Tom Glenn's Blog, page 138

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

I have ruminated several times in this blog on why we Americans lost the Vietnam war. Over the years, I’ve changed my opinion. I now believe that, given the inherent decency of Americans, we could not have won the war.

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. 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.”

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.

Abrams’ 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, assuring that the North Vietnamese would win the war.

More tomorrow.

My Brothers Weigh In

Long ago in this blog, I wrote about the loneliness of men who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) from combat. My thoughts are worth a revisit.

Since I began promoting Last of the Annamese and started this blog, I have been receiving email notes and Facebook postings from other men who served in Vietnam. They have reinforced my memories with stories of their own and, in effect, confirmed for me that others have unspeakable recollections, too.

Sufferers of PTSI from combat invariably go off by themselves because they can’t talk about what they did and what they witnessed. That makes them feel isolated, as if they alone are tortured by monstrous memories. When they find the courage to face their experiences directly, they nearly always go through the maelstrom by themselves, away from their loved ones. On the one hand, they feel shame for what they have done—they are often accused of cowardice and weakness; on the other they don’t want to burden those they care most about. It makes for a lonely life.

So when other men speak to me of the combat they have been through, I come to understand that I am not alone. I am one of a band of brothers. We suffer alone, but we reach out to help each other when we can. I am comforted because I wrote both The Trion Syndrome and Last of the Annamese in part to confront my memories and in part to help others who suffer as I do. Annamese begins with the following dedication:

“This book is dedicated to those who suffered through Vietnam, were jeered and spat upon when they returned to the world, and have yet to be thanked for their service. May our country awaken, recognize your sacrifice, and honor you.”

For decades, any involvement in Vietnam was condemned. I went through many years of keeping my Vietnam experience to myself. But in recent years, the attitude of Americans about the Vietnam war has changed. I’m now more often thanked for my service and welcomed home.

Now I can take pride in my service. And I see that I was never alone.

My brothers, I thank you.

People in the Emergency Waiting Room

Last week I had to take a friend to the emergency room at Howard County General Hospital in Columbia. We were in the waiting room fourteen hours before she was admitted. I had ample opportunity to observe other waiting patients.

They were from all facets of American society except for the rich—I saw no obviously wealthy people but plenty of poor ones. Most looked very ordinary, but two stood out from the others.

One was a woman who talked on her cell phone in a loud voice for literally hours on end. She spoke constantly, not allowing her communicant on the other end time to speak. She discussed intimate details of herself, her family, and friends, sexual relations, and troublesome children. People kept looking at her, but she was so wrapped up in explaining her private affairs that she didn’t seem to notice.

The other was a young man with a damaged face, no shirt, and pants that kept sliding down his hips to reveal his navel and his underwear. He was with a woman who acted as though she was genuinely angry with him. He talked frequently on his cell phone in Spanish interspersed with the English “Okay” and “Now listen to me.” My guess was that he had been in a fight.

My fiction muse went to work on these and others. I imagined what had happened to them, what might have occurred to lead up to the event that put them in the emergency room, and what would happen after they were treated. Turns out the arresting moment that leads to one of my stories doesn’t have to be from my own history. It can come from others.

What Is Courage? (2)

A faithful reader commented on yesterday’s blog about courage pointing out that love lies at the heart of courage (her comment and my response can be accessed from the upper left hand corner of that blog post).

The more I thought about her observation, the more I came to see how it applied to me. What I did to save my 43 subordinates and their wives and children during the fall of Saigon sprang from love.

I loved those men and, by extension, their families. Men are not supposed to love each other. It’s not masculine. It smacks of homosexuality. Notwithstanding, the feelings I bore for those men are among the strongest I have ever felt, similar to those I had for men who fought beside me in combat. The men under my command were among the finest I’ve ever known. We struggled together, working as hard as men have ever worked for anything, to save South Vietnam from the communists. We failed.

They were quite a bunch—everything from PhD’s to high school dropouts. Each was an expert in his field, and the work they did amazed me. Their toil gave me the intelligence I needed to warn the ambassador that the North Vietnamese were preparing to attack Saigon. He didn’t believe me and forbade me to evacuate them and their families. I did it anyway, using any ruse I could think of. I didn’t tell them about the ambassador’s order. They had enough to worry about. I learned years later that they knew about his prohibition but didn’t let on to me to save me even more stress.

My predecessor as chief of the operation was a martinet who forbade his subordinates to drink and party. He even sent his security man to follow them and spy on them, then disciplined them. When I replaced him, I held an all-hands meeting and told my guys that those days were over. I asked that if they got into trouble to come straight to me. I’d work with them. I didn’t care what they did in their off-hours. I only asked that they do nothing to cause a problem with the embassy.

I never had a single disciplinary problem my whole tour. The guys worked harder than I had any right to expect. Toward the end, they worked nonstop, grabbing what sleep they could in the office. They were as devoted to me as I was to them.

Yes, I would have given up my life to save them. I have no doubt they would have died to save me. Greater love hath no man.

So my reader is right: love is what underlies courage. I lived it. I know.

What Is Courage?

