Tom Glenn's Blog, page 92

Lucky Me (3)

At the time of my public service, the federal government’s top executives took a dim view of the workforce. In their opinion, the job of the head of an organization was to control his subordinates and keep them in line. That meant that I was constantly clashing with my bosses who wanted me to supervise and stamp out innovation—the bosses would decide what should be done, not the workers. But my success rate was far above that of the average manager. The promotions kept coming despite the reservations of my superiors. I reached the SES-04 rank, only two steps down from the top government grade.

Meanwhile, I had known since age six that I was born to write. As an adult, I had a wife and children to support, and writing isn’t lucrative. Being a spy paid the bills. I wrote whenever I could and had gotten a series of short stories published. But I knew novels was where I would excel. So I retired as early as I could so that I could write fulltime. Because of high rank, my retirement annuity was generous. I had no money problems.

My foreign assignments after 1975 were (and still are) classified, so I drew on my years in Vietnam for material to write about. For decades, Americans considered Vietnam a shameful war. They didn’t want to read about a conflict the U.S. never should have been involved in. As a result, I wasn’t able to get my novels published. Then, during the second decade of the twenty-first century, attitudes started to change. So did my luck. A new generation of Americans wanted to know more about Vietnam. Publishers began accepting my work.

I now have six novels and 17 short stories published. I’ve gotten two books published this year. I’m now working on two more novels. Things are looking up. Luck is still with me.

So here I am, an aging man with a history of lung illness that puts my life at risk if I am infected with covid-19. The nation is crippled by the disease, the economic collapse it brought with it, and the self-serving acts of the worst president in our history. But I’m lucky enough to have a steady income, not interrupted by the pandemic. I’m able to stay isolated and safe from infection. And now vaccines are on the way to immunize people like me who were otherwise in mortal danger.

How lucky can one man be?

Lucky Me (2)

I was on the battlefield constantly during the years of the Vietnam war. I witnessed brutally savage deaths of soldiers and Marines fighting next to me and developed a severe case of Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). But luck was with me. I never was wounded. More than once over the years, I found bullet holes in the fatigues I was wearing, but none ever entered my body. It was phenomenal luck.

My last job in Vietnam, after U.S. troops were withdrawn in 1973, was as chief of the clandestine NSA operation to keep track of the North Vietnamese campaign to conquer the country. As it became clear that the enemy was about to attack Saigon, I wanted to evacuate my 43 men and their families. But the U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, forbade me to send anyone out of the country. He didn’t believe that the North Vietnamese would attack Saigon. The evidence from intercepted communications made it overwhelmingly clear that the attack was imminent, but Martin refused to change his orders. So I lied, cheated, and stole to get my men and their families out alive under any ruse I could think of. I was successful, but I had to stay until the city fell. I escaped under fire on the night of 29 April 1975.

Once again, luck was on my side. Neither I nor any of my men or their families were hurt or killed. Granted, I was physically ill from being holed up in my office without food or sleep while the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon, but once back in the states, I recovered.

Meanwhile, because of my willingness to face danger to get my job done, I was promoted much faster than my contemporaries. Not long after returning to the U.S. from Vietnam, I was admitted to the Senior Executive Service, the highest paid segment of federal government workforce.

I had learned during my years in Vietnam that the way to create a successful team was by leading rather than managing. My job as a boss was to uplift my subordinates, give them the tools and support so that they could excel, be the best they could be, and fulfill their own potential. I rewarded creativity and inventiveness. I encouraged my people to try new things and test new techniques. If they failed, I gave them a chance to try again; if they succeeded, I promoted them.

More tomorrow.

Lucky Me

I am among the most fortunate people I know. In this time of plague and penury, I am remarkably healthy and free of financial problems. I have steered clear of all human contact for the better part of a year, thus avoiding the coronavirus, and my retirement annuity, provided by the federal government, has continued unabated. How lucky can you get?

