However, nobody asked my opinion at the time; I was told. Quite aside from the impossibility of dragging the troops home in view of our treaty obligations and what it would do to the colony planets in the Federation and to our allies, we were awfully busy doing something else, to wit: carrying the war to the Bugs. I suppose I noticed the destruction of B.A. much less than most civilians did. We were already a couple of parsecs away under Cherenkov drive and the news didn’t reach us until we got it from another ship after we came out of drive.
I remember thinking, “Gosh, that’s terrible!” and feeling sorry for the one Porteño in the ship. But B.A. wasn’t my home and Terra was a long way off and I was very busy, as the attack on Klendathu, the Bugs’ home planet, was mounted immediately after that and we spent the time to rendezvous strapped in our bunks, doped and unconscious, with the internal-gravity field of the Valley Forge off, to save power and give greater speed.
The loss of Buenos Aires did mean a great deal to me; it changed my life enormously, but this I did not know until many months later.
When it came time to drop onto Klendathu, I was assigned to PFC Dutch Bamburger as a supernumerary. He managed to conceal his pleasure at the news and as soon as the platoon sergeant was out of earshot, he said, “Listen, boot, you stick close behind me and stay out of my way. You go slowing me down, I break your silly neck.”
I just nodded. I was beginning to realize that this was not a practice drop.
Then I had the shakes for a while and then we were down—
Operation Bughouse should have been called “Operation Madhouse.” Everything went wrong. It had been planned as an all-out move to bring the enemy to their knees, occupy their capital and the key points of their home planet, and end the war. Instead it darn near lost the war.
I am not criticizing General Diennes. I don’t know whether it’s true that he demanded more troops and more support and allowed himself to be overruled by the Sky Marshal-in-Chief—or not. Nor was it any of my business. Furthermore I doubt if some of the smart second-guessers know all the facts.
What I do know is that the General dropped with us and commanded us on the ground and, when the situation became impossible, he personally led the diversionary attack that allowed quite a few of us (including me) to be retrieved—and, in so doing, bought his farm. He’s radioactive debris on Klendathu and it’s much too late to court-martial him, so why talk about it?
I do have one comment to make to any armchair strategist who has never made a drop. Yes, I agree that the Bugs’ planet possibly could have been plastered with H-bombs until it was surfaced with radioactive glass. But would that have won the war? The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. Blasting the surface of their planet would have killed soldiers and workers; it would not have killed the brain caste and the queens—I doubt if anybody can be certain that even a direct hit with a burrowing H-rocket would kill a queen; we don’t know how far down they are. Nor am I anxious to find out; none of the boys who went down those holes came up again.
So suppose we did ruin the productive surface of Klendathu? They still would have ships and colonies and other planets, same as we have, and their HQ is still intact—so unless they surrender, the war isn’t over. We didn’t have nova bombs at that time; we couldn’t crack Klendathu open. If they absorbed the punishment and didn’t surrender, the war was still on.
If they can surrender—
Their soldiers can’t. Their workers can’t fight (and you can waste a lot of time and ammo shooting up workers who wouldn’t say boo!) and their soldier caste can’t surrender. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Bugs are just stupid insects because they look the way they do and don’t know how to surrender. Their warriors are smart, skilled, and aggressive—smarter than you are, by the only universal rule, if the Bug shoots first. You can burn off one leg, two legs, three legs, and he just keeps on coming; burn off four on one side and he topples over—but keeps on shooting. You have to spot the nerve case and get it…whereupon he will trot right on past you, shooting at nothing, until he crashes into a wall or something.
The drop was a shambles from the start. Fifty ships were in our piece of it and they were supposed to come out of Cherenkov drive and into reaction drive so perfectly co-ordinated that they could hit orbit and drop us, in formation and where we were supposed to hit, without even making one planet circuit to dress up their own formation. I suppose this is difficult. Shucks, I know it is. But when it slips, it leaves the M.I. holding the sack.