When I first started this blog several years ago, I pondered the question of what courage is. Here’s what I wrote:

When I tell the story of the fall of Saigon, listeners come up to me afterwards and accuse me of having courage. I plead not guilty. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, courage is facing danger without fear. Believe me, I was scared the whole time.

Men and women I’ve talked to who are, by my standards, heroes for their acts of bravery, often say something similar: all they did was what was required by the circumstances at the time. And I remember reading somewhere long ago a description of a man standing in front of a mirror and watching himself tremble with fear after carrying out an act of bravery and thinking wryly to himself: “This is the portrait of a hero.”

What the protagonist of Last of the Annamese, Chuck Griffin, does at the end of the book could be described as courageous. But he clearly doesn’t see it that way. He’d use words from his friend, Ike: “You do what you have to do, whatever it takes.”

Looking back on the last days in Saigon, what I remember most vividly is my determination to get all my men and their families out of Saigon safely before the attack on the city started. It took every scrap of strength I had; I didn’t have time to dwell on my fear that I might not make it out. Toward the end, I wrote a letter to a neighbor of ours back in the states and told her to deliver that letter to my wife if I didn’t make it. At the time, I really didn’t see how I was going to get out of Saigon alive. That letter was another thing I had to do, whatever it took. When I made it back to the world [as we referred to the U.S.] alive, the marriage collapsed. I burned the letter unread.

So what is courage? I honestly don’t know. What Chuck and I had doesn’t fit the description. Maybe what drives people to risk their lives is more like determination or focus on a goal of overwhelming importance. Maybe some things are more important staying alive.

Making Fiction Out of Fact (4)

The Trion Syndrome was much more personal than my other books. It’s the story of a Vietnam veteran, like me, with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) and how he copes. The inspiration for the book was my imagining what it would be like if I decided I couldn’t stand the irrational rages, nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks and chose to end my life. When the characters of Dave and his wife, Mary, revealed themselves to me, I pondered what they would do faced with the dilemma I was dealing with. The critical moment that led to the book was my imagining Dave trying to drown himself to stop the unbearable memories.

What sparked Last of the Annamese, my most recently published novel, on the other hand, was my memory of the moment of jubilation I had when I knew that all my subordinates and their families were safely out of Saigon as it was falling. After that moment came to me from my memory, I let my mind wander and the three main characters of the book came to life: Chuck Griffin, the retired Marine officer who returns to Vietnam to help win the war because he can’t stand the idea that his son who died in the war had died in vain; Tuyet, a member of the Vietnamese royalty forced to marry a commoner for the good of her family; and South Vietnamese Marine Colonel Thanh, the common man Tuyet had married, who cannot tolerate the idea of living under the communists. What would each of these people do faced with the conquest of South Vietnam by the northern communists? They told me what they would do, and I wrote it all down.

The events of Annamese were already firmly in my mind—I had lived them myself. After 1973 when U.S. troops were withdrawn, I was assigned as the chief of the covert NSA operation in South Vietnam.

As it became clear to me that the country was going to fall to the North Vietnamese, I struggled to get my 43 subordinates and their wives and children safely out of the country. The U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, forbade me to evacuate my people—he didn’t believe that the North Vietnamese would attack Saigon. I knew better from intercepted North Vietnamese communications. So I used every ruse I could think of to get my people safely out of the country. I had to stay. The ambassador wouldn’t permit me to leave. I succeeded in getting all my people out. Then, the night of 29 April 1975, after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city, I escaped by helicopter under fire.

So the events of the story for Annamese were already there. My job in writing the novel was to put my three principal characters through that string of events and to watch what each of them did.

Hence Tom Glenn’s stories: fiction in name only.

Making Fiction Out of Fact (3)

Once I have a draft, the hard part starts. That’s revision. I spend something like 10 percent of my writing time drafting original text and 90 percent revising. That means being sure that I vary my sentence types and lengths. I study each paragraph and look for ways to cut and trim. And so on. That’s fiction craftsmanship, an entirely different subject I wrote about here some time ago.

So it’s probably fair to say that I use the right half of my brain—my intuition, my creativity—to come up with stories and characters, and the left side—my intelligence—to clean up the results.

Let me talk about how that process worked out for my four currently published novels.

My first book, Friendly Casualties, is a collection of short stories and a novella. The stories all came from my time in Vietnam. So did the novella. It tells of a woman diplomat working in the embassy in Saigon and her affair with an army captain assigned to the delta in the southern quadrant. The electrifying moment in my mind that led to the story was a memory of a time in Vietnam when I had to withhold threat information because the source was so sensitive. I solved the problem by telling the man threatened where not to go and what not to do.

The three major characters in the novella streamed from my unconscious, and I thought about what they would do faced with the dilemma I had. That led to the story I told in the novella.

My book No-Accounts resulted from the years I spent taking care of AIDS patients. The arresting scene that started it was my memory of one of my patients holding my hand and thanking me just before he died. I was so deeply moved by that moment that it turned into a book.

