Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  Worse, he felt terribly exposed. Out there with only a fatigue jacket between you and the bullet you were sure was coming your way. And firepower? You had an M16 with its puny 5.56mm bullets instead of bombs and rockets and the lovely .50-caliber machine guns ready to spit out ounce-and-a-half slugs at a range of thousands of meters. How could you protect yourself with an M16?

  And the noise! He knew he must have sounded like a herd of clumsy elephants. Periodically one of the snake-eaters would stop, scowl at him, adjust this strap or that, admonish him to fill his canteen as often as possible so it wouldn’t slop half-full, duct-tape a snap that kept clicking against its keeper.

  But by the second patrol, the first one luckily having made no enemy contact, he felt a bit more confident. He’d shed his insignia of rank—Wanna be a target, Captain? one of the Mike Force troopers had asked. You do, just keep wearing those railroad tracks. He’d lost ten pounds of Officers’ Club–induced fat. The immediate-action drills they’d conducted on the short stand-down period increased his confidence in his ability to hit something with the M16, and the demonstration of the seemingly puny 5.56mm ammunition on a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with water had definitely revised his opinion of the weapon. The drum had simply exploded.

  All that confidence fled with the first contact.

  The company had been choppered in to the Special Forces camp at Loc Ninh, near the Cambodian border. It was supposed to have been a simple body recovery mission—the Loc Ninh Strike Force had been ambushed some ten klicks outside the camp, losing ten Cambodian strikers and one American. Since then the jungle around the ambush site had been thoroughly worked over by air assets of all types, including a B-52 strike. The NVA, the briefer at Bien Hoa had said, have pulled back across the border to lick their wounds. Should be a walk in the woods.

  And it had been, at least for the first day. Loc Ninh was surrounded by rubber plantations, long since abandoned to the encroachment of the jungle. Still, visibility was good; they could move fairly swiftly and easily made the first day’s objective, just a kilometer short of the ambush point. There the rubber ended, and second-growth forest took its place. None of the triple canopy you ran into higher in the country. Here the trees were short enough to let light down to the floor, which of course meant that undergrowth of all types flourished. Wait-a-minute vines with barbed thorns curled their tendrils over bushes oozing sap that burned exposed skin. Here and there elephant grass, with its razor-sharp leaves, sprouted higher than your head. There were trails, of course, but they were likely to be mined and booby-trapped. From here on said the Mike Force commander, a grizzled captain with three tours under his belt, it would be machete time.

  Trucker had slung his jungle hammock between two rubber trees, slathered himself with bug juice, and wrapped his body in a poncho liner. Such attempts to sleep on the first patrol had been met with body aches, startled wakefulness at the slightest sound, mosquitoes as big as dragonflies sucking the life out of you even through the layers of uniform cloth.

  Now it took only moments to fall into a sleep interrupted only by someone shaking him at one o’clock and whispering that it was his time to go on watch. You went out with the Mike Force, you did what the Mike Force did. And that included taking your place on the perimeter, straining your eyes in the darkness to try to determine if that really was a bush you were seeing, or a North Vietnamese with a knife in his mouth.

  Wisely, the Americans on the Mike Force left control of the claymore clackers in the hands of the Cambodes, who could tell the difference between the sound a man makes and that of the animals that roamed the underbrush. Otherwise the toll on wild pigs, monkeys, and tigers would have been frightful.

  The next morning, after a quick breakfast of instant coffee in water heated in canteen cups suspended over fiercely burning pieces of C-4 plastic explosive and, in Trucker’s case, a Milky Way candy bar, they were once again on the move. Two Cambode machete men, guarded by four other Cambodes armed with M16s, cutoff M-79 grenade launchers, and a Mossberg shotgun, sliced their way through the undergrowth in two parallel paths. The Cambodes cut only enough of the vegetation away to slip through, which was the cause of much muttered cursing on the part of the Americans. Much taller than their counterparts, they had to constantly stoop and sometimes get on their knees to get through the growth.

