Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  Recon Team Texas hunkered down in a bomb crater so old it was overgrown by vines and brush that were able for the first time to gain a foothold as a benefit of the sunlight blasting down through the blown-away canopy. Their tiger-stripe fatigues blended well with the foliage, and Alexander had passed around a camouflage stick to replenish the face paint that had eroded through three days of sweat. They moved with the deliberate slowness of men who knew that quick motions would be picked out by the eye, but that imperceptible movement would be ascribed to visual trickery.

  Alexander focused his binoculars, shielded against glare from the late-afternoon sun by a homemade shade of C-ration cardboard, on the one howitzer he could see, some two hundred meters away. It was firing steadily, the gun rocking back on its cradle as each shell left, then being pushed back forward by the on-board hydraulic cylinders. By the time it had reached its forward position, the gunner had opened the breech, let the expended shell casing fall free, and the two loaders, struggling under the weight of the heavy shells, had fitted another in place. A few seconds for the gun commander to twirl elevation and windage dials in response to the faint commands heard from the fire direction center, then he steps away. A quick pull of the lanyard and yet another shell is on its way to wreak havoc on the unseen target.

  The clouds of smoke expelled from the muzzle are caught by the canopy overhead, swirling in lazy patterns through the leaves. Sergeant Alexander had to give the enemy credit—the guns were in an outstanding position. And the swarming little men, bodies sheened with sweat, were working as fast and as efficiently as would have any gun crew back at Fort Sill. Perhaps it took a few more of them to hoist the shells—that was all.

  He could, he thought, easily have picked them off at this range, several of them dying before anyone could get a fix on the far-off reports. But get a fix they would, sooner or later. And gun crews could be replaced. All he would accomplish would be to get the team compromised, possibly killed.

  Let the zoomies do their stuff, he thought. Then we’ll see what happens.

  He heard the growl of aircraft engines at about the same time as did the enemy. The gun commander signaled a stop, and the crew looked fearfully up into the sky.

  The growl turned into a high-pitched howl as the plane dropped into a dive. Signal enough for the Vietnamese to drop down into their dug-in protective bunkers. Time for us to get our heads down too, Alexander thought, scuttling back down the rim of the crater and tucking himself into a ball.

  The first bomb always took you by surprise. No matter how many times you’d been in the vicinity of a five-hundred-pounder, your mind never seemed to maintain the memories of the shock. The noise was impossible, drilling through the head even when your hands were clapped firmly over your ears. The earth beneath you rippled like a live thing, as if a giant snake somehow lived beneath and was now twisting in its death throes. The hum, rather than whine, of flying shrapnel told you just how big were the pieces of bomb cutting through the trees, slicing through the thick trunks with no more difficulty than a chain saw through balsa. Clouds of dirt filled the air, combining with explosives smoke to make breathing more like chewing.

  Alexander knew better than to raise his head. More than one overeager spotter had forgotten, in the heat of the moment, that this would be only the first of three, as the flight overhead followed the leader.

  The next bomb landed somewhere close to the first, and the final one came uncomfortably close. Close enough to collapse part of the crater wall, half-covering him in dirt. Another little wind shift and that one would have landed right on top of us, Alexander thought. Team Texas would simply have ceased to exist. Listed in the rolls as missing, as so many others had been. Made into mincemeat, legs and arms and guts blown into the trees, there to be feasted upon by the flies and whatever jungle scroungers finally got up enough courage to overcome the fear of approaching the site of the cataclysm.

  He shook off the thought and crawled back up the rim of the crater, once again focusing on the battery position. Shit! The bombs had fallen short by at least a hundred meters, the smoking craters marking their impact point doing nothing more than clearing out empty jungle. The howitzer he could see had been shifted, but looked otherwise unhurt.

  He crawled back down into the crater, accepted the handset of the radio from the assistant patrol leader.

  “Gonna have to do better than that, Covey,” he said.

