Tom Glenn's Blog, page 84

Rerun: Being a Man

A couple of years ago, I blogged here about what it feels like to be a man. The death of my partner, Su, almost a year ago, and the isolation inflicted by the pandemic made those feelings stronger. So I decided to rerun that blog post with updates. Here it is.

I’m glad I’m a man. I take pleasure in my size and strength, my courage and my stamina. I take pride in my manly achievements, everything from weight lifting to surviving Vietnam.

I esteem women and believe that they are equal to but different from men. I don’t claim to understand them. As a man, for example, when I prepare for sleep at night, I take off my clothes and go to bed. That takes something under five minutes. Women take much longer. I don’t know why. I can’t figure out why they spend as long s twenty minutes in the bathroom. What do they do in there that only women have to do before they sleep?

Men are bigger and stronger than women. That physical superiority brings with it moral responsibility. We men, to deserve to be called men, must honor and care for those smaller and weaker than us. It is our responsibility to defend, protect, and nurture women, children, and those not as blessed as we are, that is, the infirm, crippled, or aged. If we don’t meet that requirement, we have failed as men.

During the last half of my life, I’ve come to understand that we have another obligation—to respect women for their equality in every aspect of human life except physical size and strength. Women are men’s equals in mental, psychological, spiritual, and moral prowess. I suspect but can’t prove that they are superior to us in their insights about others and the way they handle human relationships.

Another of my unprovable insights is that women are superior to us men in solving physical problems. The first tendency of men faced with, say, a jammed door or package that won’t open is to use physical force. Women instead use their brains. More than once in my life I’ve found that no amount of muscular effort will open a bottle only to have a woman quietly run hot water over the top and open it easily.

I conclude that to deserve to be called men, we males must prove ourselves worthy of that honor by carrying out the duties inherent in manhood. Otherwise, we are men in name only.

Rerun: On Aging (2)

But far and away the worst part of aging is the effect on the brain. Memory is the biggest problem. Too often I can’t remember a word or a name. I have trouble remembering the routes to various places I drive. I devise sneaky stratagems for finding the word I want (using thesauruses), recalling names (going through my personal directory), and finding my way around town—a Garmin Automotive GPS Navigation System.

But the odd aspect of aging is that as the brain slows, the incorporeal organ that uses the brain to think, the mind, becomes more expansive and resplendent. I can see, understand, process, and crystalize facets of being human far better than I ever could before. The enhanced facility in thinking addresses primarily the nonmaterial aspects of living—creativity, morality, the nature of love, the breath-taking beauty that surrounds us.

Most important to me is that what I care about most—writing—is flourishing as never before. My use of language is better than it has ever been. I’m more facile with words and write faster than I once did. The right words come to me like flashes of lightening. I grasp and express connections and relationships I was blind to when I was younger.

So I have no complaints. As long as the mind grows and flourishes, the aging of the body is more than tolerable.

Rerun: On Aging

My recent blog post on death reminded me that I’m getting on in years. So I decided to rerun my thoughts of the subject written here several years ago. The irony is that what I thought then is even more true today. Here, with updates, is that post.

I’m getting old. No point in pretending otherwise.

I’m not complaining. The alternative to aging doesn’t appeal to me. But the gradual decay of the body is a challenge I wasn’t expecting and didn’t prepare for.

My approach to living is as youthful as ever. I’m very active. I spend my hours—never enough to get everything done—in writing, taking care of my house, reading, and exercising (weightlifting). Until the pandemic put a stop to it, I regularly did public readings to promote my books and gave presentations, lectures, and classes.

For years I was a runner and have always lifted weights, not for health reasons, but because I enjoy it. Then, some years ago, I had botched knee replacement surgery. Now I walk with a slight limp, and running is a thing of the past. But I still lift weights regularly. I can’t manage the heavy weights I used to lift when I was younger, but I heft a respectable amount.

The challenge of aging is that the body can no longer do everything it used to. I’m not as physically strong or agile as I once was. When I do a presentation that has me on my feet for more than an hour, my legs ache, and I have trouble walking. As a result of having survived lung cancer, I have a persistent cough, and I tire easily. That means I have to nap every day, whether I want to or not. Since I’m not as physically active as I used to be (e.g., no running), I have to watch my diet to avoid gaining weight.

I’m lucky that my vision is as good as it has ever been. I don’t need glasses. My hearing is poor, but it has been ever since I suffered ear damage from close gunfire on the battlefield and from being shelled (artillery) during the fall of Saigon. My sense of smell never was any good, so I can’t tell if it’s declined.

More tomorrow.

Rerun: The Bond (2)

I have no doubt that what I did on the battle field in Vietnam saved lives and hurt the enemy. But I didn’t personally kill enemy soldiers. I had no way of directly protecting the men who fought by my side except by warning them that the enemy was close at hand and tipping them off as to what the enemy planned to do. I was armed with a .38 revolver to defend myself, but I never used it in combat. That wasn’t why I was there. So my sense of kinship with my brothers fighting at my side could not have been as strong as it was between those actually doing the fighting.

