South Vietnam was divided into four military regions known as Corps Tactical Zones, each defining command structure, troop deployment, and strategic operations during the Vietnam War.
The fourth entry cites the action of the 1st Marine Air Wing one sortie which could have included our mythical Captain Jimmy Thompson USMC that Quanh saved in Chapter 7.
In each number of the aggregate, in every instance, there are stories, POV the countless, faceless receivers of all this largesse. The enemy, the presumed enemy, the mistaken enemy and all the others who just got in the way. All have their story. Stories too among the collaterally damaged and the watchers, who see their families, friends and neighbors die.
Those that die. Those that are hit but live. Those who witness. Those who feel the force, hear the noise and screams and are terrified.
This Press Release 4993 dated 16 September 1969 was short a week in making it an even 5000, or almost fourteen years. One could see in the composite, how the Americans running the war could be deluded in presuming the enemy must be close to defeat. How could a small country with so few people withstand such an onslaught and not be decimated?
Marking the end of the war in 1975, they withstood over five more years of this punishment (minus a couple of bombing moratoriums).
Maybe the Americans paid too much attention to their numbers and stuck to their professed strategy of a war of attrition. Bomb them out of existence, keep the kill rate high until the remaining population submits. And the sky belonged to America. How could we lose?
The real war on which this story is based has its other side, the non-fiction side. What actually happened, what caused it to happen and a lot of questions of why and how and what happened next. I collected the recollections of those times, the players, motives and the pageantry of it, the incongruity of it, its vastness, and how many people it takes to affect a war and their effect. It is a pageant in the grandest proportions, played with the most beautiful, most powerful, most exciting tools of war. At least that’s how the Americans do it.
I watched a squadron of F-4 jets dive bomb a target near Danang. I was on the tarmac waiting for a flight back to Saigon. The jet dove at a very fast 50 degree angle. We were too far to hear it scream downward, but we felt the concussion that followed and saw the smoke rise. The next F-4 was already diving when the other jet cleared the green canopy and climbed into position for another dive. Horrible and lethal but still stirring.
I put these pieces together in what I labeled, The Back of the Book. It is also a bit of a memoir on what I saw and the people I met.
Some of the people were transformed to fiction and became my characters. Other characters were wrought from my Marine Corps days. Yet others came from somewhere along the way.
