The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  0552:30 hours: “Now the other one,” said Hatfield into his radio. “Everybody present arms to the north.” Air Dog Four had seen what happened to Air Dog Six, turned, and hovered for a bit, ready to take off northward at top speed, but from the ground below came a deadly chunka-chunka-chunka sound. A dozen .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds from the M2 Browning machine gun mounted on the back of Zack’s War Wagon, fired by Big Nick the Swede, punched through the skin of the Apache. One of them blew off the pilot’s right leg, and a second exited though the roof, sheared the main gear housing beneath the rotors in half. The copter seemed to flutter briefly, and then it simply dropped like a stone onto the access road.

  0553 hours: “God in Heaven, they brought down all four copters!” gasped Meryl Sandoval in shock.

  “Some gangsters and thugs!” growled Hacker. “Plus they’ve bugged out and put the Ventura between us and them again! All weapons systems, cease fire! We’re just plowing up empty beach now.” He got on to the radio. “Air Dog commander, whoever that is now, this is Mama Bear. The hostiles have taken down all four of the gunships. Do you have any more?”

  “Negatory, Mama Bear,” came the reply. “We’re all transports, and truth to tell, we’re running low on fuel. We were expecting to refuel at the Astoria airport but I guess that’s no longer an option. We need to head for Portland.”

  “For crying out loud, you’ve got ten choppers left out there, and you must have door gunners or some kind of armament!” yelled Hacker. “You’re saying you can’t give us any air support? What the fuck?”

  “You military guys stuck your hands into this hornet’s nest, you can pull yourselves out,” said the pilot carelessly. “We ain’t military, we’re special federal officers. Later, dudes. It’s been a real slice.” The copters leveled out into formation and began flying northward well out to sea. Hacker was able to live up to sailors’ reputation for salty language, but the copters were soon gone off the radar.

  “All right, what do we do now?” asked Sandoval. She was seething with rage, but she still maintained a sufficient grasp on reality to understand that her executive officer was better at this than she was, and she needed him to get her out of the mess before she figured out how to blame him for it. “Launch our own copter? Reverse course and try to get back in range?”

  “I think we need to save our copter for recon over a new landing site, ma’am. We don’t know how long he’ll have to stay in the air, and he’s not armed. We could sail up and down this beach all day and they’d simply scuttle back and forth like a school of minnows, always keeping Ventura between our main guns and them. God damn, whose idiotic idea was it to run a huge vessel like that aground that provides anybody on the beach with a shield?” demanded Hacker. “Never mind. We need to evacuate everybody off the Ventura. She’s starting to burn pretty good and when the fire hits the main diesel tanks and the turbine boiler she may blow sky high, never mind all the extra ordnance and fuel that hasn’t detonated yet. We have to get them off the beach, and then we find another landing place, maybe down by that headland, and we put the men ashore under full cover from our weapons systems. Helmsman, stop engines, then reverse slow.”

  “I thought you said we weren’t going to chase them up and down the beach?” demanded Sandoval.

  “We’re not. We’re just backing up a bit,” said Hacker. “We’ll cover the north side and Mulvaney can get everybody down on the beach. We’ll need our own boats and the landing craft from Ketchikan and Kodiak Queen to move in, assuming our FATPO guests on those vessels will condescend to take orders from mere United States military officers. They’ll pick up survivors, always staying to the north side of the wreck so if the goots want to fire on them they’ll have to move into our line of fire. This business of using the Ventura as a shield cuts both ways. Day, tell them to start getting those boats in the water.” He picked up the radio. “Derek, what’s your casualty situation like?”

  “I can see maybe a hundred or so POs on the decks here, shooting at the beach. I think maybe half my crew is accounted for,” replied Mulvaney. “We’re not going to be able to stay here much longer. The fire down below is out of control and the smoke is starting to get really intense up here. The chief engineer also says that explosion ruptured the fuel tanks in the engine room, and we’re awash down there with thousands of gallons of diesel. Once that gets ignited there will be nothing but a hole in the sand.”

