Ralph Peters
Authors: The war in 2020
RALPH PETERS
THE
WAR IN 2020
POCKET
STAR
BOOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The views expressed in this book are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Excerpt from Huyn Sanh Thong's original English translation of
The Tale of Kieu
used with permission.
A Pocket Star Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 1991 by Ralph Peters
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-75172-7
First Pocket Books paperback printing January 1992 10
987654321
POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Printed in the U.S.A.
To the memory of
EMORY UPTON
One watches things that make one sick at heart.
This is the law: No gain without a loss,
and Heaven hurts fair women for sheer spite.
—The Tale of Kieu
from the Vietnamese
In the year of our Lord 2005, the United States made a terrible mistake. In the course of yet another internal crisis in post-Mobutu Zaire, South Africa had seized extensive mineral-laden tracts in Shaba Province. Bound by half forgotten treaties, ignorant of the details of the local situation, and anxious to convince a doubting world of our continued importance as a superpower, we deployed the XVIII Airborne Corps to Kinshasa. The operation proved awkward, and slow. The Army had been gutted during the euphoric reductions of the nineties, when standing ground forces had come to seem as anachronistic as they were extravagant. But we still had faith in ourselves.
The XVIII Airborne Corps limped onto a sick continent. Africa had been largely written off by the solvent nations of the world. Unable to feed its people, unable to pay its bills, and annoyingly incapable of governing itself decently, Africa had nothing more to offer than occasional troughs of minerals and dwindling animal herds that had come to seem far more valuable to the civilized world than the continent's emaciated millions. The continent was dying. First, the AIDS pandemic had taken the joy out of photo safaris, then, shortly after the turn of the century, a new plague had begun to stray out of the African bush.
Such considerations did not bind Americans. We believed we heard the slightly off-key call of duty, and we sent the best we had. Wheezing from the effort, our forces raised the flag in the heat of a country for which they were ill-equipped, ill-trained, and about which they were blithely ill-informed. But none of this seemed to matter. The Americans had landed, and
,
really
,
the deployment hardly seemed more than a formality to the men who made the decisions.
No one seriously believed the South Africans would fight.
1
Africa 2005
YOU CAME IN OVER THE GRASSLANDS, WITH ANIMALS
bolting then turning again and again beneath the sound and shadow of the metal birds. It was punishingly hot in your flight suit and helmet, and you already had a water debt, but at least the patrols were a break from the monotony of life at the bivouac site. You came in over the light brown sea of the grasslands, skimming over islands of twisted shrubs, and the distant flight controller's voice tinned sleepily in your earphones. Then the country began to rise. Just slightly. You could see the hills of mining waste from a long way out, and you hardly bothered to glance at the controls. You wanted to fly. You always wanted to fly. It was the only life in the languid days. But now, with the squadron's African home in sight, a duller side of you was anxious to get back down on the ground.
You patterned in around the tallest waste bank, and the metal roofs of the mining complex mirrored the high sun of southern Zaire. Shaba Province, alias Katanga. You cursed and turned your head slightly. The glare quit, leaving you a view of military tentage and perfect rows of helicopters at rest in the dappled shade of the camouflage nets. A red and white cavalry guidon stirred to life atop the only two-story building in the settlement, and the dust began to rise toward you. A hatless soldier in aviator sun-glasses, his mouth and nose protected by an olive drab bandanna, raised his arms. Come to Papa. Africa disappeared in a brown storm.
You were home. Walking off the flight stiffness amid the familiar fixtures of a field site anywhere in the world: fuelers and lines, warning markers, portable guide lights, wind streamers, GP-medium tents with their sides rolled up to show neatly ranked cots with sleeping bags rolled or canoed, soldiers in T-shirts, dog tags hanging like macho jewelry. The torn brown envelopes of field rations. Texan heat. No war.
The unit had quickly settled into a normal field routine. Regular patrols flew south, inspecting the emptiness. There was an unmistakable feeling of disappointment among the men who had been primed for combat, but there was relief, as well. Soldiers cursed the weather, the godforsaken landscape, the insects and meandering snakes, the rations, and the brass who never knew what was going on and never got anything right. Some swore that the U.S. Army was on the wrong side again, that the Zaireans were worthless motherfuckers. The few books that had been tossed into rucksacks or kit bags for the trip were read, passed around, reread.
