by Ian Slater
All right, Ellman thought, that’s enough — we read the State Department memos too.
Even so, Noyer appreciated the President making the point. It was surprising how few congressmen fully appreciated the fact that there were serious divisions within China, which, if handled adroitly by agencies such as the CIA, could help the fight against the PLA.
The President turned to Noyer. “Have we enough operatives of our own in China?”
“No, sir. That’s why it would be good to have some liaison with Taipei on this.”
“We already have liaison with them,” CNO Reese cut in. “Unofficially, of course.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Noyer replied. “But I mean at the highest levels.”
“Such as?” the President inquired.
Noyer decided to press a little. In the firm it was called covering-your ass. “I mean, sir, that if we had the chief executive’s authorization to negotiate a deal with Taipei.”
The President was doodling on his desk’s leather-bordered blotter. “All right,” he replied. “You have the chief executive’s go-ahead, Dave, but I caution you that if it’s screwed up in any way, no one in this room’ll remember anything about authorization.” He looked at Ellman and the Joint Chiefs. “Is that understood?” They nodded their assent.
“We’ll be discreet,” Noyer put in. “I have just the person in—”
“No!” the President cut in. “I don’t want to know whether it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. Nothing! Nada!”
They all smiled in agreement. They were the President’s men.
“Of course,” the President added, his tone much lighter now that the serious decision had been made to help foment trouble in South China — or anywhere else along General Wei’s and General Wang’s supply line—”knowing you, Dave, you’ll probably have one of their goddamn pirates representing us.”
There was hearty laughter except, Ellman noticed, from David Noyer, who merely smiled politely. “The main thing,” the President said, grasping Noyer affectionately on the shoulder, “is that we help Freeman. Until he gets up to proper strength over there with men and materiel, he’ll need all the assistance we can give him.”
It was the understatement of the year.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Chinese were pushing south all along the fifteen-mile Dong Dang-Lang Son front, with follow-up divisions from the Chengdu military region’s Fourteenth Group Army pouring through the hole punched out by artillery at Lang Son. Troops spilled down into the patchwork quilt fertile valley southwest of Loc Binh, eleven miles southeast of Lang Son.
Here they were joined by forward elements of several divisions, 34,000 men, from Guangzhou’s Fifteenth Group Army of 56,000 men. The remaining 22,000 troops were split between an infantry division of 13,000 and an airborne division of 9,099 officers and enlisted men and kept in reserve in and around Lang Son to help repulse any breakthroughs in what the PLA commanders knew would be the inevitable American-led U.N. and Vietnamese counterattack.
The two commissars — the political officers — of General Wei’s and General Wang’s armies had joined forces and convinced Wei of their argument to keep pushing south to Hanoi. Wang, however, was arguing that both group armies, while still north of Hanoi, should pivot eastward near Phu Lang Thuong, and instead of worrying about Hanoi, should head for the vital port of Haiphong, thirty-five miles to the east.
One of the political officers interjected, “Comrade, your plan to turn east toward Haiphong is most commendable militarily-”
“Commendable?” Wang cut in. “It is in my view essential.” His fingers jabbed at the map of northern Vietnam. “Haiphong is the tail of the American supply line. If we capture Haiphong, we can prevent supplies from Japan from ever reaching Freeman’s troops.”
“I have already said, comrade, that militarily this is sound — as far as it goes. But Hanoi is the capital and is only twenty-five miles from Phu Lang Thuong. The capture of the Vietnamese capital would be of major psychological significance. Once the capital falls, morale collapses.”
“That,” Wang replied, “is a hypothesis, comrade. Haiphong is a fact.”
“Only another twenty-five miles south, comrade.”
Wang pointed to the map. “Twenty-five miles, comrade, can be a life’s journey. Yes, we have done well so far — because we have had the element of surprise — but now that is gone, and the Americans will soon launch an attack.”
“If we keep striking south, General, we will overrun Hanoi, and then the Americans will withdraw as they did once before, when Saigon fell. They will flee like rabbits, and Vinh’s Vietnamese will withdraw ever southward.”
