Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  One one thousand, two one thousand, he mouthed, Nie watching him closely. Finally he tossed the metal orb around the corner, followed closely by Nie. They’d “cooked off” the grenades, allowing the fuses to burn for two seconds of the three to four seconds they were supposed to take before they exploded. Made it far less likely that someone was going to be able to scoop them up and throw them back.

  “Du ma My!” someone screamed just before the grenades filled the world with chest-crushing concussion and black explosives smoke.

  Driver whirled around the corner before the survivors could recover their senses, double-tapping a cursing North Vietnamese soldier who was trying to get his gun up. The man went down like a stone, exposing another, whom Driver also shot.

  Nie opened up with his M16, impartially hosing down everyone in his path. The racket was earsplitting, the acrid powder smoke clogging the nostrils, mercifully overpowering the smell of blood, shit, and fear.

  Within seconds it was over, Frick and Frack rushing by Driver as he reloaded the pistol, happily shooting down the few enemy soldiers who had survived the initial onslaught. Frick motioned him forward. Just ahead was daylight.

  “Hold this position,” Driver told Nie. “I’m gonna go get something to close this little subway down.”

  Sloane had hit upon the happy expedient of driving lengths of one-inch-diameter steel reinforcing rods into the ground at two-foot intervals through the outer perimeter trench. The rods had been shipped in months ago, intended for use in reinforcing the concrete of a planned series of bunkers, but the cement itself had never arrived—probably scammed off for some South Vietnamese officer to build a house, Billy Joe Turner had sourly surmised. The rod had laid in a stack, quietly rusting, until Sloane, looking for something with which to follow Captain McCulloden’s directive, had remembered them.

  Driving the rods was easy, given the fury that possessed him. With each whack of the sledgehammer he fancied he was crushing the captain’s skull. How dare he speak to a fellow officer that way! Especially in front of the enlisted men. He had seen their barely suppressed smiles, the amusement that crinkled their foreheads. They were probably even now laughing at him. Boy, the captain really dug in ol’ Sloane’s shit, didn’t he? In their inimitable crude way, they would be dreaming up all sorts of tales to tell.

  It wouldn’t look good, afterward.

  Reputations were such tenuous things. He remembered a crude joke told in the team house by Turner, about a French painter. Who had complained that, despite his having painted a thousand pictures, some of which now hung in the finest collections in the world, no one called him an artiste. But, and here Turner had adopted the worst French accent Sloane had ever heard, I suck one little dick, and everyone calls me a cock-suckaire!

  Would his actions with Stankow this morning be enough to offset his reputation with the men? Probably not, especially when McCulloden, after a promising first start, had gone back to treating him like some unpleasant substance he had to scrape from his boot.

  Whump—and the piece of reinforcing rod he had been hammering against the fierce resistance of the dry earth suddenly disappeared. “Give me another piece of rod!” he commanded the Montagnards, his voice excited. He drove it down two feet to the right of the first, this time being a bit more careful, and when it too had gone in three feet, the resistance stopped.

  Without a word, Bucky Epstein, who had been following the probing crew at a distance, amused at seeing Lieutenant Sloane engaged in the first physical labor he could remember the officer doing, left to inform the command group of the find.

  Sloane sat down, aware for the first time that he was sweating profusely. He greedily swallowed down half a canteen of water, looked ruefully at his ordinarily spotlessly clean tiger fatigues. They were covered in red dirt, sweated through at crotch, armpits, and chest, the sweat already drying to encrusted-salt white.

  It felt good. His shoulders were already aching, he knew his hands were blistered, his head felt as if it were going to explode, but it felt good. He’d always scorned physical labor, felt that such efforts belonged to the “common man,” that people such as himself should be doing the supervision of such things. There was no dignity in digging in the dirt, and dignity was all-important. How could you lead men if they thought you were just like them?

  Perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all. Epstein, who had been following the group—ostensibly to provide security—had for the entire time worn that mocking smile that was so much a feature of his demeanor. With the finding of the tunnel his manner had suddenly changed. Was that just the slightest hint of respect?

