Tom Glenn's Blog, page 195

Amerasian Orphans in Vietnam

In my novel, Last of the Annamese, the protagonist, Chuck, regularly spends time with orphans at Cité Paul-Marie, an orphanage in Saigon. He is particularly fond of a tiny crippled Amerasian boy to whom the nuns have given the French name of Philippe. Chuck calls him “Pipsqueak,” and the child, trying to repeat the sound Chuck makes, calls Chuck “Pee-kwee.” Chuck’s housemate can’t see how Chuck can stand to be with the misshapen children whom he calls as “manglemorphs.” But Chuck finds them deeply moving and does all he can to make them smile.

Neither the orphanage nor the orphans named in the novel are real, but both are based on fact. During my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam, I regularly spent time with the mixed-race orphans, fathered by American GIs with Vietnamese women, at a real orphanage run by Vietnamese nuns who spoke only French and gave the children French names. Where the children came from, how old they were, and their reals names remained a mystery. I suspected that the nuns didn’t know the children’s origin, names, or ages. These were helpless infants whose parents had abandoned them or had died in the war.

I was devastated by the 4 April 1975 crash of first flight of Operation BABYLIFT, a program sponsored by President Ford to move as many orphans as possible to the U.S. before the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon. Seventy-eight orphans were killed in the crash. I expressed my grief by attributing it to Chuck in the following passage from late in the novel:

“Chuck remembered the feel of Philippe’s tiny body pressed against his chest. Pee-Kwee. He forced himself to contemplate the unbearable—Philippe suffocating in the airless cargo hold and then crushed by the plane’s collision with the earth. Chuck welcomed the grief. No one else would mourn the death of the Amerasian ‘manglemorph’  whose real name nobody knew.”

As Chuck asks himself early and again late in the book, and as I ask myself: Do all memories have to hurt?

A Veteran’s Dark Lifetime Gift

Today’s Washington Post carries an op-ed that moved my heart. It says what I tried to say in my earlier blog post today, but says it better than I did. It’s at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...

Read it with care.

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“Thank you. And Welcome Home”

Say these words today to every veteran you know.

When I came back to the world (the U.S.) after the fall of Saigon, I so yearned to hear those words. Returning from earlier trips I’d been call a baby killer and a butcher. Young people spat on me. It sickened my soul.

I came home in May 1975 a sick man with amoebic dysentery, hearing damaged from shelling during the attack on Saigon, and pneumonia brought on by inadequate diet, sleep deprivation, and muscle fatigue. The worst was Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. I had top secret codeword-plus clearances, so I couldn’t go for therapy—I would have lost my job. My wife and the children were in Massachusetts at her father’s house. She refused to return to Maryland until I got our house back. We’d leased it to another family until 1976, when our tour in Vietnam was due to end. She and the children finally came back the following July. So I was left to cope with my nightmares, irrational rages, and flash backs by myself. It was the lowest point in my life.

For decades, I never spoke of my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam. I was ashamed for myself and for my country. Four years ago I heard those yearned-for words for the first time. I wept.

So talk to your veterans today. Tell them you’re grateful for their sacrifices. Let them know you’re glad they got back still alive. Use those sacred words: “Thank you. And welcome home.”

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Veterans Day

Today I celebrate with my brothers and sisters the joy and anguish of being a veteran. Today I declare my undying respect for my fellow veterans for their contribution and sacrifice in serving what I continue to believe is the greatest nation in the world. Today I grieve over those we’ve lost and cherish those still among us.

When I get together with other veterans, we don’t talk about our experience under arms. We don’t need to. Each of us knows what we’ve been through. There is among us a silent understanding.

The strongest bond I’ve ever observed or experienced between human beings forms when people fight side by side for their country. Each of us knows that we’ll give up our lives to save the man or woman next to us in battle. We don’t call it love—that’s too sentimental. But that’s what it is.

So today I honor all my fellow combatants, those who survived and still suffer the permanent soul damage that combat inflicts, and those who didn’t live to stand again by my side. You are my brothers and sisters. May you find peace and fulfillment.

The Marine Corps Birthday

Today is the 242nd birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. This afternoon I did the fall of Saigon presentation at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Many active-duty and retired Marines were in the audience. When I told the story of how Marine Corps Colonel Al Gray saved my life, I heard the distinct Marine oo-rah from the audience. When I wished the Marines a happy birthday, the oo-rahs got louder.

