Tom Glenn's Blog, page 87

Public Servant

I spent my entire career as a public servant, first in the military, then as a government employee. I took my role seriously. My job was not to get ahead, not to seek promotions, not to climb the corporate ladder, but to work for the good of the citizens of the United States.

And I did it to the best of my ability. I worked as a spy, helping U.S. troops on the battlefield, then as a leader of analysts to monitor the actions of governments hostile to the U.S. I struggled to be the best that I could be and later to help others to be the best that they could be in service to the country. Our achievements were sometimes spectacular, and we took justifiable pride in what we were able to do.

Now that I am retired, I reflect on the honor that my country bestowed on me by calling on me to serve. My life is richer and my country is better off because I answered that call.

Review of False Light

I have completed and submitted for publication my review of Eric Dezenhall’s new novel, False Light. The review will be published later this month—I’ll post the URL here when it comes out.

For all the years I’ve been reviewing books, I’ve stuck by one rule: never pan a book. If I judge a book to be of such poor quality that I can’t recommend it, I don’t review it at all. The Dezenhall novel presented me with a dilemma I’ve often faced: what do I do when I don’t really like a book but recognize that my personal taste does not justify condemning it as being of poor quality? Answer: give the book an impersonal review based on universally accepted writing standards.

False Light was, on the whole, was not my kind of book. Granted, there were aspects I enjoyed—the humor, the ingenious plot, the likeable protagonist. But too often the writing struck me as amateurish and longwinded. I was impatient for the author to get on with the story and stop rooting about. I suspected, as I so often do, that the author was deliberately adding text to make the book long enough to qualify as a novel. Nor was the story about life-and-death issues that can rivet my attention.

In short, the novel was not to my taste. That didn’t make it bad fiction. So I did my best to give it a fair review. I stressed the aspects I enjoyed the most and downplayed my negative reactions. I allowed myself to mention the aspects I disliked but ended with the qualities I most enjoyed.

I guess that’s about as fair as I can get.

My Hospice Work (4)

I volunteered to help AIDS patients in part because I couldn’t stand to watch men dying alone on the streets and in part to help me cope with my own Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). The experience changed me. While acting as a buddy helped me deal with my own unbearable memories, it also inflicted its own psychic wound. Just as I had turned to writing to get me through my struggle with PTSI, I did the same to cope with the shock and grief of seeing so many AIDS patients die. The result was my novel, No-Accounts, the story of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS.

The book has been honored over the years by the Eric Hoffer Awards and the Indie Book Awards. It was at the time my only novel not about Vietnam. Some readers tell me it is my best book.

As the AIDS crisis wound down and I was no longer needed as a buddy, I moved on to other charitable causes. I worked for less than a year as a volunteer visiting men dying in a VA hospital. Then I discovered hospice, a system of palliative rather than restorative care. Hospice volunteers visited with dying patients, befriended them, ran errands for them, comforted their loved ones. I worked as a hospice volunteer for seven years. I only dealt with one patient at a time, but before I ceased my volunteering, I had handled over twenty patients. As with the AIDS patients, I loved each and every one of them and mourned when they died.

I am a better man for having been an AIDS buddy and a hospice volunteer. But my willingness to face death squarely makes me an unusual American. One of the peculiarities of our culture is that we avoid mentioning or talking about both sex and death. Those are taboo subjects to Americans. We banish them from our consciousness and try to pretend they don’t exist. In other cultures I’ve lived and worked in, physical loving and dying are openly spoken of and are accepted as aspects of living. So I don’t feel that I deserve credit for working with the dying. It’s what people everywhere do.

Except in the United States of America.

Bohannon Interview

Last night, I was interviewed by Jim Bohannon on his show about my novel Secretocracy published last year. You can listen to the interview by going to https://www.jimbohannonshow.com/jim-bohannon-podcasts/  Click on the spot that says “Jim Bohannon 02-03-21,” then on the time marker, go to 1:40:00.

If you take a listen, let me know your reaction.

My Hospice Work (3)

During the five years from 1985 to 1990, I cared for seven AIDS patients as a volunteer buddy. All were gay, all died. My team leader was diagnosed, came down with this disease, and died. By 1990, I was at the point that I couldn’t face yet another death.

Then medical science discovered ways, not of curing the disease, but of treating it so that it was no longer fatal and someone infected could resume a more or less normal life. A diagnosis, in other words, was no longer a death warrant. We now knew how AIDS was transmitted—through the conduction of bodily fluids from an infected person into the body of another. People were no longer afraid to touch AIDS patients. More volunteers committed to helping patients. In effect, the crisis was over.

