The Military Dimension-Mark II

by David Drake

  The Military Dimension-Mark II

  by

  David Drake

  Table of Contents

  MARK II: The Military Dimension

  David Drake

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original.

  (A shorter edition of this book was published under the title The Military Dimension.)

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, N.Y. 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-87697-X

  Cover art by Newell Convers and John Pierrard

  First printing, December 1995

  Distributed by

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  DEDICATION

  To Mr. Eugene Olson

  Who taught by example and enthusiasm

  As well as by the book.

  Acknowledgments

  "Rescue Mission," copyright © 1988 by David Drake for The Fleet, ed. David Drake and Bill Fawcett.

  "The Dancer in the Flames," copyright © 1982 by Stuart David Schiff for Whispers (magazine) #17-18, ed. Stuart David Schiff.

  "Arclight," copyright © 1973 by Mercury Press Inc. for F&SF, April 1973, ed. Edward L. Ferman. "Band of Brothers," copyright © 1990 by David Drake for The Far Stars War, ed. Bill Fawcett.

  "Firefight," copyright © 1976 by Kirby McCauley for Frights, ed. Kirby McCauley.

  "Contact!" copyright © 1974 by The Conde Nast Publications Inc. for Analog, October 1974, ed. Ben Bova.

  "As Our Strength Lessens," copyright © 1993 by David Drake for Bolos: The Honor of the Regiment, September 1993, created by Keith Laumer, ed. Bill Fawcett.

  "Best of Luck," copyright © 1978 by David Drake for The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series VI, ed. Gerald W. Page.

  "The Guardroom," copyright © 1985 by David Drake for Afterwar, ed. Janet Morris.

  "The Last Battalion," copyright © 1977 by The Conde Nast Publications Inc. for Analog, September 1977, ed. Ben Bova.

  "Something Had to be Done," copyright © 1975 by Mercury Press for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1975, ed. Edward L. Ferman.

  "The Tank Lords," copyright © 1986 by Baen Publishing Enterprises for Far Frontiers, Vol. VI, ed. Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen.

  "The End," copyright © 1990 by David Drake for Sworn Allies: Volume 4 of The Fleet, March 1990, created by David Drake & Bill Fawcett.

  "The Way We Die," written in 1971, copyright © 1991 by David Drake.

  I was pleased to note when I put together these acknowledgments that most of the editors cited have remained over these many years personal friends of mine. May it always be so.

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  The Hammer's Slammers series:

  Hammer's Slammers

  At Any Price

  Counting the Cost

  Rolling Hot

  The Warrior

  The Sharp End

  Lacey and His Friends

  Old Nathan

  Ranks of Bronze

  Starliner

  The General (with S.M. Stirling):

  The Forge

  The Hammer

  The Anvil

  The Steel

  The Sword

  An Honorable Defense:

  Crisis of Empire (with Thomas T. Thomas)

  The Hunter Returns (with Jim Kjelgaard)

  Enemy of My Enemy:

  Nova Terra (with Ben Ohlander)

  The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Welcome To The War Zone

  I started writing when I was an undergraduate at Iowa, majoring in history and Latin. My first sale (in 1966) was a Lovecraft pastiche. More accurately, it was a pastiche of very bad Lovecraft pastiches by August Derleth; and I can't really understate the story's quality.

  I entered Duke Law School and, after I'd completed half the three-year course, I was drafted. The Army offered me a number of choices, all but one of which involved me signing up for more time than the two years to which the draft committed me. I took the remaining option: entry into an accelerated Vietnamese language course, which would be followed by interrogation school.

  There wasn't much doubt where I'd be sent after interrogation school; but there wasn't much doubt anyway. At that time (1968) every draftee who'd been to college, and who didn't sign up for a special school, went to Nam with an 11 Bravo Military Occupational Specialty.

  Infantry.

  So I learned Vietnamese and studied interrogation techniques; and, in 1970, I was assigned to the Military Intelligence Detachment of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment as an enlisted interrogator.

  In general, MI personnel were rear-echelon types. Most of our people stayed in the 11th Cav's base camp at Di An (which was universally pronounced Zee An by Americans. I don't know why; in Vietnamese the pronunciation was Yee An).

  If there was a safer place in Viet Nam at the time, I haven't heard of it. Di An was rocketed exactly once while I was there, and the guys in the field wouldn't believe even that.

  The 11th Cav was unusual in that it did keep small units of interrogation and order of battle specialists in the field with each of the three squadrons (a squadron is the cavalry equivalent of a battalion). After a week with the detachment, I volunteered for field duty.

