South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  “We’ll get to them later,” Freeman promised. “By Christ, I’ll go in later and get those boys out myself. But damn it, right now we have to get our forces out of there or they’ll all be chopped to pieces.”

  * * *

  On the hill, in the cacophony of battle, the order did not go down well. Martinez was yelling to Rhin over the sound of mixed small-arms fire, the scream of other wounded men, and the steady woomph! woomph! woomph! of the Hueys overhead, being told to exit the area, their M-60 machine gunners risking a burst only now and then, when there was little or no chance of hitting USVUN troops, which wasn’t very often.

  “Don’t worry, man,” Martinez called out to Rhin. “Old man says he’s gonna come in himself and get you guys out later on.”

  “Yeah, right,” Rhin said. ‘Tell the old man to go fuck himself.” Rhin’s face was a grimace, but it wasn’t from pain, the morphine shot coursing through his veins. It was sheer anxiety creasing his face, Rhin wondering what in hell would happen when the morphine wore off and Chinese were closing in. Martinez grabbed a bandoleer of 7.62mm ammo for the M-60 from D’Lupo, who wasn’t doing much of anything, and gave it to Rhin, who he knew would have to feed the belt himself in the absence of boxed magazine ammo.

  “Aw, shit,” Martinez said. “I’m staying with Rhin.” Martinez dragged the M-60 toward him and set it up so that Rhin could feed in the belt.

  “Hey, soldier!” a captain from Bravo Company yelled. “Move out down this hill. Now.”

  “But sir—”

  “Do as I fucking s—” He never uttered another word, an AK-47 round bursting his head open at the base of his skull, bone splinters and blood blown out like an aerosol spray.

  “Move!” a sergeant yelled to Martinez while returning fire at the closing Chinese troops.

  “Go!” Rhin said. “Get outta here — go, man!”

  Martinez slapped Rhin on the shoulder. “See you, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  As the remaining American and. USVUN troops ran, crawled, and moved however they could down Disney Hill, Wei’s PLA swarmed onto the hill, more and more coming out of the tunnels. Their losses were staggering: over four hundred casualties in firefights and rushing tactics in less than twenty minutes, and still they kept coming, many of the retreating Americans unable to fire weapons because the M-60 barrels, despite new nonferrous lining, were overheating.

  The Chinese, over two thousand of them now on the hill, kept pressing the attack, which, to the delight of General Wei in his HQ just south of Pingxiang, was fast becoming one of the most humiliating routs in U.S. military history. In the southern Chinese dialect, Wei’s and Wang’s staff were referring to the Americans as “chicken chow mein.”

  The Americans, nearing the base of the hill and trying to put as much distance as possible behind them so artillery could be called in, fought desperately to consolidate their position before the entire rout became a massacre, the spearhead companies of Wei’s Chengdu army moving down the hill, killing every American left behind.

  Some Americans and other USVUN soldiers now out of ammunition put up their hands in surrender. One of them was Private Rhin. As he sat there, his hands up, he saw one Chinese soldier approaching him cautiously as if melting in a mirage, the heat haze caused by the red-hot barrel of his M-60, which had just jammed. His hands up higher, Rhin sought to reassure the PLA soldier, “No booby traps, man, I’m clean.” Rhin knew that the Chinese soldiers, more of them nearing his position now, couldn’t understand the words, but he hoped they’d understand his tone. “I’m safe, man — no booby traps.”

  The Chinese nearest Rhin looked down at the big American soldier as if he had never seen a black man before, then bayoneted him through the heart.

  Under Wei’s express orders, no prisoners were taken. Prisoners in combat were a nuisance and could cost you valuable rice rations and water.

  * * *

  Marte Price tried to report the battle of Disney Hill as objectively as she could, telling of Freeman’s controversial order that had ended in tragedy for the men like Rhin left on the bloodied hill, but CNN was carrying the story under the news headline as FREEMAN’S FOLLY.

