Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  Now the very best troops they had, the ones whom the commander had held back for just such a mission, were ready. They would roll over the pitifully meager defenses that marked the inner perimeter, the defenses of which the commander had full information provided by spies placed inside the camp long ago.

  They would take even more casualties, but in the end they would win. Just as they always had, always would. The Americans suffered from the fact that they had to limit their losses. On the lower levels of command, excessive losses would get you relieved, your career shot to ribbons. On the higher levels, it would lose the war for you as the people back in the States, obviously less dedicated and far less controlled than were the people of North Vietnam, rose up in protest when too many body bags came back.

  For the commander, any and all losses were acceptable, as long as the job got done.

  His last units were in place. It was time.

  DiUlio watched them through the starlight scope. “Call the cap’n,” he told Wren. “Tell ’im they’re comin’.”

  Wren complied, for once not bitching that he wasn’t a goddamn radio operator, that if DiU wanted to talk to somebody, he ought to get off his greaseball ass and do it himself, that just because he was an Indian didn’t mean he had to follow the white devil’s orders.

  He was far too scared to make any jokes at the moment. From the occasional glint off a rifle, from the smell of unwashed flesh, from the sensing mechanisms buried in the back of his brain that no one could explain, but everyone had, he knew they were coming too. This time no easy ride, the enemy not attacking portions of the camp where he wasn’t. They’d be right on top of his bunker, shooting down into the ports, dropping grenades, shoving satchel charges up against the door. Killing anyone who came out.

  Upon receiving a roger from Captain McCulloden, he dropped the handset for the field phone that was hardwired to the command post and went to the machine gun that covered the wide-open space between the inner perimeter and the trenchline where the enemy was massing. They’d have to come up and out of there—the connecting trenches had been blown—and cross a killing field that would have daunted the over-the-top boys of World War I. But they would come. Of that he was sure.

  A strange calmness settled over him. “DiU,” he said.

  “Yeah, Bobby.”

  “Tell me again what it was the gladiators said.”

  “You mean, ’We who are about to die salute you’?”

  “Yeah. That was it.” Wren was silent for a moment. “That’s pretty fuckin’ stupid, isn’t it,” he finally said.

  “Yeah.” DiUlio grinned over at his friend. “But better than ‘It’s a good day to die.’ ”

  Finn was getting reports from his men stationed on the perimeter, the gist of which seemed to be that the enemy was going to attack from two sides—the north and the east. Just as he would have done. A slight elevation to the east would let the NVA support weapons shoot over the tops of the assault troops, and to the north some of the bunkers that had been imperfectly destroyed by the demolitions charges provided a bit of cover.

  They wouldn’t try to attack from more than two complimentary directions for fear of shooting their own people on the other side. But there would be reserve troops in covered positions stationed to the south and west to exploit any breaches, and more important, to block any escape.

  Not that there would be any attempts at organized break-out. The only chance, should the positions be completely overrun, would be to take advantage of the confusion and escape by ones and twos. A very slim chance indeed.

  The field phone hissed. “Here they come!” came Wren’s voice.

  The fire that erupted from both sides made the message moot. Okay, Finn thought. Let’s see how this is going to work.

  Stankow and Epstein were side by side, the big Polish sergeant manning a 1919A6 machine gun while the diminutive Epstein steadily worked an M-79 40mm grenade launcher—called the blooker from the sound it made when firing grenades the size of a juice can. Stankow was sweeping the onrushing assault troops with long, sustained bursts, ignoring the return fire that seemed to be pinpointed at his head. Bucky Epstein mechanically inserted round after round in the blooker, aiming at knots where the NVA bunched up, the high-explosive grenades shattering among them and downing everyone within bursting radius.

  A screaming berserk broke from the ranks and rushed toward them, wildly firing his AK-47. Bucky took careful aim and shot him directly in the chest. The Vietnamese was so close that the round didn’t have time to arm, instead embedding itself in his chest. That’ll teach you, Epstein thought.