And yet it is the most intense love I’ve ever felt. Emblazoned in my memory are the moments of death of men who fought next to me. I can’t talk about them. It hurts too much. Those hideous events, along with the ghastly happenings during the fall of Saigon, are the source of my Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, an unrelenting psychological malady. The memories never fade. They will be with me always.

The percentage of our population that are veterans is shrinking. The number of combat veterans—those who served in the military and saw combat—is at the vanishing point. I only know two other men who are combat veterans. Both, by sheer coincidence, were navy corpsmen, battlefield medics for the Marines in Vietnam. Both have my greatest respect.

When I’m with other veterans, especially those who served in Vietnam, I know the bond is still strong. A quick nod, a brief look in each other’s eyes, a handshake—we recognize each other. Nothing needs to be said. We each know we put our lives on the line for each other and we’d do it again.

Rerun: The Bond

I’ve blogged several times here about the bond that forms between men who fight side by side on the battlefield against a common foe. I’ve said that it is the strongest bond I’ve ever experienced. I want to revisit that topic, which remains sacred to me.

Disclaimer: I’m not a psychiatrist or sociologist, so I can’t talk in scientific terms about the bond. I can only tell you how it affected me.

I have to start by stressing why men fight in combat. They may have been put in harm’s way because of their desire to defend their country or their devotion to God or their determination to fight evil. But on the battlefield, men fight for each other. That is, they fight for the lives of their brothers fighting at their side. They see their mission as keeping their fellow combatants alive even if it means giving up their own lives.

The feelings among men fighting by each other’s side is the strongest love I’ve ever experienced. Soldiers and Marines don’t call it love—that’s too sentimental. But that’s what it is.

I’m sure I didn’t experience that bond to the depths that other men in combat did. I wasn’t there to shoot and kill the enemy. I was there to provide information about the enemy—where he was, the size and identity of his units, what he was doing, what his intensions were—through the intercept and exploitation of his radio communications. The men by my side were the fighters, intent on destroying the enemy and defending each other.

More tomorrow.

Gun Statistics in the U.S.

It’s time to revisit firearms deaths in the U.S. As I reported a couple of years ago in this blog, I try to remain politically neutral in all my posts. To me, gun deaths is not a political issue. It’s a sickness that the U.S. uniquely suffers from. The following facts are dated (it takes time to gather the data) but still valid:

Americans are 25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries. Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. Over a hundred people are killed each day by gunshots in the U.S.

The numbers are going up. The rate of firearm deaths per 100,000 people rose from 10.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 12 per 100,000 in 2017, with 109 people dying per day. The numbers for 2020 are not in yet, but in 2018, the most recent year for which data are available as of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics reports 38,390 deaths by firearm.

Over the years, I have repeatedly heard the argument that American culture is a gun culture. We had to have firearms to protect ourselves and our families as we opened our western frontier. Maybe so, but none of that is true today when the number of guns we as a people own are more than our population. Today our devotion to guns is a sickness that is killing us by the thousands.

It’s time that we joined the rest of advanced civilization and rid ourselves of the weapons that are slaughtering us.

Rerun: The Dangers of Revealing Classified Information

Several years ago, actions by President Trump and Republican Congressman Devin Nunes to reveal classified information prompted me to post in this blog a warning of the dangers of making our secrets public. Trump’s continued access to highly classified information after he has left the White House alarms me. He is perfectly capable of peddling our secrets to gain some benefit from a foreign interest. So I resurrected that post. Here it is, updated.

In 2017, I published an article in the New York Times on the 1967 battle of Dak To. It began with the words, “I learned the hard way during the Vietnam war that when intelligence is ignored, people get killed.”

Revelation of intelligence to its target often has the same result. I spent thirty-five years of my life in intelligence. I saw it happen.

Compromise of sensitive intelligence is always dangerous. What the American public can’t know or understand—because all matters about intelligence are classified—is that revelations of sources and methods, directly or by inference, destroys intelligence. Once a target finds out that I’m gathering information about him and knows or can guess how I’m doing it, he can easily change his behavior and block further access to information. If I am monitoring his communications, he can stop communicating or change his method. If I am surveilling him, he can hide. If an agent is reporting on his activities, he can kill the agent.

The public is equally unaware of the value of intelligence. Knowing where an adversary is, what he’s doing, what his means of action include, and what his plans are is of inestimable value to the U.S. government. Removing that information by compromise can plunge us into the dangerous darkness of ignorance. A foe can act against us with no warning.

Most important, revealing of intelligence sources and methods can cause deaths. If the sources were human, the target removes them, usually by killing them. Put bluntly, when intelligence is compromised, people can die.

Ordinary Americans can’t possibly be expected to know the ins and outs of intelligence and what the risks are. Nor will they know the results of intelligence loss. That’s why the actions of our elected officials are so crucial. They act on our behalf. In sum and at the risk of repetition: public revelation of intelligence is at best perilous. Worse, disclosure of intelligence sources and methods for political gain is both morally questionable and dangerous to our security. It can and does result in deaths.

Rerun: Bufes

I’ve written here several times about the objets d’art collected over my years working abroad. They have not changed, but they’re worth a second look.