I moved on to volunteering for other causes. I worked with the homeless, with sick and dying soldiers in a VA hospital, and with the dying in a hospice—more about that anon.

My experience with AIDS patients had several results. First, I learned that I could face the danger of infection, just as I had faced the dangers of combat. Once when I was injecting a patient, I accidently stuck myself with the needle after it had been in the patient’s body. I waited the six weeks required for the virus to take hold, then had a blood test. No infection. A second test after twelve weeks certified that I was free of the virus. I had faced a danger as potentially fatal as combat and had come through unscathed. I had confronted the possibility of my own demise calmly.

Second, I had loved every one of my patients and had grieved over each death. Despite that, I kept going back and taking on new patients. I could face the death of a patient head-on.

Third, I learned that my biases, mostly unconscious, about gay men were wrong. These men, both the patients and the caregivers, were strong, resilient, and compassionate. The buddies, as the volunteer caregivers were called, were willing to put their own lives on the line to help the stricken. The sick faced their deaths with quiet courage and peaceful resignation.

More tomorrow.

My Hospice Work (2)

I volunteered at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C., a health facility specifically established to help the gay community. I was immediately assigned a patient. My job was to take care of him in any way he needed. I cooked for him, fed him, bathed him, dressed him, even gave him injections. I used every safety device possible. I wore plastic gloves, showered before and after each time with him, washed my hands repeatedly. A few months later, he died. I wept at his funeral. I had grown to love him.

A medical check verified that I was free of the disease. The clinic assigned me another patient. My journey through the world of AIDS had begun.

None of the volunteers working with AIDS patients at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in the 1980s were medically trained. Our job was not to treat for the disease but to comfort our patients in any way we could. In effect, we were there to help them die as peacefully and painlessly as possible. To distinguish us from medical practitioners, we were called “buddies.”

We had monthly team meetings. I discovered at my first meeting that I was the only straight volunteer at the clinic. The others maintained their distance from me. I learned what it felt like to be the object of prejudice.

The purpose of the monthly meetings was to allow us to vent and support one another. More than once, I held a guy while he wept over the decline or death of his patient. We exchanged phone numbers and felt free to call one another when we needed to talk. By the second meeting I attended, the other buddies began treating me like one of them. Some months later, our team leader urged us to work with families of the patients and help them cope. One of our jobs, he said, was to show that even though we were homosexual, we were strong and competent men. “Take Tom, for example” he said. “He can demonstrate how a gay man is firm and dependable.” The others nodded.

The team leader had forgotten I was straight. So had the others. For the first time in my life, I felt honored to be considered gay.

More next time.

My Hospice Work

My recent mention of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) reminded me of a time in my life, now long ago, when I volunteered to work with the dying. I told the story several years ago in this blog. It’s worth revisiting.

As my readers know, I came away from the Vietnam war with psychological damage called PTSI. I tried to banish my memories of death during combat to my unconscious, but they came back to haunt me in unbearable ways and brought with them panic attacks, nightmares, flashbacks, and irrational rages. My sole salvation in my struggle against PTSI was to face my memories head-on and learn to live with them. It was working, but it wasn’t enough. Some instinct in my soul pointed me towards helping others as a way to put my memories to rest.

At the same time, I was reading in the press of men abandoned on the street to die. They were suffering from an unknown disease called Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), a chronic, life-threatening condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It came to be called the gay disease because nearly all its victims were homosexual. No one knew how the disease was transmitted, and people were afraid to go near AIDS patients, let alone touch them—a diagnosis of AIDS was a death warrant. The victims were left to die homeless and alone.

I couldn’t tolerate such cruelty. But maybe touching these men would cause me to contract the disease. I reasoned that if I was willing to put my life on the line to save the men fighting next to me in combat or to get my subordinates in Saigon safely out of Vietnam, I could face this danger. I’d take every precaution—wear gloves, keep my body covered—but I’d do my best to help these dying men.

I talked through the dangers with my wife. I told her that if I contracted AIDS, she would, too. She urged me to go ahead.

More tomorrow.

Why Capitalize Marine?

Following my posts on Al Gray, a reader asked why I capitalize Marine. The answer: to honor the branch on service for which I have the most respect.

During my years working for the National Security Agency (NSA), the most important job I was tasked with was supporting troops in the field during combat. Much of the thirteen years I was in and out of Vietnam was spent doing just that. And the warriors who most welcomed and made the best use of the intelligence I was able to provide were the Marines.

