Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  Too bad, asshole, he murmured as he settled the scope on the spot, took up the slack on the trigger, felt the satisfying shove of recoil. He settled the scope back, only to see that the branches were still moving in the same rhythmic way.

  The realization that he had been taken in came at almost the same time as the bullet. Only the fact that involuntary muscles had jerked his head up, off the scope, saved him from taking it somewhere around the cheekbone. As it was, it clipped off a chunk of his ear. He dropped to the floor of the bunker, pulling the rifle down with him.

  “Time to get the hell out of here,” he told the spotter.

  There was no response. He turned to see the Montagnard slumped on the floor, watching with dull eyes as the last of the blood from a severed carotid artery washed down the front of his shirt.

  “Son of a bitch!” he swore.

  He’d been outfoxed. Taken advantage of because of his overweening self-confidence. That someone out there was at least as good as he was came as a terrible shock.

  And it had caused a man’s death.

  Think about that later! Now get out of here. Get the bastard who did it.

  Sergeant Stankow was having problems of his own. The snipers were making it extremely difficult to work the 4.2-inch mortar. One of his ammunition bearers had been killed, and the others were unwilling to stand up and expose themselves to the fire. That reduced them to crawling back and forth to the bunker, pushing the heavy shells in front of them as they went.

  It would get worse if they couldn’t shoot at all. At least now he was able to keep harassing and interdictory fire on the likely assembly points, keeping their heads down if not killing them. Once you stopped that, they wouldn’t have to use snipers. The regular riflemen would be pouring it on, and with the volume of fire that would be coming into the camp, disaster would be inevitable.

  He instructed the Montagnard mortar sergeant to keep firing and, crouching and sometimes crawling, made his way to the nearest 81mm mortar pit. The 81 had a much smaller bursting radius, but was far easier to use. Best of all, the ammunition was considerably lighter.

  He found that crew cowering at the bottom of a trench, not daring to raise their heads up for fear of getting them taken off by sniper bullets.

  “You would make the fire chief ashamed,” he told them, in passable Jarai. The fire chief was a holy man in their tribe and was primarily responsible for their recruitment by the Americans. Stankow had seen him once, at a rice-wine ceremony, the wizened ’Yard looking as if he were at least a hundred years old. Although, given the stresses and strains of living in the jungle, hunted by both sides, subsisting off monkey meat and grubs, he could as well have been no older than Stankow.

  It worked. One of the ’Yards, not the sergeant, who obviously wanted to remain under cover, spoke sharply to them. They crawled over to the gun, started handing Stankow the high-explosive rounds.

  He cranked the elevating mechanism up, sighted on the aiming sticks, pulled the safety wire from the warhead, and dropped the round down the tube. Whomp! and it was on its way, the arc of the slow-moving round clearly visible. For a moment Stankow thought he might have elevated the tube too far—the round was being pushed by a gust of wind and looked to be coming right back down on them.

  It was, he knew, an optical illusion. The round drilled its way back down, the slight wobble creating a ululating whisper. A whisper that someone below would hear only at the last second.

  When it was far too late to do any good.

  The explosion came just outside the outer perimeter wire. Right where he would be massing his troops, were he the enemy commander.

  “More!” he said.

  Finn McCulloden, having sent Lieutenant Sloane, assisted by Olchak, to the dispensary, quickly made his way back to the command bunker. He too was concerned about the increasing amount of small-arms fire coming into the camp.

  “We still have commo?” he asked Becker.

  “Voice and CW,” the sergeant replied. “Which do you want?”

  “Voice,” Finn replied. Becker tuned the big Collins transceiver, handed him the handset.

  “Charlie Six, this is Cowboy Six, over.”

  Came the welcome voice of Sam Gutierrez. “Good to hear from you, Six. How’s it going?”

  “Better than we have any reason to hope, not as good as I’d like.” Finn thought about telling Gutierrez about the tunnels, decided to send that particular information over the CW, coded by Becker on his onetime pad. No use in letting the enemy radio intercept get more information than he was ready to allow.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Get us some support in here. Air, artillery, gunships—I don’t care. They’re wearing our asses out with sniper fire, and I’d like a little relief.”

