Vietnam II: A War Novel Episode 1 (V2) (2 page)

Major Mike Lewis

Air Force Reconnaissance Pilot

Andersen AFB, Guam

We were given three days to forward deploy to Guam.  Saddam had invaded Kuwait a week before and we were leaning forward preparing for a deployment to the middle east.  When we heard we were headed west our minds were blown.  The first thing on our minds was Korea.  The North Koreans might be trying to take advantage of the situation.  Hell with the Soviets finished I thought we might be settling the score. 

I mean Vietnam?

That wasn’t on anyone’s minds.

I turned on final and saw that the chase car was waiting for me right on center line.  The maintenance package had flown out two days before on a C-141. 

The U-2 is notoriously hard to land.  It tends to float down the runway due to the high lift wings and the pilot cannot see the ground once he is over the field.  A chase car drives down the runway as the plane lands and calls corrections to the pilot on a radio.

I touched down on Andersen’s weird runway and hoped the car driver knew what to do.  Only runway I knew of in the Air Force that went uphill and then downhill.  Of course I spent my career in U-2s and C-5s.  Those C-130 guys land in weirder locations than this.

The CONOPS called for a two ship package.  The squadron commander was in the second aircraft and he was coming in a few hours behind me.  Intel was there to brief me upon landing.  I figured I’d have a night to get settled in before operations began.  Whatever was going down it was hot.

Other pilots who had flown in on the C-141 were suiting up to fly.  Maintenance was turning my plane to take back off.  They were pressing forward with the mission immediately.

They pulled me out of the aircraft and threw me into a trailer on the flight line.  I barely had time for a piss before I was sitting through two hours of briefings on the known air defenses of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

During the brief they told me that we would be doing high altitude surveillance of the former known and suspected POW camps.  It blew my mind.  This was before the news had broken the story.  Intel had slides though.  When they showed me what we were looking for I understood.

We were hitting the ten camps named in the Thailand Box as well as other targets that the intel bubbas were coming up with.

They planned on two sorties a day with me taking the morning go.  More pilots were enroute from the states as well as more airplanes.

I was still in the middle of inprocessing when my U-2 taxied out for an evening go.  It was the first combat sortie over Vietnam in 17 years and I felt a twinge of regret that I was not flying it.  Looking back you could consider it the first sortie of the war.

They bussed me over to billeting and told me to enter crew rest immediately.  We were low on pilots and everyone was put on minimum crew rest.  They already had me schedule to fly a line the next day.  I had just over twelve hours to eat, sleep and shower before I was going to back in the cockpit and up to near space.  All I had time to do was chug a beer in the billeting lobby before my twelve started.  Then it was grab some chow and off to bed.

For me the war would have to wait another twelve hours.

Lieutenant Colonel Carol Madison

Air Force Intelligence Officer

Defense Intelligence Agency

With the invasion of Kuwait on the second of August we had gone to twelve hour shifts gathering intel.  We were trying to keep everything secret, but the press was already on us by the number of pizzas we were having delivered late at night.  I had to hand it to those reporters.  It was a brilliant use of soft intel.

At the start of the second week we were all getting pretty burnt out.  When I came into work that evening things were jumping.  I thought the word had been given and the deployment had started.  I gathered slides from my team members and brought them to the commander.

“Shelve them.”  Colonel Stevens said.

“What?”  My first thought was that we had done a bad job.

“We are off of Iraq.  For now.  Get me everything you have on Vietnam.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Vietnam.  We had a war there twenty years ago.”  He said with an unusually sharp tone.  He was obviously under pressure from above.

“It just threw me for a loop.  I don’t know if we have anything.”

“Find something.”

I looked through our files and other than some information about their armed forces we had very little.

The reinvention of the wheel had begun.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Adams

State Department

Washington D.C.

My job was military liaison to the state department.  It was a kush and highly sought job and there were only a handful of officers chosen every year to do it.  It involved giving input on anything military related to state department officials to help them make decisions and develop policy. 

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait the first week of August. It was dominating the news.  There were wars in the Middle East and Africa all the time, but this was a big deal.  Kuwait was a friend and the free world wondered about if the oil supply would be safe.  Sides and players changed so much that people hardly took notice. 

They brought me into a meeting that morning expecting that I would be talking about Iraq again.  I had made myself intimate with our capabilities and theirs so I could at least answer most questions with an air of authority.  The civilians were a little taken aback if a military man did not know every detail of the armed forces.  I guess they figured we studied foreign armies at night while they were at home watching sports with their kids.

“Give us some background on the Vietnam Prisoner of War situation?”

Well they had found a way to outflank me yet again.  I decided then and there that I was done with that job and advancing my career.  I couldn’t wait to get back in a cockpit.  I could die happy retiring as some lieutenant colonel in charge of some flying squadron somewhere. 

“I really don’t know, but I can find out for you.”  I would become more and more comfortable with that statement in the coming days.

That got me an ugly pinched face from the GS. 

“You just got a national holiday dedicated to POW/MIAs and you don’t know anything about it?”  His tone was a little disrespectful.

“I respect the sacrifices of those men, but I have never been a POW or an MIA and I have never met one personally.  What would you like to know?”

“Are there any left alive?”

This time I gave him an ugly face.  How the hell should I know?