These odds and ends that decorate my house are from around the world, especially from Asia. I have half a dozen paintings, oils and water colors, painted by South Vietnamese artists, that I bought over the years in Vietnam. On my desk is a coffee tile, now cracked, mounted in wood, showing the Chinese character for dao (道), meaning “way” or “path”—the source of Taoism. A fish basket table stands beside my piano, and rounded wooden stools are by the fireplace. Two white ceramic garden seats, two to three feet high, sit on my deck. One is perforated to show the empty spaces between leaves. The other, completely solid, is three elephant heads formed into a single column—it’s from Laos, the land that once worshipped an elephant god with one head but three faces, each with a trunk.

On the wall in my piano room is a painting of the cathedral in Kiev. Nearby is the sculptured head of Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen. Over the fireplace in the sun room is a rendering of an Aztec face. Nearby, hung on the wall by my reading chair, is a copy of the head of Mary in Michelangelo’s sculpture called Pietà on display in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

But the items that get the most attention are my bufes, that is, “big ugly fucking elephants,” as the soldiers and Marines used to call them. These are three-feet tall Vietnamese ceramic figures of elephants with ornamental head dresses and decorated saddles. I have them in a variety of sizes and colors.

I bought the bufes in Vietnam and displayed them in the various villas I had with my family over the years in Saigon. I couldn’t resist talking about them in my novel, Last of the Annamese, set in Vietnam. Early in the story, Ike and Chuck, housemates, are entertaining a visiting U.S. Marine colonel. Also present is Molly, the nurse known for her irreverence and rangy language. The scene reads as follows:

            After dinner, the guests adjourned to the living room for brandy. Molly sat next to the colonel, munched chocolates served by Oanh [the servant], and asked for an ice cube in her snifter. Chuck gave her one without comment, but [Colonel] Macintosh laughed.

            “Sorry,” she said to the colonel, “but if it’s worth snorting, it’s worth snorting on the rocks.”

            Macintosh eyed the ceramic elephants—one green, one purple—supporting the glass top of the cocktail table. “I see a lot of these. Are they a Saigon special?”

            “We call them bufes—big ugly fucking elephants.” Molly ignored Ike’s wince. “Yeah, you can pick them up on Tu Do [Street] for a few thousand pee [GI slang for piaster].” She held her glass to Chuck. “Would you?”

End of quote.

Ungeminnt

A reader reminded me of my fondness for using foreign words in my writing. Probably the most egregious example shows up in my novel, The Trion Syndrome, where I used the German word Ungemmint which has no equivalent in English. The term means both unloving and unloved. It’s a quality born of evil which has no understanding of love.

The protagonist of Trion, Dave Bell, a German scholar, applies the term to himself without knowing why. For reasons he can’t remember, he thinks he has lost his soul. Something happened while he was serving in Vietnam; he doesn’t remember what.

I used the concept of Ungeminnt because it describes my own feeling about myself. Many things happened during the thirteen years I spent more time in combat in Vietnam than I did in the states. After the fall of Saigon, when I returned to the U.S.,  my memory was incomplete and faulty. Later, events came back to me, sometimes in dreams. I knew that if I ever wanted to be free of being haunted, I had to bring those events into my conscious memory, face them, and learn to live with them. I had, in effect, to get my soul back.

For me and for Dave, my protagonist, it’s a life-long struggle. Dave is helped by his son. I’m helped by my writing. In telling Dave’s story, I confront my own past and find the remnants of peace.

Vietnam and Skin Cancer

The legacy of my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam is cursing me more than ever before: skin cancer.

Throughout all those years in Vietnam, we Americans wore as few clothes as possible because of the heat. Temperatures averaged between 91 and 95 degrees during the dry season, peaking periodically to 104 degrees. That was far hotter than any of us were used to. Going shirtless was standard.

I stayed darkly tanned for all those years, and I became so accustomed to the weather that I dreaded the coolness of the states. I became so acclimatized that to this day I enjoy hot weather and dislike the cold.

I had no idea that continuous exposure to the sun would damage the skin of a pale-complected man of Irish-English-Scottish lineage. When I returned to the states after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, I continued to wear few clothes during the summer months. I even sun bathed.

Some years after Vietnam—I don’t remember how long—my primary care physician sent me to a dermatologist. The diagnosis: skin cancer. I had all three types: basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma. The only treatment, as far as I know, is surgical removal of the cancerous tissue. I underwent so many excisions that I made no attempt to keep count.

The treatments went on for years. Then three or four years ago, for reasons I no longer remember, I stopped my dermatology visits. When I went for my regular routine checkup last month, my doctor recommended that I see a dermatologist. When I did, I discovered that I had skin cancer all over the upper half of my body. The excisions started all over again.

The worst so far has been inside my right ear. The skin there is so thin that cutting out the cancer required a skin graft, with flesh taken from my collar bone. The procedure took more than two hours. I now have one ear covered in bandages and a collar bone under gauze and tape.

I’ve learned my lesson, though it’s too late in life to seek correction by behavioral change. I’m stuck with the fruits of my youthful actions. It looks like I’ll be fighting skin cancer for the rest of my life. Fortunately, it’s not fatal.