Drowning on Land
Deep beneath the ground, the shells blew. The earth heaved around them, the trench they were in collapsing where the sandbag revetments had rotted.
Time-delay fuses, McCulloden thought. Oh, shit.
The ground heaved again and again—the sound of the explosions muffled, transmitted through the soil like ripples through water. Must be what an earthquake feels like, he thought, the ground beneath your feet no more solid than if you were walking on the air. The very air seemed to waver, turn brown, the dirt so thick it coated the lungs, that and the explosives choking out the life-giving oxygen.
Then a particularly close hit threw him bodily down, collapsing the walls around him, covering him with rat-infested sandbags, worms, the detritus of years of neglect. He was swimming in dirt, desperately trying to keep his head out of the constantly filling trench, praying to survive and knowing that if just one more hit close, it was over.
He had time only to register an explosion so impossibly loud that he knew even before the pain hit that his eardrums were probably gone. Then the world went black.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
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Copyright © 2004 by John F. Mullins
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Dedicated to all the men, living and dead,
who served or are serving in the Special Forces.
John F. Kennedy told us to go out and “fight any foe,
bear any burden,” and we did.
De Oppresso Liber
Operations Order 25/72
B Company, 5TH Special Forces Group
(Airborne), 1ST Special Forces
SITUATION ENEMY FORCES. 1: Weather—High temperature 105 degrees Fahrenheit, with a low overnight of 80. Partly cloudy, humidity 92 percent. Forecast calls for increasing cloudiness over the next twenty-four hours with the strong possibility of rain. Expect low overcast in the mountains, ground fog beginning at approximately 0300 hours, degraded visibility for flying operations.
2: Terrain—Mountains rising to 5,000 feet a.s.l., heavily jungled, triple-canopy trees with some underbrush. In cleared areas expect heavy underbrush, elephant grass, wait-a-minute vines. Intermittent streams, most of which will be dry here at the end of the dry season.
3: Identification—Captured documents and reconnaissance have shown the presence of the 66th and 28th NVA Regiments in the area, supported by elements of at least one artillery regiment. Local Viet Cong battalions likely in support.
4: Location—Command headquarters likely across the border in Laos. Long-range artillery also likely there. Elements of both regiments have taken up positions from which they can easily mount an assault against Camp Boun Tlak. Signals intercept indicate the presence of antiaircraft artillery near the camp and located on the high ground surrounding it.
5: Activity—The enemy has moved its forward elements into covered and concealed positions within easy reach of the camp. Digging continues, despite frequent shelling from within the camp. Air observation shows communications trenches and forward positions being manned at all times.
6: Strength—Unknown with any certainty, however, the 66th and 28th are known to have recently crossed the border from rest and refitting in their sanctuaries in Laos after the mauling they took last year during Operation Bold Strike. Air strikes and other aggressive actions are unlikely to have degraded their combat ability to any great degree.
FRIENDLY FORCES. 1: Mission of next higher unit—Commander, Company B, and his combat staff will maintain a forward operating base at Firebase Esther and be prepared to maintain communications with all friendly elements able to support the mission.
2: Location and planned actions of units on the left, right, front, and rear—There are no units on the left, right, front, and rear.
3: Mission and route of adjacent units—There are no adjacent units.
4: Fire support available—Division Artillery, 4th Infantry Division, will provide fire support consisting of long-range artillery and aerial rocket artillery.
ATTACHMENTS AND DETACHMENTS—None.
MISSION—II Corps Mobile Strike Force (Mike Force) will move to reinforce Detachment A-228 at Camp Boun Tlak and assist the camp strike force in resisting the expected assault.
EXECUTION CONCEPT OF OPERATION. 1: Scheme of maneuver—To be developed by Commander, II Corps Mike Force, and his staff.
2: Fire support—Operations in and around Camp Boun Tlak will be supported by Cobra gunships, with Air Force fighter support as backup.
COORDINATING INSTRUCTIONS—To be prepared by the Commander, II Corps Mike Force, and his staff.
SERVICE SUPPORT RATIONS—Reports from within the camp indicate sufficient rations to support all reinforcements for the immediate future.
ARMS AND AMMUNITION—As per Mike Force Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).
UNIFORM AND EQUIPMENT—At the discretion of the battalion commander.
EVACUATION OF WOUNDED—Normal medevac procedures.
PRISONERS AND CAPTURED EQUIPMENT—Field interrogation of prisoners is authorized. Captured equipment is to be destroyed in place.
COMMAND AND SIGNAL SIGNAL—Normal Signal Operating Instructions (SOI) in effect.
COMMAND—II Corps Mike Force battalion commander will assume command of all operations within Camp Boun Tlak upon his arrival on scene. Normal chain of command procedures will be followed.
The briefers, consisting of Company B command and staff personnel, asked for questions and, when there were none, left the tent. Remaining were the key personnel from the Mike Force battalion. Almost as one they looked at one another, and the expressions could be summed up in a couple of words.
Oh, shit.
Chapter 1
“So, what do you think?”
