by Ian Slater
“I suppose now we’re bloody hostages for that friggin’ strip,” Murphy said, nodding north toward the airfield.
“Yes,” Mellin answered. “Well, let’s try to get along with them, Mike. Okay?”
“You serious? Listen, mate, if you think I’m going to cooperate with this fucking—”
“Lower your voice,” Mellin said sharply. The helos were taking off. He added softly, “No point in getting them riled up for nothing. B’sides, I don’t see we’ve got much option. They’ve got all the guns.”
“Yeah,” Murphy answered. “But we don’t have to bloody well kowtow to—”
“Be quiet.” It was Shirley, indicating Upshut and several other guards coming their way, dividing the POWs into squads of ten prisoners each. Suddenly the sun was swallowed by cloud, and the marshlands, the higher ground, and the airfield were cast in a depressing gray metallic light that took the sheen of the long elephant grass. It made the airfield, now caught in a shower of rain, look farther away than it really was.
A dark column of three-ton, khaki-painted trucks was coming from the airfield. When it pulled up at the edge of the marsh about three hundred yards from the POWs, an officer alighted from one of the trucks with a PLA flunky a pace behind carrying what looked like a soapbox, but which in fact was a depleted ammunition box of sturdy construction.
The major waited for the flunky to put down the box, then mounted it as if he were Alexander the Great. Though somewhat dated in his phraseology, his English was near perfect. “I am Major Chen. You are prisoners of the People’s Liberation Army.”
“No shit!” Murphy murmured.
“You are here to work. First you will be so good as to construct your accommodation. Thirty bodies will be in each brick house. You will be pleased to build your accommodation quickly and well. Guards will direct you.”
“I’ll bet,” one of the prisoners said.
“You will behave well,” Major Chen said. He pointed northward. “After, you will assist in enlarging Ningming airfield. Anyone, man or woman, who refuses to work will be shot” He waited some seconds for the last bit to sink in. “Questions?”
Murphy had his hand up. The major pointed to him. “Speak!”
“We’re not soldiers, we’re civilians. We shouldn’t even be prisoners.”
Danny Mellin added to Murphy’s comment. “Even if you do consider us prisoners of war, under the Geneva Convention you’re not entitled—”
“Quiet!” Major Chen shouted. “I want nothing about Geneva. You are in China. The Geneva Convention is bourgeois propaganda.”
“When will we be fed?” an Englishman asked. “We haven’t eaten.”
“Rice,” Chen replied, thinking the Englishman had asked him what they would be fed. “And some fish — perhaps.”
“Medical care?” another shouted.
“The same as our soldiers,” Chen said.
“That means sweet fuck-all,” the Aussie said. Someone told him to shut up. “Up yours,” came his response.
The major said, “Troublemakers will be shot!”
None of the POWs, including Murphy, said anything. A few of them moved uneasily.
“Build well!” the major urged. “Remember the three little piggies.” Despite the tension, a prisoner, unable to contain himself, burst out laughing.
The next instant the major was walking back toward the truck, his flunky trotting after him.
“What about the three fucking piggies?” Murphy asked no one in particular.
“Do you think,” Shirley Fortescue said angrily, “that it’s possible for you to utter one sentence without using the F word?”
Murphy screwed up his face. “Not fucking likely.”
“No speaking!” one of the guards shouted, making his way toward Mellin.
“It wasn’t him,” Murphy said. “It was me.”
“No speaking!” The guard lifted the butt of his Kalashnikov threateningly. No one moved. The guard, though still glaring at Murphy, lowered the rifle. Finally he turned to Mellin. “You boss number one squad — yes.” It was half command, half question.
“All right,” Danny agreed, not seeing any alternative. Then the guard, seemingly ignorant in all other respects, made a decision that, even though he couldn’t have known, was as brilliant as any that King Solomon made. He designated Mike Murphy as “boss number two squad — yes.”
“No,” Murphy said. “I’ve got no bloody intention of helping you—”
The guard didn’t understand all the words, but he knew refusal when he heard it in any language, and he kicked Murphy in the shin, then slammed the rifle into his chest, knocking the Australian down. “Boss number two — yes.”