  “Okay, start getting everybody you can over the port side and onto the beach,” ordered Hacker. “Get down however you can. Once you’re down set up a defensive perimeter as far away from your ship as possible, in case it does blow. We’re sending boats from Higby and the other two vessels to pick you up. Our guns will cover the north beach for you.”

  “Roger wilco,” said Mulvaney.

  0554 hours: “Could we fire over the Ventura, at a high angle, and shell the fascists on the south beach that way?” demanded Captain Sandoval.

  “Might hit a few private houses, and any civilians that are still hanging around after all these fireworks,” warned Hacker.

  “Fuck ’em,” said Sandoval. “If they’re still here after three years of insurrection they’re probably fascists themselves.”

  Hacker shrugged. “Fire control, compute an angle to drop shells in about a three-hundred yard arc along the dune lines and about a hundred yards behind and to the south of Ventura.”

  “Working on it, sir,” said the E-5, tapping on his keyboard.

  0556 hours: On board the Kodiak Queen reporters Edgar Roberts from the BBC and Marsha Meinertzhagen from TV-Euro in Brussels had been thoroughly infuriated at being left out of the shore party based on the Ventura, lowly foreigners that they were. Now they were queasily aware that they might have had a lucky escape, judging from what they could see going down on Sunset Beach. But journalists they were, and they could no more avoid browbeating and haggling with the Queen’s captain, William Worley, demanding to go along in one of the rescue boats, than they could avoid breathing. Finally Worley agreed to let them record the no doubt heroic actions of his crew. He avoided mentioning the fact that he’d had to promise the men triple time for the whole trip to get them to volunteer to man the boats.

  The Kodiak Queen launched a total of six boats, three motorized lifeboats and three inflatables similar to the ill-fated Slitherydee. These had already been in the davits and ready to go to ferry FATPO troops to shore. Now there were two sailors in each boat, and a two-man FATPO machine gun crew with an M-60 and a grenade launcher in each one, and in one of the inflatables rode Roberts and Meinertzhagen with one cameraman each, cameramen and journalists both green at the gills with fear but willing to risk their lives for a story. They began heading inshore toward the burning wreck of the Ventura, from which a huge column of black smoke now ascended high into the sky. The rattle of hundreds of weapons from the beach sounded like the static on some monstrous radio, with intermittent muffled explosions, and even from this far out they could see the beach littered with silent, still black figures.

  0557 hours: “Okay, I see what he’s doing,” muttered Hatfield. “He’s getting everybody off the port side of the ferry and he’s going to cover them from the warship while they are recovered from the beach by those boats.”

  “Getting about time to be on our way, Cap?” asked Washburn.

  “Yeah, we’ve made a hell of a splash here today, quite literally, but there’s such a thing as pushing your luck,” agreed Hatfield. “No way I’m exposing our people to that damned cannon and those Gatling guns.”

  “They’re raising the barrel,” pointed out Ekstrom. The barrel of the 76-millimeter gun was indeed rising up to a sharp upward angle, and the turret moved to the right.

  “Shit!” cursed Hatfield, “They’re going to use it like a mortar!” He picked up the radio. “Straw Bosses, Boppers and Bangers, listen up. They’re going to be lobbing shells over the burning vessel onto your positions, any moment now. Beat feet, comrades! Don’t just scatter like
quail, though. Keep it orderly. Company commanders, move your people back to the staging area in sections and those sections that aren’t moving, stay prone until your turn comes to move. Low-crawl wherever possible. Shrapnel flies high, so keep your butts down.” The gun thundered and spat fire and a shell arched into the air, and a moment later screamed down into the dunes. Then the gun fell silent.

  0558 hours: “What the hell?” shouted Hacker. “Why isn’t it firing?”

  “Sensors from the turret just say misfire, sir,” said the fire control officer.

  “A fucking dud!” raged Hacker. “God damned Israeli crap! Clear the stoppage, kick the dud into the spank bank and reload!”