“I think we’re gonna get our asses shot out of the sky.”
Lieutenant Colonel Sam Gutierrez looked at the aerial photo again. The North Vietnamese zigzag trenches were clearly shown going right up to the wire of the beleaguered camp. If you squinted hard enough, you could see the blurry shapes of people. Lots of people.
“I think you might be right,” he said. “See any other way of doing it?”
“Way I see it,” Captain Finn McCulloden, commander of the First Battalion, II Corps Mike Force, mused, “is that we have three courses of action. Walk in from here. That way we could take the whole battalion. Get the battalion in there, Charlie isn’t going to take the camp. Don’t give a damn how many people he throws against us. Problem is, it’d take three days at best. That’s if the NVA haven’t ambushed all the avenues of approach, which they will have.
“Second, land right here,” he said, pointing to a bald knoll, formerly an artillery firebase. “Never be able to get more than one lift in, the place is probably mined like hell, and the trails down off it mined and ambushed.”
“So that leaves…”
Finn smiled. “It leaves coming in as fast as we can, landing right in the middle of the c
amp, which as we know is registered with mortar concentrations and rockets, has antiaircraft guns all around it, and probably direct fire from recoilless rifles and RPG-7s. How do you like those odds, Captain Cozart?”
The helicopter pilot grinned back. “They suck.” He looked around at the other pilots, seeing the young men, most of them warrant officers with less than two years in the Army, nod their heads in agreement.
“Then that’s what we do?” Finn asked.
“No other choice, is there?” Cozart replied. “Your people are going to have to be unassing those choppers in a hurry. No room for more than a two-ship landing at a time. How many people are you going to try to get in there?”
“One company,” Finn replied. “Eighty ’Yards, five round-eyes. The rest of the battalion will walk in. Maybe we can hold Victor Charles off until they get there.”
Cozart called his pilots together to start planning the assault. Gutierrez pulled Captain McCulloden off to the side. “You know I wouldn’t ask this, if I thought they could hold out one more day.”
“Shit, Sam. I know that. Hell, I still owe you money from R and R, so I know you don’t want me killed just yet.” Finn McCulloden and Sam Gutierrez went back a long way, to their first tour in Vietnam when Sam was the captain commanding an A team and Finn was his junior medic. It was Sam, when he returned for his third tour and found himself commanding a C team in Pleiku, who had convinced Finn, also just starting his third tour, to take the newly opened position as commander of the Mike Force. They often needed new commanders, being the reaction force for A teams in trouble. There were no “walks in the woods” for the Mike Force. When it went out, there was a fight. The survival rate for the Americans who ran the Mike Force wasn’t high.
“Don’t suppose I can talk you into waiting, taking the main force of the battalion in?”
“You know better than that,” Finn said. “Besides, you wanted me to take command, and I can’t command from thirty klicks away.”
Gutierrez nodded his head in assent. There had to be new command on the ground at Camp Boun Tlak. The team there, what was left of it, had lost confidence in the commander, First Lieutenant Bentley Sloane. Sloane had been the executive officer under Captain Stan Koslov, taking over the team when Koslov was killed on a local security patrol.
Thereafter Sloane had refused to let patrols go outside the wire, thus clearing the way for the NVA regiment now besieging the camp to make its preparations in relative safety. The more experienced members of the team—and there were damned few of them these days!—had argued with him to no avail. Now they blamed him for their precarious situation.
And Colonel Gutierrez agreed. This late in the war, Special Forces had been inundated not only with relatively inexperienced NCOs, but with officers who had no background in special operations at all. Some of those officers learned, and learned quickly. Others became casualties. Still others would probably never learn, and that type included Lieutenant Sloane.
Gutierrez recalled Sloane reporting to the C team for further assignment. He had wasted no time in letting it be known that not only was he a West Pointer, but that his family’s military tradition was long and distinguished, starting with his great-grandfather, who had won the Medal of Honor at Cold Harbor. Gutierrez had marked him as a careerist, and an arrogant one at that. Getting his ticket punched with a short assignment in the combat zone, in preparation for moving up to bigger and better things. With the drawdown of conventional units and their increasing departure, SF was still the best place to get shot at.
Gutierrez had assigned him to Boun Tlak because Koslov was one of the best A team commanders still in II Corps, and what damage could the lieutenant do, under Koslov’s thumb? Besides, Boun Tlak was next in line for turnover to the Vietnamese under Nixon’s Vietnamization program, and the assignment wouldn’t be for all that long, anyway.
Even shorter now, he thought.
Cozart approached. “Got a plan. May not be a good plan, but it’s the best we can come up with at the moment.”
“Let’s hear it,” Finn said. He had a lot of faith in John Wesley Cozart. Whatever anyone might say about the short-in-stature, arrogant aviator, you had to admit he had brass balls. You called him in, he was going to come in or die trying. Over the last six months that had happened four times.
“Way I figure it, we pack about twelve of your guys on each bird,” Cozart said. The Huey was designed to carry six to eight American troops, but the Montagnards of the Mike Force were considerably smaller than their round-eye counterparts. Finn nodded. A heavy lift, but twelve they could do.
