by Ian Slater
There was an enormous orange-red, fireworks-like display as Kalyusha and 90mm rockets went off, followed by a sustained roar made up of tens of thousands of Black Rhino going off, the culvert, because of its tunnel-like shape, a natural conduit for the force of the multiple explosions. Trang disintegrated in a hail of Black Rhino splinters, his blood vaporized to a fine mist, and amid all the noise, screams, and chaos of PLA bodies and supplies toppling out, the only thing Danny Mellin could hear and didn’t want to was the distraught neighing of the horse cut down by shrapnel and lying helplessly somewhere on the track. If he could have, he would’ve gone down to finish it off, but by now the area in the culvert was swarming with dazed troops, their officers yelling, adding to the confusion of the wreckage.
A parachute flare shot out of the burning culvert, and now the full extent of the derailing could be seen to have surpassed Mellin’s wildest expectations. It would take the PLA days, at least, to get a rail crane up from Ningming, and even with the number of troops Wei had at his disposal, it would take days to clear the culvert, let alone get another train through.
* * *
As Danny Mellin, Shirley, and Murphy headed south through the sodden fields, they were exhausted, their adrenaline used up in stopping the train, and weakened by the effort They stopped for a while to rest, and Shirley searched her baggy, sodden PLA uniform for any rations, but found only a mush of wet tobacco and rice paper.
“Don’t worry,” Danny advised them. “Dehydration’s the problem, and we sure aren’t going to die from thirst”
“You can eat the eucalyptus leaves,” Murphy said.
“You sure?” It was Shirley, feeling a lot calmer now in her mind but very shaky, and suffering from a stunner of a headache from lack of food.
“Eucalyptus leaves?” Murphy said. “Sure I’m sure. Koala bears live on ‘em.”
“Koala bears look pretty dopey,” she said good-naturedly, then suddenly fell quiet. “I hope he didn’t feel much.”
“No,” Murphy said. “I mean, he wouldn’t have felt a whole car of ammo going off like that.”
“C’mon,” Danny said, “let’s try to make as much mileage as we can tonight. There’ll be Chinese swarming around here tomorrow once they figure out the line was sabotaged.”
“How far south, Danny? As the crow flies.”
“Ten, eleven miles.”
“Christ!” Murphy said. “Didn’t figure we were that close.”
“Much longer if we kept to the rail tracks.”
“We’re practically home, mate.”
“That’s just the border,” Danny informed him. “Then we’ll have to work through to our lines, wherever they are.”
“Oh ye of little faith!” Murphy joked. Despite his fatigue, he was still high on the rush of stopping the train.
“Pipe down,” Danny cautioned.
“Right,” Murphy said, carrying the PLA rifle, giving the Makarov to Shirley. Now they could see a saffron glow, blurred by the rain, hanging suspended like an enormous upturned bowl of flames over the culvert.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
The satpix relayed to Freeman wasn’t of the best quality, but it told him exactly what had happened — a massive train wreck on the PLA’s main line of communication. He didn’t hesitate, and like a juggler in midact, shifted all his attention from one problem, Dien Bien Phu, to the other, ordering all elements of Second Army in the Disney area to press home a dawn attack preceded by a creeping barrage from the 105mms and 155mms on the margin between the southern base of the hill and the flooded paddies.
Even as his artillery began to pulverize the PLA positions on the north side of Disney, Freeman, like a good political cadre, was making “damn sure,” as he put it to his senior commanders, that every man in the USVUN force on Disney would know that the PLA’s logistics line had been severed and that this was the best chance they had.
As a gray dawn stole upon the hill, the USVUN troops— over ten thousand of them — moved from Disney’s ridgeline to the northern slope. It was touch and go for six and a half hours of close combat, but like one grain at a time in an hourglass, the ratio of mortars between the USVUN and the PLA moved from 1:1 to 2:1 to 3:1 in the allies’ favor.
