Tom Glenn's Blog, page 139

Books on the Time of Trouble

Since the beginning of the year, I have reviewed two books on the time of Trouble in Northern Ireland. Both dealt with the conflict between the Irish nationalists, also called republicans, and their foes, referred to as unionists or loyalists, aided and abetted by the British government. The nationalists were mostly Catholic, the unionists principally Protestant.

The dispute began in the 1960s and ended, at least on paper, in 1998 when the parties signed a peace agreement of sorts. During the early part of that struggle, until 1975, I was either in Vietnam or between trips. My attention was focused on the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, and I paid little attention to events in Northern Ireland. As a result, both books were eye-openers for me.

The first, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, 2019), published in February, is for all intents and purposes a history of the low-level war. It’s title comes from a poem by Seamus Heaney about the Trouble:   

     O land of the password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.

Secrecy was paramount for the nationalists. They barely trusted one another and revealed nothing to those who were not known to be on their side.

More tomorrow.

Living Alone and Helping Others (4)

All in all, I conclude that solitude suits me. But, ironically, I have learned the immense value of giving to others and expecting nothing in return. It turns out I have two vocations in life. One is writing, the other is offering a helping hand to those in need.

These days I help a number of people in different ways. I write regularly to a man in prison and have volunteered to testify on his behalf during his parole hearing. I have never met him face to face. He wrote to me after reading one of my books. I came to understand that he needed support and encouragement. So we began a correspondence that has now lasted years.

But my friend in prison isn’t the only one. I care for an older lady friend who needs companionship. I spend time with an older man who is lonely. I exchange emails with a mentally deficient man. These people benefit from time spent with me, a gift I’m more than willing to give.

So here I am, alone and content. I have learned that helping others is a source of fulfillment like no other. I am at peace.

Living Alone and Helping Others (3)

Through it all, even though I was a member of a team of men helping AIDS patients, I worked alone. But I was there for my patients so they wouldn’t be alone.

After the AIDS crisis passed, I spent seven years as a volunteer taking care of the dying in a hospice. I did it because so few others were willing to take on that job and face death. By that point in my life, I had already lived with death on the battlefield in Vietnam and at the side of AIDS patients. I did it because I could do it, and, once again, I did it alone.

Meanwhile, another factor deepened my isolation. That was shame thrust on me for my time in Vietnam. For decades, Americans considered the war shameful. They denigrated those who had fought in that war. Their blame exacerbated feelings of shame I already had—I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) in part because I had survived while soldiers fighting next me had died. It was what’s now called survivor’s guilt.

All sufferers of PTSI assume they are alone, that others are free of the malady. Besides, because of my security clearances, I couldn’t seek therapy. I had to work through the problem alone. Once again, I was on my own.

One major element of my success in coping with PTSI was the discovery that other combat veterans were also subject to the disease. I wasn’t alone after all. My brothers were there with me. Now we help each other and teach each other to take pride, not shame, in our contribution to our country.

More tomorrow.

Living Alone and Helping Others (2)

After U.S. forces pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, I was named head of the covert NSA operation in South Vietnam. I found myself in charge of forty-three men who looked to me for guidance. Their safety and wellbeing, and that of their wives and children who were with them, were my responsibility.

By the time I took over as head of NSA’s detachment in Vietnam, I had already learned that for an organization to achieve, the man or woman in charge had to lead, not manage. I knew my job was to give my subordinates whatever they needed to be the best that they could be. I was there not to control them but to uplift and inspire them. That meant I had to respect them and give them the freedom to fail and the undergirding to succeed. In the simplest terms, I was there to help them.

As Saigon was falling and the U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, forbade me to evacuate my men and their families, I used every ruse I could think of to get my men and their loved ones safely out of the country. I did it without help and often despite resistance from those in power in Washington. Once again, I was on my own. My job again was to help, this time to assist my men and their families to survive.

When the AIDS crisis peaked in the 1980s, I felt called upon again to help. Men were literally dying in the streets because no one would go near them for fear of being infected with a fatal germ. I couldn’t stand to watch it happen, so despite the risk, I volunteered to take care of men dying of AIDS. I worked my way during five years through seven patients, all gay men who died. As we learned eventually, the risk of infection was small—it required introduction of the AIDS virus into the bloodstream. As it happens, I did suffer a needle stick after giving one of my patients an injection, but I didn’t come down with AIDS.

Once again, I found myself working alone to help others.

More tomorrow.

Living Alone and Helping Others

I live alone. I don’t have to. I’m sure if I set my mind to it I could find a way to live with a woman. Or I could find roommates or even join others in a shared house. In my lonely moments, I bemoan my solitude. But it’s really my own doing. It’s what I want.

