Tom Glenn's Blog, page 176

Saigon’s Propaganda Banners

During my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam, I visited Saigon so many times that I lost count. Early on—I don’t remember when—I noticed the orange-and-white propaganda banners strung across the streets. Using words without pictures, they encouraged the populace to support the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and fight against the communists. Each one had a slogan, and I don’t remember ever seeing the same slogan repeated in a second banner.

These standards, omnipresent, became a leitmotif in Last of the Annamese. The book mentions them nine times. Their presence in a dying city and their condition become a reflection of South Vietnam’s decline. Today and tomorrow, I quote three of the references.

The first, from early in the story, is from the point of view of Chuck, the protagonist, who, unlike me, doesn’t speak Vietnamese:

“He glanced up at the orange banner stretched across the intersection. Rising hot air distorted the Vietnamese words written in the western alphabet with zany diacritical marks, dots, little question marks, and tildes over and under the letters. Chuck studied the otherworldly collection of symbols. He didn’t know what the words said, only that they were propaganda urging the populace to support the Republic of Vietnam and defeat the Communists.”

More tomorrow.

Friendly Casualties (5)

The second half of Friendly Casualties is a novella. Characters that appeared and reappeared in the stories that make up the first half of the book show up again. The protagonist is Maggie, an American employee of the State Department assigned as an intelligence analyst to the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The time is late 1967 and early 1968, and the story centers on the Tet Offensive that began in January 1968. Maggie is in love with an army captain, Rick, who is assigned to work with a South Vietnamese army unit in the delta. Maggie discovers that the North Vietnamese are targeting Rick’s unit and hope to kill Rick himself.

I wrote the novella using two different points of view, those of Rick and Maggie. Much of the tension in the story derives from what each of the characters knows but doesn’t share. Maggie discovers that her co-worker, Lotte, is really a CIA employee under cover who is running an agent network. Lotte uncovers the threat to Rick’s life but doesn’t warn him or the unit he’s working with lest she compromise her source. Maggie is faced with a choice of doing nothing or violating security by warning Rick of the danger.

The story grew in part out of my experience in Vietnam during those years and my forecasting of the Tet Offensive. Maggie, like me, predicts the offensive and is not believed. I was never forced to choose between security and warning of a coming attack, but all too often those cleared for the intelligence I was handling and producing failed to act and chose not to alert threatened units. The deaths that resulted still haunt me.

Friendly Casualties (4)

The saddest story in Friendly Casualties is “Jolly, Jolly Sixpence.” It tells of Riley, a man wracked by Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) from his time in combat in Vietnam. His wife has divorced him, and his young son, Joey, shies away from him. When Riley discovers that his son is enjoying the company of his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, he decides that for revenge, he will cut down the cherry tree he planted to celebrate Joey’s birth.

I wrote the story as the result of my own struggle with PTSI. But it also came from watching other men trying to cope with their untameable memories. I was lucky. I learned early on that I had to face down the inescapable scenes in my head and find ways to cope with them. The character of Riley is typical of so many men I knew who tried to bury their memories only to have them come back in flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and irrational rages. Riley is slowly being destroyed by the disease. Although the story ends before Riley’s final collapse, I know that he, like so many victims of PTSI, eventually finds living unbearable and takes his own life.

Riley offers to teach Joey the song, “I’ve Got Sixpence” at the beginning of the story, but Joey isn’t interested. Fragments of the song reappear in Riley’s consciousness as the story unfolds. The last two lines of the story are the last two lines of the song: Happy as the day when we line up for our pay, as we go rolling, rolling home.

The title of the story comes from the second line of the song. I learned it in Vietnam from Aussies there fighting by our side. I’ve never been able to establish the origin of the song, but my guess is that it was British and probably dates back at least to World War I. The words, as I learned them, are as follows:

I’ve got sixpence,

Jolly, jolly sixpence,

I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life.

I’ve got tuppence to spend,

And tuppence to lend,

And tuppence to send home to my wife, poor wife.

No cares have I to grieve me,

No pretty little girls to deceive me.

I’m happy as a lark, believe me,

As we go rolling, rolling home.

Rolling home, rolling home,

By the light of the silvery moo-oo-on—

Happy as the day when we line up for our pay,

As we go rolling, rolling home.

