Tom Glenn's Blog, page 152

The Gift: Foreseeing the Future

My search of early posts to this blog unearthed another one worth repeating. This one also comes from January 2017. The Chuck referred to is the protagonist of my novel Last of the Annamese:

A blog reader questioned me about Chuck’s gift for foretelling what the North Vietnamese would do next. How could that be? How did it work?

In Last of the Annamese, I describe Chuck’s ability to foresee the future with the sentence “. . . he’d let his consciousness rove over patterns and trends and the flow of events until he knew what was going to happen next.” That depiction is derived from my own experience. How does it work? I have no idea. I discovered how to let my consciousness blur while I studied events. I’d let my mind wander over the data. Then, sometimes suddenly, I’d know what would happen next. I don’t know how I did it. Others with the same gift were equally puzzled.

One result was that we developed over the years a series of indicators. When the North Vietnamese did x, y followed. The system was too vague to be called scientific; it was intuition at work. I’ve always thought that the best analogy was the sense of smell: it was almost as if when a certain combination of scents appeared, I’d foresee the next event. My guess is that the gift springs from an ability to be in touch with one’s unconscious. That ability dominates my writing.

End of quote. Looking back, it now seems to me that the magic of foretelling the future was true only with respect to the North Vietnamese. It didn’t work with every day life or happenings in the news. I now see that a major aspect was my intimate knowledge of the North Vietnamese and their communications. I spoke the three languages of Vietnam (Vietnamese, Chinese, and French). I had been exploiting Vietnamese communist communications since 1960. And I had spent so much time in Vietnam tracking the enemy—each year between 1962 and 1975, I was in Vietnam at least four months. In sum, I knew the enemy like the back of my hand.

That depth of knowledge was rare. I knew a handful of other intelligence analysts who shared it, but ignorance of the enemy—his tactics, his way of thinking, his beliefs, the patterns of his activity, his dedication to winning the war—was commonplace among both military and civilian U.S. leaders. Our inability to understand the enemy was one of the principal reasons we lost the war.

More tomorrow.

Cancer (2)

Continuing my quote from a blog post of January 2107 about my bout with lung cancer:

The other factor that helped me cope [with my lung cancer] was that I never stopped working. Even on my worst days, I wrote. When the Naval Institute Press (NIP) accepted Last of the Annamese for publication in 2016, I redoubled my efforts. I worked on the proofs of Annamese and struggled through the editing process with a genuinely excellent editor from NIP to get the book ready for publication in March 2017. At the same time, I completed work on Secretocracy, a novel based on my years in intelligence, and I’m shopping it around to publishers. Now that I’m up to my elbows in promoting Annamese with presentations and still doing readings and book signings of my earlier books, I’m working ten-hour days and loving every minute.

So thanks to devotion to work I love, I’m well on my way to complete recovery. And I’m deeply grateful for my good luck.

End of quote. In 2019, I’m still recuperating from the effects of the cancer, the chemotherapy, the radiation, and the surgery. I’m constantly irritated that I tire so easily, and I still cough up sputum and am subject to sneezing fits. But I’m also getting on in years and have already lived past the average age for an American man. So I’m not sure to what degree my problems are hangovers from the cancer and its cure or are just from getting old. At the same time, my drive to write is as strong as it ever was. I’m working on two new novels.

Meanwhile, Secretocracy, revised to take place during the Trump administration, has been accepted for publication and will come out next year.

I have no complaint.

Cancer

I’ve now been posting this log for about two and a half years. It occurred to me that texts I posted long ago could be updated and posted again. Here’s what I said about getting cancer in January 2017:

A friend who follows this blog asked me why I never mention my battle with cancer. Somehow, it seems irrelevant. But just to set the record straight, here’s the story:

In 2013, I coughed up blood. My doctor at the time said it was nothing to worry about. He diagnosed me with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Early in 2015, I brought up blood again. Since my doctor had told me not to worry about it, I didn’t go see him until time for my regular checkup in May. He sent me for a chest x-ray. I had a large tumor in the upper lobe of my right lung.

I underwent maximum chemotherapy and radiation, and then, in November 2015, a surgeon removed the tumor from my lung. Recovery is continuing. I still have a bad cough, and I lack energy. But the cancer is gone so far as we can tell.

The surgeon and my oncologist were frankly thrilled at my ability to withstand the treatments and the surgery. I was, in every other respect, a pinnacle of health. I was a runner until my right knee gave out in 2013, and I’ve always been a devoted weight lifter. That meant that I had to watch my diet to be sure I stayed healthy enough to run and work out. The end result was that I survived both the cancer and the treatment with flying colors. And I’ve never returned to the physician who failed to diagnose the cancer in 2013.

More tomorrow.

Volunteering (3)

The experience of taking care of gay men dying of AIDS changed me. I discovered within myself anti-gay biases that I didn’t know I had. But the patients I cared for showed a courage that reminded me of the men who served beside me in combat. The volunteers who worked with them were unflinching in their commitment to helping their brothers. All of them were gay. I was the only straight man among them. I came away with new respect for the gay community.

