Tom Glenn's Blog, page 81

Thirteen Years as a Civilian on the Battlefield

Between 1962 and 1975, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S. My job was signals intelligence support to U.S. combat troops and friendly forces on the battlefield. I tipped off the friendlies to what the enemy was doing, where he was, what units he had deployed, and what his plans were. My information came from the clandestine intercept of the enemy’s radio communications. After the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973, I stayed on as chief of the National Security Agency (NSA) secret operation working with the government of South Vietnam against the North Vietnamese invaders. I escaped under fire when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on 29 April 1975.

Through it all, even though I operated under cover as military—army or Marine enlisted man depending on which unit I was supporting—I was a civilian. I was a veteran—I had completed my military service before NSA hired me and sent me to Vietnam starting in 1962. One source defines a veteran as “someone, who in his/her life, wrote a blank check made payable to the United States of America for an amount ‘up to and including my life.’”

The troops I lived with and went into battle in Vietnam with found it hilarious that I, a civilian, often outranked their commanding officers. Yet here I was sleeping beside them, eating C-rations sitting next to them in the dirt, using their latrines, and going into combat at their side.

As far as I know, the enemy never penetrated my cover. And my status as a civilian on the battlefield makes me unique. No one else I knew could do the job I did in Vietnam. I was comfortable in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam. I had been exploiting North Vietnamese communications since 1960 and knew them intimately. I was willing to put my life on the line for the good of my country. And when we lost the war—the first war the U.S. had ever lost—I went into mourning.

Some years ago, given my combat background, I tried to join the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). The organization refused to admit me to its ranks. I was not qualified because I had been a civilian, not military, during my time in battle on foreign soil. But the American Legion welcomed me with open arms.

It regularly surprises me to realize that my service on the Vietnam battlefields ended 46 years ago this month. The memory of those days is as vivid as ever. My grieving over the men killed by my side never lessens. And my pride in my service has never been stronger.

Some experiences don’t fade with time.

My Chop

Sitting within sight as I write is my Chinese chop. It is a square piece of carved tan marble four inches tall and a little over an inch wide. The upper half is an intricately carved stylized dragon. Its bottom is a stamp of my initials, TG3 (for Thomas L. Glenn III, my payroll signature), as I scribbled them during my many years working and living in Asia. The initials look like a cursive Chinese character. My knowledge of Chinese obviously helped me shape my initials, even though I don’t remember doing it.

The word for this implement, “chop,” in English comes from the Hindi chaap, meaning stamp, imprint, seal or brand, or instrument for stamping. We use “chop” both as a noun and a verb, as a name for the object itself and to describe the act of stamping or sealing a document.

The chop—or seal—is used in China to sign documents and artwork. In looking into the history of the chop, I found out that its use goes back to the beginning of Chinese antiquity. According to the ThoughtCo website, “There are three Mandarin Chinese names for the Chinese chop or seal. The seal is most commonly called 印鑑 (yìn jiàn) or 印章 (yìnzhāng). It is also sometimes called 圖章 / 图章 (túzhāng).”

The same source reports that the Chinese normally use red ink to sign documents with a chop, but I usually use black. I don’t use the chop for official documents—chops are not accepted in the place of signatures in the U.S.—but I often chop letters to friends and family.

The chop is one of many links I have to my youthful years operating in Asia. It, along with my ceramic temple dog, porcelain elephants, and decorative garden seats, keep alive in my memory those happy and terrible days.

My Time as an AIDS Volunteer (2)

Over the years that I was a buddy for AIDS patients, I came to love every one of them. And when they died, I grieved.

In five years, I went through seven patients. They were all gay, and they all died.

Just at the time when I decided I couldn’t face another death, medical science isolated the means of transmission—bodily fluids, especially semen—and discovered medicines that treated the conditions brought on by the disease. The death rate plummeted. I ceased being a buddy. I worked for several years with the homeless, then spent seven years caring for the dying in the hospice system.

My experiences with the men who died of AIDS changed my life and outlook. I discovered that all my unconscious biases against gay men were wrong. I learned that the only difference between me and my patients was their sexual preference. They were men just like me. And the other volunteers—I was the only straight buddy—were blessed with an unusual strength and willingness to put their lives on the line to help their brothers. These were heroic men, not the sissies I’d been led to expect them to be.

Now, all these years later, I have put aside volunteer work. I’m too old and feeble to care for those who cannot care for themselves. But I see that working with the dying gave me a deepened understanding of the human soul. It enriched my lifework, writing.

My experience of caring for dying gay men, moreover, gave me a unique insight. I was so moved by the experience that my understanding of living deepened. And, since I was a writer, I wrote about it.

The result was the novel No-Accounts (Apprentice House, 2014).

My Time as an AIDS Volunteer

Something I said recently in one of my posts brought a question from a reader: what was my connection to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s? To answer the question, I resurrected a post from some years ago. Here it is, revised and updated.

