First Citizen (24 page)

The underside of the Stomper’s fuselage was fitted with ceramic-sponge panels.

“Those’ll deflect or absorb the energy of anything up to .50 caliber. They learned how to fit them from the heat tiles of the old Space Shuttle. Engine nacelles and fuel pods’re protected with a titanium laminate armor. Supposed to turn back an armor-piercing grenade, but I’ve never tested that.”

When we climbed in and I took the copilot’s left-hand seat, I could immediately see the weak link in the whole Stomper system: the controls. Every function was monitored or commanded by computer and routed to the pilot through the central display unit, or CDU, and the variac, or joystick. That stick and the “Engines start” button were the only two controls. Just like a kid’s video game. No, I was not worrying about electrical glitcharillos: Backup circuits and tandem chips were probably stuffed into the console. But let something crack the gas plasma plate of the CDU, or a wire pull loose inside the joystick, and you plowed it. Even the canopy jettison was set up from the variac.

It was a design vulnerability that, in combat action, everyone would chalk up to computer dependency, system efficiency, or low-bidder mentality. Everyone except those who crashed and burned.

Gonzales, in the right seat, pushed the button and before anything else the CDU flickered on. Then the engines, right and left in order, kicked to vertical, coughed one puff of black smoke, and began to whine high and nasal like Gina Fong.

Sitting on the ground, Gonzales did a test orbit with the stick. I could see the nacelles rotate and tilt in unison. Through the airframe, we felt them tug right-forward-left-backward. That plane wanted to
go.

He twisted something on the variac and the Stomper leapt straight up into the air at 1,200 feet per minute. The CDU said so. In about ten seconds, we were looking a long way down at the field and surrounding rooftops.

“Do you have to clear with the tower or anything?” I asked casually.

“We did,” the pilot grinned. “All done by computer call sign and automatic delay. We went when the system told us. I don’t have to use the radio unless I really want to chat.”

“Oh.”

Gonzales pushed forward on the stick; the nacelles pitched forward; and that 350 feet per second was translated into about 250 miles per hour, fast. My stomach—
mine,
and I was used to Fraggy Dan getaways in a Blackhawk—was left somewhere over Hayward.

“With only three guys, she’s a little more responsive than usual,” the pilot admitted. “A full load will slow her down. Some.”

He headed for the rolling hills opposite the Bay. “I’m going to take you to a patch of live oak we use for assault practice. Show you how easy she is on the in-and-out.”

For the next hour, he hopped that plane into little patches of ground among the scrubby trees. Most times, our chin bubble was practically resting in one set of branches, while the tail surfaces fought their way into another. Gonzales would touch wheels, pop the door, then pull her out like a champagne cork. When we parked back at Hayward, Granny flipped open his checkbook and was all ready to write. I signed up for flying lessons the next week.

We also personally tested tanks and half-tracks. But aside from trucks for transport, I was dubious about taking in any heavy ground vehicles. I was even less enthusiastic about armor. In the desert, on hard gravel with not a lot of cover—maybe. But in among the vines and lowland sinks and other shit, about the only tracked vehicle I wanted was a bulldozer with a big plow. Our main strike force was going to be the Stompers, supported with bladder trucks and rolling machine shops. Corbin agreed, so that is what we sent down to Poway.

It sounded crazy to me, setting up a near-desert base to train our unit for a jungle war. Then I got out the topo maps and the atlas and looked over our theater of war: The northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula, where we would at least start out, is hardly jungle at all. Except for mangrove swamps along the coast, the land is a semi-arid plain vegetated with low scrub or
chaparral.
The most remarkable feature is the natural cavities known as
cenotes,
or water holes.

Not until you go south, across the central zone, do you find tropical vegetation—tall cedars, kapok, and mahogany trees, lianas, and all the rest. The only microclimate in California that approximates these rain forests is the redwood groves. And flipping around
there,
firing live grenades, and bivouacking a couple of thousand troops is—umm—contra-environmental. We did try for a permit from Fish and Game, but they turned us flat down.

Poway was not bad. And our aim was not to climatize the men and women, anyway. It was to toughen them and make a team out of them. We could have done that in Antarctica or the Bronx.

