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

accomplish at that late date. Maybe Charlie just wanted to get a few last kicks in before it was over. Those last few weeks were filled with terrible tension, on top our fears of dying from radiation from those Neutrons, nobody wanted to be the last man to be killed in Vietnam.
    We were taking fire right until the end and taking casualties almost until the last day. The final guy in Bravo Company to buy it was named Rosebud-he must have took some crap for that-and he was such a lard ass I don’t see how he made it through Basic, guess they really were desperate for warm bodies. A round took most of his head off while he was sitting in the latrine, blood and brain geysered in every direction. I can’t think of a more un-heroic way to go.
     
    Captain Elston came around and gave us the word that a cease-fire had been signed in Paris. He told us not to assume that just because somebody had signed a piece of paper thousands of miles away, we were off the hook, nobody was sure just what was going on with Charlie out in the bush and that we should be prepared to defend ourselves if fired upon. For good measure we were ordered to stay within the perimeter and minimize all contact with the Vietnamese. “Play it safe and give ‘em a wide berth” would be our policy. That was fine with us, all we gave a damn about was when we were getting the hell out of there; our job was done as far as we were concerned. As usual we had it wrong, part of the cease-fire agreement allowed us to keep troops in Laos for up to a year, so there was no reason to hurry up with pulling my unit out.
    So as the weeks after the Paris agreement had been signed wore on, Bravo Company sat tight. This did nothing for anybody’s mood once the elation that naturally came with the war’s end, passed. I had to break up more than one fist fight during that time; a couple of poker games almost ended in cold blooded murder and Ernie Spivik nearly got his head bashed in with an entrenching tool because somebody didn’t like the tone of his voice.
    We did have a couple strange encounters with the enemy in the weeks after the cease-fire. One morning a large group of them appeared out of the jungle, not more than a stone’s throw from our forward lines. Nobody said a word, we just stared at each other for a few minutes, some of them were clad in those famous black pajamas, but the majority wore khaki and Pith helmets. They just disappeared back into the jungle and we never saw any more of them, I figured that it was a unit from somewhere in the South that was in a hurry to get home now that the fighting was over, no different than us. By then the Chinese had crossed over into North Vietnam and were pushing toward Hanoi, picking up the pieces after we had softened them up. I guess a lot of those NVA regulars out in the bush had families they were desperate to get home to. Somehow word reached Charlie out in the boonies about what was happening back home; once the Chinese were in control, we started to get small groups of Vietnamese coming up to our lines and surrendering. Guess they knew the Chinese well enough not to go home and trust their asses to them. It was much worse down South, where literally thousands of Cong and NVA regulars came out of the jungle and capitulated to the Americans-they refused to give up to the South Vietnamese out of pride. I’ve read the story of how a First Sergeant found himself taking the surrender of the entire COSVN (Communist Office of South Vietnam) just west of Saigon. Nothing so dramatic happened to me.
    My unit was finally relived of its position in late August, nine long months after we arrived. All of us jumped aboard the Chinooks and turned it all over to the 2nd Brigade and they were welcome to it. In only a few hours we were back down in Da Nang where we had started from back at the end of December. Everybody was given R & R; along with Spivik and a couple of other guys from Bravo Company, I spent a few days in Bangkok. After