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Army Green

by Walter D. Rodgers

352 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0759; ISBN 1-55395-045-3; US$28.00, C$31.95, EUR23.00, £16.00

Army Green is a fictional study encompassing the lives of two friends from Kansas City, as they encounter the events and situations of the last half of the 20th Century.

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about the book      about the author      excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book Army Green is a fictional study encompassing the lives of two friends from Kansas City, as they encounter the events and situations of the last half of the 20th Century. Their backgrounds are similar, yet differ enough to provide an intriguing level of contrast. It is the sequel to Century's Child. The two men meet as teenagers in the Kansas National Guard of 1954. Their lives develop over the next 50 years, separately for the most part, but along parallel career and family lines. The protagonist, Bill Anderson, begins his post-high school life intending (and wanting) nothing more than to have a "steady lifetime job" at Sears, Roebuck's gigantic mail order plant in Kansas City, Missouri. Thirty-five years later he has developed a completely-unexpectedly steady lifetime job as one of the Army's seniormost enlisted logisticians. He describes his life as a series of accidents which turned out well. The reader can't avoid the conclusion that the narrator made those incidents bear fruit, and his protestations to the contrary, chance had only a small part in their outcome. The turning point of his story is the crucial accident of his activation and posting to Vietnam in the wake of 1968's Tet Offensive. After that, even with twelve years' seniority, Sears doesn't have a chance. During his career, he continues to encounter his friend, now-Doctor Coe Richards, the protagonist of Century's Child. Richards' more-conventional civilan-and-reservist's life provides an engaging ongoing counterplot from the first to the last stage. During his first Vietnam tour in the Second Battalion, Eighth Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division in Central II Corps, he is able to meet once with Richards, the narrator of Century's Childm who has already been in-country for six months. Anderson's duties in subsequent assignments call for him to return to Vietnam three times over the next seven years. Certainly, the rich detail of Anderson's and Richards' peacetime service, and their Vietnam and Middle Eastern experiences in both combat- and rear-areas ring with the authenticity of men who were there, and saw it all. In the novel's concluding pages, the reader sees that these mens' name was legion; individually, they won out over personal adversity, as a group they won the Cold War, and even in old age they continue to be typical of the group that makes the United States viable and stable.

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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: Century's Child Western Sunrise

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Excerpt

10 September 2001

    My name is Bill Anderson.
    I'm an Army command sergeant major, pay grade E-9, the top enlisted rank.
    I am not a Regular; by choice, I've stayed a Reservist On Active Duty (RAD) since 1968. I keep trying to retire, and the Army always agrees, but then asks me to extend for one more year, and in one instance, for 18 months.
    This is the ninth time that they've done it.
    They seem to like my work.
    Sometimes I think (that at the old-for-a-soldier age of 65, what I can do is to provide an institutional memory to an organization (the Army) that is notorious for short-time personnel tours, and of either having a very short memory or none at all.
    And it was all an accident, every step of the way, from my being a seventeen-year-old junior college kid, till now.
    I started out with the intention of making my career as a lifelong employee of Sears, Roebuck and Company.
    However, things change. Boy, do they change.

*

August 2001

    We were eating lunch at the new Amerisuites Casino's buffet in North Kansas City.
    Both of us were back in town to visit relatives.
    Coe Richards was more of a habitué of Las Vegas than I was, having been there nineteen times since 1970. He maintained that this casino compared favorably with Vegas's. There*s less gambling noise, but more background music, though, he noted aloud. Personally, I think I prefer music.
    It was a Tuesday. The place was crowded with night workers, the unemployed and retirees.
    Quite a change from when we were growing up and gambling of all types was illegal, he said.
    Our talk turned to the Great War of 1914 through 1918.
    I visited Verdun and The Somme last October, Coe said.
    I missed the 1914 battlefields, except Mons/Ypres, but even that single example was enough to compare it, fought 85 years ago in 1914, where the soldiers were pretty much all volunteers, with the other two, fought two years later, where they were mostly conscripts.
    The Frontier Battles of 1914 were costlier than either of the other two was, though the casual listener to accounts of all three would likely conclude exactly the opposite.
    In August 1914, when Great Britain went to war in Belgium against the invading Germans, thousands of men, including several dozen members of Parliament, volunteered immediately and were killed within the first 90 days of fighting. That was partly explainable, I think by the ninety-nine years of European peace that preceded 1914. Young men went off to war as if on a summer's lark.
    Now, we know better.
    Even though the combat veterans of the 20th Century are thinning out, enough survive to remind us of war's unspeakable, horrible face.
    If another world war were to involve the United States, ask yourself how many of today's Congressmen would do the same thing 1914's Parliamentarians did?
    I get "zero" for an answer; what's yours?
    It's the difference between doing what you want to do, and may even think you love, in a way, and doing what you are forced to do.