Aloneness suits me for two principal reasons. First, I am an introvert by nature and by nurture. I grew up as an only child after the death of my sister when she was six and I was four. Further, with an alcoholic mother and a father in prison, I learned by the age of six that I had to depend on myself even for food. Living in a slum, I became wary of others who might try to steal from me or force me to do their bidding. I was determined to find a better life. I knew I had to do it myself. No one was going to help me.

Second, I am a writer. It doesn’t matter whether I want to be or not; I am. I found out as a child that my mission in life was to write. I’ve been doing it ever since.

A writer must work alone. Even when engaged in a joint writing project, the time spent drafting text is of necessity time spent by oneself. Writing is not a team sport.

The life I chose for myself reinforced my seclusion. I put myself through college working twenty hours a week to pay my way and feed myself. When I graduated at twenty-one, I enlisted in the army. In basic training I learned something new: teamwork. I found out that in some endeavors, like combat, the only way to survive and succeed is to work side by side with others. And I discovered that giving a buddy a helping hand offers more satisfaction than anything I can do for myself.

After I finished my military service, the National Security Agency (NSA) hired me and sent me to Vietnam where I served on and off between 1962 and 1975 with two complete tours and many, many shorter trips. My job until the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973 was signals intelligence support on the battlefield. That meant keeping friendly forces, army and Marine, informed of the enemy’s whereabouts, movement, intent, and readiness. I found myself in a fulltime helping role. I was there not to engage in combat but to help those who were.

More tomorrow.

Medical Office Staffs

In my long and turbulent life, I’ve faced multiple medical problems, despite being a model of good health. Three times I’ve lived through pneumonia. I survived lung cancer and the surgical removal of the upper lobe of my right lung. Twice I’ve collapsed from exhaustion. And I went through knee replacement surgery.

The physicians who cared for me were, for the most part, better than capable. I wouldn’t be here today if they had failed at their mission. But their office staffs—the people who make appointments, answer the phone, and maintain the files—have so often proven to be incompetent, rude, and clueless that I have several times been forced to seek another practice.

To be clear, I’m not referring here to the medical staff, the nurses, aids, and physician’s assistants. They, like the doctors they serve, are more than proficient.

Why are medical office staffs so often inadequate? I can only guess. My life experience has taught me that often people talented at an art or vocation lack management skills and haven’t any idea of how to lead. Their attention is focused on their calling. They seem to be unaware of the practicalities that support their mission.

The primary care doctor I’m now seeing is a master of his profession. He provides me excellent care. And his office staff is outstanding. It consists of a single person, a woman who has worked for him for years who is a model of accomplishment. My perception, based on fleeting inferences, is that she sees to it that he doesn’t overlook or forget tasks. She’s a marvel.

Is my portrayal of medical office staffs wrong and unfair? I have no idea. I encourage readers to chime in and let me know their experience.

Sandworm

I have just read and reviewed Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg (Doubleday, 2019). My review won’t be published until the book is in print in November, but the story the book tells haunts me.

“Sandworm” is the name given to the entity behind much of the cyber mischief that has disrupted nations and other organizations since the 1980s. It was finally identified in late 2018 as an element called 74455, a subordinate unit of the Russian government’s GRU. “GRU” is the English version of the Russian acronym ГРУ, which means Main Intelligence Directorate. The GRU is Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency.

The work of 74455 was first espionage and later sabotage against countries and organizations unfriendly to Russia. It was responsible for the crippling of the entire infrastructure of Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine (twice), and many other locations. It was behind the hacking of the U. S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the damning information leaked to WikiLeaks. Whether the leaked emails affected the outcome of the 2016 election is still open to debate. In June 2017, A. P. Moller-Maresk, a Danish business conglomerate active in transport, logistics and energy, with 574 offices in 130 countries, was mutilated by a cyberattack. The list goes on and on.

The story told in Sandworm shocked me. I had no idea the threat was so great. The U.S. is vulnerable. If 74455 launched a cybersabotage attack against us, government and industry both could be hobbled coincident with the destruction of factories and machinery and the closing of hospitals and schools. It is a terrifying prospect.

As I noted in my review, I’m familiar with the U.S. National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies—I had a thirty-five year career in intelligence. I have no doubt that the U.S. government knows far more about 74455 than Greenberg reveals in his book. And I know that the U.S. created Stuxnet, the most destructive and effective cybersabotage tool known. It was used to attack Iranian computers controlling uranium enrichment at Natanz and destroyed 984 centrifuges, effectively bringing the effort to a halt. It may be that the reason we have not been subject to a cybersabotage strike is that we have tools to ward off 74455’s weapons. Since all information on the U.S. cyber armory is classified, the public has no way of knowing.