But that’s only the latest episode. Unerring good luck has stayed with me all my life. As an impoverished youth (alcoholic mother, father in prison), I was able to put myself through college at the University of California in Berkeley by working twenty hours a week at a variety of menial jobs (e.g., restaurant dish washer, delivery boy)—the tuition back then was only a little over fifty dollars a semester for California residents. Immediately after graduation, to avoid the draft, I enlisted in the army with the proviso that I’d spend a year at the best language school in the world, the Army Language School at Monterey, California, studying Chinese. When I arrived at the school, I learned that the army had decided that I was to study not Chinese but Vietnamese, a language that I had never heard of. Back in those days (1959), we didn’t call that part of the world Vietnam; we called it French Indochina.

That chance decision by the army shaped the rest of my life. When I graduated from the language school, I was immediately assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland. I became a spy. Once at NSA, I signed up at Georgetown University for classes in Chinese. I had taught myself French as a child (languages come easily to me), so by the time I finished my enlistment in 1961, I was comfortable in the three languages of Vietnam—Vietnamese, Chinese, and French—and NSA hired me at rank and pay scale much higher than usual for a new recruit. At the same time, that little known part of the world called Vietnam was rapidly becoming the focus of U.S. military attention. By sheer luck, I was equipped to help out.

I was first sent to Vietnam in 1962. For the next thirteen years, until the fall of Saigon in April 1975, I was in Vietnam more than I was in the states. My job was signals intelligence support to U.S. military forces, both army and Marine, on the battlefield. Using information derived from the intercept and exploitation of North Vietnamese radio communications, I was able to alert friendly forces to the presence of enemy troops, their identity, location, and intent.

More tomorrow.

2020

This year will go down in the history books as the worst many of us have endured. The most destructive pandemic in our history coincided with the most incompetent and self-serving president the U.S. has ever had. The result was utter devastation—our economy in tatters and 324,000 dead as I write.

Most of us know somebody struck down by the pandemic. One associate of mine has been diagnosed as infected; another has died. The rest of us survive by avoiding others.

I have been isolated and alone since last March. I’ve learned to do without human company. For me, it’s a matter of life and death. As an older man with a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer, my chances of surviving covid-19 are slim. So I’ve spent the better part of a year away from other human beings who might infect me.

The year has been painful for me for another reason: I lost my partner of twenty-plus years when she died of a stomach ailment at the end of March. The grieving continues. How long will it last?

So I’m glad to see the year end. In 2021, we’ll have a new president far more competent than the one leaving office. Vaccines will likely slow the spread of covid-19. For the first time in more than a year, people will be able to gather again.

I look forward to a new and better life in a new and better year.

What War Brings

I’m reminded again that a fraction of 1 percent of all Americans now living have ever experienced combat. As a people, we have no memory of war and don’t grasp its savagery. As a result, we, unlike other nations who have experienced wars on their own territory, we are much more willing to contemplate going to war than other countries.

I have tried several times in this blog to convey the horror that war brings. Nothing matches seeing men all around you killed in ways so grisly that it’s hard to find enough left of them to put into body bags. That experience inflicts a wound to the soul that never heals.

 If combat occurs in and around places occupied by civilians, they, too, become victims. And their homes and workplaces are destroyed. War kills and destroys indiscriminately.

I urge Americans to keep these thoughts in mind when the time come to decide if we should resort to armed conflict. Lives destroyed cannot be restored.  

To Perfect Imperfect America (2)

The third great flaw in American society is our wealth disparity. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Income inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s and in many states is up in the post-Great Recession era. In 24 states, the top 1 percent captured at least half of all income growth between 2009 and 2013, and in 15 of those states, the top 1 percent captured all income growth. In another 10 states, top 1 percent incomes grew in the double digits, while bottom 99 percent incomes fell. For the United States overall, the top 1 percent captured 85.1 percent of total income growth between 2009 and 2013. In 2013 the top 1 percent of families nationally made 25.3 times as much as the bottom 99 percent.”

We are, in other words, grossly unfair in our income distribution. The poor, especially racial minorities, suffer the most while the richest among us grow richer.

