The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1 (hammer's slammers) Read online

  The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

  ( Hammer's Slammers )

  David Drake

  This three volume set presents for the first time the genre-defining Slammers series in a uniform hardcover set. This volume features all of the Hammer's Slammer short fiction, as well as all of the interstitial material from the original Slammers collection, as well as new artwork, new interstitial material and an original Slammers story, "A Death in Peacetime". The first volume will feature an introduction by Gene Wolfe, and cover art by Vincent Di Fate.

  David Drake

  The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

  Introduction

  BY GENE WOLFE

  It is remarkable—though never remarked—how few writers have been soldiers in wartime. Kipling, who wrote of soldiers and soldiering as well as anyone ever has, was never himself a soldier. I believe I am correct in saying that Hemmingway was never a soldier, although he drove an ambulance and was wounded in combat. Avram Davidson presents a peculiar case; as a Marine medic in World War Two he was technically a sailor, although he wore a Marine uniform and treated wounded Marines in the South Pacific. Subsequently he jumped through all sorts of legal hoops to stay out of the Israeli Army while fighting Arabs, since service in the army of a foreign nation would have cost him his US citizenship.

  Such are the exceptions—some of the few writers at the edge of military service who were, or may have been, shot at. The Red Badge of Courage is often called the greatest of all war novels; Stephen Crane did not take part in the Civil War, although he interviewed many men who did.

  David Drake is a writer of the rarest kind. He knows soldiers because he has been one, and knows war because he has been there. He knows more: he knows how to speculate plausibly about the future of soldiering and the future of war.

  People who know as little of science fiction as most science fiction writers know of war believe that the business of science fiction is to predict the future—to extrapolate rationally from present trends, and, especially, present fads.

  We should thank God that it is not. Rational extrapolation is a pistol, effective only at short ranges and not very effective there. The duty of science fiction is to tell us not what will be, but what might be, what the future may hold, what human reactions to it are likely, and what results are apt to ensue—socially, economically, militarily, romantically, and in every other department of life.

  More and better than any other writer, David Drake does this for the wars of the future and the men and women who will fight them. Like every science fiction writer, he assumes that certain technological developments have taken place. He also assumes, as all who write science fiction are forced to, that certain others have not taken place. (He is, of course, fully capable of making a different set of assumptions and writing a good story around those.) Self-appointed experts may disagree with the assumptions of the Hammer's Slammers stories. They know exactly what war in the far future will be like. That there will be no war, or that wars will be fought entirely by robots while human beings sit around hoping not to die at the end. Or whatever. We should ask them and all such experts whether they have made their fortunes in the stock market. If there really were people capable of predicting what life—and death—will be like a thousand years from now, they would be capable of predicting what those things will be like just a few years from now, wouldn't they? Of predicting it and making shrewd investments. After all, there are men who can jump a one-foot ditch but cannot jump a three-foot ditch; but there are no men who can jump a three–foot ditch but cannot jump a one-foot ditch. Prediction is a rifle, less accurate as the range increases.

  We can argue with any assumption found in any science fiction story. It will give us a good bull session, and perhaps even a bit of enlightenment. Still, we cannot rationally deny these assumptions. In science, it is the happy fate of human kind to know what is possible but not what is impossible. In 1946, anyone who said that all the wars to come in the Twentieth Century would be non-nuclear would have been laughed to scorn.

  On what basis, then, can we judge a science fiction writer's assumptions? (Assuming that they seem relatively plausible.) Reading any story in this book will supply the answer. Good science fiction assumptions are those that lead to a good science fiction story.

  Ah, but what is a good science fiction story? That is a question we might debate endlessly. I can no more give you a definitive answer than the next reader of David Drake's next book can. But by references to Dave's stories in this one, I can illustrate my own opinions. I will try to do it without hurting those stories for you—the last thing I want to do is deprive you of the pleasures this book affords.

  First, a good science fiction story gives us that famed sense of wonder. The intricacies of future tank warfare do that for me, and you will find plenty of those here.

  Second, a good science fiction story gives us a place to stand on, something that checks with our own experience. At some point in the story, we need to say to ourselves, "Why, I've been there!" Or, "I knew her!" Or, "That's just how it was for me!"

  I find a number of these in the stories in this book, and so will you. My favorites—my own dear pets among them all—are the open-topped combat cars the Slammers use for recon. I rode in open APCs (Armored Personnel Carriers) once, you see, and hunkered down as the shells banged and boomed outside and the shrapnel screamed overhead.

  Third, a good science fiction story must be a good story, just as a good crime story must be a good story. It must give us someone to like who has problems we want to read about; Colonel Hammer and Danny Pritchard are obvious examples. They may be smarter than we are, and braver than we are; but they are anything but alien to us. They are human beings, and recognizably so. We like them, and can imagine ourselves standing in their boots.