Wei’s commanders had to give ground, not much at first — a hundred yards or so — but by 0115 the USVUN had pushed off Wei’s best troops. Running low on everything because of the train wreck, particularly ammunition, the PLA had to give more ground until it was a rout and Freeman’s forces owned the hill. This also allowed the U.S. air cavalry to put down its helos without being fired upon from Disney’s crest.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
At Dien Bien Phu things were not nearly as upbeat. The ninety men of the Special Forces weren’t so much depressed by the sense of siege as by the lack of action. Though they had been well-trained in defensive maneuvers, their natural disposition was to go on the offense. They also knew that if they went on the offensive now, they would be quickly pounded and eaten up by the vastly larger enemy force.
The big enemy guns the experts had told Navarre couldn’t be brought through such terrain were there and in fine shape. Though firing sporadically, they forced the men of Echo, Foxtrot, and Deltas — who had turned the first initial of their designations around to form “DEF’ and defiantly hoisted a makeshift flag above the triangle of deep, interlocking trenches and firing bays — to scurry for cover.
DEF was equipped with 82mm mortars, but overall there was no heavy ordnance.
Freeman knew that his first Enterprise raid was a failure, and that if he was to avoid a second Dien Bien Phu defeat of the kind meted out to the French in ‘54, he would have to order in the three companies of Airborne to help, enemy artillery or not. To avoid, or at least minimize, the massacre that could result because of enemy triple A on both sides of the valley. Freeman ordered that the Airborne go in that night. And here American technology in the form of the infrared goggles— which led to ferocious headaches after several hours of wear— allowed the slick pilots, with a fully night-equipped M53J Pave Low helo acting as pathfinder, to ferry in the nine hundred men.
* * *
The thousands of PLA troops could hear the choppers landing, and opened fire with their artillery, but however good their gunners were during the daylight, using open sight down-the-barrel direct fire, at night it was a different story. Even with the help of para flares turning night to flickering daylight, they were less effective because of the inferior computer guidance targeting necessary for the kind of deadly, vectored, indirect fire of the kind provided now by the American Airborne gunners. The 105mms and 155mms were ferried in by the huge, dragonfly-shaped CH-54 Tarhe helos to positions behind the ring of hills that surrounded the valley and were fired without their crews ever seeing the enemy, but with devastating results.
In short, the more sophisticated computer-fire-directed American guns could shoot from beyond the hills, out of sight of the enemy, with the Chinese guns unable to silence them.
It meant that while U.S. artillery could fire at any enemy gun position whose flash gave away its position, the PLA could not fire back with any accuracy worth talking about. Nevertheless the PLA, with their hidden dug-in guns and their mortars, did their best, pounding what they could see below on DEF’s triangle, the bombardment resulting in over a hundred American Airborne casualties during the hectic unloading phase. As soon as the Hueys unloaded their cargo of men and supplies for the DEF garrison, they began loading up with dead and wounded.
A PLA 105mm round hit a fully loaded Huey, and in the ghostly flickering of flare light and gas tank explosions, unidentifiable body parts could be seen dangling and dripping with blood from the nearby bushes and trees — one of the legless torsos belonging to a soldier who had apparently remembered his drill sergeant’s advice at Fort Bragg, for the media found his set of dog tags in his boots.
* * *
While this disembarkation was taking place at Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of miles eastward in t
he South China Sea Elizabeth Franks, her “grape” refueler jacket barely visible on the rain-slashed flight deck of the USS Enterprise, fought to keep her footing as the giant carrier came about, heading into the wind.
As soon as Gunner’s Mate Albright Stevens, stamping his feet to keep them warm, got off his watch, he and Elizabeth would find some warm, hidden place, and there all the stress and strain of the flight deck would be released. For a split second Elizabeth Franks was nearly blown overboard as the blast from a Phantom, its engine moving onto full afterburner, was not fully deflected by the water-cooled shield. Someone, a yellow shirt, grabbed her barely in time.
The Phantoms were punishing the PLA at several locations in the Spratly Islands where Wang’s troops had defiantly and bravely — or stupidly, depending on your point of view — raised the Chinese flag. In addition. Enterprise was also standing by to launch “Operation Landfill,” drawn up by the commander of the Second Army, General Freeman, as an alternative strike force now that so many Air Force bases east of Dien Bien Phu had been struck by PLA hit-and-run saboteur squads.