“Yes,” Mellin said. “He’ll do—”
“He say!” the guard shouted, lifting his rifle menacingly again.
“Yeah, all right,” Murphy gasped, pushing himself up. “Boss number two.”
The guard gave a curt nod and grunt of approval before moving on and designating eighteen more squad bosses.
“Look,” someone said, nodding toward two trucks stopping at the edge of the marshy ground, steam rising from the covered rear of each truck. The first two trucks contained boiled rice for the guards, with a helping of fish paste. The prisoners received only a bowl of rice each from the last truck, and worn-looking red plastic cups of green tea.
“And about fucking time,” Murphy quipped out of the guard’s earshot.
Mellin moved over to Shirley Fortescue as they were lining up for the meager rice ration. “Shirley, look, I know Murphy rubs you the wrong way, but try to ignore his bad language.”
“Hmm,” she answered coldly, and stopped as Upshut appeared on the scene from one of the truck cabins with a twenty-six-ounce bottle of Tsing Tao beer. He was taking the top off with his teeth, and Shirley told Mellin, “It’s like trying to ignore a bad smell.”
“C’mon,” Mellin said. “He’s okay underneath. He was the only one with guts enough to help me when I was first cap—”
Upshut was now by the tailgate of the truck, arrogantly drinking his beer. It started to rain. Upshut went back to the truck’s cabin and through the windscreen watched Ningming airfield turn to a watery blur.
As Murphy’s turn came to receive his dollop of rice and mug of green tea, he said, “Thank you,” out of habit, and returned to where the other forlorn-looking POWs were huddled in the rain.
“You’re right,” a fellow prisoner said to Mellin, checking that none of the guards was looking in his direction. “Sooner we lay those bricks, sooner we get out of this damned rain.”
There was a low murmur of approval, except for Murphy, who commented, “Fuck the bricks. Where the hell are we? This Ning-bloody-ming — how far’s it from the Chinese-Viet border?”
“ ‘Bout fourteen miles,” another Australian said, “as the crow flies.”
“Yeah,” Murphy responded. “Well, I’m a fucking crow. Anybody else? Danny?”
No one answered. More guards were headed their way, shouting at them to get up and start working. “Quickly! Quickly!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
To an outsider, the incoming flight of Hercules helos, containing Freeman’s USVUN interdiction force — made up of volunteers from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, British Special Air Services commandos, and Gurkhas — would have seemed uneventful. For some of the older men in the IFOR, however, the flight to Da Nang was a return to the old days of ‘Nam, that part of their youth that was among the most hellish and intensely felt experiences of their lives. A few among the helicopter pilots who would fly them to the Laotian-Vietnamese border would be using routes they’d used before, when Nixon had authorized secret strikes into enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos during ‘Nam.
Colonel A. Berry, chosen by Freeman to command IFOR, had distinguished himself behind enemy lines in the Gulf War against Iraq when Saddam Insane had invaded Kuwait. Berry was extraordinarily confident and well trained, like the men he led. He also had a pr
odigious memory. It was the memory of his great-grandfather schooling him in things military that came to him now, and despite the roar of the engines and the thump of the undercarriage, he could still hear the old man telling him of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu near the northern Laotian-Vietnamese border, 160 miles west of Hanoi.
The French, tired of the hit-and-run tactics of the Communist Viet Minh forces, had wanted a pitched set-piece battle, and they got it in one of the bravest and ultimately one of the most humiliating defeats in military history. The French were thrashed. Lesson one: Berry’s grandfather had told him to never ever underestimate the enemy.
* * *
The planned sabotage of the thirty-five-mile Ningming-Pingxiang-Dong Dang section of the southern rail line was called off on the express order of C in C, USVUN forces, General Jorgensen. He consulted Freeman, who in an unprecedented decision, considering his military career, agreed with the C in C that not even Delta Force or SAS, the two elite Special Forces of the United States and Great Britain respectively, should be used. No one could be used. Freeman had viewed the latest KH-14 spy satellite photos, which revealed evidence of the massive manpower of the China’s People’s Liberation Army.