"
Hey, George,
"
a fellow captain called, passing down the lines of cots,
"
what the hell're you reading now?
"
Taylor held up the cover of the paperback so his friend could see.
"
That some kind of horror novel, like?
"
"
Not exactly,
"
Taylor answered, lazy on his bunk.
"
Heart of Darkness.
"
The man laughed.
"
Sounds like one of my old girlfriends. You want a beer, George?
"
"
Got one.
"
The captain smiled good-naturedly.
"
Captain George Taylor, troop commander. The guy who has everything.
"
And he headed off toward the field canteen.
Taylor and his comrades spent their nonflying hours getting magnificent suntans and listening to the English-language South African radio station that broadcast the most powerful signal in the region and played the best music. The female disc jockeys with their fantasy-inspiring off-British accents never said a word about crisis or plague or their own troop deployments, but as the situation seemed to normalize, they began dedicating songs to the
"
lonely GIs up north.
"
Everyone's favorite announcer was a woman named Mamie Whitewater, whom the troops quickly renamed Mamie Skullfucker. When there were no missions to fly and the sun made it too hot to remain under the canvas, Taylor loved to lie in a jerry-rigged hammock with a can of beer chilling a circle on his stomach muscles, browning his skin for the girls back home and listening to the teasing radio voice. He knew she had to be blonde. And morally unsalvageable.
There was no war. Only the sun, boredom, and bad food. Taylor's unit had not been stricken by Runciman's disease, and the reports that filtered down through the staff of mounting RD casualties closer in to Kolwezi or back in Kinshasa held little reality for the aviators in their isolated cocoon. It was all somebody else's nightmare, less important than speculating about how long it might be before they all went home. They argued about whether or not there had ever been elephants in this part of Africa, and bored young pilots broke flight discipline in their efforts to take snapshots of the lesser wildlife they encountered on patrol. Occasionally, Taylor would get a flash that these long, hot days were idyllic, paradise before the fall. But his inspirations never lasted long, and most of the time he simply felt weighed down by the empty, uncomfortable drudgery of it all.
Once, he flew over a village where corpses lay at random intervals in the dirt street, bloating in the sun.
Plague.
His hands jerked at the controls. But the effect was ultimately no more than that of watching a troubling film clip. He simply banked his helicopter away, rising into the clean blue sky.
The last morning seemed especially clear, and the air still had a freshness to it when they took off. The mission was as routine as could be. Patrol south along the Lualaba River trace toward Zambia. No wild-assed flying. The squadron commander had delivered a stem lecture to all of the pilots the day before, after a lieutenant had nearly crashed his Apache trying to get a photo of what he swore was a cheetah. So it was going to be a day of dull formation flying, with no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. The squadron S-2 had even stopped delivering regular threat updates.
Taylor was in a down mood, and he was unusually snappish with his subordinates over the radio. He had received word that one of his classmates from Fort Rucker, a man who was almost a close friend, had died of Runciman's disease back at the lOlst's main command post. The death was absurd, since Chuckie Moss had the least dangerous assignment imaginable—chauffeuring general officers around in the best-maintained helicopter in the division. Chuckie was recently married, a bit of a clown, and not yet thirty years old. For him to have died, when there had not even been any combat, seemed absurd and inadmissible.
Taylor's thoughts strayed in disorder. Remembering Chuckie on a wild weekend down in Panama City, Florida, his thoughts tumbled into bed with an old girlfriend. Joyce Whittaker. An absolute wild woman. He could remember Chuckie, beer in hand, laughing about the noise and declaring that old Joyce was a gal of considerably more energy than judgment. And he remembered Joyce's body glazed with sweat, her eyes closed, as the scrublands slipped away under the belly of his aircraft. The sunlight began to dazzle through his face shield, and he wriggled out of his survival vest in preparation for the impending heat.
They were barely ten minutes out of the field site when the radar on Taylor's bird milked out, its screen frothing with pale discolorations. Taylor assumed it was an equipment malfunction, since the new electronics on the A5 Apaches were finicky on the best of days, and the dust of the field site was hard on them.
"
One-four, this is Niner-niner,
"
Taylor called to the aircraft flying echelon right to his own.
"
My radar's crapping out. You've got sky watch.
"
"
This is One-four,
"
a worried voice came through the headset.
"
I'm all milked out. What the hell's going on?
"
Suddenly, the voice of an old chief warrant officer cut into the net from one of the trail birds: