Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  He tried to keep his imagination under control.

  The next explosion was right on top of the bunker. One ’Yard screamed in fear, the others huddled even closer to one another. A very human reaction—seeking comfort in the closeness of another human body. Tactically very unsound. What they should have been doing was scattering themselves as far away from one another as possible. That way there would be at least some chance of a few surviving if a shell came through the overhead.

  He didn’t feel up to scolding them right now. Actually, it was only with some effort that he didn’t crawl over and get right in the middle of the pack.

  Clods of dirt came raining down. A scorpion landed on his leg, stood there alert and obviously angry at being disturbed from its cozy lair. Its tail arced above its back, the stinger quivering. Bucky casually flicked it away, watching as it ran back into the dirt, frantically burrowing.

  That’s what I’d like to be doing right now, he told the insect. Couple more of those like the last one, and we won’t have any choice.

  The noise of the big guns was muffled by the jungle, but was getting ever closer. Alexander halted the team, listened, motioned with his hand to alter the direction of march of the point man, and then they set off again. He’d stopped communicating with Covey fifteen minutes before. Right now they would be inside the security zone of whatever troops would be protecting the guns. There would be no more noise until it was absolutely essential.

  The point man raised his right foot high in the air, his eyes scanning the brush around them, the ground beneath his feet, the small space his leg would be moving, always alert to the slightest sign of danger. Was that bush up ahead in fact a camouflaged NVA machine gunner? As you move your leg forward, are you going to brush up against a trip wire? The spot where you’ve chosen to put down your foot, is it relatively clear of twigs, dried leaves? The little piece of foliage sticking up, is it in fact a sprout, or is it the characteristic three-prong probe of a mine?

  The lifted foot is slowly brought down, outside edge of the sole first. Slowly and ever so carefully the foot rakes the ground, moving leaves and twigs out of the way. The foot is put down into the cleared space, and weight is then shifted from the rear foot to the front. The rear foot is lifted, and the whole painstaking process is repeated.

  And they were moving with what, to Van Alexander, was extreme rapidity. At least some of the noise of their passing was masked by the booming of the artillery, now almost constant.

  Move another hundred yards, it taking almost a half hour, halt again. Another slight shift in direction. Sounds among the trees can be deceptive, the waves being deflected by the heavy vegetation. What seems directly ahead can be off to one side or the other, and the only way you are going to know it is to get ever closer. Triangulate with the ears, watch for the shock waves of overpressure moving the trees. Listen for the shouts of the battery commander as he directs the firing.

  Not too far now, Alexander thought as he heard that very sound, faint yet and considerably muffled by the jungle. He looked up through a slight gap in the canopy, saw one of the limestone cliffs looming not too far away.

  He thought he might have figured out why none of the airplanes flying overhead had spotted the battery. But he’d have to get closer to be sure.

  Ahead again, now moving even slower.

  The point man froze, one foot still in the air. Slowly and carefully he brought his foot back to the spot it had just left. He pointed to a spot just off to the side.

  Alexander focused his eyes on the spot, trying to see the pattern emerging from the foliage. It was like staring at a painting, trying to gather the tiny bit of information the artist had hidden somewhere there, a slight curlicue of the brush that told you what you were seeing wasn’t really what you thought you were seeing.

  Then he saw it. A slight movement, something only the sharp eyes of the point man would have picked out. An arm, being brought up, and when it stopped, you could see that it had reached a face. Slight shine of sweat. Rhythmic movement of the jaw.

  A sentry, eating something. As yet totally oblivious of their presence.

  Alexander didn’t have to look at them to tell that the remainder of his team was standing exactly as stock-still as was he. The sentry was absorbed in what he was doing and wouldn’t be expecting trouble this far over the border, but all it would take would be the smallest careless movement and the situation would change. He’d get off at least a warning shot before they could kill him, and within seconds others would swarm the position. Then it would be immediate action drills and break contact and a hell of a run, calling Prairie Fire emergency the entire way, and hoping like hell you could get enough air to keep them off your ass until finally somebody could come in and whisk you away.

  Team Texas had been in that situation a number of times before. And it wasn’t pleasant. Alexander had no intention of doing it again, if he could avoid it.

  Besides, it would make it absolutely impossible to find the guns. And some poor bastard across the border, maybe even someone he knew, would die.

  Not acceptable.

  He slowly drew the sound-suppressed High Standard .22 pistol from its holster on his survival vest, pulled the slide back slightly to confirm a round was in place in the chamber, let it slide back into battery. Thumbed off the safety. Rested the barrel on his free hand and took a sight picture right about where he judged the bridge of the nose to be.

  The report was only slightly louder than the noise made by the slide as it ejected the spent shell and chambered another. He fired again, knowing as he did so that he was merely gilding the lily. The sentry had slumped with barely a grunt, now lay exposed beneath his camouflage canopy. The second round hit him in the top of the head.

