WAR CRIMES

By Martin Robert Grossman

After fleeing the vindictive communist government of Vietnam in the mass exodus of 1975, the Phan family moves to America. They become naturalized citizens and relocate to Seabrook, Texas, where they once again take up fishing for a living. But the local fishermen do not take kindly to the new outside competition. Fueled by

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: May 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781633937154

Martin Robert Grossman

Martin Robert Grossman is the author of three best-selling children's books, Oscar the Otter, The Pigs of Lake Hood, and Totems of Seldovia. In 2017 his passion for adult military fiction was realized with the publication of Club Saigon. His books have received stirring reviews in the local media in his hometown of Anchorage, and throughout, Alaska. He has been a featured writer at the Alaska Writers Conference and has been author in residence at many lodges and libraries statewide. Recently he has been the featured author in The Rock magazine. He has written articles and served as a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. During the Vietnam War he served with the elite 5th Special Forces (Green Berets) of the United States Army

Book preview

PRAISE FOR

WAR CRIMES

The meat of this gritty crime novel has more turns than a Missouri country road—it will keep you on the edge of your seat —always wanting more. An enjoyable read. Looking forward to the next one.

— JERRY ENGLAND, Chatsworth, CA, US Army 1962-1964, 7th SF.

"War Crimes is both a suspenseful crime novel and a powerful, informative account of the lasting effects of the Vietnam war on the soldiers that fought in it. Grossman weaves a story that embraces both the Special Forces soldiers and the refugee Vietnamese that came back to the United States. It is a great follow-on to his previous book, Club Saigon. The characters were so vivid and the plot so intricate, I couldn’t put it down. A great read—highly recommended.

— NILES NORDQUIST,Star, Idaho,U.S. Army 1966 – 1968, Honor Guard in the burial of 24 men who came home to their loved ones in caskets.

Story moves very quickly, and keeps the reader wondering what’s next. Character development is very strong but not in a way that bogs down the narrative.

—RANDLE M BIDDLE, WINDSHIP Studios Star, ID

"Just finished War Crimes. It is as good or even better than Club Saigon. Easy and smooth to read. Hard to put down. Had a great twist. Lots of good insider information. ANOTHER GREAT BOOK."

—JIM CLENDENIN, Umpqua, OR, U.S. Army 5th Special Forces

WAR CRIMES

MARTIN ROBERT GROSSMAN

WAR CRIMES

by Martin Robert Grossman

© Copyright 2019 Martin Robert Grossman

ISBN 978-1-63393-714-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. With the exception of verified historical events, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue, and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

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They say ev’ry man needs protection,

They say ev’ry man must fall.

Yet I swear I see my reflection

Some place so high above this wall.

I see my light come shining

From the west unto the east.

Any day now, any day now,

I Shall Be Released.

—BOB DYLAN 1967

This book is dedicated to those that served in the Vietnam War and to all the men and women of our armed forces who daily protect our liberty and freedoms from those who would destroy us and our way of life.

To the Wall.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

EPILOGUE

INTRODUCTION

Oh, Sergeant, I’m a draftee and I’ve just arrived in camp

I’ve come to wear the uniform and join the martial tramp

And I want to do my duty, but one thing I do implore

You must give me lessons, sergeant, for I’ve never killed before.

Pete Seeger, The Willing Conscript, Broadside Ballads, Vol. 2

I call this work a fictional burrito—fiction, wrapped in a factual tortilla. I have chosen to begin this book in the first person so the reader is better able to understand the feelings and morays of the sixties as seen through my eyes. By then, World War II and Korea had gone down with the setting sun and Vietnam was rising on the dawn’s early light.

Prepare yourselves to enter The Zone, a place back in time where truth may be stranger than fiction. The cost of a ticket to ride this rollercoaster is the collateral damage from the Vietnam War that you, too, have become. You didn’t have to be boots on the ground. You could have been family, or a wife or sweetheart that gave that proud GI the brown helmet (a Dear John letter), one of the many forms of mutilation inflicted during and especially after the Vietnam War. Even today, it is easy to see this damage in the faces of the homeless, disenfranchised, drug or alcohol-addicted veterans who clog our streets, and in the system created to help them after the war. A government bureaucracy motto is, To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.

And so, it begins.

It’s been more than fifty years since my jungle boots first touched the soil of Vietnam. Fifty years. Not so long for some, but a lifetime for those who were there. At a time in my life when my memory is failing, the memories I would most like to forget won’t let go. They lap back into my mind like the incessant tide tumbling onto some faraway beach. They have attached themselves like a magnet to an iron ball. They push into my brain’s deepest recesses, refusing to surface until I try to sleep, or some outside event triggers them.