  Another idea hit him. “Get shovels,” he told the interpreter. “Let’s find out who’s down there.”

  Olchak hadn’t been able to find the cratering charges he would have preferred, but did locate a bunker with cases of engineer demolition packs, what some people called satchel charges. Each was an olive-drab satchel, about the size of a large lady’s handbag, containing four two-and-one-half-pound slabs of TNT. Good enough, he thought.

  He organized a carrying party, each Montagnard hefting a wooden case with four of the units inside. They weren’t particularly happy about carrying them, especially now that someone outside the perimeter was once again directing sniper fire at any exposed targets. Since Olchak didn’t think he’d have time to explain to them that a stray round wouldn’t detonate the TNT, and since even if he had, he wouldn’t have known how to put it in Jarai, he fell back on the expedient of cursing and shouting and the occasional boot to the backside to get them moving.

  Give me my old squad anytime, he thought as they hurried down the trench. They never questioned orders, never hesitated, never showed fear. Of course, they were now all dead, their bones entombed somewhere in the vast Russian wastes where they’d fallen. He’d been the only survivor, of that and of other squads, the ones in the last years of the war no more than children. He hadn’t, he realized now, been much more than a child himself, sixteen when levied by the German occupiers, only nineteen when he’d had to make his way alone, through hundreds of miles of Silesian forests, Russians everywhere, to make it back home.

  And what was waiting for him when he got there? Ruined towns, piles of corpses hastily buried and methodically dug up by the forest animals looking for food. The few survivors hating him, blaming him along with the Germans for what had happened to them. Threatening to come and slit his throat in the night.

  His sense of survival told him that he would be far better off in one of the prisoner-of-war camps down the road, the ones run by the Americans or British. To go to a Soviet PW camp was to disappear, vanish as so many had into the vast slave labor camps somewhere the other side of the Ural Mountains.

  He had, of course, lied about his unit to the young American interrogator at the nearest camp. He’d been merely a foot soldier in an infantry unit, he said, impressed by the Germans against his will, sent off to fight and threatened with execution if he did not. Since the story matched so well that told by thousands of his countrymen, and since by the time he’d joined his unit they had abandoned the practice of tattooing the blood group on the inner forearm, he had gotten away with it. SS Standartenführer Georg Olchak became Privat Georg Olchak, one more victim of the Nazis.

  Since he’d never been allowed to come home on leave, and since all who had known him in the military were now dead, he was easily able to carry it off. He had been out-processed, and because of his command of English imparted by his schoolmaster mother, also now dead, had found work as an interpreter for the occupation forces. From there it had been a simple matter to emigrate to the United States, particularly when his home country was swallowed up by the communists. By then the Allies had realized that their old friend Stalin was now their new enemy, and anyone willing to fight the minions of godless communism was welcome.

  He’d never regretted the move. Killing one communist was as good as killing another, no matter what color the skin or shape of the eyes.

&nb
sp; McCulloden’s eyes lit up when he saw the boxes. “Just the ticket. How many of these do you need, Elmo?”

  Driver, exhausted and not really willing to go back down into the dark hole that stank of death, shrugged his shoulders. “One box ought to do it. So give me two.”

  “Spoken like a true demo man,” Olchak said, grinning at the sergeant. “Calculate the charge, double it, then add ten percent.”

  “Creative destruction,” Driver replied. “Nothing like it in the world.”

  He dropped back down into the hole, grabbed a handed-down crate of explosives, and dragged it to where Nie was still holding the fort. Elmo had to bump across the bodies to do so, one of them moaning as his foot pressed down on the stomach. Expelling gases, Elmo knew, but it freaked him anyway.

  “One more back there,” he told Frack, not willing to walk across the bodies any more than he had to. “Go get it while I rig these.”

  The ’Yard looked unhappy to leave his brother, but followed orders anyway. Soon he came back dragging it. “Make big boom,” he said. “I like.”

