Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  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 air. The very air seemed to waver, turn brown, the dirt so thick it coated the lungs, that and the explosives smoke choking out 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 all 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.

  A direct hit on the ammo bunker.

  Chapter 4

  From far away, someone was calling his name.

  He ignored it. Couldn’t they let him rest, for a little while at least? It was warm and snug where he was. Nice and dark, just as he liked it when he slept. Leave me alone! he wanted to tell them, but found that he could not talk. Something was blocking his mouth.

  No matter. He’d had dreams like this before, nightmares really, when he couldn’t move, couldn’t talk. This one too would pass when he woke up.

  The voices were becoming even more insistent. Irritating. Damn it! Usually when he had these dreams, there was fear, sometimes abject terror as the nameless thing that was always in pursuit came closer and closer and he was trying to escape but could only wait for the rending jaws, the annihilation.

  But this was just plain irritating. Go away! Let me sleep.

  Then a great blow to the center of his chest, and he came up coughing and sputtering, heaving up great clots of dirt.

  “Thought you were a goner for sure, Cap’n,” Epstein said.

  He blinked the dirt out of his eyes, saw that he was in a shallow trench where it was obvious that Epstein had been clawing away at the soil covering him. His legs were still buried deep.

  “All’s I could see was your hand stickin’ up,” Epstein said. “Twitched a couple of times, so I figured you still had somethin’ goin’. Had to give you a good smack, get you started breathing again.”

  He helped McCulloden dig himself the rest of the way out. Except for a great tiredness and a huge ringing in his ears, he seemed to be otherwise uninjured.

  “You okay?” he asked the sergeant.

  Epstein grinned. “Hell of a ride, wasn’t it? Guess I better get back to my troops. By the way, don’t think we’re gonna use that position anymore.” He gestured back toward the spot they had just occupied. It looked like the photographs of a place he had once seen, called Verdun.

  Master Sergeant Olchak came up, grinning at the sight of his dirt-covered commander. “You ’bout tired of playin’ in the mud, sir? Somebody wants to talk to you.” He handed McCulloden the handset of the radio he was carrying.

  Finn ran his tongue in around his teeth, found more dirt, spat it out. Olchak offered him his canteen. Finn accepted gratefully, finding the lukewarm water as delicious as French champagne.

  “The radio, sir,” Olchak said, gently reminding him of what he was supposed to be doing. “FAC, call sign Shooter Two-Zero.”

  Finn stared at the handset for a second, feeling strangely befuddled. What was happening to him? Usually he brushed off such insults as that his body had just suffered. He’d been, in the course of three tours, wounded twice, suffered severe concussion three times, and had fallen thirty feet from a helicopter hovering over too-tall elephant grass. Each time before he had gone on about his business. Now all he wanted to do was lie back down again.

  It had been so nice and warm and dark.

  With a physical effort he shook it off, dislodging yet more dirt, some of which was taking up residence in the crotch of his tiger fatigues. His grandma would have said, “You could grow potatoes in there, boy.”

  Damn near joined you, Granny, he silently told her.

  “Cowboy Six, this is Shooter Two Zero,” came the voice from the handset. Finn realized it was at least the third time he had heard it.

  “This is Six,” he said. “Go.”

  “Got a flight of fast-movers burning up gas,” the FAC said. “Where do you want ’em?”

  “Arty been working us over down here.” Finn’s head was clearing somewhat, now that he had something positive to do. “I figure one-five-sevens. Way it came in, had to be a battery.” He looked critically at the craters. There was an ever-so-slight slant, pointing back toward the west. “My guess would be they got ’em somewhere across the line. You see anything back that way?”

  “Wasn’t looking,” the FAC said. “Wouldn’t do much good if I had. We don’t have clearance for strikes over there, unless we get permission from Saigon first.”

  Finn silently raged at a policy that would allow the enemy sanctuary while exacting no revenge for his violations of international law. But it had been that way since his first tour, down on the Cambodian border, and would probably remain so until the war was finally over. The politics of it were obviously more important than the lives of mere men down here on the ground.

  “Fine,” he finally said. “What ordnance are your fast-movers carrying?”

  “Nape and Rockeyes,” the FAC replied, signifying napalm and cluster-bomb units (CBUs). The latter were particularly good for troops in the open, scattering hundreds of bomblets over a wide area where they fell and exploded, filling the air with shrapnel.

  But he didn’t see any troops in the open. At least not at the moment. And the CBUs were fairly useless in heavy jungle, a lot of which had not been cleared to the distances he would have liked around the camp.

  “Roger,” he said. “Give me the nape starting fifty meters from the wire, west-east axis right up the ravine you see there. Burn off some of that crap, maybe we can see something. Then I’ll think of something to do with the Rockeyes.”

  “Good copy, Six. By the way, got several more flights that want to get in on the action. Rest of the country quiet for a change. You game?”

  Finn smiled, finally feeling himself now that he had something useful to do. “I expect I can find ’em something to do. Bring ’em on.”

