Tom Glenn's Blog, page 190

Thanh’s Strength

Early in this blog, I quoted a passage from Last of the Annamese that the publisher, Naval Institute Press, believed best represented the book as a whole. I quote it again today with one additional paragraph to convey the quiet strength I observed in so many South Vietnamese officers as the North Vietnamese victory came closer:

Thanh boarded his aging C-47 for the flight from Binh Tuy Province back to Saigon. As the aircraft whined upward, its two engines shuddering, he looked down on the wandering La Nga River, the war-scarred town of Hoai Duc, and the mountains northeast, soaking in the January sunshine. It was only a matter of time before Hoai Duc and its sister towns of Tanh Linh and Vo Xu fell to the North Vietnamese. Three North Vietnamese regiments and a newly formed division were on the move. He’d talked to the anxious soldiers, urged them to pray and seek serenity, and, although he didn’t use these words, to prepare for defeat and death. The young faces looking up as he spoke, the frightened eyes pleading for hope, had depleted his reserves. He must not allow himself to sink into despondence as he had the day Phuoc Binh was lost. Too much work left to do. Too many hearts to unburden. Too many souls to comfort.

He longed to go home and replenish his spirit, but he had no home. The villa near Tan Son Nhat was a shell devoid of love. Did the Mother Goddess deliberately burden the strong more than the weak? She had weighed him down, but he knew—and apparently, she did, too—that he had reserves as yet untapped. He would need every droplet of vitality in him to make it through to the end. That he was suffering was irrelevant.

Escape from the Highlands

I’ve written before in this blog about my trip to the highlands with my counterpart, a South Vietnamese general, in March 1975, as the highland monsoons were winding down. At the end of the trip, we landed on a hill near the town of Ban Me Thuot. The North Vietnamese attack had started before we arrived. While my counterpart was addressing the troops, we came under fire. Here’s the description of what happened, taken from Last of the Annamese:

Small arms fire erupted far below in the valley to their west. Chuck could see tiny flashes and puffs of smoke followed by a chattering of muzzle reports. The soldiers stood stock still, their backs to the valley, seeing nothing.

Thanh continued his speech. He moved among the troops, his hands behind his back. Tension in the ranks stiffened the soldiers. Still Thanh spoke on. Strain darkened the lined young faces as the sound of battle grew louder. At last Thanh became silent. He walked the full length of the rows, reading the faces. Now close to the plane, he called out a single short sentence three times. His voice gone soft and tired, he said something low. The sergeant screamed them to attention and issued an order. They scattered on the run.

The rain pounded. The C-47 started its engines. Thanh, Chuck, and the junior officers dashed to it. All around them, soldiers hurried to their battle stations. They saluted and waved at Thanh as they ran by.

A pepper of small arms fire shot plumes of mud at their feet. The airstrip was under attack. They scrambled aboard the plane which rushed down the runway before the door was closed. Once aloft, it strained into a steep ascent. Chuck held on. He hoped the bellowing engines wouldn’t fly apart. Finally, the plane righted itself above the clouds, and the engines purred as if in relief.

General Al Gray

I’ve written several times in this blog about U.S. Marine General Al Gray. I was reminded of him this week when I got an announcement that the second volume of his biography is now in print. I immediately ordered a copy. I’ll write here about the book after I’ve read it.

I liked Al when I first met him in Vietnam in the early 1960s. He was a captain back then, having spent time as an enlisted Marine before becoming an officer. As I trundled around Vietnam under cover supporting army and Marine units in combat, I kept running into Al.

It was Al, now a colonel, who rescued me during the fall of Saigon. When he arrived at my office door during preparations for the evacuation from Saigon, he and his Marines were under cover. He was in mufti—civilian clothes. I’d never before seen Al out of uniform. I didn’t think he owned any civilian clothes.

Over the years that followed, Al and I attended conferences together and spoke of our experiences in Vietnam. And it was he, by then a retired general, who spoke with me at my presentations on the fall of Saigon at the National Security Agency (NSA).

In Last of the Annamese, the Marine colonel who rescues the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, during the fall of Saigon, is named Macintosh. Several scenes in the book recount interactions that actually took place between me and Al Gray. But the character of Macintosh is not based on Al Gray. I made no attempt to portray Al, in all his humble majesty, in my fiction.

To wit: Al is a down-to-earth guy with no pretensions. He was so successful as a commander in combat because he is a Marine’s Marine, devoted equally to accomplishing the mission and taking care of the men and women he was responsible for. He never asked his subordinates to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He wasn’t their boss; he was their supporter. He was there to make them the best that they could be.

