Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  “Sorry, Six,” he mumbled. Finally Gutierrez signed off with the admonition to not fuck this one up.

  Becker started to say something, was stilled with a glare. “Mike Force is coming in,” Sloane told Turner. “Get the troops ready.”

  “They never stopped being ready, sir,” Turner replied in that laconic Tennessee drawl that seemed to take forever to get the words out. “We know how many?”

  “More than we need, I’m sure.”

  Turner grinned. “Ain’t you the feisty one.” He turned to Becker. “See if you can get it arranged to take some of the wounded out on the last lift. We got about ten criticals, won’t make it through the night.”

  “Got it, Sarge,” Becker said, literally snapping to.

  That was another thing, Sloane thought. Why didn’t the troops show him the same respect they showed the old, barely literate team sergeant. Another notation for his book.

  Turner looked back at him, the smile still curling his lips. “Ain’t had enough fight yet, I take it?”

  Not nearly enough, Sloane thought, not bothering to answer the question, turning back to the embrasure and lifting the binoculars. But I will. And not even high-and-mighty Mike Force can stop me.

  Turner shrugged, raised his eyebrows at Becker, turned, and left the bunker. Outside the smell of burning wood mixed with feces was strong. During the last mortar barrage the shithouse had taken a direct hit. It was going to be slit trenches from now on.

  Not that he thought it would be a problem. His asshole was so tight, he’d told the team medic, you couldn’t have driven an eight-penny nail up it with a ten-pound sledge.

  Turner, like most of the Americans in the camp, the new lieutenant being the only exception, was a multiple-tour veteran of Vietnam, plus had been on one of the old White Star teams in Laos. He’d seen his share of combat—more than his share, if you wanted to know the truth—and couldn’t remember a time he’d been more frightened. Firefights in the jungle, you always knew that if you didn’t get hit early, and if the enemy proved too strong, you could break contact and escape. When your own team initiated the firefights, it was because you knew you could win them. And on the recon missions he’d run across the border into Laos and Cambodia for SOG, the team was so small you could work your way around even the most determined of trackers and, if worse came to worst, call in enough air to keep them off your back until you could get emergency extraction.

  Now there was no retreat, no way of breaking contact and escaping, no punching through the cordon of troops surrounding the camp. All exits were closed. Air helped keep them off you for a while, but the trenches were getting closer, and no matter how many strikes there were, there were always diggers to take the place of the ones who had been killed.

  Uniforms from the bodies of those killed during the frequent probes indicated they were facing the Sixty-sixth NVA and Twenty-eighth NVA Infantry Regiments. There would be, Turner knew, an NVA artillery regiment in support. Though he had seen no evidence of it, he was also fairly certain there would be yet another NVA infantry regiment in reserve.

  Over a division of enemy troops, against his pitiful force of four Civilian Irregular Defense Group companies, something like odds of nine or ten to one. The Mike Force company, if it managed to get in the camp in anything like good order, would help a little bit, but not much. Classic infantry doctrine said that the attackers needed a three-to-one ratio to assure victory against fortified defenses, but classic infantry doctrine wasn’t worth a shit over here. Classic infantry doctrine assumed that even if the enemy did make a breakthrough, you could bring up your own reserves and pinch it off. There were going to be no reserves here.

  He hunched down and ran from the command bunker to the 120mm mortar pit, where SFC Andy “Big Polack” Stankow and his indigenous mortar crew were pumping rounds into “danger close” targets just outside the wire. The tube was pointed almost straight up. Smoke from the propellant had stained the big sergeant’s skin so dark he looked like a giant Montagnard.

  “Mike Force be here in twenty,” he said.

  “ ’Bout goddamn time,” Stankow grumbled, his accent heavy. “They miss fight otherwise, eh?”

  “I’m sure they’d be real sorry about that,” Turner replied, grinning affectionately at his heavy weapons specialist, who hadn’t paused for a second. A line of Montagnard soldiers snaked its way to the nearby ammo bunker, daisy-chaining the heavy shells to the pit. Four of them were bandaged from shrapnel wounds, and one showed bleeding through the gauze. Turner made a mental note to have the medic come over and check him out.

  “I’ll give you the word to check fire,” he said.

  “Better not have to check too long,” Stankow replied. “Dey be all over our ass, we don’t keep shooting.”

  “How’s your ammo supply?”

  “Dat’s de good news. Ve got enough to last two, maybe three more days. Not like old days when we shoot three rounds at Germans and run like hell.”

  Stankow had, as a teenager, joined the partisans fighting the German invaders, killing his first soldier when he was barely fifteen. He’d approached the soldier, who had been drinking wine stolen from a manor house, and had thrust a knife into his stomach. The soldier, barely older than he had been, asked only, “Why?”

  It still bothered him. He’d told the story to Turner one night when both of them had been drinking far too much, to explain why he hadn’t killed a Viet Cong sentry when the man had been within easy knife range.

  He had no trouble in killing at a distance, however. He dropped another round down the tube, the whomf of the propellant driving the air out of the chests of those standing near. Another round, a slight adjustment of the elevating and traversing mechanism, and another.

