Tom Glenn's Blog, page 73

My Father (2)

In short, in the absence of parental care, I took care of myself. I’ve never known if I am blessed with formidable self-reliance or I became competent as caring for myself simply because no one else was there to do it.

Ironically, I sometimes feel like I should thank my father for his failure to look after me because it forced me to learn to stand on my own. That ability was invaluable during my days in combat on the battlefield in Vietnam and elsewhere. I couldn’t depend on the man fighting next to me to save my life. My survival was up to me.

My father’s fiascos were a lesson for me. I swore that when I became a father, I wouldn’t fail my children as my father had failed me. And, in my judgment, I was a very good father as long as I was with my children. But my work required that I spend a great deal of time away from home, first on the battlefields of Vietnam, later elsewhere. In another pitiless irony, my occupation which provided the funds to feed and house them and my wife in comfort also deprived them of my company

As I age and am forced to face my own successes and failures as a father, I rate myself as a qualified success. My four children are all healthy and successful. I spent less time with them than either they or I would have wanted, but our hours together were precious and valued. We have no complaint.

So Giuliani’s imminent disbarment brought back memories and, ultimately, peace. I am content.

My Father

I read in the daily press about New York state bar authorities ordering that Rudolf Giuliani, once (and maybe still for all I know) Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, be suspended from the practice of law. Soon he will be disbarred.

That brought back memories of the disbarment of my father. He was a practicing lawyer in Oakland, California, where I grew up. When I was a child, he was tried for the embezzlement of $40,000 from one of his clients, convicted, and sentenced to San Quentin state prison. Needless to say, he was disbarred. When he was released from prison, he came home to live with me and my mother but continued to get into trouble with the law and went back to prison. While I was working my way through college, he forged checks against my bank account. I cut all ties with him and went to great lengths to assure that he didn’t know where I was or how to contact me. Years later, local police telephoned me to tell me that he had been killed in a bar brawl.

Because my parents failed to care for me (my mother was an alcoholic), I learned from early childhood to depend on myself. To avoid going hungry, I got part-time jobs as a child, everything from delivering newspapers to waiting on customers in a drug store. I continued working, as much as twenty hours a week, through grammar school, high school, and college. I missed my college graduation at the University of California, Berkeley, because I was in the university’s Cowell Hospital, on campus in Berkeley, recovering from exhaustion.

More next time.

Gun Deaths in the U.S.

At the risk of repeating myself—I’ve addressed this subject several times over the four years I’ve been blogging—the U.S. stands out among the world’s nations as the country with the highest gun ownership and highest rate of deaths by gunfire among similar wealthy nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The ratio between number of guns in the hands of civilians and the number of gunfire deaths is constant throughout the world: the more guns, the more people die.

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.

Now let’s look at the number of people killed by gunfire. According to the Washington Post, through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the U.S., about 54 lives lost per day. The rate of deaths by gunfire per 100,000 people in the U.S. in 2019 (the most recent figure I was able to acquire) was 3.96. That was more than eight times higher than the rate in Canada, which had 0.47 deaths per 100,000 people and nearly 100 times higher than in the United Kingdom, which had 0.04 deaths per 100,000.

Again: the more guns in the hands of civilians in a country, the more citizens die by gunfire. And yet we are loath to pass gun control laws. Firearms are woven into the culture of the U.S.

Forty thousand people die each year from gunfire in our country. Let’s change that. We can start by reducing the number of guns in the hands of police. We can learn from the British whose bobbies (British policemen) are often not armed. And we can limit by law the number of firearms in the hands of civilians.

It’s time for America to join the rest of the world’s civilized nations by reducing the number of firearms in the country, thereby saving thousands of lives.

Hot Weather

For thirteen years, between 1962 and 1975, I spent more time in the tropical climate of Vietnam than I did in the U.S. It was so hot that I, like all other Americans, wore as few clothes as possible to cope with the heat. I stayed suntanned through all those years. And I became completely acclimated to the hot weather.

But then, in April 1975, the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam, and I was forced to flee the country under fire. I returned to the U.S. and did everything I could think of to acclimate to the temperature in the Washington, D.C. area of the U.S. I failed.

To this day, I yearn for the days of summer. When the temperature gets into the eighties, I start to feel comfortable. When it hits the nineties, I feel like I’m home again. I keep the air conditioning thermostat in my house set at eighty so that visitors won’t complain about the heat. That means I have to sleep with blankets rather than just a single sheet, but the company of others demands some sacrifice.

