The Complete Hammer's Slammers Vol 2

by David Drake

  Tyl turned.

  "Wait," he said. Everyone was watching him. There was a red blotch on the back of Eunice's hand where he'd held her, but he was as controlled as the tide, now. "I want doctors for my men."

  He lifted his hand toward the House of Grace, glorying in the pain of moving. "You got a whole hospital, there. I want doctors, now, and I want every one of my boys treated like he was Christ himself. Understood?"

  "Of course,of course,"said Father Laughlin in the voice Tyl remembered from the Consistory Meeting.

  The big priest turned to the man who had been wearing the commo set and snarled, "Well, get on it, Ryan. You heard the man!"

  Ryan knelt and began speaking into the handset, glancing sometimes up at the hospital's shattered facade and sometimes back at the Slammers captain. The only color on the priest's face was a splotch of someone else's blood.

  Trimer walked to the aircar, arm in arm with President Delcorio.

  Borodin and Drescher had already boarded. Neither of them would let their eyes focus on anything around them.When Pedro Delcorio squeezed in between them, the two officers made room without comment.

  Father Laughlin would have followed the Bishop, but Eunice Delcorio glanced at his heavy form and gestured dismissingly. Laughlin watched the car lift into a hover; then, sinking his head low, he strode in the direction of the east stairs.

  Tyl Koopman stood between his sergeant major and the UDB lieutenant. He was beginning to shiver again.

  "What's it mean, d'ye suppose?" he whispered in the direction of the main stairs.

  "Mean?"said Charles Desoix dispassionately. "It means that John Delcorio is President—President in more than name—for the first time. It means that he really has the resources to prosecute his Crusade, the war on Two, to a successful conclusion. I doubt that would have been possible without the financial support of the Church."

  "But who cares!" Tyl shouted."D'ye mean we've got jobs for the next two years? Who bloody cares? Somebody'd 've hired us, you know that!"

  "It means," said Jack Scratchard, "that we're alive and they're dead. That's all it means, sir."

  "It's got to mean more than that," Tyl whispered.

  But as he looked at the heapsandrowsof bodies, tens of thousands of dead human beings stiffening in the sun, he couldn't put any real belief into the words.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Slammers were gone.

  Ambulances had carried their wounded off,each with a guard of other troopers ready to add a few more bodies to the day's bag if any of Trimer's men seemed less than perfectly dedicated to healing the wounded. Desoix thought he'd heard the sergeant major say something about bivouacking in the House of Grace, but he hadn't been paying much attention.

  There was nothing here for him. He ought to leave himself.

  Desoix turned. Anne McGill was walking toward him. She had thrown off the cloak that covered her in the cathedral and was wearing only a dress of white chiffon like the one in which she had greeted him the day before.

  Her face was set. She was moving very slowly, because she would not look down and her feet kept brushing the things that she refused to see.

  Desoix began to tremble. He had unlatched his body armor, but he still had it on. The halves rattled against one another as he watched the woman approach.

  There was nothing there. There couldn't be anything left there now.

  It didn't matter. That was only one of many things which had died this morning. No doubt he'd feel it was an unimportant one in later years.

  Anne put her arms around him, crushing her cheek against his though he was black with iridium dust and dried blood."I'm so sorry," she whispered."Charles, I—we . . . Charles, I love you."

  As if love could matter now.

  Desoix put his arms around her, squeezing gently so that the edges of his armor would not bite into her soft flesh.

  Love mattered, even now.

  Afterword To Counting The Cost:

  How They Got That Way

  I gained my first real insight into tanks when I was about eight years old and the local newspaper ran a picture of one, an M41 Walker Bulldog, on the front page.

  The M41 isn't especially big. It's longer than the Studebaker my family had at the time but still a couple feet shorter than the 1960 Plymouth we owned later. At nine feet high and eleven feet wide, the tank was impressive but not really out of automotive scale.