  A rushing sound like an aircraft arcing across the sky, and Turner crouched low in the trench. The NVA shell landed not ten meters away, throwing up a huge cloud of dirt and rocks, the smell of high explosives so powerful it felt as if his nostrils had been burned right out of his head. He raised up, saw that the mortar crew had resumed their firing.

  “Charlie gonna get your range, one of these times,” he said.

  Stankow grunted contemptuously. “Shitty goddamn gunners. Must have been trained by the Russians.”

  Turner laughed. If there was one thing that Stankow hated worse than the Vietnamese, it was the Russians. Get him started on that and he would hold forth all night.

  No time for that. Turner passed through the mortar pit, took another trench, and headed for the dispensary. Going to have to let the medics know to get ready for casualties, he thought. Heavy casualties.

  He just didn’t see how the Mike Force was going to get in there without getting shot to pieces.

  Lieutenant Sloane didn’t either, and it didn’t, frankly, bother him. Actually, he thought as he idly listened to Becker tap out confirmation of the LZ arrangements on the keypad attached to his leg, it might be better all around if there was a debacle.

  It would just go to show how desperate the battle really was.

  A warrior is judged by the quality of his enemies, he remembered reading somewhere. Probably something the instructors at West Point had tried to drill into the heads of the plebes. There was no glory in defeating someone who was clearly your inferior. They had to be almost larger-than-life, possessing either great advantages in numbers or being so wily that your own numbers didn’t count.

  Sloane was a student of history, but not of the history that the victors wrote. He liked to look beneath, to see the machinations of the writers, the biographers, the propagandists.

  Such things were essential. After all, how could you win the requisite glory, for instance, in fighting a bunch of ragtag, half-starved Plains Indians whose numbers never achieved, even in their years of greatest triumph, anything like the numbers of soldiers against them. And yet the Plains Indians campaign streamers were proudly displayed on the guidons of the cavalry brigades, even to this day. And people still admired the soldierly qualit
ies of Crook, the ruthlessness of Sheridan, and the doomed gallantry of Custer.

  Here, he had it all. Nothing had to be invented. The North Vietnamese had a huge numerical advantage. They had the tactic of “hugging the belt,” staying so close to friendly lines that the American advantage of airpower was in large part nullified. Their commanders were combat-seasoned through ten or more years of constant warfare. The press back home portrayed them as dedicated, almost fanatical fighters.

  All the better then to win that which he must have. To prove to his father that he wasn’t the weakling, the pansy, the useless piece of shit that dear old dad, especially when he had been drinking (and that was an almost constant in the last few years), was fond of calling him.

  Sloane senior had been a tank battalion commander under Patton during the Battle of the Bulge. Had been in the race to relieve the embattled paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne. Had missed being in the lead tank penetrating the perimeter only by a matter of minutes, being beat out by that goddamn, as he inevitably called him, Abrams. Had won the Distinguished Service Cross, three Silver Stars, and other combat decorations too numerous to count and had returned to the States a full colonel. Had later been promoted, below the zone, to brigadier general and then to major general.

  And had then seen his career stall in a peacetime army that had no use for so many World War II generals. Even Korea didn’t help a great deal, as he missed the entire war being stuck in a desk job in the Pentagon. Embittered, he’d turned increasingly to drink, which had only exacerbated the problem, and had gently been encouraged to retire.

  Bentley’s grandfather, who had made lieutenant general, had scorned his son’s weaknesses. And Sloane senior had passed the favors on down to his own son.

  That would soon end. Not since the Civil War had a Sloane won the ultimate prize. The starry blue ribbon that said it all.

  That was soon going to change.

  Billy Joe Turner was still in the trench when the rocket barrage came in. One moment he was crouched down, making his way beneath a couple of logs, the next he had been picked up and smashed against the log, dislodging one with his head, and a moment thereafter he was sprawled in the bottom of the trench gasping for breath. A second round came in, and a third, each picking him up bodily and flinging him back down. Loosened dirt cascaded down into his face, and he had one brief, horrible thought of being buried alive. He scrambled to his knees, only to be knocked down once again as yet more rockets came in.

  And then it was over, and the total silence at first convinced him his eardrums had been shattered. Sure enough when he felt his ears, his hand came away with blood.

  And then he heard a high, keening wail, from somewhere behind him. Other sounds started to intrude, a couple of shouts, a moan, and someone screaming for a medic. He peeked up over the edge of the trench, was astounded by the complete devastation. Clouds of dust obscured the perimeter, anything that had survived above ground was now gone, and there were a couple of bundles of rags that he knew had only minutes before been men.

  The medical bunker had taken a direct hit, and it appeared the roof had collapsed. It was from there that most of the shouting came.

  He measured the distance between his position and that of the bunker. Close to a hundred yards, right out in the open. But to get there following the trench line would take him nearly a half kilometer out of the way. If the trench hadn’t collapsed in a dozen places, which seemed likely given the ferocity of the attack.

  Screw it, he thought.

  He scrambled up over the side of the trench, got to his feet, and nearly fell down again. Whatever damage had been done inside his head had thoroughly screwed up his equilibrium. He staggered forward, concentrating upon putting one foot in front of the other, realizing that he must look like a drunk trying to make his way home.

