Napalm Dreams

by John F. Mullins

  Before leaving the bunker, he opened a red-painted ammunition can that had been emplaced in one of the walls. Inside were four fuse lighters attached to lengths of time fuse. He pulled the pin safety, grasped the rings at the end of the lighters, and yanked hard. With a pop each ignited, and soon the fuse was bubbling from the fire inside. Now he had about five minutes to get clear before the cratering charges placed in the walls blew the place to kingdom come. You didn’t leave a perfectly good bunker for the enemy’s use.

  He left the bunker to the light of Stankow’s flares, still burning brightly above them, throwing everything on the ground into alternating shadow and light. He could see men streaming from the trenchline, those who had suffered only minor wounds helping those who couldn’t help themselves. There were pitifully few of the former.

  Sloane was slumped over the machine gun. Finn checked the pulse in his neck. Very rapid, thready. Shock from blood loss. Nothing to do for it now.

  He hoisted the lieutenant, intending to put him in a fireman’s carry, finding that he couldn’t. Didn’t know I was that tired, he thought. Okay. Drag his ass it is.

  Sloane came to, looking up groggily at Finn. “We get ’em?”

  “We got ’em,” Finn replied. “Can you walk?”

  “I can try.” Finn placed the lieutenant’s arm around his shoulders, stood up. Sloane struggled to help, managed a wobbly upright position.

  “Gotta get back to the inner perimeter as quick as we can,” Finn said. “Place is gonna blow any second.”

  He noticed that Sloane did not object. No “Leave me behind, I’ll hold ’em off” stuff. Finn was glad. He had no intention of leaving a live American behind, and it would have been much harder to drag a resisting subject the long way to the inner perimeter.

  They stumbled forward, Finn half-dragging the semiconscious Sloane. By fifty yards Sloane had slipped back into wherever it was that people went at times like these. Now it was a full drag.

  The bunker explosion caught Finn by surprise, blowing them flat on the ground. Bits of sandbag, chunks of support beam, and pieces of pierced steel planking rained down. From outside the wire came a renewed burst of small-arms fire, some of it from heavy machine guns. B-40 rockets were impacting among the fleeing men, the shrapnel adding to their already severe losses.

  Not gonna make it, Finn thought. The bunkers that marked the inner perimeter were still at least a hundred yards away. Gonna die right here.

  No, goddamnit, I’m not, he swore to an unheeding sky. And neither are you. He grabbed Sloane by the web gear and, half-crawling, half-stumbling, kept going.

  Then strong hands were lifting the lieutenant, pulling him away. Finn rolled over to see DiUlio and Wren supporting the unconscious man between them.

  “Figured you could use some help, Dai Uy,” DiUlio said. “Goddamn it, Bobby,” he said to Wren, “you want to do your part here?”

  “Already lifting more than you are, you greaseball motherfucker,” Wren said. “We gonna screw around here all night?”

  “Like I said earlier,” Finn said laughing, getting up and following the two sergeants as they made their quick way to safety, “you two ought to get married. Want me to perform the ceremony?”

  On the north side of the camp, Sergeant Young took stock of his situation. He’d pulled the fuse lighters for the bunker demolition almost two minutes before. That meant he had perhaps a minute before it blew, and with it, him. The NVA had got a squad inside the wire and in the connecting trench, and now they were blocking his way to safety. Every time he raised his head up above the trench, a heavy machine gun tried to take it off.

  Behind him in the bunker lay Bartlett, the junior medic who’d patched up Olchak, then stayed to help defend the position. A B-40 rocket had hit the machine gun he was manning, the resulting explosion and shrapnel taking his head off at the neck. The spray of blood hosing out of the stump had washed the bunker in red. Young had covered him as best he could and left him.

  Die here with him or die there in the trench, he thought. Through his fatigue jacket he touched the gold Saint Christopher medal his wife had given him when he’d left for Vietnam. It’ll bring you through, she had said, return you to me.

  “Gonna have to do a lot of work tonight, Chris,” he said. “Hope you’re up for it.”