  He chanced a glance down the covered trench, seeing the Montagnard soldiers pouring steady streams of fire into the enemy, not a one of them cowering, not a one trying to run. Beyond the squad that helped defend this section of the trench was the key bunker defended by DiUlio and Wren. Streams of tracer reached out from the embrasures like searching fingers.

  Those who have not been there cannot imagine the level of noise, the smoke, the smells, the confusion of combat. The mind shuts it out, completely overloaded, and movement becomes dreamlike, seemingly suspended in time. Actions that take only seconds seem hour-long. There is no sound of individual shots or explosions, only an ongoing roar made up of the reports of thousands of rifles and machine guns, punctuated by ear-shattering blasts of grenades, B-40 rockets, satchel charges.

  Holes are blown into the line of defenders, smoke whirling away momentarily to expose shattered bodies, men crying for help, their mouths moving but no sound coming forth. Only the ugly rictus of oncoming death.

  Epstein glanced down to see that he had fired up almost all his grenades, and the enemy was still coming. He dropped the blooker, grabbing up his M16 and emptying a magazine into the closest ones. They fell, but there were more behind them. Just too many.

  He unsnapped the strap holding his pistol in place. Checked to see that his K-bar knife was still in its sheath. Reloaded the M16, his movements as sure as those of a robot. Just too many.

  Charlie Hackett keyed the intercom to the fire control officer in the back of the plane. “FAC says first run should be two hundred meters on an azimuth of two seven five degrees from Sky Spot Bravo Tango Five,” he said.

  The FCO looked out the window to see nothing but pure overcast below, then checked his charts. “Hell,” he said, “that’s right on top of them.”

  “Roger that,” the pilot replied. “Guy down there says, we’re underground. Victor Charlie isn’t. Requested miniguns and twenty mike-mike only. You copy?”

  “I copy. Standing by.”

  The pilot turned the big plane on its wing, setting up an orbit that would circle the target below. “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” he said.

  From the skies came a great moan, as if a dragon had bestirred itself and was roaring in anger. And his anger was ferocious.

  An ordinary machine gun putting out sustained fire puts out a tracer round for every four ball, and you can see them flying at regular intervals at perhaps a tenth of a second. Measured intervals, as regular as a metronome.

  There is no interval in the tracer stream coming from the minigun. It looks like a garden hose pouring out liquid fire. The ground where the stream strikes looks as if it were a live, churning creature in its death throes.

  And there were three of the guns firing.

  Epstein watched in wonder as the enemy troops now within feet of his position were struck down as if by the hand of God. Where there had once been living creatures, there was now nothing but flesh mangled and bleeding. The beat of the incoming rounds rattled against his overhead cover like the staccato of monsoon rain. The finger of fire moved on, simply erasing everything in its path. Behind it the point-detonating 20mm cannon fire simply mangled the dead bodies even more.

  The only enemy troops who survived were those who had already breached the defenses on the north side, and they were quickly dispatched by the defenders rushing into the gap.

  Epstei
n stared, fascinated, as the miniguns continued to work their deadly mission, now moving outward toward the enemy troops who had not perished in the first assault. They tried to break and run, but were tangled in pieces of wire, fell into holes, gathered in confused knots as the men in front of them hesitated for a long, fatal instant. The fire swept over them, and they were gone.

  I asked for a miracle, he thought. And I got this. Close enough.

  “Bucky?”

  He turned to see Stankow slumped in the bottom of the trench. Blood flowed from a bullet hole in the side of his neck. Epstein dropped down, checked the wound. Ah, shit. He pressed his finger into the pressure point just beneath Stankow’s jawbone, trying to stop the flow from a severed jugular vein.

  “Medic!” he screamed. “Goddamnit, get a medic over here!”

