Puff the Magic Dragon

Puff the Magic Dragon

It was hot.

And I don’t mean "it was hot" in any way that you can understand, unless you’d been there. I come from Charleston, and it used to get hot and humid during the summer inland in South Carolina. Here, that sweltering, humid, oppressive heat was a cool day.

We were sitting in Firebase Norman, like we did on a lot of these hot nights. Firebase Norman was located southwest of Saigon, somewhere in IV Corps in the middle of jungles and swamps and, basically, one of the most hellish environments that I could ever imagine. To our south was the Rung Sat Special Zone, where the Navy SEALs did their work clearing out the Mekong, but up here we were the Ninth Infantry Division, the "Brown Water Navy", as it were. And my company, Company B of the Second Battalion, Sixtieth Infantry, was bored to tears that night.

"Wake up, Cooper," I heard from next to me. I quit daydreaming(well, it was night, so maybe I was just dreaming), and glanced over to Hector Ruiz. Ruiz smiled at me slightly, leaning on the stock of his M-60 as he looked over the sandbagged walls of Norman. "You keep getting lost like that, Victor Charles is gonna sneak up on you and shove a satchel charge up where the sun don’t shine."

"Even Victor Charles wants to stay in tonight," I countered lightly, glancing out at the rice paddies and swamps just to our north. Somewhere up there was Tan Son Nhut, the air base where I had landed and joined the Ninth two months ago. Since then, I had slogged through the Mekong River(none of us really considered it "The Delta" until you got down where the SEALs were), with some light combat as my only action. Victor Charles had been quiet at the end of the monsoons when I arrived, and there was no indication tonight would be any different. "Victor Charles is hiding in his little tunnel complexes."

"Shit, man, don’t you know?" Ruiz asked, as though I was the only one never to hear about what he was about to say. "Heat draws ‘em out."

"You’re lying," I said, turning to my short, stocky Hispanic companion on guard duty that night. Ruiz shook his head.

"No, man, the hotter the better for them," he said, serious.

"You’re kidding," I said.

"Yeah, I am," Ruiz finally said, breaking a smile. I laughed a little, too. When you could get killed at any second, lots of stupid things make you laugh a little. "Just stay alert. L.T. doesn’t like me as it is. If some little zipperhead gets past us, it’ll be my fault, no matter what."

"I’ll make sure to let one by, then," I said. Ruiz s imply gave me a rueful smile, then went back to staring out at the paddies. I did too, pausing to light a cigarette and listen to someone playing the Mommas and the Poppas somewhere inside the wire. It was soft, but I could just make out the lines to California Dreamin’. It had only been two months since I had gotten to the Land that God Forgot, but I had already forgotten what winter was.

"Coop, you see that?" Ruiz suddenly asked, tapping my shoulder. "Coop, man, what was that?"

Ruiz was pointing out toward the rice paddies, but I didn’t see anything, even after staring into the darkness for a long ten seconds.

"See what?" I asked. "What was it?"

"I don’t know, man," Ruiz answered. "You got the Starlight?"

"No," I answered. I turned, and looked down the sandbag wall. "Hey, Jackson!" I called out, trying to keep my voice down. "What’s out in the paddies?"

"Rice," Jackson answered irritably. From someone else, it might have been a joke, but Jackson was a big, big man from somewhere in Mississippi. He stood about six eight and was a wall of walking, sunburned muscle with two mean blue eyes and a quiet hatred for darkies(like me) or spicks(like Ruiz). But in combat, he was THE most reliable man I had ever met. In Mississippi he might have lynched me with the Klan at his side, but in IV Corps he was the man I wanted when the shit went down. Just another subtle difference when your life could end in a heartbeat.

"Ruiz saw something, man!" I called out. "You got the Starlight! Check it out!"

Jackson grumbled something that sounded real close to "stupid nigger" under his breath, then raised the Starlight scope to his eye. He said nothing for a very, very long moment.

"What’s out there?" I prompted, getting a little bit nervous.

"Sweet Jesus," Jackson whispered. His irritable tone was gone, and the only other time I ever heard him not irritable was when he had nearly tripped a mine on patrol. This was not good.

"What is it, man?" Ruiz whispered. Jackson said nothing as he fired off his first flare.

There had to be at least a million men in khaki uniforms running at us.

Not Victor Charles. The NVA.

Holy fucking Christ!" Ruiz exclaimed. He simply opened up then, even as the NVA regulars looked up at the flare, realizing they’d been seen. Ruiz was the first to react to that terrifying scene, and about half the NVA focused on us first.

We ducked back as at least a hundred AK-47s went off, all of them aiming for us. The sandbags ripped and tore beneath the torrent of lead. The topmost bags were cut to ribbons and started top fall off, and I felt a lot of the sand that I had shoveled into those bags two weeks ago spill out on my back. But the alarm was up. Already the entire firebase was running, and M-16s were chattering amid the hail of the NVA rifles. Explosions were going off all around me then; the gooks had brought their mortars, and they were hitting the center of the compound with devastating accuracy. Our own mortars were thumping back. In a minute the artillery crews also had the 155s, the "little" howitzers, aimed at point blank and were firing earth shaking rounds into the paddies. One glance outside the wire, however, showed me that the NVA were already too close for the howitzers, and they were getting inside the effective range of the mortars as I watched.

