The Viets were on top of us, and my only option was to call in fire on our own positions.
We had a few seconds to find cover; the Viets had none as the rounds screeched into the dusty, rubbled street we fought from.
The third volley got me, lifting me and punching me through a shop wall.
I landed on something soft, realized I was hit but still alive, and stumbled out.
Here and there, tattered, dust-covered, bearded, staring, my men came out of the shatter.
They looked god-awful… but they still had their weapons, and still were fighting.
It was the Viets' turn to hesitate, then break, going back, in stumbling runs, the way they'd come.
I made sure they were retreating before I allowed myself to look at my shattered leg, my torn chest and arm, saw a tank with a white star on its turret rumble toward me, decided I'd done enough for one day, and went down.
I don't know who put the Viets' banner across my chest as they carried my stretcher to a waiting medevac chopper. I think I'd like to kick his ass, for that was one of the biggest causes of my future troubles. All I had was the banner, and, all bullets expended, my.44 Magnum.
I went out to a hospital ship, where amazingly nobody stole either my flag or pistol, and then to Camp Zama in Japan, then back to Walter Reed, where they started putting me back together.
The war wasn't going well, and "Sam Richardson's Last Stand" was just what the media, and the American public wanted.
There were already thirty thousand dead, twice that wounded, and Kennedy was forced to call up the reserves.
They wanted me to take the Congressional. I refused. I'd met men who'd won that medal and knew damned well I'd done nothing but what I was supposed to be doing, and that's not what they give that little necklace for.
They were getting me ready for my third operation at Walter Reed, and I was already anesthetic-silly when the President of the United States came calling.
In swept Kennedy, flanked by more generals than I'd seen pictures of in the Pentagon, plus, of course, a scattering of press types.
I guess I did something dumb, like try to sit up at attention. I was in the presence of one of my heroes, and a real legend.
"Relax, Major," Kennedy said, with that famous grin that'd brought him who knows how many votes.
"Uh, sir, It's 'lieutenant. »
"Not anymore. You were made captain while you were still on the ground in Hanoi, and I just took the liberty of jumping you up a grade."
I may have moaned, thinking how that would play with my fellow officers. Kennedy must've thought I was in pain.
"Maybe this'll make you feel better," he said, holding out a hand without looking back. A general put a box in it, then another. He gave me the Distinguished Service Cross, which is just below the Medal of Honor, and a Purple Heart.
I stammered thanks.
Kennedy moved beside me, let the photogs have their shots.
"Plus," he said, "when you get better, I want you as one of my aides."
I managed a "yessir," then events got to me, and my mind went away.
The papers, of course, loved it:
Prexy Names Richardson
To Personal Staff
Last Stand Hero to
Advise Kennedy
And so forth.
I was recuping well, and my father came to see me.
"Congratulations, I suppose."
"I didn't know what else to do, sir."
"No," he agreed. "Not much you can do when the gods reach out. But you might be in for some problems."
"I've already gotten some grief," I told him, "from some of my friends."
"That, too," my father said. "But I was thinking more of something I learned a long time ago. If you like the circus, don't sit so close you can smell the elephant shit."
I didn't understand, not for some months. By the time I did, it was too late.
I hated Washington. Going to Georgetown, which supposedly educates you in the realities of power, I should have known better. But I didn't. The only people who went there wanted something. Preferably for nothing.
I can't remember anyone who fulfilled Kennedy's orders to "ask not…" All the bastards did was ask… and take.
And the Kennedy brothers were no different than anyone else.
I saw, very quickly, that mad gleam of power in JFK's eyes, and realized he would do anything to keep or increase his authority.
I also despised his personal morality. Kennedy, it was said truly, would fuck a snake if someone held its head. He had no qualms about cheating on his wife, at any moment of the day or night if he could find a hall closet to slip his latest bimbo into.
He lied to the people of America, justifying it with "When the time is right, they'll be told. But not yet." Which meant, as far as he was concerned, never.
His brother the attorney general was even worse, keeping his own overweening ambition concealed in the pretense that all he wanted to do was help his brother.
I never forgot what my father told me, that one of Robert Kennedy's first jobs was as one of the unutterably evil Senator McCarthy's lawyers.
I was, indeed, too close to the elephant.
I applied for a transfer back to the real Army several times, but was always refused. Kennedy said he "needed me."
I should have known I was his token war hero, especially after he called me into his office, and told me I was headed for Fort Bragg.
"For what, sir?"
"Since the Green Berets are mine, I think it would be a good idea to have one around me."
"But-"
"On your way, soldier."
And so I went. And found something wonderful.
I'd deliberately chosen paratroops, and then Rangers, not because I wanted the little tabs and devices on my uniform, but because I wanted to be a warrior among warriors.
In Special Forces, I found warriors far more dangerous, more qualified, than I could have dreamed of.
They treated me, naturally, as just another White House dickhead.
I kept my mouth shut, and soldiered hard.
I wanted approval from these men, and I didn't get it.
But I returned to Washington with my beret, and a determination to get myself back to Vietnam, in any capacity so long as it was with SF.
The progress of the war helped.
It was not going well at all.
We held Hanoi, just like we held all of the other major cities in North and South Vietnam. But what of it?
Ho Chi Minh, his Communist party, and his army sank into the marsh of the countryside. Ho went back up the Red River, back into the mountains on the Chinese border, just as he'd done when the French tried to hold his country after WWII.
From there, he fought his war.
We garrisoned the cities, and tried to hold the roads.
And the Communists fought back. Not "fairly," as if there's such a thing in war.
But from the ditch, from the jungle, always at our back.
When we got arrogant, or careless, his Regulars, or the main force Viet Cong in the south, or even the local guerrillas, would appear, strike hard, and vanish.
Enraged, we struck back, bombing villages we thought were "hostile," or even declaring entire districts free-fire zones. If those areas weren't hostile before the helicopter gunships or the B52s or the fighter-bombers came over, they certainly were afterward. To ensure the people we were supposedly helping fight Communism hated our guts, we sent through battalions of legs, who thought any gook was a Commie, and probably deserved to be dead.
The puppet government we supported in Saigon was only interested in looting and control. Their best troops, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam paratroops and Rangers were used as palace guards.
Kennedy seethed, increased the draft, and had, by 1967, over a million Americans in country.
And the war raged on.
University students protested the war, and these protests were slapped down by Attorney General Kennedy. He made the famous statement that "protest in a time of trouble is treason," and the prisons filled up with middle-class Americans, who were given the option of jail or the military.