“Right now I’d settle for economy. Hell, I’d even take a seat in the smoking section.”
“Your standards have fallen. Tomorrow be okay?”
“Can’t get a ticket for the red-eye?”
“All booked up.”
“Well, in that case, screw it. Might as well stay here and keep you guys out of trouble. Any chance of getting a resupply before dark?”
“Slim,” Finn admitted. “Won’t be a chopper, of that I’m fairly sure. Seems our fearless aviators ain’t too fond of being shot out of the sky. Can’t say I blame them. What is it you need?”
“Serum albumin, antibiotics of all kinds—penicillin, streptomycin, most of all chloramphenicol. Got two guys in the back, wounded before we got here, having to give them massive doses. Probably get gas gangrene, we don’t. Whatever bug is in them laughs at procaine.”
“Anything else?”
“How about a nice field hospital, complete with good-looking nurses?”
“Probably have to wait for a couple of days on that one. But I’ll see what I can do about the rest. You might think about grabbing a couple of hours of sleep in the meantime. Gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
“Might just do that. Think I ought to set the alarm?”
Finn laughed. “Got a feeling you won’t need to.”
Sloane found Sergeant Olchak and a group of Mike Force soldiers, stripped to the waist and sweating profusely, replacing wire as best they could where the artillery had wadded it up. Without a word he pitched in, and soon he was sweating as copiously as they. The late-afternoon sun was still brutally hot, and worse, there had been a sudden increase in humidity. Olchak mentioned as they worked that it looked like the long-delayed monsoon would soon be upon them.
After the second time Sloane ripped the skin from his fingers, tugging on the recalcitrant wire, he reluctantly accepted a set of heavy work gloves from the sergeant. It didn’t help his simmering resentment at having to work like a damned prisoner. Endlessly he recited a litany of complaints, wisely keeping them inside his mind. Olchak, like all the other Americans in the Mike Force, spoke only admiringly about their commander. Sloane didn’t think that his opinion, which was that Captain Finn McCulloden didn’t know the difference between enlisted men and officers, among other things, would be greeted with any enthusiasm.
Well, by God he did! Though his jacket was sweated quite thoroughly through, he was not going to pull it off and sweat like a stevedore. He glanced down, appalled to see that the neat crease he insisted the house girls iron in his pants had completely disappeared, and that his usually well-shined boots were covered with dirt and wearing several scars where the barbed wire had dragged across them. And he’d just replaced those boots! It was all very well for the NCOs to wear their footgear until the cleats were nearly worn off, but he’d be damned if he’d do it.
One had to maintain standards, after all. Even if you were here in the middle of the jungle, about to be overrun by thousands of screaming fanatics.
Those outside the wire—yes. They’d soon find out what they’d gotten themselves into. For a moment he was swept away by his dreams of glory. Parades, perhaps. He completely ignored that the war was so unpopular back home that even Medal of Honor winners were sneaked in and out of the White House, as if they were poor relatives you had to acknowledge, but didn’t have to talk about.
But even without the parade, there would be glory enough. He savored the thought of going to the Fort Myers Officers’ Club on a Friday night, when General Sloane (retired) and a bunch of his cronies met for poker and heavy drinking, and walking up to the table. Completely unannounced, of course. He wouldn’t even be wearing the neck medal. Too ostentatious, too speaking of premeditation. No, the little blue ribbon with stars, worn atop all the other medals and decorations—now including the Purple Heart! he reminded himself—that would be enough.
They’d jump up to congratulate him, these old men who had laughed so often at the jokes and insults his father had heaped upon him. And their words would be tinged with bitter envy.
His father would just sit there and smile his crooked little smile and say nothing. But he would know. Oh, yes, he would know.
Even if he didn’t get to do that, if he died in the attempt, it would still be good. Maybe even better. Let the old bastard choke on it. I hope it kills him!
He swayed, suddenly dizzy. Olchak saw him, thought it was from the heat and exertion, insisted that he get out of the sun, rest a little while. He was surprised at the concern he heard in the sergeant’s voice. Yes, he said, maybe I’ll do that. I’ll be back out to help in a few minutes.
“Ah, bullshit,” Olchak said. “We’re just jacking off here, anyway. Charlie wants to come through this wire, he’s gonna come through. All we can do is slow him down a little bit. Get some rest. You get a thump like that on your noggin, you gotta be careful. We’ve already lost enough people today.”
You’re not going to lose me, Sergeant, he said silently. At least not yet.
Stankow was working with Bucky Epstein on the other side of the camp. There too the wire was wadded up, and worse, several of the claymores had been destroyed through sympathetic detonation. Stankow had his ’Yards fetch more from one of the bunkers, replacing each as he came across a bare, scorched spot. The ones still in place he signaled Bucky to run a continuity check on. This consisted of inserting a tester in between the wire and the firing device, called a clacker because it resembled a kid’s toy popular back in the fifties. Squeeze the clacker, which would ordinarily have sent a shot of electricity down the wire, detonating the mine, and it was shunted into the tester, which lit up if the firing circuit was complete. Their decision to bury the firing wires as deep as possible was obviously paying off. If the wire hadn’t been clipped at the mine itself, the circuits were inevitably good.
For the most part, Stankow was able to hook the new claymores up to the old wires, thus securing the circuit. Several of the mines he booby-trapped, carefully burying a zero-delay grenade under the body of it, holding down the spoon by the weight of the mine itself. Charlie had a habit of sneaking sappers into the wire and turning the mines around, or stealing them for later use. Pick one of these up, and the resulting explosion of not only the grenade but the mine itself would shred the body so that it bore little resemblance to anything human.
As they finished with each area, Stankow had the ’Yards carefully rake the ground, smoothing out their footprints, removing any debris. Any marks that appeared there now would stand out like, as Stankow delicately put it, a whore in church.
His flame fougasse mines were, he was glad to see, intact. Next he installed a number of trip flares. Ordinarily the flares weren’t a part of the defenses—wind and the occasional small animal making its way through the wires set them off all too often. Everybody would jump to alert, see that there was no reason for it, stand down, and jump to alert again. After a while they would get so used to it that they would no longer pay any attention.
Which was, of course, the point at which Charlie would be coming through the wire.
Didn’t matter now. They’d all be awake tonight anyway.
Very occasionally a round would snap by, but they were from far off, the NVA obviously not yet willing to chance the 175s by coming in closer. He simply ignored it. Unaimed as it was, the chances of one of the rounds hitting him were small. And if one did? Obviously it was just his time to go.
Fatalism had been a part of his makeup ever since as a young man he’d joined the partisans. No one expected to live through that war, anyway. If you didn’t get killed in combat, you were going to get tracked down by the Nazi special troops combing the forests. And if they didn’t get you, perhaps your own side would find you of insufficient reliability and kill you themselves.
Which the communists would have done, if he’d stayed there after the defeat of the Germans. First they rounded up the noncommunist fighters, trumped up charges of collaboration, and had them shot. The
communist fighters went next. After all, if you were to control a country, you couldn’t very well have people running around who already had a history of fighting against anything they saw as oppression. No matter what the ideology.
Stankow wondered how many of the Viet Cong realized what was going to happen after the war. They should already have seen the writing on the wall. Tet ’68 should have shown them that. The NVA had allowed them to bear the brunt of the fighting, exposing themselves in an offensive that bore absolutely no chance of military success. They’d been told they would be welcomed with open arms by the residents of Saigon, Da Nang, Nha Trang, and all the lesser cities, that the people would rise up in general revolution once they achieved their goals.
Only to find out that they had been lied to. That the people, instead of supporting them, gladly turned them in. That the second wave of North Vietnamese regular forces they had been told to expect had not been forthcoming. And the Viet Cong had died by the thousands. Even now, in areas that during his first two tours had been regarded as VC sanctuaries, you could go with scarcely any chance of encountering the enemy.
Unless the NVA had moved their main-force units in. Which was the case all along the border. Slowly nibbling away at the forces that opposed them, then disappearing back into their sanctuaries.
