Tom Glenn's Blog, page 37

Gun Violence

According to the June 9 Washington Post, the U.S. has suffered more than 250 mass shootings thus far this year. And Congress is struggling to pass laws to address our massive gun killings. I’m pleased to see our lawmakers moving out, even though I know that gun-loving Republicans will scuttle all meaningful reductions in gun ownership. And I know that the only solution to our firearms problem is to reduce the number of guns in the hands of our citizens, something we are not willing to do.

The U.S. has more guns per capita—120.5 guns for every 100 people—than any other country in the world, and only Brazil exceeds us in the number of people killed by guns annually. The ratio between gun deaths and gun ownership is the same throughout the world: the more guns, the more deaths. Two examples chosen at random illustrate the point: The U.K. has 2.5 guns per hundred people; it had 107 people killed by guns in 2016. Belgium has 6.56 guns per hundred inhabitants; number of Belgians killed annually by firearms per 100,000 people: 1.24. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2020, the most recent year for which complete data are available, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S.

I reject out of hand the argument made by many Republicans that we Americans are a gun culture. To the degree that that’s true, let’s change it instantly. Our culture, as of June 9, has killed 19,066 people so far this year. Better to reject our culture outright and reduce the number of guns in the hands of our citizens than to accept multiple thousands of deaths every year—including small school children in place like Uvalde, Texas.

Eye Surgery Recovery

I’m back, though a long way from being at my best. The surgery on both of my eyes, for a condition called Lower Lid Ectropion OU, took place on Monday, June 6. One eye will be completely covered with bandages until June 23. The other, though damaged, is usable. Turns out I can type and read the results with one eye—awkward and irritating but doable. Under these conditions, writing is a slow and exasperating exercise, but it was what I was born to do. So how can I complain?

I ask my readers’ patience as I struggle. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do or how fast. Bear with me. I’ll be back in full force one of these days, probably before the end of the month.

New Book Review Published

The Washington Independent Review of Books has just published my latest book review. It’s of Andrew Holleran’s The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022). You can read it at https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-kingdom-of-sand-a-novel?fbclid=IwAR2tsMLqLgv4-2k8qTTP5__oSegEj8NBpgObzfkeNhT-z7pKbPEFbdgMUy0

Let me know what you think.

Eye Surgery

At 7:30 this morning, I’m due to report in to the Wilmer Eye Institute’s Bendann Surgical Pavilion in Baltimore for surgery on both eyes to resolve something called lower lid ectropion OU. It’s a condition in which the lower eye lids droop. I’ll be out of commission for some number of days—no one has been able to tell me how long. I’m guessing it will be less than a week.

So this is my last blog post for a while. Don’t give up on me. Be patient. I’ll be back.

Scrubs

Many years ago, when I was a volunteer taking care of patients at the height of the AIDS crisis, I wore scrubs, a pajama-like uniform preferred by medical personnel consisting of a short-sleeved shirt and pants with a tie string. I even had my name, rendered as “Dr. Glenn,” sewn on the breast pocket of the shirt. The joke was that I was authorized to use the title “doctor” because I had earned a PhD. Never mind that I wasn’t a physician.

I ended up with half a dozen scrub sets. I still have them and occasionally wear them to lounge around in or for a quick run to the store when I don’t want to get fully dressed. I am proud of my doctoral degree, but it almost never gets recognized (as an author I’m known just as “Tom Glenn,” not “Dr. Tom Glenn”). So on the rare occasions that I wear my scrubs, I particularly enjoy being addressed as “Dr. Glenn.”

I’m considering wearing a pair of scrubs when I go in for my eye surgery on tomorrow. If I do, I’ll let you know what happens.

Việt Cộng

Sometime back, I blogged on “Viet Cong” and why I don’t use the term. The issue has come up again, so, at the risk of repeating myself, I post again.

First of all, “Viet Cong” is short for the Vietnamese Việt Nam Cộng-sản which simply means “Vietnamese Communist.” The communists themselves never use the term. During the war, Americans used Viet Cong or VC to mean the communists native to South Vietnam, independent of the north, as opposed to the North Vietnamese who infiltrated South Vietnam. The Americans who used the term bought into the fiction North Vietnam had created that an independent movement developed in South Vietnam that rebelled against the South Vietnamese government. That movement, according to the fiction, was named the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam), shortened to National Liberation Front or NLF. The front was never a real organization. It was a cover for North Vietnamese operations in South Vietnam.

Second, the entire effort to defeat the South Vietnamese government and the American forces was a North Vietnamese endeavor. Every aspect of it was controlled by Hanoi. There was no independent rebellion in the south. So the American distinction between “North Vietnamese Army” (NVA) and “Viet Cong” (VC) assumed a reality that never existed. The North Vietnamese army, called the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) by the north, included three categories of forces: regulars, regional forces, and guerrillas. The latter two were what we Americans called Viet Cong, but troops in these categories were neither independent of the north nor native to south Vietnam. All three types of PAVN soldiers included northern, central, and southern natives.