Lieutenant Colonel Carol Madison

Air Force Intelligence Officer

Defense Intelligence Agency

I often wondered in those days leading up to the second Vietnam War what the President’s mood when he got the word.  The President had spent a year in the Hanoi Hilton and he got elected on the basis of his war record.  His opponent had challenged his competence for the presidency based on his time there.  They said he suffered from PTSD.

The late night talk shows used to joke about him invading Vietnam again.  It had all seemed so funny.  No one took it seriously.  I was starting to wonder if the comics’ monologues were just a posting of the dark part of our collective conscious.  It was like reattacking Vietnam had been on the back of our minds all along.

I had four people on leave and two others deployed to Germany.  For my investigation team I had my enlisted workhorse Luciano, two fellow intel officers, Carter and Johnson as well as two civilians named Dave Ellington and Dave Smith who went by the two Daves.

My team was pulled into a briefing right before lunch.  I guess somebody wanted to let us know that we were not just chasing our tails.  We came back a little stunned.  They had hard physical evidence of living POWs, or at least living since the end of the war.

A package had been given to the embassy in Thailand that contained a human skull as well as hair and blood samples from other MIAs.  There were photographs and letters to their families as well as confessions.

The only glaring omission was a map of where to find them.

The briefing was given by a full bird named Carter from state that I did not recognize.  When it was over he asked for questions.  It was an unspoken rule in the military not to ask questions at the end of a briefing and if you did you had better make it a good one.  One of my troops, Luciano, asked if all of the physical evidence could have been frozen or stored in some other way.  The question through the Colonel for a loop and it was not well received.

After the data on the POWs reached his office he became a different man.  It pissed him off.  I know it did.

“Can you imagine what would happen if the American public got a hold of this?” Luciano said when we got back to the office. “I could picture a bunch of hippies turned yuppies marching on Washington.  You’d be able to see the smoke from space.” 

After the brief I gathered everyone at DIA for the operation brief.  They were all career intel officers and NCOs.  DIA was not their first assignment.  Experience was one of our advantages.  Unfortunately, they were all pretty exhausted from the build up for the Kuwait invasion.  Now I had to ask more of them. 

Much more.

“Here is a list of the people we are going to interview initially.  They may lead to other sources of information and we will follow them appropriately.”  I told them.  “Here are your assignments.”

I handed out folders with labels like retired DIA, POW HUNTER, RECONAISSANCE OFFICE, SIGNALS and ARVN REFUGEE.

“Here is a list of the standard interview questions.  Ask more questions as you see fit, but make sure you at least ask these.” 

The questions I had come up with during the Thailand Box brief.

“We are working closely with state on this.  Most of the individuals you are interviewing have been vetted and their contact information is up to date according to the FBI.  Take lots of notes and get tape if you can.  Tell them whatever you think you think you should, but under no circumstances tell them about the Thailand Box.  As always be sure to hold on to your receipts while you are on the road.  If you run into any trouble call home.”

I was keeping Carter local in case I needed a hand compiling or needed someone else with some rank to send to the Pentagon or State.  The two Daves were manning the office and doing research here while secretly keeping our Kuwait plans warm on the back burner.  Luciano and James I put out on the road in the states.  Johnson was our only bachelor so I was sending him to Thailand. 

“Questions?”  I asked knowing there would not be any.

There were none.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Adams

State Department

Washington D.C.

This was the first time I had been to the United Nations on business.  There would be an official meeting about Iraq with the cameras rolling in a few hours.  The politicians were already practicing their sound bites and getting makeup applied in the big room. 

Judging by the little room deep inside the building were four state department GS’s and myself found ourselves this is where things really happened.  The fourteen men in this room were the ones who made it happen.  I had no idea why I was here.

“We would like to discuss Kuwait.”

“We want to talk about Vietnam.”

“The United Nations feels that your issues with the Vietnamese are an internal matter.”

“You know why countries ignore the Geneva Convention?  Because no one enforces it.”

This took the man aback.  I think he was expecting a short meeting.  Since I did not have a speaking role I kept my mouth shut.

“Hussein’s move puts world energy reserves in danger.  His invasion of Kuwait was a success.  If he should turn his army toward Saudi Arabia he would control most of the world’s oil.  With that kind of capital and a near peer military I would think that the United States would take this threat seriously.”

“The United States does take the situation in Kuwait seriously.  Unfortunately we lost our last war.  It will be difficult to summon the political will to get ourselves involved in another armed conflict given the last one.  These recent discoveries of POWs still being held give our voting population the feeling that Vietnam is unresolved.”

“Are you saying that the United States will not support the liberation of Kuwait?”

“That is not what I am saying at all.”

This German looked like he wanted to take a swing at someone.  I did not even realize what the ambassador had said.

“What I am saying is that all of NATO has no interest in supporting the liberation of Kuwait.”

It got really quiet.  I think I forgot to breath.

It looked like these guys would be taking out into the parking lot for a fist fight.

“What are you looking for?”

“We would feel prepared to move European forces forward to protect the Saudi oil if we could receive support in getting our POWs back.”

“The UN has already given you a blank check on economic embargoes of Vietnam.”

“We are worried, given our past experience with Vietnam that this may go beyond that.”

“You want us to turn a blind eye to armed intervention?  Out of the question.  You say that you cannot get the political will to protect Saudi, but you think you can get public opinion to support further involvement in Vietnam?”

“We don’t want you to turn a blind eye.  We want your full support.”

Go USA!  I had a rock hard erection and I wanted to tie an American flag on the end of it.

Awesome!