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 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 amp; 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.
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 looking for that trick combat patch on the right sleeve, a beret, and some war stories, but a political bastard as well.
I kept my mouth shut and did everything he wanted.
His team, actually three recon teams slammed together, went across the border, and the shit closed in on them.
They were trapped, about twenty klicks into Cambodia, in the area known as the Parrot's Beak. Simons wanted gunships and liftouts to save them.
Somehow the US ambassador to Cambodia heard about their plight, and ordered nothing could be done to embarrass the US. His order was echoed by the general commanding III Corps, my personal boss. Simons's men were to be abandoned to escape and evade on their own. Which meant die in place.
I took a deep breath and ordered my own helicopter resources into the air, went across the airstrip to the local gunship company, who owed me, and got their B-model gunships in the air.
As I gave the orders, for the first time in a long time, maybe since Hanoi, I felt a great weight lift. The hell with orders, the hell with the chain of command, and the hell with my career. I was finally doing something that was right.
I ordered my Mike Force, evil Chinese mercenaries called Nungs you could absolutely trust, unlike the ARVN Special Forces and army, to insert and get the SOG people out. I pulled on my combat harness, threw some magazines for my old Schmeisser machine pistol into a pack, and went with them.
It was hot, it was heavy, it was bloody, and it isn't the story I'm trying to tell.
By the next dawn, we brought out all of Bull Simons's thugs. Four were dead, but we extracted the bodies, and all of our own casualties, including the Nungs.
Simons brought his command and control Huey down on the strip at Lai Khe as I landed and stumbled out, wanting only a beer, to make sure my wounded were taken care of, eighteen hours sleep, and finding out what little of my career was left.
He got out of his bird, and I saluted him.
He looked me up and down, not even a smile on his face.
"I guess I was wrong," was all he said, and he went back to his ship and headed back for Nha Trang, one of SOG's headquarters.
Somehow, maybe because the SOG mission was most secret, and approved at "the highest levels," I stayed a light colonel, in charge of my unit, and nobody said anything. If there was a distinct chill when I went to III Corps headquarters in Saigon, what of it? Special Forces were never the favorites of the Regular legs.
Time passed, and I was relatively content. I wasn't doing anything to win the war in particular, but I wasn't losing it, either, unlike some others.
Things continued to get worse, culminating with a sapper raid against the Republic's palace in Saigon that managed to not only kill a host of ARVNs and civilians, but the serving president and prime minister of South Vietnam as well.
President Rockefeller had the unpleasurable experience of approving General Duong Van «Big» Minh as emergency head of state. Big Minh had served once before, proven his incompetence, and been set aside. But he was, I guess, to the powers in Washington, the only game in town.