I realized one morning not long ago that before I die I need to perform one final act. I need to do it for my wife, my children, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren. I want them to understand why I am the way I am. Perhaps by knowing they will understand and forgive me for my observable faults and the underlying nuances of my life that drive my disturbed psyche every sleeping and waking hour. This is what my willing participation in the Vietnam War has left me. I have become unwilling collateral damage, like many other volunteers and draftees who fought and survived.

Now is the right time to tell this story. I know that once I finish writing this, I might never write about these fragments of my life again. I also know that dredging up old wounds and picking at the scabs that torment my life may not be good, but I am determined to come at it with a full-frontal assault and not wait for the nightmares to begin anew. When this effort is completed, my hope is I will finally be able, after all this time, to end the torture, take in a long, deep, clean breath of fresh air, and exhale a lungful of understanding, for my family and the world to see.

Life is not a straight shot. It is not predictable. We are only guaranteed two things in life—a slap on the ass when we first arrive and a shovel-full of dirt in our face when we exit. Everything else we get in life is a result of the choices others make for us when we are young or those we make for ourselves as we get older; it’s as simple as that!

Excerpt Club Saigon

As I look back, I still would have joined the Army just after my twentieth birthday and I still would have volunteered to fight in Vietnam. Patriotism was just something instilled in me throughout my life. There was no free lunch at that time in our country’s history. The politicians had yet to take a decisive stranglehold on our government when I signed on. But unbeknownst to this youngster at the time, our government had made enough secret inroads to cause irreparable future damage to the fabric that was America.

I couldn’t care less that the freedom marchers were carrying their signs, walking their shoes and sandals off and shouting their anti-American slogans; that was their right under our Constitution and I respected that. What I saw as they marched and rioted and ran to Canada was a draft system that took the inner-city youth, the disenfranchised, the uneducated, and the poor and gave them a 1-A rating and a spot at the front of the death-and-destruction line. That rating essentially put a target on their backs, and they were shipped to a place that most of them couldn’t spell or find on a map. There, they would be hunted down and killed by a tenacious enemy fighting on its own home ground, an enemy that had fought this fight for more than a hundred years and never lost.

After America’s victory in WWII, the country was alive and vibrant. The middle class began to rise, good jobs were abundant, education under the GI Bill offered opportunity, homes were there to be purchased with inexpensive GI home loans; life was good in post-war America. We flourished as a country and a society. Then, slowly at first, our government began to take over in areas not constitutionally mandated—those areas set aside by the Founding Fathers to be in the purview of the individual states. Social programs were put in place, funded by American tax dollars. Those safety nets had been provided by the many churches that make up that cornerstone of our founding documents—a cornerstone known as freedom of religion. Sleazy politicians got their fingernails deeper into American freedoms, and gradually those freedoms eroded in what was left of our once great democratic republic.

As the political worm began to turn, our Founding Fathers likely turned over in their graves. The America we had known moved another step closer to becoming an entitlement nation, part of the subterfuge quietly imposed on the American people by her professional politicians. As the unpopular Vietnam War raged on, it was put front and center on every television in the nation as the politicians and the media secretly pulled the rug out from under her honorable patriots, past, present and future.

What happened to the principle the Founding Fathers set down in our Constitution—the principle of the citizen legislator? What happened to constitutionally-mandated states’ rights and a small federal government? The professional politicians removed term limits from their vocabulary, voted themselves fat salaries and different rules to play by, stacked and politicized the Supreme Court and turned this once proud nation down the road to becoming a welfare state. Those same people protesting the war and calling soldiers baby killers looked the other way as our government was taken over by politicians promising them a handout instead of a hand—and the price of that welfare was a vote.

The 1960s marked the beginning of the end for more than our country; it marked the end of the trail for more than 58,000 of my comrades. For most of us that made it home, there was no parade, but for those that came home in a body bag or those who never came home at all, they, at least, eventually got a black granite shrine with their names engraved on it for all to see—an appropriate metaphor for the politicians to be able to point their greedy fingers at and take credit when credit wasn’t due.

WWII was mostly run by the generals and admirals who reported directly to the president—like Generals Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, McArthur, Lemay, and Admiral Nimitz, just to name a few. They didn’t ask the president for permission to engage and kill the enemy. There was no such thing as rules of engagement—they just did it, and that’s why we won the Second World War. We kicked ass and took names. Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo—they were all thrown to the curb without a second thought and run over by the bus we call America.

Vietnam was a different story. By then, the politicians had their fingers in the social pie. In order for them to obtain absolute power, they needed to personally manage the Vietnam War, which they did from behind large oak desks in plush offices, smoke from their illegal Havana cigars billowing like the smoke that clung to the jungle floor after one of the many battles paid for with the blood of conscripted American boys who never wanted to be there.

