Tom Glenn's Blog, page 193

Spine Tingle

In Last of the Annamese, I write of tingle at the base of the spine that the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, feels when danger is near. The idea came from my own experience.

I became consciously aware of the sensation early in my years in Vietnam. I felt it in moments of peril. It only occurred when my conscious mind was unaware of the menace. As soon as I noticed it, I turned my attention to looking for proximate hazards. The warning was nearly always accurate.

I have often wondered at it. It reminds me of artistic inspiration in the sense that it feels as though it originates outside of me, as if another, unseen being were communicating with me. I can understand why the ancient Greeks, among others, believed in muses and other spirits that intervened in daily life to inspire, warn, or enlighten.

The tingle inspires in me utmost respect for the human subconscious. I see that so much in my life originates in that dark place in my soul that is hidden from waking mind. In me and all human beings there is wisdom and knowledge and beauty waiting to spring into consciousness. The trick is to learn to release the underlying spirit and use its bounty.

Questions I’m Always Asked (2)

The other question I’m invariably asked is, have I ever returned to Vietnam.

The answer is no.

I loved the country, and I loved the people. I lived with them, worked with them, spoke with them in their own language—be it Vietnamese, Chinese, or French.

But I don’t want to go back. My feelings are so strong that I would actively avoid going back.

I have two reasons. The first and minor one is that I know that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Cộng Hòa Xã Hội Chủ Nghĩa Việt Nam), as the communists now call their country, is a police state. I would only be allowed to go where the government wanted me to go and would only meet Vietnamese under the iron control of the authorities. The native Vietnamese and Chinese would be required to demonstrate how happy and prosperous the people are and how much they love Americans. I’d see no poverty or repression. In short, I’d see a false picture of what Vietnam is today.

The stronger reason is that I don’t want to revisit places that are, for me, filled with grisly memories. The source my recurring nightmares, flashbacks, irrational rages, and panic attacks—my Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI)—is Vietnam. I don’t want to relive the horrors I witnessed and participated in during combat and the fall of Saigon. I don’t need to be reminded. The memories are as strong today as they were when I was there. They never go away. They never weaken. I have learned over the years to face them head on, to cope with them, to mediate my emotions. Returning to the scene of my psychic wounds would serve no purpose other than to sharpen my pain.

My days in Vietnam ended forty-two years ago. Those days are my past. My present in consumed in writing about what happened. Maybe my future will be more peaceful.

Questions I’m Always Asked

During my presentations and in communication with readers, two questions recur: (1) Why did the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, act as he did during the fall of Saigon? and (2) Have I ever returned to Vietnam?

I’ll answer the first question today, the second tomorrow.

Graham Martin refused to call for an evacuation of American and Vietnamese compatriots as Saigon was falling. I pleaded with him repeatedly to arrange for the escape before the North Vietnamese attacked the city. I gave him prima facie evidence that the assault was about to begin.

He treated me with disdain and took no action. In the wee hours of the morning on 29 April 1975, eight hours after the onslaught began, Washington countermanded him and ordered the evacuation. The military side of the U.S. government, under no delusions about what was happening in Vietnam, was ready. I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. My South Vietnamese counterparts weren’t so lucky. The North Vietnamese killed or captured 2700 of them.

Why did Martin fail to call for an evacuation? He testified before Congress that he had been approached by the Hungarian member of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS), a group established in 1973 to monitor the cease-fire signed by the U.S. and the North Vietnamese and immediately violated by the latter. The Hungarian told the Ambassador that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking Saigon; they wanted to form a coalition government with “all patriotic forces” and rule jointly. The Ambassador accepted these assurances—from a representative of a communist government allied to North Vietnam. I’ve learned recently that the CIA analysts at the embassy were also persuaded that an attack was coming. The Ambassador and the CIA chief of station in Saigon, Tom Polgar, both rejected the warnings.