  Here I am going to set off on a private rant—stop me if you can. War stories written by people who know nothing of wars and even less of the men and women who fight them often tell us at great length that those men and women are dehumanized, and try their damnedest to show them like that. Soldiers are often tired enough to drop, and people tired enough to drop are seldom as quick with a quip as the cast of M*A*S*H. But if that level of fatigue dehumanizes them, we can forget about the next guy who gets lost in the woods for three days. After the second day he is no longer human, so why should we care?

  I have known one man, a fellow soldier long ago, whom I considered dehumanized. He grasped his rifle tightly just about all the time, and although we tried to keep ammunition away from him, it was impossible where we were: that rifle almost always had a round in the chamber, and the safety was always off. Looking ahead, and looking left and right, and looking behind him without cease, he repeated: "There ain't no Chinks around here, I want to go back to Baker Company. I want to go back to Baker, there ain't no Chinks around here. There ain't no Chinks around here, I'm goin' back to Baker Company, ain't no Chinks around here." We had him instead of Baker Company because we were about a mile behind the Main Line of Resistance just then, while Baker Company was on line and manning outposts.

  Also because the guys in Baker Company were threatening to kill him before he killed them. He was suicidally courageous, would never remove the filthy fatigue cap he wore under his helmet, and had other peculiarities. I once met him on a dusty road as he walked along muttering to himself and kicking a human head as boys used to kick tin cans. (If I had been as quick as I like to pretend, I would have suggested he take it to the Battalion Intelligence Officer for questioning.) When we, too, began threatening to kill him, the brass at last concluded that he was not sim
ply angling for a Section Eight.

  The point of all this is that this one soldier was unlike anyone else in our company, and was in fact certifiably and dangerously psychotic. And that he was a lone exception among the hundreds of soldiers I fought behind, beside, and now and then in front of. Ken Clough was perhaps the sanest man I have known. I watched him one day when he was caught in a mortar barrage; and just when I felt certain he had been killed, he rolled onto his back and lit a cigarette. Lieutenant Wilcox, who killed thirteen enemy in one day with a thirty-eight, was thoroughly human and as fine an officer as I ever saw.

  I have been telling you about all this, because I know that some of you will not know it. I would not tell David Drake the same thing because I know that he knows it already. You will find it here, in every story he writes. Men and women do not stop being women and men because they are out where the metal flies, and that is the wonderful, the truly miraculous, thing about them. Now and then the experience even knocks a bit of the pretence and pettiness out of them, and that is the glorious thing about a real shooting war, otherwise such a mess of pain and waste.

  I sat in on a late-night party once in which the subject of friendship came up, and I listened in dumbstruck incredulity as one man explained that his friends had to like the same things he did—that they must not only read the same books and magazines he did, and listen to the same music, but pretty much share his opinions of all those things. He was followed by an attractive young woman who insisted that her friends had to be of her social and economic class. At that point I made all of them shut up while I explained that a friend is someone who will give you a drink from his canteen and watch while you sleep.

  You will find the waste and horror and cruelty of war in the pages that follow, and the glory of it, too, as well as the friendships formed when there's little cover or none and the enemy has the range.

  Now go to it!

  FOREWORD

  BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL WRITER BY WAY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA

  Some years ago my son took an undergraduate history course in the Vietnam Era. He mentioned that his father had been drafted out of law school in 1969. The other students and their twenty-seven-year-old professor were amazed; they "knew" that college students weren't drafted.

  I was in the Duke Law School Class of 1970 when LBJ removed the graduate student deferment in 1968 and I was drafted along with nine more of its hundred and two guys. There were only two women in our class, a sign of the times that changed abruptly afterwards.

  I'd been a history and Latin major as an undergraduate. I'd been against the war in a vague sort of way but I'd never protested or done anything else political except vote once, since the voting age was twenty-one. There was never any real question about me refusing to serve, though believe me I wasn't happy about it.

  While a student I'd sold two fantasy short stories for a total of $85. I used what I knew about: historical settings and monsters based on H. P. Lovecraft's creepy-crawlies. I was proud of the sales, but writing was just a hobby.

  Because I scored high on an army language aptitude test I was sent to Vietnamese language school at Fort Bliss, then for interrogation training at Fort Meade. Finally to Nam, where I was assigned to the Military Intelligence detachment of a unit I'd never heard of: the 11th ACR, the Blackhorse Regiment.

  My service wasn't in any fashion remarkable, and nothing particularly bad happened to me. I was in the field for a while with 2nd squadron just after the capture of Snuol; then with 1st squadron; and for the last half of the tour I was back in Di An, probably the safest place in Viet Nam, as unit armorer and mail clerk. The Inspector General was due, and apparently I was the only person in the 541st MID who knew how to strip a .45 down to the frame. (Military Intelligence doesn't seem to get many people who shot in pistol competitions in civilian life.)

  And then I went back to the World. Seventy-two hours after I left Viet Nam I was sitting in the lounge of Duke University Law School, preparing to start my fourth semester. Because nothing awful had happened to me, I was honestly convinced that I hadn't changed from when I went over.

