by Ian Slater
“You don’ understand, man,” Martinez said, adopting a tone of mock condescension. “You just a dirt farmer. Don’t you know how important this hill is to the negotiations? Testing our will, man. Here and at Dien Bien Phu. Ain’t you ever hearda Pork Chop Hill?”
“Stick it up your ass,” Doolittle replied. “And rotate, mate.”
“Wish to Christ we had more ammo,” D’Lupo said. “Half of that last drop is in the fucking drink. All on account of that prayer of his. Meanwhile, the chinks are getting resupplied by the fucking Ningming express, which we can’t fucking bomb because it’s in fucking Chinese territory. And they’re using Black Rhinos.”
“How do you know that?” Martinez asked.
“You blind or somethin’, Martinez? Last guy we Medevacked outta here was hit in the thigh, man. You could put your fist through it. He’ll die ‘a just plain shock, man!”
“All right, knock it off, you guys,” a sergeant cautioned. “Chinks are gonna have another run at us.”
“Oh nice,” Doolittle said. “Ain’t that fucking lovely. Low on ammo and we’re on for another inning.”
“Can it, Doolittle.”
There was the high screech of incoming, and reply fire from the few air cavalry 105mms that had been dropped onto the narrow margin between the paddies and the south side of Disney, everyone save the U.S. Arty gunners crouching low as they could in the sloppy, mud-filled foxholes.
* * *
As the afternoon wore on, mist and low cloud now mingling in a diaphanous veil over the flooded fields along the Ningming-Xiash line, another dozen or so POWs had been caught. Trang led the trio of Murphy, Shirley, and Danny Mellin closer to the bogged truck, but told the soldiers he was under orders to take them to the culvert.
“What if there isn’t a maintenance shack inside the culvert?” Trang asked Mellin.
“There will be,” Danny assured him. “I’ve been watching the spacing between them — one every couple of miles. Besides, with a culvert, you always have the danger of slides— have to have something nearby to mend a track. All you have to do, Trang, is take us along the track. Tell the guards — if they bother to ask — that you’ve been ordered to take prisoners to the culvert and check the tracks, help fix ‘em with your prisoners if need be. Everyone knows how uptight General Wei and his boys have been about this supply line to the border, especially now that the rain’s washed away parts of the road. Only supply line they have is the railway.”
“Yeah,” Mike Murphy said, with more bravado than he felt. “They’ll expect the recaptured prisoners to be used as coolie labor.”
Shirley said nothing. The lack of sleep and food and the long, tense day in the flooded fields were taking their toll, but she didn’t want to let on, particularly in front of Murphy. Then, as if he’d been reading her thoughts as they sloshed their way through the waist-high water and mist toward the rail line, Murphy said, “Hey, Trang, let’s stop awhile. I’m feeling a bit whacked!” Murphy looked at her as he said it and winked. Weary as she was, she smiled at Murphy. “Thanks.”
Suddenly they heard shots and people screaming, somewhere a hundred yards or so east, behind them. This was followed by shouting.
“Sounds like Upshut,” Murphy said. They all stood still in the water, Shirley frozen in fear. Something had slithered across her foot in the muddy ooze that squelched beneath her toes. For a moment she was paralyzed with fear. She wanted to scream. Murphy sensed it and put his hand on hers. “We’re almost at the rail line,” he said by way of encouragement. “Tracks are elevated. We’ll be on dry ground — well, as dry as it gets ‘round here.”
He could feel her gripping his hand. She was shaking — cold and fearful.
“Got the Jim-whimmies myself,” he said softly.
Trang had turned in toward the rail line as the light began to fade, making it particularly dark in the culvert, whose appearance now took on the aspect of a long, dark tunnel.
There was a shout from a PLA guard a hundred yards off, and Trang, “without,” as Murphy would have said, “batting an eyelid,” answered loudly, his voice carrying across the water as if through an amplifier. His tone, even to Mellin, Shirley, and Murphy, who didn’t understand Chinese, was so pregnant with authority that it gave them a surge of confidence. As his horse took the incline up to the railway lines, Shirley slipped, Trang turning on her with a stream of invective, waving her impatiently up the embankment.
