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Wray, now that his bluff was being called, wasn’t so tough. He said the trouble with killing the little bastard was all the fucking paperwork involved, but what he really meant was “killing the little bastard” was a contradiction of what they were supposedly fighting for — inconvenient stuff like habeas corpus. Without wanting to sound weak, Wray wanted to convey this to the JDF agent. “Chinese’d just take him out and shoot him in the neck if he was one of ours.”
“We don’t have to shoot him,” the JDF agent said. “There wouldn’t even be a bruise.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Wray said. “But like I said — too much friggin’ paperwork.”
“It’s up to you,” his Japanese colleague said amicably.
“Well, stick a barrel against his head and tell him to tell you who he contacted and why — I mean their specific target.”
The JDF man made a face. It was a question. What happens if he still doesn’t answer? You’ve lost all credibility. Right?
“Try it,” Wray said. “I’ve got a hunch the little bastard’ll sing like a bird.”
“Do you want to try it?” the JDF agent asked. What he meant was, You lose face if you want to, Wray-san, but not me.
“All right,” Wray said. “I’ll do it. Give him another fifteen minutes to think about it, then call me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
On the point of Freeman’s recon patrol, D’Lupo’s squad of seven men from the first platoon had moved out to the flanks and back again in cloverleaf pattern, a rifle platoon between them and the HQ section behind them, the warm jungle dampness causing their shirts to cling to them like Saran Wrap under the Kevlar bulletproof vest, each man wearing a patrol harness, pistol belt, two ammo pouches, one smoke and two fragmentation grenades, and a K-bar knife, in addition to bandoleers of machine-gun bullets, a poncho, C-rations for the ninety-six-hour probe of Chinese positions, a claymore mine, and a collapsible shovel. But all this mountain of gear, except for his M-16, was ready for instant jettisoning if necessary by a quick ruck release strap, leaving the grunt as free as possible to fight.
Behind the HQ squad of General Freeman, Major Robert Cline, Marte Price, the radio operator PFC Rhin, and the two CNN crew, was a weapons platoon led by Martinez, made up of SAS and Delta veterans. They were a rear guard, but moving as cautiously as the men on the point, lest they get caught in an ambush, should the enemy try to sucker them in by allowing the point, the HQ and rifle platoon, to pass before springing a trap.
The haunting night sounds — thousands of birds and some of the millions of bats from caves like those around Lang Son— filled the darkness with such a flood of noise that was both unnerving and reassuring, since neither side would hear the other in the middle of such a racket, unless the Chinese tried to move tanks or self-propelled heavy artillery units down the road.
The noise of the bats and the general confusion they’d caused in the undergrowth amid a variety of animals, from wild pig to small deer, serow goats, and flying squirrels, seemed to cease almost as quickly as it had started. Then it began to rain, a deluge dumped on the jungle, immediately washing off much of the insect repellent on exposed flesh. In ten minutes the downpour too had ceased, and now masses of insects, mainly mosquitoes, buzzed, and rain could be heard plopping from the trees into pools and onto the canopies of broad-leafed plants as the soldiers unavoidably brushed against them.
There was a dull thump, followed by another, then another.
“Mor—” But the mortar rounds had already landed, splitting the air, their explosions throwing up earth in huge, dark convulsions of undergrowth and fire — men screaming all around, the frenetic chattering of machine guns opening up — another scream and the purplish veined explosions of grenades, the crash of more grenades, mortars — the air hot, coming in bursts whose concussion stunned and whose shrapnel lacerated the thick vegetation like hail.
Though the farthest ahead, D’Lupo’s squad was only now coming under attack, the trap being sprung, men yelling on the perimeter, “Two o’clock — five five!” and another explosion, the air acrid with the stink of cordite and muddy earth. Hunkered down, Freeman was calling back to the trucks for a relay message to Hanoi for TACAIR from wherever he could get it.
