Tom Glenn's Blog, page 183

Vietnam War Veterans Day (2)

In response to my earlier blog today, my friend Monty Phair sent me the following:

It is a day America has set aside to respect our Vietnam Veterans. For those who answered the call when their country needed them, who bravely fought in foreign lands, we all sincerely say “Welcome Home.”

All Vietnam Veterans get a FREE Sandwich on National Vietnam War Veterans Day

If you’re among those who served during Vietnam, or if you know someone who has, please mark your calendars. Stop in any MISSION BBQ on March 29th and bring your Vietnam Veteran Hero. . .

Proudly Serving Those Who Serve,

Your Friends at MISSION BBQ

End of quote from Monty.

Vietnam War Veterans Day

The American Legion, of which I am a proud member, today issued an announcement about tomorrow. I quote:

Thursday is Vietnam War Veterans Day. 

While we honor our war dead on Memorial Day and our living veterans on Veterans Day, this is a time when we give a special tribute to those who served during the Vietnam War. For many, it’s the recognition they deserved when they returned to America. 

They defended our flag with honor. They supported democracy. They fought in brutal conditions. 

Yet when many Vietnam War veterans returned to America, they were unwelcomed. While we cannot change the actions of the past, we can show our support and gratitude today – something that should have happened 50 years ago. 

In fact, many American Legion posts and members, Sons of The American Legion squadrons, American Legion Auxiliary units and Riders chapters are supporting efforts to honor these special veterans. http://www.vietnamwar50th.com/   

Across the nation, ceremonies will honor Vietnam War veterans this Thursday. Of course, the Vietnam Wall will play a special role in honoring and remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Throughout the United States, nearly every state is planning to host commemoration events. 

We should not allow this special day of recognition to fade when the calendar turns over. Join me in thanking Vietnam veterans for their service not just this Thursday, but every day. 

Welcome Home.

End of quote. How I yearned to hear the words “welcome home” when I arrived, a psychological wreck, back in the real world (the U.S.) in May 1975 after escaping under fire when Saigon fell. I didn’t hear them. I wasn’t welcomed. Hearing them now brings tears to my eyes.

March 1975 in Vietnam

As the end of March approaches, my mind returns to March 1975 in Vietnam. Two events stay in my memory. The first was Congress’s decision on 14 March not to appropriate funds for Vietnam, even though the South Vietnamese government was out of money to pay its troops and replace lost weapons as it battled the invading North Vietnamese. That decision was the death knell for South Vietnam.

The other event was my trip to the highlands with my counterpart, a South Vietnamese general, now deceased. His name is still classified, so I can’t tell you who he was. Here’s the description of that trip, from my article, “Bitter Memories: The Fall of Saigon”:

On 9 March, I flew north with my counterpart, a South Vietnamese general, on his C-47 to Phu Bai, near Hué in the far north; to Pleiku in the central highlands; and thence to Ban Me Thuot in the southern reach of the highlands. Our purpose was to visit units under the general’s command to prepare them for the coming onslaught. In Pleiku, during a courtesy call with the commander of II Corps, Major General Pham Van Phu, things turned sour. The general I was traveling with and the II Corps intelligence staff chief tried to persuade General Phu that Ban Me Thuot would be the first target of the Communist campaign in the highlands. Intercept of North Vietnamese communications made that clear. The II Corps Commander was unpersuaded. He doubted that the Communists were preparing to strike, and if they were, II Corps headquarters would be the logical focus of the offensive. After all, he was the most important man in the highlands, and he was at II Corps headquarters in Pleiku.

My counterpart cut short our trip, and we flew directly, that afternoon, to Ban Me Thuot.

End of quote. More tomorrow.

Tet 1975

My most recent blog about Palm Sunday reminded me of Tet 1975. Tet is the Vietnamese celebration of the lunar new year and the beginning of spring. It is by far the biggest holiday of the year. Festivities go on for days. In 1975, the holiday fell on 11 February. It was tinged with fear. Phuoc Long Province, some 60 miles north of Saigon, and its capital, Phuoc Binh, had already fallen to the communists. For the first time during the war, the North Vietnamese held the land they had seized. Attempts to regain it for the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) failed. With cold in the pit of my stomach, I reviewed our evacuation plans.