  Spectre kept its orbit, the FCO slowly working his guns outward in an ever-expanding circle. The electronics warfare officer (EWO) monitored the high-tech consoles that jammed enemy radar, popping a magnesium flare every time his radar indicated a handheld SAM had been fired. The flares, far hotter than the exhaust from the Hercules engines, pulled the heat-seeking warheads inevitably away from the plane. They’d been through this routine many times before, and the air defenses here were far less sophisticated than those they ran into across the fence, where the largely unmolested NVA had set up so many guns and missiles to protect their precious trucks.

  “I’ve got heat signatures, moving toward the camp in a vee formation,” one of the operators told him.

  The EWO read the data, concluded that the heat signatures could have been trucks, but were most likely tanks. He passed the information on to the FCO.

  “Targets,” the EWO told the gunners for the 105mm cannon sited in the back of the airplane. “Engage.”

  The 105 gunners, who had been feeling very left out, adjusted the weapon according to directions given by the FCO. About time, the gun chief thought.

  Chapter 16

  “Choppers comin’ in, sir,” DiUlio said.

  Finn completed the sutures he’d been putting in the shrapnel-ravaged body of a young Montagnard soldier, washed his hands, and stepped outside the medical bunker where he had been helping Andy Inger treat the casualties. He looked down at his fatigues, covered with blood and bits of flesh, shrugged his shoulders. They expect somebody looks like he stepped out of a bandbox, he thought, they’d better go back to the States.

  The first lift brought in Captain Charlie Secord and one of the Mike Force companies. The other would soon follow. The troops fanned out, alert and ready, facing outward toward an enemy that was no longer there.

  The NVA had pulled out after the slaughter of their best troops by Spectre. Back across the border to regroup, lick their wounds, treat their wounded, bury their dead. The ones they’d managed to carry off, at any rate. It was a measure of just how badly they’d suffered that the camp was littered with bodies stiffening in the sun.

  “You okay, Finn?” Charlie asked, gesturing at the blood.

  “Belongs to somebody else. Dustoff on the way?”

  “Be in as soon as we call the place secured. Fourth ID commander said he wasn’t going to risk his pilots until we do.”

  Which thoroughly pissed off some chopper pilots, Finn was sure. Dustoff had a habit of flying into anything, anytime, to evacuate casualties. Which saved a lot of lives. Which got a lot of dustoff crews killed. Worth it? Hell if he knew.

  Any more than if it was worth it, the dead and wounded in the camp.

  Stop that! he told himself.

  “I think it’d be about time, wouldn’t you?”

  Captain Secord immediately got on the radio. “Be here in five,” he said after a moment.

  The second lift came in, carrying the remainder of the Mike Force battalion. Sergeant Major Mike Hauck was with them. He sent his troops to reinforce B company, then joined the two captains.

  “Had yourself a minor pissing contest here, it looks like?” he said.

  “Little fight,” Finn admitted. He looked out over the camp, seeing the shattered bunkers, the ripped barbed wire, and everywhere the bodies. Hundreds, maybe even thousands. Friend and foe alike, wrapped in fraternal embrace, forever together. Blood trails so wide the ground was slippery with it leading out of the camp where the NVA body-recovery teams would have used their hooks to drag people away.

  The sound of helicopters grew loud again, and within a few moments he could see the big red cross on the nose of the first bird. It sat on the flat space where DiUlio had spread a panel, and from the medical bunker came a stream of patients, some walking on their own, some supporting others, and many, many carried in litters.

  Lieutenant Sloane was one of the first ones aboard. Weak from loss of blood, pumped full of serum albumin and saline, in and out of consciousness, he was nevertheless still very much alive. He waved weakly at Finn as they put him on board. Finn waved back.

  Washington, Olchak, Stankow, Young, and Becker also went out. Stankow was protesting that he could stay, they ought to get some of the more seriously wounded Montagnard soldiers out first; Olchak was telling him to shut up; Washington was watching in silent amusement; Young and Becker just looked glad to leave.