The guard they saw in the dying light looked as miserable, Danny thought, as he himself felt, it being no joke standing out all day in the rain with only one meal of hot, or rather, warm, rice and fish sauce delivered by the short food train that preceded the one big supply train a day, which Wei sent through to the Disney front every night.
They were on the standard four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch-wide track now, walking alongside the wooden sleepers that had been laid in a bed of stones, each segment of rail fixed to its tie by a screw bolt and a steel wedge between the rail and the bolt. Danny had told Trang to pretend to be inspecting the ties for any maintenance that might be needed.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
The President of the United States was holding an emergency conference in the White House, not in the War Room, but in the Oval Office, and the significance of that was not lost on Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Reese and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff. The President wanted a political assessment of the situation, and he was sure — not only from the CIA’s reports from agents in Beijing, but from his own gut feeling as a politician going into an election year — that Chairman Li Peng was calling a similar meeting in the Zhongnanhai Compound on Changan Avenue before he would give his request to the delegates in the Great Hall of the People.
The President and chairman both knew that the military conflict at Disney Hill on the Chinese-Vietnamese border, and at Dien Bien Phu near the Laotian border, were chess pieces in a game of political will, ostensibly between China and the U.N., but in reality between China and the United States of America.
The President told the assembled Chiefs of Staff and adviser Ellman that his position was very much like Truman’s situation in the Korean War. There, it had been Pork Chop Hill over which the U.S.-led U.N. force and China had to battle it out while both sides were negotiating at Panmunjon.
“As far as I’m concerned,” the President announced, “once the Chinese agree to withdraw all their forces to their side of the Vietnamese-Chinese border, it’s over. The whole reason this started is because they thought they could invade other people’s territory and claim it as their own. But-” He raised a hand to stifle any immediate objection. “—I realize that Dien Bien Phu is another matter. The Chinese are farther away from their border there.”
“Yes,” the Army Chief of Staff said. “And they’ve chosen Dien Bien Phu on purpose because it was there that France— the West — was defeated.”
“Humiliated,” Ellman said.
“Yes,” the Army Chief of Staff agreed. “That’s a better word for it.”
“Just as we were humiliated,” Admiral Reese said, “in Saigon in ‘seventy-five. Two things Americans remember vividly: where they were when JFK was shot, and the photo of the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy — panic-stricken people trying to get the last ride out of town and people being pushed off.” He paused, sure that he had everyone’s attention. “Mr. President, if we allow that to happen again — if we just pull out — nobody in Asia will trust us ever again. I know a lot of our ‘Nam veterans feel like that.”
“Ironic, isn’t it,” the President said, “that we’re discussing how best to make our point in Vietnam that we’ll stand up to bullies — the very country we fought?”
“History’s full of irony, Mr. President. We once fought the British, and now they’re at our side at Dien Bien Phu.”
The President nodded, picked up the silver letter opener, and began tapping on the desk blotter. “Well, now that Jorgensen has got us in Dien Bien Phu, how does he pr
opose to get us out?”
The Army Chief of Staff spoke. “Matter of fact, sir, you might recall it wasn’t General Jorgensen’s idea. It was Douglas Freeman who got us in there with rumors about U.S. MIA sightings — although to tell you the truth, I think he was probably looking for a way to protect his left flank. The Dien Bien Phu valley is a good staging area for the Chinese.”
“And it’s surrounded by mountains,” Admiral Reese put in.
The President put down the letter opener. “Can’t we just pull the USVUN Special Forces out of there?”
“Not now,” Ellman said. “Number one, the U.S. public have expectations of possible MIA discoveries. Second, and most importantly from the political angle, Dien Bien Phu is crucial. Whether we like it or not, it’s become a litmus test. The world media is fixated on both Disney and Dien Bien Phu. But thanks to press creeps like that Frenchman LaSalle, the whole world is seeing Dien Bien Phu in particular as a test of U.S. will. Third, SATINT shows us that the PLA must have been building up supplies there for at least a month. We all thought it started with the PLA paratroop drop, but they were probably among the last Chinese to enter the area. They’re all around us.”
