Tom Glenn's Blog, page 172

Presentations (2)

Far and away my most popular presentation is on the fall of Saigon. By last year, I’d given it more than fifty times and stopped counting. As more and more of my experience in Vietnam has been declassified, I’ve been able to include greater detail about what happened. I can now speak openly about being a covert NSA operative intercepting and exploiting the communications of the invading North Vietnamese. I can describe my knowledge that eighteen North Vietnamese divisions surrounded Saigon toward the middle of April 1975. I can talk about the enemy unit just north of me which was awaiting the order to attack.

And I can tell of the failure of the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, to act on my warning that Saigon was about to be assaulted. He never called for an evacuation. As a result, many people died, and I barely escaped under fire.

I always tell my listeners that the story I’m telling them is also the story told in my novel Last of the Annamese. I explain that I wrote the book as fiction so that I could relate what happened from five different points of view, three American and two Vietnamese. I stress that the book, as one reviewer pointed out, is fiction in name only.

What surprises me is that every time I do the presentation, I choke up as I relate events that still move me deeply: the raw courage of the two communicators who volunteered to stay with me to the end despite the risk to their lives; the intent a South Vietnamese officer to shoot his three children, shoot his wife, and shoot himself when the North Vietnamese took Saigon; and my last message, sent to the Director of NSA, General Lew Allen, commending to him my people who had shown such ingenuity and courage in the face of disaster. During the Saigon presentation, I keep a handkerchief in my pocket to wipe the tears from my eyes as I speak of each of these events.

I do the fall of Saigon presentation because I want Americans to know what happened at the end. It was an event that changed the U.S. and changed my life. It is shameful narrative of American abandonment of those gallant South Vietnamese who fought by our side. But it’s also a story of bravery and self-sacrifice by those I worked beside. It is a story that must not be forgotten.

Presentations

As an author, I regularly do readings and presentations. I read from my published work, four novels and seventeen short stories, but also from manuscripts I’m working on. The venue varies. It ranges from community centers and libraries to schools and veteran organizations.

Sometimes, the day being commemorated dictates the content. On Memorial Day and Veterans Day I read on the National Mall and occasionally at other gatherings celebrating the day. But most often, it is the audience that determines what I’ll say.

My favorite audience is veterans and their spouses. These are folks who know whereof I speak. I see nods and smiles when I talk about time with combat units. These people know what it means to eat C-rations sitting in the dirt, they know what a kaibo (field bathroom) is, they understand terms like fatigue blouse, lock and load, and skivvies. If they’ve been in combat, they know the psychic wounds from watching your buddy die at your side. These are wounds that never heal.

When Vietnam veterans are among my listeners, the bond is palpable. These men—they’re nearly always men—know what it means to have fought in a failed war. They understand the anguish of coming home from combat, with all the soul-wounds that entails, only to be met by mobs who called them “butchers” and “baby killers” and spit on them.

These men are my brothers.

More tomorrow.

The End in Saigon: Oddities (5)

I wrote yesterday about the failure of the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, to call for an evacuation as it became unquestionable that Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. One of the eerie results was that I and other Americans were repeatedly approached by locals asking us to arrange for their evacuation or to get enough money to buy their way out. The following, from Last of the Annamese, tells of two incidents I lived through:

At lunchtime, he [Chuck, the protagonist] stopped at the shoe repair on his way to the snack bar [in the DAO building at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon]. Behind the counter of the miniature shop stood a Vietnamese in khaki shirt and shorts—no doubt once the property of the U.S. Army—and the inevitable clogs. Chuck handed him the green cardboard ticket he’d found in Ike’s room and watched him search through shelves. The man was already old, even though he looked like he’d never grown up. He had the face of a young boy, but his hair was graying and his skin was creased.

The man put a brown-wrapped package on the counter. “Five thousand three hundred twenty pee [short for piastres].”

Chuck counted out a wad of bills.

“You want give me tip, sir?” the man said, his eyes hungry.

