Tom Glenn's Blog, page 146

Honorable Exit

My interview with Thurston Clarke, author of the just-published Honorable Exit, is now on line. You can read it at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/an-interview-with-thurston-clarke

The book especially appealed to me because Thurston tells my story along with many others in the book about how we struggled to save our South Vietnamese allies as Vietnam fell to the communists in March and April of 1975.

If you read the interview, and especially if you read the book, let me know your reaction.

Why I Write about Vietnam

A reader asks why I write so much about Vietnam. Why not put it aside and move on? It’s a fair question.

The answer comes in two parts. Part one: Vietnam is very important to me personally.

I spent the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam. In effect, I spent my youth there—I was 25 years old when I arrived and 38 when I escaped under fire as Saigon fell. I speak the three languages of the county, Vietnamese, Chinese, and French. My children spent part of their childhood in Vietnam. As a consequence of the many times I was in combat on the battlefield there, and because of the unspeakable events that occurred during the fall of Saigon, I will always suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. My experience in Vietnam shaped the rest of my life. It made me the man I am today.

Part two: Vietnam is important to the United States of America.

It was one of our longest wars. It was until then—and arguably ever—the only war this country didn’t win. The war was lost in part because the American public turned against the war and demanded that it end. Over 58,000 men and women were killed in action, over 300,000 wounded. It was the last of our wars for which we drafted men into service.

For more than three decades after the war ended, it was considered shameful. Returning troops during the war were reviled and spat upon. Only in the last half dozen years has the public attitude started to change. We now honor our Vietnam veterans that we once denounced as butchers and baby killers. Americans nowadays, especially those born after the war, want to know about what happened and why.

The Vietnam war, in short, changed us fundamentally. By the time the change is finished, we will be a very different people.

More and more Americans ask me about Vietnam. I’ve now done my presentation on the fall of Saigon more than sixty times. I have the honor to be a source on what happened in Vietnam and why.

That’s why I write about Vietnam.

Helicopter Evacuations during the Fall of Saigon

April 29, 1975 saw the largest helicopter evacuation in history. Two United States Marine Corps helicopter squadrons, ten U.S. Air Force helicopters, and a large number of Air America choppers carried out 1,373 Americans and 5,595 people of other nationalities from South Vietnam to ships of the U.S. 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea. Counting those who escaped by sea, some 130,000 people fled South Vietnam. It was the greatest evacuation since Dunkirk. By the time of the evacuation, the North Vietnamese were in the streets of Saigon. They had huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, and captured American weapons. Yet not one of the helicopters was shot down.

The night of 29 April, I escaped from Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon, in the pouring rain and pitch black on an Air America Huey, a small helicopter that could only carry about ten people and was unarmed. As soon as we were airborne, I saw tracers coming at us. We took so much lead in the fuselage that I thought we were going down, but we made it. As I learned later, mine was one of the few choppers fired upon. If the North Vietnamese had the fire power to shoot down our birds and bring the evacuation to a halt, why didn’t they?

I think the answer is that they didn’t want to. All they wanted was for us to be gone.

But if the North Vietnamese didn’t want to shoot down our helicopters, who shot at mine? My guess is that it was the South Vietnamese. We were pulling out and leaving them behind to face the conquering North Vietnamese. They were furious. I can’t say I blame them.

I’m forced to agree with critics who say it was a shameful war with a shameful ending. Most shameful was leaving behind the multiple thousands of South Vietnamese who had stood by our side. To this day, I grieve over the men who worked with my organization and were left behind.

Amerasians (3)

The end of my quote from Last of the Annamese:

One by one, the other children crouched close to Chuck’s feet. He sang three verses and stopped. The wolfish, meager faces watched him.

“Can’t you smile?” Chuck asked them.

They went on staring.

“Smile.” He opened his eyes wide and used two fingers of one hand to push his own lips into a grin.

The little girl closest to him covered her mouth and giggled. A boy laughed out loud. Soon they were all laughing, even Philippe. A passing sister shushed them but kept going.

“You want another song?” Chuck said.

“Song?” Philippe said, nearly inaudible.

Chuck sang as much as he could remember of “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain.” At the end, the children screeched with laughter.

“You should clap,” Chuck said with a grin.

“Ka,” Philippe said.

“I—” Chuck pointed at himself, then performed a charade of singing. “You—” Holding Philippe in the crook of one arm, he pointed at them and clapped.

Again he pointed at himself, sang a few notes, pointed at them. The girl at his feet clapped three times silently.

“Yes,” Chuck said with a big smile. He repeated the pointing and singing. Half the children clapped hesitantly. “Good for you. Again.” This time they all clapped.

The singing and clapping went on until the last of the sunlight had moved beyond the courtyard. Chuck told them that was all, and they moaned in unison. He stood and carried the weightless Philippe back to his spot by the chapel wall.

“I’ll come see you again soon,” Chuck said.

“Soon,” Philippe repeated.

On his way out, Chuck left the customary twenty in U.S. green in the empty saucer inside the compound gate.

End of quote. Many of the children in orphanages were evacuated during President Ford’s BabyLift operation, but many more were left behind. I shudder to think how the North Vietnamese treated the bastard children of their sworn enemy.

Amerasians (2)

Further from my quote of Last of the Annamese about Amerasian orphans in Vietnam:

Philippe raised his scarred face, lacking one cheekbone, eyes out of alignment, and offered Chuck a disfigured smile. “Hi pee-kwee.” He reached for Chuck.

Chuck lifted him into the sunshine. “I missed you.” He folded Philippe into his arms. When Ben [Chuck’s son] was a year old, he was this size, but he weighed more than Philippe, whose arms were barely thicker than Chuck’s thumb. The sisters didn’t know how old Philippe was. They didn’t know his real name. They said nothing about how he came to be in the orphanage.

As usual, a sister carried a folding chair into the yard and opened it for Chuck. Philippe nestled in Chuck’s embrace, pressed his head into the curve of Chuck’s neck, and grasped Chuck’s shirt in a tight fist.

Chuck rocked him. “You all right, Pipsqueak?”

“Pee-kwee?” the boy said in perfect imitation of Chuck’s intonation.

“You want me to sing to you today?”

“Seen too yoo?”

“Okay.” Chuck started “Froggy Went a’ Courtin’” in a quiet, deep voice. He’d read, back when Ben was a baby, that children responded more to the vibrations of the male voice than to the sound, and sure enough, Philippe contoured himself against Chuck’s chest.

More next time.

Amerasians

During my thirteen years of roaming around in South Vietnam during the war, I spent a good deal of time helping out in orphanages. From the late 1960s on, a growing proportion of the orphanage population was Amerasian children, fathered by American soldiers with Vietnamese women. These children were outcasts—welcomed neither by the Vietnamese nor the Americans. Even if they survived to adulthood, they would be shunned by the Vietnamese and treated as second class citizens at best.

These little kids broke my heart. They wore rags and barely had enough to eat because the orphanages were impoverished. And the nuns who took care of the children were invariably harsh.

The protagonist of my novel Last of the Annamese volunteers, like I did, to visit the children and play with them. The following is the text telling of one visit to an orphanage. What I have described is what happened to me on every visit:

Chuck rang the bell at the gate set into the white-washed walls of Cité Paul-Marie, where both the sisters and the orphans were Vietnamese but spoke French. Sœur Annette-Marie, in her bleached wimple and habit, admitted him to the courtyard. “Bon jour, bon ami.” As she led him down the walkway toward the center of the compound, a one-legged girl hobbled by on a crutch. The sister spoke sharply to her. The child responded with a raspy “Oui, ma sœur.”

Behind the chapel, they entered the children’s play yard. Here, in the spot furthest from the street and a possible grenade attack, were more than a dozen children, most Amerasian—fathered by American GIs with Vietnamese women. All had been brought here from the main orphanage in Gia Dinh, northeast of the city, or from Da Nang, where the orphan population was outgrowing the facilities. He could no more judge the children’s ages than he could those of the Vietnamese sisters. The Viets were the tiniest people he’d come across, and these kids, like the ones he’d seen in Da Nang seven years ago, had been malnourished to boot. Most were mutilated or crippled, their faces pinched, their limbs twisted. He looked from child to wiry child until his gaze settled on Philippe, the smallest of the boys, dressed in sun suit and zoris and squatting in the shade of the chapel wall.

Chuck hunkered and lifted the miniature brown chin. “Hi, Pipsqueak.”

More tomorrow.

The South Vietnamese General Who Abandoned His Troops (2)

On 29 April 1975, as the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon, the two communicators who had volunteered to stay with me to the end and I were holed up in our comms center. We had no food left and hadn’t slept for days. Just after daylight, I got a call from the Vietnamese major I’d visited a few days before. He wanted to know where his boss, the general, was. He’d tried to telephone the general but got no answer. I dialed the general’s number with the same result. I found out much later that the general had somehow made it from his office through the mobs in the streets of the city to the American embassy and had gotten over the wall. He was evacuated safely while his men stayed at their posts awaiting orders from him. They were still there when the North Vietnamese arrived. All of them were killed or captured. Those who survived were sent to so-called “re-education camps,” really concentration camps where the death rate soared. Those who did not die were imprisoned for many years.

After I got back to the states and returned to NSA in 1975, I learned that the general who had abandoned his troops was now working at NSA. I wanted nothing to do with him and avoided him. Years later, I received an invitation to an awards ceremony—the general was being given a medal for his work during the fall of Saigon. Disgusted, I refused to attend. NSA’s deputy director, Ann Caracristi, summoned me to her office. She berated me for failing to honor a hero. I referred her to the eyes-only messages I had transmitted to the director at the time, General Lew Allen, describing the Vietnamese general’s emotional collapse and hysteria. General Allen had never shared the messages with her or anyone else. And he had destroyed them when he left the agency in 1977 to become commander of Air Force Systems Command. The men who worked with me and I were the only living human beings who knew what had happened.

