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

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