Exploding ammunition was one less thing the Abrams tank crew had to worry about. Their worry list was short. The M-1 tank, like the F-15 aircraft, had not suffered a single loss to its enemy counterpart in battle. In Iraq an M1 Abrams’ ammunition caught fire and the tank burned furiously. No one was able to reach the driver of the tank and pull him out. After the tank stopped burning they finally opened the drivers hatch to retrieve his body. The driver emerged unharmed except for the fact he was mad as a hornet that his friends waited so long to get him out.
Elvis switched to fully automatic and started mowing down the dozens of ghostly images surging toward the missile teams.
The four remaining tanks turned off the road and into their antagonists. Between the tanks and the dug in Free Cubans lay a six-to-eight foot deep gully that ran along the road. The lumbering giants slowly tried to negotiate the creek all at once. Apparently none of them wanted to be the next casualty on this deadly stretch of road. The Free Cuban missile teams courageously held their ground and their fire. They waited for a tank to expose its top hatch on its way down to the bottom of the gully. A few sparks in the sky was the only announcement the missile made before another tank turret blew high into the air and illuminated the battle scene in a white hot light. One of the tanks bogged down in the muddy bottom of the gully with its tracks spinning, stuck fast. The two remaining tanks roared up the other side of the gully and charged head long into the missile teams, which sent them scurrying back up the brushy hill.
The tanks getting off that road spelled trouble for the Free Cubans trying to hold the hill. The Communists would be advancing with armored support. If the tanks weren’t taken out, their stay on this hill could be measured in minutes.
The artillery was now a non-stop cacophony with no breaks at all between explosions, just a roaring, earth-jarring violence that seemed like the end of the world. He sent the signal to the gun to retract to its below ground level position. His screen went blurry and dark when the gun did so. The ground seemed to lift beneath him in shock waves and the air sucked out of his lungs. Elvis remembered studying about the Soviets who were assaulting some heights held by German Nazis during WWII. The Soviets brought ten thousand pieces of artillery to bear on that one assault. All the times he thought about being on the receiving end of artillery he had never even come close to grasping its terror. He realized in all his life he had never really been scared before. He was shaking like a cold Chihuahua. His eyes were wide with a crazed panic. He reached into his breast pocket for hard root beer candy and beta blocker pills. He ate plenty of both, chewing up wrappers and all. The candy shattered as Elvis chewed for his very survival. The plastic packaging of the pills cut his gums and the aluminum foil it contained made for a very unpleasant sensation between his teeth. He kept the mess in his mouth and sucked it like a chaw of tobacco. He had his own convoluted theory about the candy and his uncontrollable shaking. He was convinced that the adrenalin pumped into his system gobbled up the sugar in his bloodstream, leaving him weak and shaky. However it worked, candy did help him. The propranolol was standard issue to help inoculate the troops against post-traumatic stress disorder. He had his own theory about that too. Elvis thought it might help him control the fear he felt and let him think a little clearer.
He clicked the button to extend the gun to its upright position but got no response. He tried a few more commands to no avail. He had lost all contact with the gun. Either the line was cut or the gun itself was blown up. He reached down and picked up a spool of new line, ready to run it out to his gun.
The artillery stopped. Elvis was still frozen with fear. He just couldn’t seem to work up the courage to get out of that hole. Within a minute Elvis heard his name called out.
“Elvis! Elvis! Where are you?”
It was Nestor. Elvis pushed the lid up and brought his night vision receptacle over his right eye to find a world in a thick pall of dust and smoke from burning vegetation. “I’m here! I’m here! Right here!”
Nestor slid next to Elvis’ hole like he was sliding into home plate. “You OK?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m OK. You OK?” said Elvis. Nestor did not look OK. Both nostrils were bleeding and one of his ears was oozing dark blood. In fact the whole world did not look ok. The surrounding brush had most of their leaves blown off leaving the skeletal looking branches reaching for the sky.
Nestor said, “We’re pulling out buddy.” He almost sounded apologetic.
Elvis was a little confused about Nestor’s demeanor but it did not dampen the hope and relief that swept over him at the thought of getting out from under this artillery.
“Help me get the gun,” he said as he climbed out of his hole.
“Not you. Us.” Nestor said in a matter of fact way.
“What? Are you crazy? I’m not staying here without support,” Elvis snapped.
“It’s an order buddy. The sniper teams have already pulled back. They’ve overrun our perimeter. They’ve killed two guys down there. I think it was Gabriel and Boris. They were wounded they tried to surrender. They killed ‘em anyway. I saw it. They are not taking prisoners.”
It felt like Elvis’ brain went numb. He couldn’t focus his thoughts.
Nestor continued, “We don’t even have enough guys to get the wounded out. They slaughtered us down there, Elvis.” Nestor’s chin quivered but quickly caught himself. “Rivas is dead.”
