Tom Glenn's Blog, page 41

SCOTUS Scuttled

The Supreme Court of the U.S. is en route to its own demise, thanks to Donald Trump and his followers, who packed the court with incompetent right-wing justices. Now the court has suffered a leak of its draft judgment of abortion prohibition, in itself an unprecedented lapse.

The end result will be, over time, that the court will lose relevance. Its only power is its influence—it has no means of carrying out its decisions and must depend on the president and Congress. To the degree that the U.S. citizens lose respect for the court, its potency shrivels. And the leaked decision to reduce access to abortion goes against the will of the majority of the U.S. population.

This may be the greatest damage yet inflicted by Donald Trump.

Colonel Lou Schott Honored Again

WMAR Television (Baltimore), who recognized me in its “Voice for Veterans” series a few weeks ago (you can view it at https://www.wmar2news.com/voiceforveterans/army-veteran-former-nsa-spy-writes-to-cope-with-trauma-from-vietnam-war) has now done a segment on Marine Colonel Lou Schott (see it at https://www.wmar2news.com/voiceforveterans/101-year-old-wwii-vet-shares-his-experiences-to-inspire-future-servicemembers).

Colonel Schott and I are both members of American Legion Post 156, and I was privileged to attend his WMAR interview. While my currently declassified combat service on the battlefield was in Vietnam, Colonel Schott was a platoon leader at the Battle of Peleliu (September 15 to November 27, 1944) in the Mariana and Palau Islands of the western North Pacific Ocean. The clash was one of the toughest, bloodiest battles of World War II. After an injury and a promotion, Schott took command of a rifle company in the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines before moving on to other commands that led to his promotion to colonel.

I am privileged to be a combat brother to Colonel Schott. I am pleased and gratified to see him honored.

Flea Market

Just to let you all know: I’ll be hawking and autographing my books at the Hawthorn Center Flea Market in Columbia, Maryland on Saturday, May 14. Here’s the flier:

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Hope I’ll see you all there.

More Words, Words, Words

Because I was born to be a writer and have worked as a linguist in seven languages, words and their origin are forever in the forefront of my mind. I recently devoted a couple of blog posts to words that intrigue me, but I’m nowhere near finished. Turns out I have plenty of material to work with. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, English now has 171,476 words that are in current use and is adding more all the time.

I start today with two words taken from oriental languages. First is tycoon, defined as a wealthy, powerful person in business or industry. It comes from the Japanese taikun, “Great Lord” (大君).

Possibly related is typhoon, a tropical cyclone.  The term presumably come from the Chinese 大風 (tai fung), “big wind”, but some etymologists argue that its origin was Portuguese (perhaps from Greek tuphōn which means “whirlwind”).

Then there’s finicky—overly fussy about one’s needs or requirements. The word came about as an alteration of finicking, itself an alteration of another adjective, finical. It’s believed that finical derives from the adjective fine.

Next is persnickety, alternate form of pernickety, placing too much emphasis on trivial or minor details; fussy. The word is of uncertain origin; the Dictionary of the Scots Language says that it resembles per- (“intensifying prefix”) + nick, but might be derived from particular + finicky with the form influenced by past participles ending in -et, -it, and -ed.

And finally (for today, anyway) is snicker—to give a half-suppressed, typically scornful laugh. The word has many related words in English, among them snigger, sneer, smirk, simper, titter, giggle, whicker, and chortle. The word’s origin is unclear, but it may have been consciously invented in the 1690s. It’s possibly of imitative origin, similar to Dutch snikken “to gasp, sob.”

That’s plenty for today. More next time.

Polls Favor Republicans

All the polling I’ve looked at suggests that the Republicans will take back the Senate and the House of Representatives in November. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight,for example, forecasts Republican victory. And Republicans raised $248,000,000 last year to pay for campaigns. I have no numbers for this year, but I’m sure the amount will be, by November, even greater.

