Tom Glenn's Blog, page 210

Who Shot at My Escaping Helicopter?

On the evening of 29 April 1975, I escaped from Saigon as it fell. My flight from Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of the city, was part of Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Americans and some South Vietnamese as the North Vietnamese took the city. I flew out on a slick, a little Huey, rather than one of the big CH-53s. As soon as we were airborne, I saw the tracers coming at us. We took so much lead in the fuselage that I thought we were going down. But we made it. In the dark and the rain, we flew out to the South China Sea where the ships of the U.S. 7th Fleet were waiting. The pilot, despite the pelting rain and the pitch black, circled repeatedly. Finally, very slowly, he descended and landed on the floodlit helipad of the Oklahoma City, the flagship of the 7th Fleet. He told me later that he, an Air America civilian pilot, had never before landed on a ship.

Two aspects of the escape intrigue me even today. First, why was it raining? The monsoon season, with its spectacular downpours, wasn’t due until the following month. Did the monsoon come early to coincide with the fall of Vietnam to the communists?

Second, who was firing at us?

I don’t know how many U.S. and Vietnamese helicopters carried people from the city during Operation Frequent Wind. My guess is that it was hundreds. The North Vietnamese by the evening of 29 April were already in the streets of Saigon. They had a full complement of anti-aircraft weapons. And yet, as far I know, not one chopper was shot down. They could have brought down dozens, but they didn’t.

In puzzling through what happened, I’ve concluded that the North Vietnamese didn’t want to impede the U.S. flight from Vietnam. Had they fired at our helicopters, we could have inflicted great damage on them with the combat aircraft we had in the vicinity. Besides, all they wanted was for us to leave.

So who shot at the Huey I was in?

My best guess is that it was the South Vietnamese military whom we were abandoning to their fate. They had large weapons with tracer ammunition—used to show the shooter if his bullets are hitting the target. And they were both furious and desperate as we flew away and left them to the mercies of the North Vietnamese.

I escaped alive, though they certainly tried hard to bring me down. I can understand how they felt. In the end, I was the lucky one. They were all killed or captured by the North Vietnamese.

I Remember Saigon

Most of Last of the Annamese is set in Saigon between November 1974 and the end of April 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. I knew the city well. I had lived there on and off for thirteen years. Granted, before 1973, I didn’t spend much time in the city because I was off in the field supporting combat units. But after the withdrawal of U.S. military forces in 1973 and my final tour began (as head of the covert National Security Agency (NSA) operation in Vietnam), I lived in the city with my wife and four children. I was away only for short trips with my South Vietnamese counterparts.

When I first arrived in Saigon in 1962, the French language was as common as Vietnamese. Many French citizens still lived there, and some Vietnamese, particularly in the upper classes, preferred to speak French. So I got plenty of practice in both Vietnamese and French. To use my Chinese, I had to go to Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon—its name means “big market”—where the residents often spoke the Beijing dialect of Chinese, the language I had studied, even though it was not their native tongue.

Saigon was a gracious cosmopolitan city back then. The restaurants and cocktail lounges catered to the French. They were, for the most part, not expensive by American standards, and they welcomed me because I spoke their languages. I rented a tiny apartment downtown on Tu Do Street which I used infrequently because so much of my time I was in the field.

By the mid-sixties, Saigon had begun to stink, literally. As the war forced more and more refugees into the city and hygiene declined, the canals that riddled the city were more and more polluted with human waste and garbage. Each time I returned to Saigon from the U.S., I noticed the stench as soon as I deplaned at Tan Son Nhat (the airport on the northern edge of the city); by the time I’d been there a week, I’d grown used to the smell and was no longer even conscious of it. Newly arrived Americans would remark on it until they, too, became inured.

By the time I arrived with my family for my last tour in 1974, Saigon was in decay. The buildings, even private residences, were in serious deterioration. The city’s population had grown beyond congestion. Maimed soldiers crammed the streets. The poor, who had no place to live, were everywhere.

When the end came in April 1975, and I escaped by helicopter under fire, the city was in chaos. I fled from a place I had loved once. Now it was ataxia incarnate.

Maryland Public Television (MPT) Travelling Exhibit

Yesterday, I went to the Howard County Central Library in Columbia to see again the MPT travelling exhibit celebrating Vietnam veterans from Maryland. The display consists of sixteen eight-foot banners, one for each veteran featured in MPT’s three-part documentary, “Maryland Vietnam War Stories” aired in June 2016. I was honored to be one of the sixteen.

Three aspects of the exhibit got my attention during this viewing, the first time I’ve seen the exhibit since last year.