First of all AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It is caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. Until the late 1980s when we learned how to treat the disease, AIDS was invariably fatal. For reasons we didn’t understand, it hit gay men more than any other group.

When the AIDS epidemic first hit in the early 1980s, the U.S population as a whole was terrified of the disease. We didn’t know how it was transmitted. People, including health care professionals, were afraid to go anywhere near a person sick with AIDS. Landlords wouldn’t rent to them. Hospitals wouldn’t accept them. Doctors and nurses wouldn’t treat them. The result was that men were literally dying on the street because no one would take them in.

I watched what was happening, and I couldn’t tolerate it. I had faced death on the battlefield in Vietnam and knew I could do it again. I decided to volunteer to take care of AIDS patients. I told my wife that there was an unknown likelihood that I’d contract the disease. If I did, she would, too. She told me to go ahead.

For the next five years I was a buddy to AIDS patients in a program run by the Whitman-Walker Clinic, a gay men’s health and wellness center operating in Washington, D.C. I did everything for my patients because they could do nothing for themselves. I fed them, bathed them, dressed and undressed them. I was often the only human being caring for them. They were abandoned except for me.

More tomorrow.

Gilchrist’s Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans

On 28 March, Gilchrist Hospice Care repeated its annual Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Celebration. This year, the gathering was virtual. I watched it on my computer in the comfort of my office. The whole ceremony is available online at  https://e.givesmart.com/events/kbl/page/WatchGilchristVets/

I was surprised that I recognized so many so many in the audience from previous years. There was even a shot of me. And there was the remembrance of those who died in the war. I was at the side of so many killed in action. The presentation repeatedly brought tears to my eyes.

I have many ties to Gilchrist. Following the five years I devoted to caring for dying AIDS patients, I spent seven years working with the dying under the auspices of Gilchrist. And Gilchrist took loving care of my partner, Su, who died just a year ago. If I have anything to say in the matter, Gilchrist will care for me when my time comes.

I continue to be a strong supporter of hospice services. We Americans do the best we can to hide the reality of death, just as we conceal matters of sex and bodily functions. But death is real and inevitable for all of us.

Let us be thankful that Gilchrist is there for us.

The Postal Service (2)

Returning to my post about the postal service after my insertion of remarks about March 29 and 30:

In all fairness to the USPS, the service itself should not be blamed for its current failures. It has the highest approval rating of any government service—90 percent. It supports itself with fees charged to its customers and stamp sales and receives no government subsidy from tax payers. It picks up and delivers almost half of the world’s mail. And many, including me, depend on it to bring life-saving medications to our doors.

No, the USPS’s failures are solely due to the deliberate sabotage of of Donald Trump and his lackey, Louis DeJoy. President Biden has now nominated three new members for the USPS Board of Governors.  As I understand it, he may be able to name a fourth. The newly constituted Board of Governors could fire DeJoy and replace him with a responsible Postmaster General. The sooner the better.

And there are moves underway in Congress to revamp USPS finances to rid it of burdensome and unnecessary costs. Providing the service with additional funding is a possibility. Let’s encourage Congress to act.

We Americans need to treat the USPS as a service, not as a business. Its purpose is not to make money but to serve American citizens. It’s long since time we restored the USPS to its proper role.

March 29 and 30

I interrupt my post on the USPS to draw attention to March 29 and 30, two days of unusual importance to me.

March 29th is Vietnam War Veterans Day, the anniversary of the day in 1973 when the last combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. And March 30 is the state of Maryland’s annual Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans celebration. Given my many years of serving in Vietnam, both days are sacred to me.

During the war, too often when I came home with the troops, we’d be met at the San Francisco airport by mobs who spat on us and called us “butchers” and “baby killers.” For decades after the war ended, I never spoke of my time in Vietnam. It was considered a shameful war.

Then, a half dozen years ago, all that began to change. I remember when I was invited for the first time to a welcome-home event for Vietnam veterans. When I got there, young folks hugged me and said, “Thank you for your service. And welcome home.” I wept.

Americans have indeed changed their judgment of Vietnam. On March 29 and 30, they celebrate the sacrifice and contribution of men and women who fought in Vietnam. Our service is no longer a matter of shame. It’s now a matter of honor.

But March 30 is sacred to me for another reason. It was on that day in 2020 that my partner for over twenty years, Su, died. Even after a year, I’m still grieving.

March 30 will always be for me a somber day of memories. Over time, the sadness will lessen as I remember the happy times that Su and I shared. My shame over Vietnam will continue to fade, and my pride in my service will grow.

Then comes the sad month of April. The 29th is the 46th anniversary of the fall of Saigon from which I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. I left behind many who died. I will always mourn them.

So for the foreseeable future, Spring will be my time of remembering. And grieving.

