The loss of Buenos Aires did mean a great deal to me; it changed my life enormously, but this I did not know until many months later.
When it came time to drop onto Klendathu, I was assigned to PFC Dutch Bamburger as a supernumerary. He managed to conceal his pleasure at the news and as soon as the platoon sergeant was out of earshot, he said, “Listen, boot, you stick close behind me and stay out of my way. You go slowing me down, I break your silly neck.”
I just nodded. I was beginning to realize that this was not a practice drop.
Then I had the shakes for a while and then we were down—
Operation Bughouse should have been called “Operation Madhouse.” Everything went wrong. It had been planned as an all-out move to bring the enemy to their knees, occupy their capital and the key points of their home planet, and end the war. Instead it darn near lost the war.
I am not criticizing General Diennes. I don’t know whether it’s true that he demanded more troops and more support and allowed himself to be overruled by the Sky Marshal-in-Chief — or not. Nor was it any of my business. Furthermore I doubt if some of the smart second-guessers know all the facts.
What I do know is that the General dropped with us and commanded us on the ground and, when the situation became impossible, he personally led the diversionary attack that allowed quite a few of us (including me) to be retrieved — and, in so doing, bought his farm. He’s radioactive debris on Klendathu and it’s much too late to court-martial him, so why talk about it?
I do have one comment to make to any armchair strategist who has never made a drop. Yes, I agree that the Bugs’ planet possibly could have been plastered with H-bombs until it was surfaced with radioactive glass. But would that have won the war? The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. Blasting the surface of their planet would have killed soldiers and workers; it would not have killed the brain caste and the queens — I doubt if anybody can be certain that even a direct hit with a burrowing H-rocket would kill a queen; we don’t know how far down they are. Nor am I anxious to find out; none of the boys who went down those holes came up again.
So suppose we did ruin the productive surface of Klendathu? They still would have ships and colonies and other planets, same as we have, and their HQ is still intact — so unless they surrender, the war isn’t over. We didn’t have nova bombs at that time; we couldn’t crack Klendathu open. If they absorbed the punishment and didn’t surrender, the war was still on.
If they can surrender—
Their soldiers can’t. Their workers can’t fight (and you can waste a lot of time and ammo shooting up workers who wouldn’t say boo!) and their soldier caste can’t surrender. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Bugs are just stupid insects because they look the way they do and don’t know how to surrender. Their warriors are smart, skilled, and aggressive — smarter than you are, by the only universal rule, if the Bug shoots first. You can burn off one leg, two legs, three legs, and he just keeps on coming; burn off four on one side and he topples over — but keeps on shooting. You have to spot the nerve case and get it … whereupon he will trot right on past you, shooting at nothing, until he crashes into a wall or something.
The drop was a shambles from the start. Fifty ships were in our piece of it and they were supposed to come out of Cherenkov drive and into reaction drive so perfectly co-ordinated that they could hit orbit and drop us, in formation and where we were supposed to hit, without even making one planet circuit to dress up their own formation. I suppose this is difficult. Shucks, I know it is. But when it slips, it leaves the M.I. holding the sack.
We were lucky at that, because the Valley Forge and every Navy file in her bought it before we ever hit the ground. In that tight, fast formation (4.7 miles/sec. orbital speed is not a stroll) she collided with the Ypres and both ships were destroyed. We were lucky to get out of her tubes — those of us who did get out, for she was still firing capsules as she was rammed. But I wasn’t aware of it; I was inside my cocoon, headed for the ground. I suppose our company commander knew that the ship had been lost (and half his Wildcats with it) since he was out first and would know when he suddenly lost touch, over the command circuit, with the ship’s captain.
But there is no way to ask him, because he wasn’t retrieved. All I ever had was a gradually dawning realization that things were in a mess.
The next eighteen hours were a nightmare. I shan’t tell much about it because I don’t remember much, just snatches, stop-motion scenes of horror. I have never liked spiders, poisonous or otherwise; a common house spider in my bed can give me the creeps. Tarantulas are simply unthinkable, and I can’t eat lobster, crab, or anything of that sort. When I got my first sight of a Bug, my mind jumped right out of my skull and started to yammer. It was seconds later that I realized that I had killed it and could stop shooting. I suppose it was a worker; I doubt if I was in any shape to tackle a warrior and win.
But, at that, I was in better shape than was the K-9 Corps. They were to be dropped (if the drop had gone perfectly) on the periphery of our entire target and the neodogs were supposed to range outward and provide tactical intelligence to interdiction squads whose business it was to secure the periphery. Those Calebs aren’t armed, of course, other than their teeth. A neodog is supposed to hear, see, and smell and tell his partner what he finds by radio; all he carries is a radio and a destruction bomb with which he (or his partner) can blow the dog up in case of bad wounds or capture.
Those poor dogs didn’t wait to be captured; apparently most of them suicided as soon as they made contact. They felt the way I do about the Bugs, only worse. They have neodogs now that are indoctrinated from puppy-hood to observe and evade without blowing their tops at the mere sight or smell of a Bug. But these weren’t.
But that wasn’t all that went wrong. Just name it, it was fouled up. I didn’t know what was going on, of course; I just stuck close behind Dutch, trying to shoot or flame anything that moved, dropping a grenade down a hole whenever I saw one. Presently I got so that I could kill a Bug without wasting ammo or juice, although I did not learn to distinguish between those that were harmless and those that were not. Only about one in fifty is a warrior — but he makes up for the other forty-nine. Their personal weapons aren’t as heavy as ours but they are lethal just the same — they’ve got a beam that will penetrate armor and slice flesh like cutting a hard-boiled egg, and they co-operate even better than we do … because the brain that is doing the heavy thinking for a “squad” isn’t where you can reach it; it’s down one of the holes.
Dutch and I stayed lucky for quite a long time, milling around over an area about a mile square, corking up holes with bombs, killing what we found above surface, saving our jets as much as possible for emergencies. The idea was to secure the entire target and allow the reinforcements and the heavy stuff to come down without important opposition; this was not a raid, this was a battle to establish a beachhead, stand on it, hold it, and enable fresh troops and heavies to capture or pacify the entire planet.