Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War by F. C. Schaefer

that there was nothing to do but mark time in the barracks at Da Nang until it was time to go home, they were pulling units out in the order they were deployed to South Vietnam, so all that time we spent sitting on our asses in Texas in the summer of ‘65 counted against us. While in Da Nang I ran into my nephew George, who had enlisted in the Marines a year earlier, just after he got out of high school. He was my oldest brother’s son and I imagine that he and my father had the same talk with him that they’d had with me. George had been in country just long enough to see some action around the DMZ and he would be there another year as part of peace keeping operations. While he was over there he fell in love with and married a South Vietnamese girl. I can tell you my brother and my father had real problems with that; George and his family would finally settle in California.
    I didn’t leave South Vietnam until just before Thanksgiving. There were only a few weeks left in my enlistment and I had a lot of leave saved up, so my military career was effectively over the minute I set foot in San Francisco. We’d been warned that Frisco wasn’t the best place to be seen wearing a uniform, this despite the fact that Berkeley had been closed down for months, but I didn’t have any trouble-not that I stayed in town very long. By the time the 23rd Infantry made stateside all the celebrations were over and returning soldiers were old news. The only warm welcome I got was when I got back to Biloxi, but that was the one that counted. The Old Man had almost got on a plane and flown to San Francisco to meet me and for the rest of his life he cherished the picture of the two of us-me in my uniform-setting on the front porch that appeared in the Biloxi newspaper.
     
    Ruth Eleanor Green: The barbarity of the Neutron bombings of North Vietnam had such a profound effect on us in the Coalition for Peace. We had truly underestimated this government’s capacity to use violence to achieve its ends. To this day I cannot look at the pictures of dead Vietnamese civilians-women and children cut down where they stood-without having tears come to my eyes. Many of my friends in the Peace Movement were so shaken that they gave up on America altogether and moved to Europe, but I refused to allow myself to become bitter and disillusioned. I took my directionfrom Dr. King and thought that the answer was in remaining active in the Movement.
    I volunteered to work in the McGovern campaign, even though everybody said he didn’t stand a chance against LBJ and the old guard Democratic machine. But the Senator from South Dakota was the only one who showed the commitment and the guts to stand up against the madness we’d seen in Vietnam despite the public opinion polls. How I wish Bobby Kennedy had stepped up early on and not let those same polls influence him; instead we went onto the field of battle behind the only man who showed the necessary courage. We were a brave band of brothers that early spring of 1968, marching against all that entrenched power and public sentiment, but we truly believed the war in Vietnam was wrong and that enough people could be swayed to our side through persuasion. Thousands of us went into New Hampshire and Wisconsin determined to make our case for George McGovern in those early primary states. And to make our case against LBJ, Nixon, Westmoreland and their war machine and all it had taken from America. Thousands of people listened and voted their convictions-and were ignored. I thought getting thirty-five percent of the votes against a setting President was doing pretty good, but what really mattered was winning delegates and our side won barely enough to count on one hand when the dust settled. Talk about having the deck stacked and the fix put in.
    Then Dr. King was killed in Memphis and it felt like I had been knocked flat. For a month afterward I couldn’t think about politics or a stupid fight over a Presidential