We were lucky at that, because the Valley Forge and every Navy file in her bought it before we ever hit the ground. In that tight, fast formation (4.7 miles/sec. orbital speed is not a stroll) she collided with the Ypres and both ships were destroyed. We were lucky to get out of her tubes—those of us who did get out, for she was still firing capsules as she was rammed. But I wasn’t aware of it; I was inside my cocoon, headed for the ground. I suppose our company commander knew that the ship had been lost (and half his Wildcats with it) since he was out first and would know when he suddenly lost touch, over the command circuit, with the ship’s captain.
But there is no way to ask him, because he wasn’t retrieved. All I ever had was a gradually dawning realization that things were in a mess.
The next eighteen hours were a nightmare. I shan’t tell much about it because I don’t remember much, just snatches, stop-motion scenes of horror. I have never liked spiders, poisonous or otherwise; a common house spider in my bed can give me the creeps. Tarantulas are simply unthinkable, and I can’t eat lobster, crab, or anything of that sort. When I got my first sight of a Bug, my mind jumped right out of my skull and started to yammer. It was seconds later that I realized that I had killed it and could stop shooting. I suppose it was a worker; I doubt if I was in any shape to tackle a warrior and win.
But, at that, I was in better shape than was the K-9 Corps. They were to be dropped (if the drop had gone perfectly) on the periphery of our entire target and the neodogs were supposed to range outward and provide tactical intelligence to interdiction squads whose business it was to secure the periphery. Those Calebs aren’t armed, of course, other than their teeth. A neodog is supposed to hear, see, and smell and tell his partner what he finds by radio; all he carries is a radio and a destruction bomb with which he (or his partner) can blow the dog up in case of bad wounds or capture.
Those poor dogs didn’t wait to be captured; apparently most of them suicided as soon as they made contact. They felt the way I do about the Bugs, only worse. They have neodogs now that are indoctrinated from puppy-hood to observe and evade without blowing their tops at the mere sight or smell of a Bug. But these weren’t.
But that wasn’t all that went wrong. Just name it, it was fouled up. I didn’t know what was going on, of course; I just stuck close behind Dutch, trying to shoot or flame anything that moved, dropping a grenade down a hole whenever I saw one. Presently I got so that I could kill a Bug without wasting ammo or juice, although I did not learn to distinguish between those that were harmless and those that were not. Only about one in fifty is a warrior—but he makes up for the other forty-nine. Their personal weapons aren’t as heavy as ours but they are lethal just the same—they’ve got a beam that will penetrate armor and slice flesh like cutting a hard-boiled egg, and they co-operate even better than we do…because the brain that is doing the heavy thinking for a “squad” isn’t where you can reach it; it’s down one of the holes.
Dutch and I stayed lucky for quite a long time, milling around over an area about a mile square, corking up holes with bombs, killing what we found above surface, saving our jets as much as possible for emergencies. The idea was to secure the entire target and allow the reinforcements and the heavy s
tuff to come down without important opposition; this was not a raid, this was a battle to establish a beachhead, stand on it, hold it, and enable fresh troops and heavies to capture or pacify the entire planet.
Only we didn’t.
Our own section was doing all right. It was in the wrong pew and out of touch with the other section—the platoon leader and sergeant were dead and we never re-formed. But we had staked out a claim, our special-weapons squad had set up a strong point, and we were ready to turn our real estate over to fresh troops as soon as they showed up.
Only they didn’t. They dropped in where we should have dropped, found unfriendly natives and had their own troubles. We never saw them. So we stayed where we were, soaking up casualties from time to time and passing them out ourselves as opportunity offered—while we ran low on ammo and jump juice and even power to keep the suits moving. This seemed to go on for a couple of thousand years.
Dutch and I were zipping along close to a wall, headed for our special-weapons squad in answer to a yell for help, when the ground suddenly opened in front of Dutch, a Bug popped out, and Dutch went down.
I flamed the Bug and tossed a grenade and the hole closed up, then turned to see what had happened to Dutch. He was down but he didn’t look hurt. A platoon sergeant can monitor the physicals of every man in his platoon, sort out the dead from those who merely can’t make it unassisted and must be picked up. But you can do the same thing manually from switches right on the belt of a man’s suit.
