Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (3 page)

Just how far from home I had come hit me the second I walked out of that clean air conditioned jet air liner into the tropical air of South Vietnam. I don’t know what assaulted my senses the worst, the heat or the smell. I had spent 18 summers in Mississippi, but I had never felt anything like this, the humidity was a physical presence, kind of like an invisible force field. As bad as the weather was, the smell of a tropical country of over a million people with no indoor plumbing cannot be described. Two of my brothers were farmers and I had spent a lot of time when I was growing up with them, feeding the hogs and cleaning out stalls in the barns, so I know what shit smells like, but on that first day in Nam the whole world smelled like shit. Within two hours after we’d landed, every guy in my squad was sick on his stomach. Some heroes we were.

For the first ten days in country, my squad was shunted off to temporary housing at the big base in Da Nang, which consisted of nothing more than a large tent with cots, just a dozen guys sitting around trying to stay dry since it was the middle of the rainy season. Everything was so strange and different, we were glad to have nothing to do; the high point of the day was when somebody went out to get beer. Also once a day, Captain Elston, the Company commander, would come by and assure us that this was only a momentary situation, because of the rapid troop buildup there was a backlog in getting the new units onto the line, but to be ready to move out since orders could come any day. I grew to hate the boredom of sitting in that tent and watching the rain turn the earth to mud, but I was to learn that there were far worse things than sitting on your ass.

Finally the orders came down for our battalion to move out to a base camp about a hundred miles south of Da Nang, down in Binh Dinh province. For green troops, we got what we thought was pretty easy duty: patrolling a section of Highway 19 and making sure it stayed open so supply convoys could keep moving. This was about the same time we were launching a counteroffensive to retake the Central Highlands and there were big battles going on around Pleiku and Kontum, there was a steady stream of transports full of causalities coming back down the 19; we pretended not to see the ones full of black body bags. The squad that I was a member of would go out in a jeep and scout ahead of the convoys, because, despite the fact that most of Binh Dinh had been pacified, Viet Cong sapper teams and snipers were constantly causing trouble, not to mention the constant refugees that turned up. I think every civilian man, woman and child in South Vietnam got on that road at one time or another, pulling their carts and dragging their livestock with them. One day, about ten days into our escort duty, we were taking a battery of Howitzers up 19 when we ran head on into about 50 refugees making their way to An Khe. We gave them the right of way and were taking a break by the side of the road when some Cong, situated in a clump of trees about 100 yards away, opened up on us with an AK-47 burst. Whoever the shooter was, he was a lousy shot, all of the bullets went wide, but every last one of us went into the ditch by the road and hugged the earth for all it was worth--the only exception was Sgt. O'Mara, one of the tough lifers who ran the outfit, he remained on his feet the whole time and screamed at the rest of us to get back on our feet and return fire, but it did no good. All of us were pissing in our pants; I had this image of a bullet piercing my eyeball the minute I raised my head and no matter what I couldn’t get that image out of my mind. O'Mara’s curses finally got us back on our feet, which made us feel ashamed and we begged him not to report us, “The next time you yellow bellies are ordered to get on your feet, you move your asses, don’t matter who’s shooting at you!” was all he said and we readily agreed. The Sergeant cut us some slack and never mentioned the incident again, and we swore never to eat dirt like that again. That was my first time under fire.