My sense is that the flaws in our culture spring in large part from the great reverence given to individualism in American culture. The emblematic and mythical heroes of our society are not those who worked with others for the good of all but those who strived alone and succeeded—Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan, for example. We glorify not those who stand with others but those who stand alone.

Compare us with the other nation famous for its revolution, France. While we admire the feats of individuals in our struggle for freedom, the French point to the success that resulted from everybody working together. Their motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, says it all.

So we Americans, for all our greatness, have some work to do to improve our nation. We need to move away from glorifying rugged individualism toward exalting compassion for others. Along the way, we need to learn to love other races, move toward banishing firearms from our society, and redistributing our wealth.

My understanding of the effect of the covid-19 pandemic and its economic damage is that people, especially the young, have come to value charity towards others in a new way. If I am correct, we Americans will come out of pandemic better than we went in.

To Perfect Imperfect America

I am a citizen of the greatest country in the world, the United States of America. It has achieved things no other nation has approached, and it has been particularly generous to me.

But it suffers from glaring flaws that I and other Americans must work to correct.

Until recently, I, like most white people, believed that racism was largely a thing of the past in the U.S. Then came a series of deaths of Black people at the hands of police. In the outrage that followed, I was shocked to learn that bias against Blacks is thriving. Blacks make up about 12.3 precent of the U.S. population, but police kill many more Blacks than Whites, covid-19 deaths are much higher among Blacks than Whites, and Blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed and earn 25 percent less than Whites. On average, Black men receive jail sentences 19.1 percent longer than white men convicted of the same crime. In short, racism is widespread in the U.S.

The second U.S. flaw that stands out is our devotion to guns. Gun ownership is part of our culture, going back to the days after the founding of our nation when we were expanding our frontiers. But those days have long since passed, and it’s time for us as a country to recognize and curb our destructive devotion to guns.

We have more guns than people in the U.S. We own 120.5 guns per 100 people. And we suffer 4.43 gun deaths per 100,000 people annually. According to Wikipedia, “In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available as of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s  (CDC’s) National Center for Health Statistics reports 38,390 deaths by firearm, of which 24,432 were by suicide and 13,958 were homicides.”

Compare us with Canada. Where we own over 120 guns per 100 people, in Canada the figure is 34 guns per 100 people. We suffer 4.43 gun deaths per 100,000 people; Canada has 1.94.

The same ratio appears everywhere throughout the world—the more guns in the hands of citizens, the more gun deaths.

More tomorrow.

Rerun: They Spat on Me, Called me “Baby Killer”

Several years ago, I posted in this blog about the way I was greeted when I returned from Vietnam. I was reminded of the post recently when a reader used a search engine to find and read the post. Here it is again, updated to the end of 2020:

Every year between 1962 and 1975, I was in Vietnam at least four months. That meant I was making multiple trips each year between Nam and the world (what we called the U.S.). I usually travelled with the troops. Starting in 1968, when I landed in San Francisco with returning troops, we were often met by crowds who called us “butchers” and “baby killers” and spat on us. The experience sickened my already damaged soul.

I reacted with searing shame. I was proud of my work in Vietnam, as were my compatriot soldiers and Marines. But the behavior of my country’s people shamed me.

For decades after the fall of Saigon, service in Vietnam was anathema to Americans. To have participated in that war was considered shameful. So for many years I never mentioned my time in Vietnam. I sweated through my flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and irrational rages alone. We didn’t have a name for my condition back then. Now it’s called Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). I didn’t know that other veterans were afflicted with it, too.

Then, five or six years ago, I was invited to a gathering that honored Vietnam veterans, something I’d never before heard of. The words I had so longed to hear were spoken to me that night, accompanied by smiles and hugs: “Thank you. And welcome home.”

I cried.

I’ve come a long way since that night. I’ve learned that I’m part of a large brotherhood of Vietnam vets with PTSI. The world has changed. Now people want to know what happened in Vietnam. I’ve given my presentation on the fall of Saigon more than seventy times. Now audience members often say to me, “Thank you. And welcome home.” I still get tears in my eyes when I hear those words.