  Van Alexander didn’t like to take chances. The .22 round, slowed by the sound suppressor, was a notoriously unreliable man-stopper. The first time he’d used it, against an enemy point man, he’d shot for center of mass. The surprised victim had slapped at the wound as if at a pesky mosquito. He’d had to shoot the man twice more in the face before he’d finally died.

  The point man, who had stood as still as a statue the entire time, being dangerously exposed and subject at any moment to discovery, now began his slow movement forward again. They passed by the sentry, the jungle ants already swarming at the tiny trickle of blood that seeped from the hole next to his left eye.

  Within minutes they were, Alexander judged, inside the security perimeter. Able to move faster now, any worries about noise eliminated by the steady booming of the guns, the shouted orders of the crews, now the only worry the chance encounter.

  Then the point man once again stopped, looking quizzically upward. Alexander moved forward to join him, like him surprised at the sight of a sheer limestone cliff rising at least three hundred feet straight up.

  They had been fooled, he judged, by the echos of the guns, bouncing off the cliffs. Now it was quite clear that the howitzers were somewhere off to the right.

  Once again on the move, getting a little distance away from the cliffs. Far too easy for someone to channelize them, hem them up with the unscalable rock on one side, many guns on the other.

  As they moved, Alexander cursed himself. What on earth had caused him to think this was going to be easy? At any moment they could stumble across any number of North Vietnamese, far more than could be quickly and silently removed, as he had the sentry. And it would be expected that they would have good communications here within a base area. Good enough to notify every reaction force around, good enough to get them surrounded, with the only choice then being to surrender or die.

  Van Alexander had seen firsthand, on Bright Light missions sent in to recover what might have been left of recon teams, the results of surrender. That, he vowed, would never happen to him. Not as long as he had at least one round left in any weapon.

  Sweat was pouring off him, even though it was quite cool here in the shade of the cliff. His heart was pounding; his fingers felt as
if they were emitting liquid fire. He had an almost overwhelming urge to piss, finally said screw it, and let it run warm down his leg. The ammonia smell, with a sweet underlay of pure filtered adrenaline, came sharp to his nose.

  Time to get out of here, he thought. Call in a general location, guns can’t be that far away, let the zoomies take care of it. Only reasonable course of action. Won’t do anyone any good, we die here.

  But the team kept going, linked perhaps more closely to the mission than they were even to one another.

  Alexander shook his head, glanced back at the assistant team leader, Sergeant Leroy Billings, gave him a wry smile. Billings smiled back, his expression understanding. Yep, it said, this is pretty goddamn stupid.

  But they didn’t stop.

  “Covey, this is One Zero,” came the whisper over the radio, so soft the Covey rider had to strain his ears to hear it.

  “Go, One Zero,” he said, shifting in the tiny seat to ease the pressure on his right leg. It still ached fiercely where the doctors had taken a fist-size chunk of muscle out, the flesh pulverized from the AK-47 bullet that had tumbled through like a crazed somersaultist.

  Had it not been for that wound, he would have been on the ground on a mission like this one, so he was particularly attentive to the team leader below.

  “When we moved, I think we ended up next to those guns we were talking about,” Alexander said. “Purely by accident, of course.”

  The Covey rider looked up to see the Air Force pilot smiling back at him in his rearview mirror. “Of course,” the rider said. Their conversations would be monitored by signals intercept and recorded for further analysis by the technical and tactical boffins down in Saigon.

  “Check out grid Uniform Tango five seven zero six, eight five four seven,” Alexander continued.

  An eight-digit coordinate! RT Texas’s One Zero must have stumbled very close to the guns, indeed, the rider thought. A four-digit grid, in the military grid-reference system, meant you had placed something within a thousand-meter square and was often about as good as you could get in the jungle. A six-digit coordinate located you to within a hundred meters. Good enough for government work, unless you were calling in a danger-close.

  An eight-digit coordinate meant you had located the spot to within ten meters.

  The Covey rider might have scoffed at such a claim coming from someone else. But he knew Alexander, had in fact been the young sergeant’s first one-zero. Fresh out of an accelerated Special Forces qualification course, not yet twenty years old, Alexander had been typical of the young men they were now receiving. Expecting them to survive the most dangerous and difficult missions being run in Southeast Asia.

  Most, if not all, the older sergeants, those who had multiple tours, who had run recon practically from the beginning, either had been killed, had been so severely wounded they were medically discharged, or had simply given it up. The realization came, sooner or later, that if you kept doing this stuff, you were going to die. It was that simple.

  So kids like Alexander came, were given a little bit more training down at the Combat Orientation Course in Nha Trang, and were sent to the various Command and Control units to become assistant patrol leaders. If they showed any promise at all, they were then sent to the Recon Team Leader course at Long Thanh and became one-zeros.

  From the beginning, Alexander had shown such promise. As loud and boisterous as the others in the club, in the field he became a quiet, competent professional. No matter what situation they got themselves into, and there had been more than a few, he never lost his head. And he had an almost uncanny sense of direction, able to read terrain features as a lover might the face of his sweetheart.