Friendly Casualties (3)

Continuing the background on Friendly Casualties:

One story, “The Snake and the Swallow,” tells of an aging Vietnamese amah (a woman who cares for children) named Yên and her love for a little American boy, Robin. The story is set in April 1975, when the North Vietnamese were about to take Saigon and American families are fleeing. Yên knows that if she continues to work with Robin’s family, the Communists will punish her for her closeness to the Americans. But she chooses to stay anyway because of her love for Robin. Yên’s name, ironically, means “calm and peaceful.”

The story was drawn from my own experience with the Vietnamese women who were servants for my family. Their dedication to us and their love for our children moved me deeply.

One event illustrates the kindness and courage of these women. When Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup d’état and killed on 2 November 1963 (only twenty days before John F. Kennedy’s assassination), I was working in Saigon at a site some ten blocks from our villa. As soon as I learned that the coup was underway, I hurried home because I was worried about the safety of my family. No taxis were on the streets, so I ran all the way. When I got to our villa, my wife wasn’t there. She was, as I learned later, being held prisoner at Tan Son Nhat, an airport and military base on the northern edge of the city where she was teaching English to South Vietnamese army officers. As I tried to get into the villa, I discovered that the door was blocked from the inside. I finally forced my way through. The servants had pushed all the furniture up against the doors. I found my year-and-a-half old daughter, Susan, on the floor in the middle of the room. Our three servants were seated in a close circle around her, protecting her in case there was gunfire or shelling.

In April 1975, I evacuated my wife and four children to the U.S. twenty days before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. I moved to my office at Tan Son Nhat. Before I left our villa, I paid our three servants triple wages and told them they could stay there if they wanted to. I never saw them again.

Friendly Casualties (2)

As noted in an earlier post, the stories in my novel-in-stories, Friendly Casualties, are all drawn from events that really happened. I believe that the power of the narrative results from its foundation in truth. Most of the stories are set in 1967. I was in Vietnam most of that year working with U.S. military forces engaged in battles in various parts of the country. Not all the real events that led to the stories took place that year, but using the license of fiction, I put them close together in time.

One story, “Short Timers,” almost crosses the line and becomes nonfiction. It is based on my experience working with U.S. Army unit I don’t want to name. During my time with the unit, I wasn’t a journalist, as is the protagonist of the story, but a signals intelligence specialist there to help the unit with information about the enemy. As in the story, during a lull I helped the enlisted men build their club. Unlike the journalist, I was not sent packing when combat was imminent but participated in the battle.

Two of the men I’d worked beside were killed. A third was seriously wounded. I’ve never forgotten them and still grieve for them.

More tomorrow.

Memorial Day on the National Mall

I spent the day yesterday on the National Mall participating in the Memorial Day Writers Project. Musicians, poets, and writers—most of us veterans—offered our art to assembled listeners. I was struck by three aspects:

First, so many of the writers were so good. These men and women are inspired pros. They’ve mastered the craft and were born with the requisite creativity. And they have something urgent to write about.

Second, I was surprised by the number of writers and musicians who had served in Vietnam. They spoke and sang of places I knew so well. They had fought with units I’d supported on the ground. For once in my life, I was talking with people who knew what I meant when I said “in-country” (Vietnam) and “the world” (the U.S.).

And finally, over and over, no matter which war the performer was involved with, I was moved almost to tears by the grieving they expressed for fallen buddies. They, like me, will never recover from the loss of the guys killed standing next to them. We share wounds that never heal.

I came to see with new clarity that people who have never experienced combat cannot understand the way it shapes those who have been through it. But those of us who have lived through fighting on the battlefield can offer healing and comfort to other combatants. When I am with men who have fought in battle, we recognize each other. Nothing needs be said. We are with our brothers.

Memorial Day: In Flanders Fields

For today, Memorial Day, my post will be nothing more than a poem, the same poem I’ll read later today on the National Mall. I didn’t write it. John McRae did in 1915.

Please read it. Even if you’ve read it before. It captures better than any words I know the spirit of Memorial Day.

In Flanders Fields 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place, and in the sky,

The larks, still bravely singing, fly,

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

 

We are the dead; short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

 

Take up our quarrel with the foe!

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high!

