by Ian Slater
The girl moved closer to the pig and hesitantly touched its still-warm underbelly with her big toe. She did it again, then, satisfied it was dead, looked behind her for several seconds, then looking forward, stepped over the boar and stopped dead, her eyes following the short barrel of Kacey’s machine gun, her body giving a start as she met his eyes, her mouth agape. She had never seen a black man before.
“Shh,” Kacey whispered, putting a finger to his mouth, then, with the same hand, gesturing for her to give whatever she was holding to him. He could see it was a grenade with the pin pulled, only her grip keeping the release lever down. She looked back along the trail again, and in that instant the Ranger was about to grab for it, but one fumble… He waited till she turned and looked at him again. Smiling, he very slowly extended his hand. Her tiny warm hand withdrew from him for a moment. He stopped, his dry mouthed smile fixed, his tongue cemented to the roof of his mouth. She let him close his giant’s hand around hers, and his thumb took over the pressure on the lever. Now he was in a real fix. What do I do with the fucking thing?
As she turned and walked away from him, stepping carefully back over the dead pig, Kacey transferred the grenade to his left hand in case he had to fire the HK single-handed, and felt for the first aid pouch around his helmet. He’d tape the grenade’s lever down.
He had it done inside a minute and, first pulling the pig off the trail then moving into the mildew-smelling bush, he made his way forward at turtle speed, torn by his desire to get away and make sure Foxtrot Company was alerted to enemy presence, and the need to be absolutely quiet should the girl bring anyone back.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
With the weather closing in, nimbostratus cloud now spreading out over the valley above Dien Bien Phu in a low, metallic-gray ceiling, the American air cavalry still had smoke to contend with. The aerial armada of helos carrying the battalion had to turn back — to the delight of Pierre LaSalle, who, from the safety of Hanoi, kept filing stories critical of the U.S. presence.
General Jorgensen called Freeman at Second Army’s HQ at Phu Lang Thuong. “Douglas. Harry Jorgensen here. Washington’s pressing me. They want to know if we can hold Disney Hill or whether you should pull out before casualties become unacceptable?”
“General, we have pulled back. By God, I hate to have to admit it but we have, and we’re still being hit. Those bastards of Wei’s are swarming out of those goddamn holes like ants. Trouble is—” There was a sizzle of static on the line. “—trouble is, we can’t pull back any farther, otherwise we’ll be waist high in paddy water.”
“I’m not saying pull back as far as Lang Duong, but if you can get out of the paddies onto higher ground, we can maybe move some armor in.”
“Negative. We’re between a rock and a hard place here. We withdraw any farther, we’ll have to fight waist high in mud. Turn into a goddamn turkey shoot for the Chinese. No, we’re going to have to make our stand where we’ve dug in between the base of the hill and the rice paddies. ‘Least TACAIR can hit the hillside.”
“But the choppers can’t see where they’re going.”
“General, you get me helos to bring those men in tonight, and I’ll counterattack.”
“What?” It was like being down twenty to zip in the Rose Bowl at halftime, Jorgensen thought, and the losing coach telling you he was going to win the game.
“Last thing they expect, General,” Freeman continued. “I’ve got — mortars… I need is the men.”
The static was getting worse, but whatever Freeman had said, Jorgensen told his aide in an aside that it was going to take more than mortars. Freeman’s forces were already running low on ammunition, and despite some blind drops into the smoke and mist, most of the ammo crates had disappeared underwater. Anyone who had to leave his weapon and pack behind, wading out to try to retrieve them, was at especially high risk, as Chinese snipers at the edge of the smoke used the sodden parachutes as range markers.
“Douglas…”
“Yes, General.”
“I’m sorry for my remarks—”
“My fault,” Freeman cut in. “I have a penchant for sounding off when what I should do is shut up.”
“You’re the best field commander for Second Army, Douglas. I’ll try to get you those helos.”
When Jorgensen hung up, Freeman, in an uncharacteristically paranoid moment, under the stress of battle, wondered aloud to Cline what Jorgensen had meant when he said he was “the best field commander for Second Army.”