  “Not responding, sir,” said the E-5. “Do you want me to reboot the system? It will take a minute, but the reboot should automatically clear the chamber and eject the bad shell.”

  Meryl Sandoval saw a chance to re-assert herself, regain control of the situation and come out of the whole mess a hero to boot. Maybe even cop herself a Congressional Medal of Honor. “No time! We have to clear it and reload manually,” she said forcefully. “I’ll do it! Carry on, Number One! I’ll call you on the intercom from the turret when the stoppage is clear!” She scampered off the bridge.

  “I’ve never even seen her inside that turret since I came on board!” exclaimed Hacker. “Not once. Does she even know how to clear it manually?” He looked at Day and the fire control officer. They both threw up their hands and shrugged.

  Sandoval ran down the deck, broke open the hatch into the gun cupola, and stepped inside. She saw the breech of the 76-millimeter cannon lying in its cradle, oddly upright at its high angle. She reached up and grabbed the lever for the breech lock, pulled it down and around and swung the breech open. Unfortunately, that was not what she should have done. She should have hit the manual eject lever and jacked the dud shell into the extractor tube, then very carefully removed it from the tube and inserted it into one of the padded cylinders on a rack along the bulkhead which were placed there for the purpose of containing misfires for later disposal. When Meryl Sandoval opened the breech the dud shell fell out onto the deck with sufficient force so that this time it exploded, detonating the three other exposed shells in the loading cage to the left of the breech. The pressure burst cracked the armored turret and sent the gun itself spinning like a top high into the air, descending into the sea with a mighty splash. Meryl Sandoval’s pulverized body, every bone broken, was sent whirling backwards out of the open door of the turret and rolling along the deck like a meatball, leaving a red smear behind it, finally coming to rest in an unrecognizable heap by a hatchway entrance.

  0559 hours: “What the hell was that?” asked Hatfield, stunned, looking at the ruined gun turret that was now pouring smoke. “Did we do that?” He got on his radio. “Uh, guys, did somebody have a Exocet missile or something they forgot to tell me about, and did any of you just blow up the gun turret on that Coast Guard cutter?” There were wild cheers and laughter from behind them as the message was relayed to the Volunteers.

  “You know what? I think they did that to themselves,” said Len Ekstrom, staring through his own binoculars. “Don’t ask me how. We seem to be fighting the Three Stooges.”

  “Niggers,” said Washburn. “Some nigger fucked up.”

  The entire bridge crew of the Higby were staring out at the shattered deck and turret and looking down at the sodden mess of meat that had been their captain a minute before. “This isn’t happening!” muttered Hacker in horror. “How? What the hell did she do?”

  “Jesus God in Heaven!” moaned Day.

  Hacker got on the PA system. “Damage and firefighting parties to the main turret!” he bellowed. “On the double, God damn it! Every swinging dick on this ship get your ass on the bow with every hose, every extinguisher, and get that damned fire out! Body recovery party to the number two hatchway.”

  Day spoke up. “Sir, those 76-millimeters are armor piercing shells. They detonate at thousands of degrees, hot enough to actually burn through armor plating on an enemy vessel. I see flames inside that turret, blue and white flames. The very metal of the wiring and the consoles could be on fire.”

  “Fire control, how many shells were still in the loading magazine?” demanded Hacker.

  The rating gulped. “Seventy-six, sir.”

  “An interesting bit of naval history, gentlemen,” said Hacker philosophically. “Does anyone remember how the German battleship Bismarck sank the British battleship Hood with a lucky shot to the magazine?”

  0559:30 hours: A mighty explosion lifted the front half of the U.S.S. Frederick J. Higby clear of the water, and the front bow section from the turret forward broke off. The Higby settled down and began to sink rapidly in about 130 feet of water. On board the incoming boat from Kodiak Queen, which the sailor at the outboard diverted to rescue survivors from the Higby after some argument with the black FATPO lieutenant who wanted to continue on to the beach to pick up his buddies, Roberts and Meinertzhagen’s cameramen recorded the sinking and the abandoning of the ship, the Coast Guard sailors floating in the cold water of the Northwestern sea, clinging to bits and pieces of debris, some of them badly burned.

