Tom Glenn's Blog, page 185

Prologue: The Burning Child

I often volunteered to work with orphans during my years in Vietnam. Because of the war and economic conditions, the many orphanages were filled beyond capacity, especially with mixed-race children. So my novel, Last of the Annamese, portrays all five principal characters caring for orphans. The book begins with a prologue called “The Burning Child, Da Nang, 1967.” It tells of a visit by the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, and his friend, the Marine captain, Ike, to an orphanage. There they find a small Amerasian boy dying from white phosphorus lodged in his skin. Chuck brings a doctor to remove the phosphorus from the boy’s body, but it is too late:

The jeep skidded to a stop by the gate. Mother Monique and the guide met them.

“I’ve brought a doctor.” Chuck hooked his thumb toward a third officer in the jeep.

Monique turned and trudged through the gate, hands in her billowing skirt.

Chuck pushed past lay caregiver. “What the hell’s the matter with her?”

“No, you wait,” the caregiver called after him.

He sprinted into the compound and burst into the infirmary, Ike and the doctor behind him, and ran to the child. A tattered sheet was over the child’s face. Chuck yanked it off. Traces of smoke scattered. The child lay twisted, not moving. Not breathing.

“I try to tell you,” the woman cried behind him. “Mother Monique, she is getting ready to bury him. You leave now. Okay?”

The doctor knelt by the child, felt his neck, and pulled the sheet over his face.

Chuck swallowed hard, pivoted, nearly lost his balance, and stumbled out of the infirmary. In the narrow passage, he leaned his forehead against the stone wall. Tears forced themselves from his shut eyelids, ran down his face, and dripped from his chin.

“Let’s go, Chuck.” Ike rested a hand on his shoulder.

Chuck mopped his face with both hands. Ike led him to the jeep. The doctor followed. They headed into the city streets, not speaking.

End of quote. White phosphorus was used as a weapon by the U.S., not the Vietnamese Communists.

Ordinary Life in the Face of Disaster (3)

Part of the oddity toward the end in Saigon in April 1975 was that new people, U.S. government employees, kept arriving to begin their tours even though most of us knew the country was about to fall to the North Vietnamese. Those of us who had been in-country for some time were weary, gloomy, and cynical, but the new arrivals were invariably naïve and cheerful as if everything were normal. I describe one such newbie (that’s what we called them) in Last of the Annamese. Here’s a fragment of conversation between the novel’s protagonist, Chuck Griffin, and a newly arrived Marine captain, Tommy Riggs. Ben, referred to by Chuck, was Chuck’s son, killed in action in Vietnam:

Tommy drank, his leg jiggling. “So, you’ve been here, what, a year?”

“Since seventy-three.”

“You know, life here isn’t as bad as what it’s cracked up to be.” Tommy swept the villa with his eyes. “Nice place. Guess I could do without those lizards on the walls.”

“They’re geckos.”

Tommy snapped his fingers. “Right. I knew that. Anyway, there’s a lot going on. The airport was a zoo. And the street traffic—something else.”

“You never served a tour here?”

“Never did. It was mostly over before I got commissioned.”

“It’s not ‘mostly over’ now.”

“Oh, I know, but you know what I mean, Chuck.”

Chuck ground his teeth. Where did this kid, younger than Ben, get off calling him, a major when he retired, by his first name?

A distant rumble stopped the conversation. Tommy sat up. “Shelling? Us or them?”

“Them.”

“They have heavy arty?”

“Plenty,” Chuck said. “Soviet 152 and 122-howitzers and U.S.-manufactured 155’s and 105’s captured from the ARVN.”

Tommy cocked his head “AR-what?”.

“Army of the Republic of Vietnam,” Chuck said. “The good guys.”

“Wow. Howitzers. I thought the VC were mostly guerrillas.”

“U.S.-types say VC or Viet Cong to mean the southern guerrillas and NVA or North Vietnamese Army to mean the regular forces. False distinction. It’s all the same crowd, and they’ve got everything from booby traps to SAMs.”

“Damned shame.” Tommy shook his head in disgust. “Should never have gotten to this point. We should have kicked ass and taken names.”

