by Larry Bond
If there was a surprise, it had come from the Chinese. Their equipment was better in many respects than had been predicted, but their leadership was much worse. The generals running the war had been more timid than Perry expected, shutting down drives when dealt the slightest setback.
On the one hand, this was a valuable psychological insight: it told Perry that the Chinese army had quite a distance to go before it would truly achieve its potential. On the other hand, it was the sort of flaw that might be reversed quickly, if the right general were found to lead the charge and then clean house. But whether a Chinese Ulysses S. Grant emerged or not, the advantages the Chinese held over the Vietnamese were so extensive that even a McClellan would win this war in a matter of weeks.
Which brought Perry to the question of what the U.S. should do.
The United States could defeat China in a head-to-head battle. No war was easy; Perry knew from his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan that even a lopsided battle brought heartache and pain to the victor. But defeating China in Southeast Asia was possible. The key was acting quickly and decisively, with massive amounts of force.
A-10As and Apaches were only the tip of the spear as Perry saw it. He needed a lot more force. And he’d asked for it.
The idea wasn’t simply to stop the Chinese and get them out of Vietnam. They had to be soundly defeated—a strong punch in the nose that sent them to the mat. Such a strike would convince their army that the Americans weren’t to be messed with. Better, it would undermine China’s premier. And that was the key to a peaceful future: ousting Cho Lai from power.
The Chinese had seen decades of wise leaders. While they certainly hadn’t always acted in America’s best interests, they had recognized the importance of peace to their, and the world’s, prosperity. Cho Lai was a different character entirely, a throwback to times when brutality ruled. That approach would eventually be disastrous for everyone; the sooner he was removed, the better.
So, massive involvement by the U.S. now made a lot of sense ... but what if that wasn’t possible? What if the best the U.S. could do were wing-and-a-prayer operations along the lines that Major Murphy had undertaken against Hainan?
By conventional measures, the operation there had been a success— the Chinese had completely overreacted, apparently scrapping all plans for a seaborne assault, at least in the near term. But that had had minimal impact on the longer term. The war continued and would continue, as the new assault proved.
While certainly valuable from the Vietnamese perspective, such small tactical victories would not change the overall outcome of the war if the U.S. stayed out of it.
They were poisoned victories from the American perspective. For one thing, the longer the war went on, the more likely a Chinese Grant would emerge. The longer the Chinese army fought, the more experience their “middle managers”—the NCOs and junior officers—would gain for the future.
If the U.S. was eventually going to have to fight China, and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do it now, then it was definitely in America’s best interest to have the PLA as inexperienced and even overconfident as possible. In that sense, small setbacks aided them immensely.
Perry also feared that any revelation that the U.S. was involved would provoke a severe reaction among the American public. Everyone he spoke to at the Pentagon made it clear that public sentiment was against intervention. Throw in a congressional investigation and a bunch of headlines about dead Americans in Vietnam, and they might turn against the Army itself.
The longer the war in Vietnam continued, the more tempting it would be for the president—any president—to continue adding troops and support on a piecemeal basis. Perry could frame the argument himself: Look at what Zeus Murphy had accomplished with a handful of men, most supplied by Vietnam. What might an entire SEAL team and an attachment of Rangers, a few Delta boys, and some clandestinely inserted CIA paramilitaries accomplish?
And once they were there, the logic for more would be inescapable.
Incrementalism killed you: put a full force in at the very beginning, and you could win. Play into battle piecemeal and watch yourself get ground down. That was a basic lesson of just above every battle in history.
Harland Perry stood at a crossroads. The President—who happened to be a personal friend-—had sent him here for advice.
He had made a suggestion for extreme force, and been rejected. Not yet in so many words, but the delays showed Greene lacked enough public support to commit troops.
So now Harland Perry had to make another recommendation. His advice would be to withdraw completely and quickly—to simply stand aside.
It was almost certainly not what the President wanted to hear. And while it was extremely logical, it went against Perry’s own wishes and emotions—his instinct was to fight, and much better sooner rather than later.
But emotions didn’t win battles; logic did. And it was his duty and responsibility as an officer to present the President, most especially this President, with the best recommendation he could make.
~ * ~
20
Hanoi
It had been about a week since Zeus had seen Captain Thieu and his Aereo L-39C, a small jet trainer used by the Vietnamese for a variety of tasks. In the interim, Thieu had flown several sorties a day, and the plane bore the scars. The little warbird had been hit by nearly a hundred rounds of ground fire, including a few from Vietnamese guns. Fortunately, the bullets had been both small and unlucky, missing the Aereo’s vitals. The majority of holes had been patched, though there seemed to be a few perforations in its rear belly from the most recent mission—a quick hop north to check on the Chinese formations a few hours earlier.
If the rings under his eyes were any indication, Thieu had had less sleep in the past twenty-four hours than Zeus. Yet he seemed energetic as he walked Zeus around the aircraft prior to their takeoff. A quartet of small bombs had been fastened to the wings; they supplemented the 23 mm twin-cannon mounted beneath the fuselage. Aircraft were so precious that even his recce mission would be combined with an attack sortie.
“Think those holes will be a problem?” Zeus asked, pointing to a few fresh notches in the belly.
Thieu laughed. “Ha-ha, Major Zeus, always making jokes.”
“Those are holes,” said Zeus.
“No worry. Board now.”
The Albatros was a two-seater, and Zeus sat in the rear. He had a flight stick and throttle, and Thieu insisted on giving him a quick orientation on how to use the controls if something happened.
“This way, if I am shot, you will land,” said Thieu over the plane’s interphone circuit. “Plane is very valuable.”
“What makes you think they’d get you and not me?” said Zeus.
“Ha! You are very lucky man, Major Zeus. The captain is very lucky to be flying with you today.”
“Oh yeah. I’m just oozing luck.”
The oxygen pumped into his mask gave Zeus a jolt of energy. Having flown with Thieu before, he had skipped breakfast—a decision vindicated by the roller-coaster takeoff that buried his stomach somewhere behind the tailplane.
“See—we miss all potholes!” said Thieu triumphantly as they climbed out.
The sun wouldn’t rise for another half hour. The dim sky and darker ground made it hard for Zeus to orient himself. The course Thieu laid out was due east to the sea, then north along Route 18 in the direction of Tien Yen.
Zeus strained to see out the sides of the cockpit, looking for lights or other signs of life. But there was nothing, just shades of gray.
“Do you prepare for bombing?” Thieu asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“We will drop our bombs first, then make our observations,” said the pilot.
“Are we that close to the lines already?” Zeus glanced at the compass for the heading. They were still going east.
“We turn and be prepared,” answered Thieu. “Ready?”
“Anytime.”
The plane took a s
low bank. They were traveling just under seven hundred kilometers an hour by the plane’s gauges—in the area of 375 knots, or nautical miles an hour. That put them a little more than five minutes from the front line, by Zeus’s calculation.
Something red sparked in the distance. Zeus stared at it, unsure what it could be. It looked like a splash of paint on a photograph, something that didn’t belong.
More red appeared, a line of splashes.
Tracers!
They were a lot closer to the front than he’d thought. The Chinese were at Tien Yen already.
“Gunfire ahead,” said Thieu.
“Ours or theirs?”
“No matter.”
Zeus heard Thieu speaking to someone over the radio. The aircraft took a sharp bank to the left, then swung its nose back northward. The altimeter indicated they were at five thousand feet above ground level— well within the reach of whatever was firing ahead.
Probably Vietnamese antiair, thought Zeus. But what were they shooting at? Not them.
Zeus saw the answer in a string of black dots behind the flashes.
Chinese helicopters. Two of the dots were flying to the right, the others were slightly behind in echelon.
The dots at the right glowed red. They were firing rockets or something at the ground.
The antiaircraft fire intensified. Yellow-red streams leapt from the ground, bullets hosing the air. One stream turned black; another died. The ground flashed. A fire erupted.
“Hold on, Major,” said Thieu. “Our fun begins.”
The jet suddenly twisted on its wing, pushing down to Zeus’s left. The nose angled down, gently at first, but then in a flick of the pilot’s wrist almost ninety degrees. The plane became a dagger aimed at the earth. Zeus felt his stomach push toward his spine.
The left wing lifted; the nose swung hard to Zeus’s right. He strained to see, raising his head over the side of the cockpit, but gravity pushed him back down into his seat. The plane shot upward—straight up it seemed, though by this time Zeus was so dizzy he had no real idea of the direction they were going. His head slammed back against the rest. The engines surged behind him.
“I think we got him!” yelled Thieu. He could have been at a baseball game, cheering a grand slam.
“What?”
“The tank,” said Thieu. “You see it?”
Zeus struggled to look out the canopy. The ground was dark. If there was smoke or fire from the explosion it was lost in a blur of shadows as they zoomed away.
“I don’t know,” said Zeus.
“Look on next run. Will be to your left.”
“You didn’t drop all the bombs?” Zeus asked, but his words were swallowed by the engines as the pilot coaxed more power for another plunge toward the battlefield.
Everything outside the canopy blurred. The Albatros was not a particularly fast aircraft as jet fighters went, yet it seemed to be flying at the speed of thought.
