Stankow just grunted in answer, trusting in the cocksucker Olchak’s experience to tell him what the grunt meant.
“Another triple-strand concertina behind that,” Stankow continued. “Twenty-five yards of tanglefoot, then a row of claymores. Moat, which you’ve already seen, another triple-strand concertina. This one is new, made from that razor wire we just got in.”
Tanglefoot was single-strand barbed wire, strung ankle to waist height in symmetric patterns, covering the entire space between the row of concertina and the claymore mines. Its purpose was to delay, if not stop, any attackers. You could crawl under it, but it was a slow process. You could step through it, but you were also slowed, and terribly exposed. Not a good place to be when you were confronted by a bank of claymore mines. The latter sprayed a pattern of steel ball bearings in a cone-shaped pattern, making certain anyone caught in the zone was going to be riddled.
“Control of the claymores?” Olchak asked.
“Two control centers. One at the company command post for each sector. Second is at the CP in the inner perimeter. They can be fired individually, in a ripple, or all at once.”
“How often do you check the firing wires?”
“We run a continuity check at the beginning of each shift. Other than that, we can’t do much. Wires are buried. They weren’t, we wouldn’t stand much chance of keeping them whole under a mortar or artillery barrage.”
“So, someone could conceivably go out and stick a pin through the firing wire, short it out, but it would still show a complete circuit on continuity check, am I right?”
Stankow grudgingly admitted that. It was something he had worried about too. But there seemed to be little they could do about it.
“We blow one at random, a couple of times a month,” he replied. “So far we’ve only had one failure. And that was because one of the ’Yards opened it up, took the C-4 to use for fishing.”
“Grenades weren’t good enough for him?”
“Said he wanted some bigger fish.”
Olchak pointed to a well-worn trail leading from the bunker line out past the outer perimeter. It had quite obviously been blazed by someone familiar with the camp defenses. In the minefield it first took a sharp right, then back toward the outer perimeter, then right again, on and on until the minefield was cleared.
“When we first got here, all the ’Yards had their families living in the camp. Captain Koslov didn’t like that, thought there was too much chance some of ’em were on the other side. Made them move out. They set up some longhouses down the valley. Of course, their husbands and fathers thought it ridiculous they’d have to go out the main gate to see them. We started getting these trails all over the place. Tried to stop ’em; only thing we did was make ’em cut the wire in other places.”
“Should have shot a couple,” Olchak said.
You would say that, you Nazi-loving bastard, Stankow thought.
“When the NVA moved in, the problem went away,” he said. “Families took to the hills. Lost a couple of soldiers with them, I expect because they needed some security. Not as many as I would have expected, though. We got a pretty good crew here.”
And we’d have lost them all, if we’d started shooting one or two, pour l’encouragement des autres, he thought.
“But you’ve still got the trails,” Olchak insisted.
“Somebody tries to use one now, they’re gonna get a hell of a surprise. In fact, I wish they would come that way.”
He had helped Stan Braxton, the demolitions specialist, bury the surprises. Fifty-five-gallon drums filled with a homemade napalm, beneath which were command-detonated shaped charges. Flame fougasses, they were called. When set off, they would burst spectacularly, cooking anyone within a twenty-five-meter radius so thoroughly you wouldn’t have to stick a meat thermometer in them to see if they were done, Braxton said.
Despite the looks of the place, with the trash and all in the moat, they were probably as prepared as they were going to get to repel a ground attack. Which wouldn’t mean a hell of a lot, Stankow knew, when the sappers got into the wire. He’d never liked sitting behind fixed defenses. For every defensive measure you took, there were a half dozen ways of getting around it. A bunch of SS troopers outside Warsaw could have told you that. If they had still been able to say anything at all, after he and a couple of his partisan friends had wriggled through the wire, thrown grenades into the bunkers, and shot any survivors.
Where were you? he silently asked Olchak. Nazi bastard.
“You can go back to your mortar pit,” Olchak said. “Keep up the H and I on all major trail junctions. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky. Kill a battalion commander, or something.”