“For Second Army?” Freeman said, hypothesizing that Jorgensen might have meant he wouldn’t be the best field commander for any other U.S. Army.
“I don’t think he meant that for a moment,” Cline told Freeman. “He means you’re the best man for the job.” Cline paused. “For the situation we’re in.”
Freeman turned on him. “The situation we’re in, Major, is a retreat. By God, is that all he thinks we’re good for? I told him I was going to counterattack, and I will. Damn it,” Freeman said, pacing up and down before the situation map, “I need a prayer for good weather — like Georgie Patton had at Bastogne. Get some air cover. Bob, get that senior padre of ours to see to it.”
Embarrassed, Cline opined that the padre was probably pretty busy with the wounded that the “dust-offs”—or Medevac choppers — had brought back to Phu Lang Thuong’s field hospital.
Freeman looked surprised. “I thought all our wounded were going straight to the Tampa?”
“They are, General, but there were so many wounded in Disney that there was a backup of choppers all the way off Haiphong harbor, so some came back and unloaded at Phu Lang Thuong’s field hospital. As I said, the padres are pretty busy.”
“What’s the matter with you? Goddamn prayer only takes a minute. I want a prayer and I want to see a copy of it. Padres know the right wording.”
“Yes, sir.”
Reluctantly, Cline made his way toward the field hospital, feeling more embarrassed by the second until he realized that if you believed in God, Freeman’s request, a symptom of “Disney”-induced stress, made perfect sense. He realized then that what really bothered him was his own angst, the persistent question he harbored at the back of his mind as to whether or not God had made man or man had made God. Freeman’s order for a prayer was forcing Cline to confront his own uncertainty.
* * *
“I’ve already said prayers, Major,” the overworked padre told him. “I’m praying for every man that’s wounded on our side as well as on the Chinese.”
“I don’t know whether the general’d appreciate that.”
“The general’s not God, Major, though sometimes he acts like it.”
“Look, Padre, I don’t want to get in a slugfest with you. The general’s ordered a prayer, a prayer for good weather so we can get proper air cover.”
“To kill more Chinese?”
“No,” the major said, feeling his temper rising. “To get out of this murderous trap our boys’re in.”
The padre said nothing. He’d just administered last rites to a man — a boy, really — whose face had been blown away by a Chinese stick grenade.
“Look, Padre,” Cline told him. “Quite frankly, I don’t give a hoot if you write a prayer or not — I’m not one of your flock — but if I don’t have something on paper to show the boss, I’m going to get reamed out. So, what is it to be? You want to write the prayer or tell him personally that you won’t?”
The padre sighed. “I’ll write a prayer.”
Cline resented the dog-in-the-manger tone. “Listen, Padre, last time I heard you give a sermon — which I was required to attend — you were going on pretty strong about defeating godless communism.”
“I still am — but not men.”
Cline rolled his eyes impatiently. “That’s like saying you want to fight Nazism but you don’t want to kill Nazis. Can’t be done, Padre. Will you write it now—please?”
The padre took out his pen and notebook and wrote, Dear Lord
, we ask of you that you give us fair weather so that we may have time to withdraw our men from this catastrophe.
Cline read it. “Jesus Christ, Padre — that won’t do it.”
“How do you know what God wants?”
“I’m talking about the general. He reads this — this ‘catastrophe’ and withdrawal bit, he’ll go ballistic!”
Wordlessly, the padre took the note, crossed out catastrophe, put danger instead, and changed withdrawal to rescue.
“That’s a bit better,” Cline told him. “But it’s only — I mean it’s kind of short, isn’t it? Can’t you tart it up a bit?”
“You mean puff it up?”
“Yes,” Cline said angrily. “Puff it up. Now!”
The padre wrote again, looking up now and then, collecting his thoughts.
Cline read it. “Okay, fine. Thanks, Padre,” and he walked off.
“You’re welcome. And Major?”
Cline turned around. “Yes?”
“No offense to you or the general-it’s been a bad day for all of us.”
