tomorrow.

Burns and Novick: The Vietnam War

I’m once again watching the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick PBS ten-part series, The Vietnam War. I bought the DVDs when the series was first broadcast in 2017 and watched them galvanized. As this blog has shown, my view of the Vietnam war has changed over the years. I returned to the series because I wanted to continue my research (I have read every major book on the war) and to refresh my memory for my writing but also to reevaluate the series.

I’m now more than halfway through the series, and my judgment remains the same: excellent. When I’ve completed the series, I’ll have more to write. For the moment, here are some immediate reactions.

The series early on equates the National Liberation Front (NFL, short for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam) with the Viet Cong. That is a grave error. The NFL was a fiction created by the North Vietnamese. Its manifesto was drafted in Hanoi and transmitted to South Vietnam in 1961 with orders to launch the front as an independent movement in South Vietnam opposed to the South Vietnamese government. The NFL never existed except on paper, and its supposed leaders and members were all subservient puppets of the communists.

The term “Viet Cong” is an abbreviation of the Vietnamese việt nam cộng sản which means “Vietnamese communist.” Americans came use to the term to mean independent South Vietnamese fighting against the government of Vietnam in allegiance with North Vietnam. Eventually “VC” came to mean the same thing. In fact, there were no independent South Vietnamese communists. All of them were under the iron control of Hanoi from the end of the war against the French (1954) until the North completed the conquest of the south in 1975.

The U.S. use of NFL and VC is a propaganda victory for the North Vietnamese. They worked hard to depict the war as an uprising of South Vietnamese patriotic forces against a foreign-imposed regime. It painted the members of the front and all engaged in the war against the government of South Vietnam as independent patriots. The U.S. was fooled. So too were virtually every writer about the war ever since.

How do I know that the NFL was fake and that the VC were indistinguishable from the North Vietnamese? Because I was reading North Vietnamese communications to their clandestine operatives in South Vietnam in the early 1960s. I was assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA) as a soldier and later was employed by the agency. It was obvious to me that the North Vietnamese never gave up on their efforts to conquer the south from 1954 onwards.

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

Following the change of policy under General Abrams, could we have persevered and won in Vietnam? I now believe that we could have achieved victory only by invading North Vietnam and creating huge damage. That probably would have drawn China into the war. It would have turned into World War III. We could have won such a war, but the cost would have been overwhelming. And it would have required enormous damage to North Vietnam, reducing it and its population to a stone-age level of existence. We chose, wisely I believe, not to proceed.

One handicap we faced during the war was that the government of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem and those who replaced him was inherently autocratic and corrupt. The government had between minimal and no support from the populace.

Whether the U.S. could have reshaped Vietnamese politics so as to assure democracy and the rule of law in South Vietnam is open to question. We did try, without success. But militarily, we thought we were on our way to victory when the people of the U.S. decided the war must end, even if that meant shame and defeat. Meanwhile, our political leaders concluded privately that the price—World War III and North Vietnam all but destroyed—was not worth the gain. In short, we chose withdrawal 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 as we did in Vietnam. We left behind literally hundreds of thousands upon whom the North Vietnamese wreaked vengeance. Our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest to me that we have not learned that lesson.

Could we have won the war in Vietnam? Yes, at great human cost and with world-scarring destruction. We had the wisdom and decency to accept defeat.