“Will they?” Wang asked, his skeptical tone indicating quite clearly what he thought of the political officer’s conclusion.
“Yes,” the political officer answered, his confidence as evident as Wang’s skepticism. “The Americans, comrade, have no more stomach for another long war in Vietnam.”
Wang shook his head. “The Americans have no stomach for another defeat in Vietnam — or anywhere else, comrade. Iraq revived their confidence. And Haiti.”
“Haiti,” the other political officer responded, “was nothing. Our young Communist pioneers could have taken Haiti.”
“I disagree, comrade.”
“I am not interested in Haiti,” the political officer said.
“But I’m interested, comrade,” Wang replied, “about your—” Wang thought carefully. “—your preoccupation with Hanoi. Is this truly your view or is this Beijing speaking?”
“I am with the party on this,” the political officer said.
There was a long, tense silence. No one wanted to lose face. Wang lit a cigarette, offering the packet around, the other three accepting graciously.
“I will go this far,” Wang proposed. “I will keep attacking south with General Wei’s army group on my right flank. If we meet strong resistance at Phu Lang Thuong, I will turn east toward Haiphong, calling on our reserves of the Fifteenth Group Army to reinforce my spearhead. I will use armor to race for the port and destroy the Americans before they can organize a full-scale counterattack. We will move at night and rest during the day, as General Giap did, and the North Koreans in their civil war — to avoid American air attacks.”
The political officers conferred. A compromise was reached: the generals would have ten days to take Hanoi. If they did not succeed, they would accede to General Wang’s strategy, and support him in a drive east to Haiphong. Wang was not satisfied, but it was two against one, with General Wei ready to follow whatever would be best for his career prospects.
“All right,” agreed Wang, “but I wish to draw your attention to the Americans’ industrial capability. I was a very young man when my grandfather told me stories about the American devils in Korea. They were all but driven into the sea, and for their Marines trapped at Chosin reservoir, it was the longest retreat in their history. But they counterattacked, comrades, and drove us back across the Yalu. Their industrial capacity is—” He thought for a moment. “—something which has to be seen to be believed.”
“They had this capacity in the Vietnam War, General, and they were driven out.”
“The American public was not with them then.”
It was the political officer’s turn to be skeptical. “You think it is with them in this war, General?”
“The U.N. lackeys are with them,” Wang replied.
“Perhaps,” the political officer said, “but that can evaporate overnight. Is the American public with them?”
General Wang conceded the possibility that the American people’s support might be only transitory at best, that it might vanish overnight if he could inflict unacceptable casualties on the Americans — kill as many of them as possible in the shortest time. That was an aim both political officers and both generals could agree on. Wang was heartened by this thought — the fact that while the PLA had sustained 26,000 casualties in the three weeks of the 1979 war with Vietnam,
the American public would simply not tolerate such losses. Finally, in the matter of numbers, China would always win. Every day in China another sixty thousand babies are born.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Pulling back from where the blue on blue had occurred, D’Lupo’s seven-man point squad, the first rifle platoon HQ, and three other platoons behind them — including Martinez’s Special Forces group and the retreating troops of General Vinh — ran into some isolated sniping but managed to establish a half-moon-shaped defense perimeter. It was about three hundred yards in diameter, its edge just beyond a V-shaped gully formed by a creek bed which the PLA would have to cross before climbing fifteen feet at a forty-five-degree incline if they were to attack the allied force. Behind the half-moon-shaped perimeter there were the burial mounds of a deserted village. The villagers, terrified of the PLA, had left, heading south for Phu Lang Thuong well before the retreating advance patrol of the EMREF and Vinh’s troops had arrived.
On the lip of the gully, EMREF’s Special Forces had planted antipersonnel, puck-sized disk mines. Using K-bar knives, they’d gently lifted patches of grass, not cutting out the patches but lifting them up carefully from one side, as one would gently prise up a scab, then scratching out a two-inch hole beneath the grassy trapdoor, placing the disk mines, and covering them with the patch. Farther back from the gully’s lip, members of the two rifle platoons placed claymores, just as cautiously laying the trip wire. Johnny D’Lupo ordered some claymores on the flanks and in the rear.