“You’re supposed to get a tip?” Chuck said.

“The prices, they go up. Now cost fifteen hundred pee for one bread. And DAO, it set what I can charge. So now I ask customer for tip.”

Chuck put another thousand pee on the counter.

“I thank you very much, sir.” The cash vanished.

Next Chuck went to the dry cleaners. The clerk was a young girl in shapeless black pajamas. Her ready smile reminded him of Huong [the servant of a friend]. She took his slip and produced two class A Marine uniforms on hangers for his inspection.

“Six thousand five hundred pee, sir.”

He reached for his wallet.

“You meet my mamma, sir?” the girl said.

At the end of the counter sat a caricature of an ancient Chinese woman, her white hair smoothed back into a bun. Brocaded pajamas hid her tiny frame. Her face was a map of lines, her cheekbones protruding. She smiled and nodded, her eyes mere slits.

The girl took his money. “My mamma and me, we very afraid.” She leaned toward him and whispered. “We Chinese, sir. We work for American. The VC tortures us, kills us. You help us?”

Chuck was jarred. “Look, I just work here. I don’t have any planes or boats.”

“You American, sir,” she said, as if that explained everything.

He slung the uniforms over his arm and escaped to the corridor.

End of quote. At the end, when Saigon fell, almost all the Vietnamese and Chinese who worked with us were left behind. The North Vietnamese killed many and sent the rest to “re-education camps” where many more died.

The End in Saigon: Oddities (4)

So much of the irrationality during the fall of Saigon resulted from the ambassador’s continuous reporting to the Secretary of State and the president that the North Vietnamese had no intention of assaulting Saigon. He had been approached by the Hungarian member of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (a group established in 1973 to monitor the supposed cease-fire) who told him that the North Vietnamese would not attack the city. They instead wanted to form a coalition government of “all patriotic forces in the south” and rule jointly. The ambassador believed that gentlemen, a representative of a communist government allied to North Vietnam, in the face of overwhelming signals intelligence that the attack was imminent.

One result was no plan for the evacuation of South Vietnamese that had worked with U.S. forces. I described the resulting chaos in a scene from Last of the Annamese in which the protagonist, Chuck, asks his boss, Colonel Troiano, about evacuation plans:

“The Embassy’s dragging its feet,” Troiano said. “The Ambassador thinks there’s going to be some kind of cease-fire to negotiate the formation of a coalition government. But we haven’t been idle. Ever hear of the DAO [Defense Attaché Office] Special Planning Group? Don’t let the name fool you. The SPG’s the forward evacuation coordinator. It’s been quietly working with the Marines flying in from ships off the coast to get everything ready. But the Ambassador is doing everything he can to throw obstacles in their path. He won’t allow the Marines to wear uniforms, fly in on Marine helicopters, or stay overnight. Because we’re expecting mobs outside the gate, the deputy DAO, General Baughn, sent a message to higher ups requesting additional security guards when the evacuation begins. The Ambassador was furious—ordered Baughn out of the country. So now all the preps are sub rosa. Trouble is, the city is already rolling toward panic. That’s going to make it rough.”

“So the servants at the houses, the chauffeurs—”

Troiano wilted. “If the Embassy had faced the facts and started evacuating people other than high-risk Viets, we could have gotten many of them out. As it is . . .” He shook his head.

“What will we do, sir?”

“When I find out, I’ll tell you.”

End of quote. In short, the ambassador never did call for an evacuation. But the military side of the U.S. government was under no delusion about what was happening. It moved ahead, ordered the 7th Fleet to the South China Sea with Marines and helicopters aboard, and established liaison with people on the ground in Saigon. The sad part of the story is that the evacuation effort was too small and came too late. We couldn’t evacuate those faithful South Vietnamese who had worked with us against the communists. They were left behind to the mercies of the conquering North Vietnamese. That included 2,700 South Vietnamese soldiers that had worked with my employer, NSA.

More tomorrow.