  Bird after bird came in, taking the wounded Montagnard soldiers to the Sixty-seventh Evacuation Hospital (Semi-Mobile) in Pleiku, the same hospital to which the Americans were being taken. Back in the old days there had been huge arguments about this, the brass in Saigon and Long Binh insisting that indigenous soldiers be treated in Vietnamese hospitals. After a few occasions when Special Forces soldiers visited their wounded troops and found them in absolutely filthy conditions, largely untreated, with infections that would have responded immediately to even the most basic antibiotic therapy but which now suppurated and turned into gas gangrene, that had changed. Particularly when the SF had let it be known they weren’t completely averse to tossing a grenade into the next medical command conference.

  It took over an hour just to get the more severely wounded on their way, eight at a time. If a company had taken over 10 percent casualties, most military planners considered it as combat ineffective, ready to be pulled off the battlefield. Alpha company of the II Corps Mike Force had suffered 60 percent casualties—with 2.2 percent dead. The camp strike force had suffered even worse. Out of the three companies at the beginning of the battle, they could muster at most a reinforced platoon.

  But the North Vietnamese had suffered worse. Much worse. God knew how many had died in the pre-attack bombardment from the 175s. Sky Spot had accounted for more. Bodies still hung from the wire and protruded grotesquely from the ground in the outer perimeter. Three PT-76 light amphibious tanks still smoldered on the other side of the runway. Wren and DiUlio were just now organizing a body removal squad to clean up the hundreds caught in the Spectre strike.

  A great victory, someone would call it. Body count for this week would go through the roof. Politicians would cite it as an example of the wisdom of the policy of Vietnamization—after all, this had largely been a fight between Vietnamese forces. Instead of dozens, scores perhaps, of American troops filling the casualty lists, there would be only four, Curtis, Bartlett, Driver, and Noonan.

  “I’m gonna try to find myself a cold beer,” Finn said, turning away from it all.

  Hauck gestured toward the sky, at a shiny helicopter that bore the insignia of the Fourth Infantry Division. “Looks like the muckety-mucks finally decided to come out and see what’s going on. Maybe get themselves another air medal.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Finn said. “They want me, tell ’em I’m taking a nap.”

  “Mind if I come in, Finn?” Sam Gutierrez asked.

  McCulloden was sitting in what was left of the team house. The roof was almost completely blown away, there were holes all through the walls that hadn’t been sandbagged, and worst of all, the refrigerator had been blown to shit. No cold beer. No beer of any kind.

  But he’d found a bottle of Jim Beam, so things weren�
�t completely bad.

  “Want a drink?” he said.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Gutierrez accepted the proffered bottle and took a healthy swig. It burned all the way down and through his stomach. Too late, he remembered he hadn’t eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours.

  Couple more swigs, and he’d be telling the general who had given him the ride out here to go fuck himself too.

  “Did a good job here, Finn,” he said.

  “Suppose so,” Finn took another shot. He handed the bottle back.

  What the hell, Gutierrez told himself. He took another drink.

  “You want a ride back to Pleiku? Wash up, get some food, maybe a little sleep? You know they’re gonna be on your ass like stink on shit. After-action reports, write-ups for medals, all the normal happy horseshit.”

  Finn nodded slowly. “I reckon Secord and Hauck can handle it from here on out. They gonna rebuild?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. Vietnamese say it’d cost too much, camp’s too exposed anyway.”

  “So Charlie gets what he wants.” Finn’s voice was flat, unemotional. He knew better than to let go, to scream and rage over the incredible stupidity of letting people die for something you were going to give up anyway.

  “Yeah. But it cost him.” Gutierrez reached for the bottle.

  “He’s willing to pay. Are we?”

  Epilogue

  Two days later, in starched and pressed jungle fatigues with all appropriate badges sewn in place, Finn reported to the division commander and his staff. His boots were shined, his face clean-shaven, he’d even gone to the barber and had him reduce at least some of the accumulated shag.