“You think they’re gonna get behind us?” Dave Rhin asked.
“What d’you think, man?” Martinez, from the Special Forces platoon, replied. Rhin was on the field phone to HQ platoon, reporting that everything was set up and confirming that, in their capacity as the advance patrol for the EMREF, they were now in contact with Vinh’s forces, who had joined the defensive line above the southern side of the gully. After further consultation with Vinh’s English-speaking operator, the HQ squad ordered the flank mines to be dug up lest either of Vinh’s flanks gave way under a PLA attack and were forced into the American perimeter. Instead, the mines were to be placed on the Vietnamese flanks, several hundred yards away from both EMREF flanks.
“Shit!” one of D’Lupo’s seven-man squad complained. “Nothing I like better, man, than to dig up mines we just laid.”
“Right,” D’Lupo agreed. “Some fucker oughta thought of this ‘fore we started laying the fucking things!”
“Stop your whinin’, man,” Rhin advised. “Go take the fuckers to the Vietnamese flanks. They’ll love yer for—”
There was a high, whistling sound followed by the crash of an explosion, then another and another, men screaming, scrambling for cover as more explosions of red earth and undergrowth vomited skyward. The soil fell like rain for several seconds after the first mortar salvo, the smell of cordite and freshly uprooted vegetation pungent in the hostile air.
Some of the EMREFs who had been digging slit trenches lay unmoving, dead now, one beheaded, another sitting quite still, the victim of the tremendous force of the concussion and perhaps shrapnel as well. D’Lupo dived behind one of the loamy burial mounds, an 82mm Chinese mortar round landing close to the lip of the gully, sending shrubs and sticks into the air. Immediately, he moved to a mound in front of him that had been hit dead center, D’Lupo noting that there was an advancing pattern of small, mortar-made craters in front of him. He now dived into a burial mound, the peak of its cone blown off, the incoming round he’d just fled landing ten yards behind him. To his amazement, as he came up for air, he noticed his arm covered in blood.
He had no recollection of being hit. Despite the explosions of incoming and the steady Bomp! Bomp! Bomp! of outgoing 81mm rounds from the Special Forces platoon, D’Lupo pulled his bleeding arm quickly from the protective burial mound. He was staring at a completely emaciated skull, a sandy-white loam spilling over it like sand in an hourglass, the skull’s teeth red where D’Lupo’s arm had scraped them as he’d dived for cover.
As suddenly as it started, the heavy mortar barrage ceased, only to be replaced by the tearing tarpaper sound of light and medium machine guns using not only the heavier 7.62mm ammunition of the old Type 68 assault weapon but also that of the newer 5.6mm CQ automatic rifle.
Following the blare of a Chinese bugle, someone on the west U.S.-Vietnamese side of the gully shouted, “They’re coming!” Rhin cussed like the trooper he was, disgustedly releasing his radio pack, which was now so much junk, the only thing intact being the handpiece, which he now tossed away. Through the undergrowth, they could see Chinese regulars, whose “piss-pot” helmets were covered in camouflage netting, branches of leaves draped from them, and whose black-green-brown combat uniforms were so difficult to see against the background of the gully’s bush-lipped opposite bank.
Even knowing that his platoon was cut off from HQ— they’d have to use runners, if necessary — Rhin was impressed by the Chinese assault. No sooner had half of them, fifty or so, been chopped down by the American and Vietnamese fire than the remaining fifty, having rushed across the shallow streambed, were out of sight, now at the base of the forty-five-degree-angle dirt cliff. The ocher-colored dirt cascaded down like a waterfall as the Chinese, without stopping, immediately began scaling the steep incline of loose soil by running up as far as they could go with supporting machine-gun fire from the bank behind them, from which they’d descended.
At the apogee of their climb, unable to make it alone up an almost vertical dirt face of ten to twelve feet, they took hold of long, arm-thick pieces of bamboo stilts shoved up to them as an assist from the men below.
