Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals III

I didn't understand, not for some months. By the time I did, it was too late.

I hated Washington. Going to Georgetown, which supposedly educates you in the realities of power, I should have known better. But I didn't. The only people who went there wanted something. Preferably for nothing.

I can't remember anyone who fulfilled Kennedy's orders to "ask not…" All the bastards did was ask… and take.

And the Kennedy brothers were no different than anyone else.

I saw, very quickly, that mad gleam of power in JFK's eyes, and realized he would do anything to keep or increase his authority.

I also despised his personal morality. Kennedy, it was said truly, would fuck a snake if someone held its head. He had no qualms about cheating on his wife, at any moment of the day or night if he could find a hall closet to slip his latest bimbo into.

He lied to the people of America, justifying it with "When the time is right, they'll be told. But not yet." Which meant, as far as he was concerned, never.

His brother the attorney general was even worse, keeping his own overweening ambition concealed in the pretense that all he wanted to do was help his brother.

I never forgot what my father told me, that one of Robert Kennedy's first jobs was as one of the unutterably evil Senator McCarthy's lawyers.

I was, indeed, too close to the elephant.

I applied for a transfer back to the real Army several times, but was always refused. Kennedy said he "needed me."

I should have known I was his token war hero, especially after he called me into his office, and told me I was headed for Fort Bragg.

"For what, sir?"

"Since the Green Berets are mine, I think it would be a good idea to have one around me."

"But-"

"On your way, soldier."

And so I went. And found something wonderful.

I'd deliberately chosen paratroops, and then Rangers, not because I wanted the little tabs and devices on my uniform, but because I wanted to be a warrior among warriors.

In Special Forces, I found warriors far more dangerous, more qualified, than I could have dreamed of.

They treated me, naturally, as just another White House dickhead.

I kept my mouth shut, and soldiered hard.

I wanted approval from these men, and I didn't get it.

But I returned to Washington with my beret, and a determination to get myself back to Vietnam, in any capacity so long as it was with SF.

The progress of the war helped.

It was not going well at all.

We held Hanoi, just like we held all of the other major cities in North and South Vietnam. But what of it?

Ho Chi Minh, his Communist party, and his army sank into the marsh of the countryside. Ho went back up the Red River, back into the mountains on the Chinese border, just as he'd done when the French tried to hold his country after WWII.

From there, he fought his war.

We garrisoned the cities, and tried to hold the roads.

And the Communists fought back. Not "fairly," as if there's such a thing in war.

But from the ditch, from the jungle, always at our back.

When we got arrogant, or careless, his Regulars, or the main force Viet Cong in the south, or even the local guerrillas, would appear, strike hard, and vanish.

Enraged, we struck back, bombing villages we thought were "hostile," or even declaring entire districts free-fire zones. If those areas weren't hostile before the helicopter gunships or the B52s or the fighter-bombers came over, they certainly were afterward. To ensure the people we were supposedly helping fight Communism hated our guts, we sent through battalions of legs, who thought any gook was a Commie, and probably deserved to be dead.

The puppet government we supported in Saigon was only interested in looting and control. Their best troops, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam paratroops and Rangers were used as palace guards.

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.