Tom Glenn's Blog, page 163

Veterans and Me (2)

My favorite story about my experience with soldiers took place just after the 1967 battle of Dak To in the central highlands of Vietnam. I described what happened several months ago in a blog post:

“I was getting to know the soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division. They found my presence hilarious. I was a civilian under cover—lest the enemy discover they had a spy in their midst—as an enlisted man even though I outranked some of their officers. I lived with the enlisted men. I slept in a tent with three GIs, ate C-rations sitting in the dirt with the troops, used their latrines.

“One morning when I woke up, my fatigues, the combat uniform worn by soldiers, were missing. I put on my skivvies and wandered around the cantonment area asking if anyone had seen them. They reappeared about two hours later. The troops had snitched them and taken them to a local tailor. They paid him to sew patches over the breast pockets on each fatigue blouse. They said ‘Glenn’ and ‘Civilian.’ On the two collar points of each blouse, where [an officer’s] military rank would normally appear, the number ‘13’ had been embroidered—I was a GS-13 (civilian rank) at the time. All my fatigue hats were now decorated with the 4th Infantry Division crest.

“The troops couldn’t stop laughing. And I was happy. They now accepted me as one of them. They insisted on taking pictures of me in my enhanced fatigues. I still have one of the photos.”

It was a happy time for me. The only problem was that not all the troops in the 4th Division knew me. Occasionally I’d encounter a soldier who was totally confused by my uniform. He’d spot the “13” on my collar and didn’t have a clue whether he should salute or not.

More tomorrow.

Veterans and Me

A quick review of my blogs over the past two years made clear to me how often I have talked about veterans. These men and women are my brothers and sisters. The bond I have with them is the extension of the love that people who fight side by side feel for one another. They don’t call it “love”—that’s too sentimental. But that’s what it is. The most intense love I’ve ever experienced.

The bond starts when two combatants come to understand that each of them is willing to sacrifice his life to save the other. Greater love hath no man. And when one of the combatants dies, the grief is profound.

Some of that sorrow was captured in the 1922 song, “My Buddy”:

Miss your voice, the touch of your hand

Just long to know that you understand

My buddy, my buddy.

Your buddy misses you

Those words don’t express the anguish still in my soul for the men who fought next to me and died. But they capture the quiet way that soldiers grieve over the loss of a buddy. We keep our weeping to ourselves. All that others see is a silent sadness, unexpressed and not to be shared.

More tomorrow.

Chaos at the End (5)

More about the bedlam in Saigon as the North Vietnamese surrounded the city:

The Ambassador, persuaded that the North Vietnamese would never attack Saigon, threw every roadblock he could think of into the path of those getting ready for the evacuation. He inanely clung to the specifications of the 1973 peace agreement with the North Vietnamese that no more than fifty members of the U.S. military could be in Vietnam at any given time. He insisted that the U.S. not violate the agreement even though the North Vietnamese had obviously abandoned any pretense of abiding by it. They had already seized two-thirds of South Vietnam by military force and had surrounded Saigon with eighteen divisions.

I have described several times in this blog the final three days during the fall of Saigon before I and my two communicators escaped under fire. We were holed up in the comms center of my office. Although we couldn’t get out to see it happening, chaos in the streets of Saigon had become rampant. The mobs were everywhere and had surrounded our compound. They were now ten to fifteen people deep, becoming more unruly by the hour, demanding evacuation.

Bob and Gary and I gave up trying to sleep. We had little food left. It was snacks we’d been able to cadge from a hotel bar while we could still get out into the streets. Starting on Monday, 28 April, the North Vietnamese shelled us. A C-130 transport aircraft on the airstrip behind the building blew up. The building next door to us was destroyed. Two Marine guards at our gate were killed. The shelling continued on and off through next day as Marine helicopters flew in from the U.S. 7th Fleet cruising out of sight from land in the South China Sea. Bob and Gary went out by chopper the afternoon of Tuesday, 29 April. I went out that night in the pouring rain, after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. I was later diagnosed with amoebic dysentery, ear damage, pneumonia from lack of sleep and inadequate diet, and Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI).

The chaos ended the next day, Wednesday, 30 April, when the North Vietnamese completed their conquest of South Vietnam and occupied Saigon. The 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers who had worked with my organization over my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam were all killed or captured by the North Vietnamese.

The chaos was over everywhere but in the souls of those of us who lived through those infamous days. The chaos continues in me. My PTSI will be always with me.