It’s clear that I’m going to be all right. The PTSI will never go away, but I’ve learned to live with it. And I can be publicly proud of my service to my country.

But what about other vets who died before the American people changed their view? They were never thanked or honored. They died alone in their shame. I grieve for them.

What I Did on the Battlefield

Following my recent posts on my work on the battlefield, a reader asks what I actually did. I thought it was obvious. Maybe not. Here’s the answer.

My job was direct support, providing minute-by minute data on the enemy to friendly forces. I was under cover as a member of the unit I was supporting. I dressed in their uniform, cut my hair like theirs, lived with them. When the time to fight came, I went with them into battle. I tipped off our side as to where enemy was, what his strength was, which units faced us, what they were doing, what they planned to do. All this information came from intercepting and exploiting the enemy’s radio communications.

Sometimes I myself did the intercepting and exploiting of the enemy’s tactical voice communications. I was comfortable in seven different foreign languages, thanks to a God-given talent for which I deserve no credit. So I was able to listen in and keep friendly forces up to date.

The most valuable information came not from my personal efforts but from the complex and thorough signals intelligence system developed and deployed by the National Security Agency (NSA), my employer. In Vietnam, for example, it included a series of army and Marine field stations throughout the country, smaller intercept teams, airborne assets, and ships at sea off the coast of Vietnam—all under cover. All these were linked through a superb communications system controlled by NSA which fed me timely facts and figures on the enemy. That allowed me to tell the units I was supporting which enemy forces were nearby, their location, their movements, and their intentions.

To do that job, I had to be on the battlefield with U.S. and friendly troops. Early on in Vietnam, I earned a reputation for combat support. Unlike other, more sensible civilians, I was willing to do my job in the midst of combat. And I was better at it than any of my civilian compatriots. I felt it was my duty to use my unusual gifts and training to do all I could to help my country.

Our efforts in Vietnam failed. We lost the war. So all my risks were for naught. I escaped under fire as Saigon fell in April 1975. Those days were the worst in my life.

But I comfort myself these days by remembering that I gave all I had for my country. After the fall of Saigon, I came down with serious physical illnesses as a result of being holed up for more than a week in the city with little food and no sleep as the North Vietnamese attacked. But, miraculously, I was never wounded. Nevertheless, I was willing to put my life on the line for my country.

I am justifiably proud.

U.S. Combat Veterans

I am finding myself in a more and more exclusive segment of the U.S. population: combat veterans. And I don’t really deserve to belong to that valiant group. While I was in combat on the battlefield repeatedly during my career as a signals intelligence operant, a combat veteran is defined as one who fired upon an enemy and was fired upon by that same enemy. My job was to tell friendly forces what the enemy was up to. I was a civilian but under cover as military, dressed in the battle fatigues of the unit I was supporting. I was armed, usually with a .38 revolver, but I never once fired a shot during combat. I honestly didn’t have time for that. I was too busy collecting information on the enemy and passing it to our troops.

But there is no question that I was fired upon. Bullet holes in my fatigues testified to that. The miracle is that I was never hit. So I consider myself an exception to the rule about firing on the enemy and declare myself a combat veteran.

Meanwhile, I am a veteran in the normal sense of the word. I did three years of service in the army but never saw combat. It was only after I completed my enlistment that I ventured onto the battlefield as a civilian under cover as military.

Because I lived as an enlisted man with the units I was supporting—sleeping on the ground beside the men I was there to help, eating C-rations with them sitting on the ground, and going into combat with them—I allow myself to claim the title of combat veteran.

I’ve researched how many combat veterans are living today in the U.S. I found no exact figures. The best guess offered by researchers is that 10 percent of all active-duty soldiers see combat. I believe that figure is far too high, but if I accept it, it means that there 1.74 million combat veterans living in the U.S. in 2020. Half of them are 65 or older, and the vast majority served during the Vietnam War. Veterans of all stripes comprise approximately 6.9% of the nation’s adult population according to the Census Bureau. Consequently, the surviving number of combat veterans is less than one percent of the population.

So I am a member of a very select group. I am both humbled and proud to be counted among the men I most admire.