  Spearchucker Washington was setting up a .50-caliber machine-gun team to cover the ravine when the first fast-mover came in. “Down!” he yelled, having already been told over the command net what was to come.

  The Montagnard soldiers unquestioningly flattened themselves against the clay, one so close to Washington his merry brown eyes were staring into his own. The expression changed when the first whoosh of a napalm canister struck just outside the wire.

  Glad I’m wearing a hat, Washington thought as the blast of searing heat struck them. It was like opening the door to a furnace, the heat seeming to penetrate to the bone. My hair would be even frizzier than it is.

  One after another they came in. By turning his head slightly he could see them as they arced up over the mountain, the droop wings of the F-4 Phantom easily identifiable. To get as low as they needed to be for precision work, they then had to pour the coals to it to rise above the surrounding terrain. Dirty black trails of smoke marked their passing, pointing up into the sky like accusing fingers.

  The shifting valley winds brought back to him the smells: burning gasoline, woodsmoke, and underlying it the unmistakable stench of charred flesh. Someone was out there, he thought. Poor bastards.

  He’d had as much war as anyone in Special Forces, had been in situations that, except for the valor of his troops and a great deal of luck, would not have been survivable. Had seen men ripped apart by the effects of high-speed metal chunks tearing into their bodies. Had wallowed in his own blood after taking one of those pieces of metal himself.

  But he couldn’t even imagine what it m
ust be like to always be expecting the death from the skies. How the hell they managed it, kept on fighting despite the losses they must have been taking, was beyond him. He didn’t know if he could have done it.

  He had a grudging admiration for them. Very grudging. The same troops who could withstand such treatment, who stood fast under years of privation, near starvation at times, who could expect not much more than a long and lingering death should they become seriously wounded, were capable of such casual cruelty that it sometimes took your breath away.

  On a previous tour he had served with Project Delta, a long-range reconnaissance unit based out of Nha Trang. Delta had the unenviable mission of sending small teams of men into the most closely held Viet Cong and North Vietnamese sanctuaries, there to gather intelligence and direct artillery and air strikes against lucrative targets.

  Washington was too big to be on one of the reconnaissance teams (the commander had taken one look at him and said, “Hell, you can’t be on a team. You got wounded, they’d have to quarter you to get you out”). The other choices were rear-area make-work, or joining the Ranger company that served as the reaction force. Washington had, of course, chosen the latter.

  As a platoon leader of the company, he was sent in to find a team with whom they had lost all radio contact. They hadn’t been hard to find. They still sat at their last reported position, the four Montagnards lying in a semicircle around the three Americans. Almost as if they had been placed there for some barbaric religious ceremony.

  One of the Americans had obviously been killed early in the engagement. His body, except for being stripped naked, was untouched except for the hole where an AK round had taken off the back of his head.

  The other two hadn’t been so lucky. One had been bayoneted at least a hundred times. From the blood that had flowed from the wounds, it was obvious the thrusts had been carefully calculated not to kill.

  The other sat against a tree, sightless eyes staring out into the jungle. His pants had been pulled down around his ankles, and his genitals were missing. There were no other wounds.

  The claw marks on the trunk of the tree to which his hands had been tied were mute witness to his suffering.

  So, while Washington had a grudging admiration for his adversaries, he didn’t have much sympathy.

  “Burn, you cocksuckers,” he said as another flight of Phantoms came in.

  Finn was glad to see the napalm causing a brush fire that quickly ran up the ravine, charring everything in its path. The monsoon rains had been late this year, the grass and underbrush were as dry as they would ever be—ideal conditions for a conflagration.

  Finn hoped it burned down the whole goddamn plantation on the other side of the mountain. The Frenchman there had long been suspected of being a Viet Cong supporter. So far, no one had been able to prove it.

  On his last trip to Saigon, Finn had run into an old friend, Captain James NMI Carmichael, who was now a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) adviser in Thua Thien Province. The PRU, explained Carmichael, trying to recruit Finn, was the action arm of the Phoenix Program. Its results-oriented mission was to eliminate the Viet Cong infrastructure, wherever it could be found. Gather the appropriate intelligence, locate the target, capture him if possible, and if not…

  Finn suspected that the Frenchman wouldn’t have lasted long in Jim Carmichael’s province. Maybe, he thought, I was wrong to turn him down when he tried to get me to join the PRU. Maybe on another tour.

  First you have to survive this one, he told himself.

  He directed the FAC to have the Phantom flight drop their Rockeyes on the trench complex to the south of the camp, opposite the ravine. Not, he suspected, that they would do a lot of good there. Charlie was well and truly dug in, and it would only be by chance that a piece of shrapnel would catch an unwary victim. But if they didn’t drop it, they would fly out over the ocean and pickle the bombs before returning to base, no one particularly liking to set one of the big birds down with live ordnance still attached to the wings. Better to cause some hate and discontent among the ranks than to kill a few innocent fish, he told himself.