  Trucker considered the information he had just been given by Covey. The problem with his approach pattern had been that the cliff made a slight curve just before the pickling point for the bombs. The A1E, as maneuverable as it was, had had trouble adjusting to the curve that had been necessary in midrun. A slight mistake and the wingtip would have brushed the rock, with obviously disastrous consequences. It was drop slightly early and hope the bombs cruised in, or take the chance of vastly overshooting, and with the team on the ground being so close, that wouldn’t have been a good idea. They’d already come close to that, with the third man in the flight hitting the release button just a fraction later than had he and his wingman.

  There had been a scattering of antiaircraft fire as they’d rolled in, more so for the last man than the first, but still less than he had expected. Mostly small arms, though he had seen the telltale puffs of something larger exploding just off his right wingtip as he circled—37mm, obviously, from the size of it. Not radar-guided, otherwise that puff of smoke might have been right under his engine.

  He considered the next approach. Angling more toward the cliff and coming in from that direction wouldn’t work—by the time he got to a release point he would be far too close to the looming rock. No way of jamming the throttle to the fire wall and leaping up over the cliff.

  He could come in from the other direction, but dreaded the thought. The approach from that angle would necessitate his flying down the narrow valley that fed into the slight opening. A flak trap if ever there was one. For at least part of the run he would have to be so low they could shoot down on him.

  He shrugged, then touched for luck the left pocket of his survival vest. Inside it he carried a Saint Christopher medal. It had been given to him by his father, a pilot like himself, who had survived air combat throughout the Pacific, and another stint at trying to get himself killed in Korea. Don’t know if it does any good or not, his dad had said. But what the hell. Can’t hurt.

  He keyed the mike on the command frequency. “Follow my lead,” he said. He winged over and headed for the mouth of the valley.

  Chapter 10

  The barrage had been going on so long that when it stopped, Finn McCulloden didn’t at first realize it. His ears rang with a tinnitus that went bone deep. His head pounded, each beat of the heart seeming as if it would squirt blood out his ears. The air was so thick he could barely breathe it.

  And he was in a deep bunker shielded from the worst of it. He remembered pictures he had seen of the trenches in World War I, the landscape looking like something shipped down from the moon. How could they have stood it, day after day? It must have seemed a relief to finally get the command to go over the top—better to face the machine guns than huddle under the incessant shelling.

  Periodic radio messages from the other members of the team had told him just how much the camp was suffering. Bunkers collapsed, burying everyone inside. Ammo dumps exploded. Guns knocked out. Enough explosions in the wire to blast great paths, paths through which the sappers would soon come.

  And there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. That, he supposed, was the worst part. Always before he could influence the action, attack or retreat, break contact and run like hell if necessary.

  There was no place to run. Nothing to do except huddle here and hope the next one didn’t finally collapse the overhead cover. He’d already been buried alive once today and had been lucky. He didn’t want to go through that again. There might not be anybody around to dig him out the next time.

  Now sounds were filtering through the rin
ging. Cries for help, in both Montagnard and English, and some even in French. The crackling of a big fire somewhere. Shouts.

  He didn’t know what had caused the lull, or how long it would last. What he did know was that he had damned well better take advantage of it.

  Reluctantly, he grabbed his gun and went outside.

  Hell, he thought, couldn’t have looked any worse. There was little recognizable from the camp he had earlier seen from the air. Chunks of wadded-up tin from the aboveground barracks littered the ground; pieces of sandbags fluttered in the slight breeze. Over all was the miasma of smoke, of blood, of shit. Some of it was fresh. He saw that the half-barrel latrine nearest his bunker had been blown to bits.

  Some of the debris was the torn-apart intestines of a Montagnard who’d made the mistake of coming out of his bunker—perhaps driven mad—only to catch a huge chunk of shrapnel across his stomach.

  The ’Yard’s dark eyes watched him as he approached, the knowledge of his impending death absorbed into a wisdom as old as the dirt upon which he lay. He breathed in short, panting gasps, blood flowing from between the fingers that tried to hold his intestines in.