Or maybe we’ll just piss away some more ammunition, Stankow thought. Oh, well, it got him away from Olchak. Who he was seriously thinking about strangling.
Sloane was sitting in the command bunker, nursing his anger. Captain McCulloden still hadn’t seen fit to talk to him.
It didn’t help when Becker took a radio call from Colonel Gutierrez, asking for the captain. “I’ll talk to him,” Sloane told the radio operator.
Becker looked embarrassed for him, further fueling his rage. “Ah, he was pretty specific about wanting to speak to Cowboy Six, sir.”
“Well, goddamnit, go get him then!”
Becker knew he should stay with the radio, didn’t really trust the lieutenant to operate it properly. The big Collins single-sideband that was their only voice link to the outside world was notoriously temperamental. If it went out, they’d be limited to CW—Morse code tapped out on a keypad.
By the lieutenant’s own admission he wasn’t even cross-trained in commo! How you could be a Special Forces officer without having at least a little cross-training was beyond Becker. Maybe like the older NCOs said, it was because Sloane was summer help. Weren’t enough of the older officers, the ones who had served their apprenticeship at Fort Bragg or Bad Tolz or Okinawa, to go around. They’d been killed, suffered disabling wounds, been promoted well past the rank necessary to serve on an A team, or had just thrown up their hands and quit in disgust.
So you ended up with people like Sloane, who obviously intended to serve his one tour in SF, get the requisite I-been-there badges, and go on to bigger and better things. The hell of it is, Becker thought, you give him a few more years at this, knock that ego down a peg or two, and he might just turn out all right. Certainly didn’t suffer from cowardice—the run to save Sergeant Turner had shown that. He’d watched the entire episode from the safety of the command bunker and had wondered if he would have had the courage to do it himself.
Best not to piss him off any more, he thought. The lieutenant looked ready to blow.
“Be back in a couple, sir,” he said, grabbing his M16 and slipping on his load-bearing equipment (LBE). The belt was salvaged from an old Browning automatic weapons belt, had six integral pouches, each of which held four twenty-round magazines of 5.56mm ammunition. On each side, behind the magazine pouches, hung a one-quart canteen, kept topped off. In front was a first-aid pouch with bandages, and on the other side was an older model of the pouch, which contained five Syrettes of morphine, a bottle of dextroamphetamine, and a few aspirin. Rolled on the rear was a poncho and poncho liner. On the harness itself he had strapped an Air Force survival knife, haft down on the left-hand side. To the back was strapped a tube containing serum albumin blood expander. Finally, there was a pouch containing a strobe light.
The whole rig weighed in at something over twenty pounds. He’d made the mistake once of leaving the bunker without it, thinking it silly to encumber yourself while you were inside the camp. Sergeant Turner had seen him and had administered a truly inspired ass-chewing.
“Suppose we get hit,” the sergeant had said. “And you’re on the opposite side of the camp. You’ve got a rifle with one magazine. No water. No extra ammo. No way to signal you need help. You have to stay in a bunker all night, no way to get warm. Better yet, you get cut off, have to E and E, spendin
g your nights out in the jungle for a week or two. You think this shit would be too much to carry then? Put it on, dumb ass.”
And he had, and he always would. Turner was gone, but the truth of his statements lingered on. Especially now.
They were in deep shit. Best be prepared for whatever came.
Finn McCulloden was helping Sergeant Washington dig deeper into the red clay, siting one of the many M60 machine guns with which the weapons platoon was equipped. From his inspection of the perimeter Finn had noted that it was already fairly well equipped for grazing fire along the final protective line (FPL), with an older 1919A6 .30-06 machine gun placed at each point of the star shape in which the camp was laid out. The FPL position, used as the last resort when the attacking force was close enough to justify it, interlocked fires between machine guns, creating a line through which no one could cross without the high probability of being cut to pieces. But, he knew, the NVA would already have plans to take out one or more of the machine gun positions, creating dangerous gaps in the line through which they could pass without worrying about more than direct fire.