“Don’t need much fuel, there and back,” Cozart continued. “Keep door gunner ammo to a minimum—ain’t gonna be much time for shootin’. That makes it an eight-ship lift.
“They’ll expect us to come over this hill,” he said, pointing to a piece of dominant terrain just to the east of the camp. “That way we’d be masked from their fire the maximum amount of time. Which means they’ll probably have most of their antiaircraft guns sited here.” He pointed to a patch of jungle just to the other side of the camp’s cratered runway.
“So we’ll trick ’em. We’ll swing around, come in from the north, cross this ridge, drop down into the riverbed. Fly right on the water, pop up, be in the camp before they know it.” He was grinning, clearly enjoying the thought of the flight.
Finn looked around at the young aviators, who would in the normal course of events be hanging out on the block back home or revving their souped-up cars up and down the main streets of a dozen small towns. Not one of them was over twenty-one.
Smiling and laughing as if this were a training mission back at Fort Rucker.
An eight-ship lift, flying nose-to-tail rotor down a narrow riverbed, where the enemy would be able to shoot down on them. Where, if one ship went down, the following ones would have to make some hellacious gyrations to avoid running into it.
Where there wouldn’t be a chance to autorotate if you lost power. You would fly right into the ground at 120 knots.
“Shitty plan,” Finn said. “Let’s do it.”
His four NCOs thought it was a shitty plan too. “First two or three birds might get through okay,” Sergeant First Class (SFC) Elmo Driver, platoon sergeant of the First Platoon, said. “Charlie’s gonna be so surprised, seein’ us come down that river, probably won’t be able to get a shot off. After that, it’s gonna be a shootin’ gallery.”
“I’ll take ass-end Charlie,” SFC Walter “Spearchucker” Washington, weapons platoon leader, said. “Always at the back of the bus, anyhow.” Washington had won the hearts and admiration of Special Forces men everywhere when, shortly after Kennedy had awarded SF its distinctive head-wear, he had been approached in a bus station by a little old lady, who had asked if he was one of those Green Berets.
“No, ma’am,” he’d replied. “I’m a nigger. This here”—pointing to his hat—“is a green beret.”
“Sorry ’bout that,” Finn said. “You’re up front. We need your machine gunners in that camp probably worse than anybody. Any other volunteers?”
“Hell, I figure ol’ Elmo’s wrong,” Staff Sergeant (SSG) Andy Inger, company medic, said. “First birds ain’t never goin’ to make it through. They’ll be piled up like a bunch a flies after the first frost. Gonna need somebody to come in, pull your sorry asses out of the wreckage. That might as well be me.”
“Cheerful fuckin’ bunch, ain’t ya,” Master Sergeant (MSG) George “Slats” Olchak, the American company commander of Company A, First Mike Force Battalion, grumped. Olchak was widely known as an equal-opportunity curmudgeon, who was reputed to have last smiled when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
“Ours is not to reason why,” Andy Inger said. “If anybody around here stopped to reason why, we’d all be at home with our wives and girlfriends. Though not simultaneously, of course.”
Finn laughed with the others. These few, these pitiful few, he thought, remembering the fragment of a poem by somebody or o
ther. Once more into the fray, dear friends. Shit. Did anyone who wrote this stuff actually stand a chance of getting shot to pieces? Wouldn’t have been so goddamn happy about it then, would they?
These four Americans were all that was left out of what had been a seven-man company command unit. The company XO, SFC Joe Pelligrino, had been killed just outside the old camp of Vinh Thanh. First Platoon leader SFC Tim “Backtrack” Volusio was back in the States, recuperating from wounds received on a downed-pilot recovery mission just south of Pleiku. Third Platoon leader SSG Harjo Spear had finally DROSed back to the world after having served three years straight in the Mike Force, swearing as he left that he was going to Washington to straighten out those assholes in personnel who wouldn’t let you stay in Vietnam as long as you wanted to.
And the other companies were in worse shape, which was why he’d picked A Company to go in. Some of them were down to two Americans, and the line troops were severely understrength. The Mike Force had had a hard war.
“Weapons first,” he said, breaking up the good-natured bickering that always went on before an operation. “First Platoon, Second, Third. Andy, you’re right about maybe needing you at the rear. You ride the last ship. I’ll go in with Walt. We go in light, individual weapons, a couple of grenades, basic load. Gutierrez tells me Koslov stockpiled a shitload of ammo, got it stashed in bunkers all around the camp, so we won’t need any extra. The lighter those birds are, the better. Any questions?”
“Just one,” Elmo said. “I guess it’s too late to request a transfer to Nha Trang? Maybe run the Playboy Club? Sit around the bar with the other fat, old fucks and talk about how this war ain’t nearly like it was way back in ’65?”
“Maybe that would be a good idea,” Olchak chimed in. “Some ’a those guys could probably make a soldier out of him. I’ve about given up on it.”
Napalm Dreams Page 1