by David Drake
Besides, a guy's got a right to do his thing.
We heard boots on the gravel. Flip spun the jay out into the dark.
I don't know why he did it, Christ, all the officers know we blow grass and don't make a big thing about it, but it was a good thing this time.
Lieutenant Brown jumps up on the back deck of the track, still holding his recorder, and yells, "Which of you sons of bitches is smoking pot? Come on, goddammit! You think I don't know the smell?"
"Pot, sir?" says Flip all innocent like, and the el-tee takes him by the shoulder.
"Don't do that!" I said. Flip's my buddy.
Brown let got of Flip then. He knew what'd happen if he didn't, with the whole crew there to swear that he'd hit me first. There's a few things the army don't let officers do to enlisted men.
"Cooney and Bowles, huh?" Brown said, real quiet. "Okay, boy, for now. But I'm watching, you see? I'm going to have your asses, and you better believe it. Walk straight, son. Walk very straight."
He jumped down from the track then and went back the way he'd come. I waited until he'd scrunched out of sight and said, "Throw the rest of your joints right out after that one, Flip."
"Shit, man, he's gone."
"Throw it away, snake," I said, meaning it. "He's gonna be back inside of five with the CO, and they'll shake the whole track down. Get clean fast."
Sure enough, Brown and Captain Richie came over a few minutes later. I don't blame the CO, he didn't have much choice after Lieutenant Brown bitched to him. But he'd've burned us sure if he'd caught us holding.
I didn't kid myself that this was the last shakedown we'd be seeing, either. Not until Lieutenant Brown left or he caught us on something.
This morning we had a minesweep, down a stretch of Route 13 south of where we laagered. Billy and the back-deck gunner from Two-zero were out in front with the mine detectors, swinging the long booms from side to side to cover all the gravel road. I don't think either of them really knew how to use the detectors, but it didn't much matter since the dinks don't use steel-cased mines any more.
Nowadays the dinks fill a concrete shell with C4 from our Claymores and fit a wooden pressure plate. The only metal is the copper in the detonator. If you've got your detector tuned fine enough to pick that up, the headphones squeal like a hung-up cat every time you swing over a scrap of barbwire laying in the gravel. You just trust to luck and hope you'll see if there's traces of fresh digging.
Or that some mama-san in a cyclo will roll over the mine before you do.
We were lead track, right behind the sweepers with our turret cocked to the right and the tube of the main gun depressed. The five ACAVs followed at pretty close intervals with their cal fifties aimed left and right alternately, so that if something started we could spray both sides of the road right away.
Not that we expected anything to happen.
Two-zero with Lieutenant Brown in the cupola brought up the rear.
When you're working behind minesweeps you have to move by fits and starts. While we were stopped waiting for the sweeps to get far enough ahead of us again, Flip called back from his hatch, "Hey Chico, want to drive for a while?"
Chico didn't mind changing. He took the controls, and Flip hopped up onto the loader's hatch. He pulled his head close and I took off my commo helmet so I could hear him over the whine of the diesel.
"Look what I got from a coke girl," he says, and he shows me another pack of jays.
"Goddammit, Flip, I told you to stay clean," I said, mad now and a little scared. I didn't think Lieutenant Brown'd shake us down on a minesweep, but he sure as hell might as soon as we got back to troop. He knew the coke girls sold grass too.
"No sweat," Flip said. "I'll give 'em to Shorty on Six-six to hold for me as soon as we get turned around. But I'm gonna smoke one now, whatever that motherfucker says."
I shrugged and said, "It's your ass."
Flip dropped down inside the turret and lit up where nobody but me could see him. The sweetish smoke started drifting back, and I wondered if Brown would catch a whiff at the end of the column. Anyway, it was that bastard's own fault that Flip was blowing grass on duty.
"Hey, snake," Flip yelled so I could hear him. "This is good stuff. Want a drag?"
I shook my head. I figured to stay clean until Brown got the CO pissed off enough to transfer him off all our backs.
The sweeps were forty yards ahead of us again and Chico eased in the clutches. That's when we hit the mine.
It was a big one. It went off right behind the driver's compartment, lifting up the front end of the Sheridan and blowing Chico clean out into the road. That maybe saved his life, 'cause the ammo caught fire then.
When a Sheridan burns it goes whoosh with jets of red flame shooting up twenty feet into the sky from all three hatches like searchlights. I was already rolling clear when the flame boomed up past me. It blistered me right through my jungle fatigues.
Flip didn't have a chance, not even time to scream, down in the turret with them shells all around him. I was looking at him right as the mine went off, the joint halfway to his lips and a big easy smile for me.
When a Sheridan burns there's nothing you can do but watch. The flames kept roaring out of the hatches for five minutes. The turret settled through the aluminum hull until it rested on the treads.
There were half a dozen smoke grenades inside my cupola. When they cooked off, puffs of red and yellow and violet smoke burped out of the glare.
Nothing exploded. We didn't carry any HE rounds.
