Tom Glenn's Blog, page 165

My Last Warning to the Ambassador (4)

I’ll never forget that late April 1975 car trip from the embassy in Saigon—following my failed briefing of the ambassador—back to my office at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of the city. I was driving alone, but in the novel Last of the Annamese, I wrote the description of the trip from the point of view of the protagonist, Chuck, who was chauffeured to and from the meeting:

Chuck ensconced himself in the sedan’s passenger seat to the right of the driver rather than sitting in the back on the return trip to Tan Son Nhat. His hand grasped the Beretta [pistol] hidden inside the briefcase. After less than a mile, the hordes of refugees filled the street and blockaded the sedan. As the crowd surrounded the car, the din grew louder. Faces outside the car windows were savage. Chuck heard the thump of fists beating on the sides and trunk of the car. The driver, terrified, tried to move forward, but now the mob swamped the sedan, screaming. The car was stymied.

Chuck sat straight and with a calmness that surprised him, drew the Beretta into the open. He aimed it through the windshield and drew his lips away from his teeth.

The thugs directly in front of the sedan drew back, startled.

“Drive through,” Chuck growled at the chauffeur. “Now.”

The car crept forward, gaining speed. After twenty feet, it was up to ten miles per hour. Chuck kept the Beretta on display for the rest of the trip.

End of quote. More tomorrow.

My Last Warning to the Ambassador (3)

After my disastrous interview with the ambassador, during the last few days before Saigon fell, I went down the hall to the office of Tom Polgar, the CIA Chief of Station. Here’s my retelling of my discussion with Tom from Last of the Annamese. Since the book is fiction, I describe the scene from the point of view of the protagonist, Chuck Griffin:

For a moment, [Chuck] stood panting, then, on impulse, turned and hurried to the office of the CIA Chief of Station. The secretary took him immediately into the chief’s private office.

“Forgive, the interruption, sir,” Chuck panted. “I just briefed the Ambassador on the military situation and urged him to call for an evacuation. He cut me short.”

The chief smiled up from his desk. “He’s a busy man.”

Chuck’s desperation got the better of his sense of protocol. “Sir, we gotta get people out of here.”

The chief laughed. He opened a manila folder on his desk and handed Chuck a message printout. It was from the Ambassador to the president and Secretary of State, dated that morning. It declared that the North Vietnamese were using communications deception to mislead the Allied intercept effort. And they were trying to frighten the Republic of Vietnam into negotiations by transmitting false data.

Chuck’s mouth dropped open. He read the message again to be sure he got it right.

“What evidence do you have,” he said to the chief, “what evidence does the Ambassador have of communications deception?”

The chief laughed. “Tell you what. I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne, vintage and chateau of your choice, that a year from now you and I will both still be in Saigon, at our desks, following our usual routine.”

The man was serious. Chuck blinked, then turned and faltered from the room.

End of quote. Neither Tom Polgar nor the ambassador believed the compelling signals intelligence data that the North Vietnamese were about to attack Saigon. I recently learned that CIA agents at the embassy had plenty of evidence from their own sources that the assault was imminent. They weren’t believed, either. The attack several days later took U.S. officials by surprise.

More tomorrow.

My Last Warning to the Ambassador (2)

Continuing yesterday’s quote from Last of the Annamese describing my last briefing for U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, days before Saigon fell. Chuck, the novel’s protagonist and stand-in for me, has just told the ambassador that the North Vietnamese are ready to attack Saigon:

The Ambassador gave him a patient smile. “Anything else?”

Chuck’s mouth opened in surprise. “Sir?”

The Ambassador stood. “If there’s nothing more, I need to get on to other matters.”

Chuck stumbled to his feet. He took a deep breath, stood straight, and calmed himself. “Forgive me, sir, but we have little time left to get U.S. citizens and vulnerable South Vietnamese out of the country before it falls to the North Vietnamese.”

The Ambassador came from behind his desk and rested his hand on Chuck’s back as if to urge him toward the office door. “Thank you, Mr. Griffin. I’ll handle it from here.”

Despite the pressure from the Ambassador’s hand, Chuck didn’t move. “Mr. Ambassador, to save lives, I plead with you to order the evacuation immediately. Even if we start now—”

The Ambassador put his arm around Chuck and edged him toward the door. “Young man,” he said as they moved away from the desk, “when you’re older, you’ll understand these things better.”

At the door, the Ambassador smiled, showed Chuck out, and closed the door.

End of quote. Graham Martin never did order an evacuation. He didn’t accept my evidence that the attack was at hand. Instead, he believed the Hungarian member of the International Committee for Control and Supervision, the ICCS, a representative of a communist government allied to North Vietnam, who told him that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking Saigon. As a result, many thousands of South Vietnamese who had fought by our side were killed or captured after Saigon fell.

More next time.