  As I sat there, two guys I didn't know (my class had already graduated) were talking how they were going to avoid Viet Nam. One of them had joined the National Guard, while the other was getting into the Six and Six program that would give him six months army in the US, followed by five and a half years in the active reserves.

  These were perfectly rational plans; I knew better than they did how much Nam was to be avoided. But for a moment, listening to them, I wanted to kill them both.

  That gave me an inkling of the notion that maybe I wasn't quite as normal as I'd told myself I was.

  I finished law school and got a job lawyering. I kept on writing, which after the fact I think was therapy. I didn't have anybody to talk to who would understand, and I'm not the sort to go to a shrink. I don't drink, either (which I think was a really good thing).

  I had much more vivid horrors than Lovecraft's nameless ickinesses to write about now. I wrote stories about war in the future, assuming that the important things wouldn't change. The stories weren't like earlier military SF. Instead of brilliant generals or bulletproof heroes, I wrote about troopers doing their jobs the best way they could with tanks that broke down, guns that jammed—and no clue about the Big Picture, whatever the hell that might be. I kept the tone unemotional: I didn't tell the reader that something was horrible, because nobody had had to tell me.

  It was very hard to sell those stories because they were different. They didn't fit either of the available molds: "Soldiers are spotless heroes," or the (then more-popular) "Soldiers are evil monsters." Those seemed to be the only images that civilians had.

  But the funny thing is, when the stories were published they gained a following. Part of it was guys who'd been there, "there" being WW II, Korea, and later the Gulf as well as Viet Nam. Some of the fans, though, were civilians who could nonetheless tell the difference between the usual fictions and stories by somebody who was trying to tell the truth he'd seen in the best way he could.

  Some civilians really wanted to understand. I guess that as much as anything helped me get my own head straighter over the years.

  After I got back to the World I'd just done what was in front of me. I didn't think about the future, because I suppose I'd gotten out of the habit of believing there was one. When I raised my head enough to look around—almost to the day ten years after I rode a tank back from Cambodia—I quit lawyering and got a part-time job driving a city bus while continuing to write. I didn't quit lawyering "to write" (though I'd already had two books published) but because I realized the work was making me sick.

  At this point something unexpected happened. Publishers were setting up new SF lines. Editors already knew that I would write them a story that people wanted to read; my first book, Hammer's Slammers, had succeeded beyond the editor's wildest dreams. (I didn't realize that for some years afterwards.) I got literally all the work I could do. The only limitation on how many books I could sell was the number of books I could write.

  I've told you that Nam gave me a need to write and also gave me something real to write about. It gave me a third thing: service with that unit I'd never heard of; the 11th ACR. I'd been part of a professional outfit whose people did their jobs with no excuses, no matter what the circumstances.

  There are writers who spend more time making excuses for why they can't write than they do writing. I could've become one of them, but that attitude wouldn't have cut any ice in the Blackhorse. Instead I just got on with my job, and since 1981 I've supported my family as a full-time freelance writer.

  I'm successful now because I learned professionalism in the Blackhorse and carried that lesson over to the work I do in civilian life—which happens to be writing SF. The lessons people learned in Nam probably cost more than they were worth—even to the folks like me who got back with nothing worse than a couple boil scars from the time I was in the field. They were valuable lessons
nonetheless.

  If any of the folks reading this were with Blackhorse, thank you for what you taught me. I'm proud to have been one of you.

  Dave Drake david-drake.com

  UNDER THE HAMMER

  "Think you're going to like killing, boy?" asked the old man on double crutches.

  Rob Jenne turned from the streams of moving cargo to his unnoticed companion in the shade of the starship's hull. His own eyes were pale gray, suited like his dead-white skin to Burlage, whose ruddy sun could raise a blush but not a tan. When they adjusted, they took in the clerical collar which completed the other's costume. The smooth, black synthetic contrasted oddly with the coveralls and shirt of local weave. At that, the Curwinite's outfit was a cut above Rob's own, the same worksuit of Burlage sisal that he had worn as a quarryhand at home. Uniform issue would come soon.

  At least, he hoped and prayed it would.

  When the youth looked away after an embarrassed grin, the priest chuckled. "Another damned old fool, hey, boy? There were a few in your family, weren't there . . . the ones who'd quote the Book of the Way saying not to kill—and here you go off for a hired murderer. Right?" He laughed again, seeing he had the younger man's attention. "But that by itself wouldn't be so hard to take—you were leaving your family anyway, weren't you, nobody really believes they'll keep close to their people after five years, ten years of star hopping. But your mates, though, the team you worked with . . . how did you explain to them why you were leaving a good job to go on contract? 'Via!' " the priest mimicked, his tones so close to those of Barney Larsen, the gang boss, that Rob started in surprise, "you get your coppy ass shot off, lad, and it'll serve you right for being a fool!"

  "How do you know I signed for a mercenary?" Jenne asked, clenching his great, calloused hands on the handle of his carry-all. It was everything he owned in the universe in which he no longer had a home. "And how'd you know about my Aunt Gudrun?"