In the ten years from 1965 to 1975 that Americans were officially on the ground in Vietnam, we never lost a major battle. The boys on the ground had guts and resolve and they took it to the enemy wherever they found him. It was the folks at home, following their bleeding hearts and being driven in the back of a truck known as politics, that lost the Vietnam War for America—and I will go to my grave believing that.

In 1975, America struck her colors and evacuated from the roof of our Saigon embassy as one of the most embarrassing moments in American military theatre played out for the world to see. The stigma of that event would follow the soldiers who fought and lived through it throughout their tortured lives. As those choppers flew from the roof of the embassy, the promises we made to the people of South Vietnam and their families were pitched out of the barn like cow manure. They were left behind to pay the ultimate price of peace with honor. I’m sure they never got a granite wall constructed to honor the sacrifices they made for their country; they only got reeducation camps, prison, and death.

The generals who ran the war effort wanted to become politicians so they could have more power than the stars on their uniforms gave them. They did anything the administration and those close to the president told them to do. So, instead of the stereotypical WWII generals leading our army, we got General William Westmoreland. His strategy, instead of scorched earth, was what he coined body count. Instead of fighting his way to victory, he planned to count his way to conquest—on a chalkboard.

"We must launch even more audacious fights at lightning speed. We must take advantage of every single minute and head to the frontlines to liberate the south and unify the country. We are determined to fight to our death and win the war."

General Vo Nguyen Giap, April 1975

A general named Vo Nguyen Giap planned on using a time-honored strategy that worked before against the French, Japanese, and Chinese and would now work again. He counted on the lack of steadfastness demonstrated by the American people at home. He knew that America’s normal wartime tenacity was weakening daily as America’s TVs and newspapers showed mounting public anger and anti-war demonstrations. Add to the mix his own massive army’s tenacity and unwavering resolve and, despite their enormous losses, tiny Communist North Vietnam gained victory over the formerly greatest military and industrial power in the world. You might say that body count was a metaphor for our veterans as they returned home tired of the death and destruction. Some were addicted to the drugs, alcohol and the painkillers needed to get them through each day; they came home to an uncertain future in our once great and prosperous nation.

Vietnam was no mistake—it was a war crime.

Yale Magrass, LA Progressive, August 26, 2016

The road through life for most of us is a meandering, bumpy highway, never smooth unless you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth. That can especially be said for those who fought in the Vietnam War. We came from all over America; some were drafted, as the draft was in full force during the 1960s; some, like me, enlisted, wrongly thinking that our country was fighting against the Communist takeover of Southeast Asia—a region with little to no resources or resolve to resist the onslaught of the neighboring North Vietnam Communist government. While the draft snared many who were not exempt and hadn’t run to our Canadian neighbor, most of the conscriptions came from the poorer areas of the inner cities, the heartland, and the prairie states. In talking with these grunts, as they were known, I concluded that they didn’t have a dog in this fight, and most were in it for the short term and not too happy about it—one and done. Unfortunately, more than 58,000 of these troops really ended up one and done.

America got involved in the conflict in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War, sending the first undeclared contingent of fighting forces over in 1963. I was nineteen years old at the time and just starting to feel the need to go and fight for Mom and apple pie as well as my country’s interests, just as my grandfather, my father, my uncle and my cousins had done during the two Great Wars, as they were known. How I came to that conclusion—one that would eventually effect my moral compass, a morality forged over almost twenty years by loving and devoted parents, family, and friends—is a long story.

Before the 1960s, America was a strong nation of patriotic, hardworking individuals and families. It was only after the war in Vietnam started that this country—her government and her people—unraveled into an unruly mass of long-haired, sign-carrying, anti-war, anti-American soldier-citizens hiding behind their First Amendment right to free speech. The peace movement, built on the deaths of every fallen soldier that fought for this country’s liberty in that theatre of war, flourished with the help of do-nothing politicians who turned America from the land of the free, home of the brave into the land of the freebie, no place for the brave, where we remain to this day.

Politics aside, war was declared; we went, we served, and some came home to the tumult that was the new America. All gave some, some gave all was the mantra on the lips of our soldiers as they returned home from Vietnam. Many years would pass before the real death toll of the war was realized—the living death of post-traumatic stress disorder, as it later became called, and the living death of homelessness and addictions. They came home, but the America that existed in the 1960s and early 1970s didn’t give a shit. The truly lucky ones didn’t have to witness the demise of this once-great country—they came home in body bags.