  Pierre LaSalle didn’t even pretend to be objective. His hardhitting piece for Paris Match, with photos, accused Freeman of ineptitude and heartlessness while at the same time implying that the men of the U.S. Second Army were cowardly and, from a strictly military point of view, had deserved to lose and be swept off Disney Hill.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  At the Ningming airfield’s POW camp, Mike Murphy, Danny Mellin, Shirley Fortescue, and the other assorted two hundred prisoners taken either from the Spratly Island claims or oil rigs were waking up from a wet, cold night spent under badly leaking, rat-holed tarpaulins.

  “In line!” came a guard’s instruction.

  The straggly line of worn, tired faces, bodies shuffling toward the feed trucks, looked more like a column of refugees, some who had caught cold in days and nights since they’d been captured, coughing and sneezing, unwittingly spreading their germs among their malnourished companions.

  For Mellin, the problem in trying to oppose the Chinese order that they all become “construction workers”—by which the Chinese really meant construction slaves — to first build their own huts to house them, was in trying to organize his fellow prisoners. With his military background, Mellin had immediately seen that even with the simple problem of getting their rice and tea ration, what was needed was armylike organization instead of having them all moving about at random like lost sheep.

  The ration this morning was the same as before: a wooden bowl of white, sticky, boiled rice and a mug of tepid water with only the faintest aroma of tea.

  “Jesus,” Murphy said, pulling a threadbare blanket about him as he received his ration. “Looks like they just passed the racking tea bag over this tub of—” The cup flew from his hand, knocked away by the server’s ladle, an AK-47 butt striking him hard on the head and shoulder, sending him sprawling on the wet, muddy ground, his rice bowl upturned. The guards about the rice truck burst out laughing as they watched the Australian scrabbling in the mud to get the rice back into the bowl. He asked for another cup of “tea.” He was refused.

  “Bad man!” one of the guards said. Murphy had to be content with picking out the mud from the rice and using his plastic POW cup to catch some of the runoff water from the tarpaulins to drink and to clean the rice as best he could.

  “He’ll never learn,” Shirley Fortescue told Danny Mellin as they congregated with the other prisoners under their tarpaulin.

  “No,” Danny agreed, his tone, unlike Fortescue’s, one of compassion, which she thought was misplaced.

  “Well,” she said, “he asks for it, doesn’t he? I mean, I don’t like what these bloody Chinese are doing either but — well, what I’m trying to say—”

  “Yeah!” said Murphy, who had been walking toward them in the crowd. “What are you trying to say, Shirl, about these bloody Chinese?” Despite his anger of a moment before, Murphy was now grinning like a victorious teenager, perhaps, Shirley thought, because the Australian had caught her using a swear word.

  “What I’m saying, Mr. Murphy,” she answered stiffly, “is that one has to get on with people.”

  “People,” Murphy said sneeringly. “These aren’t bloody people, sweetheart. They’re our enemy.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “Yeah, I know,” the Australian responded, loudly enough, Danny thought, to bring the guards down on him again if he wasn’t careful. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Murphy continued, his voice growing louder. “You mean we should suck up to ‘em, don’t ya? Kiss their ass. Well, not me, sis.”

  “Hold it down,” someone said. “Upshut’s coming our way.”

  Either Upshut hadn’t heard Murphy or was too busy to want to do anything about it.

  “In line,” he shouted. “Quick! Quick!” He laboriously informed them through the camp interpreter
, Comrade Lu, that they must build the mud huts in one day. “No huts, no big covers.” He meant no more tarpaulins to sleep under. “You understand?”

  “Yes,” Mellin said, speaking as leader for his squad of ten.

  After Upshut had gone, Murphy said, albeit quietly this time, “A hut in a day. No fucking way, mate.”

  “Why not?” Danny said. “Twenty of us. We’ve got the concrete bricks. They’ve been kept dry under their tarpaulins. We can start now.”

  “Oh, can we?” Murphy answered, looking from Mellin to Shirley Fortescue. “Listen, bud, you’ve been listening to this sheila too much. I thought the whole idea wasn’t to help the chinks, but to break out if we could. Fourteen miles to the border, mate.”

