The Dogs of War (© 2003)

[DemoTex]

Nick lapped at a puddle of beer on the concrete slab of the patio as a scratchy print of Arabesque flickered on our small outdoor screen. Lieutenant Colonel Gauthier had poured a few ounces of his Schlitz on the floor for the dog. Gauthier would soon retire to his quarters and polish off a pint of Johnny Walker Red. It was a nightly ritual. He flew once every three months – a training flight around the base or a milk run – to get his flight pay. Lieutenant Colonel Gauthier – a former French military pilot – was a good stick, but he seldom flew combat missions anymore.

I whistled and Nick left her nearly-dry puddle and came over to me. She knew that the grease-stained paper bag in my lap contained beef jerky. Sirius perked up and trotted over too. Sirius was a teetotaler. He was my favorite. He slept in my “hootch” on nights I wasn’t out flying; maybe when I was flying, too. Sirius and Nick had been named for two friends from the night sky; friends of lost sailors and pilots.
I tore a strip of the pungent jerky into two pieces, scraped off the peppercorns, and gave each dog a meat-treat. Both dogs sat in rapt attention as I bit off another piece of the smoky jerky and washed it down with a gulp of tepid beer. Gauthier poured another puddle of beer for Nick.

“Please leave the dog alone, sir,” I begged Gauthier.

“Pardonez-moi, Lieutenant Zimmerman,” Gauthier sneered drunkenly. “The fucking dogs are doomed anyway, in this shit-hole of a country.”

“Colonel, why don’t you fly the Ho Chi Minh trail with me tomorrow night? Maybe you could teach me a thing or two,” I replied, trying to break the ice.

“Merdre, lieutenant! J'ai volé mes missions à Dien Bien Phu dans dix-neuf cinquante quatre,” growled Gauthier, belching. “You were about six years old in 1954; I was a prisoner of General Giap. I became an American citizen and took a commission in the US Army to come back to this shit-hole and avenge Dien Bien Phu.” He glanced at his beer and chuckled, “Quelle vengeance! Eh?”

"Yes sir!” I answered, realizing I had inadvertently discovered a major piece to the puzzle that was the inscrutable Gauthier: Dien Bien Phu.
The sun had set behind the Chaine Annamatique and tropical darkness had quickly followed. There was no lingering twilight in this part of the world. A twin-barreled “duster” worked out from behind us, the crimson 20-mm tracers arcing slightly to a mountainside target to the southwest of Phu Bai. An artillery battery fired harassment rounds at no one in particular. Gauthier headed for his “hootch,” stumbling occasionally, where he would fight his inner demons.

A flight of two A-1s roared over low and loud. I was working my way through a bundle of letters – the first mail in ten days - and not really watching Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren on the screen. I had opened the package from my dad first, because I knew it contained the brown paper bag of his famous jerky. Everybody loved dad’s jerky, especially the pups. I had other things on my mind, too.

Nick and Sirius had been the B.O.Q. mascots for a couple of years. Nick was fat and medium brown; more the color of filé gumbo than of a chocolate lab. Sirius was black with white paws and - if his hair was cut short enough- brindled. He was just enough off-black to minimize his liability during the Tet lunar new-year feasting. Eating a solid-black dog during Tet insured good luck in the coming year; or so we were told by our barmaid, Miss Hang Pham. We kept a close eye on Sirius around Tet. We kept a close eye on Miss Hang, always. She was probably a VC agent.

Everyone was in from the day’s missions except for two crews. Ryan and Peterson had launched at 1800 for the trail in Laos. However, US forces weren’t in Laos. We weren’t in Cambodia either, but Nixon and Kissinger were bombing the shit out of both. Welch and Quisenberry were on a mission over Dak To near the Cambodian border. They would be able to see the arc-light bombing attacks as Kissinger’s B-52s pulverized villages in northeastern Cambodia.

“Why am I here?” I asked myself, thinking back to my narrow escape from the “jaws of the cat of death” the previous night over Laos.