I told Ann about the Vietnamese general’s abandonment of his troops when he was safely evacuated. She had never heard the story before. She refused to cancel the awards ceremony, but she allowed me to avoid it.

That Vietnamese general worked for a number of years at NSA before his death. I never spoke to him. I and the men who served with me in Vietnam declined to ever be in his presence. In the name of his 2700 subordinates he had left to their fate, we refused to mourn his death.

The South Vietnamese General Who Abandoned His Troops

Reading Thurston Clarke’s Honorable Exit brought back vivid memories of the last days of Vietnam. I wrote several days ago about the 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers I failed to evacuate at the end. Today I want to tell the story of the general commanding those troops and about one of the 2700, an army major, who was sacrificed at the end.

The general, whose name is still classified, headed the South Vietnamese signals intelligence effort against the North Vietnamese. During the last week of April 1975, as the North Vietnamese surrounded Saigon and prepared for the final attack, the general became despondent. He sat alone in his darkened office sobbing hysterically. I urged him to evacuate his men before Saigon fell, but my words went unheard.

Meanwhile, I visited one of his officers, a major I had known for years. I wanted to be sure he and his troops knew where to go when the U.S. ordered the evacuation, something I couldn’t discuss on an unsecured phone line—the North Vietnamese were already in Saigon’s outskirts and were monitoring my telephone. Always a model of Asian politeness, he invited me in and served me tea. He told me that his wife, who worked for USAID, 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.”

The major didn’t escape at the end, and I have no doubt that he carried out his plan; many other South Vietnamese soldiers did precisely what he described.

More tomorrow.

The Civilian Meritorious Medal

The darkest days of my life began in May 1975 when I returned to “the world” (the U.S.) after escaping under fire when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. I was suffering from amoebic dysentery and pneumonia brought on by inadequate diet, sleep deprivation, and muscle fatigue during the final days in Saigon. Worse, I had a full-blown case of Port-Traumatic Stress Injury from by my years in combat and the horrors during the final sweep of North Vietnam in its conquest of the south.

My wife and children, who had escaped Saigon twenty days before it fell to the North Vietnamese, were staying at her father’s house in Massachusetts. I telephoned her and begged her to come to Maryland. I told her I was very sick and needed her. She said no. She would only come back to Maryland when we got back our house. We had leased it to another family for three years, the length of our tour in Vietnam, now interrupted by the North Vietnamese conquest of the south. The lease had several years to go. It cost me considerable time and money to break the lease. My wife finally returned with the children the following July when we could move in. Her refusal to help me made me understand how little she cared about me. It was the beginning of the end of the marriage.

Meanwhile, when I was well enough, I returned to the National Security Agency (NSA) where I was employed. Nobody at NSA wanted to hear about Vietnam. It was a shameful war, best forgotten. People avoided me as if I smelled bad. Eventually I was placed in a new job and resumed my career.

A year or so after my return, the U.S. government decided to recognize me for the work I had done during the fall of Saigon, especially my successful effort to evacuate my 43 subordinates and their wives and children as Saigon came under attack. I got them out even though the U.S. ambassador had forbidden me to do so, requiring me to lie, cheat, and steal. It meant, among other things, that I had to stay in Saigon until the night of 29 April. By then, the North Vietnamese were in the streets. The helicopter I flew out on was nearly shot down.

The government’s recognition came in the form of a medal. It was the Civilian Meritorious Medal. I was reminded that usually only the military are awarded with medals. That makes me prize it all the more.

That medal, to this day, is one of my most precious possessions.

The 2700

As I worked my way through Thurston Clarke’s Honorable Exit (Doubleday, 2019), I read of the heroic efforts of Americans to rescue South Vietnamese during the fall of Vietnam. I honor those Americans. They were successful. I failed.

Working with my organization over entire thirteen years I was in and out of Vietnam were 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers. As the fall of Saigon loomed, I tired frantically to get those men and their families evacuated. Because of the U.S. governments’ on-again off-again policy for evacuation and Ambassador Graham Martin’s failure to arrange and execute an evacuation plan, many thousands of South Vietnamese were left behind to face the vengeance of the North Vietnamese conquerors. I didn’t know that Colonel Bill LeGro, chief of the Intelligence Branch of the Defense Attaché Office (DAO), had arranged what Clarke calls an underground railroad to sneak vulnerable South Vietnamese out of the country.

I knew the men I failed to rescue. I’d worked with them, tramped through the jungle with them, sat beside them as we intercepted North Vietnamese radio signals. With so many of them, we’d gotten to the point that we dispensed with the formal Vietnamese-language address system and used the more casual and intimate forms. That was the equivalent, in English, of calling each other by first names.

All of them were killed or captured by the North Vietnamese. If they survived, they were sent to “re-education camps,” really concentration camps, where the death rate was very high. Some probably spent many years imprisoned.

I’ll never cease grieving over them. They were among the finest men I’ve ever known. We Americans abandoned them and left them to their fate.