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Friendly Casualties

My first Vietnam novel was Friendly Casualties. I published it myself as an Amazon Ebook in 2012 after years of rejections of my fiction about Vietnam. The sense of shame and repugnance of Americans about the Vietnam war still dominated the publishing industry. Even my short stories were met with hostility, but I eventually was able to get seventeen of them into print.

Friendly Casualties uses a form I’ve never encountered with any other writer. The first half of the book, called “Triage,” is a series of interrelated short stories, eight in all, that relate fictional versions of happenings I had encountered during my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam. The second half, “Healing,” is a novella that weaves together the events in those stories, uses some of the same characters, and shows how so many events during the war were interdependent.

To my surprise, Friendly Casualties was a critical success. Seven readers gave it a five-star review on Amazon.com. They accurately divined my intent, to portray all participants in the Vietnam war, men and women, Vietnamese and Americans, as casualties.

I include myself in that category. I came back from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon physically ill (amoebic dysentery, damaged hearing, pneumonia), but the greatest damage was to my soul. Those wounds stay with me today, as vivid and painful as when they were first inflicted. I, too, am a casualty.

The Boy-Child

Readers have drawn my attention to a theme that reappears in my fiction, that of the boy-child. I was honestly unaware of that leitmotif until recently.

The boy-child lurks in all my books. In Friendly Causalities, the first story is about a father remembering his son who was killed in combat. In The Trion Syndrome, the protagonist, Dave, finds salvation through his son. The character of Johnny in No-Accounts embodies the idea of boy-child. And throughout Last of the Annamese, small boys reappear as a reminder to the protagonist, Chuck, that he lost a son in the Vietnam war.

Why does the figure of the boy not yet a man recur in my writing? Why was I not aware of it? I don’t know. But I can speculate.

Little boys both move and amuse me. They so often exhibit masculine characteristics of roughness and bravado without the physical size and strength of a mature man. I am drawn to children of both sexes and so often feel the impulse to care for and protect them. I am especially protective of boys whose instinctive aggressiveness increases the likelihood that they’ll get hurt.

And I admire men who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others. I see their traits in small boys, and in these boys I see the future.

While I don’t love my daughters any less than I love my son, I love him differently. I take immense pride in the fine man he has become. He is a devoted father who nurtures and protects his children. He, too, has a son that shows all the signs of becoming a fine man.

I sense in myself an instinctive fear that one of my children could die. I grew up and matured during the years of the selective service and conscription. I knew so many families whose sons were drafted and later killed in action. When my son was at the age where he could have entered the military service, I lived in quiet fear that he’d become a soldier and I’d lose him. Instead, he chose life as an academic. My instinctive fear, irrationally, remains with me and shows up over and over in my writing.

And finally, I see myself in small boys. Like all human beings, I yearn for immortality. In these men-who-are-not-yet-men, I see myself born again.

I, myself, am a boy-child grown old.

No-Accounts: How the Novel Came to Be (7)

No-Accounts ends with a true story, disguised as fiction. After Peter’s death, Martin is despondent. His team leader, Mort, comforts him and tells him that another AIDS patient is awaiting his help. Martin demurs, saying he’s not ready; he’s not sure he can face another death. Mort tells him that the patient requested Martin by name. It turns out to be a friend of Peter’s. Martin reluctantly accepts the assignment and begins his second stint as an AIDS buddy.

That’s precisely how I was assigned my second patient. I went through the same routine five more times until I put aside being a buddy and went on to work on other causes.

My team leader was not named Mort, but he died a year or two later from AIDS. In his honor, I named Martin’s team leader Mort. The dictionary meaning of the name is “a note sounded on a hunting horn when a deer is killed.” It is also the French word for “death.” As I have done so often in my fiction, I chose a personal name with symbolic overtones.

Last year, the Eric Hoffer Awards recognized No-Accounts. But the greatest honor I received came from the author Juris Jurjevics, who wrote a recommendation for No-Accounts that moved me deeply:

“Tom Glenn lived his novel seven times as a volunteer assisting HIV infected men to die. This is fiction taken from life written by a hero who accompanied the terminally ill as far as any mortal could, devoting himself body and soul to their comfort and helping them make their exit with dignity. It is one man’s story of committing unconditionally to another. A love story like no other, it is uplifting and wrenching and rewarding beyond measure.”