Blue Darker Than Black

by Mike Jenne

  The ambush was arranged in a classic “L,” with the bulk of the airmen forming an assault line in the long axis of the “L” and a support element, consisting of a sniper element and a two-man M60 machine gun team, in the short leg of the “L.” The support element was situated so that its fires were oriented down the long axis of the kill zone.

  In broad daylight rather than darkness, the ambush force looked rather odd. Attired in tigerstripe pattern camouflage uniforms, the men’s faces were daubed with jagged slashes of black and green greasepaint, and they wore heavily tinted goggles to simulate night conditions. The targets of the ambush, two medium-sized cargo trucks recovered from a scrap yard, were already situated in the kill zone. Several dummies—including two representing the captured pilots—were seated inside the vehicles. As with virtually all of the 116th’s training exercises, the ambushers’ weapons were loaded with live ammunition, so a post mortem of the drill would unequivocally show which dummies—enemy or friendly—were hit or not.

  The nascent detachment was under the command of Captain Ed Lewis, who until recently had been charged with leading the Training Flight that assessed and trained new candidates for the 116th. Glades had previous experience with Lewis. As a “lane grader” for the Florida Phase of Ranger School, Glades had evaluated Lewis during a night raid patrol roughly a year ago. Later, as a training advisor to the 116th Wing, Glades had observed Lewis as he evaluated several candidate-led search and rescue exercises; in particular, he remembered the arrogant captain levying a failing grade on a black candidate after the airman had conducted one of the best patrols that Glades had ever witnessed.

  In Glades’s opinion, Lewis had a relatively good grasp of the tactical basics, but like more than a few of his comrades at MACV-SOG, Lewis was unduly prone to rely on the latest gadgets or gimmicks. A prime example was his weapons choice for the assault force. Except for the sniper and machine-gunner, the men were armed with Ingram M-10 9mm submachine guns, all equipped with Sionics silencers. Last year, Glades had evaluated the stubby M-10 for his MACV-SOG recon team in Vietnam; his assessment was that it was a weapon ideally suited for murdering someone in a phone booth, but little else. The short-barreled little gun—which looked like a slightly oversized pistol—climbed rapidly when fired on full automatic. Fitting the gun with a silencer—more accurately speaking, a suppressor—alleviated this rising tendency to some degree, but also made the weapon awkwardly front-heavy.

  In the discussions leading up to Lewis’s choice, Glades had argued for the utilitarian M3A1 .45 caliber “Grease Gun,” a WWII-era submachine gun which could also be outfitted with a suppressor. The M3A1 was clunky and a bit bulky, not sleek and sexy like the alluring M-10, but it was exceptionally simple, dependable, and surprisingly accurate. Moreover, it fired the tried and true .45 caliber round, a proven man-stopper, rather than the 9mm round selected by Lewis. Lewis asserted that because the 9mm round was smaller and lighter, his men could carry considerably more ammunition. Perhaps this was true, but killing men was not a theoretical exercise for Glades, as it was for Lewis; Glades didn’t revel in taking lives nor did he keep count, but it was a safe bet that he had killed at least enough people to populate a small village. In his vast experience of separating men from their souls, he had found that it didn’t matter how many rounds you carried or fired, since one bullet at a time, judiciously administered, usually did the trick. And besides, compared to the lighter 9mm bullet travelling at a higher velocity, the .45 caliber projectile—a 230-grain chunk of copper-jacketed lead moving at a relative snail’s pace of 880 feet per second—packed the kinetic energy of a freight train when it impacted flesh.

  Glades had no affinity for tricks and gadgets; he was a firm believer in fundamentals in all endeavors. Two years ago, when the local high school football coach had been suddenly felled by a heart attack, Glades—with the blessing of the Ranger Camp commander—had stepped in as a volunteer coach until a replacement could be found. His entire playbook fit neatly on a single index card, with room to spare, and he spent every available minute of practice hammering home the essential skills of blocking, tackling, running, passing, and catching. Parents complained about the strenuous work-outs and the seemingly shallow repertoire of plays, but the young men learned to be a team unlike any seen previously or since. They were unbeaten in their regular season, and came within a whisper of winning the State championship, and probably would have, had Glades not been called back to Vietnam and a newly hired coach hadn’t shown up with a thick notebook brimming over with “sure fire” plays.