  “Me too.” Driver stacked the satchel charges in two piles. From the kit that went along with the charges he took out four nonelectric detonators and a roll of detonating cord. He cut four three-foot lengths of cord, then crimped a detonator to each one. Into the firing well of the TNT of the bottom satchel in each stack he inserted two detonators, double-priming them, in the parlance of demolitionists. The trailing ends of the detonating cord he then tied together with yet another piece of det cord, stringing the latter back six feet. Finally, he taped two electric detonators to the cord and ran the firing wire back to the mouth of the cave, where he handed it back up to Olchak.

  He sat back for a moment to survey his work, visualizing the effect. When he got back to the surface, he would hook up the blasting machine to the firing wire. A twist of the handle and an electric charge would course down the wire, where it would set off the electric detonators. Even if one was a dud, the other would go off. That was why you double-primed. The explosion would begin the explosive propagation of the detonating cord, a plastic-covered PETN explosive. PETN detonated at a speed of thirty-two thousand feet per second—far faster than the eye could see. It was, for a military explosive, also fairly sensitive and was used only in small amounts in things like det cord.

  The det cord would carry the explosion to the detonators crimped to it. He could simply have run detonating cord in a couple of loops through the TNT and depended upon it to set off the main charge, but why take chances. This way he knew he’d get a good detonation.

  The detonators, in turn, would begin the propagation in the TNT, itself relatively insensitive. Part of the explosive force would dissipate out the mouth of the tunnel, part of it would blow though the entry hole, but with eighty pounds of it sitting there, it should be more than enough to do the job.

  He exited the hole finally, marginally satisfied. Ammonium nitrate would have been better, but you used what you had. A combat demolitionist couldn’t be a perfectionist.

  With a flourish, Olchak handed him the blasting machine.

  “Glad you don’t owe me any money,” Driver said, wiring the leads to the terminals on the machine. “You might have decided to cancel the debt while I was down there.”

  “Depends on how much money,” Slats Olchak replied.

  The hell of it, Driver thought as he yelled fire in the hole the necessary three times, is that I don’t necessarily think he’s joking.

  He twisted the handle and was rewarded with the feeling of a huge thump somewhere beneath them, powder smoke and dirt whooshing out the hole like the exhaust from a rocket.

  “Holy shit!” he heard Epstein exclaim, and lifted his head above the trench line to see a huge plume of smoke erupt from the other end of the tunnel. Slowly, almost majestically, the ground just outside the perimeter wire collapsed into a sizable depression.

  “Don’t think they’ll be using that one anymore,” Finn McCulloden said. “Now let’s shut up the rest of them.”

  Sloane’s shovel broke through the top of the tunnel. “Stand back!” he commanded the ’Yards who were helping him dig. He pulled the pin on a frag grenade and dropped it down the hole. The explosion shook the ground only slightly, smoke pouring from the hole.

  “Dig!” he said. “Quick!”

  He was like a man possessed, dirt flying from his shovel, doing as much as any three of the Montagnards. This was his prize, and by God he wasn’t going to let anyone else exploit it. McCulloden and the others were even now blowing up the tunnel discovered on the south side of the camp and would soon be making their way around to his.

  Finally there was enough space for him to drop down inside. He grabbed a pistol belt equipped with more frag grenades and extra magazine pouches for the M-1911 Colt .45 pistol he habitually carried, the one he’d had modified to include mother-of-pearl handles. That and a flashlight completed his kit.

  Now or nothing, he told himself, steeling for the ordeal. He’d never been in a tunnel before, expected tight confines, rats, or worse. He’d heard that the Viet Cong sometimes suspended cobras from the roof. He hated snakes. Wasn’t too fond of tight places, either.

  Be a man! He could visualize his father, standing there beside him, exhorting him to shape up, quit being such a pussy, get back out there and fight it out!

  Here’s to you, you old bastard, he thought, and dropped down into the hole.

