Tom Glenn's Blog, page 60

Marine Corps Birthday

On Wednesday, November 10, the United States Marine Corps will celebrate its 246th birthday. Even though I was never a Marine, I’ll celebrate it, too. During my years of assisting troops on the battlefield, my favorite service was the Marines. Members of the corps invariably exploited to the hilt the intelligence I was able to provide them. I enhanced their success on the battlefield.

I’ve written here before about a stellar member of the corps I’ve known for more than fifty years, Al Gray. Al was a captain when I first met him in Vietnam in the early 1960s. Before becoming a combat commander, he had worked as a signals intelligence specialist. So he understood and appreciated the contribution I could make, as a signals intelligence professional, to the force on the battlefield—I could tell the friendlies where the enemy was, which units were arrayed against us, and whether they intended to stay hidden or attack us. Too often, army commanders I was supporting failed to believe and act on the intelligence I was able to provide, most famously during the 1967 battle of Dak To—one of the bloodiest battles of the war—and the 1975 fall of Saigon. Al and his Marines never failed to exploit the intelligence I provided.

Marines, under the command of Al Gray, by then a colonel, rescued me when Saigon fell in 1975 and I escaped under fire. Al went on to become a general and, eventually, Commandant of the Marine Corps. All the Marines I met over my years of service knew who Al Gray was. He was a hero to them. And yet, despite his fame and seniority, General Gray (I no longer called him Al; I addressed him as “sir”) stayed in touch with me over the years.

More next time.

Desk Name Plate

Sitting on the desk in my office are two desk name plates. One is a remnant of my time working for the government. It is standard and conventional—brown wood with a brass plate showing my name in black letters—Thomas L. Glenn III, my payroll signature. The other is intricately carved black marble with white background behind the name and decorated both front and back with fanciful oriental dragons floating among the clouds. The story behind this name plate is worth repeating.

During one of my tours in Vietnam in the late 1960s (I was there on and off from 1962 until the fall of Saigon in 1975), I was working with the troops on the battlefield—that was my job—in the central part of Vietnam. As happened so often during those years, the troops found my presence hilarious. Here I was a civilian masquerading as an enlisted man in their unit. I outranked their commanding officer but I was living with them, sleeping in the dirt beside them, eating C-rations with them on the battlefield, using their latrines, and going into combat with them. I had to do that to keep the enemy from knowing there was a spy (me) in their midst and thereby be effective in warning the Americans and their commanders what the enemy was up to from intercepting his radio communications. The troops found my payroll signature, Thomas L. Glenn III, especially funny.

To memorialize my presence with them, they paid a local artisan to carve for me a nameplate in the stone from Marble Mountain near Đà Nẵng. Rather than use my name, they had the carver put “TG-3” where the name would go. That was what they called me, and that was the radio callsign they assigned to me.

Today, that nameplate sits prominently on the desk where I write, proudly displayed to recall my years of working with the troops on the battlefield. It is a reminder of a personal history of which I am justifiably proud.

My WMAR Interview

On Wednesday, November 3, during its 6:00 p.m. newscast, WMAR Television (Baltimore) telecast the interview Erin MacPherson did with me on Friday, October 22. You can view it at https://www.wmar2news.com/voiceforveterans/army-veteran-former-nsa-spy-writes-to-cope-with-trauma-from-vietnam-war 

Reaction from friends and family has been universally positive. I was disappointed that the video version of the interview was so short, only about three and a half minutes. But I was impressed with the amount of information crammed into those few minutes. The narrative included details about my involvement in both the 1967 battle of Dak To and the 1975 fall of Saigon—from which I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. And due credit was given to Al Gray, a Marine officer I first met in the early 1960s when he was a captain commanding combat troops in Vietnam and I was providing intelligence support as a civilian under cover as military. Al was a colonel when he saved my life during the fall of Saigon. He went on to become a general and eventually the commandant of the Marine Corps.

The WMAR presentation got one thing wrong: it talked about me being in the army and later as a civilian in Vietnam. Actually, I had completed my army enlistment before I was sent to Vietnam. All my time there, I was a civilian, often operating under cover as an enlisted man in whatever unit I was supporting.

Far more important was that the segment captured both the lasting wounds to the soul inflicted by my combat experience and my pride in my service to my country. I am in many ways the product of the Vietnam war. Between my first assignment there in 1962 and my flight under attack in April 1975, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S., most of that time on the battlefield. As a consequence, I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) and am among the rapidly dwindling population of U.S. combat survivors.

So I take pride in the WMAR sequence. I invite my readers to take a look and let me know what they think.

Unmentionable Subjects

Ever since I began to travel abroad as part of my career, I have become more and more aware of the oddities of Americans. One of them is our gross discomfort in discussing the functions of the human body (including waste elimination and sex) and death. Those subjects are taboo in polite society.

