Trafford Publishing: Century's Child: A Novel of an American Family's Cold War Years

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Century's Child: A Novel of an American Family's Cold War Years

by Walter D. Rodgers

309 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0151; ISBN 1-55369-338-8; US$25.50, C$29.20, EUR21.00, £15.00

This is the story of one working-class family and its progress through the twentieth century.

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About the Book

Century's Child is the saga of the Richards family, whose protagonist describes the interaction of his family, typical of tens of thousands like it, with the military and political history of this country, from 1900 to 1998, with a single flashback to November, 1864 (Sherman's March to the Sea), and a flash-over to the Somme, July 1, 1916.
The setting is principally a Midwestern city, but over half the action takes place at multiple scattered Army posts, in South Vietnam, and in Arabia.
The first-person protagonist is determined to break out of the blue-collar world, to break the mold of generations of skilled labor, and feels driven to see just how far he can rise. He wants to do something to make the world better, and perhaps to make a difference in its history. And it is not in him to say "die."
Medical school is the logical first choice; in 1954 he begins pre-med, the first of the Richards clan to do so.
His weaknesses are almost overwhelming in the 1950s; no money (no student loans then), no family endorsement ("maybe we should keep to our place"), a disastrous failed engagement to the love of his life, minimal skills to cope with adversity, and probably most importantly, he is not as intelligent as he believes that he is.
The antagonist is the established order, which is fuelled by the sweat of the blue-collar class. The fewer of the establishment that there are, the more fuel is available to each of them. The Establishment is easy to identify; you can tell by the way that its members treat anyone who cannot retaliate. And its great strength lies principally in its incumbency.
The conflict is not in whether the protagonist will succeed in breaking away into upward mobility; that becomes obvious early in the narrative, but in demonstrating how, first with the help of intensive military training, and then with a year in Vietnam, which makes up half the book, he does it.
The risk that he undergoes is similar to the act of swinging from one trapeze to another; the payoff, if he makes it, will be incomparable. If he misses, the fall will go on for a lifetime.
He makes his jump, and is successful; additionally he and several million others win the Cold War.
It can be done; the message remains : trip and fall, trip and fall, trip and fall again, but keep getting up, and you will reach your goal.

About the Author

Walter D. Rodgers is the pseudonym of a retired family physician who lives across the Narrows from Tacoma, Washington.
Dr. Rodgers is a life member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, who practiced in the American Southwest for 33 years. He has been board-certified in family practice since 1975.
He has served as a hospital chief of staff, vice-chief of staff, and as chairman of numerous hospital staff committees and departments. He was elected president of his home district's division of the American Medical Association in 1987 for a two-year term. He was an adjunct professor of family medicine from 1980 to 1994, and an assistant professor in the same department from 1995 till his retirement in 1998.
Dr. Rodgers represents the generation born in to the Great Depression, which grew up during World War II, and who were the active members of the force-in-being that, over forty-five years, won the Cold War.
Dr. Rodgers served as an enlisted man in the peacetime Army of the 1950s, and was commissioned after completion of Field Artillery Officer Candidate School in 1961. He changed his branch assignment to Medical Corps upon graduation from the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and Surgery in 1966.
The author has also been awarded the Combat Medical Badge, the Bronze Star Medal, the Army Meritorious Service Medal, five Army Commendation Medals, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with bronze star device, plus seven other lesser decorations and is entitled to wear the ribbons of three unit citations. He is a qualified military parachutist. In 1985 he was named a Distinguished member of the 502d Infantry Regiment (Airborne) based on his combat service in Vietnam.
Dr. Rodgers is a life member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Association Military Surgeons on the United States, of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and of the Disabled American Veterans.
The author is also a graduate of the National Defense University, Class of 1990. His thesis was a comparative study of ethical behavior in the military and in civilian society.
Dr. Rodgers served for one year in Vietnam and for six months during Operation Desert Shield.
Additionally, he served 42 years in the Army Reserve's Active Troop Unit Program, retiring as a full colonel in 1996.
Also by Walter D. Rodgers:
Army Green
Western Sunrise

Excerpts
Prologue
1 July 1916
Ruins of Thiepval, 8 Miles West Of Bapaume Somme Area, Department du Nord, France