  He fell much farther than expected, almost automatically putting his body into a parachute landing fall (PLF), twisting quickly erect and covering front and then whirling to the rear, pistol held stiffly out before him.

  “Jesus Christ!” he breathed. This wasn’t a tunnel, it was a goddamned thoroughfare! He could stand without crouching or even bending his head to avoid the low-wattage light-bulbs that lit up the place. The frag grenade had destroyed the ones nearest the entry point, but as far as he could see in both directions, they lit up the cavern with an eerie blue-white glow.

  This wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment tactic dreamed up by the North Vietnamese when they decided to attack this particular camp, he thought. This thing had been there for a long time. The floor was hard-packed, showing the impression of dozens of feet. Weak spots were shored up by timber and plywood. It sloped gently downward, toward the perimeter, to allow seepage from monsoon rains to drain out.

  It was easily capable of accommodating two men at a time, shoulder to shoulder. He could imagine an entire company coming through, only to appear behind the defenders at the worst possible time.

  And I found it! That should be worth something, even with McCulloden.

  He looked up to see the round faces of the Montagnards, staring down at him in astonishment. “Get a squad down here,” he told the interpreter. “Cover my rear. I’m going to see where this thing comes out.”

  The North Vietnamese, obviously aware of the disaster that was befalling their painfully gained tunnel system, had brought in a new team of snipers. To expose yourself, even for a moment, was once again to take the chance of a bullet through the head.

  “Think you can do your magic again, Bucky?” Finn asked.

  “Do better than that, sir,” the sergeant replied, eyes lighting up. “Last time I visited Pleiku, I happened across an M-21 Sniper System. Traded an NCO from the Fourth ID, was getting ready to DROS, out of it and a case of Lake City .308. You get the troops spotting where the fire’s coming from, I’ll put a round right down their barrels.”

  Finn had no doubt it would be true. Epstein had been a corporal in the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six Day War, was rumored to have stacked up the better part of an Egyptian infantry company with a weapon far less capable than the M-21. After the war he had gotten bored with patrolling Sinai, left Israel, and joined the U.S. Army with the specific goal of coming to Vietnam. The Army had, in its usual inimitable manner, sent him not to an infantry unit, but to a maintenance battalion in the 101st Airborne. It had taken him almost the full year
of his first tour to effect a transfer to the Special Forces, being accepted as a recon sergeant in Studies and Observations Group. Wounded on his first trip “across the fence,” he had recuperated in Japan, returned at his own request to Vietnam, and, it being felt that he was still not sufficiently recovered to run recon yet, was assigned to Boun Tlak Special Forces Camp.

  Funny how things sometimes worked out, Finn mused. No novelist would have conceived of the roundabout way that had put a trained sniper exactly where he was needed.

  As Epstein ran at a crouch through the trenches to find his weapon, Finn turned back to supervise the destruction of the second trench. Once more Elmo Driver and his crew were below, this time facing no resistance. Whoever commanded the NVA facing them had obviously come to the belated realization that trying to push through enough people to overcome a determined adversary in such a confined space was a waste of time and men.

  Within a few minutes Nie, Frick and Frack, and finally Elmo Driver came storming up out of the cave. Elmo had decided it was too risky to try to detonate everything electrically. Too much chance of the NVA coming in behind them and cutting the wire while they were setting up.

  He’d hit upon the expedient of rigging several different nonelectric circuits and hiding them within the explosives. The detonators were crimped to precut pieces of time fuse, the length selected to provide only exactly enough time to clear the tunnel once the fuse lighters were pulled.

  Within only a second of Elmo’s feet clearing the hole came the whump of the explosion. Once again the ground lifted just outside the wire, settling into another depression.

  The depressions were bad, would give the attacking NVA a place to shelter themselves from direct fire once the main attack came, Finn thought. “Sergeant Stankow, you think you can put us some mortar concentrations on those?”

  “You have to ask?” Stankow said, acting hurt.

  “Probably not.” Finn grinned. This was what was nice about dealing with professionals. You seldom did have to ask.