  The snipers started getting his range, as he had known they would. The first round cracked just a few inches behind his head; another kicked up dust at his feet before whining crazily out across the camp. Better get a move on, Billy Joe, he told himself. How many times have you told people, these bastards never learned the concept of lead? Keep moving, zigzag a little, and the bullets will always be a little behind you.

  Zigzagging shouldn’t be a problem. Now run, dammit!

  Sloane got up off the floor where he had flung himself when the first rocket had come in, staring in horror at the chunk of shrapnel that had come whizzing through the embrasure, still so hot it was scorching the sandbags into which it had embedded. If I hadn’t ducked, he was thinking, that would have taken the top of my head off at just about the eyes.

  Sergeant Becker was already on the radio, giving Gutierrez a sitrep. Approximately twelve rockets, he was saying, estimated to be 122 millimeter. Casualty report to follow.

  He sounded absolutely cool and collected. Anyone on the other end would have thought he had nerves of steel. Unless you were able to look into his eyes, Sloane mused. He’s as scared as I am!

  The thought was somehow comforting.

  He looked back out the embrasure just in time to see Sergeant Turner hauling himself over the edge of the trench and watch as the first rounds kicked up dust around him. “Get back in the trench!” he screamed, knowing it was useless. The rattle of small-arms fire was becoming constant. Was this the attack for which they’d been waiting?

  No, he thought. Not during the daytime. They wouldn’t dare that, not with American air stacked up and waiting for targets. This was just another harassing attack, doing their best to soften us up, get us ready for the kill.

  It looked like they were going to achieve at least a part of their goal. The bullets were striking ever closer to Turner, who had at least managed to accomplish a shambling run.

  “Go, go, go!” Becker screamed, now at the embrasure beside Sloane. Becker turned, shouted that he was going to go out there.

  “Stay here!” Sloane commanded. “That’s an order. You stay on that radio.”

  Becker looked at him in utter contempt, for a moment appearing to be ready to defy the order.

  “I’ll do it,” Sloane said, picking up his M16. “Anything happens, you’ll be here to tell them about it.” He left the bunker.

  Becker watched him as he ran, hunched over, down the trench toward the spot where Turner had left it.

  Maybe I misjudged him, he thought.

  Nah! Just wants a fucking medal. He don’t watch his ass, he’s gonna get the CMH.

  A Coffin with Metal Handles.

  Turner was hit the first time not twenty-five yards away from the trench. Just at the moment he’d realized his equilibrium was coming back somewhat, and that he could chance running faster without the possibility of falling down.

  He’d been panting like a dog from the effort, and that had probably saved his life. The bullet passed through his right cheek, cut a quarter-inch groove across his tongue, and smashed through the molars on the left side of his jaw. The impact broke the jaw, but worse was the damage done by the now-tumbling bullet and the tooth fragments turned into secondary projectiles. They tore a terrifying hole through his left cheek, spraying blood and bits of flesh like a blood-filled fire hose.

  Had his mouth been closed the bullet would have taken off his entire lower jaw, probably including carotid arteries and jugular veins. He would have died within moments.

  As it was, the impact spun him around, and for a confused moment he started to run back the way he had come. Then he came to a complete stop, turned around again, and with great dignity shot a defiant finger into the sky.

  He started running again, the droplets of blood from his ruined cheek leaving a trail that was soon disturbed by the bullets hitting all around him. Thirty-five yards, then fifty. Jesus, would the place never get any closer? Maybe I should have gone back to the trench, let someone else take care of the guys in the bunker. I could be hiding down there right now, trying to get something around this hole in my face. There was no pain, a phenomenon he was familia
r with from suffering the impacts of bullets and shrapnel before. Pain would come later.

  If there was a later. Too late to go back to the trench now, buddy boy. Over halfway there. Run faster, steps now taking in feet rather than the inches they were when you started. You can make this!

  The next bullet hit him just above the hip, barely missing his kidney. Its downward angle drove it through the pelvic girdle, puncturing the ball joint where femur attached to hip. Suddenly his left leg refused to work. Slowly, almost stately in its progress, his body sprawled facedown on the dirt.

  Only one thing to do now, Billy Joe, he told himself.

  You damned well better crawl.

  Lieutenant Sloane reached Turner’s jumping-off point at almost exactly the same time the sergeant was felled by the last bullet. He took several deep breaths, readying himself for the dash. His concentration upon the mission at hand was so fierce he did not at first notice the slackening of small-arms fire.

  Sergeant Stankow, who had been coming from the other direction, did. He stuck his shaggy head up above the trench, glanced around, saw that the only fire at the moment was outgoing.

  “Bait,” he said.

  Sloane looked at him, not fully comprehending what he was saying.

  “Sniper could kill him now, he wants,” Stankow said. “Doesn’t want. He’s waiting for somebody to come out, try to help. Gets two or three that way.” He mused for a moment, thinking back to the bad old days in the forests near Warsaw.

  “Same thing we used to do to the Germans,” he said.

  “So what do we do?” Sloane asked, realizing for the first time just how far out of his depth he was.