  “Stand by.”

  Finn waited by the radio, its crackle the only noise in the bunker. Outside the steady thump of small-arms fire seemed to be increasing.

  “Cowboy, this is Charlie Six, over.”

  “What took you so long? I was getting lonely.”

  It had only been a few seconds, and he knew Gutierrez would take it in the spirit of the joke it was, but there was a certain amount of truth to the plea. Camp Boun Tlak was getting to be a lonely place. It felt, he thought, as if you were standing on the absolute edge of the world, and someone was steadily trying to saw it off.

  “Guns on the way,” Gutierrez said. He gave Finn the frequency of the helicopter gunships, coded by a simple transposition code they’d agreed upon during mission planning. You took a word of ten letters, none of which could be the same, and assigned a number from one to zero to each letter. A trained cryptologist could, of course, break the code through analysis of often-recurring letter combinations, but one hoped that the NVA didn’t have any cryptologists handy down at the regimental level.

  “He has your call sign,” Gutierrez continued. “Be on-station within fifteen. You got a way to mark targets?”

  “Do I ever,” Finn replied, thinking of the piles of white phosphorous shells, called by the soldiers Willy Peter, he’d seen stacked in the mortar bunkers. Willy Peter was originally designed for laying down smoke screens, the incendiary mixture inside starting to burn fiercely upon contact with the air. It produced a choking cloud of white smoke that could hide a battalion in the attack, if the wind was right and you used enough of it. A WP strike would be clearly visible even in the heavy jungle. Perfect for marking a target.

  It had the ancillary benefit of being a great antipersonnel round. The mortar casing itself fragmented, creating some damage. But far more was caused by the particles of burning white phosphorus, which hit the skin and continued to burn until smothered by lack of oxygen. If it wasn’t smothered it would burn its way completely through the body.

  “Sending a FAC back over,” Gutierrez continued. “He’ll spot for the one-seven-fives. They can fill in the gaps while the guns rearm and refuel.”

  The information eased Finn’s mind at least a little. Between helicopter gunships and artillery they could keep the fire from outside the camp to a minimum. Likelihood was that the NVA had dug in so deep they wouldn’t be taking too many casualties from it.

  You did what you could. The real test wouldn’t be today, anyway.

  He looked at his watch, once again amazed that it was still so early. Hours to go before dark. Not that he minded. He wished that somehow the earth could be forced to stand still, the sun never go down.

  As well wish for God to send lightning, he thought.

  “Those one-seven-fives, do they have any TD fuses?” he asked. TD, time delay, would allow the big shells to bury themselves in the earth before detonating. Hopefully, to collapse some NVA bunkers and tunnels.

  “TD it is,” Gutierrez replied. “I’ll relay the request.”

  “No other arty?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Getting to be redheaded stepchildren out here, aren’t we?”

  “Haven’t we always been?”
<
br />   “Hell, why change things now?” Finn said, reflecting upon the fact that Gutierrez was right. Since its inception, the Special Forces effort in Vietnam had been predicated upon the fact that it was more acceptable back home to lose a very few American soldiers and a whole lot of indigenous ones. Looked far better on the casualty figures.

  “How’s the battalion doing?”

  “Still no major resistance. Ahead of schedule,” Gutierrez replied.

  “That won’t last.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re not taking any chances.”

  Wouldn’t mind if they did, just a little bit, Finn thought. It would certainly have made him feel more secure to have the other two Mike Force companies here now. Even a North Vietnamese regiment would hesitate to take on such a force in entrenched positions.

  Not to be. Even if the battalion met no resistance at all, they could not physically move that far in less than two days.

  This was as good as it was going to get. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t so bad, that he’d been in far worse positions and had survived.

