Tom Glenn's Blog, page 166

Those We left Behind

I still grieve today over the 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers we abandoned when Saigon fell. These were men who worked with the NSA organization. I knew them. During my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam, I had traveled with them in the field. Some had invited me to share a meal with their families. Some I knew well enough that we used the familiar form of Vietnamese (anh and em instead of tôi and ông). Just as veterans everywhere are my brothers, so were these men.

And yet, at the end in Vietnam, we abandoned them. We left them to the tender mercies of the conquering North Vietnamese. Some were killed outright; others were incarcerated in “re-education camps,” really concentration camps, where the death rate was high.

We forsook them at the end for a variety of reasons. Among them were that the Ambassador, Graham Martin, never did call for an evacuation. He believed that North Vietnam would not attack Saigon. He had been assured by the Hungarian member of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (the ICCS, established in 1973 to monitor the supposed cease-fire) that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking Saigon. That gentleman represented a communist government allied to North Vietnam. By the time the ambassador was countermanded in the predawn hours of 29 April 1975 and an evacuation was ordered, the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of Saigon, and we couldn’t get to those soldiers.

Another reason that these men were left behind was that the soldiers’ commanding officer, a South Vietnamese general, was safely evacuated while the soldiers remained in place awaiting his orders. They were still awaiting his orders when the North Vietnamese took them.

But the principle cause for our desertion of these men was the shameful way we ended the Vietnam war. First we cut air support, then financial aid, to South Vietnam. Those cuts were the death warrant to the Republic of Vietnam. We Americans no longer wanted to be involved in what we considered a shameful war. So we withdrew and left our allies behind.

It’s clear that we didn’t learn from our mistakes, we did the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Are we Americans really unable to learn from our shameful errors of the past?

Remembering the Killed in Action

Each American Legion meeting begins with a remembrance of prisoners of war, those missing in action, and, finally, those killed in action. The words are sobering and honorific. The latter are described as those who gave their all on a field of honor.

So often at those moments, I find myself mentally shaking my head and asking silently, “Why don’t we tell it like it is?”

I remind myself that the words used are intended to inspire us, not horrify us. We need to remember and honor those who died in the service of their country.

And yet . . . I find myself wondering how many of those present realize and understand just how grisly combat is. There’s nothing pretty or uplifting about it. Anyone who has been through it has sustained soul damage, some—like me—more than others.

I wrote about the contrast between the way we honor our combat dead and the conditions under which they died in Last of the Annamese. The protagonist, Chuck Griffin, is remembering his son who died in combat in Vietnam. Chuck himself has seen combat. He remembers sadly:

“‘He died with honor.” That’s what his commanding officer had written. Sounded so dignified, so orderly. Evoked pictures of young heroes standing tall in beams of sunlight with the flag unfurled next to them while the strains of martial music swelled far away. Chuck could feel good about it, proud even, as long as he didn’t have to smell the burning flesh, didn’t have to hear the screeching, didn’t have to see the dismembered bodies and guts spattered across the battlefield. He shook his head. The lies we tell ourselves.”

I write about the gruesomeness of combat because I want people to know. Before we decide to go to war, let’s understand what we are asking our young men and women to go through. Then we can make our decisions wisely.

The Bien Hoa Ammo Dump

One of the final presentiments that Saigon was about to fall came on the night of 26 April 1975 when the North Vietnamese blew up the ammo dump at Bien Hoa just north of us in Saigon. By that time, I was sleeping in my office at Tan Son Nhat on the northern edge of the city. Here’s the way I described what happened in my article* on the fall of Saigon:

“During the night of 26 April, I was trying unsuccessfully to sleep when a blast threw me from my cot and slammed me to the floor. I ran to the comms center. The guys looked dazed, but everything was working and nobody was hurt. A bulletin arrived within minutes telling us that North Vietnamese sappers had blown up the ammo dump at Bien Hoa, just north of us. That meant, among other things, that panic in the streets would ramp up a couple of notches.”

The incident also appears in Last of the Annamese:

“Chuck’s ears registered the concussion first. It threw him from the rack and slammed him to the deck. Change and keys flew from the bureau. The walkie-talkie clattered to the floor. He listened through the ringing in his ears. Silence. He crawled to the window. Sliding up the wall until he was erect, he leaned to the side far enough for one eye to peer through the taped glass. Under the hostile glare of security flood lights, the city lay tense but unmoving. Something big had exploded . . . .

“Wednesday morning, Chuck learned from a Liberation Radio transcript that the explosion had been the mammoth ammo dump at Bien Hoa, less than eighteen miles northeast of them. Friendly after-action reports confirmed that enemy sappers had penetrated the perimeter. The airbase, the largest still in the hands of the South Vietnamese, had been hit the day before with rockets and artillery, and the runway had been closed for repairs. Meanwhile, the defense of Xuan Loc was over. Withdrawal had begun. The enemy’s pincers were closing.”

