Floater

By Martin Robert Grossman

Floater is the story of combat soldiers who only wanted to do their duty, come home, and live the American dream-a dream devoid of the nightmares of PTSD, homelessness, and addiction.

Captain Don Carter is a murderer, but after the events in War Crimes, a sympathetic Texas jury lets him walk free. Still imprisoned by his demons

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: Apr 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646633227

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

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FLOATER

MARTIN ROBERT GROSSMAN

Floater

By Martin Robert Grossman

© Copyright 2021 Martin Robert Grossman

ISBN 978-1-64663-322-7

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. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Published by

3705 Shore Drive

Virginia Beach, VA 23455

800–435–4811

www.koehlerbooks.com

Cover Photo-1

Sgt. Dumpty

Artwork by Jerry Hudspeth, 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion,

9th Infantry, RVN

1967–1968

Sgt. Dumpty sat on the wall

Sgt. Dumpty had a great fall

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Sgt. Dumpty back together again.

This book is dedicated to John Allison Taylor Jr., US Navy retired, and to all the men and women of our armed forces who fight and sometimes die to protect our freedoms and preserve our way of life—even in the face of protest.

To the Wall

the wall-5

All Gave Some, Some Gave All

FOREWORD

Our resistance will be long and painful, but whatever the sacrifices, however long the struggle, we shall fight to the end, until Vietnam is fully independent and reunified.

—Ho Chi Minh, December 19, 1946

The sixties were turbulent times for the American people. They had fallen into a blissful complacency after the Second World War and Korea, but that complacency would not last—Vietnam was lurking, like a python, waiting to devour them.

In 1945 the country danced around the maypole of peace and prosperity. That affluence was only interrupted by the Korean War, from June 25, 1950, to July 27, 1953. For the next seven years America grew in wealth again, and the dream of a chicken in every pot, jobs for everyone that wanted to work, and a family home came to fruition. Those were peaceful years, years where the American people could revel in their freedom and love for one another.

But that was about to change. The French colonial government had been trying for years to colonize the Vietnamese people, until they got their asses kicked at Dien Bien Phu, leading to a decisive Viet Minh victory, termination of French involvement in Indochina, and the signing of Geneva Conference Peace Accords. Most Americans didn’t know anything about Vietnam, couldn’t spell it or tell you where it was on the globe—but they were about to find out!

The French defeat led to the separation of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel into North and South. US involvement ramped up after Dien Bien Phu, and we were sucked into the quagmire. The second Indochina war would begin in 1956, include American forces, and eventually escalate into the undeclared Vietnam War.

The Daily Beast reported that the Geneva Accords didn’t so much establish a lasting peace as it set the stage for another war in Vietnam. Just a few months after the diplomats had departed from Geneva, Hanoi sent orders to the 15,000 clandestine Viet Minh political agents who remained in South Vietnam to begin a subversion campaign against the Bao Dai administration.

Meanwhile, the National Security Council in Washington called for the use of all available means to undermine the Communist regime in Hanoi, and to make every possible effort to maintain a friendly noncommunist government in South Vietnam. As 1954 ended, a CIA team under Colonel Lansdale had begun to implement a clandestine subversion program against Ho Chi Minh’s government in North Vietnam. The American crusade against Communism in Vietnam had begun in earnest.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

In the minds of the architects of America’s new war, the French defeat in Indochina had very little to do with the strategic prowess and tenacity of the enemy, and everything to do with a lack of political will in Paris, and French military lethargy and incompetence in the field. In retrospect, it’s astonishing how little respect was paid by American decision makers to Ho Chi Minh and General Giap’s brilliant protracted war strategy against France. The North was committed to the integration of guerrilla warfare, conventional operations, the methodical buildup of a shadow government in the countryside, and a worldwide propaganda campaign against Western imperialism.

There were, of course, many reasons for failing to give the Vietnamese Communists their due. Prominent among them was the arrogant and misguided belief that a new American way of war based on air mobility, heavy firepower, cutting-edge intelligence-gathering, and targeting technology would render irrelevant the strategy Ho and Giap had developed over more than a dozen years of fighting for their country. How wrong the architects of the US war proved to be! In the end, Giap employed essentially the same highly flexible strategy and force structure to defeat the Americans that he’d used to vanquish the French, albeit on a larger scale.

I think we have all underestimated the seriousness of this situation. Like giving cobalt treatment to a terminal cancer case. I think a long, protracted war will disclose our weakness, not our strength.

—George Ball

On March 8, 1965, the first US combat troops came ashore near Da Nang, South Vietnam. No one could have foreseen that the 3,500 marines who landed that day would eventually be followed by over 2.5 million American soldiers.

