Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  And the killing was just getting started.

  The next shells came in, most of them on target but one errant projectile landing just outside the wire, where the resulting crater swallowed up a section of the outer defenses. “Shit!” Finn swore. That was why you didn’t call 175s on danger-close. If he had, the errant shell would have landed just about atop the bunker in which he was standing.

  But you used what you had, and it was proving effective. From his vantage point he could see signs of movement in the formerly empty enemy trenches. Their bunkers were taking a beating—it only made sense for them to abandon those being subjected to fire and regroup somewhere else.

  Which was exactly what Finn was waiting for.

  “Right two hundred, up one hundred,” he commanded the forward observer, moving the next barrage farther away from the wire. No sense in making it easier for the attackers. “Then check fire and bring in the birds.”

  “Roger, copy.”

  Once again Finn heard the relayed commands, the indication that the rounds were on the way, the “Splash” signal. Once again the ground erupted, this time the rounds so freakishly close together it looked like a volcano erupting. The wind shifted, bringing the acrid smell of high explosives mixed with pulverized dirt so strongly to him he fell into a fit of sneezing.

  His nasal explosions almost drowned out the steady beat of incoming blades as the first choppers of the aerial rocket-artillery (ARA) battalion swept in from the south. Through teared-up eyes he watched the puffs of smoke and fire spurt from the rocket pods slung next to the skids, each ripple of fire loosing forty-eight 2.75-inch rockets at the hapless targets beneath.

  The first birds peeled off just as the second wave came in, Finn hearing a clear “Wooo-ha!” from one of the pilots. Seldom did they get targets like these. Mostly they fired their ordnance into the jungle, guided by the troops on the ground against targets they couldn’t see, depending upon reports to tell them how well or how badly they’d done.

  Now the impact of the rockets on the troops in the trenches was quite clear. Many of the missiles, it was true, impacted harmlessly outside the slits in the ground, but enough found their way into the trenches to cause absolute carnage.

  After the first strike the forward observer gave them free gun, which allowed the birds to seek targets on their own. And there were plenty, as the troops not in the artillery strike area, having been given the command from their superiors to abandon the close-in bunkers anyway, streamed toward the relative safety of the jungle hundreds of meters away.

  American troops, at least those he had trained, would be taking stock of their situations, would be receiving orders from squad leaders, platoon sergeants, platoon leaders there with them, to hold fast, to go back to the bunkers. To avoid the withering fire from the helicopters, many of which had now expended all their rockets and were now raking the trenches with on-board 7.62mm miniguns. You tried to drill it into the junior leaders—take the initiative! Those who did generally survived and, more important, insured the survival of most of their men. Those who didn’t—well, Darwin had been right.

  The North Vietnamese command structure didn’t generally allow for such flexibility. An order was passed down from on high, and it was followed regardless of the consequences. Some people, and Finn included here those who had little actual field experience in the matter, said that it was because of the relatively primitive state of the troops the NVA commanded. How could you expect an uneducated peasant to take the initiative?

  Finn knew that to be nonsense. Few people came from a more primitive state than his Montagnards, but they readily adapted to small-unit, independent action. Over the years he’d been in Vietnam he’d personally seen dozens of incidents wherein the American adviser had been killed or wounded or simply wasn’t in the right place at the right time, whereupon a ’Yard who had only last year been surviving by slash-and-burn agriculture, supplemented by the occasional crossbow shot at a monkey, would assert leadership that would have done a West Pointer proud.

  He’d counted on the NVA reaction when he’d planned the strike. They’d keep streaming out of the bunkers until someone managed to countermand the order to do so, and their communication was slow and poor.

  For a full half hour the helicopters pounded the fleeing men, until the supply of targets finally started to dry up. Which was, conveniently, at about the same time that the gunships ran out of both ammunition and fuel.

  Finn was again talking to the forward observer when the latter broke off his transmission to yell a warning to the commander of the ARA battalion, who was now overflying the battle zone on a personal damage assessment. Finn saw the cause of the warning, a sudden spurt of fire from somewhere in the tree line, then a streak almost too fast for the eye to follow.

  Jesus, Finn thought, that’s a goddamn missile.

  He’d heard intelligence reports about the possible arming of the NVA with SA-7 ground-to-air missiles, somewhat analogous to the American Redeye, though more crude in function. Shoulder-fired, heat-seeking, it probably wouldn’t be as effective as the Redeye was against fast-movers. But it could obviously do a job on a chopper.

  The pilot only had time to break right slightly as the missile sped toward his exhaust pipe, which caused it to impact upon the tail rotor rather than flying right up into the engine before detonating with disastrous results.

  Bad enough. The explosion destroyed the tail rotor, taking away a large part of the boom. Inasmuch as the tail rotor stabilized the centrifugal forces produced by the main rotor and was the only method of keeping the chopper from spinning at exactly the same rate as the main rotor, the bird became instantly unflyable.

  And it looked like it was going to come down right on top of him.

  Sloane woke from a drugged sleep to find dirt falling in his face. The entire underground room was shaking so hard he had to hold on to the sides of the cot to keep from being thrown out. Around him the other patients were crying in terror.