Washington had placed his M60s in alternate positions, far enough away from the original sites to guard against their being taken out by any direct or indirect fire aimed at the former, close enough to take over FPL duties when they were taken out.
Finn looked up at the surrounding hills while he was helping to dig the U-shaped position, wondering just how many forward observers were scoping out their every move. Who the hell picked the spot for this camp? You would have thought that no one had ever heard of the tactical advantages of high ground.
It was the same throughout South Vietnam. His first camp, Loc Ninh down in III Corps, had been even worse than this one. The hills around it had been so high and so close the VC had been able to look down into every single bunker. Originally the camp had been proposed up the hill to the west, not only on high ground but next to the old French airstrip that had been their only link with the outside world. But that ground was covered in rubber trees, and the French who still ran the plantation had protested bitterly to the Diem regime, who had then directed the camp be built where it wouldn’t harm the precious rubber.
Late in that tour, when the camp had been hit by a couple of Viet Cong battalions and then-Captain Gutierrez had directed air strikes and artillery at positions the enemy had dug throughout the rubber plantation, the question had been rendered moot. The French had soon moved out, the camp was relocated up the hill, and the tactical situation had been vastly improved.
Finn had taken as much pleasure in that as he had when seeing the fire from the ravine roar over the mountain, hoping that it would burn out the Frenchman there.
There wouldn’t be a relocation of this camp, no matter what happened. Either it would be overrun, in which case it would be abandoned, or it would be turned over to the South Vietnamese in the so-called Vietnamization program. Many of the border camps had already been, the Special Forces advisers moving out and the LLDB taking over the task of trying to run things.
Sometimes it worked. You had Vietnamese who were the equal of anyone he’d ever known—brave, conscientious, smart. Those who had absorbed the combined knowledge of the years of American advisers with whom they’d been teamed. Outfits led by them, Finn thought, could be put up against anything the North Vietnamese had to offer.
All too often, however, you had LLDB like the unfortunate lieutenant who had just taken the long jump from a helicopter. Lazy, venal, full of bluster when it was safe, happy to hide in bunkers or run away when it was not. Their attitude had been, the Americans are here, let them fight the war!
Such attitudes were why a lot of American Special Forces people called the LLDB Low Life Dirty Bastards, or Look Long, Duck Back. But for better or for worse, it was soon going to be their show.
He was afraid it was going to be for worse. Much worse.
As they finished digging, the Montagnard gun crew came back dragging some six-by-six-inch wooden beams they had managed to scrounge. Finn didn’t want to ask them from where. Usually when the ’Yards came back from a scrounging trip, they were followed by the highly irate former owners.
He helped them stack a triple layer of sandbags to the rear and sides of the position, then place the beams across the top. They’d already located some pierced-steel planking (psp), which would now cover the beams and, once in place, hold up yet another four or five layers of sandbags. If they had time, they would then try to find some tin roofing to put on top of that, positioned with an air space between tin and sandbags. If mortar or artillery rounds came in, they would detonate on the tin instead of burying themselves in the sandbags, where they could do a lot more damage. Such measures were only good for a couple of rounds, the tin quickly being blown away, but sometimes that was the difference between ears ringing and being buried alive.
Having just been buried alive, Finn couldn’t recommend the experience.
He straightened up, back aching from all the work, to see Sergeant Becker approaching.
“Looks like I’m needed elsewhere,” Finn told Sergeant Washington.
“Knew you were going to crap out on me sooner or later,” the black man said. “White boys can’t stand that manual labor, can they?”
“That’s why we need a Mexican or two.”
“How’s that?”
“For that Manuel labor, of course.”
Washington chuckled. He looked up into the surrounding hills, face growing serious again. “Shitty spot.”
“Only one we got, though.”
“Yeah. Say, I was wondering. You think we just surprised ’em this morning, getting in here without being shot up any worse than we were?”
“Been thinking about that too. No, I don’t think we surprised them.”
“How come they gave us a free ride?”
“I think some NVA commander is sitting out there, dreaming about the medal he’s gonna get. For not only taking this camp, but wiping out a Mike Force company in the bargain.”
Chapter 5
“That’s it?” Gutierrez asked.