What Beijing couldn’t do because it lacked the U.S. state-of-the-art technology, it did through what any economist or military strategist would call a labor-intensive operation. General Wei, drawing on reserves of the Chengdu province’s Fourteenth Sichuan army, had placed a PLA soldier every fifty yards along the thirty-five-mile rail line from Ningming to the border. In all, it came to 3,696 men, each with nothing more to do on an eight-hour shift than watch his fifty yards of track, with orders to shoot anyone who even remotely looked like a trespasser.
The first sequence of digitized satfotos relayed to Jorgensen’s USVUN HQ in Hanoi had picked up about twelve hundred dots which, on magnification, showed up as soldiers on rail-line sentry duty. But it was the second and third sequence of a section of track south of Pingxiang that showed up twice as many men, alerting USVUN’s HQ that there were three shifts of eight hours each during every twenty-four-hour period, so that each fifty yards of track effectively had three men assigned to it. They were not any of Wei’s crack front-line troops, most of them being from militia units, but they could shoot, and each man was armed with an AK-47. Rice trains came out of Dong Dang, Pingxiang, Xiash, and Ningming once a shift to feed and water the troops.
* * *
“Damn it!” Freeman complained. “I wanted that track blown up in at least three places.”
“No chance of bombing it?” Major Cline asked.
“Hell, no. The fairies won’t permit it. That’d be an ‘in China’ attack and might have ‘international repercussions.’ Besides, any pilot from ‘Nam days or any other war’ll tell you that a damn rail track is one of the most difficult targets there is. Even if the weather’s good, which it isn’t, and you do manage a pinpoint hit with a smart bomb, the sons of bitches’ll have it fixed and taking trains the next morning.”
Freeman picked up one of the satfotos and held it beneath the magnifier. “See these squares every few miles?” he asked Cline, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Their maintenance shacks have T wrenches and assorted tools. Providing the train jacks aren’t actually destroyed — which they aren’t in most cases, only the ties are busted — then they can re-lay the track.” He dropped the satfoto on the table. “Hell, with over three thousand men stationed along there, they’ve got the manpower to fix up a broken length of track in a few hours.”
“So what can we do?” Cline asked, fully expectant that, as usual, Freeman would have an alternate plan.
“I don’t know,” Freeman replied. “Meanwhile, we’ve got the PLA coming out of their holes all over Disney, bear-hugging it to death.” By “bear-hugging” Freeman meant that the PLA were pressing right up against and among his troops so that no American or other USVUN artillery could be called in against the hill without killing as many Americans as PLA, or even more. Meanwhile, the trains from Ningming kept coming, laden with troops and ammunition.
* * *
On Disney Hill the fighting was ferocious, with no quarter given by either side. Much of it was hand-to-hand, after ammunition supplies had dwindled or when the American positions on the southern side were overrun.
It was here that American technology met its Waterloo, for unlike the Chinese, who used AK-47s, most of Freeman’s troops were armed with the M-16 with grenade-launcher tubes, which won’t take a bayonet. This small but salient fact was in the end responsible for what looked like an impending USVUN-American defeat on the hill, for it meant that with bayonet attached, the AK-47 became an all but unstoppable lance in the hands of the Chinese.
Martinez and Doolittle were down to their last clips. D’Lupo was firing sporadically, hesitating every few seconds to double-check his targets in the flare light, and Rhin was down to his M60-E’s last two link belts of fifty ball rounds each when they, along with everybody else in the dawn’s early light, heard the chopping sounds of helos in the south, coming from the direction of Bien Dong. It was some Second Armored Cavalry helos heading in from as far away as Phu Lang Thuong, most of the fighter planes from the Enterprise now at the end of their loiter time and leaving. More fighters were coming in to take over the TACAIR support on the northern side of Disney, but there was little if anything the fighters could do to relieve the USVUN forces on the southern side, with Chinese and Americans in such close proximity.
Only the slicks, the helos, could help. Even so, as the Hueys, like so many giant gnats, descended in battle line, they were exposing themselves to terrible danger. The helos’ leftside gunners tried to pour concentrated fire from their pintle-mounted M-60s at pockets of Chinese troops, the helos on occasion themselves taking fire from some PLA troops near point-blank range as each Huey slick touched to unload troops, ammunition, and water.