  What was striking about it was the way it had flattened a parked car when the tank's driver goofed during a Christmas Parade in Chicago. That picture proved to me that the power and lethality of a tank are out of all proportion to the size of the package.

  I learned a lot more about tanks in 1970 when I was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet Nam.

  Normally, interrogators like me were in slots at brigade level or higher. The Eleventh Cav was unusual in that each of its three squadrons in the field had a Battalion Intelligence Collection Center—pronounced like the pen—of four to six men. After a week or two at the rear-echelon headquarters of my unit, I requested assignment to a BICC. A few weeks later, I joined Second Squadron in Cambodia.

  Our BICC had a variety of personal and official gear—the tent was our largest item—which fitted into a trailer about the size of a middling-big U-Haul-It. We didn't have a vehicle of our own. When the squadron moved (as it generally did every week or two), the trailer was towed by one of the Headquarters Troop tracks; and we, the personnel, were split up as crew among the fighting vehicles.

  The tanks were M48s, already obsolescent because the 90mm main gun couldn't be trusted to penetrate the armor of new Soviet tanks. That wasn't a problem for us, since most of the opposition wore black pajamas and sandals cut from tire treads.

  M48s have a normal complement of four men, but that was exceptionally high in the field. In one case, I rode as loader on a tank which would have been down to two men—driver and commander—without me. The Eleventh Cav was at almost double its official (Table of Organization) strength, but the excess personnel didn't trickle far enough from headquarters to reach the folks who were expected to do the actual fighting.

  While I was there, a squadron in the field operated as four linked entities. Squadron headquarters (including the BICC) was a firebase, so called because the encampment included a battery of self-propelled 155mm howitzers—six guns if none were deadlined.

  Besides How Battery, the firebase included Headquarters Troop with half a dozen Armored Cavalry Assault Vehicles—ACAVs. These were simply M113 armored personnel carriers modified at the factory into combat vehicles. Each had a little steel cupola around a fifty caliber machine-gun and a pintle-mounted M60 machine-gun (7.62mm) on either flank.

  There were also a great number of other vehicles at the firebase: armored personnel carriers modified into trucks, high-sided command vehicles, and mobile flamethrowers (Zippos); maintenance vehicles with cranes to lift out and replace engines in the field; and a platoon of combat engineers with a modified M48 tank as well as the bulldozers that turned up an earthen berm around the whole site.

  Apart from these headquarters units, the squadron was made up of a company of (nominally) seventeen M48 tanks; and three line troops with twelve ACAVs and six Sheridans apiece. The Sheridan is a deathtrap with a steel turret, an aluminum hull, and a 152mm cannon whose ammunition generally caught fire if the vehicle hit a forty-pound mine.

  Either a line troop or the tank company laagered at the firebase at night for security. The other three formed separate night defensive positions within fire support range of How Battery.

  I talked with a lot of people in the field, and I got a good firsthand look at the way an armored regiment conducts combat operations.

  When I got back to the World, I resumed my hobby of writing fantasies. I'd sold three stories to August Derleth in the past; now I sold him a fourth, set in the late Roman Empire. Mr. Derleth paid for that story the day before he died.

  With him gone, there was no
market for what I was writing: short stories in the heroic fantasy subgenre. I kept writing them anyway, becoming more and more frustrated that they didn't sell. (I wasn't real tightly wrapped back then. It was a while before I realized just how screwy I was.)

  Fortunately, writer friends in Chapel Hill, Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner,suggested that I use Viet Nam as a setting. I tried it with immediate success, selling a horror fantasy to F&SF and a science fiction story to Analog.

  I still had a professional problem.There were very few stories that someone with my limited skills could tell which were SF or fantasy, and which directly involved the Eleventh Cav. I decided to get around the issue by telling a story that was SF because the characters used ray guns instead of M16s . . . but was otherwise true, the way it had been described to me by the men who'd been there.

  The story was "The Butcher's Bill," and for it I created a mercenary armored regiment called Hammer's Slammers.