My Last Warning to the Ambassador

In Last of the Annamese, I recount, almost verbatim, my last briefing for U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, during the last week before Saigon fell on 29 April 1975. I attribute to the novel’s protagonist, Chuck Griffin, my words and actions. The name of the ambassador is never mentioned in the book. But the savvy reader knows it was Martin.

Here, quoted from the book, is the play-by-play description of our last meeting:

Chuck opened the briefing book on the desk with the pages facing the Ambassador. He reviewed the status of North Vietnamese forces within striking range. “Sir, the situation is critical. The fall of Xuan Loc removed the last barrier to the North Vietnamese approach to Saigon. We know from signals intelligence that sixteen to eighteen North Vietnamese divisions now surround us, poised to invade Saigon. An intercepted message early this morning sent by an unidentified North Vietnamese unit two kilometers north of Tan Son Nhat told a subordinate to await the order to attack.”

The Ambassador glanced at his watch.

“Our best estimate,” Chuck went on, “is that the enemy won’t be completely ready to move against us for another two to three days. But the North Vietnamese are in no hurry. The South Vietnamese military is crumbling fast. We expect that when the attack begins, we’ll be hit first with rockets and mortars, then artillery as enemy troops enter the city.”

The Ambassador gave him a patient smile. “Anything else?”

More tomorrow.

McNamara’s In Retrospect (3)

Reading Robert McNamara’s  In Retrospect moved me to the core. I was in Vietnam on and off for thirteen years and barely survived the fall of Saigon. I watched as Americans turned against the war, and Congress responded by eliminating first air support on the battlefield, then financial support for the South Vietnamese government. I watched as South Vietnamese army troops went without pay, desertions became rampant, and units had no money to replace weapons lost in combat. I watched as, despite that, on the whole, South Vietnamese defense against North Vietnamese aggression was courageous. The South Vietnamese 18th Infantry Regiment’s long and tough fight to save Xuan Loc against forces that greatly outnumbered them ended on 21 April 1975, when the city fell to the communists. Xuan Loc was the last obstacle to the North Vietnamese in their drive on Saigon. When it was lost, I knew Saigon was lost, too.

McNamara didn’t write a detailed history of what happened after 1968, when he left the U.S. government to become the head of the World Bank. He was, after all, telling his own story, not that of those who followed him. But his sense of loss over the mistakes he made and those of the presidents he served is palpable.

McNamara doesn’t talk about the Vietnam Memorial (the Wall) on the National Mall. But I know from reading Brian VanDeMark’s Road to Disaster (see my review at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/road-to-disaster-a-new-history-of-americas-descent-into-vietnam) that he made several trips to visit the memorial. He never did it publicly. He went alone, in the dark of night. No one knew he had been there or observed his anguish.

McNamara’s In Retrospect (2)

Continuing the quote from yesterday:

“Gen. William E. DePuy, Westmoreland’s operations officer and principal planner in 1965-1968, made a somewhat different but equally telling point in a 1988 interview, when he said: ‘[We] eventually learned that we could not bring [the Vietcong and North Vietnamese] to battle frequently enough to win a war of attrition. . . . We were arrogant because we were Americans and we were soldiers or Marines and we could do it, but it turned out that it was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never closed. It was a losing concept of operation.’

“Why this failure? Gen. Bruce Palmer, Jr. . . . offered a compelling explanation. The [joint] chiefs [of staff], Palmer writes, ‘were imbued with the “can do” spirit and could not bring themselves to make . . . a negative statement or to appear to be disloyal.’

“That certainly explains part of the failure. But the president, I, and others among his civilian advisers must share the burden of responsibility for consenting to fight a guerrilla war with conventional military tactics against a foe willing to absorb enormous casualties in a country without the fundamental political stability necessary to conduct effective military and pacification operations. It could not be done, and it was not done.”

I know from reading other accounts that McNamara suffered greatly from guilt and remorse over the war. Toward the end of In Retrospect, McNamara writes:

“In the end, we must confront the fate of those Americans who served in Vietnam and never returned. Does the unwisdom of our intervention nullify their effort and their loss? I think not. They did not make the decisions. They answered their nation’s call to service. They went in harm’s way on its behalf. And they gave their lives for their country and its ideals. That our effort in Vietnam proved unwise does not make their sacrifice less noble. It endures for all to see. Let us learn from their sacrifice and, by doing so, validate and honor it.”

More tomorrow.

McNamara’s In Retrospect

I have just finished reading Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect (Times Books-Random House, 1995). It was a searing experience. McNamara spares neither himself nor the presidents he served (Kennedy and Johnson) in accepting the blame for a war lost in Vietnam.

The text begins with the sentence, “This is a book I planned never to write.” McNamara then offers a detailed history of his and the presidents’ failure to understand the war.