  It was slow going, and everyone was glad to finally get to a cleared spot. Here some tribe had practiced slash-and-burn agriculture before being pushed out by the war, and the growth had not yet had a chance to make its mark. A tumbledown bamboo hut was in the middle, and a stream flowed near the tree line on the other side. Trucker was often struck by the sheer beauty of the country, never more so than now. He could imagine a family living here, their needs met by the fertility of the soil, their only concerns how to find husbands for their three daughters. Why he gave them three daughters he could not rightly have said. Possibly because he had three of his own.

  They rested for a moment, Trucker drinking heavily from his canteen in anticipation of filling it up when they crossed the stream. He wondered if he could chance drinking it straight, without the chemical taste of halazone tablets that supposedly killed all the pathogens that waited for the unwary.

  Probably not. He wiped his face with the sweat rag tied around his neck, shifted his rucksack so that the new sore spots would get a chance to heal while the old ones got broken in again.

  The point men were halfway across the clearing when one of those chance occurrences changed everything. Of such chances, he thought later, were wars often decided.

  A feral pig burst from the jungle, running straight across their front. The point man’s reaction was instantaneous. You didn’t pass up fresh meat. He gave it a burst of three rounds, forgetting to apply lead and watching the dust kick up behind the fleeing hog. His security man, only a few steps behind, took up the slack, firing a full magazine and neatly knocking down the porker.

  The point man didn’t have a chance to say a word before the jungle in front of him erupted. Some of the stray rounds had snapped by the head of a young Viet Cong soldier, and he, thinking he was being shot at, returned fire. The VC to either side opened up as well, and the firing spread within seconds to every member of the Viet Cong battalion entrenched just inside the tree line.

  The point and security men were cut to pieces. So would the rest of the company have been, Trucker later thought, if they’d been out in the open. The VC would have waited until they stopped to get water, then would have triggered the ambush.

  As it was, the fire that got to them was unaimed, most of it going over their heads. The Mike Force commander was quick to deploy a base of fire, using his machine guns to keep Victor Charlie’s heads down while the two handheld 60mm mortars started pounding the tree line. Within minutes the FAC flying overhead had diverted two flights of F-4 Phantom jets out of Tan Son Nhut, whose ordnance that day was heavily weighted with napalm.

  It was the longest fifteen minutes of Trucker’s life, lying there on the ground, wishing he had an entrenching tool, trying to take shelter behind bushes so pitifully small they wouldn’t have stopped a BB, much less an AK-47 round. The Cambodes all around him, on the other hand, were laughing and chatting as if on a picnic, all the while returning fire with a practiced ease. The Americans with the patrol were moving here and there, calling in fire, redistributing ammo, reassuring the troopers even when they didn’t need to be reassured.

  The lone medic was treating a Cambode with a gunshot wound to the chest, paying not the least bit of attention to the rounds that snapped by.

  So, yes, Trucker didn’t think it strange that the American down below was going to risk his ass, probably die unnoticed—but not unsung—in the jungle. Trying to help people he probably didn’t know.

  That’s the way they did it, these guys in the funny green hats.

  And he was damned sure going to do everything he could to help.

  “You ready?” Sergeant Billings asked.

/>   Alexander glanced over at his one-one, seeing him getting braced to go over the lip of the crater.

  “You’re not going,” he said.

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “Need you with the team,” Alexander said. “I don’t come back, you’re gonna have to get ’em out of here.”

  “Bullshit!” Billings said. “They’re perfectly capable of getting themselves out. You know that. You, on the other hand, need somebody to cover your ass. You carryin’ all those grenades, how is it you expect to protect yourself if somebody decides to pop up out of one of those holes?

  “Besides,” Billings said after a moment, when Alexander didn’t answer, “can’t have you getting all those medals by yourself. Your melon head’s too goddamn big as it is.”

