Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War Read Online Free

A.M. and we didn’t see much. The 707 touched down on the airfield at Da Nang on the morning of Sept. 28, 1965, it had been just over a year since that family conference in the kitchen way back home in Biloxi.
    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