The President sat bolt upright. “Are you telling me we’ve been set up there?”
“Yes,” Ellman said. “Started with some cock-and-bull story about one of our officials in Ho Chi Minh City—” Ellman realized it was difficult for the President to recognize Ho Chi Minh City as anything but old Saigon. “Anyway, Jorgensen’s HQ apparently got some story from Freeman about MIAs in the area — one or a hundred, I don’t know. I would’ve thought most of them would be dead by now.”
CIA chief Noyer interjected. He didn’t like Ellman’s tone when the aide talked about “some cock-and-bull story.” Noyer had had a friend who’d gone missing. Only people who had lost someone could understand. “Far as I know, Mr. Ellman, it was no ‘cock-and-bull story,’ as you, I think, ineptly put it. One of our people, a Major—” Noyer couldn’t recall the man’s name now. “—Barker? Baker? But anyway, he’d followed what he believed was a genuine lead up to Dalat.”
“Where’s that?” the President asked.
“In the central highlands.”
The President nodded, not much the wiser. “Well, it doesn’t matter now whether he was set up with a false lead to get us involved in a vulnerable area or not. The fact is, now we’ve got ninety Special Forces with the enemy ringed all about them. The question is, what is it going to take to help them out?”
“To win,” Admiral Reese said, “Douglas Freeman has to resupply his Special Forces trapped in there and drive the PLA out from around them. There can’t be any half measures here, Mr. President, or we’ll have nothing at the bargaining table. We’re barely hanging on to Disney Hill. They’re both Freeman’s call.”
“Think he can do it, gentlemen?”
There was silence in the room.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
In addition to the battalion of seven hundred PLA paratroopers who had arrived in and around Dien Bien Phu village days before and had seized the small airstrip immediately north of the village, now four companies, over four hundred men, of the PLA’s Chengdu Twelfth Army attacked Delta’s perimeter, some PLA rushing on the surface but most — over three hundred Chinese — coming in via the old tunnels used by the Viet Minh Communists against the French, the tunnels brought back to basic maintenance level not by the North Vietnamese, but by Chinese and local Laotian hill tribes who had infiltrated the area. The enemy tunnel rats were popping up like jackrabbits all over the place to fire off a burst and throw a few grenades before the American and British defenders had time to get a bead on them.
But most damaging was the sustained fire of the enemy’s mortars, many of which, like the bigger artillery guns, were firing from dugouts so deep in the mountainside that their camouflage nets were at ground level, the dugouts themselves shored up with logs. The fighting had already reached the wire at places where firefights were breaking out even as the mortar rounds tore into the ground inside the perimeter, throwing up clouds of dust that drifted ghostlike over the wire, which was littered with over thirty PLA dead and wounded.
For PLA commander Colonel Cheng it had merely been a test of the American and British firepower. The defenders’ firepower, or rather their accuracy, was much better than that of average field troops. Colonel Cheng had expected as much, for his own intelligence section had already advised him of the allies’ Special Forces training regimen, carrying over 250-pound loads, and the required ability to burst into a room of hostages, identify the hostage-taker, and take him out with one shot. The final test for the U.S. Navy SEALs was to go six days with only four hours’ sleep. These were crack troops. It would take more than a few forays at the wire to unnerve them.
Both sides realized the airstrip would be unusable by the planes of either side, and in any event it had been potholed by the Chinese using concrete-splitting mines, and all supply roads — mule trails into Dien Bien Phu within a fifty-mile radius from north to Ban Pa Haute in the northeast to Bang Beng in the southeast — had been severed and/or were covered by ambuscades of PLA infantry. In short, Dien Bien Phu had been cut off. The weather was now clearing in the valley, but not enough for accurate supply drops, and even when, or if, the weather cleared, Freeman knew that any drop zone would immediately be pummeled by what was now recognized as a formidable ring of Chinese field artillery and triple A dug into the sites of the PLA’s mountainous redoubts.
* * *
At his Phu Lang Thuong HQ, Freeman was pacing like a caged lion. “Well, by God!” Freeman proclaimed to Major Cline. “I’m not doing another Navarre.”
