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... I found "shock and awe" disgusting. In fact, I wrote about a firestorm I witnessed in Laos:
The NVA troops on the Ho Chi Minh trail could not see or hear the B-52s seven miles up in the night sky. I glanced up through my Mohawk’s overhead canopy, knowing I would not see the bombers either – thirty-something thousand feet above me - in the ink-black stratosphere. High in the spangled Asian winter sky, however, hung the constellations Orion and Canis Major. The reddish star representing the hunter’s right shoulder, Nick, winked against a sky as black as a Rothko canvas. Orion’s belt pointed downward and to the left, as always, towards Sirius, the alpha-star of Canis Major. Sirius, the Dog Star, competed well with the bright planets Jupiter and Mars, as they ascended in the ecliptic plane. In the distant east, over the horizon of the South China Sea, were faint streaks that hinted at the imminent rising of a waning gibbous moon. The still-fat moon could be a tactical advantage or disadvantage, depending on who you were and where you were. I always called it a “shooter’s moon.”
Just short of the seventeenth parallel, I made a turn southbound for another infrared imaging run down the trail. The jungle darkness just northwest of Tchepone suddenly exploded with a carpet of bombs from the unseen B-52s. From my vantage point at two thousand feet above the Namkok Valley floor, the eruption of the earth - with streets of fire and visible shock waves - was awesome. I thought of Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.” I looked over at my observer, a doughy former Greyhound bus driver from Paris, Texas, named Charlie Walker. Charlie was on his third combat mission over the trail in Laos. Tonight he was witnessing his first arc-light saturation bombing. He was ashen.
This is Moonbeam on guard. SAMs! SAMs! SAMs! Vicinity of Ban Karai Pass! SAMs! SAMs! SAMs! Moonbeam out.
Charlie flinched, obviously waiting for me to do - or at least say - something. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” I said, trying to calm his brittle nerves. “We are thirty miles south of the Ban Karai. They are shooting at the B-52s anyway. But things might get interesting when we get over Tchepone. Just remember what General Westmoreland once said about Tchepone, ‘I’d love to go to Tchepone, but I don’t have tickets.’ What an asshole.”
“Ha! That’s good,” chuckled Charlie. “Westy on the Greyhound to Tchepone.”
Tchepone, Laos, was a desolate, war-torn, frontier village at the deathly nexus of the Ho Chi Minh trail and the serpentine QL-9; “highway” 9. The QL-9, which wound westward from out of the mountains just south of the DMZ in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province into eastern Laos, was just another “street without joy,” as Bernard Fall had tagged the QL-1 near Hue. Tchepone, reputedly, crawled with Pathet Lao, Viet Cong, and NVA troops, along with seedy Russian advisors and CIA-types trying to keep the war going.
I watched the seemingly endless bombing and listened over my headset to the soft poetry of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence through the static on the Armed Forces Vietnam radio station in Quang Tri. Charlie operated the infrared camera gear.
Three volleys of tracer rounds caught my eye just to the west and close to Tchepone. I knew there were 14.5-mm, 37-mm, and 57-mm anti-aircraft guns in that area. “Better pucker up, Charlie,” I said. “The shit’s out of the barrel.”
Tracer rounds drifted up towards us, flashing from the big guns below. Initially, the few red-orange balls floating up – five at a time, desultorily - seemed harmless; even eerily beautiful. “When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light that split the night, and touched the sound of silence,” played the sentient masterpiece of Paul and Art. Then, as suddenly as a desert cloudburst, the anti-aircraft fire poured up in sheets. The NVA gunners were shooting payback from three guns; payback for the B-52 strikes. Payback, as the saying goes, is a motherfucker.
Twenty-four terrified and pissed-off young North Vietnamese soldiers, some probably chained to the guns, were shooting at us with inch-and-a-half explosive tracer shells, fed in five-round charger clips, with a rate-of-fire of 180 rounds-per-minute. The 37 mike-mike anti-aircraft crews tracked our Grumman Mohawk, bracketing us with thunder and lightning. “But my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence,” the folk singers’ haunting lyrics addressed my darkest fears.
© 2004 CrazyCat911
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