This brought Elvis’ head up with a jerk. ‘What a waste,’ thought Elvis but those words sounded so meaningless in his head. Handsome, funny, kind, good Rivas. He muttered an expletive.
“I don’t think you got hit as hard here,” Nestor said as he surveyed the area and continued.
“The javelin teams are taking positions to the right and left of you. There’s a couple tanks out there. As soon as they knock them out we can take back this hill. We are moving the wounded right behind the hill. I think we set up an aid station back there somewhere. We’ll be back as soon as we get them over to the aid station. We are deploying all our Hopperslxv but that is only about ten or twelve or so.”
He was referring to the new and highly classified robot mine/grenade. Bigger than a hand grenade and smaller than a mine, these deadly little robots could be thrown like a very heavy hand grenade. Once it hit the ground it would right itself with gimbaled arms and point its brainy little head in the correct direction. An internal combustion chamber would ignite and drive a piston down to push against the ground and send the Hopper flying ten meters into the air and at the desired angle to achieve forward movement. It could repeat this sequence over and over and travel a distance of up to eight kilometers. All the while its cameras and sensors could send back intelligence. In the end it could find the heat signatures of the enemy, hop over to their location and explode like an anti-personnel mine at the optimum height. This generation of Hopper could not tell friend from foe, however. That improvement was quickly being added to the next version of the Hopper, which did nothing to alleviate Elvis’ fear of them. Ten or so was definitely not going to stop an assault of thousands.
“Great, Nestor. That’s just great! Just keep those things away from me,” Elvis yelled bitterly.
Elvis’ acute disappointment turned to anger at being abandoned on the hill with two missile teams that would fire their missiles (hopefully) and bug out as fast as rabbits, leaving him swarmed by hundreds of enemy.
“Ahhh,” Elvis growled in angry disgust as he spooled out a new line, moving fast in a crouching run to his gun. Bullets were whizzing through the dark smoky air and impacting randomly into the hill. He found the gun in good shape. He unplugged the old cable and plugged in the new, dusted off the scope and hooked up all three boxes of ammo in tandem. He ran back to his foxhole to find Nestor busy digging it deeper while two more members of the team, Freddy and Norberto, the latter missing a leg below the knee, were lying flat on the ground stripping off their armored vests. Elvis hooked up the laptop. “That’s good, that’s good,” he said to Nestor who
was flinging dirt out of his hole. “Let me in,” Elvis said as he grabbed Nestor by the vest and pulled him out. He then leapt in the hole with his laptop in hand and immediately started to fire the remote gun.
“We’re putting three vestslxvi on top of your lid and gonna bury it,’ Nestor hurriedly informed Elvis. “Its gonna be heavy.”
Elvis did not seem to hear his friend so busy was he firing the gun. Nestor laid down some sticks to prop up the edge of the lid a few fractions of an inch for air as the other two camouflaged the whole affair.
Hundreds of enemy were advancing, dropping flat on the ground then advancing more in leapfrog fashion. Elvis picked a group of three out of those hundreds and gave them an automatic burst. They went down. He swung the gun to the next bunch, fired a good long burst and knocked them all down like bowling pins. He continued this for nearly a minute until he looked at his round counter. He tried to estimate his ammunition expenditure, how long he was likely to survive this position then vowed to use better fire control. The forward elements of the enemy were now within five hundred meters and found a defiladelxvii on the other side of a slight rise just below his position. He would have a short amount of time to hit the easy targets to their rear. When they came over that rise it would be FPF (final protective fire) from then out. Elvis was slightly confused when the Communist artillery started to rain down on the hill again as their infantry continued to advance into it. It puzzled him for a moment but before he could organize his thoughts as to what it really meant, a T-62 tank came into view to his right. He could see the driver’s head from chin to night-vision goggles as he peered through the tank driver’s hatchlxviii. This was another puzzle. Why was the tank not using its infrared spotlight for its night vision? Was it broken like everything else in this broken down country? The tank was coming almost head-on and moving tentatively through the brush spewing machine gun fire into the night. Elvis carefully laid the cross hairs on the single lens of the goggles on the tank drivers face, made minute aiming adjustments then fired a single round. As the sight picture corrected enough to see, the hatch was now empty and the tank ground to a halt. Over and over Elvis hit the rim of the open hatch and the curved turret just above it sending bullet fragments and splinters ricocheting down into the open hatch. He had to keep anyone else out of that driver’s seat. The proximity fused artillery exploded high in the air above his hole showering the area with deadly steel shrapnel driving a small red hot sliver into his calf muscle. He could only imagine how many fragments those armored vests, now piled on top of his lid had stopped. He swiveled the gun to take a quick look to his front only to find another T62 tank in full view at three hundred meters surging forward like an unstoppable tidal wave up the slope. He aimed at the driver’s prism viewer when the tank erupted in flame, apparently hit by an American missile. An ethereal, clear yellow flame enveloped the rear of the vehicle blowing down and out to the sides creating a horrifyingly beautiful billowing cloud of translucent fire. Elvis scanned back to