I did get the chance to redeem myself on that stretch of road a month later when I was helping escort another convoy up to Pleiku during one of the endless battles that went on around there. Because there was a fire fight up ahead and another mob of “refugees” were passing by, we were ordered to pull over and wait. The hours drifted by and the shadows started to get long. We had learned that one of trucks about a half click down the road was loaded up with about a million cases of Blue Ribbon, so Sgt. Stone, from Alpha Company, and I decided to liberate a case or two, since we were risking our asses to deliver it, we felt we deserved something for our trouble. We had to walk down one empty tract of road and came right up on a three man VC sapper team, about 25 feet away in the process of planting a mine. Amazingly we saw them before they saw us, Stone gave me a couple of quick hand singles: he would take out all three of them, while I provided cover. He got two of them with clean quick shots to the head, but his third shot just missed the last Charlie, who in a split second was racing for the bush. Without thinking, I dropped to one knee and took aim and put a round through the back of his leg. It was an unspoken rule out in the boonies that unless ordered otherwise, we took no prisoners, so Stone walked over and prepared to finish the VC off. We were interrupted at that moment by a jeep carrying a camera crew from NBC News, who stopped and got the whole scene on film. They saved that VC bastard’s life, because while we were being filmed and interviewed a Captain from Special Operations came by and claimed him. Patch him up and interrogate him--big waste of time--but it gave the spooks something to do. The Sergeant and I got to look like big heroes on the Huntly-Brinkly show, thanks to that news crew. That was the first time I saw somebody killed up close, I won’t say that it didn’t bother me, but by then I had been in Nam long enough to have seen a lot of bad things. The real sad part of it was the fact that Stone and I never did get any of that beer.

So much was going on, we hardly had time to keep up with what was happening with the rest of the war--our world revolved around the endless patrols on Highway 19--much less with what was happening back in the USA, but the news that all college deferments had been suspended for one year was greeted with a lot of approval. All of the guys I was serving with were in the same boat as me, enlisted or drafted right out of high school, so when the shooting started there was a lot of resentment at those privileged kids on campuses, who were given a free pass to go to school on their Daddy’s money where they partied and chased tail. “More than enough Charlie to go around, we’ll sure to save plenty for the frat boys.” I remember somebody saying.

James Rice

Torrance, California

Supply Officer

Headquarters, III Corps

I was going to the University of Southern California and working on my Masters in Business Administration when Selective Service revoked draft deferments for all first year college students, so I got caught in the squeeze. Most of the guys I went to USC with were in a real panic, we had taken our deferred status for granted, but what the Gods of War in Washington D.C. give, they can also take away. My friends and I thought it would have been much more fair to have called up the Reserves and the National Guard units, after all they had the training and experience, but they also had jobs and families that would be pissed off if they were forced leave and go get their asses shot off in the jungles of Southeast Asia, plus they were much more likely to vote then any of us students.

This turn of events also put our parents on the spot. My father was one of the biggest real estate developers in Orange County; the three men he admired the most were Douglas MacArthur, Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, but he was livid when he found out Uncle Sam just might need me. “I’ll be Goddamned if that son of a bitch, Lyndon Johnson, is going to send my son to some Asian piss pot,” I heard him say more than once. He cursed Nixon just as hard, regretting all the contributions he had made to Tricky Dick’s campaigns. Both of my parents spent a week on the phone to their lawyers trying to find some loophole that could come in handy, but they learned the options were few; the Government meant business. You could still get a medical deferment and I know a couple of guys who got a fake diagnosis from sympathetic doctors for things like color blindness or chronic hypertension and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t seriously talk about it, but the induction centers caught on to that scam quickly; that pretty much left faking some mental illness or claiming you were queer. Only they were the kind of things that would follow you around for the rest of your life.

In the end we had to face facts and decided to make the best of it. With a year of college on my record, I had skills that made me a valuable commodity to the military and because of the buildup in forces, they needed people with skills. Despite my father’s attitude, he wasn’t above using some contacts who had contacts on Nixon’s staff in the Pentagon, mainly people he knew from past campaigns who had gone East with The Great Man. Mind you, we weren’t asking for any special favors, just some information. The Army had so many slots to fill, you could write your own ticket if you were somebody they needed and was willing to put yourself forward. You didn’t even need ROTC, that’s how I got a commission to supply officer’s school in Fort Lee, Virginia for six weeks.