  Not because I'm any kind of a hero. I hated the army, but most of all I hated the army's rear-echelon bullshit. It seemed to me that I'd get into less difficulty in the field.

  It took a couple weeks before my request was processed, so I was sent to 2nd Squadron just after it had spearheaded the invasion of Cambodia. Two of the 12.7 mm machine guns captured at Snuol were set up as trophies in front of the Tactical Operations Center; but the remainder of the months in Cambodia were relatively quiet, as were the months after we crossed back into Viet Nam. I was moved from 2nd Squadron to 1st, but 1st was having a mostly quiet time also.

  And then I was transferred back to Di An for the damnedest reason I ever heard of. An MI unit doesn't get many people who know anything about firearms. There was an Inspector General's inspection coming up, and I was the only person in the detachment who knew how to strip the officers' .45 automatics down to the bare frames and clean them.

  I spent the last half of my tour in Di An as unit armorer and mail clerk. I was a very good mail clerk, and a good enough armorer for the purpose. I survived.

  So . . . . I didn't have a bad war. I wasn't shot; I was almost never shot at; and so far as I know, I didn't shoot anybody else.

  But I spent my whole tour believing that I was going to die. Not fearing it, exactly. Just the sort of belief you have as you watch the sky cloud up and know it's going to rain.

  It could've happened easily enough. I could've been on the track that flipped over after hitting a 20-pound mine. I could've gotten my leg caught in a tank's treads the way an order of battle specialist did. The flame track I was riding could've been struck by lightning and blown up with all the fury of 200 gallons of napalm—to this day, I don't understand why we weren't struck by lightning that afternoon.

  But where I live now, a woman was killed when a bicycle ran into her. Life has risks.

  The difference is that normally you ignore those risks. I spent my tour believing during every waking moment in the imminence of my death. I think th
at was pretty common among the people I knew.

  You can't live that way and stay sane.

  I came back saying that I was fine. I finished law school, got a job as an attorney; and wrote, because now I had something to write about besides Lovecraft's fantasy horrors.

  For the most part, I still used fantasy and SF conventions. That was easier to sell . . . and maybe easier for me to handle than the unvarnished realities of where I'd been.

  Apart from the genre trappings, I didn't make up very much in my early stories (or, for that matter, in many of the later ones). I used a lot of jargon, simply because the jargon had been so much a part of my life that it didn't occur to me that it wasn't a part of other people's reality also. (An acquaintance remarked that "Contact!" read as though I thought everybody had been to Nam. I suppose I did.)

  It was a couple years before it occurred to me that I didn't need to set stories in Nam in order to tell about things that had happened in-country. For the troops at the sharp end, wars had remained more similar than different over the past several millennia. That trend could be expected to continue.

  I created a future armored regiment called Hammer's Slammers.

  My shorthand description of Hammer's Slammers is the 11th Cav with ray guns. Early on, I tried to hide the fact that I was writing about Nam. It wasn't, some of you will remember, a popular war; and it was still going on when I started doing Hammer stories.

  I said that almost all my fiction has been in the SF or fantasy genres. The one exception, "The Way We Die," is included in this volume as a new story. I wrote it within a few months of getting back to the World in 1971, and I couldn't sell it to save my life.

  Both the major incidents in "The Way We Die" are true. That isn't important. What is important is that the mindset of the narrator (the psychotic mindset of the narrator) is real; and is normal under the stresses of the situation.

  When they say that war changes a man, they're being euphemistic. War makes a man insane by civilian standards. When the man comes back, he may return to civilian norms again. After a while.

  I'm not proud of many of the things that happened in Nam. I'm not proud of some of the things I did myself. But the men I served with were, for the most part, doing the best job they could with the cards they'd been dealt. I'm proud of them, and I'm proud to have been among them.

  Anybody's got a right to criticize the things that happened. But don't criticize the men who did them unless you've been in their shoes. Ever since I came back, the object of my military fiction has been to put somebody as normal as you, or as I was, into a war zone.

  And I hope to God neither you nor your son ever has a opportunity to compare my fiction with the real thing.

  Rescue Mission

  "Is it true," demanded one of the First Platoon corporals in a voice that filled the echoing bay of the landing craft, "that this whole operation is so we can rescue Admiral Mayne's nephew from the Khalia?"

  Captain Kowacs looked at the man. The corporal stared back at the company commander with a jaunty arrogance that said, Whatcha gonna do? Put me on point?

  Which of course was the corporal's normal patrol position.

  Kowacs took a deep breath, but you learned real fast in a Marine Reaction Company that you couldn't scare your troops with rear-echelon discipline. Trying to do that would guarantee you were the first casualty of the next firefight.

