Timing, they say, is everything; and this book is being released as the war hawks are once again pressing for military action, this time against the Shia Muslims in Iran, who make threats against Israel. During the Eisenhower administration it was the communists in Vietnam who, according to the domino theory, threatened Southeast Asia and India. As reported below that intervention didn't work, while vigilance and monitoring of the Russian forces in East Germany did. Few Americans would approve of starting a war if they knew its ultimate cost in human life, and President Eisenhower was no different. The first few chapters describe the situation he faced when France decided to quit Vietnam and the bloodless success orchestrated in the Philippines that led Washington to hope that given similar help, an expatriate Catholic aristocrat could save South Vietnam. They were wrong! The Vietnamese were not Filipinos and the Ngo Ðinhs were so despised by the largely Buddhist population that President Kennedy approved their removal sparking an internecine fight between the American Ambassador and the Pentagon. On November 1, 1963 senior Vietnamese generals working with the Ambassador removed Diem; but after the assassination of President Kennedy three weeks later, the junta they had formed was itself deposed by another coup referred to openly in Saigon as the Pentagon's Revenge! The year-long struggle to hold on to power by the Pentagon's substitute Nguyen Khánh is described in Chapter 10. The concluding chapters cover the beginning of America's military intervention including the first encounter between North Vietnamese regulars and troops of the American Air Cav equipped with the new M-16 automatic rifle. From Vietnam the book turns to intelligence operations in Europe. After WWII, Berlin had been partitioned; and the western sectors of the city sealed off by the Wall. Outside in what had been occupied East Germany lurked the largest Russian Army Group in the world, menacing Western Europe. Inside the Wall, trying to avoid another surprise like at Pearl Harbor, rotating shifts of American spooks billeted in a Kaserne renamed Andrews Barracks worked round the clock monitoring Russian transmissions and the microwave communications of the East German regime while other detachments and covert agents contended with the East German Stasi, the most effective secret police force that ever existed. This section concludes with a fictionalized account of one such operation in which a disillusioned officer conspires with an East German Major to get a covert agent sent into East Berlin in a lethal game of identity theft. The scheme fails largely because the centerfolds in Hugh Hefner's magazine were better at promoting democracy than the USIS! The East German Major is shot; his two men defect; and the OP impersonates the deceased officer to get out. The OP is smuggled out of Berlin to be dumped back in the boondocks from whence he came; and with things gone awry, the American Captain is left with, as Robert Burns phrased it, "naught but grief and pain for promised joy." Can't say exactly where he went.
About the Author: The author watched America's involvement in South Vietnam grow as a draft-deferred student at a state university. Graduating shortly after the Tet offensive, he enlisted before he could be drafted and after almost two years of training, he was sent to Berlin where he worked on projects for the Army and American intelligence services. After Berlin, he went to law school and worked for various oil and gas companies during the boom years following the Arab oil embargo and the passage of the Natural Gas Policy Act. His career ended when oil and gas prices went bust in the 1980's. He began writing after Congress expanded VA coverage for Vietnam-era vets to include non-combat related conditions. This book was begun as an historical novel with a few chapters on Vietnam to explain the protagonist's decision to opt out. Unfortunately, the research reopened too many old wounds; and the Vietnamese section expanded to thirteen chapters. As for the remainder, more than twenty-five years have passed since the Berlin Wall was torn down, and there seems no good reason to keep Berliners wondering about what the crews up on Trümmerberg and operating out of Andrews were doing at night while their city slept.