Alternate History Y

Alternate History Y

Lee Harvey Oswald got sick the night before the Friday he was going to shoot the US president in Dallas. And somewhat randomly, but influenced by poorer vision and breathing, he missed the fatal shot on John F. Kennedy. The bullet still put Jack in the hospital, then he was released from the close supervisory care four weeks later; Lyndon Baines Johnson never became president.

Southeast Asia was getting messy with Communists; President Kennedy knew that the country had lost a lot of good soldiers and marines in Korea a few years before, so he never escalated the war. The secret government advisors stayed around the Democratic government of South Vietnam, but Kennedy knew the Vietnamese people did not really respect the Christian leadership of Saigon; the president could tell that this country was not ideologically or culturally like the Korean peninsula.

These people wanted freedom, albeit through Communism. Much like the Chinese.

So, South Vietnam fell, and the Soviet-Chinese enterprise started to fill into Laos and Cambodia, even Burma. Thailand held strong due to built-up troops from Britain and France; the US and many world UN countries deposited their troops there. Including India.

However, the Communist insurrections burgeoning in Malaysia and Indonesia became a messy quagmire; the United States and especially Australia and France became alarmed to the closeness of these civil wars and the Communist regimes there.

The Muslim nature of the Communist regimes of Malaysia and Indonesia struck many true Leninists or Trotskyites as counter-intuitive. How good devout Muslims believe in godless government?

They found a suitable way, and incorporated the Communist Manifesto into the Friday sermons in the mosques. More Sunni than Shia accepted, but that was enough. Not to mention the Alowites in Syria, or the Shia of Azerbaijan, already behind the Iron Curtain.

This ideological economic movement greatly affected the Muslim Middle-East, and huge swathes of Africa. East and West Pakistan had new arguments to wage against India and the West.

Meanwhile Latin America, fueled by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, became a hotbed of insurrections and democratic movements. Chinese advisors were found from Mexico through Central America all the way down to Patagonia.

Europe was freaking out. The Soviets had taken Hungary in the 1950s, preparing to move on Prague and Czechoslovakia. The USSR kept up its western and southern advances.

Yugoslavia was looking for their own lebensraum, Bosnian Muslim specialists spreading the new Islamic Communism throughout the endless countries of Africa and Asia.

China had its operatives in Cuba and El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile...

The West was in trouble. The Cold War fighting that might have only been fought by proxy in so-called Banana Republics across the globe now necessitated United States troops.

Israel was licking its wounds, trying to figure out the new Islamic Communists of the Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Turks...

Kennedy lost to Nixon eventually, and things got really messy. Hundreds of thousands of US troops were deployed into the newest World War, awaiting nuclear Armageddon.

This alternate history was a nightmare scenario.

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Back to our known history: we all acknowledge that the tragic loss of John F. Kennedy was a blow to the United States.

We also acknowledge that the Vietnam Conflict, yes, the War in Vietnam was awful and gut-wrenching.

Many young men did not return; many more lives were forever altered. Vietnam suffered unspeakable losses. No war is pretty, but this fight was ugly all around.

However, I would submit that we cannot re-write history, and more importantly, we do not know what a sniper's bullet may or may not have changed in the course of human history.

And, Jack Kennedy, in this alternate narrative, avoided the tragedy of French Indochina at first. The malaise and terrible history that we today know as Vietnam did not happen in this alternate history.

He avoided all that human trauma and drama.

At first.

But we do not know how many other victims those brave US fighters and others saved from 1960 to 1975.

We cannot know.

History is full of the unknown and unknowable.