"Drop back to the trenches! Ruiz! Cooper! Let’s go!" I heard the L.T. shout from just behind us. That order was as relieving as it was frightening; yes, I could get up and get away from the charging horde of little Communists, but that also left me exposed to about a hundred thousand AK-47s for the agonizing twenty seconds it would take me to get to the second lines of defense. Ruiz jumped up, fired a burst from his M-60…

And then the side of his face got taken off by a burst of gunfire.

I don’t know if that had registered before I got up and sprinted back to the trenches, where the L.T. was marshaling our platoon for a stand. He was already on the radio, calling, I prayed, for an air strike. Napalm, I was told, was the most beautiful thing one could see when on the receiving end of an enemy charge like this one. The guys who had fought through Tet assured me of that by the end of my first week here.

"No, dump it on the coordinates I just gave you!" the L.T. was shouting angrily as I leapt into the trench. Cooper, get firing!" he ordered as I landed. Then he turned back to the phone. "Yes, Puff is fine! How long?"

"Puff?" I asked to no one in particular. I got up and let a burst loose over the trench.

"Yeah, Puff," someone said next to me. I had no idea who he was, only that he was a lanky, pot smoking white boy with a tuft of blond hair on his chin that stuck out against the fires of the now burning firebase. "You ever seen Puff?"

"No, but I hope he has a lot of napalm," I answered. I pulled a grenade from my web gear and hurled it over the side of the trench, but I couldn’t even tell if it went off out there in the mess of NVA, rifle fire, and mortar hits. Blondie smiled and put a cigarette to his lips so he could aim the thumper. A second later, he was firing grenades out of the M-79 with a precision and speed I didn’t think possible. Almost before the grenade had left the barrel, Blondie cracked the breach, jammed in another shell, snapped it shut, and fired again. He let off six shells before he stopped to take his cigarette from his mouth and breathe out a cloud of smoke, then he turned and looked at me as I stared at him. He was unconcerned with the situation, almost enjoying himself, certain that Puff would save us all.

"Nope, Puff don’t got no napalm," Blondie stated with a satisfied smile. Then he pointed to the sky. "Here he comes now."

Up over the NVA charge, as the last of the flare light died away, I could see the pinpoints of light that marked a plane, flying low. At first I thought it was a Skyraider, the prop driven relics that performed almost every bombing run we needed down here, but then I realized that the wings were far too large. As I watched, the plane banked, exposing a flank to the NVA below it. The gooks were turning, as if they sensed the thing above them, and some even raised their AKs to fire at the silhouette. From here, I could have sworn that our savior, Puff, was nothing more than a cargo plane.

And then it fired.

The gooks didn’t seem to realize what was coming, or they probably would have run for cover. The side of the plane suddenly lit up, and I could hear the Gatling guns in the side of the plane scream out even over the noise of the chaotic battle around me. Beams of red light, hundreds of them, it seemed, hit the ground from an almost continuous gout of fire along the side of the gunship. It was as beautiful as it was deadly; wherever those red beams struck, NVA regulars fell to the ground, torn apart by the obscene amount of gunfire from above. AKs were drowned out by the screams of the Gatling guns first, then by the screams of the dead and dying beyond the wire. Blondie fired a few more grenades from the thumper, but they were mere afterthoughts in the onslaught of Puff the Magic Dragon. Puff made a single, raking pass on the field. Everything in the field simply dropped, almost all at once. Then the red beams stopped and the drone of Puff’s engines took over. Bodies were piled two and three deep on the approach to the firebase. Its work done here, Puff moved on just a little but, and the horrifying, beautiful spectacle took place once again. Once again the red beams tore out of the night sky, flames and sparks covered the side of the plane above us, and the NVA dropped by the dozens or by the scores. I stared for what seemed like years. In reality, it was about thirty seconds.

"Holy Jesus…" was all I could force from my mouth. I was frozen by the sheer volume of fire, the simple, awesome might of a cargo plane equipped with about twenty Gatling guns, all on one side.

"Puff comes through again," Blondie said to me, smiling around the cigarette in his mouth. "I hear they say one in ten round’s a tracer."

"One in ten?" I repeated, stunned. Those hadn’t been bullets. Those had looked like laser beams coming down.

"One round per square foot, somethin’ like that, I hear," Blondie said. "Gotta be a couple hundred dead gooks out there."

"Holy Jesus," I said again, looking out past the trenches, the sandbags, and the wire. All those dead bodies, some literally torn to shreds. Puff had done his job well. Well enough to make me queasy.

It made three passes. It took maybe four minutes, from start to finish, most of the time taken up turning the gunship to a new target. And Puff the Magic Dragon accounted for two hundred and five kills, two hundred and five mangled, shredded, almost unrecognizable North Vietnamese regulars, in the dark.