The Republicans are gaining favor despite President Biden’s impressive achievements for which he gets little credit. Part of the reason for that is that Biden fails to capitalize on his successes. Another part is that Democrats are forever wrangling among themselves and fail to come together while the Republicans are quick to unify. And Republicans have the money to plaster advertising everywhere.

Despite all that, I can’t help but believe the Democrats will dominate in November. The main reason is that the Republican record is catastrophically bad. First came the Trump presidency with its endless disasters crowned by Trump’s 30,573 lies during his presidency—averaging about 21 lies a day. Then came the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, incited by Trump and carried out by his supporters, which resulted in at least seven deaths. Bald-faced lies followed. The Republican National Committee officially declared that the attack on the Capitol and events that led to it were “legitimate political discourse” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who condemned the riot and the role of Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.

Meanwhile, it’s public knowledge that Republicans led by Mitch McConnell are trying to pass 489 voter suppression bills in 49 states. And 121 House Republicans and 7 Republican Senators voted against certifying Joe Biden’s unmistakable victory in the 2020 election. Meanwhile, 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of all charges in the Senate Impeachment Trial despite ample evidence of his guilt.

How bad does a political party’s record have to be for voters to turn against it? So polls notwithstanding, I foresee a sizable victory for the Democrats come November.

I welcome readers’ views.

How Fascism Begins

Those words are taken from a post by Robert Reich from a few days ago. His point was that U.S. democracy is under threat, and we’d better move fast to save it.

He’s right. The presidency of Donald Trump did more to uproot democracy and introduce autocracy than we have ever seen before. And to the degree that Republicans continue to support Trump, the freedom of our country is at risk.

How great is that degree? Fully 85 percent of Republicans now believe that Trump won the 2020 election; 35 percent of all Americans believe it—despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that Joe Biden won the election fair and square.

That’s the big lie Trump and the Republicans are peddling. It is comparable to the lies told by Hitler and Stalin in their day when preparing to take control. I wrote here some days ago about Republican “betrumping,” wall-to-wall lying and deception. I warned we should trust nothing the Republicans say.

But the danger we face is greater than that. Trump and his Republican supporters are threatening the very foundations of American freedom. If they succeed in dominating the country, our freedom is over.

Be very, very afraid and act accordingly.

Gun Violence

As of May 1, 2022, 14,190 people have died by gun violence in the U.S. this year. The number injured is 11,446. That’s according to the Gun Violence Archive. The most important related statistic is that in the U.S. we have 120.5 guns for every hundred people, the highest ratio in the world. We have more guns than people. More facts about the U.S.: there was an increase of 13.5 percent in the rate of gun deaths in the U.S. from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, gun violence became the leading cause of death for people under twenty. That year, shootings killed more young people than motor vehicle crashes or drug overdoses for the first time ever.

Yes, I know, we are a gun culture. Firearms are built into our traditions and way of life. My argument is that it’s long since time we changed all that. Any customs that cost 14,000 lives in four months are customs that must be banished.

The Biden administration has finally made a move. According to White House data, the number of “ghost gun” seizures has increased ten-fold since 2016. Biden is, in effect, changing the rules so that “ghost guns” will have serial numbers and can therefore be traced.

It comes as no surprise that Republicans are fighting against any limits to “gun freedom.” It’s time for Americans to express to their Congressional representatives that the unlimited gun death rates must come to an end. We should all write to our Congressional leaders demanding change.

April 29 (3)

After my escape during the fall of Saigon, I returned to Maryland in May 1975, but I had leased my house for three years when I was assigned to Vietnam in 1974. I took up residence in a motel and called my wife, now staying with her father in Massachusetts, to come to my aid. Despite my obvious illness, she refused. She said she wouldn’t come back to Maryland until we could get our house back. The family now living there had to be paid to relinquish the house. I wasn’t able to get it back until July, 1975. Only then was I able to live again with my wife and four children.

