Billie had already made the decision and was in the dive.

“Rog. Leaving 35.”

She was at 1500 and had her guns firing before anyone below saw her. Her fire bracketed the pit and nearly all of the rounds were in it. Several of the people in the pit fell. At just past 500 feet she flattened out and flew a jinxing course till she was two miles from the compound, then turned west and landed.

Her gun tape showed she had hit at least three people in the pit, possibly a forth. Two of them were obviously women. Both Billie and Sue breathed hard as they saw them fall on the tape. They hadn’t seen an actual person they had fired upon fall and these two were women. No more howitzer rounds were fired until after dark. Eli breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe Mandy was wrong about Billie. After all, even she could be wrong.

Brother Joash had been an artillery man in Nam. He had fired so many one oh five rounds at the enemy he had no idea how many he had rammed into the breach of a gun. He was accustomed to machine gun fire. Their fire base in Nam had .50 caliber machine guns to protect the base. The two turrets each had quad fifties that together fired over 2000 rounds a minute. The machine gunners had guns free at all time to defend the base. He hadn’t looked up when he first heard the machine guns. He continued to ram a shell and pulled the lanyard. Just as the gun fired he felt stabs of pain as the machine gunfire hit him. As he was falling he saw two of the other gunners fall. One was Ginny, a pretty young woman who had just learned to fire the gun. The other was his wife, Sandy. He felt himself being dragged out of the pit.

People were trying to tend his wounds. They were serious. His right arm was broken. He had two more rounds in his shoulder, two in his left hip and one in his right foot. He asked about his wife, Sandy. She had been one of the ammunition handlers.

Sandy had just placed a shell next to the gun and was returning to the tunnel to get the next one. Something hit her three times in the back in rapid succession and she fell, gasping for breath. Her chest hurt, it was as though she was drowning. She felt someone drag her out of the pit and then she lapsed into unconsciousness. All of the gunners would be taken out for medical treatment. All would survive.