My orders for Vietnam was my diploma, I arrived in July 1966, where I was assigned to the Headquarters of the 2nd Field Force near Saigon. It was the center of operations for the whole III Corps and I rubbed shoulders with a lot of high ranking officers--Lieutenant Colonels, Colonels, and Generals. One of my jobs was club officer for several officers’ clubs, where I got to know a lot of important people, which came in handy in my position. You have to be able to make deals and know who to go to in order to get things done. At Headquarters you always had access to the material and men that somebody needed to get a water tower built, a Quonset hut assembled, or simply having an air conditioner installed. Everybody needed something, even if it was only fifty pounds of steak. The best deal I ever swung was getting 300 cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon sent to a Captain up in the boonies in the Central Highlands, he thought it would help the morale of his company; they’d been under fire for over 50 consecutive days. The war was never far away, during the last six months of the fighting we were mortared twice, but a lot of guys out there in the bush and on the front lines resented guys like me, I was considered a REMF--Rear Echelon Motherfucker. I don’t begrudge them their resentment, they had a shit job to do, but what they didn’t realize is that the military is a big mechanism, and S-4 is the grease that keeps the machine running.

Ruth Eleanor Green

Elementary Schoolteacher

Baltimore, Maryland

In the spring and summer of 1965, I had taken a leave of absence from my teaching job with the city of Baltimore to go down to Alabama and take part as a SCLC volunteer in a voter registration drive, it was in conjunction with Dr. King’s March to Montgomery. I was only a few miles away the day they had the incident at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Both of my parents were born in Alabama and I felt this was a chance to honor their memory and the sacrifices they made so that I could get an education. It was invigorating work, even if I was frightened often, the hate you got when you came in contact with the racists and segregationists was so thick it could be cut with a knife, but I learned to overcome it because there were so many brave examples, starting with Dr. King himself down to the people I worked alongside.

I was so involved with our work that I paid no attention to the war in the early days; I don’t even remember watching Johnson’s speech where he committed American boys to go and fight over there. It wasn’t until later on that I become aware of the effects the war was having on our country, especially the black community, that my feelings and views on the conflict became clear. “The Army oughta invade Mississippi and Alabama,” one young brother in Montgomery told me, “lot more things wrong here than in South Vietnam.” That summed up a lot people’s feelings. I also noticed how many of these same young black men were receiving draft notices that would force them to leave home and go and fight in a war they did not understand and just at the time they were standing up and demanding their full rights in America. I had a moment of revelation in the summer of 1966 when I saw a report on the Huntly-Brinkly show that had film of uniformed American soldiers shooting down black men accused of “looting” in the streets of Newark and in the very next report from Vietnam there was film of identically uniformed American soldiers on a highway, shooting down a Vietnamese. The similarity was not lost on me.

Perhaps the main reason I became active in the anti-war movement was the changes in the direction of the country I felt occurred because of the war. When the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in the summer of 1964, I felt an era of real and positive change had come, that this was the just the beginning and great things were going happen for my people, things that had been too long denied, but most of all I believed that once our feet were set upon this upward path it could not be reversed, that the Promised Land of equality and justice was inevitable. I had faith in the process. I cannot believe how naive I was.

By the late summer of 1965 many of our “allies” in Congress were backing off their support of our cause, especially Congressmen who represented all those nice and neat northern suburbs. This was what killed the Open Housing Act. It was no coincidence that this happened at the same time that the SCLC and CORE had adopted resolutions critical of the war and Dr. King had criticized the draft as discriminatory. It was disheartening to see men like Sen. Dirksen and Vice President Humphrey make statements that called us Communist dupes, they sounded just like Wallace or Eastland. LBJ sold out his supposed Great Society to get lock step support for his war in Congress. What was Richard Nixon doing in that Administration? And why was Bobby Kennedy so quiet about it?

Back home in Maryland, I joined the Coalition for Peace, a Washington based group that opposed the war. There were many veterans of the Freedom Marches joining us, only now we were planning peace marches. I spent most of the time writing and editing press releases and letters to the editors to newspapers around the country. As a teacher I had long ago overcome any stage fright, so I took part in forums and debates on the war that were held around the DC area, usually on a college campus. One time I took part in a radio debate on the war with pro-war Columnist Robert Novak and I believe I held my own, my secret was that I never pretended to be something I wasn’t; I was a school teacher who was working for a worthy cause. I was nearly 30 and I knew it, I never grew an Afro or put my hair in braids, always dressed as though I was going to class and never forgot that I was a professional.