  Andy Inger came lurching down the corridor, the tremors bouncing him from one side to the other. “It’s okay!” he said. “Arty strike right outside the wire. Givin’ Charlie hell!”

  He moved around the tiny room checking IVs, replacing bandages where they had bled through, taking the vital signs of the ones who remained oblivious to the chaos. When he got to Sloane, he took out a flashlight and closely examined the lieutenant’s pupils.

  Sloane sat passively as the light shone in his eyes. He was still groggy from the codeine tablets Inger had given him earlier, something to combat the intense headache. Which, he noticed, seemed to be almost bearable at the moment.

  “Lookin’ good, LT,” the medic said. Sloane knew from his limited cross-training this meant that his pupils were the same size and reacted normally to the bright light. If they had not been, or if one had narrowed more slowly than the other, it would have meant brain damage. Swelling from the trauma. Worse, a broken blood vessel somewhere inside that was slowly, insidiously filling the limited space in the cranium with blood and fluid, destroying the brain.

  He’d heard Sergeant Matthesen, whose lifeless body now reposed in another room, talk about treating such an injury. He’d described a field trephining operation, wherein he’d bored a hole into the skull of a patient, luckily picking just the right spot. The blood had flowed out the hole, relieving the pressure, saving the man’s life.

  Sloane shuddered at the thought. You could only hope you’d be deeply unconscious during the procedure. The medic wouldn’t be able to use much, if anything, in the line of painkillers. The breathing would already be depressed—morphine or Pentothal would only depress it more. Matthesen had performed the procedure by first cutting through the scalp, exposing the skull, then boring through the bone with an ordinary brace-and-bit taken from the team carpenter kit. Sloane could just imagine the grinding, scraping progress of the drill bit as it slowly chewed its way through the bone.

  “I need to get back out there,” he said, attempti
ng to stand and immediately falling back onto the cot.

  “I’d give it a few more minutes, I was you.” Inger gently pushed the lieutenant’s shoulders back down, settling his head on the bloody pillow. There had been some seepage through the bandage, he noted, but nothing to worry about. Natural clotting factors should take care of it, as long as it wasn’t reopened.

  Sloane didn’t protest. At the moment the hard cot seemed as welcoming as a mother’s womb. He knew that his duty lay elsewhere, that his father would even now be calling him a weakling for lying there while there was fighting to be done!

  But he didn’t care. Let someone else handle it for a while. He’d done a good job so far, that he knew. No longer was there the tinge of contempt in the eyes of the other Americans. Captain McCulloden had almost, if not quite, praised him for his support in the LLDB bunker. And Olchak, helping to support him on the way to the dispensary, had been almost chatty.

  He felt a surprising warmness in the soul he had deliberately hardened against these men. Good men. Far better than the political hacks, the martinets who didn’t know any other way of commanding troops, the washed-up, old time-servers who had been in his father’s circle of acquaintances.

  To be one of them seemed almost preferable to winning the Medal of Honor.

  But not quite, he thought, his cynicism returning to save him from what he thought would be turning into a puddle of mush, as he drifted back off to sleep.

  The chopper pilot managed to get the engine killed before the aircraft hit the ground. Which meant that the main rotor, instead of smashing into the ground under power, where it would have chewed up the fuselage and anything inside it as it broke into pieces, was stopped after only a couple of turns.

  Still, the impact was enough to smash the thin metal of the helicopter like an egg, throwing the bodies of the crew chief and gunner out the open doors. Finn smelled the sudden stench of aviation fuel, realized that he had only seconds to help any survivors before they were consumed in a pyre of gas, exploding ammunition, and the magnesium alloy of which many parts of the chopper were made.

  He was already up and running before the twisted metal came to a complete stop, grabbing the unconscious crew chief by the shoulders and pulling him quickly into a nearby trench. From the way the man’s head flopped, Finn suspected he had been on a fool’s mission.

  Sergeant Washington was already at the downed bird by the time Finn came back up from the trench. Washington had acquired an ax from somewhere and was trying to chop through the Perspex windshield. Finn went over to the other body lying on the ground, that of the gunner, and saw that he could give no help. The man’s head had cracked like a melon, probably from the impact of what had been left of the main rotor. He dragged him away from the fuselage anyway. Some mother would want to know what had happened to her son, and leaving him there to be consumed by the flames would be the height of cruelty.

  Finn returned to the fuselage, seeing that Washington had managed to cut a hole through the tough plastic and was trying to release the catches from the inside. Through the bloodied window Finn could see the face of the pilot, obviously still alive.

  He wouldn’t be for long, if they didn’t get this thing open.

  Olchak came running up, carrying a long crowbar he’d found somewhere. He thrust it into the hole Washington had cut, and with all three of them on the end, they managed to prop away the window.

  “Copilot!” the man inside managed to gasp. “Hurt.”

  Finn grabbed the K-bar knife from its sheath on his harness, quickly cut away the pilot’s harness, and with Washington’s help pulled him out the window. The young man looked relatively unscathed—obviously the blood that had spattered the inside of the cockpit had come from someone else.

