Napalm Dreams; A Men of Valor Novel

by John F. Mullins

• ISBN13: 9780743477673
• ISBN10: 0743477677
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-03-30
• Publisher: Pocket Star

Summary

A shattering novel of courage, heroism, and unbreakable bonds forged in the heat of battle.

Green Beret Captain Finn McCulloden and his troops are having a very bad day -- even by the nightmarish standards of Vietnam. They've just been dropped

Excerpts

Chapter 1 "So, what do you think?""I think we're gonna get our asses shot out of the sky."Lieutenant Colonel Sam Gutierrez looked at the aerial photo again. The North Vietnamese zigzag trenches were clearly shown going right up to the wire of the beleaguered camp. If you squinted hard enough, you could see the blurry shapes of people. Lots of people."I think you might be right," he said. "See any other way of doing it?""Way I see it," Captain Finn McCulloden, commander of the First Battalion, II Corps Mike Force, mused, "is that we have three courses of action. Walk in from here. That way we could take the whole battalion. Get the battalion in there, Charlie isn't going to take the camp. Don't give a damn how many people he throws against us. Problem is, it'd take three days at best. That's if the NVA haven't ambushed all the avenues of approach, which they will have."Second, land right here," he said, pointing to a bald knoll, formerly an artillery firebase. "Never be able to get more than one lift in, the place is probably mined like hell, and the trails down off it mined and ambushed.""So that leaves..."Finn smiled. "It leaves coming in as fast as we can, landing right in the middle of the camp, which as we know is registered with mortar concentrations and rockets, has antiaircraft guns all around it, and probably direct fire from recoilless rifles and RPG-7s. How do you like those odds, Captain Cozart?"The helicopter pilot grinned back. "They suck." He looked around at the other pilots, seeing the young men, most of them warrant officers with less than two years in the Army, nod their heads in agreement."Then that's what we do?" Finn asked."No other choice, is there?" Cozart replied. "Your people are going to have to be unassing those choppers in a hurry. No room for more than a two-ship landing at a time. How many people are you going to try to get in there?""One company," Finn replied. "Eighty 'Yards, five round-eyes. The rest of the battalion will walk in. Maybe we can hold Victor Charles off until they get there."Cozart called his pilots together to start planning the assault. Gutierrez pulled Captain McCulloden off to the side. "You know I wouldn't ask this, if I thought they could hold out one more day.""Shit, Sam. I know that. Hell, I still owe you money from R and R, so I know you don't want me killed just yet." Finn McCulloden and Sam Gutierrez went back a long way, to their first tour in Vietnam when Sam was the captain commanding an A team and Finn was his junior medic. It was Sam, when he returned for his third tour and found himself commanding a C team in Pleiku, who had convinced Finn, also just starting his third tour, to take the newly opened position as commander of the Mike Force. They often needed new commanders, being the reaction force for A teams in trouble. There were no "walks in the woods" for the Mike Force. When it went out, there was a fight. The survival rate for the Americans who ran the Mike Force wasn't high."Don't suppose I can talk you into waiting, taking the main force of the battalion in?""You know better than that," Finn said. "Besides, you wanted me to take command, and I can't command from thirty klicks away."Gutierrez nodded his head in assent. There had to be new command on the ground at Camp Boun Tlak. The team there, what was left of it, had lost confidence in the commander, First Lieutenant Bentley Sloane. Sloane had been the executive officer under Captain Stan Koslov, taking over the team when Koslov was killed on a local security patrol.Thereafter Sloane had refused to let patrols go outside the wire, thus clearing the way for the NVA regiment now besieging the camp to make its preparations in relative safety. The more experienced members of the team -- and there were damned few of them these days! -- had argued with him to no avail. Now they blamed him for their precarious situation.And