And the people back in Washington? Stupid! Trying to negotiate a peace, arguing about the shape of the conference table in Paris. When everyone knew the only way you could negotiate with a communist was to utterly defeat him.
And of course you couldn’t defeat him if you let him retreat and lick his wounds, reorganize, reequip, retrain, and be back at you.
At least Nixon had let them cross the border into Cambodia, destroying in the process hundreds of tons of ammunition, countless caches of food, and ripping up bunker complexes it must have taken them years to build. But that incursion had been limited to twenty miles, and of course the NVA had known that—it had been no secret. Their main-force units had merely pulled back behind the twenty-mile limit, bided their time, and when the Americans had left, come back. Their supplies were quickly replaced, their bunkers rebuilt. And it was business as usual.
Stankow didn’t regard himself as a great military thinker. He’d leave that up to the generals. But damn! Didn’t they have anyone with the sense and, more important, the balls to stand up to the politicians?
He realized his face was growing red, the blood pounding in his ears. Calm down, he told himself. All you can do is the best you can.
He looked back over his handiwork. The ground was flat and smooth, the claymores were well-concealed and properly aimed, the trip flares were fixed to the posts that supported the wire. The razor wire gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. To a professional soldier, it was as beautiful a sight as was the latest centerfold.
“I need a beer,” he said to Bucky Epstein.
“Thought you’d never ask,” Bucky said. “Generators are running again. Should be some cold ones in the team house.”
“Any luck on those choppers?” Finn asked.
“None at all,” Gutierrez replied. “Cozart volunteered, got told he tried it, they’d bring him up on charges.”
Finn’s laugh had no humor in it. “Wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”
“Nah. But this time they mean it. You saw what the SAM-7s, handheld antiaircraft missiles, did to that chopper.”
“I know what a SAM-7 is,” Finn replied, his voice short.
“Yeah. Guess you do,” Gutierrez said, belatedly remembering that it had been Finn McCulloden’s team that had found the first cache of the deadly little missiles, the weapons that the intel people in Saigon had sworn would not be in-country, being far too valuable for the Soviets to give them away.
“Guess I understand,” Finn said. “Wouldn’t want Wes to get one of those up his tailpipe, anyway. I’ve got another idea. You got any way of getting hold of the Spads down in III corps?”
Gutierrez instantly knew what Finn was proposing. “Leave it to me. Have Becker send a list of what you need. We’ll get it done. Out.”
Finn sat staring at the dead mike for a moment. Then he roused himself, passed Becker the list of items they’d need.
“You get through with that, come over to the team house,” Finn said. “I want to talk to everyone.”
Oh, shit, Becker thought. Here comes the pep talk. God damn it, I hate it when that happens.
Means we’re in even deeper shit than I thought.
“Beer, Dai Uy?” Olchak asked.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Olchak tossed Finn the rusted, blessedly cold can, and he ran it over his forehead. Schlitz, he noted with disgust. He thought drinking Schlitz beer was only slightly better than drinking horse piss, and that would only be because it was cold.
The REMFs in Da Nang got to the beer supplies long before anyone else could, skimming off the Budweiser and sometimes even the Pabst Blue Ribbon. Generally the only things you could get out here in the A camps were Schlitz and Hamms.
Better than Ba Moui Ba, “33,” which had been all they could get on his first tour. He had been told that, in France, 33 was quite a good beer. Obviously it had lost something in the translation to Vietnamese breweries. It tasted exactly as you would expect formaldehyde to taste, that ingredient being added, he had been told, to preserve it against the tropical heat.
One way to get embalmed before your time, he supposed. The other choice had been a raw Algerian wine, Marengo. He’d felt quite the cosmopolite, drinking Algerian red wine in the outdoor café at the Continental Hotel in Saigon.
That was, of course, before they’d thrown grenades into the Continental. Now the café was surrounded by chain-link fence, and the only people who drank there were USAID civilians and contractors from RMK. The VC didn’t even bother with them.