  Shifting his attention back to the matter at hand, Glades watched the proceedings. Well disciplined, the ambushers waited absolutely motionless and silent for the past thirty minutes since quietly occupying their assault line. Glades saw Lewis whisper a code word into the radio handset, a signal for the sniper to be ready to fire. Diverting his attention to the sniper, Glades could see that the airman was carefully aiming his suppressor-equipped weapon—an M21 7.62mm sniper rifle—at the cab of the lead truck waiting in the kill zone.

  The sniper was using his rucksack as a makeshift rest; a good idea, thought Glades, since tonight the LART—Leatherwood Automatic Ranging Telescope—scope currently mounted on his weapon would be replaced with a heavier PVS-2 night vision sight. Fifteen feet to the sniper’s left, the machine gun team was poised to “close the back door” by isolating the far side of the ambush with a continuous stream of automatic fire, should anyone attempt to escape. The machine gun team’s M60 was the only “loud” weapon in the ambushers’ arsenal, and they wouldn’t fire unless they had a definite target in their sights.

  Things looked good, mused Glades, and then suddenly they didn’t. With the apparent intent of illuminating the kill zone, Lewis commenced the ambush by firing a hand-held parachute flare. While it was admirable that Lewis remembered to include the flare in the daytime rehearsal, since he obviously planned to fire it at night, he just shattered a tactical commandment.

  Even as Glades was logging the violation into memory, the air was shattered by a loud report. As the sniper pulled the trigger and broke his round, his suppressor, apparently not adequately tightened onto the M21, blasted off the threaded coupling of the rifle’s barrel. Tumbling end over end, the black-painted cylinder whistled through the air, thumped against the grill of the first truck, and then ricocheted off at an abrupt angle, very nearly hitting one of the ambushers lying in wait. There was no way of knowing where the bullet went, except that it almost certainly did not strike the intended target in the cab of the truck.

  Much to their credit, the other ambushers were unfazed by the suppressor’s malfunction. Operating in pairs, half rose and closed the gap to the vehicles while the others fired at the few hostile targets that were immediately visible. The assaulters split neatly into teams that covered the cabs and cargo areas of each vehicle, and then quickly and quietly dispatched the remaining hostile targets.

  Rising from his location, Glades fell in behind Lewis as the captain orchestrated the remaining actions on the kill zone. Speaking quietly into the radio, Lewis dispatched reinforcements to the security teams positioned a few hundred yards on either side of the kill zone. The security teams functioned as mini-ambushes to provide early warning and to interdict any enemy reaction forces.

  “Send up the blimp,” whispered Lewis. Four men walked back in the direction of the ambush position, retrieved a hefty bundle of equipment, moved back to the kill zone, and then began inflating a large finned balloon from a bulky cylinder of helium. As the blimp took shape, hissing and billowing, Lewis’s radio operator made contact with an MC-130E “Combat Talon” aircraft orbiting a few miles to the west. The Combat Talon was a turboprop C-130 Hercules uniquely configured for special operations.

  Two of the ambushers had volunteered to stand in as the pilots for the Fulton STAR pick-up. Assisting each other, they donned hooded one-piece suits that were fitted with integral self-adjusting harnesses. As the balloon rose into the air
, trailing a thick braided nylon “lift-line” connected to the harnesses, the two men sat down, shoulder to shoulder.

  Glades checked the connections that linked the airmen’s harnesses to the bridle that attached them to the lift-line. He looked at the two men, who were now more than a little bit apprehensive, and asked, “Are you boys absolutely sure you want to do this? It ain’t too late to bow out. We can send the dummies in your place. No one would think any less of you for not riding this elevator.” The men clenched their teeth and shook their heads. Glades heard the MC-130E droning in the distance, lining up on the balloon as it approached.

  He had ridden a Fulton Skyhook rig once and was not particularly fond of the contraption, particularly since it had almost killed him. A few years ago, he had been dispatched to locate a downed U-2 spy plane in the southern mountains of Uzbekistan. After locating the crash site, Glades spent two days smashing the sensitive components of the U-2 before he and the pilot’s corpse were extracted by an MC-130E Combat Talon that raced in from nearby Iran.