I was moved to my soul by the experience of caring for these men. They belonged to a group shunned by society, condemned for moral failure or blamed for their unwillingness to seek therapy to change their sexual orientation. And now they were dying in droves. By the time I finished my volunteer service with AIDS patients, my depth of understanding of the human condition had deepened and broadened. I saw anew.

The result was a novel, the only one by me not about Vietnam. I told the story of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS. The two principal characters were based on myself and an amalgam of the seven men I had watched die. I poured my anguish and heartbreak into that book to which I gave the title No-Accounts. It has been my greatest artistic success. I still get feedback from readers moved by the story.

I decided from the beginning in writing No-Accounts that I would make no effort to soft-pedal the brutality of AIDS. I described the gay character’s descent into the disease and his subjection to ancillary disease AIDS inflicts. But I endowed him with the courage and dignity I had observed in the men I cared for as they died.

In some ways, No-Accounts is my most successful novel. Most important to me: I proved that I could write about something other than Vietnam. That freed me to author Secretocracy which Adelaide Books of New York will publish next year.

Volunteering (2)

Of all my time spent in helping others, my five years of working with AIDS patients made the deepest impression on me.

It was the mid-eighties. Gay men were dying from an unknown disease called Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. No one knew how the disease was transmitted. As a result, people were afraid to touch AIDS victims. Men were literally dying on the street because no one would go near them. I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. So I volunteered to help.

I knew there was some danger—we didn’t know how much—that I’d contract AIDS from contact with the victims. But I had to do it anyway. I considered that I’d risked my life on the battlefield to help others. If I had to risk it again to help those who were desperately in need of help, I’d do it again. But I had to seek the permission of my wife. If I came down with AIDS, so would she. She encouraged me to go ahead.

Several years later, we learned that AIDS was transmitted by bodily fluids. I was safe. But among my duties was to give my patients injections. Once, after administering the injection, I accidentally stabbed my thumb with the needle. I was lucky. I didn’t come down with the disease.

I took care of AIDS patients for five years. I had seven, all gay. They all died. I loved each one of them as my brother and grieved over each death.

By the end of the 1980s, science had begun to find ways to prevent men from dying of AIDS. The crisis was over. I moved on and volunteered to work in a hospice where I took care of the dying for the next seven years.

More tomorrow.

Volunteering

My posts here over the past few days have raised in my mind the subject of volunteering to help others. It’s something I’ve been doing ever since the fall of Saigon.

My reasons were selfish. After I escaped under fire when Saigon fell and returned to the U.S., I was subject to irrational rages, nightmares, panic attacks, and flashbacks. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from a malady we didn’t have name for back then, Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. Because I held top secret codeword-plus clearances from NSA, my employer, I couldn’t seek psychiatric help—I would have lost my clearances and my job. So I had to cope on my own.

I instinctively understood that I had to bring the unbearable memories of my time in combat and the atrocities that occurred during the fall of Saigon into my conscious mind and learn to live them. Otherwise they would lodge themselves in my unconscious where they would never cease to haunt me. I turned to writing down what happened.

I also volunteered to help others. I found that when my attention was fixed on someone who needed my help, my hideous memories faded into the background. So I volunteered to work with the homeless. I took care of fatally ill men for five years during the AIDS crisis. And I spent seven years caring for the dying in a hospice.

It worked. I learned to live with my memories. I learned to give all my attention to those who needed help. I learned that compassion heals.

But I learned something more valuable: giving of oneself to succor others offers unique fulfillment. It brings us to the completion of our humanity.

What we do for ourselves keeps us going. But what we do for others makes us fully human.

More tomorrow.

Men of My Generation: Veterans

As a reader of this blog will have long since understood, I have a soft place in my heart for veterans. I’m one myself, and I share with others who have experienced military life—and particularly combat—a bond that is unbreakable.

Non-veterans cannot know or understand that bond or the life we have lived. To be in the military means to pledge one’s life in defense of others. To be in combat means to risk your life to save the life of the man fighting next to you. That bond among veterans feels universal to me, and the bond among combatants is the strongest bond I have ever experienced.

But these days, I meet fewer and fewer veterans. Those of us who matured before 1973 were subject to the draft. Some, like me, chose to volunteer rather than be drafted. That means that most American men born in 1955 or before saw military service. Far fewer enlisted after military service was no longer mandatory. By 1980, 18 percent of the U.S. population (both male and female) were veterans. Today it’s 7 percent. And the numbers will continue to decline.

As noted earlier in this blog, I cherish my military service. It taught me what I was capable of, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. It changed my life and prepared me for the thirteen years on and off in Vietnam as a civilian spy under cover. It made me ready to sacrifice my life for the people who worked for me and their families when Saigon fell in 1975.

So many men who matured after 1973 lack that experience and training. And I think that we as a people are poorer for that. Today, most of us don’t know what it means to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of others. That is a great loss.

