Rolling Hot
ROLLING HOT–the title is from military aviation, meaning the aircraft is moving to the attack with ordnance ready to fire–is based very loosely on Tet of ’68. That’s an event I’m glad to have missed, but a number of the folks I served with in 1970 had stories and even photographs of what the Blackhorse had been doing then.
For those of you who weren’t around at the time, the Viet Cong made a massive win-the-war attack on US and South Vietnamese forces during the truce declared for the Lunar New Year holiday, Tet. Politically, it won them the war: Tet proved that President Johnson and the US generals had been lying when they claimed the VC was nearly finished as a fighting force. Such public support for the war as had previously existed vanished abruptly. continue reading…
I’ve written quite a lot of military SF. This collection (and its expanded reissue Mark II) weren’t intended to collect all of it (that would take a very big book, even for the short fiction) but rather to show the range possible within that sub-genre.