The Aquitaine Progression Read Online Free PDF Page A

what’ll it be, Blue Boys? Airborne, or the President of the United States—or the label?”
    At 1520 hours Converse led the squadron off the carrier deck. At 1538, as they headed at low altitude into the weather, the first two casualties occurred over the coastline; the wing planes were shot down—fiery deaths at six hundred miles an hour in the air. At 1546 Joel’s right engine exploded; his altitude made the direct hit easy. At 1546:30, unable to stabilize, Converse ejected into the downpour of the storm clouds, his parachute instantly swept into the vortex of the conflicting winds. As he swung violently down toward the earth, the straps digging into his flesh with each whipping buffet, one image kept repeating its presence within the darkness. The maniacal face of General George Marcus Delavane. He was about to begin an indeterminate stay in hell, courtesy of a madman. And as he later learned, the losses were infinitely greater on the ground
.
    Delavane! The Butcher of Danang and Pleiku. Waster of thousands, throwing battalion after battalion into the jungles and the hills with neither adequate training nor sufficient fire-power. Wounded, frightened children had been marched into the camps, bewildered, trying not to weep and, finally understanding, weeping out of control. The stories they told were a thousand variations on the same sickening theme. Inexperienced,untried troops had been sent into battle within days after disembarkation; the weight of sheer numbers was expected to vanquish the often unseen enemy. And when the numbers did not work, more numbers were sent. For three years command headquarters listened to a maniac.
Delavane!
The warlord of Saigon, fabricator of body counts, with no acknowledgment of blown-apart faces and severed limbs, liar and extoller of death without a cause! A man who had proved, finally, to be too lethal even for the Pentagon zealots—a zealot who had outdistanced his own, in the end revolting his own. He had been recalled and retired—-only to write diatribes read by fanatics who fed their own personal furies.
    Men like that can’t be allowed anymore, don’t you understand? He was the enemy, OUR enemy!
Those had been Converse’s own words, shouted in a fever of outrage before a panel of uniformed questioners who had looked at each other, avoiding him, not wanting to respond to those words. They had thanked him perfunctorily, told him that the nation owed him and thousands like him a great debt, and with regard to his final comments he should try to understand that there were often many sides to an issue, and that the complex execution of command frequently was not what it appeared to be. In any event, the President had called upon the nation to bind its wounds; what good was served by fueling old controversies? And then the final kicker, the threat.
    “You yourself briefly assumed the terrible responsibility of leadership, Lieutenant,” said a pale-faced Navy lawyer, barely glancing at Joel, his eyes scanning the pages of a file folder. “Before you made your final and successful escape—by yourself, from a pit in the ground away from the main camp—you led two previous attempts involving a total of seventeen prisoners of war. Fortunately you survived, but eight men did not. I’m sure that you, as their leader, their tactician, never anticipated a casualty risk of nearly fifty percent. It’s been said often, but perhaps not often enough: command is awesome, Lieutenant.”
    Translation:
Don’t join the freaks, soldier. You survived, but eight were killed. Were there circumstances the military is not aware of, tactics that protected some more than others, one more than others? One man who managed to break out—by himself—eluding guards that shot on sight prisoners on the loose at night? Merely to raise the question by reopening a specific file will produce a stigma that will follow youfor the rest of your life. Back off, soldier. We’ve got you by simply raising a