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back to Vietnam, in any capacity so long as it was with SF.
The progress of the war helped.
It was not going well at all.
We held Hanoi, just like we held all of the other major cities in North and
South Vietnam. But what of it?
Ho Chi Minh, his Communist party, and his army sank into the marsh of the
countryside. Ho went back up the Red River, back into the mountains on the
Chinese border, just as he'd done when the French tried to hold his country
after WWII.
From there, he fought his war.
We garrisoned the cities, and tried to hold the roads.
And the Communists fought back. Not "fairly," as if there's such a thing in
war.
But from the ditch, from the jungle, always at our back.
When we got arrogant, or careless, his Regulars, or the main force Viet Cong
in the south, or even the local guerrillas, would appear, strike hard, and
vanish.
Enraged, we struck back, bombing villages we thought were "hostile," or even
declaring entire districts free-fire zones. If those areas weren't hostile
before the helicopter gunships or the B52s or the fighter-bombers came over,
they certainly were afterward. To ensure the people we were supposedly helping
fight Communism hated our guts, we sent through battalions of legs, who
thought any gook was a
Commie, and probably deserved to be dead.
The puppet government we supported in Saigon was only interested in looting
and control. Their best troops, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam paratroops
and Rangers were used as palace guards.
Kennedy seethed, increased the draft, and had, by 1967, over a million
Americans in country.
And the war raged on.
University students protested the war, and these protests were slapped down by
Attorney General
Kennedy. He made the famous statement that "protest in a time of trouble is
treason," and the prisons filled up with middle-class Americans, who were
given the option of jail or the military.
The pretense Kennedy maintained that he actually gave a damn about civil
rights was shattered, and cities exploded into riots. His vice president,
Senator Johnson (D.-Texas) snarled, saying Kennedy had promised to build a
better society, and instead was wasting his, the party's, and the country's
substance in a country no one could find on a map.
Kennedy ignored him, and so Johnson and Kennedy finished their terms not on
speaking terms, and
Johnson wasn't given the traditional chance at the presidency, but rather that
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hoggish toady, Hubert
Humphrey.
As the 1968 elections neared, the always-sophisticated Communists mounted a
scattered offensive in cities across Vietnam. The offensive failed, but
Kennedy insisted on further increasing the draft, and sending another million
men overseas.
That was enough for the voters. The extreme conservative Republicans were
ignored by their party for a change, and the Republicans ran moderate Nelson
Rockefeller, who destroyed the Democrats.
Naturally, one of the first things Rockefeller did after taking office was to
put the draft into high gear, and send another million men into the war.
But that was in his first one hundred days, when it's very hard for a
president to do anything wrong in the public and media's eyes.
One of Kennedy's last acts, before he left office, was to jump me again in the
promotion lists to lieutenant colonel.
That would further destroy my chances of just fitting back into the Army.
But I stayed in, and pulled a few strings.
I figured if I could get back to Vietnam, not only would I maybe be helping my
country, but I could save my career by staying well out of sight.
The C Team of 5th Special Forces, named F Company, I ended up in charge of was
at Lai Khe, a few hundred heroes who did everything from advising the ARVNs,
to pulling intelligence missions up to the border, running A Team camps in the
middle of nowhere, to all the other strange missions the Green Hats got.
If I thought being in the elite would keep me from this time of troubles my
country and Army were going through, I was quite wrong.
The tour of duty had been increased to two years, over the previous eighteen
months, so soldiers weren't constantly rediscovering fire. These draftee and
non-special operations soldiers spent their time either huddling in the
oversized, overcivilized base camps, or else timorously sweeping the jungle.
Every now and again, a column of US soldiers would encounter, generally on
their terms, the Viets. There'd be a brisk firefight, or sometimes a
knock-down brawl, and then the Viets would vanish back into the bush, into the
mountains, leaving us to lick our wounds.
We certainly weren't losing the war . . . but more important, we weren't
winning it, either. I wondered what would have happened if Bobby Kennedy
hadn't used the draft and punitive federal legislation to kill any semblance
of a peace movement, like the US had during the so-called Philippine
Insurrection.
For many people, their tour in Vietnam was nothing more than sweaty boredom,
never seeing the enemy, and only encountering him . . . or her . . . when a
convoy they happened to be riding on was ambushed, or a friend on perimeter
guard was sniped, or what they read in
Stars & Stripes, the service newspaper.
I met Arthur "Bull" Simons in a rather strange way. He was running the
supersecret Study and
Observations Group, with the rank of a one-star general. Special Forces never
got a lot of rank allocated, enlisted or commissioned, even when they were
Kennedy's darlings. It wasn't until the escalation that Simons saw his star,
the only one he'd ever get. At the time, the head of all Green Berets was a
one-star, Bill Yarborough, and, again, it took the buildup before he got a
second one.
Simons was a legend. He'd been described once as the "only soldier who
actually hates people." Maybe he did, but he also took damned good care of his
crews, as they ran illegal crossborder reconnaissance into Cambodia, Laos, and
even, I was told, into China itself.
He was about as frightening a man to look at as you could imagine a bit under
six feet, about two hundred pounds, built like a boulder. His face was lined,
hard, and he had a nose like a hawk.
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He'd been a Ranger in WWII in the Pacific, active in clandestine warfare after
that.
Naturally, when he came down to Lai Khe, wanting to personally oversee a
rather special mission I still don't know the details of into Cambodia, he
hated my guts. I was not only one of the "pussies" who'd swarmed into SF
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