Therefore, the most accurate term for the forces fighting the South Vietnamese and the Americans is the North Vietnamese. That’s who they were, and that’s what I call them.

“Bitter” in North East

On June 1, I did my presentation called “Bitter Memories: The Fall of Saigon” at the public library in North East, Maryland. I told the story of my escape under fire as the city fell to the North Vietnamese.

I have now done that presentation over seventy times. And yet, at three points in the story, I still choke up as I talk about people who were lost during that debacle. Each time I do the presentation, I experience again the close attention listeners give me. Every eye is on me. People sit motionless, wrapt in my story of near death and escape. I learn once again how silence from me raises the tension in the room.

I hope that before too much longer, while I am still spry enough to do presentations, that my adventures after the 1975 fall of Saigon will be declassified so that I can tell the world my stories. Meanwhile, I’ll go on narrating the tragic events that occurred in April 1975 when South Vietnam fell to northern communists.

“Intelligence Failure”

As regular readers of this blog know, I spent 35 years working in U.S. intelligence before I retired 30 years ago. Repeatedly during those years, and especially during the Vietnam war, U.S. government officials from the legislative and executive branches blamed “intelligence failure” for government and especially military fiascos. Because intelligence depends on secrecy for its success, we intelligence personnel never speak up in defense of our discipline. As a result, the public often believes that intelligence failures are the cause of international disasters.

While I can’t be specific because the facts are still classified, I can testify that intelligence failures are few and far between. The rare and real intelligence failures are not erroneous reports but a lack of information because intelligence sources were unable to obtain data on a subject of critical importance. Far more often, commanders flubbed and blamed inadequate or inaccurate intelligence for their errors.

One story illustrates this common occurrence. During the Vietnam war when I was operating in the central part of the country south of the DMZ (the demilitarized zone, that is, the border between north and south Vietnam), signals intelligence revealed the presence of a large and dangerous North Vietnamese force not far from our position. I warned the U.S. commanding officer who decided to attack the enemy. As he and his forces set out for target, he used plaintext (unenciphered) voice communications with his subordinate units. I warned him that the North Vietnamese were experts as signals intelligence—the intercept and exploitation of radio communications. He refused to change his mode of communications. “I want them to know we’re coming,” he said.

When we arrived at the target location, the enemy units were no longer there. Obviously, they had intercepted the commander’s communications, discovered that our forces were approaching, and escaped before we arrived. The U.S. commander concluded that the intelligence I had provided was erroneous and ever thereafter refused to exploit the information on the enemy I was able to give him.

So when you hear a government official or military commander blame intelligence for a mission failure, consider the far more likely alternative: that the intelligence was solid but the mission execution was flawed. Or maybe it was simply that the other side won the battle.

The Plaque (3)

Something like a year after the fall of Saigon, my guys got together for a reunion and dinner in Washington, D.C., and invited me to join them. At the end of the meal, they presented me with a plaque thanking me for saving their lives. It turned out that they had known all along about my struggle to get them and their families safely out of the country in defiance of the ambassador’s orders not to evacuate them.

The text reads:

“Last Man Out Award”

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 DODSPECREP employees and the closing down shop

amid the chaos and danger of those final days.

The Women and Men and Dependents of F46

“F46” was out unclassified designator.

That plaque now hangs on the wall of honor in my dining room, surrounded by plaques from Who’s Who and Top Artist. But it is the honor bestowed on me by my guys that remains the most important.

The Plaque (2)

Because I knew from intercepted communications that the North Vietnamese assault on Saigon would start within days, I was desperate to get all my people and their families out of the country. But the ambassador wouldn’t permit me to evacuate my people. He accepted the word of the Hungarian communist that no attack would happen and rejected my warnings. My boss, the director of NSA, ordered me to close down the operation and get everybody out before someone got killed. I told the ambassador that if he’d let my people go, I’d stay until the end so that he would still get intelligence from NSA. He turned me down.

Meanwhile, I did all I could to prevent my subordinates and their families from finding out that the ambassador had forbidden their evacuation. They had enough to worry about as it was. But as I learned later, they knew the whole time what was happening.

At my wits end, I decided to disobey the ambassador and secretly got my guys and their families out any way I could. Some I sent out on phony home leave; others went out on fake vacations; still others had orders for sham business travel. At the end, I took money from my own pocket, after our travel funds ran out, and bought a ticket on Pan Am for the last guy I wanted to rescue. He flew out on the last Pan Am flight from Saigon.

That left only three people still in Saigon: me and the two communicators who had volunteered to stay with me to the end. Marines flying in from the U.S. 7th Fleet, cruising out of sight out in the South China Sea, evacuated my two communicators mid-afternoon on April 29 after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. I flew out that night in pitch black and pouring rain. No sooner were we airborne than I saw tracers coming at us. We took so much lead in the fuselage that I thought we were going down. But we made it.

When we reached the Oklahoma City, the flag ship of the 7th Fleet, the pilot circled and circled over the flood-lit landing pad on the deck, then finally went down very slowly and landed. He told me later that he, a civilian pilot, had never before landed on a ship.

More next time.