  0600 hours: Hatfield and the other two leaped from their dugout. All of a sudden they were all mad, in a frenzy of long-suppressed hatred and bloodlust, all thought of caution and tactics thrown to the wind. Hatfield hollered into the radio, “The cutter’s going down! We sank it, or they sank it, or the gods themselves sank it, but now they’ve got no more choppers and no more warship! Every Northwest Volunteer, there’s pork on the beach and I’m ringing the dinner bell! Move in by sections, fire and maneuver. Kill them all!”

  0601 hours: The men busy clambering down the side of the Ventura or lowering themselves down on davit lines or rope ladders heard wild cheering coming from the beach. It was the last thing they ever heard, other than the rattling gunfire from the weapons that killed them. Captain Derek Mulvaney was knocked from the sloping deck of his burning vessel by a .50-caliber round; the FATPOs and crew who made it onto the beach were trapped between the burning ship and the encircling Volunteers who cut them down. The War Wagon roared onto the beach and opened fire with the .50-caliber Browning machine gun on the boats from the other ships that dared to approach the beach, sinking two of the inflatables and one of the aluminum motor launches, and riddling the rest with holes and dead men. The Volunteers moved in slowly, under covering fire from their comrades, until they got in close enough to the disorganized and panicking Americans to use their pistols and knives when they finally ran out of ammunition for their long arms.

  The media later informed a stunned nation that not one single American invader who set foot on Sunset Beach that day survived. The last two American casualties occurred at three o’clock in the afternoon, when the two crewmen from the damaged Apache helicopter that crash-landed near Warrenton were seen by an NVA party trying to hitch a ride on Highway 101 South. Captain Ragnar Redbeard and his boys took their heads back to Newport with them as souvenirs. The NVA suffered three Volunteers killed and fourteen wounded, among the dead being Lieutenant Charles Washburn, who was struck in the hip by a 40-millimeter grenade fired from one of the boats that actually made it to the beach and attempted to retrieve survivors. Charlie died immediately afterward in the arms of his two lifelong friends and comrades, Zack Hatfield and Lennart Ekstrom. Zack went berserk and waded into the surf up to his hips, firing his Winchester. None of the boat’s crew survived.

  Lieutenant JG Charles Day was pulled from the sea by one of the boats and ended up assuming command of the ill-fated expedition, but Captain Worley of the Kodiak Queen ignored his plea to radio for a more senior officer to be helicoptered in. Worley and the captains of the Ketchikan and the tugboats had had enough, and by eight o’clock in the morning the depleted flotilla was sailing back south to San Francisco. Worley and Day spent several official inquiries and most of the rest of their lives blaming each other for the inglorious retreat.<
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  One of the boats that made it back to the Kodiak Queen was the inflatable containing the two shell-shocked European reporters and their cameramen. Eric Roberts and Marsha Meinertzhagen later collaborated on a best-selling book, Sunrise on Sunset Beach, and went on the Euro talk-show circuit. For now, they were both gibbering with terror and exhaustion. Almost as an afterthought, just before their inflatable turned back to the ship with their boatload of survivors from the Higby, both cameramen had taken one last sweep of the beach though their telephoto lenses, and for the second time the First Portland Brigade provided posterity with an immortal sound and video byte.

  The image that went out to hundreds of millions of television viewers, the image that appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek and that went down in history, was Zack Hatfield standing on Sunset Beach, dozens of armed figures standing scattered behind him wreathed in black smoke from the burning ship, dark and sinister and indistinct, like an escort of devils. The beach at their feet was scattered with corpses and visibly red with blood. Zack stood in his feathered slouch hat, his duster flapping in the sea breeze, and he held his Winchester rifle high over his head, an epic gesture of photogenic defiance that became one of the enduring symbols of the Northwest War of Independence.