I was raised in a modest middle-class home, went to school, was a Boy Scout, played on our local Little League team, and generally thrived as a pre-teen. We lived in Los Angeles until my dad, who served in WWII, had done well enough at his aircraft factory job to move the family to the San Fernando Valley suburbs where I lived until I enlisted in the Army.

My moral compass was straight up—360 degrees, due north—at that time. I graduated from high school, attended college, worked, and married my high school sweetheart. Shortly thereafter, we had a daughter, whom I cherish to this day; life was good. Based on the 1960s criteria for the draft, there was not a chance in hell I would be conscripted, but as I watched the war unfold on TV, my moral compass kicked in. Why should I sit on my ass on the sidelines when other Americans were fighting and dying for the freedoms my family and I and every other American enjoyed? After much introspection, I decided to enlist, and that decision, though I still to this day would do it again, cost me more dearly than if my remains had been put in a black vinyl coffin and shipped home in the back of a C-130.

I completed basic training, advanced infantry training (AIT), and Jump School. I was accepted into Special Forces and more intense training. Special Forces had operations all over the world, in Europe, South America, Africa—wherever there was a need for highly trained military personnel with weapons training, language skills, and clandestine intelligence gathering abilities. Because of my test scores, I became one of the elites of the elite. I was trained as a Special Forces combat medic, a doctor without a license, and because of the ongoing war and associated casualties, there was no doubt where I would be sent.

My letters home were frequent, but as time went on the letters from home became less frequent, then nonexistent. My young wife swore her undying love and promised to wait for me. I was assigned to an A-Team in Vietnam, and between the time I got on the airplane in the States and the time my boots hit Southeast Asia, my young wife had left me and taken our child with her. My moral compass had started tilting by the time I met my A-Team in the Central Highlands.

My boots first touched the tarmac in Kontum, South Vietnam, in 1967. My heart pumped with the thoughts of protecting America from Communist aggression and restoring a proud way of life to the Vietnamese people, the way America had in World War II. It would have been nice to have an Eisenhower, a Patton or a MacArthur, but we were saddled with General William Westmoreland.

Individual major battle victories, which we knew were all won by American fighting units, were overshadowed by the new symbol of victory—body count. At Cam Rahn Bay, I was picked up and taken by Jeep to a waiting UH-1D Huey Helicopter, which took me to A-243, Plateau-Gi, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. After a short flight, my chopper put down and I got off with my duffel. I noticed that my place on the chopper was now taken up by three body bags, brothers I would never get to know taking their final trip home. It’s a horrifying sight, seeing masked death for the first time, and one that I continue to see to this day in my mind’s black eye.

My moral compass was now at 30 degrees off dead center and I found that each day, with every new combat zone experience, it tilted a little more south, until at some point it reached 180 degrees and I was lost for the rest of my life. I would never return to that place when I had my family and life was good. Now I had a new family, and no matter what our backgrounds, education, color, or religious conviction, we were all brothers, and like brothers we watched each other’s backs. Any hint of racism and other isms had to be put behind each of us, as we depended on each other for survival. Without that resolve, the American body count could easily have been doubled.

A Special Forces A-Team is set up to be in remote areas of the country, in a camp with walls around it, the walls and bunkers made with sandbags, and perimeter security of wire and explosives around that. On the inside perimeter, you had 60 mm and 81 mm mortar positions, which were manned each night by our Civilian Indigenous Defense Group (CIDG) under our supervision. It was our job to train the indigenous people, both Montagnards and Mnung, into an effective, cohesive guerrilla fighting force capable of engaging the much larger enemy pouring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the north. We trained the CIDG, armed them and went into the field with them to gather intelligence and engage the enemy. They too were my brothers.

That part was simple; what was more complex was also having to train South Vietnamese counterparts who were supposed to accompany us into the field and learn how to be effective fighters and leaders. This politically-motivated tactic never worked. I never met a South Vietnamese soldier who wouldn’t cut and run at the first sign of danger. Training them was counterproductive and a waste of manpower and resources. You’d think the politicians would not let that mistake happen again, but one only needs to look at what is happening to the local home forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who we trained and armed. The arms went over to the enemy and the training went down the toilet and into the cesspool of history. Some things never change. We are supposed to learn from history. Go tell that to the politicians. The only history they care about is their own, lining their pockets with dirty money while good American men and women bleed to death and are maimed on battlefields of their creation.

I am writing this not as a detailed history of the war in the Central Highlands of Vietnam but rather as a collection of thoughts and impressions. Just putting pen to paper will cause me many more sleepless nights sitting and staring out into the nothingness that is the thousand-yard stare, while each enemy contact is painted on the canvas of my mind. I liken my mind to the skin of