  He pulled a nicked bayonet from its sheath, clicked it onto the lug at the end of his rifle. The only thing he’d ever used it for had been to open cans of C rations, had thought it largely useless. Who did bayonet charges in today’s army?

  Now or never. He pulled a grenade from its ammunition pouch keeper, tried to yank the pin with his teeth, felt like all he was going to get for his trouble was a broken tooth. Remembered that he’d bent the ends of the pin back for safety, straightened them, and this time pulled the pin with his finger. Much easier. Guess the movies had it wrong.

  He let the spoon fly, the click as the striker hit the cap loud in the trench. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, he counted, then tossed the little orb around the bend in the trench. He heard shouts in Vietnamese, then the explosion, more shouts and moans.

  There was little that happened next that he could remember, even years later. A confused melee of shooting until the bolt locked back, trying to reload, being rushed by a soldier, jabbing the bayonet through his throat, yanking back only to have the man follow his movement, the bayonet stuck in bone. He kicked the man full in the chest, trying to pull the blade from resisting flesh, another onrushing soldier! The blade comes free just in time for him to jam it into the next man. Smarter this time—slam a full magazine home so quickly it frees the bolt catch, pull the trigger, and the bayonet comes free from recoil, shoot two more behind this one, feel a punch as a bullet hits the floating rib, angle such that it glances off and traverses beneath the flesh to an exit point in the rear, only by this missing the liver, another one—shoot!

  Then a long, wheezing run through the now clear trench, reaching the inner perimeter just in time to see Sergeant Olchak limping along, coming to get you.

  “C’mon,” Olchak says. “We were waitin’ for ya.”

  Sergeants Washington and Curtis were making a fighting retreat. The breakthrough on the east side had put enemy troops right up against the trench, where they continued to throw grenades and shoot at anything that moved. Crossing the open ground was suicide. The NVA had set up at least two RPD machine guns in the ruins of the old bunker and were sweeping the open ground with steams of tracers that ran about knee-high.

  Luckily, the trenches that led to the inner perimeter were thus far clear of enemy troops. Washington and Curtis alternated rear guard, at each twist in the trench throwing a grenade back over into the area they’d just left, then cutting around the corner and hosing down any survivors with a full magazine of 5.56. Rush back to the next twist, where one or the other would be waiting to do the same.

  Curtis drew his last magazine from its pouch, reloaded, waited for Washington to get back to him. “I’m out,” Washington said as he squeezed past.

  “Then get the hell out of here,” Curtis said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  No false heroics. No “I’ll stay here with you.” Washington shuffled off down the trench, turning the corner just as he heard a burst of fire behind him. Then a much heavier fusillade, from at least three AK-47s.

  Shit! he said. Shit.

  Stankow realized he was going to have to leave the mortars, and it broke his heart. The guns had been his joy for so long, he almost felt they were alive.

  But they were no good to him now. The enemy was so close that he couldn’t elevate the tubes high enough to reach them.

  He set the charges that would destroy the guns and the ammunition still in the bunker, told his two surviving Montagnard crew members to get to their secondary positions in one of the bunkers that protected the inner perimeter, and started the firing train.

  He made it to the command bunker just as they blew, the big 120 tube making a be
autiful arc in the sky.

  “You look like shit” were the first words from Olchak.

  “You don’t look so good yourself, you Nazi prick,” Stankow replied.

  Olchak looked down at himself, the blood, the embedded dirt, the pieces of flesh not his own hanging from his clothes, and then back to Stankow, who was bleeding from at least a dozen places, including one slash across his face where his cheek had been cut away from his jaw.

  “It’s a draw,” he said.

  Bucky Epstein had come to the same conclusion as had Stankow. He’d used up all his beehive rounds on the North Vietnamese troops who were now running around in the compound, mopping up this or that pocket of Montagnard resistance. All he had left was high explosives, and the enemy was so close the arming mechanism wouldn’t work in time to set the rounds off. What he now had was a big, single shot rifle. Hit someone with the round, it was certainly going to spoil his day, but that wasn’t a particularly effective use of the weapon.