It came, but not quickly enough. By the time four Tomcats roared in from Enterprise as dawn broke, their ordnance bristling on hard points, their vapor trails sculpted golden by the early sun, the fighting was over, the enemy had withdrawn, and Freeman’s recon force was left with nine dead and about an equal number wounded. Medevac choppers now appeared like black bugs descending. As Freeman stomped about, Marte Price, badly shaken by the attack, moved behind him from corpse to corpse. She could see his eyes moisten, but whether it was from suppressed rage, compassion, or both, she couldn’t tell.
“Goddamn it,” he said to no one in particular. “For Second Army to get mauled like that first time out in ‘Nam—”
“Excuse me, General,” Robert Cline interjected. “It’s hardly Second Army. I mean this recon force is only—”
“Numbers aren’t the point, Bob, goddamn it! I was led to understand that our approach to the snake — as our Vietnamese colleagues call the front line — would be—”
He heard a soldier moan but couldn’t see him. One of the Delta contingent had given the soldier, or what was left of him, a shot of morphine, but it couldn’t hold the pain. He was lying in the cool morning shade of a hardwood tree, his head hidden in a triangle of leaves. When Freeman neared the man and saw what was left of his face, he clamped his jaw muscles so tightly Marte Price could see them bulge. Freeman took another couple of paces toward the man and knelt beside him, gently pulling away one of the broad leaves that had acted as a curtain. The man’s face was gone, from the bright bloody pulp that had been his nose to the deep purplish red of where his eyes had been. The miracle to Freeman was that the body was still alive, its lips, lacerated, moving like some obscene puppetry. Freeman put his right ear near the man’s mouth, and he could smell the rusty metallic odor of blood and a vile stench of excrement. He nodded, looking to Marte like a priest listening to the confession of a bedridden believer. Freeman took the man’s limp right hand in his and squeezed it slightly, nodding his head. “Yes,” he said to the soldier, and with that unclipped his side holster and pulled out his .45.
“Medevacs,” Marte said. “In a few hours the wounded’ll be—”
“I know,” Freeman said without looking up. “Would you go away now — please,” and he let the .45 slide back into his holster. “Go away,” he told her, still watching the mash of bone and raw flesh. “Now!” He heard a click — a camera — and Bob Cline took her by the arm.
“My God,” she told Cline, reluctantly following him away from the tree. “For a moment there I thought the general was going to shoot him.”
“He was,” Cline said matter-of-factly, “but it would’ve panicked everyone and given our position away to any—”
They heard a scuffle behind them. “Don’t look,” the major said, but she already had and clicked her camera again. “Oh my God—”
Freeman had cut the grunt’s throat, the blood bubbling out, the man’s legs kicking about with such force they were splashing the mud up and about what was now the corpse. It wasn’t that uncommon in combat, and seasoned correspondents had seen more than one mercy killing, but it was something Marte Price hadn’t seen before, and it was always terrible to see.
Grim-faced, Freeman walked over to her. “You use that and you’ll end my career.”
Now reports were coming in from D’Lupo’s men on the front of what had been the cloverleaf formation, and from the second and third platoons, of the number of enemy killed— fourteen, and five wounded prisoners.
The terrible shock of that morning, however, didn’t fully occur until one of the four medics in the EMREF, having done all he could for his wounded buddies, moved on to help the enemy prisoners. The first was bleeding badly from shrapnel-caused lacerations to the arms and ch
est. The medic bandaged the wounds and gave the soldier a shot of morphine. It was only when he saw the second prisoner, the man’s upper right leg hit by an M-16 round, that the medic realized he wasn’t treating Chinese. Freeman was called, and arrived just as Cline was having a look at the wounded man.
“What’s up?” Freeman asked curtly, his face still creased by the strain of having put one of his own men out of his misery.
“General,” Cline replied, looking up from the wounded prisoner, “you’re not going to like this.”
“Like what, damn it?”