  The first bird made its pass, the cylinders dropping from its wings right on target. They looked like standard iron bombs in flight, until at a predetermined altitude the canister ripped open and hundreds of bomblets, each about as big as double-clenched fists, spread like snowflakes. As soon as they exited the canister, fins popped out, stabilizing the bomblets and orienting them nose downward. The spin imparted by the fins also armed the firing circuits. Long before a bomblet hit the ground, it would go off if it so much as encountered a leaf wafting through the air.

  The bomblets went off with a rippling roar, black explosives smoke coating the ground, soon to be swallowed up by the dirt chewed up by the shrapnel. A subnote of the explosion was a long-drawn-out moan, that of hundreds of thousands of pieces of metal cutting the air. And anything else they might encounter.

  The next bird came in, and the next, and the next, each neatly planning its pattern so that it slightly overlaid the last. Damn good pilots, Finn thought.

  “Cowboy, this is Shooter.”

  “Go, Shooter.”

  “How you like them apples?”

  “Just like the bridegroom said to his new wife,” Finn said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Honey, I think you’ve done this before!”

  He heard the FAC chuckling over the air. After a moment he said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t make me a slut, does it?”

  “If it does, you’re my slut. And I still love you too many, GI.”

  “Bet you say that to all the FACs. Anyhow, you ready for something else?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Hell, it surprised me. Got a call from Sandy, over somewhere you don’t want to know about. Pulled a team out and didn’t get shot up nearly as bad as they expected. Heard about your problems with the arty, said since they were in the area, anyway, might as well help. You want to give me an azimuth on where you think it came from?”

  “Two-seven-five degrees. Given the range of the one-five-seven, figure anywhere from ten to twenty-five klicks from here. Big area, ain’t it?”

  “Well, they say they don’t have anything else to do for fun, and you know how long those guys like to hang around, so they’ll be buzzing around, see if they stir up anything.” There was a pause, a lot of dead air, and then the FAC said, “You know, it would be a hell of a lot easier if they shot at you again.”

  “Gee, really like to help you out. You want me to paint a bull’s-eye on my ass?”

  “Only if you think it’d help,” Shooter Two-Zero said.

  The Sandys he had been talking about were Korean War–era A-1 fighter-bombers. Prop driven. Low and slow, they liked to say. Not like the afterburner crowd. They had tremendous load capacity, the ability to loiter for hours, and pilots who weren’t afraid to get down and dirty. You called for danger-close from a Sandy, and you’d damned well better be tucking your head between your legs, because he could put a five-hundred-pound bomb virtually yards from your position. Sandys worked over the Ho Chi Minh trail from the other side of the border, often supporting reconnaissance teams from SOG, still more often providing the necessary air support when one of the afterburner crowd was down on the ground, crying for help.

  Finn hoped they could find the artillery, but didn’t count on it. More likely the next barrage was going to be just before the attack. Which was going to come, he was sure, sometime during the night. Best they could do would be to keep the gunner’s heads down during the day, preventing another barrage at least for the moment. Which was enough to be grateful for, he supposed.

  “Appreciate the help, Shooter,” he said. “I’ll be talking to you again.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Shooter said, making a mock sigh. “You keep well down there, you heah?”

  “We’re gonna try.”

  Stankow was showing Olchak the perimeter defenses. “Five layers,” he said.
“Straight five-wire barbed-wire fence to the outside. Keeps the goats and pigs out of the minefield. Twenty-five yards behind that is triple-strand concertina. That marks the minefield. Standard layout, one antitank, five M-14 antipersonnel. All marked on the map, here.”

  “Think any of them still work?” Olchak asked.

  Stankow scowled. He didn’t like Olchak very much, hated him, in fact. And now the arrogant son of a bitch was questioning him!

  Learned his trade under the cocksucker Germans, he thought.

  Olchak was Ukrainian. Had been brought up under the Reds, fell under the spell of the so-called Ukrainian nationalists, had at their urging joined the German Army shortly after it took Kiev.

  In other words, they had been sworn enemies since 1940. Not that such situations were all that unusual in the Special Forces. The Lodge Act had encouraged “freedom fighters” from all over the world to come to the United States, there to combat totalitarianism no matter what it called itself. And the situation wasn’t as virulent as many had been. After all, Olchak’s unit had never served in Poland, being sent instead to fight and die outside Leningrad. Far worse was the case of the Nowak brothers, one of whom had been a Czech partisan, the other having joined the SS.

  But, Stankow thought, Olchak was still a cocksucker. Stankow’s favorite word for anyone he didn’t like. And Olchak was questioning the defenses.

  What made it worse was that Stankow had to reluctantly agree that it was likely that few of the mines would still be operational. Since the new lieutenant had taken command, they had been forbidden entrance into the minefield. Too dangerous, Sloane had said. And true enough, it was difficult to check the field without taking one or two casualties.

  But that was the way of it. And if you didn’t check, didn’t look for freshly dug earth, how were you to know that Viet Cong sappers hadn’t been inside the wire, clearing a path for the assault troops?