I thought Granny was going to run the unit Hollywood style: show up when he felt like it, give a few orders, drink a few beers with the troops to be sociable, then fly home until next weekend. No way. He took basic right alongside the greenest of them. He let the temporary sarges chew on his butt. He went on the twenty-mile forced marches and ended up on one of them doing the fireman’s carry, in relays, on a drill instructor who got snakebit. He even ate our food, which was intentionally subpar to weed out the grousers and the Cozumel-holiday-charter people. And, of course, he took the language classes with us. After all, they were his idea.

Teaching everyone a common, nonstandard language was a good idea for a lot of reasons. It was another way for us to blow away the chaff. It gave the unit, especially the fire teams, a common bond. And it gave us guarded communications at a subcode level. For silent work, we all learned American sign language—at least a pidgin-patois of it that we had adapted to military situations. For radio and open communications, we considered a made-up language like Esperanto, but too many Old Army units had been using that for enemy-speak in their war games. We wanted something already spoken but really out of the way—from a country we were unlikely ever to fight in. I was hoping Gran would pick Navaho and make my life easier, but he settled on Malay. Think he chose it from a hat.

Malay is a knobby, many-syllabled language a whole world away from anything European. The only word I could recognize was
soldadu
for soldier. But then, I am really
hebat
[terrible] at languages.

We trained for six months, taking our initial 9,000 down to about 5,600. Which was my target all along. Then we held Career Day—kind of a graduation, mixed with rank assignments and some choice of duty. It was the first time many of the recruits discovered who the Granny Corbin among them really was. The General. Most had thought that, because I wore the oak leaves and gave the orders in public, I was top dog.

The paperwork finally caught up with us. By a special resolution in Congress, our unit became the California 64th Air Cavalry Volunteers. There were a whole bunch of authorizations: to make war in the public interest; to seize and hold territory in the name of the Congress of the United States; to commandeer vehicles, fuel, and food supplies; to issue scrip with a redemption period not to exceed two years; to execute military prisoners. We had quasi-judicial powers. We could set up a military state and run it while the bullets lasted.

Congress also set some restrictions: We were nominally under command of the House Subcommittee on International Strategy, known among us as HSIS or “Ha-Sis.” We were required to coordinate our efforts with other G.V. units operating within our theater of operations—which was really meaningless because what does “coordinate” mean? Finally, we were forbidden to conduct maneuvers in the original fifty-one United States as defined prior to the Henderson Act. Not even for further training and drills, Corbin explained. Once we crossed the border going south, we could not return to the country except as unarmed civilians, or in boxes. That was clear enough, you would think.

Every division has two names, its official designation, like “64th Air Cavalry Volunteers,” and some warlike
nom de guerre
like “Tropic Lightning,” or “The Big Red One.” I thought it would be Corbin’s privilege, as sponsor and top dog, to pick a name he liked. But Granny was smarter than that. In those final days of training, he let it be announced that we were taking nominations for a unit name. We would vote until a majority found what they wanted.

“After all,” he told me privately, “if they’re going to fight and die for the group, they might as well like how it sounds.”

We heard everything: California Cobras, the Condors, the Seals, the Giants, and the Giant Killers, the Dodgers (which sounded pretty smart—for rifle teams—until baseball fever finally ran out), the Fighting 64th, Birdsong’s Bastards (when they thought I ran the unit, the little ass-kissers), Snake Eyes, Silent Death, Sweet Dreams, Screamers, Day Trippers, Dandy Dogs (huh?), Legion of the Damned, Foreign Legion, Foreign Order, the
Valorous
64th (for God’s sake). The names went around and around, turning up nothing that more than six people at one time could like.

Finally, with the whole unit on parade at Career Day, a newly starred General Corbin performed the swearing in and read the congressional resolution making us an official unit of the U.S. government. They listened quietly. However, when he got to the part about not returning to the United States, someone from the rear ranks shouted out of turn: “Homeless Bastards!” Corbin picked it up immediately, used it in his remarks, and by chow time that evening the phrase was humming from one end of the division to the other. We were the Homeless Bastards, so rough and tough and dangerous that our own country would not let us back inside. It fit.