The dustoff bird had landed before the fire was out. It took off with Chico, he was pretty shook up.
There wasn't anything wrong with me. As for Flip, the track'll cool off in a day or two and we'll see what's left then. Flip won't care.
I'm driving six-three now, until we get a replacement Sheridan. Sure, I'll TC another Sheridan. It don't mean nothing. You get used to a lot of things after you been in-country a while.
Lieutenant Brown's got a Grateful Dead tape on. You can hear it coming out of the hatches of Two-zero. Funny taste for a lifer. The way he's got the recorder bracketed against the turret, there's a space about the size of your fist behind it. You know, about the size of a grenade.
The rain's stopping. Pretty soon Lieutenant Brown'll pick up his recorder to head for the command meeting.
Ever see a Sheridan burn? Keep watching Two-zero.
Afterword: One War Later
I'm not a pacifist, but anyone who's read my fiction knows that I regard wars as about the worst thing that can happen to the people who fight them. I really thought when I wrote the introduction to the original form of this collection that the United States might never again be directly involved in a full-scale war.
More fool me, I suppose. There we go with the Gulf War and over a million troops involved. A tremendous military victory at very slight cost in terms of U.S. personnel casualties.
We'll get back to that last point shortly.
As wars go, the Gulf War has a lot to recommend it. Perhaps most startling to a Viet Nam vet is the fact that the high-tech hardware generally worked. More important though less surprising is that our military high command behaved professionally this time also.
I say "less surprising" because most of the Gulf War generals had been company and battalion officers in Viet Nam. That didn't necessarily make them brilliant, but it made it unlikely that they would permit themselves to be micromanaged by idiots the way their predecessors were micromanaged by Lyndon Johnson and Robert S. MacNamara.
Because of hardware that worked for a change and professionalism at all levels of our military, our forces achieved their goals in an amazingly short time. Granted, some Monday-morning quarterbacks claim that different goals should have been set. Maybe so, but that takes nothing away from the success of our military in doing what it was told to do.
Some of the media have expressed the notion that the Iraqis weren't really a dangerous enemy. That isn't what Iran, a count
ry with twice the population, came to believe during the war between them that lasted for most of the 1980s. To a considerable extent the second-guessers are really claiming that Third Worlders can't fight. Very few Viet Nam vets would agree. Nor Korean War vets. Nor Afghan War vets, for that matter. A lot of things look easy once somebody else has done them.
Direct U.S. casualties were a matter of hundreds—many of them caused by our own weaponry because the advance was too rapid for perfect coordination among its elements. Statistically, more troops would have been killed during the period of the Gulf War had they been at stateside bases where cars and booze were available instead of being bunkered in a country that bans alcohol. Young American men and women face a lot of lethal risks that don't involve being shot at by a uniformed enemy. Even as it was, the friend of mine who was killed during Desert Shield was a non-battle casualty.
For a soldier on our side, the Gulf War was as close to perfect as a war gets. Which leads us to the other 20,000 casualties: the veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome.
In another remarkable example of people having learned something from the Vietnam War, Congress is in the process of compensating those suffering from Gulf War syndrome even though experts aren't any more sure of what causes it than they were of the illnesses Nam vets claim were caused by Agent Orange. The government's attitude toward Nam vets was that if government doctors couldn't determine a mechanism to cause the vets' problems, the problems didn't exist. For the government bureaucrats involved, that was absolutely true: the problems didn't exist, for them.
The symptoms of Gulf War syndrome are various and unrelated. They include fatigue, rashes, gastrointestinal and respiratory disorders, and muscle pain. The even more varied causes suggested include Iraqi chemical and biological weapons (which the U.S. government claims weren't used), countermeasures against chemical and biological weapons (which even the U.S. government admits were administered in haste and ignorance), desert fungus, and about anything else you want to name. The U.S. Army is worried enough about the U-238 shot used in our tanks' main guns that vehicles hit by friendly fire are quarantined in Charleston as potential radiation hazards.
The important thing to me is that this time nobody is denying that we've got a lot of sick soldiers on our hands, nor that their problems are somehow related to them having been in a war zone.
That—service in a war zone—is really the only common denominator among the sufferers. I noted in the introduction that war demands behavior patterns which by the standards of civilian life are insane. Without getting too mystical, I think most people (and certainly most doctors) will agree that mental state has a great deal to do with physical health.
If you believe the stress of an office or a production line can cause ulcers, migraines, hives—think about spending six months in a bunker waiting for somebody faceless to kill you.
And join me in hoping that we won't have to put more of our young men and women into insane situations any time soon.
Dave Drake
Chatham County, NC
THE END
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The Military Dimension-Mark II
Table of Contents
Welcome To The War Zone
Rescue Mission
The Dancer In The Flames
Arclight
Band Of Brothers
Firefight
Contact!
As Our Strength Lessens
Best Of Luck
The Guardroom
The Last Battalion
Something Had To Be Done
The Tank Lords
The End
The Way We Die
Afterword: One War Later
