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5

… that Fell on the House that Jack Built

The bombing of North Vietnam has had little or no effect on the flow of men and materials from north to south.

US Secretary of Defence McNamara

Five miles south of the DMZ, Major-General Sam Kowalski, USAF, sopped up the last of his egg with the last of his ham, sluiced it down with the last of his coffee, and belched gently. It was good coffee. Not, he hastened to remind himself (nostalgia being the better part of valour) as good as the coffee in Topeka, Kansas, which was the best coffee in the world. But good. He watched the morning sun dissolve the white mists to the north, longingly: better flying weather than this, you couldn’t expect.

Except there was nothing to fly against.

It had been that way for a week now. Daily, Kowalski’s reconnaissance planes went out, daily they returned, with nothing to report. The photographs showed hills and streams, trees and cloud shadows on the grass. Nothing a man could bomb. Not even a goat. A goat would have been something, thought Kowalski; especially a moving goat. Now there was a challenge! Out of the amethyst sky, Kowalski’s spotless Skyhawks would swoop, hedge-high over the dark grass, trim as white playing-cards flicked across the green baize tables of home, and BLAT! No more goat. One dead Cong goat.

Kowalski sighed, stood up, tugged his gleaming belt into the soft movement of his breakfast, and notched it. At his right hip hung a Smith & Wesson .45 Magnum, not Army Issue, but Kowalski’s own side-arm. His mother’s Christmas present. She had gone into Duckett’s Hardware in Topeka and said did they have anything for her boy who was a Major-General in Vietnam, and the salesman had said nothing was too good for a guy like that and sold her the hand-gun for two hundred dollars. He threw in a hand-tooled cutaway holster, because that was the least he could do, he said; he would have been out there himself, he said, only he had this trick knee, had it since he was a kid, gave him hell.

On his left side, Kowalski wore a Bowie knife. It was the sort of thing the men appreciated, he knew. It gave him personality, it gave him colour, it placed him in a direct line of descent from Sam Houston and John Mosby and George Custer and Blackjack Pershing. He wanted the men to know that if the Cong ever attempted to overrun the airstrip, he, Kowalski, would be out on the perimeter, meeting them hand-to-hand. ‘Remember the Alamo!’ he would cry. ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!’

He walked out into the bright sun to where his Skyhawks were drawn up, combat-ready, gleaming-white. Bullpup AS missiles hung beneath their wings, slim, deadly, and Zuni launchers fat with 5-in. rockets, and AIM-9 Sidewinders, and plump napalm tanks like great grey footballs. Kowalski watched them through his smoked glasses, trembling with anticipation, feeling himself part of their functional mystery. Kowalski prayed for opportunity.

He was still there when the morning reconnaissance planes touched down.

‘Nothing,’ said the pilot in the de-briefing room.

‘Nothing?’

‘Looks like it, General.’

Kowalski flicked again through the blown-up photographs, still moist from the fixing-bath. He stopped suddenly, peered close, cursed the light.

‘What’s that?’

The pilot squinted.

‘Some guy cutting wheat, I guess.’

Kowalski straightened up, triumphantly, looked at his assembled staff with bright eyes.

‘Cong wheat!’ he said. ‘For Cong bread.’

A colonel shrugged.

‘It’s one peasant, General,’ he said.

‘Correction, Colonel! One Cong peasant.’

‘North Vietnamese.’

‘Cong, North Viet, what’s the difference?’ shouted Kowalski. ‘He’s cutting strategic wheat, right? To make strategic bread, right? To feed to Cong, so they got the strength to pull the triggers, right?’

Twenty-minutes later, three Skyhawks roared off north. Sam Kowalski watched their black trails dissolve, willing them on, feeling in his muscles the faint recoil of cannon, seeing the shells stitch dark patterns in the earth.

Two planes came back.

‘Who knows?’ said the lead pilot. ‘Small arms fire, maybe. I looked around, Harry wasn’t there. Then I see this smoke, coming out of the trees. Maybe he just spun out. Who knows?’

Kowalski thought of the wreckage, the shattered wings, the dead engine, the wasted bomb-load. The Cong would take the tailplane and put it on a stick and take pictures of it.

‘A million-dollar peasant,’ he said savagely. ‘Did we get him?’

‘He wasn’t there.’

Kowalski screwed the flight report into a ball.

‘A trap,’ he whispered. ‘A goddam Cong trap!’ He took out his gun and spun the chamber furiously while he thought. Also, he smiled, in a private, military way.