The message from my wife was clear: she didn’t give a damn about me. Her only concern was getting the house back. That was the beginning of the end of the marriage. We divorced a few years later.

The fall of Vietnam and its aftermath were, in short, the worst time of my life. I went on to other relationships with women and other career goals. But the wounds of those years have not gone away. Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) stays with me, as it always will. And my relationships with women have come and gone, most importantly with the death of my partner of over twenty years, Su, two years ago.

But the future holds promise. I retired thirty years ago and have now published six books and 17 short stories. I’ve now recovered enough from Su’s death that I can seek the company of a woman.

The future, despite my brutal past, looks promising.

April 29 (2)

By April 27 1975, as the North Vietnamese attacked the city, there were just three of us left in Saigon, me and two volunteers who had agreed to stay with to the end. Their names are now declassified, so I can tell you who they were: Bob Hartley was the communicator, and Gary Hickman was an equipment specialist who could keep the communications equipment running. The three of us closed down the office and hunkered down in the comms center. We had almost nothing to eat, and because of the constant enemy shelling—first rockets and then artillery—we couldn’t sleep. We went on a schedule where one guy could rest for two hours while the other two kept watch.

We were rescued by American Marines under the command of Colonel Al Gray on April 29. I got Bob and Gary on a helicopter bound for the ships of the U.S. 7th Fleet, cruising out of sight in the South China Sea, at 1400 hours (2:00 p.m.). I went out after 2000 hours (8:00 p.m.) that night in pouring rain and pitch-black darkness.

By the time I escaped, I was having serious health problems. I was suffering from dysentery, pneumonia due to exhaustion and inadequate diet, and severe hearing loss due to the shelling. As I discovered later, I was also subject to Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), a mental disorder I have been plagued with ever since.

But what I had working for me was pride. I was ready to give up my life for my country. I got all my guys and their families out safely. I did everything humanly possible to avoid the fall of Saigon. And the U.S. government recognized my efforts by awarding me the Civilian Meritorious Medal for the lives I saved during the fall of Saigon.

It is something of a miracle that during my thirteen years on and off in Vietnam I was never wounded. Much of that time, I was serving as a civilian under cover as military on the battlefield, using signals intelligence to tip off friendly forces as to where the enemy was, what he was doing, and what his intentions were. My guess is that I survived intact because the enemy shot first at men with guns. Although I was carrying a .38 revolver, it remained in its holster because I was too busy gathering intelligence to unsheathe it.

More next time.

April 29

Tomorrow is the forty-seventh anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975. The date brings back stark memories of my escape under fire during that debacle after weeks of terror.

Longtime readers of this blog will already know why I’ll never forget the month of April 1975. I was in Saigon as head of the clandestine National Security Agency (NSA) operation focused on keeping track of the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam. The 1973 peace agreement signed by the U.S. and North Vietnam declared that the Vietnam war was over. But I knew from the intercept and exploitation of North Vietnamese radio communications that the North Vietnamese had no intention of adhering to the agreement and that the fall of Saigon was imminent. The evidence was overwhelming.

The American ambassador, Graham Martin, forbade me from evacuating my people. The Hungarian member of the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS), a tripartite committee established to monitor the 1973 ceasefire between the U.S. and North Vietnam, advised Martin that the North Vietnamese had no intention of attacking Saigon—it wished to participate in a coalition government of all patriotic forces to rule jointly. Martin, to whom the very idea that the communist flag could ever fly over South Vietnam was anathema, believed the Hungarian and rejected my repeated warnings that an attack was about to begin.

I disobeyed Martin’s command and evacuated my 43 subordinates and their families using any ruse I could think of. Some I sent out on home leave, others on vacations, and still others on temporary duty (TDY)—on government business. Toward the end, when my travel funds ran out, I bought a ticket with my own money on Pan Am for one of my guys. He flew out on the last Pan Am flight from Saigon.

More next time.