Prior to 1965, America had limited its involvement to providing South Vietnam with military supplies and advisors. On the day the Marines landed, 23,000 of these advisors were already in the country. They were members of Special Forces A teams, and they were helping South Vietnamese peasants defend their villages against Communist guerillas who called themselves the Viet Cong (VC).

Ten years and 58,000 American deaths later, the last GI left Vietnam under the terms of a peace accord between the US and North Vietnam. Two years later, in 1975, the South Vietnam defenses crumbled. North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the South Vietnamese capital just hours after the last Americans were evacuated from the US embassy in Saigon. It was called Peace with honor.

The Vietnam War was the horror show of our time. Some fought while others protested, while yet others legislated. America began to crumble from her cornerstones up, and from the peak of the Capitol rotunda down. The very cornerstone of America’s democracy, the foundation our founders thought to protect—American’s freedom of speech and our free press—for the first time brought a shooting war into the living rooms of all Americans.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

—Marshal McLuhan

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 launched America’s undeclared war in Vietnam. The US 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, defined by the death of every fallen soldier that fought for this country’s liberty in that theater of war, flourished and, with the help of do nothing politicians, turned America away from being the land of the free, home of the brave to the land of the freebee, no place for the brave, where we remain to this day.

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

—General William Westmoreland

Politics aside, undeclared war and the draft were pushed on America’s population. We went, we served, and some came home to the tumult that was now America. All gave some, some gave all, but the America that existed in the sixties and early seventies didn’t give a shit, and the lucky ones didn’t have to witness the continuing demise of this once great country; they came home in body bags, and every American with a TV set got the chance to watch up close and personal.

Every evening, the eyes of every mother, father, brother, and sister were glued to the images, watching the slaughter unfold as talking heads described the carnage in vivid detail. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War was partly attributed to greater access to uncensored information presented by the extensive television coverage on the ground in Vietnam. They watched because they could. They watched in hopes of seeing their loved ones still alive, hoping above hope that their viewing wouldn’t be interrupted by an ominous knock on the door from a military officer and chaplain offering condolences to a grieving family. Fear gripped the families of American service members, just as it gripped the service members in the combat zone.

There was another thing that was front and center on America’s TV sets—the carnage on the home front. Protestors were ripping apart the fabric of the American flag. They were called hippies and war protestors, and what they did was perfectly within their rights as Americans, but it didn’t make it right. Some self-serving protestors’ goal was to eliminate the draft, while others took the moral high ground of ending the death and destruction in a foreign country; but all the demonstrations had one common consequence—it crushed the morale of the American soldier!

They couched their protests in a shroud called the peace movement, disguising their intentions and message under a mask of harmony, camouflaged as a flower child. But make no mistake about their intentions: they became the festering malady that marked the times. Some, fearful of being drafted into service, fled to Canada, while others joined groups of dissenters, groups intent on disrupting not only the war effort but the peace and tranquility at home. Some groups of student activists started on liberal college campuses. Other groups who were racially fixated and enveloped in the civil rights movement further unraveled the threads that made up the cloth of our country and our flag.

Arising out of this chaos was another kind of protestor. The idle rich and famous played the most demoralizing role in this drama. These were the turncoats and traitors, wrapped in the burning American Flag and espousing flower power while brave American soldiers were being killed by the thousands. They should have been brought to the bar of justice, but their wealth, celebrity, and political status gave them a free pass; for, as we all know, the justice system in this country is not fair and balanced, nor blindfolded like the myriad of statues on countless courthouse steps.

We all know who they are, and we all know what they did. There is more severe justice they will face: justice dispensed by those betrayed—REAL JUSTICE!

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ONE

"Remember, remember the fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot."

—Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

He was only seventeen years old when he enlisted in the Army. Before he was eighteen, his boots hit the ground in Vietnam. James Cleaver was an ordinary boy from Portland, Oregon. He was born into an average family that lived in an average trailer near the outskirts of town. James was an average student and graduated from an average high school, graduating fifty-fifth in a class of sixty. The year was 1968, and newly graduated James Cleaver jumped onto the bus that would take him from reality as he knew it, and into a time and place from which he’d never fully return. While the boys from California were being flown to Fort Polk, Louisiana, the boys from Oregon were being flown to Fort Ord, California.

The new recruits met their drill instructor, or DI, as they exited the bus at Fort Ord. All the recruits were made to line up as the DI shouted their names in a mist of spit and cigar smoke. When he got to James, he spat his name out: Cleaver, James. He laughed as he got nose-to-nose with young James Cleaver, and snarled the words from deep in his throat. Meat; that’s your new name—Meat Cleaver. He was still laughing at his own joke as he moved down the line of young men, similarly making them uneasy, deriding and dehumanizing them until the name parade finally and mercifully ended. It was then that the words to that old Army tune popped into Cleaver’s head: "You’re in the Army now, you’re not behind the plow. You’ll never get rich, you son of a bitch, you’re in the Army now."