Up and down the creek a hundred yards in either direction, more and more Chinese began scaling the cliff. Those first up to the edge were machine-gunned immediately and fell down amid their comrades at the base of the cliff. But without a pause, others took their place on the cliff and held ground, helped by a rain of stick grenades being flung up and over the cliff’s edge, lobbed amid the forward American and Vietnamese U.N. troops.
The explosions and concussions of earlier mortars had set off many of the antipersonnel mines. One Chinese at the middle of a ten-man-line charge tripped a claymore, and all ten were killed either outright or fatally felled by the ball bearings that had exploded toward them in a steel curtain at supersonic speed. But the Chinese kept coming and dying. D’Lupo and Martinez’s Special Forces knew that unless the Chinese resupply of troops could be cut, numbers alone would soon overwhelm them. Some of the USVUN machine guns were so hot, rounds were cooking off.
D’Lupo and Special Forces platoon were firing flares down into the gully, knowing that some of the units behind them must have gotten through to U.S.-Vietnam-U.N. troops headquarters at Kep or Phu Lang Thuong, and they hoped that despite the poor visibility in the low ceiling of stratus, TACAIR would be on the way. D’Lupo, by prior agreement with TACAIR’s forward air controller, had an understanding that should radio contact be lost, the enemy position would be indicated by a white/red/white flare combination.
Early in the Vietnam War, such arrangements were often made on the spot via radio contact between pilots and the men in trouble on the ground. But “Charlie,” as the enemy was then known, had often listened in on the U.S. radio messages with English-speaking radio interpreters, and would quickly fire the flare sequence onto American and ARVN positions, creating a blue on blue.
Now D’Lupo’s forward squad fired a white/red/white sequence into the gully’s eastern sector to the right of them. TACAIR, if it was on its way, should make visible contact in plus or minus two minutes, coming in beneath the blankets of the gray stratus.
Down in the gully, the Chinese immediately began a barrage of small-arms fire, shredding the flares’ chutes so they fell faster, giving the Chinese more time to pick up the unburned section of the smoke flares and, having cut their chute straps, lob them into the brush beyond the western side of the gully. Nothing like this had happened in Iraq, where, not surpri
singly, there was no bush.
Some of the Chinese, already ensconced in dugouts along the lip, kept up a sustained fire into the American positions, making it impossible for the Americans to rush forward and secure the flares, now burning furiously, supposedly marking the enemy position to be bombed. As a result, two Intruders sent in from the Enterprise dropped their ordnance, including two free-fall pods of napalm-jellied gasoline, within forty-three seconds killing sixteen Americans in the EMREF’s advance recon force. Nine of them were burned to death, running torches of fire in the brush, setting it afire before they collapsed, or throwing themselves onto the earth in futile attempts to smother the fire with soil. Friends used their cupped hands, digging with spades, whatever, to save two men who were so horribly burned they now wished they were dead.
At least three of the stricken men had made a rush toward the gully to try to extinguish themselves in the water holes of the gully bed. They were cut to pieces by Chinese small-arms fire before they got beyond the lip, falling, rolling down the steep red dirt slope, Chinese troops immediately stripping them of what weapons they could, some of the Americans’ flesh sticking to their M-16s like melted cheese.
The remainder of the USVUN were also hit by napalm, and seconds after the terrible beauty of an enormous orange flame rolling through a backdrop of green fields and brush, five Vietnamese had been burned black with five U.N. soldiers, including two from the British SAS contingent. Only their badges, “Who Dares Wins,” were recognizable after their own ammunition packs exploded.
By now the forward air controller had seen the Chinese rush the gully, realized about the flare balls-up, and redirected the Intruders. This cleared the gully nicely, an even more devastating attack than upon the USVUN line, since the sharp-angled sides of the gully made it a natural conduit for the flame that raced like a flood of molten hot steel from a furnace down the gully floor. Over two hundred Chinese assault infantry were incinerated, and the presence of the American planes ready to bomb again had dissuaded the PLA from any further rushes, the air filled with a stench of burned chicken.