I’ve never met a Marine who didn’t know who Al Gray is. I first met him in the 1960s in South Vietnam when he was a captain. Our paths crossed repeatedly as we served all over South Vietnam. When he showed up at my door in April 1975 just before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, dressed in the wildest Hawaiian shirt I’d ever seen—colors so bright they hurt my eyes—shorts, and flip-flops, I didn’t recognize him at first. I’d never before seen Al out of uniform. I didn’t think he owned any civilian clothes. And I knew he never came to Saigon unless he had to. He hated bureaucracy, and his job was in the field with his troops.

I invited him in, and he told me he’d been named the Ground Security Officer for the evacuation of Americans from Saigon. I told him everything I knew about the critical situation in the city. A few days later, he flew in from the 7th Fleet, cruising in the South China Sea, and loaded me on a helicopter for an escape under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of Saigon.

As I told the audience today, I don’t call him Al anymore. That stopped the day he became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Now I call him “Sir.” He’s the finest leader I’ve ever seen in action and a man I’m privileged to know.

So Happy Birthday, Marines. I bow in respect for you and thank you for saving my life.

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November: A Dozen Presentations

This month is the busiest I’ve had for readings and presentations. A full dozen are scheduled. The fullest week is this week, leading up Veterans Day. Before the week is out, I’ll have done four presentations and one reading.

All the presentations are “Bitter Memories: The Fall of Saigon,” in which I recount the events of April 1975—I was trapped in Saigon and escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. The one reading will be on Veterans Day, Saturday, 11 November, on the National Mall. I’ll read from Last of the Annamese.

If you’d like to attend one of the presentations and didn’t receive the list I posted earlier, email me at tomglenn3@gmail.com and I’ll send you the complete schedule.

I know that the arrival of Veterans Day is the reason that I get asked to speak so often during November. The same thing happens in May around Memorial Day. My experience in combat in Vietnam and my escape from Saigon are of special interest to veterans, especially Vietnam veterans, who nod sadly when they hear my stories.

As I write this blog, I’ve given five of the twelve November presentations. I find that my audiences are mostly older folks who are veterans or related to veterans. I’m surprised that so many are in fact Vietnam veterans. They know whereof I speak.

I was afraid that doing the Saigon presentation so often would lead to rote. I needn’t have feared. My feelings about the events surrounding the final collapse remain as strong and deep as ever. I always choke up at three points in the story: when I talk about the 2700 South Vietnamese soldiers who worked with my organization over the years—the U.S. failed to evacuate them at the end, and the North Vietnamese killed or captured all of them; Bob and Gary, my two communicators who volunteered to risk their lives and stay with me to the end; and the last message I sent, to my boss, the Director of NSA, General Lew Allen, before escaping. In the last paragraph I said, “I commend to you my people who deserve the best NSA can give them for what they have been through but especially for what they have achieved.”

The losses we suffered and the raw courage of my guys still bring me to tears and always will.

Street Names in Saigon

A week or two ago, I wrote here about street names in Saigon and how they—and the city itself—changed during the thirteen years (on and off) that I was in Vietnam and after the conquest by the North Vietnamese. I puzzled over the name the North Vietnamese gave to the main thoroughfare in the city, the street that the French had called Rue Catinat and the non-communist South Vietnamese, before 1975, had named Tự Do, meaning “Freedom.” The North Vietnamese renamed that street Đồng Khởi. In my earlier post, I reported that I was told that the new name means “total rebellion” or “total uprising,” but I couldn’t verify that translation with any of the source material I had on hand.

A kind Vietnamese reader sent me the following:

Đồng khởi = Uprising at the same time and on all fronts. “Đồng” from “đồng loạt”, meaning “at once, altogether”. “Khởi” from “khởi nghĩa”, uprising. [So] Đồng khởi = Uprising at the same time and on all fronts.

I’m grateful for the language assistance. I’m wondering if the compound “Đồng khởi” is a term made up by the communists. I have no way of confirming or denying that guess. But I am struck by the replacement of “freedom” with “total rebellion” as the name for the main street in Saigon.