I’ve never met a Marine who doesn’t know who Al Gray is. He’s a hero to Marines, the epitome of everything a Marine should be. Many years ago, when I asked him why he never married, he told me that if the Corps had wanted him to have a wife, it would have issued him one. Late in his career, when it was proper to have a wife, he married.

The general was kind enough to keep in touch with me over the years. When I was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, he got in touch with me to wish me he best of luck.

I don’t call him Al anymore. That stopped the day he became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Now I call him “sir.” He is the finest leader I have ever seen in action.

Most of us are not fortunate enough to meet a great man during our lifetime. I’m blessed. I worked with and got to know General Gray. Knowing him has been a privilege and an honor.

The End in Vietnam: Unseasonable Rain (2)

Several days ago, I published a post about rain in the middle of the dry season in Vietnam on 6 January 1975, the day Phuoc Binh fell to the North Vietnamese. Something similar happened the day Saigon fell.

The last three men in our office—Bob, Gary, and I—had been holed up in our spaces at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon, for the better part of a week after arranging for the escape of the other forty-one members of our organization and all the families. We had long since run out of food, and we were unable to sleep because of the North Vietnamese artillery shelling. Before the onslaught began, the U.S. ambassador had refused to call for an evacuation in the belief that the North Vietnamese would never attack Saigon, despite irrefutable evidence from intercepted North Vietnamese communications that the strike was imminent.

In the wee hours of the morning on 29 April with the offensive underway, Washington countermanded the ambassador and called for an evacuation. The U.S. 7th Fleet had been dispatched to the South China Sea; Marines aboard, under the command of Colonel Al Gray, flew into Saigon by helicopter and rescued as many Americans and friendly Vietnamese as they could. Bob and Gary flew out mid-afternoon on 29 April. I escaped that night under fire.

The monsoon rains weren’t due for another several weeks, but as the day ended and the time for my departure approached, the skies clouded over. The rains came. I flew out in the dark, and the downpour lashed us. Groundfire almost brought my chopper down.

The unseasonable rain, both in January and in April, coincided with sad events. It felt as though God and nature were mourning the tragedy of the fall of South Vietnam. The effect was eerie. Many Vietnamese expressed what I attributed to Thanh in Last of the Annamese: Heaven was weeping.

Christmas

Forty-three years ago today, in 1974, I celebrated Christmas with my family—my wife and four children—in Saigon. Because I was in Vietnam on an accompanied tour (my family was with me) and most of the other American men were there without family, our villa that day was filled with guests. All the forty-three men and the one woman (my secretary) in my office were invited to our open house. More than half showed up. Most of the others were out of country or in the field.

I was absent from the party for part of the day. I had to be in the office. We were following the North Vietnamese offensive in Phuoc Long Province, some sixty miles north of us. We had predicted the attacks and forecast that the provincial capital, Phuoc Binh, would fall shortly—the North Vietnamese captured it on 6 January 1975.

It wasn’t a festive Christmas. The signs of the impending conquest of South Vietnam were hard to ignore. I did the best I could to bring the cheer of the season to my men. I wasn’t very successful.

I remember looking around the room at my guys and promising myself that if things went south, they’d all get out alive. I kept my promise. All of them escaped at the end. I stayed until they were all safely out of the country, then flew out under fire as the city fell.

The End in Vietnam: Unseasonable Rain

In south Vietnam, the monsoon rains start in early May and last until November. It never rains during the dry season, between November and April. But in 1975, the year Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, the weather violated its own rules. I recorded the eerie change in Last of the Annamese.

The passage quoted below describes what happened on 6 January 1975, the day that Phuoc Binh, the capital of Phuoc Long Province sixty miles north of Saigon, fell to the North Vietnamese. In the text, the South Vietnamese Marine colonel, Thanh, refers to “An Nam.” That was a former name for Vietnam, the name preferred by Thanh. It means “peace in the south.” “Vietnam,” the name conferred by the Chinese, means “the troublemakers in the south”:

Chuck waited by the jeep. The sky was in an ugly mood.

“Rain?” Sparky came down the steps into the driveway and squinted at the black clouds.

“Never rains in January,” Chuck said. “Dry season.” A drop of water ran down Chuck’s cheek. They stretched the canvas top over the jeep’s roll bars, snapped the door skins in place, and headed out into the thicket of bicycles and cyclos. By the time they reached Cach Mang Boulevard, fat drops were splattering across the windshield. The orange-and-white propaganda banners overhead were wilting. . . .

[Later that day] it cost Chuck fifteen minutes to flag down a cab in the downpour. The ride through the mash of traffic took another fifteen minutes. At Thanh’s villa, a maid, cowering under a vinyl poncho, nodded, smiled, chattered, and motioned him through the house to the back steps. Chuck descended into the garden now blurred gray in the rain. His feet sank into the flooded grass.