Why did Martin believe the Hungarians and not me? I have no factual answer to the question, but I know that the very idea that the communist flag could ever fly over South Vietnam was anathema to Graham Martin. He and his immediate subordinates found the very idea unthinkable. I know that Martin had lost a son in combat in Vietnam. I can only conclude that the idea that his son had died in vain was, to Martin, not to be countenanced.

Martin’s conviction nearly cost me my life and did cost the lives of countless others.

Another Review Published

The Internet Review of Books this morning published my review of Doug Stanton’s The Odyssey of Echo Company. I heartily recommend the book. It may not be the best book on Vietnam I’ve ever read, but it is certainly the best written. Stanton is a brilliant writer. You can read the review at http://internetreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-odyssey-of-echo-company.html

Fiction in Name Only (7): Making Room for Zoomies

Toward the end of April 1975, I was trapped with my two communicators in the DAO building at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon. As the North Vietnamese surrounded us and destroyed South Vietnamese army units, reports from the field ceased—no friendlies were left to report. By then, the North Vietnamese were shelling us. We knew the ground attack on the city was only hours away.

I was doing regular physical recons of the compound. I wanted to know in advance before the North Vietnamese came through the fence. As I wandered through the parking lot, I happened onto a surreal scene I’ve described before in this blog. Here’s the description taken from Last of the Annamese:

Chuck exited the building to the north. The crater where the north pedestrian gate had stood [it had been hit by artillery fire] was blocked with barbed wire. The mob of stragglers outside the fence had dispersed, probably because of the rockets, but now they were gathering again. Chuck turned toward the parking lot and stopped dead. Alamo guys [that is, members of the Special Planning Group, responsible for the evacuation on the ground], including several Chuck knew, were cramming cars onto the eastern side of the building by driving them into one another so that they formed a compacted mass. As Chuck watched, the drivers turned their attention to the half dozen cars still in the parking lot, all of them large sedans except for Chuck’s jeep. These they used as ramming devices, crushing the heap of cars more tightly together. Now they turned the mangled sedans on the tennis courts. Again and again, they backed their vehicles almost to the compound fence and burned rubber to smash into the poles holding the fence around the courts until they tore out of the pavement. Next they used the cars as battering rams, flattening the nets and court fencing against the building. They left their cars idling while they gathered mangled wire, misshapen chunks of metal, and lumps of torn pavement and added them to the packed debris next to the wall. Lastly, they ground the remaining vehicles into the jumble of mashed automobiles. The area between the perimeter fence and the wall of the building was now clear. Of course. The small Air America UH-1 helicopters had been able to get into and out of the parking lot one at a time, without hitting cars or the tennis courts, but the much larger Marine CH-53’s, the birds to be used for the evac, needed more unobstructed space.

End of quote. The author and historian Thurston Clarke, when he interviewed me for his new book about the fall of Vietnam, due out in early 2019, had not known about the scene described above. He tells me he’ll include it in his description of the conquest of Saigon.

Fiction in Name Only (6): Making Room for Zoomies

Toward the end of April 1975, I was trapped with my two communicators in the DAO building at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon. As the North Vietnamese surrounded us and destroyed South Vietnamese army units, reports from the field ceased—no friendlies were left to report. By then, the North Vietnamese were shelling us. We knew the ground attack on the city was only hours away.

I was doing regular physical recons of the compound. I wanted to know in advance before the North Vietnamese came through the fence. As I wandered through the parking lot, I happened onto a surreal scene I’ve described before in this blog. Here’s the description taken from Last of the Annamese:

Chuck exited the building to the north. The crater where the north pedestrian gate had stood [it had been hit by artillery fire] was blocked with barbed wire. The mob of stragglers outside the fence had dispersed, probably because of the rockets, but now they were gathering again. Chuck turned toward the parking lot and stopped dead. Alamo guys [that is, members of the Special Planning Group, responsible for the evacuation on the ground], including several Chuck knew, were cramming cars onto the eastern side of the building by driving them into one another so that they formed a compacted mass. As Chuck watched, the drivers turned their attention to the half dozen cars still in the parking lot, all of them large sedans except for Chuck’s jeep. These they used as ramming devices, crushing the heap of cars more tightly together. Now they turned the mangled sedans on the tennis courts. Again and again, they backed their vehicles almost to the compound fence and burned rubber to smash into the poles holding the fence around the courts until they tore out of the pavement. Next they used the cars as battering rams, flattening the nets and court fencing against the building. They left their cars idling while they gathered mangled wire, misshapen chunks of metal, and lumps of torn pavement and added them to the packed debris next to the wall. Lastly, they ground the remaining vehicles into the jumble of mashed automobiles. The area between the perimeter fence and the wall of the building was now clear. Of course. The small Air America UH-1 helicopters had been able to get into and out of the parking lot one at a time, without hitting cars or the tennis courts, but the much larger Marine CH-53’s, the birds to be used for the evac, needed more unobstructed space.

End of quote. The author and historian Thurston Clarke, when he interviewed me for his new book about the fall of Vietnam, due out in early 2019, had not known about the scene described above. He tells me he’ll include it in his description of the conquest of Saigon.

New Review Published

My review of Daniel P. Bolger’s Our Year of War (Da Capo, 2017) has just been published by the Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB) You can read it at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/our-year-of-war-two-brothers-vietnam-and-a-nation-divided

Let me know what you think. Feel free to comment on the WIRoB site.

Fiction in Name Only (6): Al Gray

More on the facticity of Last of the Annamese: I first ran into a Marine officer named Al Gray early in my years in Vietnam. He was a captain when I first met him. I learned later he had been an enlisted man who finally made it into the officer ranks. I’ve told before in this blog how Al saved my life when Saigon was falling.

In Last of the Annamese, I show a Marine colonel named Macintosh saving the life of the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, as Saigon falls. Macintosh is not Al Gray—he lacks Gray’s greatness as a leader. But the portrayal of Macintosh’s behaviour just before the fall of Saigon, when he appears at Chuck’s office door, is a description, masquerading as fiction, of Al Gray’s conversation with me:

Left alone with the piles of incoming, Chuck . . . . read and sorted, munched on crackers and olives [the only food he had left]. He had to stay rational until midnight when he’d waken Sparky to relieve him. Fighting roiled just north of them, and the North Vietnamese had begun an offensive in Long An and Hau Nghia Provinces on Saigon’s western flank. News reports from Phnom Penh told of public beheadings of former Cambodian government officials. The Intel Branch had been put on comms distribution for SPG traffic. The “special planning group,” code-named Alamo, had quietly activated the forward evacuation operations center, even though the Ambassador still hadn’t approved.

The bell at the door to the exterior corridor startled Chuck. He yanked the Beretta from the holster and went to the entrance hall. Through the peephole, he saw a middle-aged American man in an oversized Hawaiian shirt of iridescent orange and gold overlaid with neon-blue palm trees. Beneath it were cut-offs and bare legs ending with tired feet in flip-flops. The face was somewhere in Chuck’s memory, but it belonged to a different context. Chuck’s weary brain struggled to make the image slide into the right frame of reference. Then it kicked in. Macintosh.

Chuck disengaged the deadbolt and opened the door two inches. Macintosh raised his hand in an open-palm wave accompanied by a silly grin.

“Hi, Griffin. May I come in?”

Chuck looked past the colonel into the empty corridor, opened the door enough for Macintosh to sidle in. Chuck closed the door and bolted it.

“You look like shit,” Macintosh said. “You should be taking better care of yourself. There’s a war on, you know.” Macintosh lifted his hands and turned in place. “Like my outfit? It’s all the rage in the islands. Ambassador won’t let the advance evac personnel dress in uniform.”