Channel 19 Interview

My interview at the Community Media Center in Carroll County, Maryland is now online. You can view it at  https://youtu.be/Ee07TKBrSks   It will be broadcast on channel 19 along with many other interviews with veterans on 11 November, Veterans Day, starting at 9:00 a.m.

​If you get a chance to watch it, please let me know how you react. ​

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Descriptions of Combat in Current Literature

I recently came across the following quote from James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity:

“I don’t think that combat has ever been written about truthfully; it has always been described in terms of bravery and cowardice. I won’t even accept these words as terms of human reference any more. And anyway, hell, they don’t even apply to what, in actual fact, modern warfare has become.”

I think Jones was correct when he was writing (he died in 1977), but current authors, it seems to me, have gotten much gutsier. Some readers have complained about my explicit descriptions of combat, particularly in Last of the Annamese. My purpose in conveying the grisliness of the battlefield is that I want the American people to know what they are sending their young men and women into when they decide to go to war.

Other current authors are more specific than I am. Lucia Viti in her Dr. Tom’s War: A Daughter’s Journey (Rogue Books, 2011), quotes combat veterans at length as they describe in gross detail the gruesomeness of combat. And Doug Stanton’s The Odyssey of Echo Company (Scribner, 2017), which I reviewed for the Internet Review of Books (the review is due to be published on 27 November), pulls no punches in depicting the carnage of men fighting to the death.

I think we writers have changed for the better. Fighting men and women do show great courage and self-sacrifice, but based on what I lived through and observed, their motivation is to protect and save the person fighting next to them, not patriotism or love of country. Those two virtues may have prompted men and women to join the military, but on the battlefield, the guy fighting next to me is more important than anything else. The bond between men and women fighting side by side is the strongest human commitment I’ve ever experienced.

So I’m glad writers now tell it like it is. A small fraction of 1 percent of all Americans have ever experienced combat. Maybe writers like Viti and Stanton will show them what their brothers, son, husbands, and fathers have suffered. And nowadays, our women are facing the same brand of slaughter.

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Source of the Characters in Last of the Annamese

I’m regularly asked by readers if the characters in Last of the Annamese are based on real people. The answer is an unqualified yes. But each is an amalgam.

The protagonist, Chuck, is in part based on me. I attribute to him the travails I went through as the South Vietnamese military forces and government collapsed under the assault from North Vietnam. Each of the catastrophes he faced really did happen during the fall of Saigon. As one review noted, Annamese is fiction in name only.

But I wasn’t the only source for Chuck’s character. I drew on the many American men I knew who lived through the collapse and escaped as the North Vietnamese were entering Saigon. I gave Chuck the features, strength, and raw courage I saw in my own men, the forty-three guys who worked for me. I made him a retired Marine officer because nearly all my men were, like me, former military. And so many men in the DAO Intelligence Branch (a real entity located next door to us) spent a life in the military before signing up as civilians to do intelligence collection and analysis in South Vietnam after 1973 when U.S. forces were withdrawn. I had plenty of courageous models to choose from.

Tuyet is based on women from the nobility and royal family I met during my years in Vietnam. I gave to her the traits I had seen in them—a preference for French over Vietnamese (they considered their native tongue crude and ignorant), a feeling of superiority, and disdain for the lower classes. But Tuyet has a depth of insight and nobility that I never saw in the aristocratic models.

Thanh is like half a dozen South Vietnamese military officers I knew—courageous, dedicated, and willing to sacrifice himself. He is the character that moves me the most. He, like so many of the men I knew, plans for the escape of his family while he stays behind to face the North Vietnamese conquerors.

A half dozen readers have asked me if Colonel Macintosh is based on Al Gray, the Marine colonel who saved my life during the fall of Saigon. Yes, in part. I portrayed Macintosh doing what Al Gray actually did, but I didn’t give Macintosh the nobility of Al Gray. Macintosh is an ordinary guy who isn’t promoted because he insists on warning his superiors that Saigon will fall. Gray did all that and more, but he was such a superb leader that the Marine Corps kept promoting him. By the way, I don’t call him Al anymore. That stopped the day he became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Now I call him “sir.” I’ve never met a Marine who doesn’t know who Al Gray is. He’s a legend in his own time. I’m privileged to know him.

I made the characters in Annamese as real as I could. I want people to know what happened to the brave men and women, Vietnamese and American, who lived through or died during the fall of Saigon.