‘Maybe the guy just went for lunch,’ murmured the pilot. But Kowalski did not hear.

That afternoon, six aircraft took off on a seek-and-destroy mission to knock out the anti-aircraft sites Kowalski had pinpointed for them. That done, a second strike was to go in and silence the peasant.

Three bombers returned. The Vietnamese, having found themselves suddenly in a strategic position, had called up a couple of heavy machine-guns to defend their village, both of which had survived the attack that had homed in on the largest building, the school.

‘School, huh?’ said Kowalski, with a certain amount of relief, due to his having originally attributed the smallness of the bodies in the photographs to some fault in his aerial cameras. He turned to his wireless operator. ‘Send this: Major-General Kowalski to USAF HQ – In a pre-emptive strike against major supply dumps north of the DMZ, an A4F Skyhawk was downed by enemy fire. A retaliatory strike against anti-aircraft positions resulted in the loss of three further Hawks. However, a major VC training-camp was destroyed, with many – make that hundreds – dead. Ten thousand rounds of ordnance and one hundred tons of bombs were expended. Attacks continue. Message ends.’

The commander smiled triumphantly upon his staff.

‘We got ourselves some war, gentlemen,’ he said.

‘For four Hawks,’ said a captain laconically, ‘they’ll want results.’

‘They’ll get results. Tomorrow, we’ll hit the missile sites.’

They looked at him.

‘Missile sites?’

‘If I know the Cong,’ said Kowalski, ‘and I know them, I can smell them, there’ll be missile sites. They got the whole night to set ’em up.’

He was right. At dawn on the following day, twenty-four Skyhawks, heavy with HE and napalm, ran into a wave of North Vietnamese GAMs. Six were shot down, one crash-landed in the DMZ; two helicopters were lost trying to bring back the pilot, who died slowly, but was recommended for the Medal of Honour by Kowalski. It was good for morale.

‘To the folks back home,’ he told his men on the parade-ground the following morning, and his voice trembled through the loudspeakers, ‘that medal isn’t just Charlie Fitzgerald’s medal. It belongs to every man out here fighting for liberty, justice, and the flag. To your mothers and dads, and sisters and brothers, every one of you is a hero.’

The airmen shuffled their feet, and blushed. Some of them were very young. Pride welled up in them, diluting fear. Reminded of what they were there for, they climbed back into their cockpits in good heart, knowing that death could have a purpose. Pride filled Kowalski, too, as he watched them go.

‘This is a major offensive,’ he told his 2IC. ‘Vital to the war. Strategic. If we break here, we break everywhere. But,’ he patted his holster, ‘no-one’s gonna break.’

That night, he went to bed happy. True, half his strike force had failed to return, but the day’s sorties had racked up a tally of a thousand tons of bombs and rockets, which was a record for his sector of the front. Also, a large area of possibly strategic jungle had been defoliated, the district hospital had been razed, and innumerable chickens would not now find their way into the lunch-baskets of General Giap and his friends. Kowalski, wide-awake, was still calculating the size of reinforcements he would need to call up in order to maintain his escalation at the prescribed textbook level, when the first mortar shell hit the airstrip. Snatching his revolver and knife from beneath their respective pillows, Kowalski leapt out into the night.

It glowed bright as day. Burning fuel silhouetted planes for the few seconds necessary for their bomb-loads to explode, shells and flaming debris rained down, men in pyjamas ran about barefoot, shouting, firing at anything that moved. Kowalski, trapped by the twin agony and joy of war, stood rooted to the spot, gun cocked, breathing in the heady fumes: it took two lieutenant-colonels and a cook to carry him away to a makeshift dug-out.

‘I knew it!’ cried the major-general. Beside him, a man fell dead, half his head shot away. ‘I knew they’d have to come! They walked right into it.’ His words were sucked away as an ammunition dump went up, tearing the night apart, but they came again ‘… what you call war, gentlemen! Tomorrow, we’ll get three divisions in here, four, we’ll get two hundred Hawks, we’ll get ground-to-grounds, and whole batteries of Lazy Dogs, we’ll get nuclear …’

A grenade blew out the side of the bunker, flinging what was left of his second-in-command against Kowalski. The man looked up at his commander, dying.

‘I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘I wonder – whatever happened to that – to that peasant?’

‘What peasant?’ shrieked Kowalski. He looked round wildly. ‘What’s he talking about?’

But before anyone had the chance to answer, and despite Mrs Kowalski’s expensive Christmas present, they were overrun.