I had experienced many Tet celebrations over the years—I’d been in and out of Vietnam for thirteen years. But 1975 was different. Despite the smug reassurances of the U.S. government and the bravado of South Vietnamese officials, I felt tension in the air. The Tet celebrants seemed to be looking over their shoulder for threats. The carefree joyousness of earlier years was missing. The communists weren’t far away, and they were getting closer. Memories of the 1968 North Vietnamese Tet Offensive reverberated.

Saigon fell two and a half months later. I escaped under fire. Suicides among the South Vietnamese we left behind were rampant. So many of the people we abandoned chose death rather than life under the communists.

Palm Sunday 1975

Today is Palm Sunday. I remember celebrating the day in Saigon in 1975. It was already clear to me then that Saigon was going to fall to the North Vietnamese even though it was more than a month before the final collapse. The city had changed drastically since I first arrived in 1962. And it was losing its bustle as the encroaching communist forces polluted its environs. Here’s my description of the Palm Sunday church service in Last of the Annamese:

They went to church by cab. While Molly was rehearsing with the [church folk] group, Ike ventured out into the streets. Nice neighborhood, nicer than Yen Do. Lots of money here. Narrow lanes with high walls topped by spikes or barbed wire. Pastel villas rising above with graceful balconies now enclosed in mesh to ward off grenades and broad windows taped against shattering from explosions. Odd that no one was on the streets. The mongers with their noise makers and high-pitched calls had disappeared. No women in ao dai carrying parasols hailing cabs. It was too quiet.

By 0945, he was in the chapel. There was Molly to the side of the altar in her somber purple, bigger and louder than anyone else in the folk group. They were still practicing as worshippers drifted in. They sang something discordant about death, ending with the refrain, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Sunlight streamed through the perforated walls. Uncomfortably warm. The stink of the city, strongest in the spring heat before the monsoons washed away the accumulated sludge of the dry season, rolled through the church. Ike loosened his collar, mopped his forehead.

As Monsignor Sullivan came up the aisle toward the altar, the group sang “Watch one hour with me.” Ike recognized the words, from his long hours in the Baptist congregations of his childhood, as a paraphrase of Jesus’s words in Gethsemane, asking his disciples to stay with him as he died. Was the church aping daily life?

The Gospel recounted the crucifixion. The text was brief, blunt, and direct.

As perspiration rolled down Ike’s back, the Mass finally ended. Monsignor Sullivan and his troop of mixed-race altar boys came down the aisle toward the entrance while the folk group intoned yet another desolate hymn. Ike blocked out the words. He’d had enough.

Writing from the Heart

Readers accuse me of writing fiction in name only. I plead guilty. All my stories and novels are drawn from things I have been through myself. My memories cry out for release, especially those of combat, living through the fall of Saigon, and my work with AIDS patients.

A friend counsels me that if I wrote happier stories, I’d have more readers. Probably so. But I don’t write to entertain. I write to vent my soul and to tell people what it’s like to live through ghastly events.

I can’t do otherwise. I’m persuaded that true writers are driven to write. And that drive comes in part from the lives they’ve lived. My life included surviving a war and escaping under fire when a city fell to the enemy. I’m reminded of the words of Jerry Yellin, a World War II veteran now in his nineties who said that “serving my country in time of war was the highpoint of my life.” Serving in Vietnam was the highpoint of mine. It shaped me and shaped my writing.

I volunteered to work with AIDS patients for five years to distract me from my own unspeakable Vietnam memories. It worked, but the experience added new scars as hideous as the ones I was trying to forget. I loved each of the seven guys I took care of and still mourn each death.

Some writers are saddled with indelible recollections of the unspeakable. That dictates their subject matter. I write from the heart. And my heart is troubled. Hence my writing.