This is Moonbeam on guard. Aircraft operating in the vicinity of Khe Sahn: Arc-light bombing on the Khe Sahn 280-radial for 66 miles. Moonbeam out.

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, Betelgeuse, 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.

I pushed the nose over and dived for a lower altitude, out of the 37 mike-mike’s kill zone. “Look!” screamed Charlie. “Starboard, low!”
A stream of green tracers, like water from a fire hose, arched up from the side of a hill just to our right. A 14.5-millimeter Soviet-built ZPU, firing 600 rounds-per-minute of explosive ammunition, was shooting at close range; way too close. I yanked the Mohawk into a tight, high-G left turn to escape the ZPU emplacement, only to have another ZPU – a quad-barreled ZPU-4 – open up from my port side.

“Flak trap! Flak trap!” I shouted, redundantly, at the now terrified Charlie Walker. A round ripped through the Mohawk’s flak curtain and canopy, sending ballistic-proof glass shards into the night void. Another round slammed into the trailing edge of the starboard wing, exploding. The aircraft shuttered violently as a round hit the tail. I fought for control and dived for the relatively safety of the tree tops.
“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” I managed to yell on the radio. “Crazy Cat 9-1 is hit. Just south of Tchepone. Flak trap.”

Citations for our Distinguished Flying Crosses would be written a week later by Lieutenant Colonel Gauthier in a style evocative of Antoine Saint-Exupery. My citation would read that I nursed a severely battle-damaged Grumman OV-1C through mountain passes, across the northern A Shau Valley (where NVA convoys inched towards Ta Bat with so many vehicles that they had abandoned any pretext of nighttime headlight discipline) and eastbound along the QL-9 to a safe bailout area over the South China Sea. Gauthier, a 1948 graduate of the French military academy at Saint-Cyr, would also write that the ordeal verified Calonne’s Dictum: “If it is possible, it is done; if it is impossible, it will be done.” What the awards would not say was that everyone in the world – the world that mattered; our little world – followed our dubious, anguished progress.

The moon was up, and by the time we got to the coastline a full search and rescue team (including two “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters) was in position just offshore. When “feet-wet,” I slowed the Mohawk and re-trimmed. I flew over the US Navy rescue vessels at two thousand feet and gave Charlie the most pointed, unequivocal order he had ever received, “Bailout! Bailout! Bailout!” The explosive charge shot Charlie’s ejection seat up the rail and through the broken canopy.

“Moonbeam, this is Crazy Cat 9-1 on guard,” I radioed. “Thanks for the help, guys. I’m punching out now. Au revoir!” I kicked my legs back against the ejection seat’s restraining plates, reached up – hesitated a second or two - and pulled the overhead firing ring just as Moonbeam bade me “Godspeed!” over the radio. My ejection was terrifying. The noise and the sudden slap of the tornado-like slipstream took me by surprise.

Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! The risers popped and I looked up at a gorgeous camouflaged parachute canopy illuminated by the low, pale moon. I watched as the Mohawk, which had been our ticket from POW-status - or worse - splashed anti-climatically into the placid South China Sea. I glanced down and saw Charlie’s parachute below and behind me. On the sea-surface silver Vs - moonlight reflected from the wakes of several Zodiacs – marked the convergence of the rescue skiffs on the spots where Charlie and I would hit the water.

Sirius nuzzled my hand for more jerky. I sipped my beer. The movie was still on and somewhere in the background was a quiet conversation about lucky Zimmerman and Walker. I could hear Malcolm Smith’s shortwave set tuned to the BBC. The artillery and the 20 mike-mike “duster” fired monotonously. Oh, that dog’s brown eyes killed me. Sirius got a piece of jerky. Nick was fast asleep.

[frogmarch]

1. Whoa!

You sure can write! All three of your pieces were tremendous, but this one really stood out for me. Along with lots of exciting action, the characters in "The Dogs of War" sprang to life, and that includes the two wonderful pups.