  The pickup had not gone without incident. Normally, it takes less than ten minutes to snatch someone from the ground and reel them into the warm safety of the cargo compartment, but a jammed capstan had caused Glades and his dead companion to be dragged behind the MC-130E for over an hour, slowly pin-wheeling in the plane’s turbulent wake.

  By the time the crew finally managed to pull the pair aboard, Glades was deeply unconscious, so stiff and cold that the airmen could not immediately differentiate between him and the cadaver. So, Glades was none too enthused about ever riding a Fulton rig again, nor did he see the wisdom of any other sane person riding it, except perhaps in life or death situations where there were no other options for escape.

  Now, obviously pondering their decision, the two airmen waited for their moment of truth. In just a few minutes, the MC-130E roared low overhead, aiming for red streamers tied to the lift-line. An odd-looking “pick-up yoke,” protruding like giant spindly whiskers from the nose of the MC-130E, snagged the lift-line and the two men were abruptly snatched up into the air. Moments later, the transport disappeared in the distance, trailing the pair as they were gradually winched aboard.

  With the “pilots” successfully rescued, Lewis blew a whistle, calling an end to the exercise. “Okay, gents,” he said. “We’re burning daylight, and I want to get in another run before we do this tonight, so we’re not going to practice our withdrawal to the pick-up zone. Gather in. We’ll have a quick powwow, go over lessons learned, and then we’ll run it again.” With that, the ambushers compared notes, mostly congratulating themselves on how smoothly the operation had gone.

  Eavesdropping on their comments, Glades opened an extra ammunition pouch on his pistol belt and extracted a small can of C-ration sliced peaches. Deftly wielding a tiny P-38 opener, he ripped into the can, held it to his nose, and inhaled deeply. He spooned the sweet fruit from the green can, one dripping slice at a time, and savored each delectable bite.

  The peaches reminded him of his West Virginia upbringing, when his father splurged every year at Christmas, walking down to the company store and plunking down just enough money to buy a gallon-sized can of peaches. That was the sole recurring treat in his childhood; the rest of his young life was mostly misery and deprivation, as he waited for his turn to descend into the mines or to find his way out of the Appalachians. Glades found his way out.

  Hearing a slight noise, he looked up and saw a small deer well off in the distance, on the other side of the road. Watching the deer as it skittishly navigated its way through a tangle of greenbrier vines, he chewed slowly on the last slice, swallowed it, and then turned up the can to drink the syrup. Sticking the empty can in his spare ammo pouch, he listened to Captain Lewis’s final comments on the ambush.

  As Lewis’s critique drew to a close, the team’s sniper, an airman just barely familiar with the concepts of long distance shooting, laughed as he threaded the silencer back onto the barrel of the M-21. “I’ll cinch it down this time, Captain,” he avowed, tugging a small pair of Vise-grip pliers from a cloth Claymore mine bag hanging at his side. “It’ll stay on. That won’t happen again.”

  “It had better not,” noted Lewis sternly. “Everyone, let’s set up for the next run.”

  “Are you nuts, boy?” asked Glades, walking over to the sniper and snatching the rifle out of his hands. “You mean to tell me that you’re dumb enough to fire a round through this can after it’s already blown off your barrel, sailed over a hundred yards through the air, and smacked into the front end of a truck? You can rest assured its guts and baffles are knocked out of alignment, and if you pull that trigger on it again, you’re going to need that rifle pried out of your face, if you’re even still alive.”

  “Uh, sorry, Sergeant,” said the hapless sniper. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You’ll be thinking a lot less after that bolt flies out the back plate of your skull, son,” noted Glades.

  “Point taken,” said Lewis. “Thanks, Sergeant Glades. Do you have any more observations for us?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, sir, I do,” declared Glades, using his thumbs to shift the weight of his load-bearing H-harness back onto his shoulders. He pointed at the lowest ranking airman present, and asked, “What did we do wrong?”

  “Uh, sir, I don’t think we did anything wrong,” muttered the young airman, apparently awed that Glades would call upon him for his opinion.

  “It’s sergeant, not sir,” said Glades. “For starters, son, you always—always—always initiate any contact with a casualty-producing device. If you don’t, then you’re just granting the enemy the split-second of reaction time that he needs to dive out of that truck or duck down below the dashboard where you can’t land a clean hit on him.”

  “I don’t understand, sergeant,” stated the perplexed airman. “I thought we did use a casualty-producing device.”

  “Well, let me spell it out to you, son. A casualty-producing device produces casualties. That means it kills or wounds folks, preferably as many as possible at the same instant. A flare is not a casualty-producing device. I’ll grant you that it’s not a bad idea to put one up after you initiate contact, so you can illuminate targets, but if it ain’t killing people, it’s not a casualty-producing device.” Glades noticed that Lewis was frowning; it was clearly obvious that the captain was annoyed at being criticized in front of his men.

  “And while we’re on the subject of flares,” observed Glades. “You can aim those hand-held flares so they pop just about anywhere you want. Now, ideally, if your assault line is back there” —he gestured at where they men had lain in wait—“like yours was, and it’s dark out, where would you want that parachute flare to go?”

  “Over yonder,” said one of the men, a gaunt NCO from Mississippi, pointing out towards the stunted oaks and sawgrass on the distant side of the kill zone, opposite from the assault line.

  “Why?” implored Glades.

  “If the flare is behind the kill zone, in relation to us, it’s going to backlight the targets, even after it hits the ground,” answered the NCO.

  “Correct. But your flare went one-hundred-eighty degrees in the opposite direction,” noted Glades, pointing into the pine forest behind the assault line. “Is that a problem?”

  “It is,” answered the NCO. “Because even though it would illuminate the targets, it would backlight us.”

  “Correct. Would there be another problem?”

  “Can’t think of one.”

  Glades leaned his weight on his right foot and frowned. “Well, there is another problem. Like you said, that parachute flare is likely to continue burning for quite a while after it hits the ground.” He knelt down, picked up a clump of pine needles, and held them in an outstretched hand. “This stuff is dry as a bone, and that parachute flare could catch it alight in an instant if you’re not lucky. And by the time you search the vehicles, put up a balloon, execute your Fulton pickup and complete the rest of you
r actions on the objective, chances are pretty good that there will be a fairly substantial scrub fire burning. And that’s a problem because …”

  “Our pick-up zone is in the direction,” answered the lowest ranking airman. “Six hundred meters past where the fire would be. We would have to run through the fire to get to the helicopters.”

  “Correct.”

  Lewis, who had been tapping his feet and fidgeting, chose to quibble. “All good points, Sergeant Glades, but since this was a silent ambush and there were friendlies on the trucks, I didn’t have the latitude of using a Claymore mine or firing indiscriminately into the trucks, so I didn’t have the option of using a casualty-producing device to initiate.”

  “You didn’t?” asked Glades, arching his eyebrows. “How about your sniper, sir?”

  “That’s why I fired the flare,” argued Lewis. “To light up the trucks so he could pick up his target.”

  “Okay, sir, but let’s remember that he’ll be using a PVS-2 scope tonight. Even without the PVS-2, are you telling me that he couldn’t line up low center of mass on the driver’s side of that windshield and put a bullet through it? Maybe he won’t hit that driver square on, but he’s sure going to do sufficient damage to distract him from driving that truck, don’t you think?”

  Lewis nodded. “I’ll concede that.”

  “Okay, Captain. So while we’re on the subject of your sniper, you positioned him so he was firing smack down the long axis of the target, so if he was successful in placing that first bullet through the windshield, it would have smacked through the glass, then drilled through the driver’s head, then cruised right on through the flimsy canvas separating the driver’s compartment from the cargo area, where it could …”

  “Possibly hit one of the pilots,” interjected the youngest airman, grinning. “Our precious cargo.”

  “Correct. So on the next go-round, you might consider positioning your shooter at an angle to where it’s less likely that he’ll accidently kill one of the folks you’re supposed to be rescuing. Last but not least, speaking to that suppressor that your sniper launched at the truck, you always check and double-check your equipment before you leave for a mission, and then you check and double-check it again before you move out to occupy your assault positions. And if it’s a piece of equipment that’s mission-critical, you check it, double-check it, triple-check it, and quadruple-check it. Understood?”