Cline nodded appreciatively. “I hope your prayer works, Padre.”
Freeman read the prayer aloud as he buckled on his holster. “ ‘Dear Lord, we most graciously beseech you to put a halt to this inclement weather so that our soldiers may more safely regroup against the attacks of the enemy and may proceed in this United Nations effort to bring peace once again to the region. Amen.’ “
Freeman shook his head in disappointment. “I don’t know, Bob. It’s all right, I suppose. Adequate, but there’s no majesty in it, no pizzazz! Almost think he was praying to the Secretary General of the U.N. We want a prayer for battle, for victory. This is a weasel prayer, not a prayer worthy of Second Army — not for warriors! Damn it!” He crushed the note. “I’ll write it myself, and you can deliver it to him, and I want him to use it in the next service. By God, our boys deserve better than this.” He rewrote it and read it to Cline.
“Dear God, we ask for a cessation of this inclement weather so that our men may advance against our foe, defeat them in battle, and so drive the godless hordes back to their Communist enclaves. And may our victory be so decisive that the warlords of communism will pause before committing further acts of war against those who fight in your name. Amen.”
Cline said it sounded great, and delivered it to the padre. It was said that night at 1900 at the hospital. A half hour later a typhoon, “Harold,” struck North Vietnam, the cloud cover descending even lower, the torrential downpour ruling out any possibility of TACAIR support for Freeman’s beleaguered troops.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
At the POW camp south of Ningming, Danny Mellin, Mike Murphy, and Shirley Fortescue were busily building the brick walls of their huts. Any reluctance the Australian had had earlier was now gone, drowned in the monsoon that had first struck the border area around Loc Binh, where Freeman’s besieged troops were fighting for their lives on the narrow margin between the base of the hill and the water-swollen paddies.
Unknown to Freeman, who was now en route to the Loc Binh front, the monsoon’s deluge had probably saved his troops on the margin, since the downpour coursing through the artillery-scored rust-red soil of Disney Hill was flooding many of the tunnels, whose drainage systems were clogged like leaves in a house’s gutters, with the artillery-mashed vegetation strewn all over Disney.
In fact, during the flash flood more PLA troops, en route from the north via the Disney tunnels, were killed by drowning than were killed by the U.S. and other USVUN troops. The rain cleared the smoke enough for the aerial fleet of choppers to return and to go in using the margin as their landing zone, violet smoke ground flares identifying the dust-offs, the Medevac helos’ LZs. Those helos whose red crosses were clearly visible on nose and sides were as usual used as aiming points by Wang’s soldiers, who knew that the Americans’ obsession with trying to get their wounded out would delay any counterattack. The air cavalry’s gunships, however, were quick to respond, the.50s on either side of the choppers sending down a deadly rain of one-in-five tracer, the frontmost helos also firing off salvoes of 2.75-inch rockets from their dual pods of nineteen apiece.
In this ear-pounding confusion of rain-curtained battle, Freeman’s air cavalry unloaded on the margin, which had more or less become a hundred-yard airfield-cum-starting point for Freeman’s counterattack, because now his consultation about weaponry with the Vietnamese general, Vinh, came into play. Standard 82mm Vietnamese mortars enabled Freeman’s troops once again to fire not only their own 81mm rounds, but PLA 82mm rounds as well.
In short, as the air cavalry rapidly stiffened the USVUN line on the margin — enough to push Wang’s Chinese army back fifty to seventy yards on Disney’s artillery-pockmarked southern face — the pyramids of mortar rounds that had to be left behind in the sudden and totally unexpected withdrawal fell into the hands of Freeman’s air cavalry mortar squads. Now, they quickly fed the Chinese ammo into the 82mm mortar tubes, the mortar rounds’ explosions not only an incentive for the already retreating PLA to retreat farther, but simultaneously further weakening the tunnels with a series of cave-ins from the rounds’ concussion. At one point, the cave-ins sealed the fate of an entire company of 115 Chinese troops.