Marte Price’s camera clicked and whirred as it advanced the film. Freeman turned on her. “Goddamn it, lady, can’t you use a quieter gadget than that? You can hear it whirring from thirty feet away.” Marte Price said nothing — she was watching Cline exchanging a worried glance with the medic. Cline straightened up. “Sir, I think we ought to get one of our Vietnamese guides over here.”
Freeman looked down at the corpse, grimly adding, “So he doesn’t look Chinese. Probably from one of the hill tribes near the border. Chinese have Vietnamese sympathizers from the border regions. I—” He stopped, as if he’d just run out of breath. “A lot of PLA sympathizers were probably wearing those goddamned pajamas. Peasant garb. Could even be from the Laos-Vietnam border.”
The HQ phone crackled and a hushed voice from the third platoon told Freeman and his force that there was movement in the heavy underbrush at eleven o’clock, four hundred yards off on the left flank behind them and coming from the direction of the Hanoi-Lang Son road, a creaking, metallic noise.
“Tanks?” Cline asked.
“Freeman! General Free-man!” It was a high-pitched woman’s voice piercing the heavy jungle growth, but there was no reply, the EMREF’s reconnaissance force having gone to ground the instant they’d known of an approaching force. It was an old Vietnamese ruse — to learn someone’s name on the opposing force, particularly that of the commanding officer, and to call out the name, giving the impression they knew a lot about you. Even among battle-hardened veterans it was a nerve-racking experience, for no matter how many times you might be reassured by your own commander, the fact was that somehow they had discovered your name — somehow they were getting inside information and had found out exactly where you were.
“General Freeman!” The voice was coming from about a hundred yards back. “General Vinh is here.”
“Yeah, right!” D’Lupo whispered. “And I’m fucking queen of the May.”
“General Freeman. Do you hear me?”
In the HQ platoon Freeman, via radio, ordered his first platoon to swing around hard left in a cloverleaf patrol, while the remaining three of the four platoons settled in defensive posture. “Okay,” said first platoon’s sergeant quietly, turning to D’Lupo, “you take the point, queenie,” and the patrol moved out.
“General Freeman!” The woman’s voice on the left flank of the HQ platoon seemed closer now, and seven and a half tense minutes later the HQ radio crackled to life, a report coming not from the left flank but from D’Lupo’s platoon up ahead. “Alpha One to Mother Hen. We’ve got a white flag fifty feet in front of us.”
“Alpha One,” Freeman ordered, “do the same. Fly a white flag.”
D’Lupo was watching the woman. She looked Chinese. At first sight she appeared to be alone, but now that his eyes had been fixed on her for several minutes, D’Lupo and others in the squad left and right of him also saw the two men materializing on either side of her, one of the AK47s looking for all the world like a stubby branch of a tree.
Slowly D’Lupo, wondering why Freeman had been so ready to answer a white flag with a white flag, reached up to the elastic khaki band about his helmet and felt for the field dressing package, the only ready white material in his kit. “Cover me,” he whispered, hoping that the two of his men nearest him on the flanks about thirty feet away from each other and either side of him had heard him. They didn’t, but they saw D’Lupo rise slowly, the white bandage wrapped loosely around the end of his M-16.
The woman, her hands held high in surrender, advanced slowly toward D’Lupo, and now the two Vietnamese guides moved forward, stopping by the four dead Vietnamese men in the black pajamas. There was a short, rapid exchange between the guides, its tone more revealing than any translation, telling Freeman that his worst fear — any commanding officer’s worst fear — had been realized. It had been a “blue on blue,” the innocuous-sounding phrase the Army used whenever there had been a clash between “friendlies” or “allies.”
The wounded men in the black pajamas were now talking rapidly at the guides, confirming that they were part of Vinh’s men, not part of the Chinese army. The Americans had fired upon their allies — or had it been the other way around? Whatever, the failure of one side or both to properly identify the other had led to the disaster of twenty-nine Americans and Vietnamese killed and fourteen wounded. To make matters even worse, Vinh’s force on the Americans’ left flank, which the Americans had thought was the creaking noise of PLA tanks, was in fact a Vietnamese relief column moving along the Hanoi-Lang Son road, riding their bicycles — some with tires punctured, riding on the rim.