Sadness descended on Chuck. And the twits shall inherit the earth.

End of quote. Saigon fell four days later.

Ordinary Life in the Face of Disaster (2)

In January 1975, Senator Sam Nunn visited Saigon on a fact-finding mission to support President Ford’s request to Congress for three hundred million dollars for the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). At the time, I was head of the covert National Security Agency operation in Vietnam, and I briefed the senator.

My estimate was gloomy. Phuoc Long Province, some sixty miles north of Saigon had already fallen to the communists, and their forces were advancing toward the capital. The intelligence we were providing made it clear that the North Vietnamese were also preparing for an offensive in the highlands and I Corps, the five northern provinces of South Vietnam. None of that stopped the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, from hosting a lush garden party for the senator, as if everything were normal. I reported on that event in Last of the Annamese. I attributed my experiences to the protagonist of the novel, Chuck Griffin, an intelligence analyst:

By Saturday, more of Senator Nunn’s people were on the scene. One of them explained to Chuck that the Ford Administration was preparing to request funds to keep the Republic of Vietnam afloat, and the Senator needed data. . . .

Chuck was low enough in rank that he escaped most of the official parties the Embassy and DAO staged to honor the visitors, but since he had personally briefed Senator Nunn after his arrival on Monday, the thirteenth, he was required to attend the Embassy cocktail party for the Senator that night. Ike was invited, too, as was Molly—to assure that enough women were on hand to impress the Senator with the orderliness of official life in Saigon.

At 1800 hours, an Embassy sedan ferried Chuck and Ike, in Bangkok-tailored suits and ties, to the Ambassador’s residence at the corner of Phung Khac Hoan and Phan Thanh Gian streets, two blocks from the Embassy. Both streets teemed with white mice [i.e., Saigon policemen] and U.S. Marine guards, oddly surreal in the white dazzle of security lights.

The two U.S. Marines on each side of the gate saluted as Chuck and Ike passed through. Straight ahead of them was the house Chuck remembered as the Personal Protective Unit building, manned by fourteen Vietnamese Special Police. Three of these thugs, armed to the teeth, now glowered as the two Americans headed left through another gate into the formal garden fronting the residence. There a middle-aged American hostess in an iridescent Thai silk cocktail dress smiled them up the porch steps and into the formal French colonial vestibule, redolent with the scent of gladiolas and jasmine. A male version of the hostess, swathed in morning coat and silver tie, waved them to the right through a tiled hallway, down a flight of steps, and into a patio awash with bougainvillaea, and orchids. Cocktail tables with tea lights dotted the grounds.

End of quote. The president’s request for money for South Vietnam was refused by Congress. The country fell less than four months later.

Ordinary Life in the Face of Disaster

Several reviewers of Last of the Annamese noted that as the fall of Saigon loomed, Vietnamese and Americans alike carried on their lives as if nothing were awry. That’s what we did. What else could we do? The U.S. Ambassador, in the firm belief that the North Vietnamese would never attack Saigon, had forbidden evacuations. So we muddled along waiting to see what would happen next.

Many passages in Last of the Annamese describe how we struggled to go on living normal lives. Here’s one depicting downtime at a bar at the end of March 1975, less than thirty days before Saigon fell:

“By 1700, Chuck was in the bar at the DAO officers’ mess to keep his appointment with Carver. The Filipino bartender, jovial and easy-going, mixed drinks with unhurried banter, and the waitresses, all in dark áo dài with camellia blossoms in their hair, clustered chattering at the end of the bar, waiting to serve cocktails. Half a dozen patrons lolled on barstools; more loitered around the room at small tables spaced far enough from one another that low-pitched business conversations couldn’t be overheard. Show tunes from unseen speakers, so soft as to be almost inaudible, blurred the hum of conversation and the occasional laugh.”

That bar was destroyed during the shelling a few weeks later.

Death with Honor

Most of the countries of Europe have experienced war firsthand. They know the grim reality of people killing each other to achieve dominance. We Americans, except for our experience of 9/11, lack those memories. That makes us more willing to consider going to war because we don’t understand how unspeakably gruesome it is.