I found two passages especially moving. McNamara quotes army Major Andrew F. Krepinevich, a military historian, diagnosing why the U.S. military failed so completely:

“In developing its Vietnam strategy to use operational methods successful in previous wars, the Army compromised its ability to successfully combat . . . insurgency operations at anything approaching an acceptable cost. In focusing on the attrition of enemy forces rather than on defeating the enemy through denial of his access to the population, MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] missed whatever opportunity it had to deal the insurgents a crippling blow. . . . Furthermore, in attempting to maximize Communist combat losses, the Army often alienated the most important element in any counterinsurgency strategy—the people.”

In short, Westmoreland’s strategy of search-and-destroy and using body counts as the measure of success was grossly misguided in dealing with an enemy using guerrilla tactics. The North Vietnamese strategy is summed up in the words of Mao Tse Tung: “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.”

In short, we failed to understand the enemy, fought the wrong war, and drove the populace into the arms of the enemy.

More tomorrow.

Holed Up at the Office in Saigon (2)

I’ve posted here before about all that happened during the final days before Saigon fell. Suffice it to say that toward the end, the three of us holed up in my office at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of the city, survived without sleep or anything approaching sufficient food. The North Vietnamese bombarded us starting at sunset on 28 April, first bombing by South Vietnamese pilots who had defected to the enemy, then rockets, then, about 4:30 in the morning on 29 April, artillery. Rounds fell inside the compound. One C-130 transport aircraft behind out building was hit and exploded. The building next door to us blew up. Worst of all, two Marine guards at our gate were killed.

Marines aboard ships of the U.S. 7th Fleet, cruising in the South China Sea, flew in by helicopter and rescued us. My two communicators went out about 1400 (2:00 p.m.) on 29 April; I escaped under fire that night. It was pitch black and pouring rain, but we made it.

The end result is that all three of us got out alive but not without injury. My ears were damaged by the shelling, and I was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery and pneumonia due to sleep deprivation, inadequate diet, and muscle fatigue.

One irony is that I was evacuated by helicopter to the Oklahoma City, the flag ship of the 7th Fleet. Aboard was a young Marine lieutenant named Ed Hall helping with the evacuation. He and I didn’t meet then. We only found out about a year ago that we were both embroiled in the fall of Saigon. Now a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, Ed is the commander of my American Legion Post.

Holed Up at the Office in Saigon

As I have noted here in earlier posts, I knew before the end of March 1975 that Saigon would soon fall to the North Vietnamese. As refugees fleeing the advancing communist forces streamed into Saigon, the streets of the city were becoming so clogged that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through much longer. After I got my wife and four children safely out of the country on 9 April, I moved out of the villa we had shared and slept in my office. I set up a cot in the front office of our suite—my office—and slept there between the two flags on each side of my desk, the stars and stripes and the gold-and-orange banner of the Republic of Vietnam. I kept a loaded .38 revolver under my pillow.

I spent full time getting my subordinates and their families out of the country. Because the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, had forbidden me to evacuate my people, I had to do it on the sly. I used every ruse I could think of to get my 43 subordinates and their families out. By 27 April, only three of us were left, me and the two communicators who had volunteered to stay with me to the end.

All we had to eat was bar snacks we’d been able to scrounge from a hotel while we could still get out in the streets. That was no longer possible—our vehicles had been crammed up against the wall of the building to make room for the Marine helicopters from the U.S. 7th Fleet, cruising out of sight in the South China Sea. Besides, the mobs outside the perimeter fence of our compound were now ten to fifteen people deep, all demanding evacuation. We were stuck there. The ambassador, confident that the North Vietnamese would never attack Saigon, refused to call for an evacuation.

As the attacking forces got closer, we gave up trying to sleep. Our diet was olives, pickle relish, and crackers. I moved my cot and the .38 into the comms center, and the three of us went on a regimen of one guy resting for two hours while the other two worked.

More next time.

The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam

Several times in this blog I’ve talked about the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (also called the National Liberation Front or NLF). In Vietnamese, it’s Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam. It was an organization supposedly formed in South Vietnam in 1960. It was purported to be a coalition of all the patriotic groups in South Vietnam opposed to the government of the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., South Vietnam) and the U.S.

In fact, it was a fiction created by the North Vietnamese communist party in Hanoi. That’s where its charter-declaration was written in 1960. It was then transmitted to communist subordinates throughout the south with orders to promulgate it. In fact, the front never existed.

I am disturbed to discover that American experts on the Vietnam war write of the NLF as if it were a real functioning organization. Brian VanDeMark in his new book, Road to Disaster, (see my review at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/road-to-disaster-a-new-history-of-americas-descent-into-vietnam) refers to it that way. So did Robert McNamara in his In Retrospect.

I’m tempted to ask NSA to declassify the proof of the NLF prevarication so that I can write an article on the subject. It’s never too late to learn the truth about our own history, even if it comes almost sixty years after the fact.