ABOUT TOM
Tom Glenn was born into a California version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald world of soirées,
days at the races, and upscale cocktail lounges. When he was four, his older sister died bringing
together his estranged parents. At six, he realized that he would have to take care of himself—his
alcoholic mother and playboy father were otherwise engaged. At the same time, he discovered both writing
and language and taught himself French and Italian. Six years later, the imprisonment of his lawyer
father for embezzlement left the family impoverished. His high school days were spent in Oakland’s
ghettos where he raised money with a paper route and a job as delivery boy. He got through college
(majoring in drama and music and adding German to his languages) by working as everything from a
dishwasher and service station clerk to a
barista in an Italian-speaking coffee shop.
Upon graduation from the University of California (Berkeley), he enlisted in the army to study Chinese
but was sent for a year to study Vietnamese—a chance event that reshaped his life. For the next
twenty-five years, Vietnam was the focus of his attention. After he left the army, he worked for the
Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Embassy in Saigon, spending the better part of thirteen
years shuttling between the U.S. and Vietnam. (the operation he headed was declassified in 2008*).
He was evacuated under fire during the fall of Saigon in 1975. In subsequent years of working for
the government, he became an expert first on Korea, later on China (he had been studying Chinese,
first in night classes at Georgetown, later in Vietnam). As he moved into the executive ranks, he
published more than twenty articles on management and leadership and took a doctorate from the George
Washington University in Public Administration. Meanwhile, he married and fathered four delightful children.
In 1984, he volunteered to care for AIDS patients, in the nineties worked with the homeless and, beginning
in 2001, administered to the dying in the hospice program. Meanwhile, he began studying Spanish and
volunteered to work
with immigrants.
Through it all, he wrote. All his writing is haunted by AIDS and the hospice experience.
Vietnam looms large in his stories, and nearly everything in his work is, in one way or
another, about fathers and children. His stories have appeared in many publications and
won numerous prizes (
see writing credits), but for the
last several years, he has concentrated on novels, none so far in print.
*See chapter 9 of Robert J. Hanyok,
Spartans in Darkness:
American SIGINT and the Indochina
War, 1945-1975. Fort Meade, Maryland: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security
Agency, 2002, declassified in 2008. Tom Glenn’s name has been redacted throughout the
document, but it was left in place twice, apparently by mistake, on page 441, and in the
photocopy of Glenn’s last message from Saigon on page 444. Historian George J. Veith,
using these two occurrences, has reconstructed Glenn’s story. Some of it appears in his
book,
Black April (Encounter Books, November, 2011).
The Hanyok document erroneously describes the escape of Glenn and his two communicators. The
actual events are as follows: The Embassy had informed Glenn, located at Tan Son Nhat
(just outside of Saigon), that it was unable to evacuate him and what remained of his
staff—two communicators. Glenn appealed to Marine Colonel Al Gray (later Commandant
of the Marine Corps) who had secretly flown in by helicopter to coordinate the evacuation.
Gray and Army Colonel Bill Le Gro, chief of the Intelligence Branch of the Defense Attaché
Office, arranged for Glenn and his men to be airlifted by Air America helicopters to the
Oklahoma City, flag ship of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, anchored out of sight of land in
the South China Sea. Glenn sent the two communicators out first and, as North Vietnamese troops
entered Saigon, finally boarded a helicopter himself late in the day on 29 April 1975 and flew
from the city amidst gunfire from the ground.