“That’s it,” the division artillery officer for the Fourth Infantry Division replied.
Gutierrez studied the overlays again. Square blocks indicated the planned barrages available along the route of march for the remainder of the Mike Force battalion. They were pitifully few.
“We’re down to damn near skeleton crews,” the DivArty commander, a lieutenant colonel like himself, said, his voice apologetic. “Division getting ready to rotate back to the States, they haven’t been supplying us with replacements like they should. Practically all the newbies are going to the units that aren’t leaving until next year.”
Gutierrez had seen the truth of that statement in his jeep drive through the base. The once-hustling area now looked almost abandoned, and those who still remained walked around in an ill-shaven, uniform-neglected, shambling stupor.
It had been like this ever since the administration had declared that the war was virtually won, that the Vietnamese could now handle the bulk of the fighting, that we were at long last going to bring the boys home. And worse than the lack of replacements was the attitude of the soldiers and officers. The war was over. Hadn’t you heard? Would you like to be the last man to die in Vietnam?
Combat units had been pulled back into base camps, where they rotted. Now that there was nothing productive to do, soldiers in time-honored ways found lots of unproductive activity. Drug use was rampant. Disobedience to orders was almost universal. Any officer with the temerity to insist upon soldierly behavior was regarded as unbearably chickenshit and subject to having a frag grenade rolled under his bunk.
Worse still, from Sam Gutierrez’s viewpoint, was the scarcity of artillery ammunition! It was still rolling in at the ports of Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay, and Saigon, but was now being siphoned off to send to the Vietnamese artillery units. Ordinarily the route of march of the Mike Force battalion would have been bracketed by nearly cont
inuous artillery plots. Now they were down to planning the plots only on those areas considered particularly dangerous, and the barrages themselves were held to three rounds per gun.
It infuriated him. It infuriated him even more given the trip he’d already made to the Vietnamese division responsible for the area. There he had politely been given tea, offered a beer if he wanted it, and turned down flatly when he asked for support. The Vietnamese had their own operation going, he had been told, and would need all the artillery they could get to save their own bacon.
The Vietnamese operation, he already knew, would consist of pushing out a couple of infantry battalions a kilometer or so, simply to clear the surrounding area of infiltrators and keep the base camps secure. If they were unlucky enough to make contact with anything more than a company-sized unit, they would break contact and scurry back to base with the artillery putting down barrages behind them. Blowing up yet further a lot of empty jungle.
Not that they would have given the Mike Force a lot of support even if they hadn’t had their own operation going. The Mike Force was made up of Montagnard soldiers, and the Vietnamese and Montagnards hated each other with a mutually intense passion. He had been told in confidence once, by one of the few LLDB officers he trusted, that even if the South Vietnamese managed to hold on to the terrain they had, and if by some miracle the North Vietnamese honored any truce the negotiators in Paris managed to come up with, the war would still not be ended. The Viets intended to teach the increasingly confident Montagnards of the Central Highlands a lesson, one they would not likely forget over the next couple of centuries.
Thus the loss of a battalion of their best-trained and motivated troops was not to be regarded with any dismay. Fewer of the tribesmen to resist later.
Though obviously the very polite Vietnamese colonel commanding the artillery would never have said such a thing. After all, they were all in this together, were they not?
The attitude did not surprise Gutierrez, though it did make him so angry he could spit. From the first, when he’d been an adviser down in the Delta trying to recruit the Hoa Hao sect, through his first experience setting up an A camp in III Corps with ethnic Cambodians as the strike force, on to the battalion he’d led of the overseas Chinese known as Nungs, and especially with the Montagnards, he had fought the general attitude. That all except the ruling Vietnamese were beneath contempt. That the country would be a great deal better off without them. That extermination of minority groups was not only allowable, but would be an acceptable solution to a problem that had plagued the various rulers for the hundreds of years since they had invaded the country from their original home in southern China. In this the North Vietnamese had the same attitude as did their southern kin, though their propaganda was much better at keeping the fact hidden.
Napalm Dreams Page 7
