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

therefore responsible for what happened during the Sino-Soviet War two years later.
    Two weeks after the cease-fire Mao’s Red Army pushed across North Vietnam’s northern border and within a matter of days had reached Hanoi. The pretext for this move was to restore order and stem the tide of refugees fleeing into China’s southern provinces. The real reason was to settle scores with an ancient enemy and to make sure there would be no Soviet ally on China’s southern flank, Mao and Chou were clearly thinking ahead. The Chinese made a few cynical statements about protecting “their beloved Socialist brothers in Vietnam.” and promptly arrested most of the North Vietnamese leadership and put the country under martial law. I’ve always said that the real winner of the Vietnam War was Red China. It certainly wasn’t the Soviets, because one of their satellites had been brutally defeated by the hated American imperialists and then to add insult to injury, they had been stabbed in the back by their equally hated Communist rival; when the shakeup in the Kremlin came in January of ‘68, nobody should have been surprised when Stalinist hard-liners took over. It was one of the unanticipated consequences of our victory; and let me say, Yuri Andropov made us really long for Khrushchev.
     
    Travis Smith : As the weeks went by and April became May, a real sense of despair come over us as the fighting drug on with no end in sight. Nobody had to tell us that another great plan by the desk top warriors in Washington had turned to shit and we were paying the price. From all the news we could pick up from the rest of the war, it looked as though the whole thing had degenerated into a bloody stalemate and it made no difference how many kids they drafted and sent over here or how many bombs and napalm they dropped on the North. Call it what they wanted-Battle Fatigue, Shell Shock-we had it and our effectiveness suffered a lot. If your mind has gone numb then you’re not much use to anybody, most of the time our lives depended on how fast we could dive for cover when Charlie opened fire, life or death was a matter of seconds.
    It was sometime in early June, nearly six months after we had moved into Laos, when we got the first word of the Neutron bombings. Of course nobody in command down in Saigon had the sense to make a formal announcement or simply try to get the facts out to us poor son of a bitches way out in the boonies, some of which were down wind of ground zero. All we got was third hand radio reports that repeatedly used the word “nuclear,” that got everybody’s attention. The first thought I had was of mushroom clouds rising over Hanoi-a pleasant image. Right on the heel of the first reports the word came that we were less than 100 clicks from one of the bombing targets. Since no one had explained the difference between a Neutron and a thermo nuclear weapon, we were thinking in terms of megatons, fallout and all those “duck and cover” lessons from grade school. More than one guy in my unit was certain that we were all about to die of radiation sickness, it was especially bad when someone got a touch of malaria and suddenly had chills and fatigue, I felt sorry for Captain Elston because he didn’t have anything concrete to tell us and it would be just like those bastards in Saigon not to give a damn what happened to us. There was a rumor that one platoon, up next to the DMZ, panicked when they got the news and shot their Lieutenant along with one of their Sergeants and went over the hill and hid out for a month in Hue. Supposedly, the Army hushed the whole thing up.
     
    Looking back, I think Charlie knew the war was coming to an end before we did, we had already got word that they had halted the bombing of the North-a big mistake on our part because it let them resupply and regroup and they hit us hard a couple times right before the cease-fire went into effect. I don’t know what the hell they thought it would