* * *
The DEF triangle now had an extra thousand men in and around it, where a circle a quarter mile in diameter ringed the dug-in garrison’s timber- and sandbag-reinforced command and hospital bunkers. The initial disorganization that besets most Airborne for the first few minutes after touchdown provided an opportunity for Wang to attack, but the mist-shrouded valley dissuaded both the PLA and DEF from moving too far from base positions. Though the Chinese still outnumbered the garrison’s defenders more than ten to one, Wang was waiting for when he could best use his dug-in artillery.
Flare light had allowed his gunners to get a few deadly salvos by direct fire down at the garrison, but the flashes of his guns would also show their positions to Freeman’s forces. Wang wanted to wait for daylight to make maximum use of his guns.
“Son of a bitch’ll attack at dawn,” Freeman opined to Colonel Berry over the secure scrambler phone. “So all you can do, Al, is dig. Dig like a bastard because the only way they can get that piece of real estate is to take it by hand-to-hand. Their artillery’ll be pounding you, and we’ll be pounding them, but in the end they have to take the friggin’ wire like they did with the frogs.”
Berry didn’t need a history lesson. He needed more time to inspect and to exhort his men to shore up their positions against what he was sure would be the coming massive bombardment from the PLA-owned hills.
Along with the reinforcements Freeman had sent in were dozens of the latest Heckler & Koch 40mm automatic grenade launchers, the lightest on the market, and constructed so their thirty-two-round belt could be fed from either the right or left. Instead of firing machine-gun bullets, with the HK40 they’d be firing machine-gun grenades.
* * *
“I don’t fuckin’ care!” Doolittle said, thoroughly pissed at being relieved on Disney only to find himself and his colleagues reassigned as support troops for the Airborne. Freeman had apparently predicted that there might be a lot of massed assaults on the wire and that men already blooded in this kind of combat should be airlifted into either DEF’s triangle or the outer defensive circle.
“I don’t fuckin’ care!” Doolittle repeated as they were digging in. “I mean, we’ve done our bit, haven’t we? Time for a bit of friggin’ S and S.”
“What’s that?” D’Lupo asked, not really caring.
“Sex and sex!” Doolittle said. “I wanted to say something to the captain ‘fore they carted us off from Disney — wanted you to back me up, eh? And what ‘appens? D’Lupo can’t find his tongue and Martinez — well, you’re a great fucking disappointment, you are, Martinez. ‘Yes, sir, no, sir, three fucking bags full, sir. We’d love to go to Dien Bien Fuck.’ “
“Well, you’re here now, Doolittle, so make the best of it. B’sides, it’s pretty important.”
“That’s right,” D’Lupo echoed.
“Yeah, ‘course,” Doolittle said. “They’re all bloody important, especially when you might buy it!”
“The French lost here,” Martinez said.
“Oh,” Doolittle said. “I get the picture. Wherever the frogs get beat we ‘ave to go in an’ put it right. That the story?”
“Nah,” Martinez answered. “You know, I mean — it’s important politically.”
“Oh,” Doolittle said, taking a rest from digging a shooting bay. “I see. Now we’ve got Henry fucking Kissinger here. Since when did you give a shit about politicians, Marty?”
“I dunno. I thought about runnin’ for Congress sometime.”
“Oh, Gawd protect us — Congressman Marty!”
“Doolittle,” D’Lupo said, “why don’t you shut up and dig?”
“All right, all right.” He started filling sandbags again. “ ‘Course, y’know — Christ, there’s a lot of noise going on ‘round here.”
“It’s called artillery, Doolittle. Our guys and their guys, remember?”
“Yeah, well, you know where they’re gonna hit us? Across the fuckin’ river — on our left flank. All this rain — everybody figures they won’t try to cross.”
D’Lupo tossed up another bag as flashes of artillery outlined his arm like a broken tree. “They’ll hit us from all directions at once.”
“Of course, everyone knows that. I know where I’d hit em.
“Where?” Martinez asked.
“Behind their latrines.”
“Bullshit—”
“Nope — that’s the truth, mate. PLA never post enough guards near their latrines.”
“No wonder,” D’Lupo said, “if they smell bad as you.”