What we do know is that our president, while still a candidate, celebrated the hacks of the DNC and even expressed hope that the hackers had breached Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The U.S. intelligence community was unified in the conclusion that Russian hackers were behind the attack on the DNC, a finding that Trump denied.

I know from bitter experience what happens when intelligence is ignored: people die. The possibility that our government might dismiss intelligence or fail to act in the face of a cyber threat is a matter of grave concern.

Climate Change

The Washington Post in early August reported that data from a European climate agency shows that last month edged out July 2016 for the warmest month ever around the globe. That record was set as Europe grappled with a heat wave that set records in many cities. I suspect that August will also be one of the hottest on record.

We must take action to slow down climate change before great swaths of the earth become too hot to live in and seal level rises to the point that coastal cities are flooded. It’s already happening. The emergency is now.

We need to move quickly to reduce carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. That means finding energy resources other than coal and fossil fuels. They’re available—wind, sun, natural gas—but we are doing next to nothing to shift to renewable energy sources while the earth is slowly scorched and the ice at the poles is melted.

Some suggest that the U.S. is only one player in the climate change game, and changes by us won’t have much effect. But other nations are already moving in the effort against climate change. And the U.S. is a world leader—other countries follow our lead.

President Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax. He and his Republican backers are unwilling to address the emergency even as Europe is disabled by heat and the waters rise on our own coasts.

The 2020 election offers us a way of changing our government so that it becomes active on climate change. It can’t come soon enough.

Men’s Forum

Once a week, I attend a two-hour discussion group for men only in a local 50+ center. The participants range in age from their sixties to one hundred. There is no agenda for the meetings, but I note that the participants avoid subjects that will elicit passionate disagreement. Hence, because we have strong representation from both conservatives and progressives, we rarely have much to say about the Trump administration.

I hold something of a local hero standing with the group. They know about my exploits in Vietnam because several years ago I gave them my fall of Saigon presentation. Nearly all men of that age group are veterans, and these men are especially appreciative of military experience. Some of them have read my books and Thurston Clarke’s Honorable Exit, which came out this year. Clarke’s book tells half a dozen anecdotes about me during the last six weeks before Saigon fell.

I enjoy the group primarily because I learn from listening to them what public judgments about a variety of subjects are currently in vogue. I rarely have anything to say. My sense is that I simply don’t know enough about many current issues to be able to make a well-based comment. Other members don’t seem to be similarly constrained. I do speak up when topics I’m knowledgeable about—e.g., Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, Vietnam, the intelligence community, languages, music—come up, but even then I’m brief and to-the-point. I’m there to listen and learn.

I’m grateful to the group for allowing me to join them. Two members have become friends, and another half dozen are cordial allies. Even those who don’t see eye-to-eye with me are friendly. All of them teach me.

Intelligence

The Washington Post over the past weeks has published a series of articles on the U.S. intelligence community. The resignation of Dan Coats as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the nomination of John Ratcliffe to replace him and Radcliffe’s withdrawal brought the intelligence apparatus into focus. An article on Gina Haspel, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), widened the focus. The reporting led to concern about the health and well-being of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

 President Trump has repeatedly expressed his animosity for the seventeen intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. He agreed with Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor in the face of unanimous agreement among the intelligence agencies that it did. He has verbally lambasted the agencies and publicly shared intelligence results with Putin. He defended his choice of Radcliffe—a strong Trump supporter with no aptitude or experience for intelligence management—for DNI by saying he needed someone who could rein the intelligence agencies which “have run amok.”

 All this alarms me. I spent thirty-five years as a U.S. intelligence operative and I know firsthand how often intelligence prevented disasters by warning U.S. leaders of our enemies’ intentions, plans, and acts. I am deeply concerned that President Trump will cripple the U.S. intelligence effort.

 Maybe he already has. Because intelligence is classified, the public has no information on what is going on with the agencies. We do know that the former DNI, Dan Coats, continued to report to the president facts that Trump did not what to hear—about Iran’s adherence to the treaty it signed with the U.S., North Korea’s continuing buildup of nuclear forces, Russian malfeasance. We know that Trump rejected those facts. I suspect that Coats resigned in frustration. We don’t know what Trump may have done to the agencies in retribution.

 I know from personal experience the tragedies that follow failure to believe and act on intelligence. Many times during the Vietnam war, U.S. commanders ignored intelligence warnings. It happened so often I coined the term the Cassandra Effect to describe the results. Examples: U.S. officials disregarded warnings about North Vietnamese intentions to attack at Dak To in 1967, their plans for the Tet Offensive, and their preparations to attack Saigon in 1975. The results were tragic.

 Is the same thing going on now? Is the president disregarding validated intelligence? Is that what he means when he says that the agencies have “run amok”? Is he working to disable the intelligence agencies? We don’t know. The danger is real and serious.