  "No, Corporal Dodd," said Kowacs. "Admiral Mayne is planning coordinator for this mission, but neither he nor any nephews of his have anything behind-the-scenes to do with it."

  He glared at his assembled company.

  The behind-the-scenes order had come from Star Admiral Forberry; and it was Forberry's son, not a nephew, who'd been snatched—no body recovered, at any rate—when the Khalia raided the Pleasure Dome on Iknaton five years before.

  Nobody else spoke up; even Dodd looked abashed.

  Kowacs gazed at the hundred and three pairs of waiting eyes—wondered how many of them would have any life behind them in twenty-four hours . . . .

  Sighed and thumbed the handset controlling the holo projector.

  The image that formed above Kowacs' head was fuzzy. The unit was intended for use in a shielded environment, while the bay of the landing ship Bonnie Parker was alive with circuits and charged metal.

  No matter: this was the 121st Marine Reaction Company, the Headhunters, not an architectural congress. The projector would do for the job.

  "Fleet Intelligence believes this site to be the Khalia's major holding facility for human prisoners on Target," Kowacs said, referencing the hologram with a nod. "Their slave pen. Reconnaissance indicates that slave ships land at a pad three kilometers distant—"

  A second hologram bloomed briefly, the scale of distance merging it with one wall of the big room.

  "—and their cargoes are carried to the holding facility by air trucks which touch down on the roof of the Administration Building," Kowacs continued as the image of the outlying spaceport disappeared. The building in the center of the main hologram brightened and began to rotate in three dimensions while the Marines squinted.

  "Based on analysis of captured Khalian structures," Kowacs said, "Intelligence believes the building is an integral polyborate casting, probably of two above-ground levels—"

  "That high and the Weasels only got two floors?" demanded a sergeant from the Heavy Weapons platoon. She was concerned, not gibing like Dodd earlier. "Them little bastards, they like low ceilings."

  "Good point, Sergeant Rozelle," Kowacs said, as if he liked to be interrupted . . . but soldiers who were too dumb to think for themselves were too dumb to trust with your life in a reaction company. "Intelligence believes the building is scaled to the needs of human—slave—intake. But there aren't any windows, and there may well be a third level inside."

  Kowacs cleared his throat. Before any of the half dozen Marines poised with further questions could interrupt again, he continued, "The walls and roof are rigid enough to withstand considerable stress, but they're apt to shatter once their integrity is breached. Intelligence believes that strip charges will hole them and that plasma bolts should crumble sections large enough for easy entry."

  Almost the entire complement of the 121st was veteran. Even the scattering of newbies was aware that Fleet Intelligence believed a lot of things—but all Fleet Intelligence knew for sure was that no analyst's butt was going to be on the line if his beliefs were false.

  "The admin building is separated from the camp proper by double fences with fifteen meters between them," Kowacs continued as the hologram of the building froze and that of the fenced area brightened in turn. "The intermediate separation is believed to be mined and is swept by automatic weapons sited on the building's roof coping. The fence may be electrified."

  Marines nodded, easy in the knowledge that barriers impassable to a bunch of unarmed civilians were going to be a piece of cake to them.

  The forty-eight buildings splayed like a double row of spokes around the hub of the admin building, twelve and thirty-six, brightened as the hologram fence dimmed.

  "Beyond that are the slave pens and workshops themselves," Kowacs said.

  Just for a moment he paused, his mouth half open—prepared speech interrupted by memories of Khalia and slaves . . . . Memories of his father and mother, dead on Gravely, and his sister's body left behind two weeks later on LaFarge when the same raider landed to replenish its stock.

  Its larder.

  "Intelligence doesn't even guess at the structure within the compound." Kowacs forced his tongue to continue, though it was several moments more before his eyes were focusing again on the Marines. They were draped over folded bunks and the equipment crated to deploy with them. Some of them looked back at their captain with vacant expressions that Kowacs knew must mirror his of a moment before.

  "There may be guards in the barracks, there may not," he continued thickly, damning the emotion that clogged his throat and made him less able to do his job—<
br />
  Of erasing every living Weasel from the universe.

  "If there are guards, they probably don't have weapons; but most of you know an unarmed Khalian can still be a dangerous opponent. "

  "It's still a fucking pelt, too," growled someone from a corner of the bay.

  "Yeah, it's that too," Kowacs said in a voice with an edge. "And any Marine taking trophies while there's still a job to do, I'll take his ears myself. Do you understand?"

  The newbies thought that was a threat. The veterans knew it was a promise.

  Kowacs took a deep breath and, fully in control of himself and the situation again, continued as the hologram changed. "The outer perimeter is a double fence again, but with guard towers on the exterior."