*

31 October 1968
Camp Holloway, Pleiku, RVN

    It took the Viet Cong four months to make up their losses using North Vietnamese Regulars as replacements, another four to integrate them, and finally to design a new grand strategy, which I encountered at midnight, 31 October 1968.
    There was a Seabee 2-ton truck parked outside, preparatory to picking up some extra blasting caps and some TNT blocks early the next morning.
    I wouldn't have been surprised if the NVA company had hollered "Trick-or-treat, G.I!" or "Happy Halloween, Fourth Division!" as they blew a narrow gap in the wire, fired about a dozen B-40 rockets to cover the assault, and rushed in, to be met by a fusillade of rifle and machine-gun fire. I stayed low for three or four minutes, though nothing landed anywhere near me. The fire slacked off, and then, like the biggest dummy of all time, I climbed up onto the Navy truck, noticing as I did so that it had a ring-mounted fifty-caliber M2 Browning machine gun behind the passenger seat. I grabbed one of the spade grips, not intending to fire the gun, but to use it as a handhold to pull myself the rest of the way up into the truck bed.
    At that moment six American 105mm star-shells ignited 400 yards out from me, 200 yards outside the wire, about 800 feet above the ground, lighting up the landscape. On the gentle rise to our front, I saw what looked like a four-man supporting weapons section at 400 yards' range. I grabbed the other grip of the fifty-cal, aimed it, and fired a (much-too-long) 25-round burst of fifty-caliber at them, hoping to suppress their fire.
    The M2's heavy muzzle didn't climb or whip around at all as far as I could see. It just sat there and pumped out half the belt, steady as a rock.
    The attack sputtered out after thirty minutes.
    Four Americans were killed, and sixteen wounded. The NVA left 23 dead in the wire, all wearing medium-green cotton uniforms, and left 33 heavy blood trails, each from carrying or dragging away a badly wounded man.
    The next morning at first light, twenty minutes before dawn, the intelligence clerk walked over, and handed me one of the new palm-sized transistorized walkie-talkies.
    He told me it was CPT Washington, the battalion intelligence officer, a very dark-skinned young black man whom I didn't know well, who wanted to talk to me.
    Oh, shit, I thought, again.
    "Ivy Trout Four Alfa, this is Ivy Trout Two," he crackled at me. "Can you look west 400 meters and see me waving at you?"
    "Yessir, affirmative," I responded, shakily.
    "Grab a loaded weapon and walk over here," he said. "There's something that I want you, and an officer, if you can bring one along, to see."
    2LT Sims, the Medical Field Operations Assistant, was available. He and I picked up rifles and headed out through the gap in our wire at the double. We were there in seven minutes flat, joining the three men standing by, waiting for us.
    CPT Washington looked into my brain with his dark brown, almost black, nearly pupil-less eyes.
    "Sergeant Anderson, did you fire at the enemy with a fifty-caliber last night?" His eyes shifted down at four tarpaulin-covered bodies lying in a row, with only their boots bulging upward from under the canvas marking which end was head and which was foot.
    "Yessir," I croaked.
    Jesus, I thought, who did I kill? God, don't let them be Americans.
    The intel officer grabbed a corner and threw back the tarp. Each body had four or five relatively-small entrance wounds and an equal number of eight-plus-inch-diameter exit wounds. I almost giggled nervously: how can most of a cavity, empty by definition, be missing? but held it in. Remember, the fifty-cal was designed in 1917 to be an early anti-tank weapon; its bullet is four times the weight of an M1 bullet, and 13 times that of an M16 round. Its use against a personnel target is massive overkill.
    Three of the corpses were NVA officers, identically dressed in green poplin uniforms, much like ours. Someone had recovered their headgear, pith helmets, and placed one on each of their chests.
    The dead man lying nearest the middle of the four was wearing the insignia of an NVA major; the other two were captains. One of the captains' head was missing above his jawline. The fourth man was in civilian clothes, a short-sleeved shirt and dark brown trousers. CPT Washington identified him as probably being his battalion's political officer or commissar. "Congratulations. You probably wiped out their command group, and I'd guess their political officer, in about three seconds. I'll get you a Bronze Star for this, or know the reason why. Lieutenant Sims, you are a witness. Thank you. Dismissed."
LT Sims and I saluted (my hand was shaking) and headed back to our desks, carrying our rifles by their receivers' on-top handgrips.
    "Nice shooting," the lieutenant remarked as we split up, inside the wire.
    And just as I said in the very beginning of this story, it was all an accident.
    That didn't keep me from writing a letter to Coe Richards, telling him all about the incident, but also saying for God's sake not to tell our wives, Joan or Marcia. It was much better for them to think that I was in a nice safe supply depot, and that Coe was in a nice, safe hospital. We could always tell them later what big liars we'd been.
    Or not.

*

Afterword 16 September 2001 Ft. Lewis, Washington

    There hasn't been time to write much during the past few days.
    This time, they hit us, and they hit us where we lived. They were only 75% successful, but 3,000 dead in 15 minutes must at least get your attention.
    When news of the Nine-Eleven attack came in on my transistor radio, I was inventorying old buildings at Camp Murray, Washington.
    I don*t remember being particularly shocked by our country being attacked per se; the method was unsettling, however, as I thought of the passengers trapped aboard those four pirated Boeings.
    Better get to work, I thought.

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Catalogue Information

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