Black Light

“No Wimbledon Cup up there,” said the general. “My best year, you took it. Nineteen seventy-one.”

“Sir, if I’d have known you had a gap in your trophy case, I’d have dropped a shot or two!”

The general laughed. “It’s all shit, of course. But I have customers in here all the time. It impresses them. Now, what’s on your mind, gentlemen?” He lit a cigar and leaned back in his chair comfortably, as if looking forward to a good time.

“Sir,” said Russ, “I’ve been hired to coauthor Bob Lee Swagger’s story for the Presidio Press in San Francisco. We wanted to at least touch on the wider shape of the story: that is, American sniping in Vietnam as programs and how they affected the war. There’s not a lot of data on the army’s, yet I understand the army snipers got much higher kill rates than the marines.”

“It had nothing to do with the quality of men,” said the general with an executive’s practiced smoothness. “At the senior noncommissioned officer level, the American services all have extremely talented and motivated individuals. The marines have stayed wedded to marksmanship as the core of their service; that’s fine, as history has proven out time and again. The army has been charged with staying at the cutting edge of ground combat technology. That was my job. That’s where Tigercat came from. We started in the early fifties trying to develop a technology that would give the night to the American sniper.”

“The M-3 sniperscope,” prompted Bob.

“A piece of junk,” said the general, expelling a large curling cumulus of smoke. “Bulky, clumsy, awkward, with a distressing propensity toward showing the vegetation more clearly than the enemy. So heavy it could only be mounted on a light rifle like the puny carbine. But … a start.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob. “No doubt, if we’d have had your gear in the Nam, we could have kicked ass big- time.”

The general wasn’t really listening.

“Do you know what the difference between the marine and the army sniper programs was? I mean, speaking frankly. I love the spirit of the marines, but our kills were so much higher. Do you know why?”

Russ inwardly blanched. He knew this was the last thing Swagger would want to hear from this grinning, self-promoting baboon.

“No sir,” said Bob evenly.

“The marines somehow couldn’t commit at the conceptual level to the idea of technology. At some fundamental level, they believed still in the romantic notion of individual heroism. They somehow refused to enter the modern age. You marine snipers were like World War I pilots or cowboy gunslingers, going off on your own to do battle with the enemy and taking him out one-on-one. We believed in team spirit, sophisticated technology and body counts. Our body counts were so much higher. We saw through to the heart of it: it was about killing the enemy, not dueling him. And our sniper teams moved in and left nothing but step-ons. When we put a V.C. down, we didn’t count it until the next morning we could put our boot on his chest. We called them step-ons.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob chastely, nothing showing on his bland face. “I sure wish I’d had a chance to work the jungle with that kind of equipment.”

His piece said, the general returned to the technical and the arcane.

“The M-3 was a great advance over the M-2 system of World War II, yet in Korea the troops hated it and the army itself didn’t really understand or follow up. It was my idea to run the thing through a night-battle wringer and try to develop doctrine. Fortunately, somebody read my idea in Infantry Journal and I was given a chance to practice what I’d preached. We called the project B

LACK

L

IGHT

and ran it out of Camp Chaffee, where we tried to devise some data for night operations with vision devices. We were stuck with the goddamned M-3s. But at least we were able to show the R&D boys what was necessary in a night-combat environment. No one really knew until that time. They’d just copied the German hardware.”

“Tell us about B

LACK

L

IGHT

.”

The general launched into a long and somewhat self-serving account of the project, and it soon developed that the problem with him wouldn’t be getting him to talk but getting him to shut up. His chatter soon evolved into performance, soliloquy, ultimately a one-man show, punctuated by theatrical blasts of smoke. He looked like the god of war, Mars himself, sitting there under his reasonable gray hair as the clouds swirled and he gave pronouncement. Much of his presentation seemed to turn on obscure issues, like trying to find the right number of men that stayed within command parameters and yet were adequate to provide security for the shooter. Months were spent determining if six or eight or ten were better, and the ultimate choice was four, given that the sniper himself could do double duty in a firefight with a greasegun. Night command vocabulary was tested; night map reading was examined and night navigation; radio techniques were explored. The shooting was a relatively late part in it.

“About ’55 we got to the shooting.”

“What did you use for targets? The Germans used people, you said.”

“On the record? On the record, heat-generating targets were not mandatory, because we were only beginning to understand the principle of ambient light, that is, passive night vision. We used the M-3’s active infrared, that is, an infrared searchlight. We could have shot at anything. But there was a ballistic component to the project which mandated load testing on living organisms. Off the record, we shot sheep and goats. Cattle would have been preferable because their respiratory system most resembles humans, but I had no stomach for trying to bring down a steer with a bullet that at its best generated muzzle energies somewhere between a .38 Special and a light .357 Magnum.”

On and on it went, through the construction of the units, problems with the clamps that secured them, difficulty with the webbing that supported, and so forth and so on. Russ thought he’d doze.

“I’m just curious,” said Bob finally, and Russ knew that he’d played out the whole long hand, nursed the man’s vanities and ego, gotten through the bullshit lecture on “individual heroism vs. team spirit and body count” to get to this point at last, “what sort of administrative control could there have been on the units themselves? Was it standard infantry arms-room administration; was it more stringent? Who actually controlled the units? The actual M-3s?”

“Technically, I did, though the true administration of the project fell in the hands of my first sergeant, whose name was Ben Farrell. Very good NCO. Killed outside Da Nang in ’64.”

“Who controlled the arms-room keys?”

“Well … what does this have to do with anything?”

There was an awkward moment.

Then Russ said, “The truth is, we think there’s a movie potential for this book. And the reason I wanted to talk about night vision was that I had an idea for a funny scene. Young soldiers break into the armory and steal some night-vision devices. They use them to spy on a WAC encampment, some girls with nice tits. Tits and ass. That’s the kind of wacky stuff the movies love.”

“Oh, Lord,” said the general. “Why don’t you just make it up? What do you need my help for?”

“Sergeant Swagger insisted that everything be at least based in reality.”

“Well, I can assure you nobody used our hardware to spy on WACs and if you knew anything about the WACs of the fifties, you wouldn’t want to spy on them either.”

“We could make it nurses,” said Russ. “Would that be better?”

The general made a face of disgust. “Hollywood,” he said. “No, it’s impossible. There were only two arms- room keys. Three, I assume the base commander had one but he paid us no mind. We had our shop, our barracks space and use of three range facilities and various field assault courses. The only two keys were controlled by First Sergeant Farrell and myself and he was a Prussian in the discipline department. No one used those weapons without our permission or knowledge. Which means no one used them, period.”

Bob veered away from the point.

“Did you find the units equally effective?”

“No,” said the general, relaxing somewhat, and expelling a long whoosh of dark smoke, and went on to explain the difference in the units, the difference in the lots of ammunition, the difference in the three carbines themselves.

It went on like that, Russ pretending to keep notes, Bob prodding with gentle questions, up to and including