I’m in the odd position of having survived combat not as a soldier but as a civilian. I never served on the battlefield when I was in the army, but I saw plenty of combat after I completed my military service. For thirteen years, on and off, I was a National Security Agency employee operating under cover in support of the troops fighting in Vietnam. My cover during those years was as an army soldier or a Marine.

The memories of living through combat dominate my writing. I am repeatedly struck by the blissful ignorance of the American population of the ghastliness of combat. Several passages in my novel Last of the Annamese address that gap in our understanding. Here’s one, in which the protagonist, who had been through combat himself, considers the death of his son in Vietnam:

“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. 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 screams, didn’t have to see the dismembered bodies and guts spattered across the battlefield. He shook his head. The lies we tell ourselves.

Being a Man

I’m glad I’m a man. I take pleasure in my size and strength, my courage and my stamina. I take pride in my manly achievements, everything from weight lifting to surviving Vietnam.

I esteem women and believe that they are equal to but different from men. I don’t claim to understand them. As a man, for example, when I prepare for sleep at night, I take off my clothes and go to bed. That takes something under five minutes. Women take much longer. I don’t know why. I can’t figure out why they spend as long s twenty minutes in the bathroom. What do they do in there that only women have to do before they sleep?

Men are bigger and stronger than women. That physical superiority brings with it moral responsibility. We men, to deserve to be called men, must honor and care for those smaller and weaker than us. It is our responsibility to defend, protect, and nurture women, children, and those not as blessed as we are, that is, the infirm, crippled, or aged. If we don’t meet that requirement, we have failed as men.

During the last half of my life, I’ve come to understand that another obligation is to respect women for their equality in every aspect of human life except physical size and strength. They are our equals in mental, psychological, spiritual, and moral prowess. I suspect but can’t prove that they are superior to us in their insights about others and the way they handle human relationships.

Another of my unprovable insights is that women are better than we are at solving physical problems. The first tendency of men faced with, say, a jammed door or package that won’t open is to use physical force. Women instead use their brains. More than once in my life I’ve found that no amount of muscular effort will open a bottle only to have a woman quietly run hot water over the top and open it easily.

I conclude that to deserve to be called men, we males must prove ourselves worthy of that honor by carrying out the duties inherent in manhood. Otherwise, we are men in name only.

I welcome the insights of others on the subject of manhood.

Why I Write About My Ugly Vietnam Memories

A reader asks why I so often report on my hideous memories from Vietnam. Why don’t I just forget about all that and move on?

First of all, I can’t write about my experiences after Vietnam. Everything after 1975 is still classified.

Besides, I can’t forget what happened in Vietnam. That’s the nature of Post-Traumatic Stress. The memories are ever fresh. Trying to push them out of my conscious thought only makes them worse. Then they operate at the subconscious level and show themselves in flashbacks, panic attacks, irrational rages, and nightmares. To stay healthy, I have to face the memories head on. One of the best ways to do that is to write down what happened.

And I have moved on. I finished my intelligence career in the executive ranks, then retired as early as I could to write fulltime. I now have four novels, 17 short stories, and several nonfiction articles in print. I’ve finished another novel (Secretocracy) that I’m now hawking, and I’ve started yet another beyond that. I haven’t eliminated or escaped the Post-Traumatic Stress, but I’ve come to terms with it.

Moreover, I must embrace my memories. These recollections, though unspeakable, are sacred to me. They’re about the men who died by my side and the people I saved and others I tried to save and couldn’t. They’re a vibrant part of the man I am. I would be a lesser man without them.

Further, I want people to know what happens in combat and what transpired when Saigon fell. One of the reasons I write is to unmask the gritty reality of war and expose the historical facts. It’s no accident that my novel, Last of the Annamese, is fiction in name only, as one review described it.

And finally, I’ve lived a life that, as fellow author Larry Matthews put it, Indiana Jones would have envied. I have a trove of rare experiences to draw on for my writing. That store of tales resulted from the 35 years I spent in intelligence. I can write about the barely believable people I knew, the battles I survived, the horrors and the transcendent moments.

