Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (8 page)

It was sometime in early June, nearly six months after we had moved into Laos, when we got the first word of the Neutron bombings. Of course nobody in command down in Saigon had the sense to make a formal announcement or simply try to get the facts out to us poor son of a bitches way out in the boonies, some of which were down wind of ground zero. All we got was third hand radio reports that repeatedly used the word “nuclear,” that got everybody’s attention. The first thought I had was of mushroom clouds rising over Hanoi-a pleasant image. Right on the heel of the first reports the word came that we were less than 100 clicks from one of the bombing targets. Since no one had explained the difference between a Neutron and a thermo nuclear weapon, we were thinking in terms of megatons, fallout and all those “duck and cover” lessons from grade school. More than one guy in my unit was certain that we were all about to die of radiation sickness, it was especially bad when someone got a touch of malaria and suddenly had chills and fatigue, I felt sorry for Captain Elston because he didn’t have anything concrete to tell us and it would be just like those bastards in Saigon not to give a damn what happened to us. There was a rumor that one platoon, up next to the DMZ, panicked when they got the news and shot their Lieutenant along with one of their Sergeants and went over the hill and hid out for a month in Hue. Supposedly, the Army hushed the whole thing up.

Looking back, I think Charlie knew the war was coming to an end before we did, we had already got word that they had halted the bombing of the North-a big mistake on our part because it let them resupply and regroup and they hit us hard a couple times right before the cease-fire went into effect. I don’t know what the hell they thought it would accomplish at that late date. Maybe Charlie just wanted to get a few last kicks in before it was over. Those last few weeks were filled with terrible tension, on top our fears of dying from radiation from those Neutrons, nobody wanted to be the last man to be killed in Vietnam.

We were taking fire right until the end and taking casualties almost until the last day. The final guy in Bravo Company to buy it was named Rosebud-he must have took some crap for that-and he was such a lard ass I don’t see how he made it through Basic, guess they really were desperate for warm bodies. A round took most of his head off while he was sitting in the latrine, blood and brain geysered in every direction. I can’t think of a more un-heroic way to go.

Captain Elston came around and gave us the word that a cease-fire had been signed in Paris. He told us not to assume that just because somebody had signed a piece of paper thousands of miles away, we were off the hook, nobody was sure just what was going on with Charlie out in the bush and that we should be prepared to defend ourselves if fired upon. For good measure we were ordered to stay within the perimeter and minimize all contact with the Vietnamese. “Play it safe and give ‘em a wide berth” would be our policy. That was fine with us, all we gave a damn about was when we were getting the hell out of there; our job was done as far as we were concerned. As usual we had it wrong, part of the cease-fire agreement allowed us to keep troops in Laos for up to a year, so there was no reason to hurry up with pulling my unit out.

So as the weeks after the Paris agreement had been signed wore on, Bravo Company sat tight. This did nothing for anybody’s mood once the elation that naturally came with the war’s end, passed. I had to break up more than one fist fight during that time; a couple of poker games almost ended in cold blooded murder and Ernie Spivik nearly got his head bashed in with an entrenching tool because somebody didn’t like the tone of his voice.

We did have a couple strange encounters with the enemy in the weeks after the cease-fire. One morning a large group of them appeared out of the jungle, not more than a stone’s throw from our forward lines. Nobody said a word, we just stared at each other for a few minutes, some of them were clad in those famous black pajamas, but the majority wore khaki and Pith helmets. They just disappeared back into the jungle and we never saw any more of them, I figured that it was a unit from somewhere in the South that was in a hurry to get home now that the fighting was over, no different than us. By then the Chinese had crossed over into North Vietnam and were pushing toward Hanoi, picking up the pieces after we had softened them up. I guess a lot of those NVA regulars out in the bush had families they were desperate to get home to. Somehow word reached Charlie out in the boonies about what was happening back home; once the Chinese were in control, we started to get small groups of Vietnamese coming up to our lines and surrendering. Guess they knew the Chinese well enough not to go home and trust their asses to them. It was much worse down South, where literally thousands of Cong and NVA regulars came out of the jungle and capitulated to the Americans-they refused to give up to the South Vietnamese out of pride. I’ve read the story of how a First Sergeant found himself taking the surrender of the entire COSVN (Communist Office of South Vietnam) just west of Saigon. Nothing so dramatic happened to me.