  The hardware was easy. I'd spent enough time around combat vehicles to have a notion of their strengths and weaknesses. Hammer's vehicles were designed around the M48s and ACAVs I'd ridden, with some of the most glaring faults eliminated.

  All the vehicles in the field with the Eleventh Cav were track laying; that is, they had caterpillar treads instead of wheels. This was necessary because we never encamped on surfaced roads. Part of any move, even for headquarters units, was across stretches of jungle cleared minutes before by bulldozers fitted with Rome Plow blades.

  The interior of a firebase was also bulldozed clear. Rain turned the bare soil either gooey or the consistency of wet soap. In both cases, it was impassable for wheeled vehicles. Our daily supplies came in by helicopter.

  Tracks were absolutely necessary; and they were an absolute curse for the crewmen who had to maintain them.

  Jungle soils dry to a coarse, gritty stone that abrades the tracks as they churn it up.When tracks wear, they loosen the way a bicycle chain does.To steer a tracked vehicle, you brake one tread while the other continues to turn. If the tracks are severely worn, you're certain to throw one.

  If they're not worn, you may throw one anyway.

  Replacing a track in the field means the crew has to break the loop; drive off it with the road wheels and the good track while another vehicle stretches the broken track; reverse onto the straightened track, hand feeding the free end up over the drive sprocket and along the return rollers; and then mate the ends into a loop again.

  You may very well throw the same track ten minutes later.

  Because of that problem (and suspension problems. Want to guess how long torsion bars last on a fifty-ton tank bouncing over rough terrain?) I decided my supertanks had to be air-cushion vehicles. That would be practical only if fuel supplies weren't a problem, so that the fans could be powerful enough to keep the huge mass stable even though it didn't touch the ground.

  I'm a writer, not an engineer. I didn't have any difficulty in giving my tanks and combat cars (ACAVs with energy weapons) the fusion powerplants without which they'd be useless.

  Armament required the same sort of decision. Energy weapons have major advantages over projectile weapons; but although tanks may some day mount effective lasers, I don't think an infantryman will ever be able to carry one. I therefore postulated guns that fired bolts of plasma liberated—somehow—from individual cartridges.

  That took care of the hardware. The organization was basically that of the Eleventh Cav, with a few changes for the hell of it.

  The unit itself was not based on any US unit with which I'm familiar. Its model was the French Foreign Legion; more precisely, the French Foreign Legion serving in Viet Nam just after World War Two—when most of its personnel were veterans of the SS who'd fled from Germany ahead of the Allied War Crimes Commission.

  The incident around which I plotted "The Butcher's Bill" was the capture of Snuol the day before I arrived in Cambodia. That was the only significant fighting during the invasion of Cambodia, just as Snuol was the only significant town our forces reached.

  G, one of the line troops, entered Snuol first. There was a real street, lined with stucco-faced shops instead of the grass huts on posts in the farming hamlets of the region. The C-100 AntiAircraft Company, a Viet Cong unit, was defending the town with a quartet of fifty-one caliber machine-guns.

  A fifty-one cal could put its rounds through an ACAV the long way, and the aluminum hull of a Sheridan wasn't much more protection.Before G Troop could get out, the concealed guns had destroyed one of either type of vehicle.

  The squadron commander responded by sending in H Company, his tanks.

  The eleven M48s rolled down the street in line ahead. The first tank slanted its main gun to the right side of the street, the second to the left, and so on. Each tank fired a round of canister or shrapnel into every structure that slid past the muzzle of its 90mm gun.

  On the other side of Snuol, they formed up to go back again. There wasn't any need to do that.

  The VC had opened fire at first. The crews of the M48s didn't know that, because the noise inside was so loud that the clang of two-ounce bullets hitting the armor was inaudible. Some of the slugs flattened and were there on the fenders to be picked up afterward. The surviving VC fled, leaving their guns behind.

