G, one of the line troops, entered Snuol first. There was a real street, lined with stucco-faced shops instead of the grass huts on posts in the farming hamlets of the region. The C-100 AntiAircraft Company, a Viet Cong unit, was defending the town with a quartet of fifty-one caliber machine-guns.
A fifty-one cal could put its rounds through an ACAV the long way, and the aluminum hull of a Sheridan wasn't much more protection.Before G Troop could get out, the concealed guns had destroyed one of either type of vehicle.
The squadron commander responded by sending in H Company, his tanks.
The eleven M48s rolled down the street in line ahead. The first tank slanted its main gun to the right side of the street, the second to the left, and so on. Each tank fired a round of canister or shrapnel into every structure that slid past the muzzle of its 90mm gun.
On the other side of Snuol, they formed up to go back again. There wasn't any need to do that.
The VC had opened fire at first. The crews of the M48s didn't know that, because the noise inside was so loud that the clang of two-ounce bullets hitting the armor was inaudible. Some of the slugs flattened and were there on the fenders to be picked up afterward. The surviving VC fled, leaving their guns behind.
There was a little looting—a bottle of whiskey,a sack of ladies' slippers,a step through Honda (which was flown back to Quan Loi in a squadron helicopter). But for all practical purposes, Snuol ceased to have human significance the moment H Company blasted its way down the street.
The civilian population? It had fled before the shooting started.
Not that it would have made any difference to the operation.
So I wrote a story about what wars cost and how decisions get made in the field—despite policy considerations back in air-conditioned offices. It was the best story I'd written so far, and the first time I'd tackled issues of real importance.
Only problem was, "The Butcher's Bill" didn't sell.
Mostly it just got rejection slips, but one very competent editor said that Joe Haldeman and Jerry Pournelle were writing as much of that sort of story as his magazine needed. (Looking back, I find it interesting that in 1973 magazine terms, the stories in The Forever War, The Mercenary, and Hammer's Slammers were indistinguishable.)
One editor felt that "The Butcher's Bill" demanded too much background, both SF and military, for the entry-level anthology he was planning. That was a good criticism, to which I responded by writing "Under the Hammer."
"Under the Hammer" had a new recruit as its viewpoint character, a kid who was terrified that he was going to make an ignorant mistake and get himself killed. (I didn't have to go far to find a model for the character. Remember that I hadn't had advanced combat training before I became an ad hoc tank crewman.) Because the recruit knew so little, other characters could explain details to him and to the reader.
I made the kid a recruit to Hammer's Slammers, because I already had that background clear in my mind. I hadn't intended to write a series, it just happened that way.
"Under the Hammer" didn't sell either.
I went about a year and a half with no sales. This was depressing, and I was as prone as the next guy to whine, "My stuff's better 'n some of the crap they publish."
In hindsight, I've decided that when an author doesn't sell, it's because:
1) he's doing something wrong; or
2) he's doing something different, and he isn't good enough to get away with being different.
In my case, there was some of both. The two Hammer stories were different—and clumsy; I was new to the job. Most of the other fiction I wrote during that period just wasn't very good.
But the situation was very frustrating.
The dam broke when Gordy Dickson took"The Butcher's Bill"for an anthology he was editing. It wasn't a lot of money, but I earned my living as an attorney. This was a sale, and it had been a long time coming.
Almost immediately thereafter, the editor at Galaxy (who'd rejected the Hammer stories) was replaced by his assistant, a guy named Jim Baen. Jim took the pair and asked for more.
I wrote three more stories in the series before Jim left to become SF editor of Ace Books. One of the three was the only piece I've written about Colonel Hammer himself instead of Hammer's Slammers. It was to an editorial suggestion: tell how it all started. Jim took that one, and though he rejected the other two, they sold elsewhere. The dam really had broken.
I moved away from Hammer and into other things, including a fantasy novel. Then Jim, now at Ace, asked for a collection of the 35,000 words already written plus enough new material in the series to fill out a book. Earlier I'd had an idea that seemed too complex to be done at a length a magazine would buy from me. I did it—"Hangman"—for the collection and added a little end-cap for the volume also—"Standing Down."
To stand between the stories, I wrote essays explaining the background of the series, social and economic as well as the hardware. In some cases I had to work out the background for the first time. I hadn't started with the intention of writing a series.
Hammer's Slammers came out in 1979. That was the end of the series, so far as I was concerned. But as the years passed, I did a novelette. Then the setting turned out to be perfect for my effort at using the plot of the Odyssey as an SF novel (Cross the Stars). I did a short novel, At Any Price, that was published with the earlier novelette and a story I did for the volume . . . .
And I'm going to do more stories besides this one in the series, because Hammer's Slammers have become a vehicle for a message that I think needs to be more widely known. Veterans who've written or talked to me already understand, but a lot of other people don't.
When you send a man out with a gun, you create a policymaker. When his ass is on the line, he will do whatever he needs to do. And if the implications of that bother you, the time to do something about it is before you decide to send him out.
ROLLING HOT
Chapter One
The camera light threw the shadow of the Slammers officer harshly across the berm which the sun had colored bronze a few moments ago as it set. Her hair was black and cut as short as that of a man.
"For instance, Captain Ranson,"Dick Suilin said,"here at Camp Progress there are three thousand national troops and less than a hundred of your mercenaries, but—"
shoop
Ranson's eyes widened, glinting like pale gray marble. Fritzi Dole kept the camera focused tightly on her face. He'd gotten an instinct for a nervous subject in the three years he'd recorded Suilin's probing interviews.
"—the cost to our government—"
shoop-shoop
"—is greater for your handful of—"
"Incoming!" screamed Captain June Ranson as she dived for the dirt. It wasn't supposed to be happening here—
But for the first instant, you never really believed it could be happening, not even in the sectors where it happened every bleeding night. And when things were bad enough for one side or the other to hire Hammer's Slammers you could be pretty sure that there were no safe sectors.
Camp Progress was on the ass end of Prosperity's inhabited continent—three hundred kilometers north of the coast and the provincial capital, Kohang, but still a thousand kays south of where the real fighting went on in the areas bordering the World Government enclaves. Sure, there'd been reports that the Conservatives were nosing around the neighborhood, but nothing the Yokel troops themselves couldn't handle if they got their thumbs out.