“Malaya,” Freeman said, his tone terse.
“Malaya?” Cline asked, nonplussed.
“After the Japs hit Pearl Harbor,” Freeman answered, “they drove south on the jungle roads through Malaya. Get a flat tire — they’d just keep going on the rims. Sounded like armor on the move to the Aussies and the Brits. Scared the hell out of ‘em.” It was a throwaway comment, but it reminded Captain Boyd, Freeman’s press officer, just how encompassing and particular Freeman’s knowledge of military history was.
* * *
Marte Price was having a war of conscience about whether or not to file her fax report on Freeman’s mercy killing and his use of “Japs” instead of “Japanese,” when she saw the two Vietnamese guides talking fast and gesticulating wildly, looking down at and up from the dead men in the black-pajamas-cum-uniforms. She knew, then, she had a really big story: two legendary old foes — the United States and Vietnam— represented by Freeman and Vinh, both commanding “specialist forces,” had screwed up.
Marte Price’s story about “friendly fire” would be avidly picked off the wire service by hundreds of newspapers in the U.S. But it was CNN, with its four phone and “umbrella” antenna, that almost instantly sped the pictures of the American dead to its billions of viewers all over the world via satellite.
Both Freeman and Vinh refused to be photographed for what they both — Freeman vociferously, Vinh less so but just as firmly — referred to as propaganda for Beijing. And they were right. The blue on blue or “friendly fire” episode that had killed the four Vietnamese gave way to charges by GIs that yet another Army situation was definitely FUBAR — fucked up beyond all recognition.
Other mild pejoratives, courtesy of CNN, rained down from U.S. soldiers and Chinese alike, and for the first time since the terrible tank battles at Skovorodino in another U.N.-sanctioned intervention, General Douglas Freeman, though still not knowing who had fired the first shot, took full front-on responsibility for the debacle. In private he was fuming, knowing that his overall command of the U.S. forces in Vietnam was in jeopardy.
The only good news he received that day was the ringing endorsements of his corps commanders of Second Army, now en route to Vietnam from Japan. Many of them had been with him at Skovorodino in Siberia, where his armor was lured into a trap by “false” tanks that U.S. aerial reconnaissance had spotted, and those in Second Army who remembered the humiliation also remembered Freeman’s audacious comeback in some of the largest tank battles since Kursk.
In Washington there were congressional calls for his, Freeman’s, removal as C in C of the U.N. force, but the President and Joint Chiefs held firm. All of them knew the pitfalls of command — particularly the huge psychological bridge that had to be crossed by old foes, such as Vinh and Freeman suddenly having to form a coalition.
And in one of the strange paradoxes of modern politics, General Vinh — who had fought so hard as a young man against the Americans, in particular the American Division in the Vietnamese War — was now welcomed aboard by Rush Limbaugh and others on the political right of the media, and within days Vinh’s defense of Freeman was used to batter the democratic left into virtual silence. But Greenpeace complained that the U.S. transport ships carrying Second Army toward Vietnam were flushing out their bilges at sea and thereby endangering the delicate sea life ecosystem in the waters off the China coast.
Freeman, who was clearly meant to be cowed by this second public salvo against him, responded via Marte Price, that Greenpeace’s complaint sounded like a lot of “bilge” to him and that Greenpeace might better occupy itself with concerns about the “delicate ecosystem of human beings in and around Lang Son” who lay dead and dying as a direct result of the worst pollution of all — invasion by what was now over ten divisions — over 130,00 °Chinese shock troops.
“How do we know they were shock troops. General?” press officer Boyd asked afterward.
“Because,” Freeman replied, “they gave us a hell of a shock, that’s why.”
“Yes, sir,” said Boyd.