Dutch didn’t answer when I called to him. His body temperature read ninety-nine degrees, his respiration, heartbeat, and brain wave read zero—which looked bad but maybe his suit was dead rather than he himself. Or so I told myself, forgetting that the temperature indicator would give no reading if it were the suit rather than the man. Anyhow, I grabbed the can-opener wrench from my own belt and started to take him out of his suit while trying to watch all around me.
Then I heard an all-hands call in my helmet that I never want to hear again. “Sauve qui peut! Home! Home! Pickup and home! Any beacon you can hear. Six minutes! All hands, save yourselves, pick up your mates. Home on any beacon! Sauve qui—”
I hurried.
His head came off as I tried to drag him out of his suit, so I dropped him and got out of there. On a later drop I would have had sense enough to salvage his ammo, but I was far too sluggy to think; I simply bounced away from there and tried to rendezvous with the strong point we had been heading for.
It was already evacuated and I felt lost…lost and deserted. Then I heard recall, not the recall it should have been: “Yankee Doodle” (if it had been a boat from the Valley Forge)—but “Sugar Bush,” a tune I didn’t know. No matter, it was a beacon; I headed for it, using the last of my jump juice lavishly—got aboard just as they were about to button up and shortly thereafter was in the Voortrek, in such a state of shock that I couldn’t remember my serial number.
I’ve heard it called a “strategic victory”—but I was there and I claim we took a terrible licking.
Six weeks later (and feeling about sixty years older) at Fleet Base on Sanctuary I boarded another ground boat and reported for duty to Ship’s Sergeant Jelal in the Rodger Young. I was wearing, in my pierced left ear lobe, a broken skull with one bone. Al Jenkins was with me and was wearing one exactly like it (Kitten never made it out of the tube). The few surviving Wildcats were distributed elsewhere around the Fleet; we had lost half our strength, about, in the collision between the Valley Forge and the Ypres; that disastrous mess on the ground had run our casualties up over 80 per cent and the powers-that-be decided that it was impossible to put the outfit back together with the survivors—close it out, put the records in the archives, and wait until the scars had healed before reactivating Company K (Wildcats) with new faces but old traditions.
Besides, there were a lot of empty files to fill in other outfits.
Sergeant Jelal welcomed us warmly, told us that we were joining a smart outfit, “best in the Fleet,” in a taut ship, and didn’t seem to notice our ear skulls. Later that day he took us forward to meet the Lieutenant, who smiled rather shyly and gave us a fatherly little talk. I noticed that Al Jenkins wasn’t wearing his gold skull. Neither was I—because I had already noticed that nobody in Rasczak’s Roughnecks wore the skulls.
They didn’t wear them because, in Rasczak’s Roughnecks, it didn’t matter in the least how many combat drops you had made, nor which ones; you were either a Roughneck or you weren’t—and if you were not, they didn’t care who you were. Since we had come to them not as recruits but as combat veterans, they gave us all possible benefit of doubt and made us welcome with no more than that unavoidable trace of formality anybody necessarily shows to a house guest who is not a member of the family.
But, less than a week later when we had made one combat drop with them, we were full-fledged Roughnecks, members of the family, called by our first names, chewed out on occasion without any feeling on either side that we were less than blood brothers thereby, borrowed from and lent to, included in bull sessions and privileged to express our own silly opinions with complete freedom—and have them slapped down just as freely. We even called non-coms by their first names on any but strictly duty occasions. Sergeant Jelal was always on duty, of course, unless you ran across him dirtside, in which case he was “Jelly” and went out of his way to behave as if his lordly rank meant nothing between Roughnecks.