My unit was finally relived of its position in late August, nine long months after we arrived. All of us jumped aboard the Chinooks and turned it all over to the 2nd Brigade and they were welcome to it. In only a few hours we were back down in Da Nang where we had started from back at the end of December. Everybody was given R & R; along with Spivik and a couple of other guys from Bravo Company, I spent a few days in Bangkok. After that there was nothing to do but mark time in the barracks at Da Nang until it was time to go home, they were pulling units out in the order they were deployed to South Vietnam, so all that time we spent sitting on our asses in Texas in the summer of ‘65 counted against us. While in Da Nang I ran into my nephew George, who had enlisted in the Marines a year earlier, just after he got out of high school. He was my oldest brother’s son and I imagine that he and my father had the same talk with him that they’d had with me. George had been in country just long enough to see some action around the DMZ and he would be there another year as part of peace keeping operations. While he was over there he fell in love with and married a South Vietnamese girl. I can tell you my brother and my father had real problems with that; George and his family would finally settle in California.

I didn’t leave South Vietnam until just before Thanksgiving. There were only a few weeks left in my enlistment and I had a lot of leave saved up, so my military career was effectively over the minute I set foot in San Francisco. We’d been warned that Frisco wasn’t the best place to be seen wearing a uniform, this despite the fact that Berkeley had been closed down for months, but I didn’t have any trouble-not that I stayed in town very long. By the time the 23rd Infantry made stateside all the celebrations were over and returning soldiers were old news. The only warm welcome I got was when I got back to Biloxi, but that was the one that counted. The Old Man had almost got on a plane and flown to San Francisco to meet me and for the rest of his life he cherished the picture of the two of us-me in my uniform-setting on the front porch that appeared in the Biloxi newspaper.

Ruth Eleanor Green:
The barbarity of the Neutron bombings of North Vietnam had such a profound effect on us in the Coalition for Peace. We had truly underestimated this government’s capacity to use violence to achieve its ends. To this day I cannot look at the pictures of dead Vietnamese civilians-women and children cut down where they stood-without having tears come to my eyes. Many of my friends in the Peace Movement were so shaken that they gave up on America altogether and moved to Europe, but I refused to allow myself to become bitter and disillusioned. I took my direction
from Dr. King and thought that the answer was in remaining active in the Movement.

I volunteered to work in the McGovern campaign, even though everybody said he didn’t stand a chance against LBJ and the old guard Democratic machine. But the Senator from South Dakota was the only one who showed the commitment and the guts to stand up against the madness we’d seen in Vietnam despite the public opinion polls. How I wish Bobby Kennedy had stepped up early on and not let those same polls influence him; instead we went onto the field of battle behind the only man who showed the necessary courage. We were a brave band of brothers that early spring of 1968, marching against all that entrenched power and public sentiment, but we truly believed the war in Vietnam was wrong and that enough people could be swayed to our side through persuasion. Thousands of us went into New Hampshire and Wisconsin determined to make our case for George McGovern in those early primary states. And to make our case against LBJ, Nixon, Westmoreland and their war machine and all it had taken from America. Thousands of people listened and voted their convictions-and were ignored. I thought getting thirty-five percent of the votes against a setting President was doing pretty good, but what really mattered was winning delegates and our side won barely enough to count on one hand when the dust settled. Talk about having the deck stacked and the fix put in.

Then Dr. King was killed in Memphis and it felt like I had been knocked flat. For a month afterward I couldn’t think about politics or a stupid fight over a Presidential nomination. That bastard Wallace could have gotten elected for all I cared; he was drawing big enough crowds to make it look like a possibility and the calendar was only April. Then in June, I was asked by friends in The Movement to come with them to Chicago at the end of August, they were planning a big mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention to demand they nominate Robert Kennedy instead of Johnson, and everyone was needed on deck. Taking it to the streets is how they put it. At first I though it was a stupid idea, LBJ was going to get his coronation and there was nothing we could do about it now. No one with any power was listening to us, I told them, and going to Chicago was a waste of time. But I was wrong; somebody was listening after all.