  He opened the breech, pulled the pin that held the breechblock in place, removed it, and threw it into the ammo bunker. He searched for the red-painted box that held the demolitions firing circuit, finding only a smoking hole where it had been.

  He grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the bunker, then scrambled over the sandbag wall, holding his head as the explosion went off. For a moment there was complete darkness as the wall collapsed on him. He dug his way to the surface and limped toward the safety of the inner perimeter. The North Vietnamese gunners followed him with tracer.

  Can’t get me, he taunted them, as he fell into the hole and safety.

  Finn McCulloden took stock of his assets. Of the men who had been there when the battle started, three—Noonan, Bartlett, and Driver—were dead. Curtis was missing and presumed dead. Sloane was being worked on by Inger, might live if they could get him to a hospital within the next twenty-four hours, would certainly die if they did not.

  Olchak, Stankow, Washington, Young, and Becker had suffered wounds that would have gotten them evacuated under normal circumstances, but they could still fight. Becker had gotten his when, after a mortar round had destroyed the antenna for the Collins radio, he’d gone outside and erected a spare. That had made him a target for every sharpshooter in the area, and he’d taken a hit in the fleshy part of the right buttock, the round transiting that and the left buttock, strangely leaving an exit hole not much bigger than the entrance. DiUlio was now giving him a ration of shit about not keeping his big ass down.

  DiUlio, Wren, Epstein, and Redmon had suffered smaller wounds—cuts and scratches mostly, though on closer examination it seemed that Epstein was peppered with tiny bits of shrapnel.

  The reports had come in from the platoons, and they weren’t good. Fully half the Montagnards that had made up the camp strike force and the Mike Force company were dead or missing. And Finn hadn’t even started to tally the wounded.

  Only he and Inger were untouched, Inger because he’d been steadily working on the wounded in the dispensary bunker—and him? He didn’t know how he’d escaped. His canteen had been shot away, as had his hat, and after a moment Olchak came over, poked his finger through a bullet hole that cleaved through his fatigues right across his chest, and raised a shaggy eyebrow.

  “Been livin’ right, have you?” Olchak said.

  “Clean mind, clean body,” Finn replied. “Take your choice.”

  “Must be the mind, ’cause you stink! So, what’s the plan, fearless leader?”

  “Get ammo and grenades redistributed,” Finn replied. “Make sure there are no big gaps in the line. Everybody under overhead cover. Charlie’s got a smaller target for his mortars now, we can expect a lot of them. Go through the dispensary, put everyone who can still hold a gun on the line.”

  The NCOs left to do his bidding, leaving him there with Becker. “Need a shot of morphine?” he asked the commo sergeant.

  “Already had one, can’t you tell?” Becker was in great good humor. The wound no longer hurt when he sat down, there was no serious bleeding, and he felt fairly certain he wouldn’t again have to go outside.

  “Empty Syrette?”

  Becker produced it from his shirt pocket. Finn pushed the needle through Becker’s collar and bent it over, leaving the empty Syrette as a signal to anyone who might in the future treat the sergeant. Too many times medics up the chain of evacuation, not knowing that the casualty had already had Syrette after Syrette, gave their patients more and more morphine, the casualty finally expiring from an overdose.

  Finn then turned to the radio, got Gutierrez, and quickly brought him up-to-date on the tactical situation.

  “That matter we talked about earlier?” Finn said.

  “Roger.”

  “Think it’s about time.”

  “Agreed. Inbound in thirty minutes. Can you hold out that long?”

  “Got to, don’t we?” Yeah, Finn thought, we’ve got to.

  A joke currently making the rounds of the combat troops ran through his mind. Like all the black humor that came out of Vietnam, it contained more than a grain of truth.

  “War exacts a heavy toll,” it went. “Please have the correct change.”

  At Pleiku air base a hundred miles to the south, the crew of the C-130 got the word they’d been waiting for. Preflight checks were done quickly—hell, Crew Chief Danny Williams thought, they’d already done them about ten times before getting the word to take off. The gas turbine engines started to whine, the big props whirling the heavy, moistureladen air. Williams looked up at the sky, shook his head. Still solid overcast. IFR takeoff and landing tonight. Lots of fun, considering the mountains all around.