Xuan Loc was the last obstacle between the North Vietnamese and Saigon. Once they had occupied it, they surrounded Saigon. The end was at hand.

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*You can read the entire article at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-59-no-4/pdfs/Glenn-Remembering-Saigon.pdf

When the Birds Abandoned Saigon

In Last of the Annamese, my novel about the fall of Vietnam, South Vietnamese Marine Colonel Thanh observes that as the war grew closer to Saigon, the birds forsook the city.

I remember it. Toward the end, as North Vietnamese shelling came closer, I noticed the eerie silence between bombardments. I looked up into the trees. No birds. I remember at the time thinking that no omen could be more grim.

The birds’ twittering and calling to one another was so much a part of life in South Vietnam and we were so used to it that we were not even aware of it at the conscious level. In Saigon, it was part of the background noise, along with traffic sounds and the calling of street vendors.

I recall the chill I felt when I realized the birds were gone. They were wise, those birds. Death and destruction were only days away.

The NLF and the VC

I am astonished that a fiction created by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war persists. North Vietnam pretended—and the U.S. accepted—that the Viet Cong (VC) and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, also called the National Liberation Front (NLF), were independent groups opposed to the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government. Neither was real.

The term Việt Cộng is an abbreviation of the Vietnamese Việt Nam Cộng Sản, which means Vietnamese communist. Neither the North Vietnamese nor the communists in the south ever used the term. U.S. personnel in Vietnam used Việt Cộng, and its abbreviation, VC, to designate southern Vietnamese who were communists independent of but allied to the North Vietnamese. No such group ever existed. All the Vietnamese Communists, whether natives of north, central, or south Vietnam, were loyal to and completely under the control of North Vietnam. There was no distinction.

The NLF was equally unreal. It was purported to be an alliance of all patriotic southerners who opposed the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. In fact, it was fabrication invented by North Vietnam. The declaration of the NLF was written by the Lao động (Workers) Party, the communists, in Hanoi in 1960 and then promulgated throughout South Vietnam under the pretense that it was composed by southerners in opposition to the rulers of South Vietnam and the U.S. In fact, the NLF never existed.

I was taken aback while reading Brian VanDeMark’s Road to Destruction (see my review at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/road-to-disaster-a-new-history-of-americas-descent-into-vietnam) to see that the author referred to both groups as if they were real and independent. I’m now reading Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect. He, too, speaks of both groups as genuinely autonomous players.

I’ve written at length elsewhere (see my New York Times article at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/opinion/vietnam-tet-offensive.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region) about the failure of the U.S. to believe its own intelligence during the Vietnam war. Surely anyone reading my reporting and that of other analysts from the National Security Agency beginning 1961 would have known beyond doubt that the VC and NLF were North Vietnamese creations. VanDeMark notes that one of our failures during the Vietnam war was our ignorance of Vietnam, its history, and its culture. We didn’t call on the few experts we had in the government. I add that we ignored our own intelligence. Little wonder we were surprised that we won all the major battles but lost the war.

Phạm Ngọc Thanh (2)

In Last of the Annamese, I portray the last visit by the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, to Colonel Thanh. My description of their conversation is an almost verbatim rendering of the conversation I had with the South Vietnamese officer I talked about in yesterday’s blog post.

As with all the characters in my fiction, I didn’t actively create Thanh. He came to me as if from a source outside myself, fully formed. As I wrote about him, he revealed more of himself to me until it felt as though he was someone I knew well and saw every day.

What I admire most about him is not his serenity but his strength. His peacefulness and courage spring from his internal harmony which is the underlying core of his potency. He is at peace with himself. That gives him power.

Thanh isn’t perfect. He makes mistakes. But he is strong enough to recognize his errors, admit to himself and others that he’s erred, and then correct himself.

Reviewers have congratulated me for creating him and making him so compelling and believable. But it doesn’t feel as though I made him up. It feels as though he came to me ready to play his role in the story of the fall of Saigon. He told me his story. All I did was write it down.

Phạm Ngọc Thanh

One of the three principal characters in Last of the Annamese is South Vietnamese Marine Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thanh. Unlike the others in those days of disaster, Thanh is under no delusion. He knows South Vietnam will fall to the communists.

Thanh insists on calling his country An Nam (literally, peace in the south) as opposed to Viet Nam (the troublemakers in the south). As a Buddhist priest turned Marine officer, he finds serenity in the face of disaster and chooses death rather than escape from his dying nation.

The character of Thanh has attracted the most attention from the book’s reviewers. As one pointed out, a possible interpretation the book’s ending is that Thanh is himself the last of the Annamese. Others have remarked on the contrast between Thanh’s untroubled courage and the self-serving drive of most of the other characters.