James Rice:
My father was a delegate to the Republican Convention in ‘68; he was a Reagan man all the way and the absolute last thing he wanted to see was that rich welfare state Eastern liberal Nelson Rockefeller get the nomination; so you can imagine how royally ticked off he was when he got back from Miami Beach the second week of August. Reagan went into that convention with over 400 delegates and a real head of steam, so all the guys like my Dad who’d worked their asses off for Goldwater really and truly believed they were going to do it again. The strategy was to stop Rockefeller on the first ballot and then pick up enough delegates to put their man over on the second. But they had the rug pulled out from under them at the end of the first roll call when Governor Rhodes of Ohio stood up and threw all his favorite son votes to Rockefeller; Romney in Michigan did the same thing, clinching the game for Rocky before my father and the Reagan campaign knew what had hit them. All my father talked about when he got home was how the Eastern Establishment had the fix put in from the start and there was no damn way he was just going to just fall in line behind some millionaire who‘d never have to worry about seeing the value of his home decline because Negroes moved next door. He thought it was a personal spit in the eye to him and everyone else who’d worked for Goldwater and Reagan when Rockefeller honored Martin Luther King in his acceptance speech and affirmed his support for the Civil Rights Act. And it sure as hell was salt in the wound when Rockefeller picked a fellow liberal like Mark Hatfield for his Vice President.

It was so bad that my Dad and his buddies were actually talking about getting behind George Wallace, a cross burner; not just voting for the Alabama Governor, but raising money for him in California and forming a committee of the like minded in the Golden State. All those riots from Watts to Detroit, all those scenes of Negroes looting and burning left a lot of pissed off white people feeling like there was nowhere else to go. But then came the Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of the month and the world got turned upside down.

Gen. Earl Halton:
In the wake of the Moscow shakeup, Secretary Nixon postponed his plans to leave the Administration and decided to stay on until the end of President Johnson’s term, which meant that I stayed on as well. The best part of it was the extra star I got; the down part was-along with everyone else on the Secretary’s staff-getting pulled into the election of ‘68.

The events of that year have been well chronicled in more than a few books; I would point out the investigative works of Theodore White, William Manchester, Joe McGuiness, and David Halberstam as among the best and there is little I would say here that will add to their work. And I have nothing to say on the subject of whether I was a confidential source for any or all of those gentlemen.

What I can say is that it was Secretary Nixon who first informed President Johnson of the proposed “Kennedy Coup” at the Chicago Convention; this was confirmed to me by the Secretary himself who recounted the details of his conversation with the President to me the day after it happened, which would have been the second day of August. “Those sons of bitches really thought they were going to put one over on us,” were Mr. Nixon’s exact words. “They put the screws to me to me 1960, did the same thing to the President when he was running against Jack for the nomination. And Bobby is playing the same dirty game this year. Well, not this time.”

The Secretary explained the details to me this way: a cabal of old JFK hands-Sorenson, O’Brien, Powers, and O’Donnell, among others at Senator Robert Kennedy’s direction-had been in contact with Democratic Party bosses and big dogs. This cabal was intent making Senator Kennedy the Democratic Party’s nominee at the Chicago Convention instead of President Johnson. They would do this despite the President having more than enough pledged delegates to win the nomination by having the states of New York, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, along with several hundred other delegates scattered among other state delegations simply abstain on the first ballot. That would be enough, combined with the 400 votes pledged to McGovern, to deny the President the nomination on the first roll call. It seemed that party rules only bound delegates to vote for a certain candidate on that first ballot, after that they were free to vote their conscience for whomever they wished and presumably would have flocked to the Kennedy banner and a chance to resurrect Camelot. Secretary Nixon assured me that this scheme not only could have worked, but was well on its way to success if he had not found out about it and alerted the President.