Fingers of red fire appeared at the side, uncurling from black fists. Angry hands grabbed at the plane. The jet bucked ferociously as the pilot neared his target.
Crap, thought Zeus. Let’s get this over with.
He glanced at the handle he was supposed to pull if they needed to bail out. They were so low here ... Would he even survive to be captured?
Hoo-rah.
They pulled up sharply, the aircraft gaining several hundred feet as the bombs were dropped. Zeus strained to keep his head where he could see outside the cockpit. There were black boxes on the ground— armored personnel carriers, he guessed, not tanks.
Or maybe they were tanks, or armored cars, or infantry fighting vehicles, or just trucks—it was too dark and they flitted by so quickly, who could tell?
Something hit the right wing. Zeus heard a screeching sound, something like metal being torn in two. The plane bucked for a moment, then righted itself. He pushed himself up against the restraints, craning his neck to see the wing, but he couldn’t quite see anything.
“Close one, Major,” said the pilot.
“Were we hit?” asked Zeus.
“Two bullets, maybe. Nothing. It would take many to harm us.”
Zeus doubted that. Just one bullet in the right place would surely be enough.
“Now we ready look on your mission,” said Thieu. His English got shakier as he became more excited, and he was clearly in the middle of an adrenaline rush at the moment. “We go to north.”
“More to the northwest, right?”
“Oh ho, Major, you are remember your compass.”
Thieu sounded absolutely high, as if he were stoned on cocaine. It was just adrenaline—and the excitement of survival. Some men pressed down under the continuing strain. For others, the stress became a drug, something you almost lived for.
Had Zeus been craving that high when he decided to take on the tanks at the border?
“Are you still with me, Major?” asked Thieu.
“I’m here.”
“Do you see the river on the right? That is Ky Cung.”
Zeus looked out the side of the cockpit. The sun was just below the horizon, and the ground still blurred into different shades of gray. But as his eyes adjusted and his mind focused, the dark blotches turned into colors, the shapes into objects that he had some hope of recognizing. He saw hills first, then a road they were passing, and finally the river, a surprisingly straight slit of black almost parallel to the aircraft’s path.
The Chinese border lay a few miles beyond the river. Zeus stared from the aircraft, straining to see activity.
“I am going to fly up Highway three-one,” said the pilot. “We will see what we can see.”
Zeus held his breath as the plane turned almost ninety degrees in a matter of seconds. Thieu dropped lower, edging the plane down toward the mountain that the highway ran through. This wasn’t so Zeus could get a better look—the lower the plane was, the harder it would be for any Chinese patrols or radars to spot.
The road tucked left and right, disappearing under the canopy. Zeus examined the terrain, trying to get a feel for how it would be to run a division through it. This was the real reason he’d come—it was one thing to stare at satellite photos and Global Hawk images, and quite another to see the land in person, even from three or four thousand feet.
What puzzled him was the fact that the Chinese had not come through here. But now it was clear. If you attacked on this route, you would be limited to the main road. The road net was limited and the sharp terrain made it exceedingly difficult to find an alternate route. Unlike the area farther east, there were no interconnected farm fields that could be used as temporary passages.
“Border is near,” said Thieu. “We may have shots.”
The pilot laughed. The aircraft had been steadily slowing; they were now doing only a bit more than a hundred knots, closing in on the plane’s stall speed—the speed at which it stopped staying in the air. But the low altitude made it appear as if they were going much faster.
There were houses ahead, on both sides of the road. The war seemed not to have reached here; smoke curled in thin lines, breakfast fires only.
Jungle.
Thieu raised his nose slightly. Zeus saw a line ahead—a fence, he thought, but it turned out to be a power line, or maybe telephone wires.
More houses, buildings. There was a barrier in the road.
“Guns on the right,” said Thieu.
Zeus raised his head, staring. He spotted what looked like tanks on a hilltop. They were ZSU-57-2s, ancient Russian-made antiaircraft guns. They didn’t fire. The Albatros continued northward, deeper into China. Its straight-line path took it away from the road, which curved left.
The ground was thick jungle, a deep green that undulated with the hills. Just as they started to bank westward, the color changed from green to a dark brown. The trees were dead, killed by a three-year drought—the rainfall pattern changed dramatically on the other side of the hills.
A good place to stage armor for an attack, Ze
us thought. But he couldn’t see any.
“Uh-oh,” said Thieu.
“Problem?”
One of the warning systems began to bleat.
“They are finding us on their radar. No worry,” said Thieu.
Zeus’s stomach jumped very close to his mouth as the pilot put the plane into a sharp dive and turn. The sensor stopped beeping.
“We have to turn south,” said Thieu, reluctance creeping into his voice. “Pingxiang is ahead.”