Tom Glenn's Blog, page 82

The ARVN

The author Nghĩa M. Võ  a few days ago asked me to write a blurb to go on the cover of his newest book,  The ARVN and the Fight for South Vietnam, which is due out on July 18 (publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.). I have known for Nghĩa many years and have enjoyed his many books. Our last formal contact was in 2012 when I reviewed his Legends of Vietnam (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012).

As I read through the text, the stories Nghĩa tells brought back vivid memories of my days on the battlefield in Vietnam. My work was primarily with U.S. forces, but, because I was fluent in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam, I sometimes provided signals intelligence support to the South Vietnamese, that is, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). I formed strong bonds with ARVN soldiers who invited me into their homes and proudly introduced me to their wives and children. That made the ultimate North Vietnamese defeat and destruction of the ARVN and the execution of the soldiers I had worked with all the harder to bear.

Nghĩa sums up his book thus: “ . . . the ARVN fought bravely and for the duration even after the U.S. left. What was missing was a balanced and aggressive leadership along with continued U.S. military support.” In short, the U.S. abandoned South Vietnam and cut off material and financial support, condemning it to defeat and death.

The blurb I wrote for the book reads as follows: “The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) fought bravely against the North Vietnamese invaders for more than a decade. Then the U.S. withdrew its support. The ARVN was defeated and destroyed. Nghia Vo tells their heartbreaking story with precision, detail, and enlightened understanding.”

Reading Nghĩa’s retelling of the many battles ARVN fought, some of which I was involved in, sharpened my hurtful memories. The hardest to get through was the story of the North Vietnamese conquest of Ban Mê Thuột in the central highlands just before Saigon fell. I traveled to the highlands at the time and warned both U.S. and South Vietnamese officials of the coming defeat but was ignored. I still grieve today over the men lost in that battle.

Some wounds never heal.

Cloisonné

Among the Asian treasures in my living room are three small ornate metal bowls with lids and two little vases, all ornamented with cloisonné, defined as “an ancient technique for decorating metalwork objects with colored material held in place or separated by metal strips or wire, normally of gold.” As with so many of the foreign objects in my home, I don’t remember where or when I got the cloisonné pieces. They look to be Chinese. Four of the five have no writing anywhere on them. But the smallest vase, only about four and a half inches tall, has a tiny, slightly raised square on the bottom, less than a quarter inch wide, that contains Romanized text three lines long. Using a magnifier, I was able to make out: “Kwo’s (gift?) cloisonn”.

The three bowls, ranging from two to three-and-a-half inches in diameter, are decorated to match. The lid of each shows an ornate pink blossom and leaves against a medium blue background. The larger of the two vases is just under seven inches tall. Its neck and body are separated by a gold band. Above and below the band are borders filled with tri-petal flower shapes drawn in gold against a dark red background. On the neck and body, above and below the borders, are a variety of blossoms in different colors against a black background filled with tiny gold figures that might represent clouds. The smaller of the two vases is dark blue with blossoms in red and pearl, no two alike, crowding its surface.

I cherish these five dainty pieces of Asian art. They recall a time and a place long gone, but their beauty remains resplendent.

March: the Frustrating Month

Every year, when March comes, my spirits rise. I know that the hated cold of winter is coming to an end. Soon the warmth I so yearn for will be with me again. The first day of Spring was Saturday, March 20. Happy days are here again.

But March delights in playing games with me. Less than a week ago, it was warm enough that I ate lunch out on my deck, but later in the week it was below freezing at night. It hasn’t been warm enough to spend time out there since.

Granted, I like warm weather more than most Americans. For thirteen years, I spent more time in the tropical monsoon climate of Vietnam than I did in the U.S. Like the GIs I was working with, both Marine and army, I regularly wore shorts and no shirt. I stayed tan year round. During my brief returns to the U.S., I found the weather disagreeably cool in the summer and downright cruel in winter.

After the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when I returned more or less permanently to the U.S., I never reacclimated to the cooler weather. To this day, I stay bundled up most of the year. The only times I’m comfortable are those when I can go shirtless, usually in July and August.

So here I am, again in March, frustrated by a promise of warmth that keeps getting pushed further into the future. The old saying is that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. So come on, lamb. Stop titillating and fulfill your promise.

“Top Knot Come Down”

Thanks to the pandemic and my unwillingness to risk going to a barber for more than a year, my hair is longer than it has ever been. To keep it under control, I have taken to gathering it into a ponytail at the back of my head and securing it with a rubber band. But I never manage to get all the hair straight through the rubber band. I end up with a clump of hair at the back of my head that feels more like a knot than a tail. So I have a top knot.