As I have written here before, when veterans meet, there is a quiet understanding. Each of us knows what we share that others know not of. We don’t speak of it. We don’t have to. The bond is there.

What’s Worth Doing: What You Do for Others

My blog post about my navy corpsman buddy made me ponder something else he said in his letter to me: that what’s worth doing in life is what we do for others. He was writing in the context of saving lives on the battlefield, but his words extend through all facets of life.

The older I get, the more people I take care of. I correspond via the internet with a lonely disabled man living abroad. I write regularly to a man in prison who looks forward to receiving my letters. I look out for an older woman who would otherwise rarely get a chance to go out to dinner or events. I have lunch once a month with an older man who has little intellectual or friendly interaction.

I don’t believe any of these people think of me as their care-giver. Nor would I want them to. But I know that I provide them something they would otherwise lack, something they cherish: a friendly interlocutor.

I cherish the opportunity to do for others. The older I get, the more I see that helping others is probably the most fulfilling and satisfying thing in my life. I dispute the biblical quote (Luke 6:31): “Do unto other as you would have done unto you.” I think it should read, “Do unto others as they would have done unto them.”

I often muse that I was born to write. Writing is my life vocation. But that calling is individual. It applies only to me and others like me. Some vocations are universal. Doing for others is one of those. We are all called upon to help our brothers and sisters.

Lest I mislead you, I’m not at all religious and do not profess membership in any religion. I am, if anything, an agnostic. But I know what love is. I have loved and been loved. And I understand that giving to another is an act of love.

I know the truth of the words from 1 Corinthians 13:13: “There are but three things that last, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Do What You Have to Do, Whatever It Takes

I correspond regularly with a man who was a navy corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam. Marines don’t have medics that go with them into combat. Navy corpsman do the job. They’re right there in the middle of the fighting on the battlefield and do all they can to take care of the wounded.

According to my research, some 10,000 corpsmen served in Vietnam. Of those, 645 were killed in action and another 3,300 were wounded. They are credited with saving thousands of lives.

In a recent letter to my corpsman friend, I told him about the picture of my combat boots on display at the Palette and the Page, an art/book shop (see https://www.facebook.com/patti.paulus.7/posts/10214344159217895). In the display, at the bottom of the picture is a quote from my novel, Last of the Annamese: “Do what you have to do, whatever it takes.”

Those words were the motto of the men facing the fall of Saigon in the book. Put beneath the picture of a man’s combat boots, they implied that the owner had done what it took and had given up his life on the battlefield.

That was the reaction of my corpsman friend. He said that Americans who have never faced combat have no idea of the sacrifices combatants make. Young people these days are not required to do military duty and never even think about being willing to give up their lives for their country or to save the life of the man fighting next to them.

“You and I,” he said, “we have to think about it.” We lived it. What we went through, saw before us, and participated in is burned into our souls. Our memories of the unspeakable savagery of combat never fade. We have to learn to cope.

My corpsman friend and I are alike in one respect. Neither of us was on the battlefield as a combatant. He was there to save the lives of the wounded; I was there to provide intelligence on the enemy. I know my friend was armed. I was, too—I carried a .38 revolver, but I never fired it on the battlefield. He was wounded in combat; I was not.

Despite the roles we played, we were there. We saw close hand the brutality of combat and the grisly deaths of our buddies.

We both write about those experiences because we have to.

God bless and preserve those who never were subjected to combat. May their lives always be free of unbearable memories.

Respect for Subordinates: Leadership (5)

One more story about me and my guys in Saigon, about a time when I managed instead of leading.

I’ve related here the story of Ambassador Graham Martin’s insistence that I not evacuate my people when the fall of Saigon loomed. While pretending to obey his command, I lied and cheated and faked to get my guys and their wives and children safely out of the country.

But I screwed up. I withheld from my men the ambassador’s orders. I didn’t want to alarm them. They knew better than I did that the North Vietnamese were bearing down on us. They knew the attack on Saigon was coming soon. They knew that the North Vietnamese were within striking distance of us. They were the guys gleaning this information from North Vietnamese communications and transmitting back it to the U.S.

I informed the Director of the National Security Agency, my boss, General Lew Allen, of the ambassador’s prohibition of evacuation, in an eyes-only message. I told him I was going to use all means at my disposal to get my people out.

By dint of blatant falsehood, pretense, and invention, I succeeded in getting all my men and their families safely out of Saigon before I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the street of the city. I breathed easy in the belief that I had spared my guys the anxiety of knowing the ambassador had forbidden me to evacuate them.

Then, a year or so ago, I had coffee with one of the men who had been a communicator in my comms shop. He told me that the men handling my messages to the director had, of course, read them and knew that no evacuation was to be allowed. Word trickled through my comms guys, then among the rest of the staff. They all knew what I was faced with. They apparently decided among themselves not to let me know that they knew to save me further anxiety.

So they were taking care of me instead of the other way around. And I let them down by not trusting their courage and maturity. In short, I managed when I should have led. And they, God bless them, did all they could to reduce my angst by playing along.

In the long term, it was they who led me.