The cool temperatures at the beginning of the summer this year are disappointing. As I write, early in the morning, the end of June is approaching. And yet, it’s only 56 degrees outside and only 70 in the house. I bundle up.

It becomes clearer to me by the day that Vietnam changed me permanently. As a linguist, I became most adept at Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam. My four children lived with me during my two accompanied tours in Vietnam and were shaped by the experience. I became an expert at signals intelligence support in combat on the battlefield, so that after Vietnam fell in 1975, I was shipped to other parts of the world to do the same thing, using my other languages.

Most of all, I remain acclimatized to the tropical heat. I guess I should be grateful that for a couple of months each summer, while most Americans suffer from the sweltering heat, I’m in my prime. Maybe all that will change for the worse for me with global warming. Even so, I’ll still be more comfortable than most.

Depending on a Computer

The collapse and death of my faithful old desktop computer and its replacement by a new, up-to-date laptop made me come to realize how much I depend on computers. I begin and end each day at the computer and spend most of the hours in between there as well. I keep this blog, to which I usually contribute daily, on the computer, and the vast majority of my correspondence is by email rather than the post office, but even my letters are composed at the computer. My job is writing—I’m an author by trade—and I do all my writing on the computer. I now have six books and 17 short stories in print, all written at the computer keyboard.

But I’m a terrible typist. Back in the days when I was in high school, only girls were allowed to take typing courses. So I taught myself to type—by the hunt-and-peck method, which I still use. That means that virtually every sentence has typos. The Microsoft Word software that I use these days automatically corrects some errors and flags others so that it is easy to find and rectify them. Fixing my mistakes as I go along is par for the course.

It wasn’t until I didn’t have a computer for a couple of days that I realized how much of my time is spent using that machine. It’s true that I read from books and the newspaper every day. I have the household chores that everyone has, cooking, cleaning, gardening. And I work out with weights every other day. Those activities take up far less than half my time. All the rest of my waking hours are spent working at a computer.

I have no complaints. I now have machine that is up-to-the-minute in capabilities and conveniences. Writing has never been easier.

My Books

My office, a large room that takes up the center section of the lowest floor in my split-level house, is surrounded by shelves filled with books, music scores, CDs, DVDs, and reel-to-reel tapes. Every few years, I have to go through the shelves and pull out the items I’m ready to part with. I then contribute them to the library of Howard County, Maryland.

Because I am a music lover and a trained musician, some shelf space is taken up with music scores and recordings. I have orchestral scores for my favorite symphonies and operas and many piano reductions and vocal scores of my favorite operas. I’ve now reduced my collection of recordings (records, tapes, and CDs) to a few shelves.

I long ago stopped adding to my collection of recordings, but books are another matter. Because I am undisciplined in my reading habits, I buy books more often than I get them from the library—I can’t be sure that I’ll finish with a book in time allotted me by the library. I frequently find myself reading more than one book at any given time and sometimes put aside a book before I finish reading it and return to it later. And I’m usually on the hook for a review of a new book sent to me by the organizations that publish my reviews (I now have well over a hundred in print on the internet). That work has to take priority over reading for pleasure.

So I end up with more books than I have room for. When it gets to the point that I’m piling books on the floor, I know it’s time to load the car and make a donation trip to the local library.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. I am a writer by vocation, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than a good read. That said, I wish I could learn to cope better with the endless flow of books.

That Photo (2)

Continuing the story about the 1967 battle of Dak To and how my picture got taken:

One morning, I awoke to find all my fatigues missing. In my skivvies, I ran around the cantonment area asking if anyone knew where my uniforms were. They showed up a couple of hours later. The troops had snitched them and taken them to a local tailor and paid him to sew nametags above the two breast pockets on the fatigue jacket. One read “GLENN,” the other “CIVILIAN.” On the collars where an officer’s rank would be displayed, the number “13” was stitched (I was a GS-13—civilian rank—at the time). And all my fatigue caps now sported pins showing the 4th Infantry Division insignia.

The troops, of course, couldn’t stop laughing, and they insisted on taking a picture of me in my fatigue jacket and cap showing the nametags, rank, and insignia. When Mission BBQ asked for a photo of me in uniform, I gave them that one, the only one I had. I doubt that anyone seeing the picture will be able to read the nametags or 13s on the collar. So once again, I fool people with my cover.

For all that, the picture, a copy of which I have hanging on my office wall, reminds me of the close bond I shared with the men I was in combat with. What most noncombatants don’t realize is that men in combat fight, first and foremost, for the man fighting next to them. They will give up their lives to save their combat buddy.