Yes, there were U.S. casualties caused by tunnel cave-ins that produced sudden sinkholes, which in turn swallowed USVUN troops, but the losses were minuscule compared with the Chinese losses. And now, with ample ammunition supplies to feed the gaping mouths of the mortars, the high morale of the American advance continued, elements of the U.S. cavalry reinforcements having already gained Disney’s summit after unforgiving hand-to-hand combat along a deep, L-shaped trench. The same trench only a half hour before had been a tunnel filled with PLA, a tunnel that fed into the Disney complex as a conduit for those troops disembarking from the Ningming-Pingxiang-Lang Son railway’s troop trains.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
DANNY MELLIN’S POCKETS were bulging with boiled rice donated by other POWs in their belief that it was going to help one of the rig workers who had been captured first and was therefore the most malnourished POW. But the rice wasn’t for any POW. Instead, Mellin, with the help of Shirley Fortescue, mixed the grains of boiled rice in the mortar used to cement the bricks together for what would be the lower center part of the wall facing the long coils of razor wire that served as the outer main wall of the prison until a proper high-wire wall could be built to replace the wire perimeter.
“So,” Mellin said to Murphy and Shirley Fortescue, who were acting as his cover while he sprinkled another handful of rice in the cement, “I need you to get me a pair of wire cutters.”
“Oh, right,” Murphy said. “I’ll order one from Sears. Just give me the catalogue. I’ll fax ‘em right away.”
Danny ignored the Australian’s sarcastic tone. “Thought you Aussies—”
He stopped as Shirley whispered, “He’s coming.”
Upshut was shouting at one of the POWs, an older man in the brick-passing line who had crumpled with exhaustion. The old man struggled to his feet, a bayonet prodding him sharply in the back, drawing blood. When Upshut saw the waist-high wall of Mellin’s group, the highest wall so far of any of the five prisoners’ huts being constructed, he nodded, adding a grunt of approval.
Mellin smiled accommodatingly, as did Shirley Fortescue, Murphy whispering, “Prick!” when Upshut was out of hearing range. Murphy turned back to Mellin. “So what was that about Aussies?”
Mellin tapped the next brick down with the handle of the trowel. “I thought you Aussies were the can-do sort. Improvise.”
Mellin’s fingers, like everyone else’s, were raw from handling the bricks without gloves of any kind. “If you and another hut boss can lose a couple of trowels, we could make a bloody good pair of cutters.”
“First thing they’d miss,” Shirley said matter-of-factly.
“Shirley’s right,” Danny added. “Every trowel’ll have to be accounted for.”
; “Yes,” she said, passing another brick. “For God’s sake, think of something practical.”
“Don’t be so fucking uppity,” Murphy retorted. “Just a thought.”
“All right, you two,” Mellin said. “Knock it off! Shirley, you got any ideas? Using the rice isn’t going to help us at all unless we can cut through the razor wire.”
Now that they were getting near the bottom of the pile, the bricks were covered in mud kicked up by the downpour that had ceased only twenty minutes before, turning the whole compound into a red-colored slush.
“Nothing comes to mind,” Shirley said. “Anybody have a good nail clipper or—”
“Gimme a break,” Murphy said. “You think everyone here was doing their nails when the chinks picked ‘em off the rigs?”
“I don’t know,” Shirley said calmly, “but I know that if they have a nail clipper…” She turned to Danny. “You know, some have a nail file attached.”
“Oh, for Chrissake,” Murphy cut in. “Yeah, great idea if we had a year or two to—”
“Just a thought,” she countered, trying not to get angry. Mellin took particular note of this pointed exchange between the two because it reminded him of his sister Angela, before she’d broken up with her one and only boyfriend in the days before she had gone to ‘Nam as a nurse. They used to have the same kind of bitterly sarcastic exchanges during a fight, but then it would soon be over, and though Angela never admitted it to Danny, he was sure their differences had been solved by sex. It was almost as if they had to have a row to deny the intensity of their physical attraction for one another. Danny had become convinced it was the same with Mike Murphy and Shirley. There seemed to be a strong, albeit hidden, sexual attraction between them, with no room for middle ground; it would be either sizzling hot or icy cold.