One was that the banner on me depicts me as an army officer. As I explained in an earlier blog, when MPT interviewed me in 2014, my connection with the National Security Agency (NSA) during my years in Vietnam was still classified. Since I didn’t say who I worked for in Vietnam, MPT deduced from the photos they had of me in an army uniform (my cover was the uniform, army or Marine, of the combat unit I was supporting) that I was an army officer. If the observer looks closely at one of the pictures, he will see that my name tags read “GLENN” and “CIVILIAN” and that the collars of my fatigue shirt, where an officer’s rank would normally appear, sport the number “13”—I was a GS-13 at the time. The uniform, and others like it, was the result of a prank the men of one unit played on me.

Second was that several of the other men featured in banners were assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade in 1967. They probably took part in the battle of Dak To. I was providing covert signals intelligence support to the 173rd during that battle, so we may have run into each other back then.

Third was the seventeenth banner. I came upon it after looking at the other sixteen. It’s an explanation that the other banners each represent one of the veterans MPT was honoring. Emblazoned in large letters toward the bottom are the words, “Thank you and welcome home.” As I explained in an earlier blog, those words make me cry. I cried again yesterday when I saw them.

Articles and Memories

In the last few days, two projects have consumed my time and attention. One was writing in this blog about abandonment and finding peace. The other was composing two pieces for submission to the New York Times and Vietnam magazine. Both endeavors forced me to remember and contemplate.

In the midst of my work, an email from a man who worked with me many years ago asked about the suicide of one of the men who was with me in Saigon. There were actually two men in Saigon at the end who later killed themselves.

One was a brilliant intelligence analyst. He had the rare gift of being able to look at the data and forecast what would happen next. He foretold the fall of Saigon almost a month before it occurred. It was he who asked me with tears in his eyes, “Did it have to end like this?” I attributed his words to Sparky in my retelling of the incident in Last of the Annamese.

The other was an equally talented linguist who worked in Vietnamese and French. All of us enjoyed his cynical humor and his imaginative and excellent writing. As the end of the war and defeat loomed, he became silent, even morose.

The deaths of both men, some time after the fall of Saigon, crushed me. They had contributed so much to our joint effort and asked nothing in return. Both were more quick-witted than me, and I suspect both qualified as geniuses. I’ve wondered vainly if their native intelligence was their undoing. Maybe if I’d understood at the depth they did, I might have been suicidal, too.

Oddly, I never was. The lowest point in my life came in the spring and summer of 1975 after I returned to the world (the U.S.) following the fall of Saigon. I was physically ill, suffering from the worst of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, left to manage on my own by my wife and my employer—as described in the blog posts over the past several days. I was grieving over the loss of Vietnam and so many good people I knew there. I was too sick in mind and body to see any hope in the future.

Maybe if I’d had the brilliant intellect and profound insight of the two men described above I’d have considered ending my life. All I know for sure is that my ultimate reaction was to gird my loins and fight back. I had writing and the support of other men who’d been in Vietnam, and I exploited those resources. I knew I’d done my best, given my all, during the collapse in Vietnam. I’d helped several Vietnamese families to escape. I’d saved the lives of the men who worked for me and their families in defiance of the ambassador. My honor was intact. Most of all, I knew I had it in me to recover.

The National Security Agency (NSA), my employer, years later, recognized my work during the fall of Saigon and awarded me the Civilian Meritorious Medal. I was right to hang in there. These days, as I said yesterday, people respect us Vietnam veterans. And we hear those cherished words, “Thank you. And welcome home.”

Abandonment (continued from yesterday)

I escaped under fire during the fall of Saigon on 29 April 1975. When I finally returned to NSA in late May 1975, I found that the war in Vietnam was seen as shameful, not to be discussed.

Over my earlier years, when I trundled regularly between Vietnam and the world (the U.S.), I and the returning troops were regularly greeted by mobs who called us butchers and baby killers and spat on us. Now, after I returned from the fall of Saigon, I felt that the whole of the U.S. was spitting on me.

Three things got me through. One was the bond I had with the men who had worked with me in Vietnam. We stuck together and helped one another. The second was my determination not to give in to adversity. The third was writing. I wrote about what happened.

For more than thirty years, I couldn’t get my stories and novels about Vietnam published. Then American attitudes changed. Today four of my novels and seventeen of my short stories are in print. The pinnacle so far is Last of the Annamese, published last March by the Naval Institute Press, which tells the story of the fall of Saigon. Although it’s fiction, it’s historically accurate and complete. What helped greatly was that in 2016 the declassification of my work in Vietnam was completed.

Annamese helped in another way. It allowed me to confront my memories of abandonment and survival. I found an imperfect peace.