That condition made me remember one of the favorite stories from my youth. I found a full version of it on the Fish Hooks website, to wit:

A country parson objected to the latest fashion among the women of his congregation who would tie up their long hair in a little bun atop their heads. The pastor interpreted the Apostle Paul’s remark that “a woman’s hair is her glory” (1 Corinthians 11:15) to mean that they had a moral duty to wear their hair loose and flowing. But when he tried to convince the women, they merely laughed. So the pastor delivered a thunderous sermon on how Jesus Himself had commanded: “Top Knot Come Down!”–which he swore were His exact words in the Bible.

The pastor was quoting the words of Jesus found in the King James Version translation of Matthew 24:17: “Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house.”

I’m going to defy that pastor. My top knot will come down when I’m good and ready—probably when I finally can get my hair cut.

’Til then, my top knot will not come down.

Rerun: The Things I Carried (2)

My two guys were evacuated from Saigon by helicopter at 1400 hours (2:00 p.m.) on 29 April 1975. I went out that night on a Huey, a small Air America helicopter. My chopper was fired upon and almost shot down, but we made it to a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea. In the pockets of my slacks were what I always carried—my car keys, change, my wallet, the usual pocket litter. But I also had my passport and identity papers which labelled me as a diplomat and employee of the U.S. State Department, my cover at the time.

I was also carrying things in my hands. One was my .38 revolver, the only weapon I’d had to defend myself against the eighteen North Vietnamese divisions that were attacking Saigon. And under each arm I carried a flag. One was the stars and stripes; the other was the orange and gold flag of the now defunct Republic of Vietnam, that is, South Vietnam. They were the two flags that had stood on either side of my desk in my office.

When the helicopter I was on landed on the Oklahoma City, the flag ship of the 7th Fleet, sailors immediately took my .38 from me, but I wouldn’t give them the flags. I kept them with me as we sailed to the Philippines. I carried them on the flight from Subic Bay to Honolulu. I had them under my arms as I flew from Hawaii to Baltimore. I landed in Baltimore wearing the same clothes I’d escaped Saigon in and carrying the same belongings, minus the .38. When I returned to NSA, I took the flags with me and presented them to the agency I had represented in Vietnam.

Today, those two flags are in the Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Maryland, adjacent to NSA headquarters.

They—and I—are home at last.

Rerun: The Things I Carried

A comment from a faithful reader of this blog reminded me of a series of posts I made here several years ago about what I carried with me when I escaped from Saigon under fire in April 1975. The subject is worth a revisit, so for today and tomorrow, here’s that blog post brought up to date:

When Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried came out in 1990, I read the book fascinated. I’d been with the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam. I knew what they had with them. I remembered what I carried.

But back then, I still couldn’t speak of my time in Vietnam. For one thing, the fact that I was an NSA (National Security Agency) civilian operant under cover as military in Vietnam was still classified. Besides, I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) and couldn’t bring myself to speak about what I had been through. Beyond that, Vietnam back then was still considered a shameful war. I never mentioned my years in Vietnam.

Now I’m in a different time. My years-long presence in Vietnam on and off between 1962 and 1975 was declassified in 2016. I’ve come to terms with my PTSI by forcing myself to speak publicly of my combat experiences. And Americans now are curious about Vietnam. It’s no longer a shameful war. Now it’s a mysterious one, and people want to know more about it.

So now I can talk about the things I carried, especially at the very end, in April 1975 when I fled under fire as the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon.

I escaped in the clothes I was wearing, the standard office apparel for Americans in Saigon—white, short-sleeved dress shirt with no tie; slacks; and black loafers. I’d been wearing that same outfit for more than a week, holed up in my office at Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon, as the North Vietnamese attacked. The clothes were dirty and smelly. So was I.

That last week when I was hiding out in my office with the two communicators who had agreed to stay with me to the end was a time of severe deprivation. We had almost nothing to eat and couldn’t sleep because of the continuous artillery shelling. I kept going by dint of sheer willpower: I was determined to do everything I had to do, including giving up my life, to save the lives of the two guys with me.

More tomorrow.

Domestic Intelligence?

I read regularly in the press about how “intelligence” foretold of the January 6 incursions at the U.S. Capitol. As readers of this blog know, I spent more than thirty years in intelligence, but all of it was directed at other nations, not internally toward citizens of the U.S. Its sources and methods were, and still are, classified. Of necessity, its functi0ns and results were concealed, not because the government didn’t want citizens of the U.S. to know the innards of its working, but to prevent the target nations from knowing we were spying on them, how we were doing it, and what we were able to learn about them.