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Not on the same day but at approximately the same time of day, another bus full of young men pulled out of the swamp and past the front gates of Fort Polk. More cannon fodder for the politicians on both sides of the pond, so they could spray their poisonous venom into the eyes of the people they swore to represent.

That was the Vietnam spectacle, a spectacle that was just now beginning to light the Southeast Asian skies with the bonfire of discontent. For the past few years, the pot of soup had simmered, but it was now nearing a boil; and soon a young recruit named Bob Hawk Hawking would be up to his ass in the broth of disgruntlement.

Hawking was born in Fresno, California, in the heart of the Central California farm belt. He was born in the upstairs bedroom of his parents’ farmhouse. He never cried as he was born, just pissed down the doctor’s arm when the doctor slapped him on the ass to start his breathing; Bob Hawking started out his life being pissed off and never changed.

His parents made a fair living from the California soil. Bob grew up a card-carrying member of the Future Farmers of America. He went to average schools and was an average student, getting average grades. Bob graduated twenty-first in a class of thirty-five. He obviously wasn’t destined for rocket scientist school, so he looked at his options and joined the Army.

His dad and mom were proud of Bob. Make us proud, son, said his dad as he pushed him through the doors of the waiting bus. Make us proud, Bob, just like your other family members who served in WWII and Korea. We’ll always be here for you.

His girlfriend, Emma-Lou Acton—Action Acton as she was known on the boys’ bathroom walls—was also there to see him off.

I’ll be here when you get back, Bob. I’ll never leave you, she said as she kissed him passionately, full on the lips with plenty of tongue, while he groped her ass, out of sight of his parents.

Little did he know he’d never see any of them again when he pushed his way onto the bus that would take him to a faraway place, into the outer reaches of the twilight zone. Within six months, Bob’s folks would die in a fiery car crash, and Emma I’ll never leave you Lou would get pregnant by another guy, and leave him, never to be seen or heard from again—and he wasn’t even in Vietnam yet.

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Lance Tracy grew up on the streets of Newark, New Jersey. He was raised by a single mom and never knew his deadbeat dad, except the epithets his mom would scream about him in one of her drunken rages. Lance was street savvy before he was ten years old. He barely managed to get through Newark’s East Side High School, where he was a member of the Red Raider varsity wrestling team. Lance had an IQ of 160, borderline genius, but never applied himself to academic pursuits. He finished his high school career ranked fifty-eighth in a class of fifty-nine. MIT would have to wait. No college on Lance’s horizon—just a long and convoluted life and a degree from the University of Hard Knocks.

After graduation, Lance had two choices—three if you count pimping for his mom: crime or the Army. Lance chose the Army. He chose a green uniform over an orange jumpsuit. It looked glorious to Lance. Jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, shooting rifles and handguns, a chest full of medals. His mom never made it to the bus station the morning Lance left for basic; she had an early sundown, pulling a train of out-of-town business execs the night before, and couldn’t get up, let alone walk the short distance to the bus station. She would be proud of him if she’d lived another year instead of dying from cirrhosis of the liver that she’d acquired after a lifetime of nonstop alcohol consumption.

Ignorance is bliss, and in 1966, without knowing it, he became more fodder for the political war raging in Southeast Asia. Night after night, he watched it unfold on late-night TV after his mom sent her johns home and slipped into a drunken stupor. It didn’t look so bad to Lance. Maybe he could distinguish himself as a combat warrior and make the service a career, or maybe, worst-case scenario, he could learn ways to kill—a career path that would also, eventually, lead to an orange jumpsuit and three hots and a cot whether he worked or not.

Eight weeks after he first set foot on Fort Ord soil, he graduated again, this time at the top of his class. Lance Tracey was headed to Ft. Benning in Georgia for jump school, he had one stripe on his shirt sleeve, and he’d been given the handle Terminator by his Army buddies, for the aggressive behavior he always exhibited. Lance Terminator Tracy was only eight weeks away from getting his orders for Vietnam.

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Armando Super-Mex Esteban was born on the streets of East Los Angeles, in the heart of the Mexican ghetto. His father and mother were both day laborers, having entered the country illegally through the border town of Tijuana. Like many illegal, itinerant workers, the family easily assimilated into American life. They had no green card, no work visa, no passport, no driver’s license or Social Security cards, but on the seedy streets of East LA those documents were easily available for a price from the criminal elements that were taking over the underbelly of their neighborhood. After living a short time with relatives, they saved enough money to rent a two-room apartment, with necessities.

Armando’s parents insisted that he get something besides a street education and wanted better for him than their lot in life. By the time he was ten years old he’d mastered both Spanish and English. He attended Woodrow Wilson Senior High School where he was a star athlete and scholar, graduating near the top of his class. Armando could have gone to college except for the fact that his family not