Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“Never mind,” said Banks. “You get MPs out after him now.” Banks had a faraway look in his eye. “I haven’t had a Hershey bar for—” He couldn’t remember since when. “And a Coke,” he said wistfully. “Not that goddamned flat shit they pump into paper cups. I mean a bottle. Glass. No friggin’ plastic. Just turning to ice — not quite. I mean, just about to.”

Depression was not unknown to Gen. Douglas Freeman, but it was rare. He was a believer in seeing the glass half-full, not half-empty. As a British commander of submarines had told him, in the end the best equipment could not stand up to the best morale. Witness the outmanned, outgunned Vietcong in the Vietnam War and the outnumbered “outradared” Nazi U-Boats in ‘44-’45. Nevertheless, Freeman’s habitual optimism, with which he imbued his troops, like the young Brentwood boy in Korea, was sorely tried when all Stealth overflight photos of the enemy prepo sites were presented to him as his mobile Humvee command post headed out for another sector of the front north of Munster.

As the machine-gun-mounted jeep bumped around the bomb-cratered road, Freeman found it difficult to focus the 3-D overlay on the latest aerial photos just taken within the last two hours. Perhaps, he told Col. Al Banks, there were the ubiquitous extra fuel drums on the Soviet tanks in the photos, but he couldn’t spot any. They had definitely been there in the photos from the earlier overflights.

He ordered the Humvee to stop, to look more closely and steadily at one of the T-90 turrets that the Stealth had picked up by infrared through the low ceiling of pea-soup stratus. “A lot of skirting around this turret, Al. Looks like some kind of spaced or reactive armor. Soon as one of our shells hits it — blows itself up. Most they get inside is a headache. But damned if I can see any extra fuel drums on the back. You have a look.”

“No, General, no fuel barrels I can see.”

“Goddamn it! Russkies always carry extra fuel. Two things you know about Russian armor is, those bastards break down sooner than ours and their materiel support isn’t anywhere as good as ours.”

Banks said nothing, and the general did not speak for several minutes, confirming to Banks just how worried his boss was. The general got out of the Humvee and, pulling his lamb’s-wool collar high about his neck, walked ahead, slapping his leg with his gloves. As he turned back to the truck, Banks slowly keeping pace behind him, the look of disgust he’d had when he’d gotten out was still there. “Damn it, Al! I just got through telling my field commanders — damn it, my whole strategy was based on telling our boys to pull back to defilade positions. Suck Ivan into thinking we’re turning tail-conserve our ammunition. Get those Commie sons of bitches overextended till their spare fuel drums are empty, then we go on the offensive. Hit ‘em with everything we’ve got.”

“I don’t understand, General. I thought you’d be pleased they’re not hauling extra fuel tanks. Limits their range.”

“I know, I know,” replied Freeman, his hand in the air irritably brushing Banks’s observation aside. “Gas drums are normally their most vulnerable spot. But in this fight they’ll outnumber us, Al. Four of their tanks to every one of ours. There are only so many you can stop like that — then the rest are all over you. No — what worries me is that no auxiliary gas tanks means they don’t need auxiliary tanks. Means they’ve got lots of gas, more than we thought, stashed in that prepo site south of Hannover.”

The general climbed back into the Humvee. “I’ve got to think of something else. Fast.” He was looking straight ahead, three other Humvees behind him and an armored car in front, but Al Banks was betting that what the general was really seeing was a map of the DB pocket.

There was a whoosh of air somewhere above them in the low cloud, followed by the chatter and rattle of machine guns.

“Holy—” began the Humvee driver, his voice drowned by the feral roar of an AA missile hitting an Apache gunship, the bug-nosed chopper momentarily visible in the orange ball of flame engulfing it. The Humvee driver put his foot down, swung the truck away from the deep pothole, and straightened it, oily smoke curling toward him. They hit the Humvee in front of them hard on its left rear fender and rolled.

By the time the men in the Humvees behind reached them down a steep embankment whose vegetation hid a drainage ditch, the driver was bleeding badly from multiple lacerations to the face. Al Banks was dead, his neck snapped, apparently in a swing blow from the barrel of the Humvee’s swivel.50 machine gun. Freeman was unconscious, his left arm looking as if it was broken.

“Watch it!” one of the soldiers cautioned. “Don’t move him.”

“Are you serious? I think he’s bought it,” answered another.

“General!” the sergeant was shouting, “General, can you hear me?”

“He’s dead,” said one.

“No he isn’t.”

“Close enough, Frank.”

“C’mon. Where’s that fucking medic?”

Major Tae jumped over the irrigation ditch, burst through the thinning smoke, his squad automatic weapon spewing flame, its tracer tattooing the NKA machine-gun position twenty yards from the ditch wall, the U.S. cavalryman giving him supporting fire, spraying the paddy to their right, the rice stalks trembling under the hail of the 7.62-millimeter bullets.

When Tae reached the machine-gun post, he saw it was abandoned, one NKA dead, the top of his skull blown off, the Soviet-made RPK 7.62 gone. Tae felt several spent casings. They were still hot, and he waved for the six-man squad from his Huey to advance.

“Where the hell have they gone?” asked the cavalryman, relieved but surprised. “Hot damn, those bastards can melt away onya!”

Tae saw one of the cavalrymen off to his left prod a dead NKA down by the irrigation channel.

“Don’t touch him,” cautioned Tae.

The cavalryman by Tae’s side was signaling the other sixty-odd troops behind him on the search-and-destroy mission. He turned to Tae. “They wouldn’t have had time to booby-trap their dead, Major.”

Tae was down on one knee, clipping a new magazine into his SAW, surveying the paddy field, wisps of cover smoke still obscuring his view.

“Where the hell have they gone?” repeated the cavalryman. “Underground?”

“Not unless they’ve got scuba suits,” said a sergeant, moving up to join Tae and the other cavalryman. “Nothing but flooded paddy out there.”

“They’re using reeds,” said Tae. “They wait till we pass.”

“Then we’ll go around it,” suggested the sergeant.

“They could’ve rigged sticks,” put in another, referring to the camouflaged pits of spikes so often set by the NKA.

“So what do we do, Major? Get our feet wet? Sitting ducks or do we risk ‘sticks’?”

The major ordered a fifty-fifty split, half the force — about thirty men — in a broken line to go across the paddy, the remaining thirty to sweep the flanks beyond the paddy, requesting an air strike ahead of them to clear.

Within ten minutes an F-4 Phantom came in low over the hills, strafing the bush area beyond the paddy a quarter mile away and dropping two napalm canisters, which turned the jade-green countryside to orange-black, leaving the once bushy area denuded. A swarm of insects had started to bother the men while they had been waiting, and several in the paddy pulled on head nets over their helmets before they moved forward, still tense but feeling better now that the air strike had pummeled the area before them.