  They both chuckled at the thought. If people came to SOG for the medals, they were to be sorely disappointed. The recon teams did the extraordinary so often that missions that might have won everyone on the team Silver Stars or better were chalked up as just one more walk in the woods.

  After a moment Alexander nodded. Billings had a point. And while he accepted that he might be killed doing what he was going to do, there wasn’t any sense in getting killed before it was accomplished.

  Billings handed him the handset. “Covey, this is One Zero,” he said.

  “This is Covey. Go.”

  “Bring it on. Out.”

  Billings handed the radio to Ksor Tlang, the senior SCU. In rapid-fire French he instructed the Montagnard to take the team east four hundred meters, wait at a designated rally point for two hours, and if the Americans didn’t join them by then, make their way back across the border. The ’Yard, ten years older than either of the Americans, looked distressed. But he would do as he was told.

  At least as far as taking the team to the rally point. And if the Americans didn’t show up, he vowed, he would come looking for them. If they were alive, he would get them out. If they were dead, he would make sure a prayer was said over their remains.

  And then he would kill as many of the Vietnamese bastards as he could.

  Alexander was looking through the binoculars again. The gun crews had almost finished relaying the howitzers. Then, as the far-off growl of engines grew louder, they hesitated, looking toward their commander for instructions.

  That individual cocked his head, realized that the planes were coming in from another direction—this time east to west—and shouted a command. The khaki-clad figures disappeared almost as if by magic, going into prepared positions that, Alexander knew, would stand up to almost anything but a direct hit by a fairly large bomb.

  And that put them exactly where he wanted them. He braced his legs for the leap as the first plane opened up with its .50-caliber machine guns, the roar even at this distance deafening. The ground erupted all around the gun, the heavy slugs tearing through trees, snapping off branches, sending up great gouts of dirt. The few that actually hit the gun spanged off crazily doing, unfortunately, little actual damage.

  As the plane flashed overhead, the engine noises increased to a scream as the pilot pulled the stick back into his stomach, desperately climbing over the limestone cliff just ahead. He cleared it with only inches to spare.

  “Damn!” Billings swore, rubbing his head where one of the expended shell casings had hit it.

  The next plane came in, and then the final one, which instead of making a gun run dropped a canister of cluster bomb units. Like giant firecrackers they exploded in the treetops, shrapnel whining like angry hornets. But, as with the .50 calibers, doing little actual damage to the guns.

  Didn’t matter. Alexander was up and running almost before his mind could register the fact, heading straight for the nearest howitzer. The hundred meters was covered in record time, even with the heavy bag of thermite grenades banging against him, even though the chewed-up ground seemed to be sucking at his feet, even though his lungs felt as if they were on fire.

  He reached the first gun, saw that the breech was still open, pulled the pin on the grenade he was carrying, and shoved it inside the chamber. The safety spoon clinked against metal as it flew off, but he was already closing the breech, locking it tightly down.

  Next gun! He could see it off to the right, set at an angle. As he ran toward it, he could hear the heavy footfalls of Billings running right behind him. At that moment he was glad the younger sergeant had insisted upon coming along. He felt very alone out here as it was.

  The airplane noises that had receded into the distance suddenly became loud again. This time they were coming in from the south, and the chattering of the guns was once again in the distance.

  As he reached the second gun, the ground erupted just off to his right, the planes deliberately flying at such an angle as to miss them. But the people under their feet wouldn’t know that. At least not yet.

  He twisted the breechblock open, dropped in another thermite, closed it up. Two down, one to go.

  Shit! Where was it? He stood stock-still for a moment, listening to the receding growl of aircraft engines and the heavy breathing of Sergeant Billings. No sign of it. Had to be there somewhere. He’d clearly heard the outgoing of three guns.

  His hearing was shattered by the report of Billing’s CAR-15 going off right beside his ear. A figure that had popped up just beside a rock outcropping to their front dissolved in a spray of blood.

  “Gonna be all over us in a minute,” Billings shouted.