  A much better map reader, the Covey rider was happy to admit, than he was. And he thought himself pretty good. So if Van Alexander said it was at those coordinates, it damned well was.

  The rider already had the acetate-covered map spread out on his knees, quickly locating the indicated spot. Right to grid five seven, up to grid eight five. Five seven zero meant that the spot was close to the grid line itself. If it had been a hundred meters to the right, it would have been five seven one something. Eight five four meant that it was something over four hundred meters up inside the grid.

  For the last numbers he took out his protractor, which contained boxes marked with tick marks. He quickly put a pencil mark 60 meters to the right of the five-seven grid line, and 470 meters up from the eight-five grid line.

  The map showed the spot to be right up next to a sheer limestone cliff. He selected two prominent terrain features, one a particularly noticeable piece of karst they’d flown over earlier, and the other a characteristic bend in the river, drew lines between each and the indicated spot on the map, and used the protractor again to measure the angles.

  He keyed the intercom. “From Parrot Head peak, azimuth one seven five, and Minton loop, azimuth zero two five,” he said. “Mark.”

  The pilot would now be able to fly over and, when he reached the intersection between the two known points, be right on top of the guns. More important, he would be able to put a white phosphorous marking rocket right on top of them, showing the way for the air strikes he was already calling on the air-to-air frequency.

  The Coveys had their own names for prominent terrain features, which served as a sort of rough-and-ready code. And also sometimes recognized what had gone on down there in the jungle.

  Minton loop, for instance, was named for a one-zero who had allowed his team to get backed up against the river when it was in full flood. The ones who hadn’t died from the North Vietnamese assault had drowned when they’d tried to escape across the raging water.

  Now it was possible that this particular cliff of limestone could become Alexander’s wall. He hoped not. They had lost way too many good men already.

  “Trucker Five, this is Covey, over.”

  “This is Five, go.”

  “Got a hot one for you. Interested?”

  The pilot of the A1E, bored with flying circles in the sky, was instantly alert. The old prop-driven plane he piloted, left over from the Korean War, jumped a little bit as he corrected the stick. About time, he thought.

  “Roger,” he said. “Gimme something to shoot at, over.”

  “You know those guns the FAC was talking about earlier? Well, I think we got ’em.”

  “Yee-haw!” the pilot shouted, thoroughly startling his wingman, who was so bored he had almost been asleep, driving the other plane with what he liked to call autopilot. Except, of course, the old birds had nothing like an autopilot.

  Quickly the Covey gave the location to the lead pilot, who used the call sign Trucker because the A1Es carried so much ordnance they were referred to as the dump trucks of the sky, and also because he had the most truck kills of any pilot in Southeast Asia. He winged over, pushed the throttle to the fire wall, and bored a hole in the sky on the way to the spot only twenty or so miles south of his current position. Within just a few moments he picked up Covey, flying an imprudent five hundred meters above the jungle canopy.

  “Got you, Covey,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Got a team on the ground,” Covey replied. “They say the guns are butted right back against that limestone cliff you see at about your seven o’clock. Slight overhang right above them, damn near makes it like they’re shooting out of a cave. Probably why we couldn’t spot ’em from the air earlier. Target run is going to have to be parallel to the cliff, north-south or south-north, your choice. Suggest five-hundreds on the first run, blow some of the canopy away, then CBUs, over.”

  As Trucker toggled the right switches to pick ordnance, he considered the problem. They were going to have to make a fairly shallow angle of attack to make sure the big five-hundred-pound bombs went exactly where they were supposed to. A fraction too far to one side and they would hit the cliff, detonating dangerously early and perhaps blowing the plane out of the sky. Too far to the other side, and the team, whose location he had now
been given, would be in the impact zone. Besides, it wouldn’t do much to silence the guns, and that was what they were there after, wasn’t it?

  Of course, that was going to put them into a run that Charlie would undoubtedly be covering with every bit of antiaircraft artillery he had.

  Nobody ever said it was easy, Captain, he told himself.

  “Roger,” he said. “South to north it is. You ready to mark?”

  “Stand by for mark,” Covey said, lining up the tiny airplane, aiming the nose downward, centering the homemade crosshairs on the Perspex windshield on the target area. He punched the firing button, was rewarded by the swoosh! of the marking rocket as it left the pod beneath his wing. Straight and true it flew, erupting in a burst of white-hot particles as it impacted the jungle canopy just short of the limestone cliff. A gout of white smoke quickly formed, bright against the dull green of the jungle.

  His course took him right over the white cloud. He was just getting ready to confirm target to the strike aircraft when with a great whoosh! the next salvo of 157 rounds erupted from the foliage below. One came so close the plane was rocked like a toy boat in a hurricane.

  “B’lieve you got the right spot, Cap’n,” came the dry voice from the Covey rider in the backseat.

  “You could be right,” the pilot said, his hands shaking on the stick, adrenaline pumping through his system like fire. It was for such a moment that you lived, he thought.

  “Got a mark, Covey,” Trucker Five said.

  “Roger, Trucker. Have fun.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Trucker said. “We will.”