I have always believed that one reason the Marines were more ready than other services to exploit signals intelligence (SIGINT) is that one of their heroes, Al Gray, was a SIGINT specialist before he became a combat commander. Al never failed to seek SIGINT support and always used it to maximum effectiveness. His fellow Marines learned from his example.

And the Marines enjoyed more than members of other services the humorous aspects of my presence with them. I was a civilian under cover as an enlisted man in their unit. My civilian rank was often higher than the equivalent military rank of their commanding officer. To maintain my cover, I lived with the enlisted troops, slept beside them in the dirt, ate C-rations at their side, used their latrines, and dressed in their uniform. And they found my payroll signature, Thomas L. Glenn III, hilarious. They called me “TG3” and assigned me that moniker as my radio callsign.

I look back with wistful fondness to my days in the field with the Marines. I still grieve to this day over those killed by my side. And I honor the corps by always rendering their name in capitals.

Al Gray (2)

Continuing the story of Al Gray and the fall of Saigon:

By 27 April 1975, I’d gotten all my men and their families out of the country except for me and two communicators who volunteered to stay with me to the end. Just before sunset on 28 April, the bombardment started. Our western gate was hit. Two of the Marines manning it were killed. Their names were McMahon and Judge. They were the last two U.S. servicemen killed on the ground in Vietnam.

Washington finally countermanded the Ambassador and issued the evacuation order in the wee hours of the morning on 29 April. Al Gray and the Marines immediately flew in from the 7th Fleet, cruising out of sight in the South China Sea, and got us out. My two communicators went out in mid-afternoon. The chopper that took me out that night was fired upon repeatedly but escaped.

Some years before that, I had asked Al why he never married. “Had the Marine Corps wanted me to have a wife,” he answered, “they would have issued me one.” But once he had stars on his shoulder, all that changed: he got married.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit Al Gray with saving my life. I don’t call him Al any more. That stopped the day he became the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Now I call him “sir.” He’s the finest leader I’ve ever seen in action and a man I’m privileged to know.

General Gray was known for the two passions that drove him: fulfilling his mission at the highest level possible and the safety and welfare of his men. He never asked his subordinates to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.

General Gray is now 92 years old. He has been kind enough to stay in touch with me over the years. I now know that once in my life I have known a great man that the world will long remember—General Al Gray.

Al Gray

I’ve been invited to speak about my experience in Vietnam at the annual reunion of Vietnam vets of Hotel Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Division at Quantico, Virginia next October. I’ll talk about support to Marine units throughout Vietnam during the war and about a Marine officer named Al Gray.

I first met Al in the early 1960s when he was a captain. Over the years, I kept running into him as he commanded Marine units engaging the enemy in Vietnam and I crisscrossed the country doing signals intelligence against the enemy in support of U.S. combat forces. The last time I saw Al in Vietnam was in late April 1975 during the fall of Saigon. By then he was a colonel. Here’s the story:

In 1974, I was assigned to be chief of the clandestine National Security Agency (NSA) unit in South Vietnam. As it became obvious to me from intercepted enemy communications in March and April 1975 that Saigon was going to fall to the North Vietnamese, I struggled to get my 43 guys and their families safely out of country before the final collapse. The U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, forbade me to evacuate my people—he didn’t believe that the North Vietnamese would attack the city. So I had to lie, cheat, and steal to sneak them out. It worked. By the last week in April, all but a handful were gone.

One night, toward the end, I was on my cot in my office trying in vain to get some much-needed rest when the door chime sounded. I took my .38 revolver, went to the door, and looked out the peephole. Outside, I saw middle-aged American man in the wildest Hawaiian shirt I’d ever seen, colors so bright they hurt my eyes, shorts, and flip-flops. This in a war zone. He gave me a round-fingered wave and a silly grin, and I recognized him. It was Al Gray. I’d never before seen Al out of uniform. I didn’t think he owned any civilian clothes. And I knew he never came to Saigon except when he absolutely had to. He hated bureaucracy, and his job was in the field with his men.

I admitted Al to my spaces, and we went in my office to talk. He told me he’d been named the Ground Security Officer for the evacuation of Saigon. He was going to get me and my remaining men out safely. When I asked why he was in mufti, he told me that the ambassador tried to stop the evacuation but lacked the legal authority. The worst he could do was insist that Al and his Marines not wear uniforms while they did their preparations for the evacuation. Al’s form of protest was his wild outfit.

More tomorrow.