The Two Flags

I’ve mentioned in passing here that two flags stood beside my desk in my office in Saigon, the stars and stripes to my right and the flag of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) to my left as I sat at my desk. As chaos enveloped the city in April 1975, I evacuated my family and moved to my office because I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be able to get through the streets, now mobbed with refugees. I slept on a cot in front of my desk between the two flags with a .38 revolver under my pillow.

When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and I escaped under fire by helicopter, I detached the two flags from their staffs and carried them and my .38 with me. When I landed on the helipad of the Oklahoma City, cruising in the South China Sea, sailors took my .38 from me, but I wouldn’t give up the two flags. I carried them with me as the ship circled and finally set sail for the Philippines. From Subic Bay, I booked a flight for Baltimore. I flew with the flags by my side. I kept the flags with me as I recovered from amoebic dysentery and pneumonia back in Maryland. When I reported for duty at the National Security Agency (NSA), my employer when I worked under cover in Vietnam, I presented the flags to the director.

Those flags are now on proud display in the Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Maryland, adjacent to NSA. Every few years, I stop by and take another look at them. Their history and mine are permanently intertwined.

Getting People Out at the End (8)

When I escaped during the fall of Saigon on 29 April 1975, I was in bad physical shape from sleep deprivation and lack of food. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my hearing was severely damaged from the shelling, and I was suffering from amoebic dysentery and pneumonia. More than once, I lost consciousness while flying out to the 7th Fleet on a helicopter and after I was aboard the Oklahoma City. Toward the end of Last of the Annamese, I described the hallucinations I experienced during those lapses:

Lights—little flecks of them, playful, zesty—swam and fluttered and hovered and vanished. They were stars on a black sky swimming over a black ocean. . . They smiled as they flew about, streaked themselves into lines and circles, then merged and disappeared. {Chuck] couldn’t hear them, but he knew they were singing sweet songs about breathing clean air. They told him to let go. He could grieve later, but now all he had to do was rest. No more searching. . . The last shred of awareness blanked out as if someone had switched off the sweet lights.

Getting People Out at the End (6)

At my fall of Saigon presentation last Sunday, an audience member asked how it could come to pass that the U.S. government was taken by surprise by the North Vietnamese victory in South Vietnam in April 1975. My answer was that the military side of the government was under no delusions about what was going on in Vietnam, but that the civilian side was swayed by consistent reporting from the U.S. Ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking the city. I remember listening in disbelief to news reports of statements by high level government officials toward the end. Here is a recounting of one such event from my novel, Last of the Annamese. The two characters, Chuck and Sparky, are listening to the American Radio Service (ARS) news:

“It is plain that the great offensive,” an authoritative voice was saying, “is a phrase that probably should be in quotation marks. 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. More tomorrow.

Getting People Out at the End (5)

In April 1975, as the North Vietnamese prepared for their final assault on Saigon, one day, all of a sudden, U.S. Marines in mufti (civilian clothes) appeared in the city out of nowhere. Here’s my description from Last of the Annamese:

Late morning on Friday, Chuck went to the snack bar [in the DAO building on the northern edge of Saigon], miraculously still operating, for a sandwich. As he headed back to the office, he tripped on empty boxes and scrap paper littering the corridors. The floors hadn’t been waxed. A fluorescent tube in an overhead fixture was burnt out. Pentagon East [what we called the DAO building] was turning into a shamble. Walking toward him were two well-built young men with crew cuts. One wore a faded chambray shirt and jeans, the other tennis shorts and a ragged tee shirt.

“Man,” one said, “it was fan-fuckin’-tastic.”

The other snorted. “I’d have pushed his gunjy skull through the goddamn bulkhead.”

When they came abreast of Chuck, their grins disappeared. They straightened their bodies and fell into cadence, as if marching.

Marines. Chuck knew all the Marines in-country, but he didn’t recognize these two. What the hell was going on?

End of quote. More tomorrow.