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

took down Powers over Russia.  The last thing that I wanted was to end up another POW.
    The only other thing I had to do was eat.  In order to survive at FL700 we U-2 pilots had to wear a fully pressurized suit like the astronauts.  I was not able to open my visor or my blood would boil.  That meant we had to eat tube food.
    The Physiological Support Squadron loaded up the cockpit before flight.  I had requested beef stroganoff and they gave me a lot of it.  Every hour I would down one through a little port on my helmet that squirted the food out to a straw inside my helmet I could eat out of.  After the stroganoff I would follow it with a tube of chocolate pudding that was enriched with caffeine to keep me awake.
    So while I tooled around at the edge of space all I could do was get fat and hope the signal guys were getting what they needed out of the mission.
     

Lieutenant Colonel Carol Madison
    Air Force Intelligence Officer
    Pacific Command Operations Center
     
    I was assigned to a joint three person team to aid in the air planning for Vietnam.  The other two members of the team were Lieutenant Colonel Elway from the army and Commander Dickens from the navy.  We were quickly dubbed the Three Amigos.  I had not seen the movie, but I put it on my list of things to rent when I got home.
    When I arrived we were planning over a dozen surveillance missions a day.  On top of that we were planning for an air campaign in the event the word was given.  The key word was cooperation.  All the services were living the Goldwater-Nichols dream and functioning like a single unit.  There were many problems.  It was not so much that we did not want to, but just that we had never done it before.  The Air Force, Navy and Army had three separate ways of doing things and they did not always agree.
    When we got rolling forward in the Southeast Asia planning we were caught a little off guard.  We had multiple defense plans for a North Korean offensive against the south, but I don’t think anyone had thought about Vietnam since the seventies.  If there were ever any contingency plans for Vietnam they were long lost.  I only mention that because I am proud of how well every came together.
    We had to settle on what to call the enemy.  Nobody wanted to spell out the People’s Army of Vietnam on every form so we landed on the acronym PAV.
    Next we looked at the size of their services.  For Air Land Battle to be effective we needed to field a large number of personnel ourselves.  The operations plan called for moving fast and holding ground.
    Personnel wise they had a large army.  Like most Communist countries they had large reserves.
    People's Army of Vietnam PAVN or PAV is a singular military establishment with the singular purpose of the defense of Vietnam.  The army is an outgrowth of Vietnam’s own cultural heritage including a history of nearly messianic military leadership and four continuous decades of combat experience.
    However, the Vietnamese military had been in decline since it fought against the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1978–89.  There had been several demobilizations, amounting to 500,000 less troops and military spending had been slashed.  Regardless, Vietnam still had one of the region’s largest militaries and one of the largest in terms of personnel per general population.  Furthermore, the People’s Army of Vietnam remained political with many of their senior officers holding leadership positions in the Central Committee and even the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP).  The military was extremely confident with their prestige based on a formidable track record.  Over the last century they had opposed major military powers including France, the United States and China. 
    PAV, which stands for People's Army of Vietnam, is the formal name of all the Vietnamese armed forces.  The other services exist within the army and are identified by the designation PAVN for People's