  “I never said anything about escaping,” Danny said. “Besides, it’d be a lot longer than fourteen miles. That’s in a direct line.”

  Murphy, his blanket still wrapped around him, glared at the American. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Yank, eh? Day I helped you up, I thought I was picking up someone with guts.”

  “Be quiet,” someone else said.

  “Yes,” another hissed. “You’ll get us all in a jam.”

  “In a jam!” Murphy said loudly, his eyes bright with anger. “You fucking dodos, don’t you understand? Didn’t you listen to Uncle Lu? You’re already in a fucking jam. They want you to build your own friggin’ prison to lock you up in, and you’re just gonna do it.” The Australian’s head was jerking left and right as if suddenly overtaken by a nervous tic.

  “What would you do?” Shirley Fortescue asked him. “Refuse and get shot?”

  “No, but—” He stopped as if he’d forgotten the question, his head again in a nervous tic, less violent than it was a minute before, but still there. “I–I wouldn’t help ‘em,” he said. “You know, go-slow tactics.”

  “For Chrissake,” someone said. “Lower your voice.” Murphy tried, but was only partially successful, his voice rising and dropping without any warning or apparent control. “Accidents,” he blurted out. “Y’know — make me mortar too wet— y’know.”

  People edged away from him. They all knew what they’d get for any kind of sabotage. The Australian wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “Listen up.” It was Danny. “Before we start, I want to make a request. A guy in one of the other groups is pretty ill. Kept him on one of their ships. Hardly fed him at all. I’m asking everybody to save a spoon or two of rice per meal over the next few days. Give it to me. Okay with everybody?”

  There was a murmur of assent, however reluctant they were to share their already meager rations.

  “How bad is he?” Shirley asked Danny.

  “What? Sorry, what was that?”

  “How ill is he?” she asked.

  “Well, without the extra rice, he probably won’t make it.”

  Shirley moved off toward their brick pile, asking no more questions. Danny Mellin was glad. He’d just told them all a blatant lie, but he figured that by the time anyone found out, he’d have gotten the rice he wanted.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  With Hanoi 150 miles away to the east, and the refueling depot at Ban Lot behind them, the command helo and the three big “bananas,” or Chinook troop carriers, carrying Freeman’s interdiction force, two Huey gunships on the flanks, approached the Laotian-Vietnamese border in a mist that wreathed the hills and filled the valley around Dien Bien Phu.

  The joint U.S.-British Ranger/SAS/Gurkha Special Forces group was under the overall command of U.S. Army Colonel Berry, with British SAS Major Anthony Leigh-Hastings and U.S. Ranger Captain Walter Roscoe, Jr., assisting. The three-platoon-sized force had been ordered by Freeman to go in four miles south-southwest of Dien Bien Phu along the valley floor to a point one mile west of the Ban Cong Deng road junction near the southern end of the valley.

  Their secret mission was to interdict the road that wound eastward out of Deo Tay Chang, a small Vietnamese settlement only a mile east of the Laotian border. It was hoped the Special Force would engage and stop the infiltration of any Khmer Rouge-led enemy column before the latter could reach the Ban Cong Deng junction and have the luxury of either heading north to Dien Bien Phu, just inside Vietnam, or east, farther into Vietnam.

  As the big Chinooks descended into the mist, their woka, woka, woka sound beating the air, curdling the mist, the thirty men in each helo gripped their weapons and their bulletproof Kevlar vests, which most of them had been sitting on against the prospect of losing their genitals from ground fire, a fear they shared with all heloborne troops.

  The two M-60s on each of the two gunships opened up, pouring down what the gunners hoped would be suppressive fire in the event that, contrary to Green Beret recon team info, the Khmer-led insurgents had already reached the Ban Cong Deng junction east of the landing zone.