The two principal characters in No-Accounts presented themselves to me when I put myself into a meditative state. Peter, the young gay man with AIDS, had essentially wasted his life having a good time as one of the stars in the gay bar scene. He was bright and capable, but instead of using his talent for the good of others or even to create a career, he frittered away his time until he came down with AIDS. The straight man, Martin who cares for him is a failure. His is in a dead-end job, his wife has left him, and his daughter refuses to see him.

The story in the novel is about how these two men help each other to contribute to the good of others as death approaches. I watched them interact in my imagination, then wrote down what I saw.

More tomorrow.

Making Fiction Out of Fact (2)

The only good thing about Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) is that the memories of grisly moments never fade. They are with me always. That means I have no problem remembering exactly what happened, when, where, and how. The factual basis for my fictional story is firmly grounded.

My work after 1975 is still classified, so I can’t talk about it. Suffice it to say, it had its exciting moments that added to my trove of adventures that I can draw on for fiction.

Meanwhile, I volunteered to help those in need. During the 1980s, I took care of men dying of AIDS. I worked with seven patients. They were all gay, and they all died. Then I spent seven years as a volunteer in a hospice, working with dying people. Those experiences, too, are emblazoned on my memory.

So I have a rich set of experiences to draw on for my fiction. It’s all fact. It all happened.

But the characters in my books and stories are all created by my imagination. They are often based on an amalgam of traits I saw in real people, but they are not depictions of people I knew. Instead, they are produced by my unconscious. I’ve learned to put myself in a meditation-like state, quiet my mind, and give up control. Then the characters come to me, as if in a dream, fully formed. In the beginning they don’t always reveal themselves completely. I have to wait for them to decide to let me know them.

I put my imaginary characters into the real situations that spring from my memory and imagine what they would do. I watch them act and react, then write down what happens.

I usually don’t know the ending of a story or book until I write it. And a scene that I am writing often takes turns I’m not expecting. The characters sometimes do things that surprise me. It is as though a muse were dictating to me a story that only she knows.

More tomorrow.

Making Fiction Out of Fact

I will be doing a presentation this evening on using fact as the basis for fiction. What follows are my thoughts on the subject.

Reviewers of my books often note that my writing is fiction in name only. Everything I write is based on events I have participated in or observed. My four novels and seventeen short stories—and my two books coming out next year—are drawn from events that really happened. I don’t know how to write fiction any other way.

My writing process comes in three stages that sometimes overlap. The first two don’t feel like I’m making them happen. It is as though a spirit or muse is feeding me thoughts and commanding me to create a story. The third stage, revision and polishing, is more intellect driven.

The first stage occurs when an arresting scene comes upon me like a dream. I dwell on what happens in that scene, then let my imagination, or more often, my memory, suggest what led up to that scene and what the outcome was. Little by little the story comes to me.

The inspirational moments of that first stage always originate in something real in my own history. Lucky for me as a writer, I’ve lived a particularly vivid life. Between 1962 and 1975, I was in Vietnam at least four months every year. I had two complete tours there and so many shorter trips that I lost count. My job was signals intelligence, the intercept and exploitation of the radio communications of the invading North Vietnamese. I kept getting sent back to Vietnam because I knew North Vietnamese communications like the back of my hand—I’d been producing intelligence from them since 1960. Besides, I spoke the three languages of Vietnam: Vietnamese, Chinese, and French.

Maybe most important, I was under cover as an enlisted man with whatever unit I was supporting. I lived with the troops—slept beside them on the ground, sat in the dirt with them eating C-rations, used their latrines, and went into combat with them. I worked with army and Marine combat units all over South Vietnam. That meant I was often in the middle of the fight on the battlefield. One consequence is that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). The unspeakable horrors that occurred during the fall of Saigon, when I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city, made it worse.

More tomorrow.

Books on the Time of Trouble (2)

The fighting in Northern Ireland came to an end when it was clear that neither side would prevail and further killing was useless. The Northern Irish ended up with more independence than they had known, but they are still today subject to British rule.

You can read my review of Say Nothing at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/say-nothing-a-true-story-of-murder-and-memory-in-northern-ireland

The other book, Country: A Novel (HarperCollins-Custom House, due to be published October 1, 2019), is fiction. Its author is Northern Ireland native Michael Hughes who writes in the dialect of the region. Set in 1996, it tells of the ruminations among the rebels about whether to continue to fight the unionists and the British or to accept the outcome of the peace talks then underway—that is, to surrender rather than endure and inflict more bloodshed. Most of the characters are the Irish resisters.

Reading Country was a challenge. The Northern Irish dialect is filled with words and structures I had never come across before. In my review, I offer a sample of the vocabulary: “recce,” “oul,” “quare,” “scupper,” “spondulicks,” “bog,” “slag,” “gunk,” and “snog.” The word “wee” is used throughout to mean “little.” “Dacent” apparently means “decent; “thon” seems to mean “that” or maybe “yon.” In short, it took patience and a fair amount of detective work on my part to get through the text.

My review will appear coincident with the publication of the book later this year.

I ended up recommending both books. They both taught me history about the struggle in Northern Ireland. I’m a better man for knowing more.