  Finn saw the gray of death settle in, the soldier now breathing easier, longer, more shallow. And then he breathed no more.

  “Dai Uy!” he heard someone call. “Over here.”

  Sergeant Washington was digging frantically at a caved-in bunker, having freed only a pair of tiger-striped legs. The jungle boots, as opposed to the rubber Bata boots worn by most of the Montagnard strike force, told Finn that the man buried beneath was an American.

  “Think it’s Driver,” Washington said, as Finn helped him lift one of the heavy beams. “Told him that goddamn bunker was too shallow! Son of a bitch wouldn’t listen, as usual.” Tears were streaming down the black man’s face as he continued to call Driver every name in the book—“stupid goddamn honky” being only one epithet.

  Driver and Washington had been together ever since training group back at Fort Bragg. Driver had been an unregenerate redneck, and Washington was from a middle-class black family from Alexandria, Virginia. Against all stereotypes, they had become fast friends.

  And now, as they lifted the last bit of debris from Driver, it was apparent that Washington had lost his friend. One of the eight-by-eight mahogany beams supporting the ceiling of the bunker had been blown in two by the force of a direct hit. That beam had crushed Driver’s chest, driving his ribs all the way into his backbone.

  Washington gently wiped the dirt from his friend’s face, then covered it with a cravat bandage. He stood staring for a moment, looking into the surrounding hills.

  His look was of stony implacability. Like some Zulu prince, staring down at the British column, clutching his spear and vowing death. Finn, who had faced down death so many times it had become a habit, shivered slightly.

  Glad he’s on my side.

  “C’mon,” Finn said. “This ain’t gonna last forever. Lots of other people out here need help.”

  Washington shook himself, much as a horse might shake off a good sweat. “Gonna be some motherfuckers die here tonight,” he said.

  That there are, Finn thought. Only problem is, some more of ’em are likely to be us.

  “Well, y’all, here’s the drill,” Trucker drawled. Despite his being from upstate New York, he liked to affect a slight Southern accent. Something about the slow, measured, hell-this-don’t-mean-anything-anyway cadences of the South soothed nervous subordinates, made even the most hairy of missions seem like nothing to worry about.

  “Gotta come in from the north. Fly our asses right up that little draw you see off your left wing, drop on the mark, and break left. Snuffy down there says we dropped a hundred or so meters short last time. We got one bomb apiece left. Let’s make ’em count.”

  He got rogers from the other two, the pilot flying the last bird sounding perhaps a little less sure of it. Trucker didn’t blame him. Hell, he wasn’t sure of it himself.

  He stood the plane on its wing, dropped altitude in a screaming dive, pulled up just below the head of the valley, jinked right to avoid an outcropping that had been invisible from up above but now seemed to want to reach out and grab him.

  “Damn,” he muttered to himself. “This is about more fun than I need.”

  He didn’t dare give the bird full power. It was a toss-up. Any faster and he would likely become a greasy spot on the rocks on either side; any slower and he was a fat target for any chump with enough sense to apply enough lead.

  A stream of green dots rose to meet him, seeming slow until they came close, then whipping by the canopy and cracking into his right wing. Pieces of the aircraft’s skin spun away, the formerly smooth surface replaced by ugly blackened holes.

  Glad that son of a bitch didn’t aim a little more to the left, he thought. Those rounds would have been bouncing off the armor under my ass. They had enough sense to use armor-piercing, I’d have gotten a lead enema.

  Now more tracer came up to greet him. And, to his horror, he saw yet other streams coming, it seemed, from the cliff faces.

  So much of it that to fly through was simply an exercise in stupidity. While he had long ago become resigned to the fact that he was likely to kill himself in one of these runs, he’d be damned if his suicide included the murder of his friends.

  He jammed the throttle forward, pulled the stick back. The old bird leaped like a hawk coming out of a power dive, clearing the edges of the cliffs just ahead of most of the tracer. He heard several thunks in the rear, hoped that they hadn’t hit anything vital.