He found Thanh alone, sitting on a Chinese garden seat at the rear of the compound in a grove of bamboo. He was in utilities but hatless, wet to the skin, his sparse hair plastered to his head. Chuck sat next to him. Together they watched the rain.

At last Thanh turned to him and spoke. “Phuoc Binh fall.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You tell Mac for me, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

Thanh’s face turned upward again. His eyelids quivered as raindrops splashed down his forehead. “The Heaven.” He pointed upward. “The Heaven weeps. An Nam no more. An Nam was. You listen to her weep now.”

Chuck listened to the rain. He heard the weeping. Thanh was no longer the tiger of Phat Hoa, Thanh the fierce, Thanh the incorruptible. He was just a little man sitting in the rain, a man grown old so quickly. Thanh is a dead man.

 

The End in Vietnam: Yearning for Home

When Saigon fell, I escaped under fire by helicopter to a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea. It was the night of 29 April 1975, pitch black and pouring rain. I recounted my memories of my first night on the ship in Last of the Annamese. I attribute the experiences to Chuck Griffin, the novel’s protagonist, but they are what I went through.

At the time, I was starting to hallucinate. I was in bad shape as a result of exhaustion, amoebic dysentery, and pneumonia, brought on by sleep deprivation, inadequate diet, and muscle fatigue from being holed up for days in my office as the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon. Here’s how I recounted my irrational state in the novel:

Chuck wandered until he was on a deck. Bits and snips of light flickered uncertainly over the ocean’s surface, like specks of moonlight, but no moon was in the sky. The deck was wet from recent rain. The ships of the fleet he could see clearly. But there, away from the ships—no, sometimes in between them—were fragments of light, some like candles, others like dying flashlights. Little boats. Thousands of them. He watched them, hypnotized. Who were they? Why were they there? He closed his eyes. He could still see them. They were swirling now. He felt himself sinking . . .

. . .

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. He 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.

End of quote. By the time the fleet sailed to the Philippines some time around 10 May, I knew I needed to get to a doctor. But I wanted to go home. I can’t tell you how much I yearned just to go home. I finally got a diagnosis and treatment after I arrived in Maryland toward the end of May. But the home I so craved no longer existed.

Correction

I just noticed an error in the New York Times announcement of my presentation on the fall of Saigon. It’s to be at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 9 January, not 7 January. It will be at the Howard County Library Central Branch at 10375 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, MD 21044.

My apologies.

The End in Vietnam: Physical Collapse

The last few days before we were evacuated during the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Bob, Gary, and I were under severe physical strain. We had gotten forty-one of our fellow workers and all the families out safely despite the Ambassador’s failure to call for an evacuation. The three of us told each other that we were there to turn the lights out when we finally had permission to leave.

By 27 April, we were out of food except for bar snacks we’d been able to scrounge from a hotel before we were unable to get through the streets of the city which were blocked by throngs of refugees. But we had lots of coffee, thanks to Bob and Gary’s foresight. We drank gallons of coffee, ate next to nothing, and had no sleep.

The strain of the past several months and the deprivations toward the end took their toll on my body. I came down with diarrhea. I had other symptoms, too, but due to the stress of the situation and the shelling we were subjected to, I ignored my physical problems and kept on working. I had to keep going. Bob and Gary’s survival depended on it.

I was finally able to get Bob and Gary out on a helicopter on the afternoon of 29 April. I escaped under fire that night after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. Once aboard the Oklahoma City, the flag ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet, I still had to stay on my feet. After the fleet sailed to the Philippines, I booked a flight immediately to Honolulu because I had to brief CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific) on what had happened in Saigon. When I sat down after the briefing, I passed out. After I got back to the mainland, I was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery, ear damage (caused by the shelling), and pneumonia due to sleep deprivation, inadequate diet, and muscle fatigue.

After a few months of recovery, I was as good as new. To this day, I’m amazed at what the body is capable of when lives are at stake.

Fall of Saigon Presentation

An announcement in the New York Times ’67 Vietnam series yesterday:
 




Upcoming Events


At 7:00 p.m. on Jan. 7, the author and former intelligence officer Tom Glenn will give a presentation on the fall of Saigon at the Howard County Central Library in Columbia, Md. As the station chief for the National Security Agency in Saigon in 1975, Mr. Glenn was among the last Americans to leave the country before it was conquered by North Vietnam.

The address of the central branch is 10375 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, MD 21044. If any of the readers of this blog are able to attend, please let me know your reaction to the presentation.

My article in the New York Times ’67 Vietnam series is 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

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