The End in Saigon: Oddities (3)

One of the crazy happenings toward the end, as the fall of Saigon got closer in March and April 1975, was the arrival of new people assigned to our office together with their families. After the 1973 cease-fire, Saigon was no longer deemed a hazardous tour, and accompanied tours—permission for new assignees to bring their families with them—were standard. So families kept arriving. All our reporting made clear that the North Vietnamese held more than half the country and were bearing down on Saigon. But the official optimism of the civilian side of the U.S. government held sway.

I remember the arrival of at least two families toward the end while I was in the midst of trying to get my people out of the country. I welcomed the new arrivals and immediately arranged for them to depart as soon as possible. They were shocked, angry, and dumbfounded. Better disarray than death.

The End in Saigon: Oddities (2)

Among my unpleasant duties as South Vietnam was falling to the North Vietnamese was to inform South Vietnamese families of those who worked with us that that their father, son, or brother had been killed. I related one such scene in Last of the Annamese. Chuck, the novel’s protagonist, has found the home of Huong, a servant of his friend, Molly, in Phu Lam, which I described as “a shamble of shacks and lean-tos reeking of human waste.” Huong serves him tea and asks how Molly is doing:

“Miss Molly . . . Miss Molly is dead, Huong. The plane she took to the states crashed.” How could he say it like that, straight out, a routine statement of fact?

Huong’s polite face cracked. The smile remained as if forgotten. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” he said with crazy calmness. “I thought you knew.”

She didn’t answer.

“I came here to tell you,” he said, “that I have enquired about your husband.” She raised her head and looked at him, the smile in place, the eyes terrified. “We have no word on him. He was not with the men from his unit who made it to Vung Tau from Tuy Hoa.”

For a moment, she didn’t move. She shivered, wrapped her arms around herself, and turned from side to side. Then she folded her hands in her lap and sat very still. “You very good to come and see me. I thank you very much, Mister Griffin, sir.”

He understood that his visit was over. He rose. “God be with you, Huong.”

“Yes, sir, Mister Griffin, sir.” She was on her feet, looking down at an angle so that he couldn’t see her face.

He went outside. From inside, her voice rose, nasal, keening. The old woman hurried in. Others gathered around the door.

End of quote. More tomorrow.

The End in Saigon: Oddities

I’ve written at length here about the fall of Saigon and my escape under fire. But several zany events punctuated that bizarre experience. One was official U.S. denial that Saigon was about to fall.

Quoted below from Last of the Annamese is a scene based on my experience of listening to the American Radio Service in the midst of our scramble to evacuate everybody possible—even though the ambassador had forbidden evacuation. We were tired to the bone from lack of sleep. In this scene, Chuck and Sparky, two members of the intelligence branch, listen to the radio as they prepare to return to work after a brief rest at home:

“It is plain that ‘the great offensive,’” an authoritative voice was saying, “is anything but that. What we have had here is a partial collapse of South Vietnamese forces, so that there has been very little major fighting since the battle of Ban Me Thuot, and that was an exception in itself.”

Chuck and Sparky gawked at each other.

“That,” the ARS reporter said, “was Secretary of Defense Schlesinger speaking today on Face the Nation.”

Sparky swung his head from side to side as if to fight off a case of the wobblies. “What’s that guy smoking?” He sighed. “You can bet we’ll be drafting a message for General Smith to send to Washington ticking off the facts.”

Chuck didn’t answer. They’d be correcting Washington rather than the other way around. Sinister topsy-turvy had become a way of life.

End of quote. Washington’s denial was in part driven by the official fiction that the cease-fire signed with the North Vietnamese in 1973 was successful. That falsification was the basis for the ambassador’s refusal to allow evacuations; he insisted that the North Vietnamese would never attack Saigon.

Secretary Kissinger had crafted the cease-fire agreement working with the North Vietnamese. It required the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam but left the invading North Vietnamese forces in place throughout the country. The North immediately violated the agreement by resuming hostilities. The later cessation of U.S. air support and financial aid—while Chinese and Soviet aid to the North Vietnamese continued—sealed the fate of South Vietnam.