    In 1888, a few of Grandpa Clair's uncles and their children, his older cousins, had followed the lumber north to Labrador. They settled there, some migrating further east to the Crown Colony of Newfoundland, not yet a part of the Dominion of Canada. They became permanent residents there, and, as the trees played out, worked the cod fisheries at sea, or the packing plants ashore.
    Some recent historians would say that on this day in 1916 the Twentieth century was less than two years old, having begun on 7 August 1914.
    At the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, six of the youngest of the Richards cousins joined Newfoundland regiments of the British Army, and after some training in Home County Barracks, were sent to England for further "lessons-learned" instruction. That consisted of a distillation of the hard experiences of the Battle of the Frontiers, in which 400,000 Allied soldiers died between 7 August and 15 November1914, and the also-ruinously-costly Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.
    From there, the boys were allocated to separate companies, and moved to France for their final field training. They were then rotated through the trenches by company for three or four days at a time, to develop an introduction to actual combat survival skills.
    One of the cousins lost a leg to a stray German rifle bullet on 2 May 1916, and was invalided home later that same month. He developed deep vein thrombosis, followed by septicemia, and died at sea during his return voyage to Newfoundland.
    On the morning of 1 July 1916, after four days' artillery bombardment of the German trench positions, and closely following a diversionary French attack before Verdun, the Newfoundlanders launched their assault. They left their trenches, and advanced in open order, shining Lee-Enfield Short Model rifles at high port, bayonets fixed, with the men dressed right, and uncovered front-to-rear. They walked away from the low ridgeline marking their field fortifications, keeping a twelve-foot interval between men, down into the shallow valley to their front, and then up the slope of the opposite low hill toward the shell-torn German earthworks.
    Only a few of them made it as far as the German wire, though rare individuals and understrength sections did actually get into the enemy's positions.
    In most places along the line, however, the Germans climbed quickly up, out of their untouched 20-foot-deep dugouts, carrying G1898 long Mauser rifles and Maxim machine guns, took their pre-assigned, if battered, positions and shot the advancing khaki waves to pieces. The Newfoundlanders were knocked down in windrows before most of them had even reached the halfway point of their assault.
    The five Richards cousins were never seen again; doubtless they were among the 20% of the dead who were not identifiable, and were buried behind the battlefield among the 27,000 others who died there, all in less than two hours.
    None of the American relatives heard about this episode at the time. I dis-covered it while researching the emigrant branch of The Family in 1988. Only then was it possible to tell the few surviving American Richards what had happened to their older cousins seventy-two years before.
    Their graves are still there, not five hundred yards from the places that they died, among those of their comrades-in-arms and -in-death.
    No Newfoundland Territorial unit, even at the height of World War Two, twenty-eight years later, has been deployed to a combat zone since that morning in 1916.
Chapter 1

1.
    Christmas Week, 1990, Ayun Airfield, North-Central Arabia
O, Mankind! Call upon your Lord humbly and in secret. Lo! He loveth not the aggressor!
          The Glorious Koran
          Surah vii, 55.
          Marmaduke Pickthall, Translator

* * * I stood in the long shadow of a five-ton truck, watching the 645th Medical Clearing Company unload in Arabia, 111 officers and enlisted men and women in all, in two C-130s. Each was heavily loaded, carrying a full duffel bag, an M-16 rifle and a stuffed ALICE pack. Their load-bearing equipment (LBE) was Army Green, Shade AG-44.
    I spoke to their advance-party executive officer: "They look good. You must have trained them well."
    "We think so," he responded. "They were all MOS-qualified before they were alerted to deploy, and we've had five weeks to give them a final polish."
    The men and women seemed dazzled by the late afternoon sun after being closeted in the relative darkness of the C-130s' cargo bays. They were wide-eyed and skittish, frequently looking toward the north as though expecting the rumble of distant artillery fire, unusual in green troops.
    The advance party counted off the troops into smaller quartering groups, and then led them into a pre-placed tent village consisting of twelve GP Medium tents, and a line of eight U.S. Government-leased light-blue civilian Porta-Potties which would not have been out of place on any stateside construction site.
    As I reflected on it, I'd spent a lot of Christmas seasons away from home. The first one, long past for me, is the most difficult.
    That morning, early, I'd finished the first of the 68 letters home that I'd write from the Middle East. Any Old Soldier will tell you that the time to do any personal task is the half-hour before or following breakfast, whether it's writing home, taking a dump, or cleaning your weapon; you're not likely to have any other time to do it that day. Admittedly, I wrote home less often than I had from Vietnam, thanks to the development of satellite telephone communication in the interim.
    The scene this December 20th was of a wide view, one of a light beige powdery sand, lit by brilliant white sunlight, and of sharp black shadows. There wasn't a cloud in the huge sky. In fact, that was the usual case in Arabia.
    No plant life was visible in any direction.
    The air was dry, with a faintly incense-like odor. One whiff, and your nasal passages were wide open for the duration.
    The debarkees were wearing desert camouflage, khaki battle dress uniforms (BDU), with black markings placed irregularly to break up their outlines.
    The 645th's personnel made up the first element of many more units due to follow, up to and including general hospitals, the Army's largest treating facilities.
    I remember thinking that it would be the newcomers' first night in a combat zone, though hardly mine. Over the next few months, they'd be exposed to modern warfare, and, if they survived it, would never again be the people they were that evening.
    I knew. I'd been through it all, 23 years before.