  But that was like trying to lie to yourself. Every time before there had been an out. No matter how bad it had got, you could fight your way through, break up and escape and evade, if necessary. Lose yourself in the jungle. The VC didn’t track all that well, and the North Vietnamese were worse. Not hard to shake off pursuers, particularly if you left them the occasional surprise.

  There would be no E and E here. It was stand and fight. And die.

  For just a second he allowed himself the luxury of wondering, yet again, what the hell he was doing here. At any time over the last few years he could have resigned his commission, as so many had, and returned to the States. Where his only contact with the war would have been on television and in the newspapers.

  And where you would have died, slowly, inside. Suicide, the weapon of choice being alcohol, or drugs, or just despair and guilt.

  He signed off, told Becker to mind the radio, that he was going to go out and get ready for the helicopter gunships that had been promised. He quickly scribbled a report on the tunnels, told the commo man to encode it and send it by CW.

  Becker looked at his face—and for the first time became afraid.

  The captain looked—what was it? Sad. That was it. Sad and resigned.

  Oh, shit, the commo man thought. We’re in more trouble than I thought.

  Andy Inger looked up from where he was treating a strike force trooper for a sucking chest wound to see Olchak bring in the lieutenant. He noted the blood-soaked bandage on the officer’s head, quickly determined that the bleeding was only seepage at the moment.

  “Take a number,” he said, his voice cheerful. “Be with you in a moment.”

  For a second it looked as if Lieutenant Sloane was going to protest. Inger turned his back to the officer, grabbed a set of angle scissors, cut away the striker’s fatigue jacket to reveal the black-rimmed hole where the bullet had gone in. A light pink froth bubbled from the hole with each breath the soldier exhaled, was sucked back in on inhalation.

  He turned the man over, sharply sucking his breath at the sight. The bullet had obviously tumbled, tearing out a great chunk of rib and the flesh surrounding it. Still, there was no sign of either arterial bleeding, which would have been bright red, or the dark red flow of a major vein.

  The man’s breathing was becoming steadily more labored, indicating to Inger that the affected lung had probably collapsed. He ripped the cover off a petrolatumimpregnated bandage, pressed first the bandage, then the waterproof cover it had come in, over the wound. The surface quickly dimpled, showing him that he had a good seal. He did the same to the front wound, then wrapped a big Ace bandage around the man’s chest to keep the bandages in place. He then had the striker lie down on the affected side, the better to allow the unaffected lung to expand into the space that the damaged lung had opened.

  The effect was immediate. The striker started breathing far more easily, and within seconds the slight blue tinge left his lips.

  There was one final step. Inger asked one of the Montagnard medics for a thoracentesis pack. From it he took a long needle, a three-way valve, and a huge syringe. He swabbed a spot just over the striker’s floating rib with Betadine solution, then inserted the long needle between the ribs. The striker’s face screwed up with the pain, but he endured it stoically. It never ceased to amaze Andy Inger how much the Montagnards trusted them to do the right thing. Stick my hand in the fire? I really don’t want to, but the American must know what he’s doing. Okay.

  Blood immediately started flowing from the needle. Andy slipped the three-way valve on it, then affixed the syringe. Turned one way, the valve allowed him to aspirate blood through the needle by pulling back the plunger on the syringe. When the syringe was full, he turned the valve the other way, pushing the plunger back down and squirting the blood and other liquids into an emesis tray.

  He pulled out, he estimated, a full 500 ccs of liquid before the needle started coming up dry. Now that the entry of outside air into the closed system was blocked, the other lung would be expanding. As a sign of this, the striker was now breathing almost normally.

  He left the needle in place, instructing one of the ’Yard medics to watch the man, let him know if there was any sign of respiratory difficulty. The ’Yard wanted to know if he should give the striker some morphine. Now that the shock of wounding was lessening, the man was showing clear signs of pain.

  “No can do,” Inger said. “Morphine depresses the breathing. He’s just going to have to grin and bear it.”

  He turned his attention to the lieutenant, who had slumped on one of the few empty cots and was now watching his every move in fascinated silence.