  The moment the first helo landed, Rangers and SAS fanned out forward and aft of the Chinook to establish a fire perimeter, the rotor wash sending shivering waves of water in a nearby paddy, rice stalks bending in the fearsome wind and howl of the man-made storm. There was no return fire, and soon all three LZs were declared secure. The helos disappeared into the mist, the chopping of their rotors growing fainter. Suddenly, as the jungle swallowed up the last of the ninety commandos of the Ranger/SAS/Gurkha force, it was as if nothing had ever disturbed the stillness of this remote valley where, over four decades before, the French had met their modern Waterloo.

  “Now the tricky part’s over,” Major Leigh-Hastings said. “The hard part begins.” He meant setting up ambush in terrain where the difference between being the hunted or the hunter could be a matter of seconds, the movement of a leaf, the crack of a twig.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  It wasn’t until some of the incoming wounded — not those on Disney Hill, but from the accompanying or western left flank attacked by Wei’s troops — were brought in by the Medevac helos to the MUST that the extent of the wounds among USVUN troops became known.

  In the heat of the battle, few but the medics had noticed that enemy bullets, not shrapnel, had been splitting open the Kevlar bulletproof vests. By the time the wounded were on the operating table, the vests had been taken off, revealing horrific chest and head wounds caused by just one bullet. It was almost impossible to stop the bleeding, and there were hundreds of minute, razor-sharp pieces.

  The doctors at first assumed the wounds had been caused by mortar shrapnel. But it wasn’t a surgeon or medic who would eventually solve the problem, it was Freeman, who had flown in via chopper from his HQ at Phu Lang Thuong after hearing about the new kinds of wounds. He’d also heard that the PLA had been firing on the Medevac choppers, using the Red Cross insignia on the nose and side as aiming points.

  “That’s nothing new,” he said, thinking aloud. “We’ll have to have a fighter escort for the most serious cases, after they’ve been patched up and sent on to our hospital ship in the gulf.” He turned to Cline just as they were landing. “Bob, while I look at the sitreps, you get me X rays of some of our boys with those wounds everyone’s talking about.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Bob, bring me actual fragments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Freeman exited the chopper in its dust storm, he instinctively ducked and returned a salute to a colonel of artillery whose expression told him something else had gone wrong.

  “What is it, Colonel?”

  “Sir, we’re losing more men on the hill.”

  “Why? There shouldn’t be any of our men left on the hill. I gave an order to withdraw.”

  “I know, sir, but some of the guys stayed with the wounded. They’re getting cut to pieces by PLA mortars, and I don’t want to send arty in on them — kill our own men.”

  “Colonel,” Freeman said, “if we don’t move those damned Chinese off the base of that hill, we’ll have to withdraw farther back into those goddamned paddies, and once we get stuck in them, we’ll never get out. You listen to your FAC, use H.E. and fire fo
r effect.” He meant for the colonel to listen to his forward air controller, who was up ahead in a Bird Dog 1 or Cessna, flying around at ninety miles per hour within range of PLA small-arms and triple A fire. If the colonel fired for effect, laying the high explosive down where the FAC told him, then hopefully the American arty of 105mm and 155mm would hit pockets of Chinese rather than U.S. and other USVUN troops.

  Even so, both men knew some fellow Americans would get hit. But they also knew that if U.S. artillery wasn’t used on the position, then the Chinese swarming down the hill would kill even more Americans in the paddies. Now the artillery colonel became the next son of a bitch that day as Americans died on the Loc Binh front, no matter that the FAC-directed arty, given the battle conditions, was as accurate as anyone could have hoped for. Freeman took full responsibility for the order, and earned the unenviable reputation of being the first American commander since World War II to call down artillery fire on his own men. Only the Chinese did that.

  In just over seventeen minutes of vicious close-in fighting, when attackers and attacked both ran out of ammunition and the fighting became hand-to-hand, as it had earlier farther up the hill, the momentum of the PLA attack faltered. In those seventeen minutes, which seemed like seventeen hours to two dozen or so American and USVUN troops, Freeman’s artillery stopped the Chinese advance, giving his men at the paddies’ edge time to get behind the long dike and set up defensive positions as slicks, Huey helos, flew in and dropped off ammo, Baby Ruth bars, and water supply.