* * *

    On Christmas day, an instructor team from Central Command (CENTCOM), driving Dodge pickup trucks, pulled up at 7AM. All personnel located nearby were to be trained intensively for nine clock hours on the one-man-fired AT-4 Karl Gustav antitank rocket launcher, a very effective Swedish design that an American manufacturer built under license. It was a disposable four-foot-long single-use 84mm-diameter (thus, its caliber) fiberglass tube, containing the entire firing unit: rocket, propellant/fuel, and electrical ignition system.
    Everyone fell into formation for class, no exceptions, private to full colonel. I couldn't help thinking back over the decades I'd served since 1954, and of the Army's failure to design or adopt anything even remotely like the Karl-Gustav after it dropped the 3.5-inch rocket launcher around 1960. Yes, we had a one-man launcher, but it was too light to stop a tank. And yes, we had heavier rockets that would do the job, but they were too heavy for one man to carry and then fire. Nothing against the AT-4, mind you, I just wondered why we (who used to be the foremost country on earth when it came to innovation) didn't develop it or a facsimile.
    There hadn't been time for actual firing practice in the states, so CENTCOM was making it a very high priority in-country.
    We practiced firing the weapon with a 9mm subcaliber device (really a model of the launcher fitted with an internal 9mm carbine barrel that fired a standard pistol bullet) until we were proficient with it at a range of 75 meters, our targets being cardboard rectangles a little smaller than a tank hull. The target range wasn't marked out on the ground; it was simply miles of desert, with a low dune half a mile distant as our backstop.
    Let me backtrack to correct myself on one point: We did have one individually-fired anti-tank missile that was wire-guided, which required the gunner to stand upright on a modern battlefield for 11 seconds, to guide it home. Whoever approved that weapon for issue to troops had surely never been under12 small-arms fire. Eleven seconds is about three mens' lifetimes when the bullets are flying.
    All through the day-long class, the rumble of passing 25-ton semis only let up between serials of what looked like one everlasting convoy, heading north along the excellent Saudi highway system, all newly-built since (the oil-price hike of) 1974. It was the advance party of the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized). The heavy trailers were loaded with either one tank, plus miscellaneous cargo, or with two Bradley armored fighting vehicles. Both were admittedly overloads, but time was of the essence.
    The lightly-armed 82d Airborne Division was already in its over-watch/ screening positions just south of the border with Kuwait. They had been there since August; being a very light infantry force they were (and are now) the unit of first resort for rapid overseas deployment. However, airborne units are too lightly armed to resist an armored or mechanized attack for long. So, a stronger defensive posture had to be put in place quickly, lest the Iraqis decide to head south, with their hundreds of Soviet-made T-55s and T-72s, once they'd consolidated their forces inside Kuwait.
    In retrospect, even ten years after the fact, I can't understand why they didn't do just that, after taking twelve hours or so to regroup and consolidate in Kuwait City. They'd probably have used captured commercial gas stations to refuel, and then struck south into Arabia before even the 82d, our most mobile force, could arrive from CONUS. The Iraqis could have, no, should have, seized most of Arabia's oil fields in 72 hours, tops.
    Even after the U.S./Coalition force buildup was completed several weeks later, the Iraqi army had over three times the number of tanks that we did, and twice the number of artillery tubes. It was reasonable to expect that there'd be at least some breakthroughs into our rear areas, where the medical units would be located. This mandatory training would give us some small chance to defend against them.
    There would be no place for the medics to run, and no place to hide for them, nor for their helpless, unarmed charges.
    So, as the Geneva Convention states: "Medical personnel are specifically permitted to fight to defend themselves and/or their patients."
    Saddam Hussein had promised us "The Mother of All Battles," and I believed him; couldn't really afford not to. I just hoped that the heavyweight 2d Armored Division could get here from Germany before it started.
    I was working for the Theater Surgeon's office in this war. I couldn't go back to the 101st, though they were beginning to arrive in-theater. I was too old, and too high-ranked; my old airborne division had no place for me. Even the XVIII Airborne Corps, when it finally arrived, was up to strength and had no vacancies.
    When I imagined what Saddam's promised clash of armies would be like, I visualized a repeat of a freewheeling, widespread, weeks-long 1943 replay of the Battle of Kursk, spread over a hundred-mile-diameter vortex of desert. The open terrain, and the numbers and composition of the opposing forces was aboutequivalent to the Russians' and Germans' in 1943. We'd have played the Germans' role of the smaller force, though the one possessing a degree of technological superiority.
    However, the Germans had lost the Battle of Kursk.

Catalogue Information