“I don’t follow,” Cline said.
“Navarre,” Freeman grumbled, “French C in C in ‘fifty-four — sent in a swashbuckler — Colonel Christian de Castries. Like General Navarre, Castries was a cavalryman — a damn fine one too, but when the enemy is all around you — with arty — you can’t fight it like a cavalryman. Can’t do a George Patton when you’re in a bull ring and the stands are thick with guns. No…”
Freeman, both hands on the map table, was staring down at Dien Bien Phu. Cline could hear the heavy rumble of PLA howitzers beyond Disney as the sky lit up in flashes. Cline admired Freeman’s ability to focus — as if mesmerized — on another battle while a different battle was raging so close at hand.
“No, Bob,” the general said. “When you’ve got this situation, the only way is to dig in — hold your position until the cavalry can come in.”
“Is there a chance of them making a fighting withdrawal?” the major asked.
The general was slowly shaking his head. “Ninety men? Even if Echo and Foxtrot can reach Delta, my guesstimate is we’d be lucky to get out one or two. But there’s another reason why we can’t try a fighting withdrawal.” With that, he thrust his HQ’s copy of the order from the Pentagon, adding, “It went direct to Jorgensen’s HQ south in Hanoi.” The message read:
NEGOTIATIONS FOR CEASE-FIRE MAKE IT IMPERATIVE YOU HOLD POSITION. HOLD UNTIL RELIEVED.
“Pawns,” Cline said disgustedly, throwing down the message. “They’re not here. They don’t care about our men.”
Then Freeman, the acerbic critic of the U.S. State Department, stunned Cline. “No, they’re right, Bob. We try to run out of this at Disney or Dien Bien Phu or show Wang a white flag, we’re finished in this part of the world. We haven’t got nearly the size of force here the French had, and they lost. But we have to hold. Our will is being tried here — just as it was for France in ‘fifty-four. If the enemy busts our balls here like they did the French, that’s it for the American century in Asia. China’ll rule the roost, including Japan and everybody else. But—” The general took in a long breath of air. “—we have a cavalry the French didn’t have.”
“Planes?”
“Oh, the French had aircraft — not enough, but they had ‘em. Now Giap, that clever little history teacher, made sure that as well as
cutting all the trails into Dien Bien Phu, he also hit the big airfields to destroy the French air force on the ground. But one thing the French didn’t have was—”
Freeman was interrupted by a signals officer handing him the news that all major USVUN airfields within striking distance of Dien Bien Phu were under Chinese sabotage attack. Over half the aircraft — most of them helos-had already been destroyed.
“What?” Cline said. “What didn’t the French have?”
“A big boat,” Freeman replied, “called the Enterprise.”
Freeman knew not to call a ship a boat in military parlance, but Cline realized that Douglas Freeman had a Churchillian sense of history and was conscious that if his Special Forces could take a pounding at Dien Bien Phu and could hold, then Freeman’s words to him this night would enter military legend.
“We don’t have to win, Major,” Freeman added, as if reading the other’s mind. “All we have to do is hold.”
“Yes, I know,” Cline said somberly. “Until relieved. I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
“I think,” Freeman said, focusing on Dien Bien Phu, and in what struck Cline as a peculiarly jocular tone, given the odds, “we’ll do some gardening — a little clear cutting.
“Now, Bob, I want you to have signals flash an order to our boys in Dien Bien Phu not to radiate out in patrols to engage the enemy. We already know where the enemy is — all around us. What Berry, Leigh-Hastings, and Roscoe have to do is dig in — interconnecting trenches with zigzags — and have the trenches reinforced with whatever they can find. I want them to dig deep — keep the trenches narrow, behind razor wire, and machine-gun strong points and claymore mines around the whole perimeter. And to be ready to cannibalize enemy mortar ammo. We can’t get heavy artillery to them yet, but now that all columns — Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot — are in Dien Bien Phu on the Vietnamese side of the Laotian-Vietnamese border, we can use TACAIR. That’s going to be our artillery. We’ll drop them the razor wire ASAP.”