That peace is rooted in self-reliance. I learned that even if the whole world turned against me, abandoned me, and left me to survive on my own, I could depend on myself. I discovered in myself a resilience I didn’t know I had.

So, yes, I and others like me were abandoned. But we were a determined bunch, not cowed by hostile saliva. We worked hard and clung to each other. We watched as other warriors from other wars came home to thanks and honor withheld from us. We gritted our teeth and hung on.

When Americans changed the way they saw the war in Vietnam, they looked at us with new eyes. The young folks wanted to know what really happened. In the last three years, I’ve been to gatherings where people actually honored me and others who survived Vietnam. We are again upright citizens. We stand with other veterans who served their country.

Now at last, Americans are thanking us. Despite our resilience, our determination, our toughness, we Vietnam vets are more moved than we will admit. “Thank you. And welcome home.” Those words make me cry.

Abandonment

I’ve talked at some length in various places in this blog about my feelings before, during, and after the fall of Saigon. What I haven’t wanted to talk about until now is my sense of abandonment.

As the North Vietnamese encroached on Saigon and I struggled to hold together what was left of my mission and my organization, I was doing it alone. I managed to get forty-one of my subordinates and their families out of the country, even though the ambassador had forbidden an evacuation. The embassy and CIA not only didn’t help me; they threw roadblocks in my path. I lied and cheated and stole to save the lives of my guys and their wives and children. I succeeded. The only help I received was from the two communicators, Bob and Gary, who volunteered to stay with me through the fall of Saigon. The three of us propped each other up through the days when we had nothing to eat and no time to sleep.

After I got Bob and Gary out, I escaped on a helicopter under fire. I flew to a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet which eventually set sail for the Philippines. Though I didn’t know it until I got back to Maryland in mid-May, I was suffering from exhaustion, amoebic dysentery, and pneumonia brought on by muscle fatigue, inadequate diet, and sleep deprivation.

From Subic Bay I caught a flight to Honolulu. The senior National Security Agency (NSA) official in the Pacific region met my plane. I was a wreck—I’d lost weight and was still wearing the clothes I’d escaped in. I was unshaven, in desperate need of a haircut, and physically ill. Instead of asking how I was or suggesting I look for a doctor, he said, “You can’t be seen around here looking like that.” He turned me over to one of his subordinates who saw to it I looked respectable for my briefing at CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific).

I can’t tell you the name of the man who met my plane. It’s still classified.

Things went from bad to worse. I passed out when I sat down after coughing through my briefing at CINCPAC. I knew I was ill, but instead of going to a doctor, I booked a flight to Maryland. I can’t tell you how much I yearned just to go home.

When I got to Maryland I telephoned my wife. She and our children had flown out of Saigon twenty days before the city fell. At her insistence, they went on a grand tour through Asia and Europe, arriving back in the states about the same time I did. She knew that Saigon had fallen, but she didn’t know if I had gotten out alive, nor did she make any attempt to find out. When I got through by phone to her at her father’s house in Massachusetts and begged her to come to Maryland—I told her I was very sick and needed her—she turned me down. She returned in July after I’d gotten back our house which we’d leased to another family for the length of our tour in Vietnam.

It was the beginning of the end of the marriage.

More tomorrow.

My Brothers

For the past couple of days, I’ve been working on articles for the New York Times and Vietnam magazine. I’ve dredged up memories of my time in Vietnam, and, in the process, recalled the many men I served with in Vietnam.

I call them men. The soldiers and Marines were so young that, in my memory, they seem more like children. Yet they died on the battlefield. Does their death in combat qualify them as full-fledged men?

My kinship for veterans seems to grow stronger each year. Most vets I meet are so different from me that we have trouble finding things to talk about.

I’m a retired spy, a writer with a PhD. I have been comfortable speaking seven languages other than English. I have a degree in music and play Bach on the piano.

The vets I meet at the American Legion and veteran events are every-day guys, many of them blue-collar, down-to-earth, unassuming. They don’t have much money and don’t need much for the lives they lead.

We couldn’t be more dissimilar. And yet the bond I feel for them and from them is deeper and stronger than our differences. They know what it is to serve selflessly. These men have a quiet nobility that outshines any other qualities they may have.

These men are my brothers, and I will always honor them.

Fiction Craftsmanship

The Maryland Writers Association has invited me to do my presentation on fiction craftsmanship next Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at the Finksburg Library (2265 Old Westminster Pike, Finksburg, MD 21048). I’ve been preparing the presentation, and that got me to thinking about the subject.