  Finn leaned far into the hole, seeing that the copilot was unconscious, but obviously still breathing. He cut away the harness, attempted to pull the man out, couldn’t budge him. The man, a captain, Finn saw, was pinned by his legs deep under what was left of the front fuselage. The chopper had finally come to rest on that side, and the thin metal had collapsed on him.

  The inside of the cockpit looked as inviting as an open grave. The smell of gas was almost overpowering. One spark, or vapors reaching the still-hot exhaust, and the thing would go up like a gasoline-soaked bonfire.

  “Shit,” he said, and crawled inside.

  He first checked the neck pulse on the unconscious man. Strong and steady. He was almost sorry. While he was willing to risk his life to save a man, he was far from willing to recover a dead one.

  He tried to see what was holding the man inside the wreckage, but couldn’t contort his body inside the tiny space well enough to see. With a sigh of exasperation and another muttered “Shit!” he pulled himself out the window, turned around, and reentered headfirst. Almost immediately the blood started pooling in his head. Gonna have a hell of a headache after this, he thought.

  I don’t hurry up, he then thought, I won’t have a head to worry about. The smell of gas was getting stronger and stronger. It didn’t take too much of an imagination to visualize it dripping somewhere, pooling on the red dirt, slowly making its inexorable way to a sparking electrical connection.

  The desire to get out of there, get the hell away from this death trap, was almost overwhelming. Nobody would blame him. Hell, they didn’t even have to know that the man inside was still alive. He could say that he’d checked the pulse, found nothing, and had gotten out. Who was to know?

  You are, asshole, he told himself.

  He squirmed to a position where he could see the trapped man’s legs. As he had feared, they were quite firmly pinned in the wreckage. He thought he might be able to tear away enough debris to get the one closest to him free, but saw that the other one was not only trapped, but had a chunk of the fuselage embedded in it just below the knee. Blood was dripping out on the ground, just as he had imagined the avgas would be.

  Freeing the unconscious captain would take moving the fuselage, turning it over, then prying the wreckage loose with a crowbar. And there simply wasn’t time for that.

  He pried the nearest leg loose, pulled it to the side to expose the wounded limb. “Shit!” he said one last time.

  “I’d give a goddamn Yankee dollar for some more room in this son of a bitch,” he swore as he twisted around, first taking a cravat bandage from one of his belt pouches. He tore the plastic cover off, left the green cloth folded, tied it loosely around the leg just above where it was pinned, grabbed a piece of metal that had once been part of the controls of the chopper, inserted it beneath the bandage, and started twisting. It took only a few turns before the bleeding stopped. He secured the makeshift tourniquet by tying the end of the metal rod with the loose ends of the bandage.

  Next he removed two morphine Syrettes from the five-pack he carried, injected the unconscious man with them. He wanted him to stay unconscious. What he was getting ready to do was going to hurt a lot, and pain had a way of bringing people back up from unimaginable depths. The last thing he needed was to have the patient flailing around as he cut off his leg.

  Because that was what he had to do, as much as he hated the idea. He’d done an amputation only once before, and that had been on a hapless mutt back during Special Forces Advanced Medical Training, commonly called the Dog Lab.

  The principles are the same, he told himself. Just more meat to get through.

  Damn good thing I sharpened my K-bar, he thought. Once more he pulled it from its sheath, gritted his teeth so tight his headache suddenly achieved a new level of ferocity, and made the first cut.

  The skin parted nicely, exposing the muscle beneath. He cut as closely as possible to the piece of metal that was pinning the limb down, still regretted that he was going to have to remove so much. The pilot, if he lived, would have a hard time getting a prosthesis attached. More than likely some doctor down the line was going to do the job again and was going to take it off at the knee.

  But not me, he thought. Such a
thing was so far alien to his training that the thought never really made an impression on his mind.

  Next through the muscle, separating each layer as he went. Natural tension retracted it as it was cut, making his job easier. The only bleeding was a little seepage, indicating the efficiency of his tourniquet.

  A few more careful cuts, and he was down to the bone. It gleamed pinkish white in the light coming through the Perspex.

  Okay, wise guy, what do you do now? When he’d operated on the heavily sedated dog, he’d had a nice clean table, with sharp scalpels and retractors and hemostats and most important, a bone saw.

  Then he remembered a little item he’d tucked away in a belt pouch, along with a signal mirror, pen flares, mini-smoke-grenades, and some line and fishhooks. One never knew when it might be necessary to escape and evade, and if you didn’t make it back to friendly lines within days, you were going to have to somehow survive. A piece of cable that could be rigged into an animal trap, which could, if equipped with handles made from branches, serve admirably as a garrote, why, such a thing would be invaluable.

  And if it could also cut down trees, so much the better.

  The survival saw was nothing more than a piece of wire with teeth. And it would serve the purpose admirably.

  The grinding and grating of the saw against bone was nearly unbearable to him. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end. But within seconds he had sawed through both the tibia and the fibula, and the leg was free. Now backing out, he was able to pull the pilot with him. How much time do I have? he wondered. Seemed like he’d been in there forever.

  The fuselage was rocked by an explosion, then another. From somewhere outside he heard the telltale rush of incoming artillery. The 157s from across the border, he surmised. Getting even.