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Author's Synopsis
“SAIGON SUMMER: Corruption and Murder During/After the Tet Offensive 1968” is a fictionalized account of real events during the nine months and three phases of the Tet Offensive, in South Vietnam.
During and after Tet, five military photo/journalists covered the war in the rice paddies, the cities, the mountains and highlands, and all across the Mekong Delta. While fighting raged, these same enlisted men discovered that Black Marketeers based on the Saigon Docks, were stealing and selling 45 tons monthly of uniforms, weapons, equipment and supplies, GI socks, ammunition, vehicles, MOGAS and AVGAS to both sides for obscene profits.
Tasked to photograph and report about the war, these young men saw US military infantry and support units starved of equipment, and infantry men dying because of the stolen goods. Two of the five set out to find out who is running this corrupt operation, how it works, and expose it to the two major Commands that ran the US effort in Vietnam. (namely MACV, and USARV).
Through the prism of a Public information Office on the Saigon Docks, we see both US military officers and non-com sergeants who operate the Black Market on a day-to-day basis. These active-duty men censor, distort, and destroy evidence of the operation run by four American military men.
Photo/Reporters endure terrifying firefights, monsoon rainstorms, rancid mud and insects, and hardened VC/NVA troops daily. Their work is censored and distorted to show that things are going well, despite facts to the contrary. As time passes, these “photo guys” find stolen American goods in every part of the country. And a steady expansion of further Black Market activities into all four tactical zone of Vietnam, is in the works.
They also find out about phantom ships delivering non-existent AVGAS to pipelines that don’t exist, from ports that have no record of these ships ever arriving. All to enrich these insulated “Four Horsemen.”
The enlisted men are subject to (Article 15) discipline, bogus charges and trumped-up Courts Martial charges, and repeated daily harassment and physical abuse to, “go along/to get along.”
Murders follow in the path of Black Market expansion, and men on both sides fall victim to “stop at all costs, or terminate them,” and keep the Black Market ‘pipeline’ running at full speed.
You will not like SAIGON SUMMER, but every detail of this story is true, based on personal accounts and eyewitness testimony. Evil flourished in Saigon in 1968.
ISBN/ASIN: ISBN# 978-0-988-1773-5-2 (for E-book)
Book Format(s): Soft cover
Review Genre: Fiction—Historical Fiction
Number of Pages: 210