I make a clear and precise distinction between creativity and craftsmanship (sometimes called technique). Both are required for successful and publishable fiction. Creativity can’t be learned; it’s inborn. But craftsmanship can. Even so, craftsmanship takes a lifetime of practice and learning, and it never ends—I’ll still be discovering new aspects of craftsmanship on my deathbed. And in my experience, it’s what so many young writers lack, and they don’t know they lack it.

The odd thing about craftsmanship is that it’s all but ignored in texts about writing. Early in my career, I took more than twenty classes in creative writing. Craftsmanship was only mentioned in passing. But every master writer has learned the craft to the point that it’s become second nature, always present, almost unconscious.

For me, the master craftsman in fiction is Hemingway. I profoundly disagree with his outlook on life, but nobody wrote better than he did. I still reread him from time to time just to study his technique.

So how do you learn craftsmanship? By reading, reading, and more reading. That means studying the way a fine fiction writer puts together her sentences and paragraphs and chapters; examining why sometimes a paragraph consisting of a single word can be a miracle; understanding the flow, word choices, sentence length that work. Then taking that learning and putting it into practice. That means writing, writing, and more writing.

It also means revising. I spend something like 10 percent of my writing time in drafting new text and 90 percent of it in revising. It means reading aloud what you’ve written and listening for the way the words, sentences, and paragraphs come together.

I know perhaps a hundred writers, most of them successful to one degree or another. Of those, perhaps three have what I call “the gift.” By that I mean the inborn genius for knowing how to put words together to create beauty. Two of those three are as yet unpublished. It’s because they haven’t mastered the craft. They haven’t inculcated in themselves the mechanics of fiction writing.

Until they do, their work won’t see the light of day in print.

Quonset Hut Redemption

Another one of my less grisly memories from the Vietnam war came from an assignment when I was working with a squad of military signals intelligence specialists in support of an army combat unit. As usual, I did everything I could to get the guys to accept me as one of them. This group, used to working in combat situations, was more resistant than most to accepting a civilian in their midst.

Working in Quonset huts hastily assembled to hide what we were doing, we were intercepting the communications of the North Vietnamese unit preparing to attack the Americans. Once I had broken the combat cipher used by the enemy, we perfected a system of operation whereby I would decrypt an intercepted North Vietnamese message while the intercept operator, listening to the enemy transmission, was still writing down the cipher text. As soon as the transmission was complete, I’d translate the message. Next came writing a report based on the message text—we had to do that because the North Vietnamese used cover terms in their text, and the originator and recipient had cover names. A direct translation would be meaningless to the supported unit.

One afternoon we intercepted a message about preparations for an attack on the U.S. unit we were supporting. It would begin, the intercepted message said, with an artillery barrage. The message gave time the barrage was to commence, only a few minutes from the time we began intercepting the message. Immediately after intercept, decoding, and translation, I hurriedly typed the report onto a paper tape that would be used to transmit our warning to the combat unit.

While I was typing, the artillery barrage began. All my military partners rushed to their battle stations. I was a civilian. I had no battle station. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So I continued to poke away, grabbed the resulting tape, and transmitted it while the shells rained down on us. The GI assigned to guard the Quonset I was in watched in amazement.

The soldiers I was working with were enormously impressed. I didn’t tell them that I went on working on the report because I didn’t know what else to do. After that I was one of them, and our work together was among the most successful and effective of all I did during those years.

Misidentified

Another humorous incident grew out of my work under cover in Vietnam. In 2013, Maryland Public Television (MPT) chose me to be among the sixteen veterans they featured in the three-part Vietnam war documentary to be aired in 2016. When they first interviewed me in 2014, my connection with the National Security Agency during my years in Vietnam was still classified. So I simply didn’t mention who my parent organization was. MPT found photos of me in various uniforms and finally concluded that I must have been an army officer. They produced eight-foot banners on each of us vets to be displayed in their travelling exhibit. Mine shows two of those shots of me in an army uniform and proclaims that I was an army intelligence officer.

After the final declassification of my work in Vietnam in 2016, I informed MPT of my true status. It was too late. The documentary was already scheduled for broadcast in June. The traveling exhibit, still touring throughout Maryland, shows me as an army officer.

The exhibit is still on the road. You can check the schedule at http://vietnam.mpt.org/travelingexhibit/   The Howard County Public Library Central Branch (10375 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia, MD 21044) will be showing it from 9 May through 11 June. It will be at the Perryville Library (500 Coudon Blvd., Perryville, MD 21903) between 13 June and 23 July. I’ll be doing the fall of Saigon presentation there at 6:30 p.m. on 22 June.

It’s an impressive display, worth the trip for those interested in the Vietnam war.