Tom Glenn's Blog, page 171

April 1975: The Evacuation of Saigon (2)

I’ve described in earlier posts here how, on the night of 29 April 1975, in the pitch black and pouring rain, the Air America helicopter I was on during the evacuation of Saigon came under fire as we climbed to a cruising altitude. We took so much lead in the fuselage that I thought we’d crash. But the pilot, a civilian, was able to keep us airborne. We flew out to the South China Sea and landed on the Oklahoma City, the flagship of the 7th Fleet. The pilot later told me that was the first time he’s ever landed on a ship.

During the entire evacuation, not a single helicopter was shot down. But the North Vietnamese had a multitude of weapons capable of downing helicopters. It’s now obvious that they had no intention of shooting down the birds evacuating Saigon. They simply wanted us gone.

So who shot at the helicopter I was on? I’ve concluded that it must have been the South Vietnamese military. By that time, it was obvious that the Americans were abandoning the South Vietnamese to the mercies of the conquering North Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese soldiers we left behind were justifiably furious. I understand their desperation and cannot condemn them for their actions. All of them were killed or captured by the North Vietnamese. Those who survived were sent to “re-education” camps, really concentration camps, where many died agonized deaths.

More tomorrow.

April 1975: The Evacuation of Saigon

I’ve told the story of my escape under fire from Saigon on the night of 29 April 1975 in this blog, but I’ve never given the figures of aircraft and people involved. Here are the numerical facts:

On 29 April 1975, in a span of 18 hours, 70 American helicopters evacuated 1,373 Americans, 5,595 South Vietnamese, and 815 foreign nationals from South Vietnam to ships of the 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea. It was the largest helicopter-borne evacuation ever conducted. It was accomplished by a task force of U. S. Navy/Marine and Air Force units. The evacuation of personnel from Saigon itself took 17 hours and required 590 Marine and 82 Air Force helicopter sorties.

I can find no figures for the number of Air America helicopters or sorties involved, but the aircraft of that privately-owned corporation in South Vietnam were a part of the operation, known as FREQUENT WIND. In fact, I myself escaped on an Air America chopper.

More tomorrow.

Why Fiction? (2)

Going back to the last point I made in my blog yesterday, the job of fiction is to reveal the human soul.

I was recently in a meeting of men who were discussing the need for greater emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in our school curricula. While I didn’t disagree, I made the point that it is the arts that teach about the non-quantifiable aspects of human life. As a fiction writer, I am an artist. I deal with the uncountable, unmeasurable facets of human experience, which STEM cannot, by its nature, address.  I focus on actualities such as love, freedom, nobility, the laws of logic, patriotism, charity, and justice. Schools of thought that deny the existence of the uncountable (e.g., nominalism) see all this as fantasy and delusion.

As a man who loves his children and would give up his life to save them from danger, I dismiss philosophies that deny the reality of the uncountable. As an artist and fiction writer, my job is to explore the very real world of the spirit or psyche or soul. I do it by telling stories that illustrate human experience. Think of them as parables created to portray the human dilemma. The stories are not “true” in the sense of being drawn from measurable fact. But to the degree that they show the nature of the human spirit, they are more true than the countable material facts of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Why Fiction?

My recent blog posts on Secretocracy raise the question readers often ask me: why do I write fiction. My stories and novels are obviously based on historical (or in the case of Secretocracy current) fact. And yet I tell them in novel or short story form.

The answer is neither simple nor straight-forward. I’ve done a fair amount nonfiction. One example is this blog, begun a year ago last November and now totalling about 164,000 words, nearly twice the number of words in some of my novels. My best-known nonfiction article is the story of the fall of Saigon, first published by Studies in Intelligence, the reprinted in the Atticus Review and the Cryptologic Quarterly. You can read it at http://atticusreview.org/bitter-memories-the-fall-of-saigon/  When you get to the end of part one, you’ll see  “Read 1 | 2”. Click on the number 2 to read the second half. And the New York Times published my story of the 1967 battle of Dak To. It’s 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

But what drives me to write is not the historical facts but the human heart. I care deeply about people, what gives them hope, how they cope with life’s tragedies, what keeps them going in the face of disaster. So I take the factual stories and retell them from different points of view, showing the emotions they bring to the surface.

Some brief examples: No-Accounts deals with the AIDS crisis. The story is told from two points of view: the gay man dying of AIDS and the straight man caring for him and helping him die. The Trion Syndrome is about Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. The book again has two points of view: the Vietnam vet suffering from the disease and his wife. Last of the Annamese details the fall of Saigon. Five different characters (three American, two Vietnamese) tell what happens.

In each case, I could have written about the facts in a journalistic emotionally neutral way. Instead, I stressed the human reaction to events.