  He and Airman Gus Martinelli pulled the chocks from the wheels, heaving them through the open rear doors, and scrambling on board just as the plane started its ponderous roll.

  The C-130 Hercules four-engine transport plane had been the workhorse of the Vietnam War almost from the beginning. Ferrying troops, hauling everything from ammunition to water buffalo, flying paratroopers to combat jumps, carrying USO entertainers to spots they’d never heard of, couldn’t find on a map. You name it, the Herky-Bird had done it.

  The Air Commandos had outfitted some of them with so much electronic equipment they could barely take off, electronic equipment that played havoc with North Vietnamese antiaircraft radar. Blackbirds, they called them, instantly recognizable by the folded-back prongs attached to the nose of the aircraft. These prongs, when extended, were designed to snatch the rope attached at one end to a balloon, at the other to a man on the ground strapped into a Fulton recovery rig. Designed to rescue downed pilots, the rig allowed the man to be picked up off the ground and reeled into the back of the aircraft. Not a pleasant experience, but far better than spending your time in the Hanoi Hilton.

  This particular bird was also heavily laden, but only partially with electronic gear. Spectre, they called it. General Electric 7.62mm miniguns, electronically fired Gatling guns, protruded from firing ports on the pilot’s side. A 20mm automatic cannon supplemented the Gatling guns. And from the opened tailgate, a low-recoil 105mm cannon completed the weaponry.

  Spectre was the outgrowth of a program that had started with placing just the miniguns in an old C-47 Dakota, called alternatively Spooky and Puff the Magic Dragon. The old birds had done good service at dozens of places, proving their worth by saving the lives of hard-pressed ground troops about to be overrun. To a country where bigger is always better, the thought that if a C-47 was good, a C-130 must be wonderful, was a logical conclusion.

  And Spectre too had proved its worth. It was able to loiter for hours above the battlefield, the guns so precise they could engage an enemy literally at buckle-grabbing distance from the friendly troops, the rain of fire so thorough and so deadly that, it was said, a one-second burst from one of the miniguns placed a bullet in every square inch of an area the size of a football field. It had been used in support of infantry operations throughout the war zone, as a tru
ck-buster on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and had saved the bacon of more than one SOG recon team.

  That the North Vietnamese hated it was attested to by the well-known fact that the aircrew knew they would never survive a shoot-down. The NVA had let it be known that their deaths would be the most merciful thing that would happen.

  That Spectre was respected and loved by the Americans was attested to by the fact that hard-bitten infantrymen who would ordinarily have scoffed at a crew of “pantywaist zoomies” wouldn’t allow a Spectre crewman to buy his own drink in any club in the country.

  The bird, loaded with so much ammunition it squatted on its tires, lumbered down the taxiway, turned onto an active runway, and sought permission from the tower to take off. Given clearance, the engines were run up, swirls of moisture streaming back so thick from the propellers they looked like minitornadoes.

  Slowly the plane moved forward, gaining momentum with each yard until finally it achieved takeoff speed, way past where an ordinary Hercules would already have been in the air. The pilot, Major Charlie Hackett, lifted the bird just in time to avoid the trees, skimming over them so low the prop wash whipped the branches into a frenzy.

  Within seconds he was in the clouds, visibility effectively zero. He depended upon the air traffic controllers below to vector him past the mountains, up over the—luckily—low overcast until he came out into a starlit sky.

  He relaxed enough to release the puckered ass that, he suspected, threatened to cut holes in his seat, turned the aircraft on a heading to the north.

  The FAC, orbiting unseen somewhere up ahead, was already calling him.

  Give her the juice, the FAC said. We need you.

  Darkness, interrupted only by the flickering of a few fires from destroyed bunkers, blanketed the camp. With no stars, no moonlight, and especially no flares from Stankow’s guns, the North Vietnamese felt free to mass their troops for the final assault. They’d taken grievous casualties, but none that they could not afford. The planners had never expected this to be an easy nut to crack.