All that was brought home to me again by a book I’m reading for review, Willem Frederik Hermans’ A Guardian Angel Recalls (translated from the Dutch by David Colmer; Archipelago Books, 2021). In this novel, told from the point of view of an angel, the bodily organs involved in urination, defecation, and sex are mentioned casually as are the acts themselves and the substance excreted. The story begins on May 9, 1940, the day before German invaded the Netherlands, and lasts through the first week of the German occupation. Consequently, death is common and is described without ado.

I am struck by the nonchalance of Hermans in his allusions to the body, its acts, its excreta, and its demise. His writing reminded me of my time in other nations across the world working with the citizens of those nations in their own language. Unlike Americans, they spoke of these matters as a part of daily life, neither special nor to be avoided.

We Americans can learn a lot from our allies.

Jabberwocky (2)

Reams have been written about the poem “Jabberwocky” (the text of which I quoted in toto yesterday). I’ll add only that it captivated me as a child and a budding linguist. Already fascinated with languages and having taught myself French and Italian, I found “Jabberwocky” intoxicating. I spent hours contemplating the possible meaning of Carroll’s made-up words. I saw that all of them might have been the result of a child’s misunderstanding, because all of them were derived from real words.

To this day, I am in awe of the genius of Lewis Carroll (the nom de plume of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and his intricate knowledge of the English language that allowed him to create the Alice books and “Jabberwocky.” I have spent my life trying to perfect my use of the language as a writer to tell stories with clarity and imagination. His genius lay in the opposite—concealing meaning to challenge the reader’s ability to decipher.

TV Interview

My interview on WMAR was shown tonight. If you missed it and would like to see it, you can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FcNLFQovys
Let me know what you think.

Jabberwocky

As a child, I read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and marveled at the nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky.” I quote the complete text below:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

   And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son

   The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

   The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;

   Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

   And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

   The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

   And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

   The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

   He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

   Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

   He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

   And the mome raths outgrabe.

More next time

The U.S. Incarceration Rate

According to Wikipedia, “The United States has the highest prison and jail population (2,121,600 in adult facilities in 2016), and the highest incarceration rate in the world (655 per 100,000 population in 2016).” The rate has improved over the past five years, but we are still the world leader in imprisonment. About 25 percent of the world’s prison population is in the U.S. At the end of March 2021, there were nearly 1.8 million people incarcerated in the United States.

And the evidence suggests that imprisoning those who break the law does not make them more law-abiding. The recidivism rate is 68 percent. Imprisonment, in short, doesn’t work. We need to find another way to handle law breakers.

Just as the death penalty doesn’t reduce the number of murderers, so imprisonment doesn’t lead to as decline in law breaking. It’s time for us Americans to study what other advanced democracies do to decrease both crime and punishment.

Police Killings

According to the New York Times, over the past five years, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife, or who weren’t under pursuit for a violent crime—a rate of more than one a week. I haven’t been able to find a comparable figure for other countries, but it is almost certainly much lower, partly because in those nations, the police are sometimes not armed. In London, for example, only about ten percent of the police force is now trained to carry arms.

We Americans are not able to reduce the number of police killings because we can’t curtail the number of firearms that our police carry. If we did, the police would be mammothly outgunned by lawbreakers. As I have reported here before, the firearm ownership rate in the United States is the highest in the world—120.5 guns per 100 people. We have more guns than people. Compare that figure with the number for Canada, 34.7, and the United Kingdom, 4.6.

To wit: until we decrease the number of guns held by the American population, we cannot reduce the number in the hands of police. Too many Americans would oppose a reduction in the number of guns we have because the U.S. is a gun culture. So we are stuck with police killings.

It’s time to change our culture.

Hairiest Man I Know

As noted here recently, I’m an avid fan of the daily comics. Recently, I read in the “Sherman’s Lagoon” strip about us “hairless beach apes,” that is, human beings. The trouble is, as I have reported here before, I’m presumably human, but I’m anything but hairless.

The only places on my body that I don’t grow hair are my forehead, the palms of my hands, and my feet. Literally everywhere else on my body is hairy. When I was a young man and my body hair was dark brown or black, my hairiness was something of an embarrassment. But now, as I am aging, my body hair is mostly white. That means it doesn’t show nearly as much. I get far fewer comments on my hairiness than I did as a forty-year-old.

 I tried once shaving a small section of my chest to see if the hair would grow back. It did. Thicker and darker than ever. I never tried that again.

So here I am. “I’m just a hairy guy,” as the song “Hair” says, quoted here by me not too long ago. Being hairy is supposed to be a masculine trait, but when it’s this bad it isn’t sexy any more. It’s just peculiar. Fortunately, in every other respect, I’m just an average guy.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.