The bond between men in combat is the strongest love I have ever felt. Soldiers don’t use the word “love.” Men are not supposed to love one another. But I stood ready to die to save the life of the man fighting next to me. And I knew he would do the same for me. That’s the purest, least selfish love I have ever known.

That Photo

A reader noted that in my post on Mission BBQ, I reported on the photograph of me in uniform hanging in the restaurant in Ellicott City and reminded me that I was a civilian during the thirteen years I spent more time in Vietnam than in the U.S., assisting combat forces on the battlefield with signals intelligence. When was that photo taken and why was I in uniform?

The reader is correct that I was a civilian during the entire thirteen years that I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S. But most of that time—all but the last two years—I was under cover as an enlisted man in whatever unit, army or Marine, I was supporting. That meant I wore the uniform of the outfit I was with, to prevent the enemy from discovering that they had a spy in their midst.

I avoided being photographed because I was operating under cover. But once, I did allow a photo. That was in late summer or early fall of 1967 during the battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s western highlands. I was there on the battlefield supporting the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and the 173rd Armored Brigade during combat.

The troops, of course, knew I was a civilian. And they found my presence there—a civilian pretending to be one of them—hilarious. To avoid attracting the enemy’s attention, I lived with the troops, slept on the ground next to them, ate C-rations sitting in the dirt with them, used their latrines, and went into combat with them. As far as I know, the North Vietnamese never discovered my presence.

More next time.

Goose Family Gone

I have written several times here about a family of geese. They first appeared as a pair of adult geese a couple of months ago swimming in the pond behind my house and wandering through the trees and open spaces close by. Then, one day, I saw four goslings with them. A week later, there were only three goslings. Then, starting five or six days ago, I saw no geese at all. They’ve disappeared.

I know that when geese pair, they make a nest to which they return every year. So the geese near me must have made a nest in the woods close to my house, probably the first for this couple. They couldn’t have decided to move away because the goslings were still too little to fly. So in all likelihood, they were killed.

My first thought was that they fell prey to an animal. But given the size and ferocity of the adult geese, only an animal considerably larger than them could have killed them. The only animals I’ve seen in these parts that large are deer, not known for attacking other animals.

So the great likelihood is that humans killed them. Maybe someone made a meal of them. More likely, one of my neighbors decided that they were an invading nuisance and did away with them.

I miss them. I had looked forward each day to watching them swim in a row in the pond, an adult at the front and back and the goslings in a line in between. Then they would wander through the trees and into the open space to the east side of my house, pecking at the ground.

I have seen a variety of animals close to my house, everything from rabbits and foxes to deer. But none appeared as frequently or over such a long period as the geese. It saddens me that they have vanished.

Mission BBQ Lunch

I’ve found a way to jury rig my laptop computer to my system to replace my misbehaving desktop machine. So I’m able to resume posting to my blog during the interim before my desktop is repaired on Friday.

Every month during normal times, my American Legion post members get together for lunch a few days before our monthly meeting. We always go to Mission BBQ, a local restaurant that emphasizes military membership décor with photos of soldiers, sailors, and Marines covering every empty wall space. Even a picture of me in uniform is there. Because of the pandemic lockdown, we have not held meetings or met for lunch for more than a year. But the post has scheduled its first post-pandemic meeting tomorrow. Hence, our gathering at Mission BBQ last Friday.

I was surprised at how moved I was to see again all those familiar faces and spend time again with veterans—men and women who know what it’s like to put your life on the line for your country and for your fellow combatants. We are becoming a vanishing breed. There are fewer of us every year. And those of us who engaged in combat are fewer still. And we’re aging. One member who was present is a retired Marine colonel over a hundred years old. He sat next to a retired navy corpsman who is almost a hundred.

I am unique among the American Legion members because I was a civilian during my time in combat. I had completed my military service before I went on the battlefield. Granted, I was always under cover as an enlisted man in the unit I was supporting. My job was helping on the battlefield with intelligence gained by intercepting enemy radio communications. Between 1962 and 1975, because I was so good at my job and spoke the three languages of Vietnam (Vietnamese, Chinese, and French), I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S. While the troops I worked with found my presence as a civilian under cover as one of them very funny, they also accepted me as a fellow troop.

When I get together with other veterans, the feeling of brotherhood I felt with the troops I was supporting on the battlefield comes to life. I’m profoundly grateful that the lockdown is ending so I can be with my brothers again.