  There was a little looting—a bottle of whiskey,a sack of ladies' slippers,a step through Honda (which was flown back to Quan Loi in a squadron helicopter). But for all practical purposes, Snuol ceased to have human significance the moment H Company blasted its way down the street.

  The civilian population? It had fled before the shooting started.

  Not that it would have made any difference to the operation.

  So I wrote a story about what wars cost and how decisions get made in the field—despite policy considerations back in air-conditioned offices. It was the best story I'd written so far, and the first time I'd tackled issues of real importance.

  Only problem was, "The Butcher's Bill" didn't sell.

  Mostly it just got rejection slips, but one very competent editor said that Joe Haldeman and Jerry Pournelle were writing as much of that sort of story as his magazine needed. (Looking back, I find it interesting that in 1973 magazine terms, the stories in The Forever War, The Mercenary, and Hammer's Slammers were indistinguishable.)

  One editor felt that "The Butcher's Bill" demanded too much background, both SF and military, for the entry-level anthology he was planning. That was a good criticism, to which I responded by writing "Under the Hammer."

  "Under the Hammer" had a new recruit as its viewpoint character, a kid who was terrified that he was going to make an ignorant mistake and get himself killed. (I didn't have to go far to find a model for the character. Remember that I hadn't had advanced combat training before I became an ad hoc tank crewman.) Because the recruit knew so little, other characters could explain details to him and to the reader.

  I made the kid a recruit to Hammer's Slammers, because I already had that background clear in my mind. I hadn't intended to write a series, it just happened that way.

  "Under the Hammer" didn't sell either.

  I went about a year and a half with no sales. This was depressing, and I was as prone as the next guy to whine, "My stuff's better 'n some of the crap they publish."

  In hindsight, I've decided that when an author doesn't sell, it's because:

  1) he's doing something wrong; or

  2) he's doing something different, and he isn't good enough to get away with being different.

  In my case, there was some of both. The two Hammer stories were different—and clumsy; I was new to the job. Most of the other fiction I wrote during that period just wasn't very good.

  But the situation was very frustrating.

  The dam broke when Gordy Dickson took"The Butcher's Bill"for an anthology he was editing. It wasn't a lot of money, but I earned my living as an attorney. This was a sale, and it had been a long time coming.

  Almost immediately thereafter, the edito
r at Galaxy (who'd rejected the Hammer stories) was replaced by his assistant, a guy named Jim Baen. Jim took the pair and asked for more.

  I wrote three more stories in the series before Jim left to become SF editor of Ace Books. One of the three was the only piece I've written about Colonel Hammer himself instead of Hammer's Slammers. It was to an editorial suggestion: tell how it all started. Jim took that one, and though he rejected the other two, they sold elsewhere. The dam really had broken.

  I moved away from Hammer and into other things, including a fantasy novel. Then Jim, now at Ace, asked for a collection of the 35,000 words already written plus enough new material in the series to fill out a book. Earlier I'd had an idea that seemed too complex to be done at a length a magazine would buy from me. I did it—"Hangman"—for the collection and added a little end-cap for the volume also—"Standing Down."

  To stand between the stories, I wrote essays explaining the background of the series, social and economic as well as the hardware. In some cases I had to work out the background for the first time. I hadn't started with the intention of writing a series.

  Hammer's Slammers came out in 1979. That was the end of the series, so far as I was concerned. But as the years passed, I did a novelette. Then the setting turned out to be perfect for my effort at using the plot of the Odyssey as an SF novel (Cross the Stars). I did a short novel, At Any Price, that was published with the earlier novelette and a story I did for the volume . . . .

  And I'm going to do more stories besides this one in the series, because Hammer's Slammers have become a vehicle for a message that I think needs to be more widely known. Veterans who've written or talked to me already understand, but a lot of other people don't.

  When you send a man out with a gun, you create a policymaker. When his ass is on the line, he will do whatever he needs to do. And if the implications of that bother you, the time to do something about it is before you decide to send him out.

  Dave Drake