He snatched a church key from the bar, popped a hole in the can, another for ventilation, and drank it off in one thirsty gulp. Best to do it that way, he’d found. All you had to contend with was the aftertaste. Something like you’d expect from wringing out dirty socks.
“Encore?” Olchak asked.
Finn shook his head. “About as much of that fun as I can stand. Everybody here?”
“All ’cept the LT,” Olchak said, just as Lieutenant Sloane came in. His bandage was sweated through, and beneath the dirt there was a tinge of blood.
“Best get Andy to look at that bandage,” Finn said. “Ain’t gonna be much time later.”
“I’m fine,” Sloane said.
Finn shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“I guess we’re all wondering why you got us together, Cap’n,” Bucky Epstein said.
Finn groaned. “Old joke.”
“Figured you’d recognize it, that way,” Epstein replied. Captain Finn McCulloden was all of twenty-eight years old. Which made him an old man in Epstein’s eyes.
“Yeah. Well. Glad you recognize superior wisdom. Sergeant Olchak, you want to give out the assignments?”
“Got it. Stankow, mortars. Epstein, recoilless. Inger, dispensary. Becker, commo. I’ve got north wall, Sergeant Young with me. Lieutenant Sloane, south, take Noonan. Washington, east, with Curtis. DiUlio, you and Wren get the west wall. Redmon, you’re the recon platoon adviser, right?”
Staff Sergeant Dennis Redmon, one of the members of the original A team, confirmed that he was.
“You’re the reserve. Bartlett’s with you. You’re the junior medic, right, Bartlett?”
Bartlett, barely out of training group before being thrown into this cauldron and feeling very, very unlucky, said that he was.
“Be ready to help Andy Inger, if he needs it. Any questions?”
“Only one,” Redmon said. He directed the question at Captain McCulloden. “Gonna happen tonight, isn’t it?”
“I’d be the most surprised son of a bitch in the world if it didn’t,” Finn replied. “We’ve hurt ’em today, but not enough. Whoever it is out there in command, he’s got to be thinking, ‘I don’t
want any more of this shit. Let’s get it done, get the hell out of here. Before these crazy motherfuckers think of something else to throw at us.’ ”
“And what else have we got to throw at them?” Curtis, the junior weapons man from the team, asked.
“Not much,” Finn admitted. “We can call Sky Spot, drop some heavy shit, but you know as well as I do how much good that does. Especially if they’re in the wire.”
“So how much chance do we have?” asked Sergeant First Class Wren, who, since he was a full-blood Chickasaw Indian, had been forced to endure the affectionate name of Blanket-Ass for his entire career with the Special Forces.
This is where I’m supposed to be delivering a speech so inspiring, it’s going to cause these guys to go out there and kick the ass of an entire goddamn NVA division, Finn thought. Alternatively, draw a line in the sand and say that it is your choice to stay or go, realizing that those who stayed faced almost certain annihilation.
Problem was, he wasn’t a speechmaker. And even if he had been, he couldn’t have forced himself to deliver it.
And as for the go or stay? Not a hell of a lot of choice there. The time for going was long gone.
So he ignored the question, choosing instead to deliver the rest of the operations plan. They knew it wasn’t a question that could be answered, anyway.
“We’re gonna get a quick resupply in here at last light,” he said. “Spads, dropping nape canisters. Most of it will be for you, Andy. The drugs you requested. Couple of other things may make life outside the wire more interesting. There’ll be no choppers. Charlie has SAMs, along with all the other shit he’s managed to move in here. We grab it, stow it away, and then I suggest you try to get as much rest as you can. We’ll keep a skeleton watch on, but I don’t think the NVA are gonna try anything before full nightfall. They never do.
“We hit ’em hard in the wire. They get as far as the final protective line, the machine guns stay to their zones, should cut a lot of them down. Past that, we start retreating to the inner perimeter. It gets bad enough, we’ll get in the central bunker, wait them out. Just like at Lang Vei. Hold out long enough, there’ll be people here to help.”
Napalm Dreams Page 19