The Postal Service

As a retired federal government employee, I am dependent on the United States Postal Service to carry and deliver my health insurance documents. As a home owner, I rely on the USPS to deliver my monthly mortgage statements and carry my payment checks to my mortgage company on time. As a writer and book reviewer, I depend on the USPS to bring books to me and transport my manuscripts to publishers expeditiously.

On all counts, the USPS is currently failing. Some days, I receive no mail. Others, my mailbox is overloaded. Mail is consistently slow and unreliable. I have had to pay penalties because my mortgage checks did not arrive on time even though they were mailed more than ten days in advance of the deadline.

But I know that the USPS is doing the best it can. It was deliberately crippled at the direction of President Donald Trump to thwart voting by mail in the November 2020 election in hopes that making voting by mail more difficult might help Trump win the election. In June 2020, the nine members of the Postal Service Board of Governors, most of them Trump supporters and operating under Trump’s direction, named Louis DeJoy to the job of Post Master General. In short, Trump in effect named a loyal patron to head the USPS and do his bidding.

DeJoy has a net worth of around $110 million. He had contributed more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund and millions more to Republican Party organizations and candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records. He was also in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention.

DeJoy, on Trump’s orders, proceeded to dismantle mail sorting machines, cut overtime, restrict deliveries, and remove mailboxes to deliberately slow the mail nationally. Donald Trump himself openly admitted that his administration was withholding funding for the Postal Service to make it harder to process mail-in ballots.

More tomorrow.

Republicans

The Republicans, by their actions, have relinquished their right to moral and political standing by a series of actions that require their condemnation. First, they supported to the hilt Donald Trump, unquestionably the worst president the U.S. has ever had. Then, between the House and the Senate, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to overturn to 2020 election, despite overwhelming evidence that the election was fair and valid. They voted, in effect, to keep Donald Trump in office in the face of undeniable evidence of his malfeasance and his defeat in the vote count.

And now the Republicans have remained silent and taken no action against obvious malefactors who have damaged the Congress by their presence—Senator Ron Johnson and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, and Lauren Boebert.

By these moves, the once honorable Republican Party has sullied itself beyond redemption and lost a sizeable portion of its voting membership. With the passage of H.R. 1, which will free voters from the impediments imposed by the Republicans; abolition of the filibuster and the electoral college; and approval of statehood for the District of Columba—all of which look eventually inevitable—the likelihood of a Republican majority disappears. Democrats have long outnumbered Republicans and, once free to vote unrestrained by Republican impediments, will easily win elections.

It looks to me is if the days of the Grand Old Party are limited. Maybe a new conservative party will emerge in its place. Even if that happens, I suspect that conservatives will remain a minority party at best. My guess is that the Democratic Party will eventually divide into a moderate faction and a progressive bloc.

The Republican Party will be as extinct as the dodo bird.

Guns in America

Several times over the years I’ve blogged here about the uniquely American phenomenon of gun deaths. I have pointed out that throughout the world the ratio between guns and population predicts with singular accuracy the number of gun deaths in a society. We Americans have more guns per person than any other western democracy—we have more guns than people. And predictably, therefore, we have more gun deaths per capita.

According to Igor Volsky  at Guns Down America, 9,436+ Americans have already died from guns in 2021, a disproportionate number of Black and Brown people among them. We’ve had mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado and Atlanta, Georgia withing the last month. According to the Los Angeles Times, the latter attack was the seventh mass killing this year in the U.S.

This morning I read of yet another mass killing. At least nine people are shot and two are dead following shootings in Virginia Beach, Virginia, last night.

Data I’ve recently come across supports the judgment that our lax gun controls are causing people to die. According to BradyPac, no background check is required for 40 percent of guns are sold or transferred in the U.S. And a loophole in our current background check system allowed a mass shooter in Charleston, South Carolina to purchase the gun that he used to take nine innocent lives.

The number of guns to gun-deaths ratio applies to localities within the U.S. States with fewer guns— California, Illinois, Iowa and much of the Northeast—have fewer guns and fewer gun deaths.

A bloc of legislators, mostly Republicans, have successfully stopped anti-gun legislation at various levels of government throughout the U.S. They are supported substantially by donations from the National Rifle Association (NRA) which opposes any gun control. The main reason that members of Congress feel comfortable blocking gun control is that most Americans don’t feel strongly enough about the issue to change their votes because of it. If Americans stopped voting for opponents of gun control, gun-control laws would pass very quickly. In other words, the country’s level of gun violence is as high as it is because many Americans have decided that they are comfortable with it. As Frank Bruni of the New York Times put it, “Normal includes mass shootings. Take that in.”

So many Americans I’ve talked to believe that guns are an intrinsic part of American culture and therefore we should be allowed to have as many guns as we want. My judgment is that that argument is both foolish and fatal. Last year, 19,379 Americans died by gun shot. The numbers since the beginning of 2021 suggest that the number of gun deaths in 2021 will be much higher. Isn’t it time that we changed our thinking and saved lives?