  He twisted his head, saw that the others had followed him. His wingman flew underneath, looking at the damage, came up to the side, and gave him a thumbs-up.

  The old Spads took a hell of a beating and kept on flying. Not like the jets that so many of his classmates were so proud of. Good thing.

  “Waal, that didn’t work worth a shit,” he drawled. “Anybody got any bright ideas?”

  Alexander saw the planes pull up, the tracers reaching after them like spectral green fingers. Pieces of the tail of the first one flew off, spinning in the sky and catching the light like aluminum pinwheels.

  Word had obviously gotten to the gun crews. He focused his binoculars on the nearest howitzer, saw a number of khaki-clad figures swarming over it, leveling the carriage, twisting the traverse mechanism, replacing the aiming stakes.

  Once again he considered taking them out with small-arms fire, and once again he rejected the idea. While he had confidence in his team and its ability to get away—coming up against it was like kissing a buzz saw—it would simply do no good. They would have replacements for the men he killed, and the barrage would go on with scarcely any interruptions.

  “Covey, this is One Zero,” he said.

  “This is Covey. As you can see, we’ve got some problems down there.”

  “Clear. Your guys willing to do some south-north gun runs, over?”

  The channel was filled only with the crackling of the ether as Covey talked to the A1E pilots on the other band. Van Alexander considered the situation. What he was planning to do was little better than assisted suicide. But it might just work.

  “Gimme all the thermite grenades,” he ordered. Leroy Billings looked at him quizzically, then, as understanding hit, started to protest.

  Alexander stopped him short. “I got a new plan, Sundance.”

  “Aw, shit,” Billings said. During the last stand-down they’d watched a new—to them—movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, on a homemade screen back in Da Nang. You had to be careful watching action movies with the Montagnards. Every once in a while one of them would get inspired and put a burst of six into the bad guy, often ripping the screen to shreds. But this one kept them enthralled. And Butch had said the same thing, just before the duo had tried to assault the entire Bolivian army.

  Billings gathered the thermites from the team members, six of them. These grenades contained a powder that, once initiated, b
urned so hot it melted armor plate. They carried them to sabotage any trucks they might come across, placing the grenade on the engine block, pulling the pin, and allowing the white-hot material to burn its way down through head and cylinders, quite thoroughly destroying the engine.

  And, Billings remembered from his training, they were quite useful for spiking cannon. Open the breechblock, toss the grenade inside the chamber, close the block, and the grenade would fuse it to the cannon. Never to be opened again, even with a cutting torch.

  “Aw, shit,” he said again, but this time only to himself.

  That’s one brave little son of a bitch down there, Trucker Five thought as he held orbit high enough to avoid any but the most long-range of AA fire. But he expected little else.

  On his second tour in Vietnam he had determined to see just what it was like down on the ground among the troops he supported. He couched the request to headquarters carefully—we’re always getting complaints that we don’t respond fast enough, don’t listen to ground control, drop our ordnance too far away or too damned close. Maybe if I go out with one of the units, I can come up with some new tactics.

  To his surprise, his commander had approved the request. This individual, a jet jock, a Korean War ace, pissed at being relegated to command a squadron whose main mission was not the air-to-air combat that defined fighter pilots, probably did it out of boredom, Trucker had thought.

  But get a little training, so you don’t embarrass us, he had been told. Trucker had then pulled a few strings through some Special Forces officers he had met in the club in Bien Hoa and had been given a slot in the Combat Orientation Course run for new guys by the Recon School in Nha Trang. A week’s worth of that, and he was deemed ready.

  Just how unready he was, he found out on his first patrol with the III Corps Mike Force. He’d always thought himself a good map reader, but now saw that if he wasn’t flying over the terrain, able to pick out distinctive features, he couldn’t tell where the hell he was at any given moment. The jungle had a monotonous sameness to it. One stream was indistinguishable from another that might run a couple of hundred meters away. One hill looked just like another. He couldn’t tell a saddle from a ridge, a valley from a blind draw.