Read Vietnam II: A War Novel Episode 2 (V2) for Free Online

themselves training members of Marxist guerrilla groups including El Salvadoran FMLN, the Chilean MIR and Colombian FARC came up.   They had even gone to Afghanistan adversely to train Soviet forces on how to fight against a guerrilla war there.  They were masters of fighting big army tactics with guerrilla warfare.  If this became a ground war they would be our toughest opponents.
    Finally, the Secretary of State brought up evidence that the Vietnamese armed forces had shipped all the captured American-made weapons from the fall of South Vietnam, including M-16s, to Latin American insurgents, through Cuban intermediaries, during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
    It looked like the State Department was throwing everything except the kitchen sink at Vietnam.
    I thought the whole thing had to do with the POWs. 
    I guess there was a bigger picture.
     

Senior Airman Khoa Tran
    Special Operations
                               
    We crossed the border into Vietnam on November third.  I was excited and scared in equal measures.  I kept bugging the operators about it as we got close like a kid asking his parents if we are there yet on a holiday trip.
    After we were in I was smiling like an asshole.  To my knowledge we were the first American military unit to enter Vietnam since we pulled out in the seventies.  I hoped that one day I could tell my dad about this.
    “What are you so happy about?”  Todd asked.
    “We’re the first!  In Vietnam.  We are making history.”
    Todd shook his head.  I could not tell if it was a negative or just frustration with me.
    “What?”
    Todd did not answer.
    “We’re not the only team dumbass.”  Jeff told me.
    “Oh,” It had not occurred to me.  In fact there were more than a dozen teams from three services as well as CIA agents operating in the country.  We were one of the last teams to mobilize.  Of course I did not discover this until after I was back home.
    Oddly enough none of us had been here before.  Other than me I guess, but I had been a child.  Operators were in and out of Indochina throughout the mid-seventies, but this kind of work is a young man’s game and even the NCOIC Scott is less than thirty.  We brought the contractor along with us though.  Judge was pushing fifty if he wasn’t already past it.  None of them seemed impressed with him, but after getting in here I was glad he was there.
    He speaks the language and can carry his own pack and mine sometimes when I can’t walk anymore.
    The second day after crossing the border we found the camp.  It was a little plot of land with ramshackle buildings.  They all looked unfit for human habitation.
    An hour after we found it, the camp was ours.
    Unfortunately, the camp was empty.
    The operators went in with their rifles ready with me and the Judge guy right behind them.  My blood was up.  I felt like I was Special Forces.
    There were eight guys in the unit.  They all went by their first names and I could guess they were all enlisted.  Other than the three that recruited me there was Mike, Bill, John, Parker, and Chris.  None of them talked to me much, but like I said they were a tight group.
    Watching them take the camp I could see why.  They charged in and covered every angle like they had been there before and practiced it a hundred times.
    We found a couple of army guys.  They weren’t anything formidable.  Just a couple of guys to keep the lights on.  They didn’t even keep their AK-47s loaded.
    Todd and Jeff started leaning on them.  They wouldn’t talk. 
    “Camp moved.”
    The two captives were both enlisted guys.  They looked scared as shit.
    “You're from south?  Ho Chi Minh City?  Maybe Nha Trang?”
    “No,”
    They heard my accent and looked at each other.
    “Your family is from the south?”
    “I’m American.”  I said realizing with two words I had said too much.  I didn’t feel so special.
    Todd came up and when I looked his way his