End of quote. I had never before seen Al Gray out of uniform. I didn’t think he owned any civilian clothes. He returned a few days later, this time in full combat uniform with his Marines, flying in from the 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea far enough out that it could not be seen from land. He got me on a helicopter that was nearly shot down once airborne. But we made it and flew out to the fleet.

As I reported earlier in this blog, I don’t call my rescuer Al any more. That stopped when he became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Now I call him “sir.” He is the finest leader I’ve ever seen in action and a man I am privileged to know. All Marines know who Al Gray is. He’s as much a hero to them as he is to me.

Fiction in Name Only (5): The Marines Arrive

More on the factuality of the novel Last of the Annamese:

Not long before Saigon fell, I spotted Marines in mufti (civilian clothes) in the halls of the DAO building at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon. I tell the story in the following passage from Annamese. Once again, I attribute to Chuck Griffin, my protagonist, my own experiences:

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?

At the Intelligence Branch, he entered the code, but the door didn’t budge. The deadbolts. He rang the bell. Troiano admitted him.

“I just saw Marines in mufti in the hall,” Chuck said. “What’s the skinny?”

“Ever hear of Operation Frequent Wind?”

“Sounds like a bad joke.”

Troiano didn’t smile. “It’s the cover name of the emergency evacuation. The President hasn’t ordered it, but CINCPAC, the 7th Fleet, and the Marines are getting everything lined up. It’ll come soon. Either over the objections of the Ambassador or maybe without his knowledge. I just got the word from the SPG [that is, the Special Planning Group, set up in Saigon to prepare for the evacuation]. The Oklahoma City and 7th Fleet are in the South China Sea, far enough out that they can’t be seen from land. Every day Air America choppers bring the Marines ashore for planning and preparation. Every night they go back to the fleet. We have fixed-wing aircraft leaving every half hour, filled with people we want to get out.”

Chuck squinted. “Why are the snuffs in mufti?”

“The Ambassador insisted on it. Their presence in country is a violation of the cease-fire agreement with the North Vietnamese. Pretend you didn’t see them.”

“Like we pretend we don’t see the North Vietnamese ready to invade Saigon?”

“Exactly,” Troiano said. “The war’s over. The President said so.”

End of quote. Troiano’s mention of the president refers to President Ford’s 24 April speech at Tulane in which he said that Vietnam was “a war that is finished.” Sitting in Saigon awaiting the North Vietnamese attack, my cynicism overcame my dread. If the war was finished, what was I, a civilian signals intelligence officer and potential prisoner of singular value to the Communists—in short, a spy—doing in a combat zone with nothing better than a .38 revolver to defend myself against eighteen North Vietnamese divisions?

Frank Snepp’s Comment

I interrupt my series on “Fiction in Name Only” to post a comment Frank Snepp left on the New York Times site (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) where my article on Dak To is posted. Frank, a CIA analyst in Saigon in 1975, is the author of the 1977 book Decent Interval which told the story of the fall of Vietnam.

“Pacific Palisades, CA November 14, 2017

“Human intelligence beat NSA to the scoop in 1967 and 1975, or at least shared the empty glory. As the CIA’s declassified history of the war indicates, my colleague in Saigon Bob Layton correctly divined the on-coming Tet Offensive weeks before it happened and was ignored by his superiors at Langley. The CIA’s best penetration inside the Communist command advised the CIA Station on August 8, 1975 and me personally on August 17 that the NVA would not stop for a negotiated settlement, and meant to seize Saigon militarily as exactly they did. Ambassador Martin and Station Chief Tom Polgar brushed aside that warning as easily as they did the NSA’s indicators. Their capacity for disastrous wishful thinking and deference to multiple false prophets, including the French, Hungarians, Poles, Soviets and Henry Kissinger resulted in a chaotic evacuation of which NSA’s Vietnamese employees and counterparts were scarcely the only victims.”

Frank and I were acquainted in Saigon, but I didn’t know that CIA analysts in Saigon also warned the Ambassador and CIA Chief of Station, Tom Polgar. I rest my case.