  “So, LT,” he said. “Let’s take a look at your little boo-boo.”

  He cut away the bandage, noting approvingly that Captain McCulloden had placed it very professionally. Once a medic, always a medic, he thought.

  It started bleeding again. Some venous flow, which could be stopped by pressure, but one bright little arterial spurt. He opened a surgical pack, took from it a pair of hemostats and a set of tweezers. He grasped the flesh next to the artery, pulled it away from the flow, ignoring the sharply drawn breath indicating just how painful the process might be. With the hemostat he dug in the wound, finally exposing the end of the small artery. He clamped down on it, was rewarded with the immediate cessation of bleeding.

  He rummaged through the pack, found the catgut sutures, pulled the artery out even farther, and quickly tied it off above the hemostat, drawing the catgut as tight as possible. When the wound was closed, the catgut would slowly be absorbed into the body, eliminating the need to go back in and take it out.

  He unclamped the hemostat, checked for bleeding, saw that there was none, then performed the same procedure for the larger veins.

  “I’m gonna close this up,” he told Sloane. “We leave it open, the scalp has a tendency to retract. Makes it a hell of a lot harder to close it up later. Besides, this’ll keep most of the dirt out. I’ll give you enough antibiotics, should keep any infection down. That okay with you?”

  There had been no mention of evacuation, Sloane thought as the medic scrubbed out the wound with a pHisoHex solution. And, he surmised, there would not be. The real reason Inger was closing up the wound was that it would enable Sloane to go back out and fight.

  The headache that had been pounding behind his eyes suddenly grew much worse.

  Chapter 8

  “Cowboy Six, this is Red Leg Two Zero, over.”

  Finn pulled the handset from its perch on the left shoulder of his web gear, pressed the push-to-talk switch, and acknowledged the call of the artillery forward observer, flying overhead in a little single-engine Birddog.

  “Understand you need a little help down there, Six,” the forward observer said.

  “Anything you can do would be appreciated, my friend.”

  “One-seven-fives are standing by. Where do yo
u want ’em?”

  Finn had come up with a plan, which he quickly described to the FO.

  “Might just work,” Red Leg Two Zero replied. Finn could almost read the amusement in his voice. “Wait one.”

  Finn listened to him relay coordinates to the faraway cannon, then heard the word “Shot.” That was his acknowledgment of the battery’s notification that the first shell was on the way.

  Moments later, though to Finn it seemed an eternity, he heard the FO report, “Splash.” Bullshit, Finn thought. Either they missed the whole damned area, or the shell had been a dud. Certainly there was no sign of an explosion.

  Then the ground shook beneath his feet, the tremor stronger than that he remembered coming from the only earthquake he’d ever been in. A huge cloud of dust mixed with explosives smoke spurted from the ground like a dirty geyser, two hundred yards outside the wire.

  The time-delay fuse had allowed the big shell to burrow itself deep into the ground before exploding. The soft ground had transmitted the shock, almost like ripples through water and, Finn hoped, collapsed any trenches or tunnels within range.

  “How’s that, Six?” the FO inquired.

  “Fire for effect,” Finn replied.

  “Fire for effect, roger.” The forward observer transmitted the command to the faraway battery, who would be standing by with shells in the tube, waiting. All the tubes would fire at the same time, upon the same coordinates, depending upon slight differences in powder weight, heat of the cannon, wind, humidity, and a dozen other factors to keep the shells from falling upon exactly the same spot. Something like two tons of explosives, Finn knew, were now on their way.

  He heard “Shot” again, counting the seconds this time. There was a slight rushing noise, growing louder by the instant, then a series of dull thunks. This time when the explosions came, you could actually see the ground move. Dirt filled the air, and from somewhere outside the wire he could hear a faint scream.

  “Right one hundred, up one hundred,” he commanded. “Fire for effect.” No time to feel any sympathy for the poor bastards who were now waiting for the next onslaught. No time to worry about the shells perhaps bursting in the wrong place. No time for anything but killing.