The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

"Joachim wouldn't have given him more than one round," Hammer whispered. His face was set, but tears ran down his cheek. "I never thought I'd see this. Never."

Hammer holstered his own pistol and rose to his knees. The guards had stopped shooting. Under a sergeant's bellowed orders they backed away from the windows and stood shoulder to shoulder, a living wall between the direction of the shot and the men they were here to protect.

The bolt had blown the remainder of Joachim's tunic away. His chest was as white and hairless as an ivory statue.

"Where's his lucky piece?" Hammer said.

"What?"

Hammer looked at Danny, his expression suddenly blank and watchful. "Joachim always wore a coin from Newland around his neck," Hammer said. "That was the only thing he'd brought from home. He said it was his luck."

"Colonel?" Danny said harshly. He got to his feet. "I'm not behind this. I don't care if you believe me, but it's the truth anyway. However, this is the best piece of luck you and the whole planet could've gotten."

Joachim's corpse smiled at him from the floor.

AFTERWORD ACCIDENTALLY AND BY THE BACK DOOR

1.

Some people decide at an early age that all they want to be is a writer. A high school classmate of mine was like that, actively Gathering Material while the rest of us were basically being kids. His career never got off the ground—he sold a couple fillers to Reader's Digest—but Robert E. Howard and my late friend Karl Edward Wagner had the same attitude and were extremely successful in their time.

I wasn't like that: I was going to be a lawyer. I intended to write and sell at least one story, but writing was only a hobby so far as I was concerned. This distinction affects everything that comes after.

2.

I sold two horror stories to Arkham House before I was drafted in 1969, and sold two more in 1970–1. The fourth sale came after I got back to the World and reentered Duke Law School. Then August Derleth, the proprietor of Arkham House, died and left me without a market.

There were very few professional outlets for fantasy stories at the time, and the fan press didn't pay at all. The modern fantasy/horror small press really started when Stu Schiff began paying a penny a word for stories in Whispers in 1973 (at my instigation, I'm proud to say). I had no luck selling the professional markets my fantasies using backgrounds from ancient history, and I scorned the notion of giving stories away to fanzines.

My friends Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner suggested that I use Viet Nam settings. Nothing else was working, so I tried that, with some success, selling a fantasy to F&SF and an SF story to Analog. The fantasy involved letting loose a monster from an ancient tomb; the SF story dealt with a tank company finding a UFO.

3.

Then I decided that I'd write an SF story using my background with the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet Nam (and Cambodia, for a couple months) instead of interjecting a fantasy or SF element into a real-world setting. That is, I'd write about a future armored unit fighting a future war. What I'd done before was simply to use the 11^th Cav as background, the way New York City or the French Revolution could be backgrounds for stories.

I made the unit a mercenary company, as Kuttner and Moore had done in Clash by Night in 1943 and Gordy Dickson had done in 1958 with Dorsai! (in both cases in Astounding). I called the unit Hammer's Slammers, following as much as anything the practice of Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers, where unit designators include the commanding officer's name.

4.

I couldn't sell the story—The Butcher's Bill—to save my life. This was remarkably frustrating, since the sales to F&SF and Analog demonstrated that I was capable of doing professional-quality work. I couldn't understand what the problem was.

One of the rejections, by Ben Bova of Analog, was particularly maddening. Ben was well disposed toward me: he'd bought one story of mine already and would later buy two more (none of them in the Hammer series). Ben commented that The Butcher's Bill was a good story, but he had Jerry Pournelle and Joe Haldeman already and he didn't think Analog needed a third series of the same sort.

From thirty years on, the notion Jerry's Falkenberg series and Joe's Forever War were the same is even more ludicrous than it appeared to me at the time, and what I was doing was a third thing yet. That wasn't obvious from the outside, not at the time.

5.

What I now think was going on in the early '70s is this. Jerry, Joe, and I were similar in one important fashion: we'd all been at the sharp end of war (Korea in Jerry's case, Viet Nam for Joe and me). Our work therefore shared a sort of realism which Kuttner, Dickson, and Heinlein lacked (for all their enormous strength as writers).