  Alexander ran toward the outcropping, passing the body of a North Vietnamese lieutenant on the way. A gun commander! Now where the hell was the gun?

  He felt a hand grab him by the load harness, pull him back behind the rock he was getting ready to go around. He had caught a glimpse, just before taking cover, of at least three Vietnamese coming up from an underground bunker. And also the other gun, just beyond them.

  Billings fired three bursts, felling the soldiers as he would have targets on a range. He ducked back down, changed magazines, popped back up, killed yet another man who had just made the mistake of looking out of a bunker to see what was happening.

  “Cover me from here?” Alexander asked.

  “Aw, hell,” Billings replied. “G’wan. I know you’re going to, anyway.”

  Alexander was already up and running. He was pulling the pin on the thermite as he reached the gun, then holding the spoon down as he tried to twist the breechblock open. Shit! Jammed, possibly by the impact of one of the .50-caliber slugs. But the NVA would be able to repair it.

  He balanced the grenade on the traversing mechanism, let the spoon fly. Within seconds the white-hot material had melted its way down through the gears, fusing them into a muddled mass.

  Billings, who had killed two more NVA by this time, watched as his team leader stopped, considering the situation, it seemed. Come on! he wanted to scream. There would be NVA swarming all over the place within seconds, and he damned sure wasn’t going to be able to fight them all off.

  Then Alexander was shinning his way up the barrel of the gun! Goddamn it, he was going to get them both killed!

  Another Vietnamese came out of a bunker somewhat farther away, looking up in wonder at the sight of a tiger-clad figure clinging to the barrel of the gun, ducked back down, came up with a rifle, and was just sighting in as Billings took the top of his head off.

  Alexander was halfway up the barrel by now, and moving more slowly. As Billings watched, he rid himself of the heavy bag of grenades, holding only one as he continued to climb.

  Billings heard a noise behind him, whirled just in time to shoot an NVA soldier who had been clawing at his holstered pistol. Another officer, this time a major. Christ, what had they gotten themselves into?

  He once again turned to cover Alexander, saw that the sergeant had finally reached the muzzle of the gun. He pulled the pin on the grenade and, with the aplomb of a champion basketball player, dunked the cylinder down the tube. Instead of attempting to climb back down, he dropped the ten feet or so to the ground with an audibl
e grunt and thump, rolled, and was back on his feet, running toward the sheltering jungle.

  Billings took the time to spray the area from which most of the enemy soldiers had appeared, grabbed a white phosphorous grenade, pulled the pin, and hurled it. It burst, showering the area with glowing particles of heat, creating almost in an instant a choking cloud of white smoke.

  Then he was up and running, following Alexander into the jungle. As he burst into the trees, he could hear rounds snapping behind him, then the blinding flash of a CAR-15 as Alexander returned fire, covering Billings until he could himself get a good firing spot.

  Came the growl of aircraft engines again. He grabbed his URC-10 survival radio, keyed the mike, and gasped, “On the smoke!”

  Up above, the lead aircraft swerved, sighted on the billowing cloud of white smoke, opened up with all his machine guns.

  “Shall we get the hell out of here?” said Alexander, as seemingly cool as if he’d just finished a training exercise.

  Billings grunted. “Y’know, we get out of this alive, I might just kill you myself.”

  Sergeant Van Alexander just grinned. Billings said the same thing almost every time.

  Trucker, pulling up from the gun run, thought he might try something different next time. By now the Americans below would be clear of the target area. He’d always wanted to practice a maneuver he’d learned back flying the old F-104 jets, a maneuver designed with nuclear weapons in mind. The problem had been that if you just flew over the target on an ordinary bomb run, a nuke would knock you out of the sky. Therefore you went into a run, pulled up in a power climb at a predesignated point, and pickled the bomb as you were on your upward arc. Too soon and the bomb would go too far beyond the target, too late and it would follow you up on your arc. It took a sure hand, and he thought he’d developed it on the many practice runs back at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.