Colonel Melbaine, commanding USVUN forces on the hill, seeing the situation quickly degenerating into crisis, was in brief radio contact with Freeman. The general, against every tenet of his “keep moving and never retreat” philosophy, concurred with Melbaine’s decision to pull the USVUN troops back down the southern side of the hill with the intention of regrouping at the fringe of the rice paddies and extricating them from the Chinese, so that U.S. artillery could pound the southern side of the hill. But Freeman, and especially Melbaine, on the spot, knew it would be one thing to give the order for his troops to withdraw and quite another to execute the maneuver.
In a microcosm of what was happening all across Freeman’s front, the withdrawal was a debacle, and in the dismal gray light of a rain-streaked dawn, confusion reigned, with General Wei’s PLA troops adapting more adroitly than anyone expected to the new situation. Showing no fear, their confidence surging with their successful and unexpected counterattack via the tunnels on Disney’s southern side, the Chinese stuck like glue to the retreating Americans and assorted USVUN troops.
The moment a squad of U.S. Second Army’s troops withdrew down the hill, the Chinese, rather than occupying and securing the vacated positions, kept pursuing the Americans and other USVUN troops. They were not only intent on driving Melbaine’s troops away from the hill but equally determined to stay among them so as to keep frustrating the attempts of Freeman’s artillery to scour Chinese positions on the hill. American casualties were mounting by the minute, over eighty men already killed, many more wounded.
However, through the bedlam of radio traffic at his HQ, Freeman kept his cool and, in an order that seemed eccentrically insignificant to Major Cline and others at the time, ordered more of his Vietnamese contingent’s mortars flown into the paddy area south of the hill where Melbaine was trying to consolidate his troops.
“Tell those helo pilots to land well back. I don’t want those mortars unloaded too close to this free-for-all on the hill. Tell them to loiter till they see a clear area from which they can pour suppressive fire.”
“Trouble is, sir,” Freema
n’s TACAIR liaison officer said, “the chinks are staying with us all the way.”
“Then have the helos loiter farther back!” Freeman said in an overriding tone of exasperation.
“Yes, sir.”
“And alert I Corps Airborne. I want them ready when we need them.”
* * *
Things were getting worse on the hill, and D’Lupo’s squad was an example of what was going wrong. Rhin, who’d been manning the M-60 machine gun, which was now so hot it was cooking off rounds without the trigger being pulled, was hit in the left leg. It was possible for him to walk, or rather limp, but he was a man down, and Martinez was already calling in a Medevac helo. The pilot, with the exemplary courage of their breed, was coming in low while the remainder of D’Lupo’s platoon stopped their retreat to quickly form a defensive perimeter around a landing zone between sheared-off trees. The firepower of the pursuing Chinese seemed to suddenly center on the Huey. The helo, the wash of its rotors kicking up dirt, leaves, and other debris, was taking hits all over, the pilot forced to take off.
In a wind shear, the helo dropped ten feet and swung sharply to the right, its rotors colliding with a broken stand of timber. The helo rose sharply, as if by some giant hand, and then fell like a grenade to the ground, its broken rotors from the main shaft and tail cartwheeling. What was left of the main rotors decapitated an American from D’Lupo’s squad, chopped up a mortar squad of Chinese, and also killed a Vietnamese machine gunner. Amazingly, the pilot suffered no more than a broken arm and severe bruising, but it slowed everyone in D’Lupo’s squad.
Freeman then made a tactical decision that would not endear him to the men of Second Army, or the American public if it got out. He made it because, as he would later cryptically tell Marte Price, “That’s what they pay me for.” He ordered squads to keep moving down the hill. He didn’t want any more calls for Medevacs because every time a slick tried to come in, every American in that sector stopped moving in order to secure the LZ, and every time the retreat slowed, it meant more men were cut down and more helos destroyed. Accordingly, Freeman ordered Melbaine to tell any wounded who couldn’t be moved to stay put and do the best they could for the time being.