Staging for Yucatan was from Corpus Christi, Texas. We went south in seven coastal steamers modified as troop carriers. Clearly, we could never fly all our staff, stores, trucks, and heavy equipment out in the Stompers. And we could not march or roll from Chula-Vista, down the length of Mexico, to Merida, which was the capital of Yucatan and would be our new base of operations. The country was so broken up that a march like that would have meant fighting for every mile. Ten percent of us might have gotten through.

As it was, we hardly expected to make port, unload, and walk into town. Although technically the territory belonged to us by annexation, we still had to invade. The plan was to land on the offshore island strip along the peninsula’s north side, at Progreso, form up, and dash forty miles south for the capital. If we moved quickly, preceded by the Stompers, we might just take the
Comunistas
by surprise.

The preparations for launching an invasion—anywhere, by any means—is an absolute
mind maze.
Every piece fits together and interlocks like a wooden puzzle: loading up your assault troops, setting up fuel points, scouting the disembarkation zone, making the first attack, establishing diversions, bringing up fresh support units, establishing a perimeter, contacting any local friendlies, tightening the perimeter, de blip, de blop, de bloop, right up until the point that your soldiers are drinking beer around a fountain in the plaza while you unload the presses for printing your new currency.

Every piece of the puzzle has its limitations: the operating range of your vehicles, the sleep-wake cycle of your troops, the firepower-to-weight ratio of the weapons they carry, the distances they have to move to engage enemy hard points. And every movement has its optimum timing, its window of opportunity, and a lockout dead zone where moving at all, let alone successfully, is impossible. They tell me bringing a first-run play to Broadway is a complicated span of action with a lot to be done in a short time on interlocking schedules. Well, tell me if the price of failure for the theater producer is a few thousand men and women shot up on the beach.

Our limitations were distance and heavy stuff.

From Corpus Christi to Progreso is about 650 miles. Technically within the range of the Stompers, until you account for a full load, possible headwinds en route, and circling and maneuvering during the assault. You fail if you arrive with tanks sucking vapor.

I wanted a carrier, even a small one. But the U.S. Navy’s heavy ships had been scrapped ten years earlier. Obsolete and unfunded. What we had was the loan of
two
Coast Guard cutters—at a per-diem fee that actually brought tears to Granny’s eyes. The cutters had chopper pads on their bridge decks and we persuaded them to each tow a fuel barge loaded with JP-5 and equipped with high-speed pumps. We were going to touch down, refuel, and fly off 150 of our first-wave Stompers in pairs. Loading ten soldiers per plane, that would bring in 1,500 troops in the first wave. Adequate.

We practiced at an airfield outside Corpus Christi until the pilots could average just three minutes on deck. At that rate, we were still looking at a dwell time over the cutters of
three hours and fifteen minutes!

The Stompers could not possibly arrive as a single strike force. Given the fuel that first-comers would burn while orbiting the cutters and waiting for last-comers to touch and fuel, our immediate strike force, the first of the first wave, would be about 30 planes. Or 300 troops on the ground and firing.

I wanted a flotilla of amphibious assault craft, little tracked boats that could wade ashore and roll right over the enemy. But when you are running a war on a shoestring, you do not have the bucks for expensive toys you will use once and abandon. I tried to rent them but no one had really done a beachhead landing in the sixty years since Normandy.

Why not just hold the attack in downtown Merida? Land, shoot them up, take over? Well, as I said, we had no plans to bring in the whole division in our Stompers, which basically were for light attack and recon. We had trucks to unload, along with the equipment, supplies, and materiel they would carry. We needed the freighters to move that heavy stuff. Which meant we needed a port to unload them. Which meant we had to take Progreso and march inland. Finally, it all worked out.

Granny took me over the plan again and again: timing, load weights, distance, firepower, fuel burn, the enemy’s strength and positions. We were mumbling the numbers in our sleep. We bought LANDSAT photos of the beach area, blew them up to twenty by twenty feet, and hung them on the wall of a warehouse on the Corpus Christi waterfront. Then we took the pilots and the first-wave troops over the assault again and again. Until
they
were mumbling the numbers in their sleep. But, in theory, they were ready.