Chaos at the End (4)

Continuing the story of bedlam as Saigon fell in April 1975, quoted from my novel, Last of the Annamese:

By that afternoon, the eight-sixteen rule was already breaking down. Too much to do. Chuck and Sparky took turns sorting the incoming cables and passed the most urgent to Troiano, who briefed his boss, General Smith, in Smith’s office on the second floor. As if by habit, Chuck and Sparky posted positions of friendly and enemy forces on the wall maps and sent hourly situation summaries to the Embassy, General Smith, and Washington. They started through the file cabinets’ shredding everything until one of their three shredders conked out. Piles of burn bags filled with mangled ribbons of paper all but blocked the door to the external corridor. Sparky and Chuck alternated carrying the bags to the incinerator in the corner of the parking lot, burning them, and stirring the ashes to be certain that nothing legible was left. Sparky, who’d done the night shift, was near the end of his usefulness. Troiano sent him into the “dormitory”—his office—to get some rest. By 2000 hours, Troiano was getting flaky. Chuck respectfully suggested he, too, retire.

Left alone with the piles of incoming, Chuck . . . read and sorted, munched on crackers and olives [the only food he had—bar snacks scrounged from a hotel while he could still get out into the streets]. He had to stay rational until midnight when he’d waken Sparky to relieve him. Fighting roiled just north of them, and the North Vietnamese had begun an offensive in Long An and Hau Nghia Provinces on Saigon’s western flank. News reports from Phnom Penh told of public beheadings of former Cambodian government officials. The Intel Branch had been put on comms distribution for SPG [Special Planning Group, the in-country team preparing for the evacuation] traffic. The “special planning group,” code named ALAMO, had quietly activated the forward evacuation operations center, even though the Ambassador still hadn’t approved.

End of quote. More tomorrow.

Chaos at the End (3)

Resuming from last week my series of blogs on the turmoil in Saigon in late April 1975 as the North Vietnamese prepared for their final onslaught on the city.

The North Vietnamese time-out just before the attack on Saigon ended as suddenly as it had begun. My novel, Last of the Annamese accurately reports what happened:

It started Saturday morning [26 April 1975]. Reports swamped the comms center. Long Binh was under attack, and Ba Ria fell. North Vietnamese shelling of Bien Hoa was low thunder that shook the floor. The final assault was under way. To get around the Ambassador’s edict that no one was to be evacuated, Troiano [chief of the Intelligence Branch, Defense Attaché Office in Saigon] sent most of the remaining personnel out of country by air on trumped-up “temporary duty” missions. The Intelligence Branch, the comms center, and the tank [the large room housing intelligence analysts] were now manned by five people—two comms techs who’d volunteered to stay to the end, Chuck [the novel’s protagonist], Sparky [Chuck’s co-worker and housemate], and Troiano. “We’re just here to turn off the lights when the Ambassador gives us permission to leave,” Troiano told Chuck. They adopted the eight-sixteen rule (eight hours of sleep, sixteen hours of work on rotating shifts) so that two people would man the tank at all times. Sparky made a food run, found out that the snack bar was deserted . . . .

They helped Troiano shove his desk into the tank and moved the cots and suitcases into his office. They pushed the three desks they’d be working at to the center of the room and moved all the rest into rows to form barriers in case the room was penetrated.

“Give me the keys to the jeep,” Troiano said. “All vehicle keys are to be handed over to the SPG [Special Planning Group, the small team coordinating the evacuation despite the ambassador] guys so they can clear the parking lot for helos.”

“What if we need to go somewhere?” Sparky said.

“None of us is going anywhere from now on,” Troiano said, “except by chopper.”

More tomorrow.

Symposium: The Tet Offensive (6)

The failure of the military to believe and act on signals intelligence happened so often during my years in Vietnam that I coined the term “Cassandra Effect” to describe it. Like the mythical Trojan clairvoyant Cassandra, I was blessed with the ability to foresee the future—by exploiting enemy communications—and cursed with not being believed.

It happened with the Tet Offensive. But it also changed the outcome of the 1967 battle of Dak To. And most painfully for me before the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon at the end of April 1975.

I’m long since retired and no longer cleared for classified information. But those currently still active tell me that the situation has changed for the better. These days, I’m told, the operators and the intelligence personnel are so closely bonded that it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which.

I profoundly hope my informants are right. And yet I see two ongoing tendencies that remind me of my days in Vietnam and greatly concern me.

One is the “can-do” attitude which fails to recognize signs of defeat. That happened in Iraq and again in Afghanistan. We do not seem to be able, as a nation, to accept the evidence that we are failing militarily and withdraw.

The other is our willingness to call it quits and leave those who fought by our side to the mercies of their enemies. When Saigon fell, we abandoned thousands and thousands of South Vietnamese who had stood next to us to fight the communists. We have now done the same thing in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I read, to my horror, stories of Iraqis and Afghans who translated and interpreted for us trying vainly to escape to the U.S. to avoid being killed by our enemies in their country.

We are a can-do, optimistic nation. I admire that in us. But I see that we are also a nation that can’t seem to learn by our mistakes. That frightens me.

Symposium: The Tet Offensive (5)

One of the issues raised tangentially at the symposium was that our forecast of the Tet Offensive was not acted on. Speakers offered various theories about why.

My own sense is that army commanders in the field in Vietnam knew almost nothing about signals intelligence. Many didn’t even know such a thing existed.

Part of the cause for the ignorance was that NSA went to great lengths to keep even the existence of signals intelligence secret. For example, those of us who worked there then weren’t even allowed to say where we were employed, leading to the joke that NSA stood for “no such agency.” NSA had good reason to keep its work secret: once a target suspects that his communications might be subject to intercept, it’s easy for him to change his mode of communicating. When that happens, we lose the ability to intercept.

Another reason for the commanders’ ignorance was inadequate training in the army on the use of intelligence. I saw so often in my work with combat forces that officers in command brushed aside intelligence of all sorts in their determination to attack and win. The “can-do” spirit of the U.S. military is on the whole admirable, but sometimes it gets in the way of sensible procedure.

I never had the problem of commanders ignoring intelligence when I was working with the Marines. I don’t know why. I do know that Al Gray, the officer I kept running into all through my time in Vietnam and the man who saved my life when Saigon fell in 1975, had been a signals intelligence officer before he became a combat commander. And he had great influence with the Marines in Vietnam. They all knew him and respected him. He was a colonel when he rescued me during the fall of Saigon. He went on to become the commandant of the Marine Corps. And to this day, he spends time at NSA where he is esteemed and continues to advise on military exploitation of signals intelligence.

More tomorrow.

Symposium: The Tet Offensive (4)

The second reason that I was involved in the forecast of the Tet Offensive is that I and other NSA professionals had, since the early sixties, worked hard to identify North Vietnamese communications practices that preceded military attacks. We were so successful that we foretold every major North Vietnamese offensive from 1964 onward.

But neither the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) nor the South Vietnamese prepared for the onslaught of the Tet Offensive. They were taken by surprise because they neither believed the forecast nor acted on it.

The irony of the Tet Offensive was that the North Vietnamese suffered a huge defeat but profited from the outcome. Their combat losses were enormous. The South Vietnamese populace did not arise in general insurrection, as the communists had hoped and expected. The troops of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) did not desert their posts. And the multiple attacks were repulsed.

But the North Vietnamese scored a political victory. The people of the U.S. had been told by their leaders that we were winning the war and that the North Vietnamese were near the end of their ability to fight. The Tet Offensive upended that premise. Opposition to the war grew rampant, leading to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1973 and the fall of Saigon in April 1975. My escape under fire as Saigon fell was but one of the many consequences brought on by the U.S. retreat from the war.

The memory of all these events overwhelmed me as I sat in the symposium and listened to the men I had worked with back then tell of our role in the Tet Offensive. The recollections were sad, but pride in our success in predicting the offensive leavened the bitterness.

More tomorrow.

Symposium: The Tet Offensive (3)

Continuing my reporting on the 17 October 2018 symposium on the Tet Offensive:

As I noted yesterday, I contributed to the signals intelligence forewarning of the Tet Offensive in two ways, even though I was not at NSA when the report and its ten follow-ups were issued.

The first action on my part was that I saw the country-wide offensive coming and urged NSA to alert U.S forces.

During the late summer and early fall of 1967, I was in the western highlands supporting U.S. forces there. From the intercept and analysis of North Vietnamese communications, I was able to tip off the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 4th Infantry Division to the buildup of Vietnamese Communist forces in Kontum Province and their intent to attack us. The end result was the battle of Dak To.

As the battle was winding down, I moved south to the Bien Hoa area, just north of Saigon. Once there I saw the same enemy communications practices we had observed in the highlands. Signals intelligence units all over the country detected the same patterns. I realized that the North Vietnamese were planning simultaneous attacks nationwide and exhorted NSA to pull together all the data and report the battle preparations.

The result was the alert to all recipients of our reporting that a country-wide offensive was about to begin.

More tomorrow.

Symposium: The Tet Offensive (2)

Throughout the day at the symposium, I was surprised when attendees would approach me and say hello. Once I saw their name tags, I realized who they were—NSA employees now retired. I remembered them as young men and women, but they’re now my age.

I knew all the speakers who were at NSA during the Vietnam war. We had worked together over the thirteen years I was trundling to Vietnam and back. They recalled moments and incidents I had come to believe were my memories alone. It felt as though my classified past was now being exposed to public view. I had to adjust my thinking. My past wasn’t secret any more.

While the central focus of the symposium was the 1968 Tet Offensive, the discussion ranged over the whole period of the Vietnam war and signals intelligence role in the conflict. I caught myself nodding and saying softly, “Yes, that’s right. That’s the way it was.”

I was most moved by the presentations of Tom Fogarty and Jack Barrett, both my compatriots during those years. They confirmed what I have maintained over the five decades since: the Tet Offensive was not a surprise to the U.S. government. Signals intelligence had foretold it. NSA issued its first report predicting the country-wide attacks the week before they began and had issued ten follow-up reports between 25 and 30 January 1968.

I didn’t write any of those reports. I was in Vietnam at the time. But I was instrumental in their issuance in two ways.

More next time.