To say all this another way, I write fiction because I want to tell the truth in a way nonfiction can’t. I want to teach about the human soul, its depth and beauty, its power and majesty. Nonfiction, properly done, never departs from the measurable and countable facts. I want to bring to life something far more important—the unquantifiable, incalculable side of life, the life of the soul.

Secretocracy (4)

One of the difficulties I’ve had in transferring the story of Secretocracy from 2006 to 2018 is that I find myself writing in the past tense about things that have not yet happened. The results of the 2018 mid-term election, four-plus months into the future as I write, are key to the plot. If both houses of Congress come under Democratic control, the path to Gene’s redemption is clear. If they don’t, I’ll have to write a revised ending to show how Gene recovered.

Another problem is conveying the Republican stance in the age of Trump. I am not a political writer, and in my fiction, I don’t take sides. But the behavior of the Republicans in 2018 goes beyond political maneuvering. I believe that most Republican representatives and senators remain silent in the face of Trump’s egregious violation of democracy out of fear. It doesn’t matter. Their reticence condemns them to guilt for colluding in the undoing of the American state. I don’t understand why they abstain from acting. That makes it hard for me to convey them convincingly in a novel.

And I have avoided describing that part of the American electorate that voted for Trump and continues to support him. I understand that the group is something like 35 to 40 percent of those who vote. They baffle me. I don’t see what they find admirable or supportable in Trump. He unmistakably favors the richest 1 percent of Americans. His policies hurt the rest of us, especially the poor. Why does anyone other than billionaires support him?

So writing what one editor called a “political thriller” set in 2018 has unique challenges. Yet so far, I think I’ve succeeded.

Wish me luck.

Secretocracy (3)

Up to now, my novels have all ended with sadness laced with hope. Friendly Casualties concludes as the protagonist, a State Department diplomat assigned to Saigon, comforts a young soldier who has lost an arm in battle. No-Accounts closes with Martin grieving over the loss of the AIDS patient he has cared for and agreeing to take on a new patient, knowing that he, too, will die. The Trion Syndrome comes to a close when a sufferer of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury from Vietnam decides to go home and face the carnage he has created. And Last of the Annamese ends when Chuck embraces a weeping child orphaned during the fall of Saigon.

But Secretocracy ends happily. Following the 2018 election when the Democrats gain power in Congress, Gene is cleared of the charges the president has leveled against him and exposes the unlawful program the administration is attempting to implement.

Why the happy ending? Because Secretocracy is less literary fiction than historical fiction, based very closely on what is actually happening in the U.S. as I write.

Some critics have called Last of the Annamese historical fiction, some even referring to it as fiction in name only. And up to a point, they’re right. It is the story of the fall of Saigon in the form of a novel. I told my own story and kept the historical facts as complete and accurate as I could. But the heart of the book, for me, is the story of loss. All five of the major characters suffer severe damage—some even lose their lives—as South Vietnam falls to the communists. It was that loss that moved me to write their stories.

But Secretocracy is about the struggle of citizens to stop the undoing of their country. I’m writing the story as it happens. I’m persuaded that the good guys will win.

More tomorrow.

Secretocracy (2)

Further to yesterday’s post: At the same time Gene, the protagonist of Secretocracy, is struggling with the presidential administration, his private life is problems on steroids. He has been separated for more than two years, but his wife refuses to cooperate on a divorce. A woman he has been seeing rejects his attempts to break off the affair, and his college-age son is told that the older woman he has been sleeping with is pregnant.

Gene lives in the attic of a palatial mansion in northwest Washington. His housemates include his landlord and two other renters. The house and Gene’s experiences there are drawn from my own history after my marriage failed following the fall of Saigon. When my wife and I separated, I lived in the attic of a shared house in an exclusive part of Washington because I was so poor—I still had to support my wife and four children and somehow manage to have a place to live. Life in a large house with other single men showed me a rough and colorful side of life I didn’t even know existed.

Part of the challenge of Secretocracy is bringing together the professional and private lives of the protagonist. Once the book is published, I’ll find out from readers how successful I’ve been.

Another challenge is splicing in the new scandals of the Trump administration as they occur. Just as I think I’ve finished a section of the book, something new breaks. I’m currently adding references to the Helsinki summit and the backtracking by the North Korean government. Yesterday, I worked in the president’s intent to withdraw security clearances from his critics. Today I’ll look for places to stitch in the president’s decision to withhold from the public information about his telephone calls with foreign leaders.

So far, I’ve never used the president’s name in the text. I hope I can keep it that way.

More tomorrow.

Secretocracy

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on my newest novel, Secretocracy. It’s based on a series of events I lived through during the Reagan administration. As a young and promising NSA employee, I was assigned to a two-year tour at the national Intelligence Staff as a budgeteer to broaden my understanding of the government’s intelligence apparatus. I refused to approve for submission to Congress a proposal that would have funded a clearly illegal operation. I can’t discuss what the operation was—it was highly classified then and presumably still is. I’ve never seen any public disclosure of it. The administration severely punished me for my refusal.