Intelligence is by nature sneaky, devious, and underhanded. But it has resulted in major victories for the U.S. completely unknown to its citizens. I’m not free to inform readers of what those victories entailed. Nonetheless, it is clear to me that they changed history for the better.

To me the duplicitous nature of intelligence is justified by its results. But that judgment no longer applies if the target of intelligence is U.S. citizens. The idea that the U.S. government would spy on its own citizens is repellant. Tyrannies like China and Russia reconnoiter their own citizens. Democracies don’t.

So I am repeatedly disturbed by reports of American intelligence against American people. Police reconnaissance of known trouble makers is neither as sophisticated nor as penetrating as U.S. spying against other nations. It doesn’t qualify as “intelligence,” not should it be called that.

The Combat Helmet

Sitting in an honored place in my living room is a jungle-green North Vietnamese combat helmet. In the middle of the helmet’s front is a small round medallion a little over an inch in diameter. Centered in the medallion is a five-pointed gold star on a red background surrounded by a thin gold wreath. It represents the insignia of the North Vietnamese Army in the 1970s.

The helmet rests on a table beneath an oil painting, dated 1974, of the Saigon outdoor central market at the height of a monsoon rain storm. Of the six paintings on the walls of the room, four are from Vietnam. In one corner of the room is a four-paneled folding screen, some six feet tall, made of tan unpolished wood and hand carved in stylized floral and leaf design. On either side of the fireplace are ornate rounded wooden garden seats, each over two feet high, with marble tops. All of these decorative pieces came from Asia during the years I was operating there. I don’t remember where or when I got them.

Nor do I  remember where I got the helmet. It looks quite new and was never apparently worn on the battlefield. I have a faint memory that it was a gift to me from a fellow Vietnam veteran, but I don’t remember who or when.

Like the rest of my house, my living room is filled with tokens from my past. I can’t recall the details of when and where I got these treasures, but the experiences they evoke are always with me. They always will be.

American Obesity (2)

When I traverse through public places, I always see so many people who are fat. They’re everywhere—in stores, on the street, in restaurants. And I don’t mean just overweight. Almost everyone I know is overweight. I mean obese, corpulently gross.

As mentioned above, nearly 40 percent of Americans are obese. Obesity is considered a chronic disease by many organizations including the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health. It is a national epidemic according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why are the majority of Americans overweight or obese? None of the sources I consulted could offer me an explanation. My guess is that one reason is that we are a wealthy nation, and food is plentiful. Another is that we have become indolent. We spend our leisure time in passive pursuits—watching television, searching the internet—rather than physically active ones, e.g., walking, running, and sports.

What is the solution to our national dilemma? I don’t have an answer. But I believe that as a nation we must seek a resolution, the sooner the better. We are not living as long as we used to. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, a baby born in 2017 is expected on average to live to be 78.6 years old, which is down from 78.7 the year before. Obesity is not listed among the causes of our shortened life expectancy, but it surely must be a contributing factor.

We must urge the current administration and Congress to initiate movement towards a healthier nation by stressing the need for all of us to get our weight under control.

Let’s press ahead.

American Obesity

As mentioned before in this blog, I take staying in shape very seriously. I have already outlived the life expectancy for American males, and while my health is excellent, I’m not taking any chances. I’m determined to live to be a hundred.

So I watch my weight and stress foods of high nutritional value and low calories. For years, I was a runner and have always lifted weights. Damage to my right leg several years ago brought the running to a  halt, so these days I emphasize working out. I am able to maintain the ideal weight for my body size and type.

That devotion to health and particularly to weight control puts me at odds with the majority of Americans. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 70 percent of adults aged twenty and over are overweight. That includes the nearly 40 percent who are obese. Before the pandemic struck, we already knew that obesity dramatically increases the risk of developing medical conditions or diseases such as cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and stroke. I couldn’t find any current figures on the degree to which obesity increases the risk of infection from covid-19, but we know that it makes severe illness from the virus more likely. We do have obesity rates for countries worldwide. The lowest are Japan and South Korea. Japan has suffered seven deaths per 100,000 people from covid-19. South Korea has reported three deaths per 100,000. Compare that with the U.S.: 163 deaths per 100,000.

In short, there is a direct correlation between obesity and pandemic deaths. That fact reminded me of a blog I did several years ago on American obesity. I’ll post it again tomorrow with updates.