More tomorrow.

Geckos

A feature of life in Vietnam, from the time I first arrived in 1962 until I escaped under fire in 1975, was geckos. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “gecko” as “a house-lizard, found in warmer regions of both hemispheres, remarkable for its peculiar cry and its power of climbing walls.” The name, “gecko,” originated as an imitation of the chirping sound the lizards make.

In Vietnam, geckos ranged in size from two to six inches. They were valuable for their consumption of insects which were a plague in the swampy regions. They were ubiquitous in Saigon, and every villa or building I ever lived or stayed or worked in there had as many as a half dozen on every interior wall. They were perfectly harmless to human beings, and we got so used to them that we forgot they were there. But sometimes at night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I’d hear their almost soundless skittering and occasional faint cries.

The only exception to the omnipresence of geckos that I recall is our office suite in the DAO building at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern perimeter of Saigon, in 1974 and 1975. I don’t remember seeing them there. Maybe I was by then so inured to their presence that I didn’t notice them. Or maybe for some reason they didn’t inhabit that building. Maybe some of the guys who were there with me can refresh my memory. If you can, please do.

The characters in Last of the Annamese are like me, so accustomed to the presence of geckos that they barely notice them. Geckos are mentioned in the text of the novel only three or four times. The only character who remarks on them is Tommy Riggs, a U.S. Marine captain, who arrives in Saigon to begin his tour toward the end of the book. They irritate him. Everybody else has forgotten they exist.

Any of my readers who were there remember them?

The Shelling of Saigon, 1975 (2)

During the last week of April 1975, those of us still in Saigon were being shelled regularly. By the last day, 29 April, the attacks had become well-nigh constant. Toward the end of Last of the Annamese, I describe an attack at four in the morning on that day:

The blast toppled Chuck to the deck. Troiano, on his hands and knees, was yelling, but Chuck couldn’t make out the words. The room shifted again. The coffee maker lifted into the air, bounced, tumbled to the floor. The telephone landed beside it. The room lurched from a third concussion. A hanging light fixture on the ceiling jumped and swung, one of its posts broken. Dust from the ceiling powdered Chuck’s neck. He and Troiano both crawled under desks.

Sparky lunged in from the hall. Another blast knocked his feet out from under him. As he hit the deck, the room jumped again. He snaked under a desk.

All quiet. Chuck could hear the other two breathing.

“Anybody hurt?” Troiano said.

“Not that I can tell, sir,” Sparky said.

“Rockets,” Chuck said. “Hit inside the compound, maybe even the building.”

The slamming erupted again. Chuck’s typewriter rose and smashed back onto the desktop. Loose paper floated like snow.

End of quote. That attack killed two Marine guards at our gate. Before dawn, artillery replaced the rockets aimed at us. The shelling continued all day. I escaped by helicopter under fire that night. By then, the North Vietnamese were in the streets of the city.

The Shelling of Saigon, 1975

Several times in this blog I’ve mentioned the shelling we were subjected to as the North Vietnamese laid siege to Saigon in 1975. It became a regular part of our lives as we heard it come closer each day.

I described the first time I heard the shelling in Last of the Annamese. It’s the early part of March. Ike and Molly are in bed:

A low rumble shook the floor.

“Thunder?” Molly said. “Monsoons not due ’til late April or May. Besides, who ever heard of thunder in the tropics?”

“That wasn’t thunder, Molly.”

It came again. She tensed.

“Rockets, maybe.” He lifted his head and listened. “No. Artillery. Never heard it that close before.”

“Them or us?”

He gave full attention to his ears. “Them.”

The soft whish of the air conditioner. A gecko’s scuttle. Their breathing. No more roar.

End of quote. As time passed, the attacks became more frequent and closer. Tomorrow I’ll describe one of the last attacks.