Secretocracy is set during the Trump administration. A senior intelligence budgeteer, Gene Westmoreland, rejects an administration budget item to fund clandestine nuclear missile sites world-wide on the grounds that the operation is illegal and in violation of U.S. treaties. The Trump administration attacks him. Gene is accused of debauchery, stripped of his security clearances, and sent to a warehouse in Anacostia to await dismissal from the government service.

The title, Secretocracy, comes from a description of the administration by Gene’s boss. He depicts the administration’s methodology for controlling all aspects of government: placing the president’s men in key positions throughout the bureaucracy, using the withdrawal of security clearances as a method of castigating the administration’s critics, and forcing resignations to avoid legal problems with dismissing public servants.

I’m using my thirty-five-year history working for the U.S. government as an intelligence operative to imagine ways that the current administration is sabotaging the intelligence community. We know that the president and his immediate subordinates are attacking intelligence agencies, but since nearly all of the intelligence community’s work is classified, none of the moves and counter-moves show up in the news. Maybe someday, when the full story is declassified, we’ll find out the details. Meanwhile, I’m inventing what I think is possible.

Yesterday, one of those invented events turned out to be reality: the president is threatening to withdraw the security clearances of those who criticize him.

More tomorrow.

MY SOUL HAS A HAT (2)

I found de Andrade’s words—quoted in yesterday’s post—so moving because he describes precisely where I am in life.

I marvel at my body’s resilience even as it shows the first signs of shutting down. I’m not a runner anymore, and I no longer walk with an athletic stride—the imperfect surgery on my right knee has introduced a slight limp. Since recovering from lung cancer, I haven’t been able to resume weight lifting. I tire easily and sleep more than I ever have. And I wince when I look in the mirror and see an old man looking back. And yet I’m able to do the hard physical labor as I did as a young man. It takes longer. But I do it.

My brain is slowing down, too. Forgetfulness takes its toll. Too often when I’m writing, the word I’m looking for won’t come. I have to trick my brain into remembering. I can’t think as fast as I once did. I have to grit my teeth and be patient while I reason through a conundrum.

And yet I have no grounds for complaint. I’ve crowded several lives into the one I was given. That meant working harder than I should have. Three times I’ve suffered exhaustion, and twice I’ve been hospitalized for it. I remember scoffing when a doctor ordered me, recuperating from exhaustion, to sleep twelve hours a day. I was astonished when I found I could do it without even trying.

I suspect that my excellent health at this age is, at least in part, a result of my incessantly active life. I maintain my home, a large house on a half acre of land. I write and publish books and articles and book reviews and short stories. I regularly do readings and presentations all over the Washington-Baltimore area. And I post to this blog six times a week.

What astonishes and delights me is that, despite the slowing of the body and the brain, the mind is more fruitful and inventive than ever. I’m not religious, but nothing I know of the concrete world can explain the mind. How can it grow and prosper while the body slows and becomes more feeble?

Is there perchance a thing called the soul?

MY SOUL HAS A HAT

My friend and fellow writer Grady Smith sent me a text that touched me. Grady’s debut novel, Blood Chit, tells of the effect of the Vietnam war on a soldier who fought there. His latest, written with other veterans, is The 31st Infantry Regiment: A History of “America’s Foreign Legion” in Peace and War. It’s due out this summer.

I quote the text exactly as Grady sent it to me, despite oddities that were probably the result of translation:

MY SOUL HAS A HAT

Beautifully written by Mario de Andrade (San Paolo 1893-1945) Poet, novelist, essayist and musicologist. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism.

__________________________

MY SOUL HAS A HAT

I counted my years and realized that I have less time to live by, than I have lived so far.

I feel like a child who won a pack of candies: at first he ate them with pleasure but when he realized that there was little left, he began to taste them intensely.

I have no time for endless meetings where the statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be done.

I no longer have the patience to stand absurd people who, despite their chronological age, have not grown up.

My time is too short: I want the essence, my spirit is in a hurry. I do not have much candy in the package anymore.

I want to live next to humans, very realistic people who know how to laugh at their mistakes and who are not inflated by their own triumphs and who take responsibility for their actions. In this way, human dignity is defended and we live in truth and honesty.

It is the essentials that make life useful.

I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of those whom hard strokes of life have learned to grow with sweet touches of the soul.

Yes, I’m in a hurry. I’m in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.

I do not intend to waste any of the remaining desserts. I am sure they will be exquisite, much more than those eaten so far.

My goal is to reach the end satisfied and at peace with my loved ones and my conscience.

We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you only have one.

End of quote.