In short, take it or leave it, this is me. I offer it to you in humility and pride.

My Guys (3)

Decades after the fall of Saigon, at a reunion of all of us who together lived through that disaster, my guys presented me with a plaque. Across the top are the words “Last Man Out Award.” Below that is a brass eagle, and at the bottom is the following text—DODSPECREP and F46 were unclassified cover names for our organization:

Thomas Glenn III

29 April 1975

MACV HQS SAIGON, REPUBLIC OF SOUTH VIETNAM

The fall of Saigon will always remain a monumental tragedy in U.S. history. This is to finally recognize your exceptional leadership while safely evacuating all your DODPECREP employees and the closing down amid the danger and chaos of those final days.

The Women and Men and Dependents of F46

End of quote. That plaque hangs on the wall of my office. I see it—and remember—every day.

My Guys (2)

In Saigon in April 1975, as conditions worsened and the enemy got closer, I regularly reported to the ambassador on North Vietnamese plans to attack the city. He didn’t believe my warning and forbade me to evacuate my people. So I cheated and lied and stole to get my men and their families out of the country before the attack began. I sent them out on any ruse I could think of—phony family leave, trumped-up vacations, fake business travel. Toward the end, I bought a ticket on Pan Am with my own money and, with no orders or authorization, put one of my guys on the plane and told him to go. That turned put to be the last Pan Am flight out of Saigon.

By the time the North Vietnamese launched their attack, I had gotten all the families and 41 of my subordinates out of the country. The two communicators who had volunteered to stay with me to the end and I were holed up in our office when the North Vietnamese started shelling us. After the enemy was already in the streets of the city, I got my last two guys out on a helicopter. I escaped that night under fire.

For decades, I was smug that I hadn’t burdened my men with the knowledge that the ambassador had forbidden their evacuation. I had spared them that terror. Then, about a year ago, I had coffee with one of my communicators. As we reminisced about the old days, he told me that he and all the other guys knew about the ambassador’s order not to evacuate. They had learned what was going on from the eyes-only messages I was sending the National Security Agency Director, General Lew Allen, to keep him informed of what I was doing. My communicators had to type and send those messages. They quietly let the others know what was going on. My attempt to protect them from hurtful information had failed. As it turned out, their knowledge of their predicament strengthened them and fortified their resolve.

I should have known better. I had violated one of my own principles of leadership: never withhold relevant facts from the followers. I had quite consciously decided to deceive my guys for their own good. They outfoxed me. Their knowledge proved that the principle was correct. I’d managed when I should have led.

More tomorrow.

My Guys

My blog yesterday about the bond among men who fight side by side made me think again about the guys who were with me at the end in Vietnam in April 1975. We weren’t combatants, but we faced the fall of Vietnam together. Each of us contributed to the survival of the rest. The bond among us was the same love that men in combat share.

Starting in 1974, I was the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) covert operation in Vietnam. Our mission was to inform the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, of what the North Vietnamese were up to, based on the intercept of their communications; and to assist the South Vietnamese government in its own efforts against those communications. I had 43 guys and one woman (my secretary) working for me. They were communicators, signals intelligence specialists, intelligence analysts, personnel specialists, and couriers.

I had long since learned that leadership works where management fails. You lead people; you manage things. I saw my job as enabling my subordinates to be the best they could be. All of them were experienced professionals. I didn’t need to tell them what to do. I needed to support them while they achieved remarkable results.

As soon as I arrived on the job, I held a meeting with all my guys. I told them that, unlike predecessor, I wasn’t going to keep track of what they did during their time off. I knew that they—the ones there without their families—partied and drank and whored around, like all young men everywhere. I instructed them to come to me if they got in trouble before the U.S. embassy got involved. I was there to help them, not control them.

I couldn’t have started better. The men were devoted to me and outdid themselves on the job. Never even once did I have to deal with an incident caused by one of my guys. As the fall of Saigon loomed, they worked harder and longer hours. Some even slept in our office suite to save time.

More tomorrow.