But the Lieutenant was always “The Lieutenant”—never “Mr. Rasczak,” nor even “Lieutenant Rasczak.” Simply “The Lieutenant,” spoken to and of in the third person. There was no god but the Lieutenant and Sergeant Jelal was his prophet. Jelly could say “No” in his own person and it might be subject to further argument, at least from junior sergeants, but if he said, “The Lieutenant wouldn’t like it,” he was speaking ex cathedra and the matter was dropped permanently. Nobody ever tried to check up on whether or not the Lieutenant would or would not like it; the Word had been spoken.
The Lieutenant was father to us and loved us and spoiled us and was nevertheless rather remote from us aboard ship—and even dirtside…unless we reached dirt via a drop. But in a drop—well, you wouldn’t think that an officer could worry about every man of a platoon spread over a hundred square miles of terrain. But he can. He can worry himself sick over each one of them. How he could keep track of us all I can’t describe, but in the midst of a ruckus his voice would sing out over the command circuit: “Johnson! Check squad six! Smitty’s in trouble,” and it was better than even money that the Lieutenant had noticed it before Smith’s squad leader.
Besides that, you knew with utter and absolute certainty that, as long as you were still alive, the Lieutenant would not get into the retrieval boat without you. There have been prisoners taken in the Bug War, but none from Rasczak’s Roughnecks.
Jelly was mother to us and was close to us and took care of us and didn’t spoil us at all. But he didn’t report us to the Lieutenant—there was never a court-martial among the Roughnecks and no man was ever flogged. Jelly didn’t even pass out extra duty very often; he had other ways of paddling us. He could look you up and down at daily inspection and simply say, “In the Navy you might look good. Why don’t you transfer?”—and get results, it being an article of faith among us that the Navy crew members slept in their uniforms and never washed below their collar lines.
But Jelly didn’t have to maintain discipline among privates because he maintained discipline among his non-coms and expected them to do likewise. My squad leader, when I first joined, was “Red” Greene. After a couple of drops, when I knew how good it was to be a Roughneck, I got to feeling gay and a bit too big for my clothes—and talked back to Red. He didn’t report me to Jelly; he just took me back to the washroom and gave me a medium set of lumps, and we got to be pretty good friends. In fact, he recommended me for lance, later on.
Actually we didn’t know whether the crew members slept in their clothes or not; we kept to our part of the ship a
nd the Navy men kept to theirs, because they were made to feel unwelcome if they showed up in our country other than on duty—after all, one has social standards one must maintain, mustn’t one? The Lieutenant had his stateroom in male officers’ country, a Navy part of the ship, but we never went there, either, except on duty and rarely. We did go forward for guard duty, because the Rodger Young was a mixed ship, female captain and pilot officers, some female Navy ratings; forward of bulkhead thirty was ladies’ country—and two armed M.I. day and night stood guard at the one door cutting it. (At battle stations that door, like all other gastight doors, was secured; nobody missed a drop.)
Officers were privileged to go forward of bulkhead thirty on duty and all officers, including the Lieutenant, ate in a mixed mess just beyond it. But they didn’t tarry there; they ate and got out. Maybe other corvette transports were run differently, but that was the way the Rodger Young was run—both the Lieutenant and Captain Deladrier wanted a taut ship and got it.
Nevertheless guard duty was a privilege. It was a rest to stand beside that door, arms folded, feet spread, doping off and thinking about nothing…but always warmly aware that any moment you might see a feminine creature even though you were not privileged to speak to her other than on duty. Once I was called all the way into the Skipper’s office and she spoke to me—she looked right at me and said, “Take this to the Chief Engineer, please.”
My daily shipside job, aside from cleaning, was servicing electronic equipment under the close supervision of “Padre” Migliaccio, the section leader of the first section, exactly as I used to work under Carl’s eye. Drops didn’t happen too often and everybody worked every day. If a man didn’t have any other talent he could always scrub bulkheads; nothing was ever quite clean enough to suit Sergeant Jelal. We followed the M.I. rule; everybody fights, everybody works. Our first cook was Johnson, the second section’s sergeant, a big friendly boy from Georgia (the one in the western hemisphere, not the other one) and a very talented chef. He wheedled pretty well, too; he liked to eat between meals himself and saw no reason why other people shouldn’t.
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