I based the character of Thanh on several South Vietnamese officers I knew during my years in Vietnam. They were stalwart, incorruptible men, willing to sacrifice their lives to save the country. I went to visit one as the fall of Saigon loomed. I wanted to tell him where he and his men should go once an evacuation was declared. Here’s how I described my conversation with him in my article, “Bitter Memories: the Fall of Saigon” (http://atticusreview.org/bitter-memories-the-fall-of-saigon/):

“I risked another trip to check on a South Vietnamese officer I worked with. I wanted to be sure he and his troops knew where to go when the evacuation order was given, something I couldn’t discuss on an unsecured phone line. Always a model of Asian politeness, he invited me in and served me tea. He told me that his wife, who worked for USAID [United States Agency for International Development], 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.’”

That officer didn’t escape at the end. I have no doubt he carried out his plan because so many other South Vietnamese officers did precisely what he described.

More tomorrow.

Favorite Humor

I’ve been without internet since yesterday. So here, belatedly, is today’s blog post:

Some years ago, my friend Cody Collins, a man who served with me in Vietnam, sent me a list of his favorite aphorisms. I still enjoy them. Here they are:

It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you place the blame.

We have enough “youth.” How about a fountain of “smart?”

A fool and his money can throw one heck of a party.

When blondes have more fun, do they know it?

LEARN FROM YOUR PARENT’S MISTAKES—USE BIRTH CONTROL

Money isn’t everything, but it sure keeps the kids in touch.

If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.

Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy green meat is bad for you.

Ninety-nine percent of all lawyers give the rest a bad name.

Xerox and Wurlitzer will merge to produce reproductive organs.

Alabama state motto: At least we’re not Mississippi

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NO MATCH FOR NATURAL STUPIDITY.

The latest survey shows that three out of four people make up 75% of the population

“I think Congressmen should wear uniforms, you know, like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.”

The reason politicians try so hard to get re-elected is that they would hate to try to make a living under the laws they’ve passed.

And one of my favorites, not from Cody: Death is jut like going to sleep at night, except that you don’t have to get later to pee.

A Soldier’s Love

I’ve blogged several times about the bond that combatants feel for one another. On 11 September, I read an op-ed in the New York Times that captured my feelings. The author was Joe Quinn who lost a brother during the terrorist assault on 9/11. Joe knows combat.  He lived through it. The words that moved me were these:

“I learned that I love soldiers. Nothing builds bonds more than living with a group of people in a war zone, getting shot at, not showering for months, roasting our own excrement in burn pits, cracking inappropriate jokes and serving something greater than ourselves.

“I also learned how that love turns to heartache when one of those soldiers gets killed, and you pack his gear up in duffel bags to be shipped home to his wife and unborn child. I learned that another family’s losing a brother doesn’t bring my brother back.”

The op-ed is: Joe Quinn, “The Real Lesson of Sept. 11” 10 Sep 2018, New York Times. You can read it at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/911-lessons-veteran.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_ty_20180911&nl=opinion-today&nlid=79098398edit_ty_20180911&ref=img&te=1

Symposium: The Vietnam War Revisited

On Friday, 14 September, I attended a day-long symposium called “The Vietnam War Revisited” at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.  I was the guest of Miss Trinh Binh An, and I wish to publicly thank her for the opportunity.

Several aspects of the symposium struck me as noteworthy. First, every speaker, discussant, and moderator was a respected academic expert. Second, most of the presenters were Vietnamese. Third, the intellectual level of the exchanges remained remarkably high.

Much of the discussion centered around the question of why North Vietnam won the war and the U.S. and South Vietnam lost. I have strong opinions on those issues myself. I’m largely in agreement with Brian VanDeMark as expressed in his recent book Road to Disaster (see my review at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/road-to-disaster-a-new-history-of-americas-descent-into-vietnam). Among the reasons for the war’s outcome are the U.S.’s scant knowledge of and failure to understand the Vietnamese and their culture, the determination of the North Vietnamese to win no matter what the cost, and the U.S. attempt to fight a conventional war depending on large main force engagements against an enemy using guerrilla tactics. As I noted in my review, the U.S. won every major battle but lost the war.

To my surprise and pleasure, participants in the symposium largely agreed with my views. There was less consensus on the role of corruption among the South Vietnamese government officials but almost universal agreement that a major element in the outcome was the U.S.’s failure to understand the character and history of Vietnam.

I asked the last question from the audience to the symposium speakers: Am I correct in assuring American tourists returning from Vietnam that the Vietnamese they met were forced by the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to create a false picture of prosperity and contentment. The participants unanimously agreed.

Toward the end of the day, Fred Koster of KosterFilms asked to do a video interview with me for his documentary on the Vietnam war. When I find out where and when the video will be shown, I’ll post that information here.