the other T62 with the dead driver to see the crew struggling to get out. He encouraged the effort by not killing them. Dozens of enemy were now surging over the last rise some four hundred meters out, running hunched over with the barrels of their AK-47’s blinking white against the darkness. Enemy artillery was still impacting against the burning hillside and exploding at wildly different heights above hill. In his relatively narrow view of the battlefield he saw Communist soldiers fall to their own friendly fire only to be replaced by the ones behind them. He fired a single shot time after time downing an enemy fifty-percent of the time at this range. Six shots every five seconds. That was the minimum to qualify as a TRAP gunner. As the enemy closed the distance Elvis increased the rhythm of killing to a faster pace. He was quite good operating the gun already but with his life on the line and so many targets, he threw away the standard targeting procedure of carefully centering the cross-hairs and firing. He had pioneered the ‘swing through’ method of firing and now he used it. He did not stop the gun as the target tracked through sight reticle but fired as the cross hairs swung through the target as a hunter would in duck hunting. A duck hunter does not stop, aim and shoot at a bird on the wing. He traces the flight path of the bird with the barrel of his gun and fires slightly in front of the duck to have the birdshot and duck meet at a particular place and time. The artillery stopped and all he heard was small arms fire. After fifty or sixty shots he found that his gun would no longer fire. Experience had taught him the gun rarely jammed. It was so rare that it never happened to him personally. If there was a problem usually it meant that the belt of ammo had caught on something. He retracted the gun, extended it and pointed the barrel right and left but it did not clear. Elvis closed up the laptop computer, brought down the night vision monocularlxix, then he drove his neck and shoulder into the heavy lid and pushed it aside. He grabbed the M16 rifle and ran to his gun. The landscape was a smoking, smoldering hill that he did not recognize. He found himself lit by flickering flames from the brush and tried to stay in the shadows. Disoriented he ran far right of the gun. Bullets were whizzing through the air and he was sure the Communists were nearly upon him. He ran for a crater created by an artillery shell. Far too late he realized the hole was already occupied by a communist soldier. Elvis did not stop his forward movement, indeed could not. He switched his M16 off safety and jumped into the hole firing. Luckily for Elvis the soldier was busy inspecting a dead Free Cuban and his Javelin missile launcher when Elvis dropped in on him. Elvis fired over and over into the Communist until his gun stopped firing. Elvis threw down the rifle and fell back against the wall of the crater in horror as if the dead man would rise up and attack him. Once he realized the Communist was good and dead he came to his senses. Rifle bullets were ripping at the rim of the crater and flying within inches of his helmet. This dead guy’s buddies knew what was up. Elvis unsnapped the grenade holders on the dead soldier and laid four of the ancient crenulated pineapple grenades to get them ready to throw. He had to get out of this hole. Once the Communists knew their buddy was dead the grenades would start raining down on him. Anyway, the faster he could fix his gun the faster he could be back in his hole and at the moment that was all he wanted. The only rifle he could find was the dead soldier’s AK47. He quickly stuffed four enemy magazines in his body armor pockets. He pulled the pin on the first grenade and threw it down the hill. Nothing happened. He threw the remaining three and only two of the pieces of junk went off. He grabbed the rifle and ran to find the TRAP. He saw a dozen or so enemy going up the hill forty or so meters to his left but they were not looking in his direction. Then he realized there was no one between the Communists and the aid station behind the hill. Elvis swore as he decided not to shoot at them and find his gun instead. Then he saw it. A thin cable on the ground. He followed it down the hill a short distance and found his gun. The explosions had upturned the ammo boxes and trapped the ammo belt. He threw the boxes clear of the hole and was shocked to find how few rounds remained. A hundred maybe. He lifted the gun and placed it pointing left. From that position he could cover his hole and the approaches to the aid station. He heard the roaring engine of another T62 and for a moment thought the game was up when he remembered the Javelin missile launcher at the last hole. He was aggravated that he did not even notice if the launcher still had a missile in it. He deduced that the last tank was killed from a different direction and no one would carry an empty missile launcher if they were running for their lives. And why would a Communist be so interested in an empty launcher? He hoped he was right. He headed toward the missile launcher when three Communists ran right past him heading up the hill. None of them had night vision on and seemed oblivious to his presence some thirty feet away. He couldn’t let them slip behind him so he dropped to his knee and fired. At this range he could not miss. He shot the last guy in line in the head. The next guy stopped to see if his buddy behind him was hit when his helmet was blown off and went down hard. The soldier who was first in line saw Elvis’ muzzle flash
and sprayed the area with automatic fire. Elvis dropped flat on the ground and fired twice into the man who fell backwards still clutching his rifle. Elvis had not gone unscathed in the exchange however. His helmet had stopped one of the AK rounds. Even while having a thousand thoughts a second going through his mind, the irony of getting shot in the helmet in return was not lost on him.
The Cuban Liberation Handbook Page 14