“Oh, very droll,” Doolittle commented.
“You guys want some coffee?” It was a young Airborne corporal.
“I’d kill for coffee,” Doolittle said.
“Well, you might have to if those gooks have a crack at us in the morning.”
They took the coffee quietly and gratefully. The mist was still heavy in the valley, and they knew, as did everyone in the thousand-man defense force spread out from the DEF’s inner triangle to the outer gun ports of the half-mile-wide circle, that as dawn approached, when it was most difficult to distinguish the shape of a man from the shape of a tree, an attack must surely come. General Wang was no doubt just as determined that Dien Bien Phu should fall as was Freeman that it should not.
* * *
When the first salvo of Chinese 105mm and 155mm artillery hit the circle, the earth shook violently and a machine-gun emplacement was gone, two men dead and several more injured as everyone hit the deck, hugging the dirt in the trenches. The din was earsplitting. Within fifty seconds American 105s were answering the flashes, and soon the artillery bombardment fell off.
Within thirty seconds Wang’s first wave of sappers hit the wire with everything from explosive charges strapped to their waists to satchel charges ready to penetrate the perimeter’s defenses and wipe out command bunkers and strongpoints. There were explosions, fountains of red earth, screaming all around, and shadows to the west coming through the mist, rubber boats full of PLA on the river, the boats now in a hail of mortar fire, with one direct hit flinging bodies skyward before they fell back and were swept away, some clinging to the boats’ remains. Mortars still rained down, giant spumes of water erupting amid the multiple spouts caused by the Americans pouring in M-60 fire as well.
The initial shock of the sappers’ wave was now over, and though many more explosions were heard along the wire, the sappers were paying a terrible price for their initial attack. Their bodies and bits of them were strewn all along the wire, the holes they’d opened already being breached by the second assault, this one by PLA tujidui—storm troopers — heavily armed and moving fast to enter the bunkers and trench system that was the outer circle. These were met by a curtain of M-60 machine-gun fire and from the DEF triangle by mortar fire of such concentration that only a handful made it into the circle trench ring, followed by earth-shattering explosions and the scre
ams of some of the dozen or so Airborne troops torn to pieces by the C4 exploding in such narrow confines. Over thirty PLA storm troopers were inside the circle for about a minute before the Airborne cut them down. A bugle blared, and as suddenly as it had begun, the Chinese attack ceased.
“Beat the bastards!” one of the Airborne proudly announced. “There must be forty, fifty dead chinks out there!”
“Terrific,” Martinez said. “That only leaves ‘bout five thousand!”
In fact, Wang’s forces, including porters and underground engineers, were twice that number, and what had depressed Martinez, Doolittle, and D’Lupo, as well as Berry’s Special Forces contingent, was the enemy’s morale. There had been absolutely no hesitation at the wire. Even from DEF’s triangle it had been at once impressive — at least from a strictly military point of view — and frightening to see how many of the sapper wave were suicidal.
Berry was anxious for the mist to lift so a striker force of fighter-bombers from Enterprise could hit the hillsides east and west of Dien Bien Phu and suppress Wang’s triple A. Then the air drops could be made within the half-mile-wide circle without too much interference.
“Wang has a measure of us now,” Leigh-Hastings commented from his bunker at the northern tip of the DEF triangle. He had punched in me numbers on his PRC-77 so the message couldn’t be intercepted.
“Of our outer ring,” Berry replied, “but they’re not ‘our boys.’ I don’t mean any disrespect toward the Airborne, they’re doing a great job, but—”
Leigh-Hastings cut in. “But our chaps are best at offensive operations.”
“You think I should be using them now?’ Berry asked.
“Not necessarily. I understand your strategy of the strong control defense, but each of our DEF chaps has a starlight scope, and the met report from Freeman’s HQ is that the mist and low fog will abate later today. Tonight it’ll be a VC moon — just enough light for Wang to attack by, but not enough for us to see them.” Leigh-Hastings also pointed out that starlight scopes, which Freeman’s G-2 had confirmed the PLA did not have, at least not in any substantial numbers, would allow the Special Forces troopers to play havoc with the PLA in the dark.