by Ian Slater
“I’ll take your suggestion under advisement,” Berry responded. “I’ll request more starlight scopes — for the Airborne.”
“Good show. I think—”
“Incoming!” Berry shouted, and the next moment Leigh-Hastings was thrown to the floor of his bunker, his radio flying out of his hands and hitting one of the wooden cross beams., He heard the high whistle of more artillery.
“They’re at the wire!” someone shouted, and the outer circle defenders opened up with everything they had. At least thirty to forty PLA were inside the outer wire, some of them having played dead outside the wire from the first attack. It was chaotic, a satchel charge detonating midair, killing more PLA than Americans; a screaming bayonet charge by PLA into one of the trenches, American and British fighting PLA hand-to-hand in the trenches.
An M-60 jammed, its quick-charge barrel glove lost and both machine gunner and assistant killed within seconds. But the HK automatic grenade launcher was proving its worth as Airborne gunners sprayed the breakthrough points with three-to five-round bursts, creating in effect a wall of small-arms artillery, the fragmentation grenades cutting the Chinese down as narrow breakthrough points forced them to cluster at the openings in the wire, running over their dead and dying comrades.
Another artillery duel erupted, the PLA issuing direct fire inside the circle, willing to kill their own as Freeman had done on Disney to gain ground by forcing the enemy back into the network of trenches. Had it not been for the Z turns built in the trenches, there would have been many more American and British casualties. The Z turns, like a traffic island, were plonked into the middle of a trench, where one man could hold off a whole squad. Martinez’s M-60, overheating, jammed, and had it not been for Doolittle cutting down two Chinese with his M-16, Martinez would have been dead. D’Lupo, out of ammunition, threw his rifle at a Chinese soldier, who ducked and bayoneted the American before being chopped to pieces by an M-60 burst at near point-blank range.
“Medic!” Doolittle yelled, firing his last grenade from his M-16 launcher at the wire. A medic was already at D’Lupo’s side, stanching the blood flow and yelling for a stretcher. The next moment the medic was dead from a burst from a Chinese T56-1 RPD, a gaping bloody hole where his chest had been. It seemed like minutes to D’Lupo, but in reality it was only a matter of seconds before a stretcher arrived and he was taken away to a hospital bunker inside the triangle.
* * *
As D’Lupo, hemorrhaging profusely, was being prepped for surgery, a Chinese who miraculously had made it all the way from the outer wire circle into the DEF triangle without a scratch, leapt into the trench, through the curtain — an artillery round shaking the overhead light violently — and began firing. He killed two nurses before the surgeon whipped his scalpel across the man’s throat, immediately returning to his patient while calling for orderlies to take out the dead nurses and telling a whey-faced medic to get a Special Forces type from DEF “down here right now. Tell him to stand outside the prep room.”
“Yes, sir.”
D’Lupo was dead.
Kacey, the Ranger who had run into Salt and Pepper, arrived a minute later with a Winchester 1200 shotgun whose hardened lead slug was guaranteed to stop a train and whose fléchette rounds, or darts — thirty of them — were lethal up to three hundred meters.
“Any fucker jumps down here,” Kacey proclaimed to no one in particular, “his fuckin’ head’ll end up in Laos!”
A man did jump down, but Kacey held his fire. The soldier, one of those who, like Doolittle, had been flown in from Disney, had his right hand missing, was covered in blood, and was staring disbelievingly at something he was carrying in his left hand. It was his other hand, having been sheared off at the wrist.
“Jesus!” Kacey yelled. “Medic — on the double!”
The bugle sounded again, and the Chinese, most of whom had failed to make it more than fifty yards into the circle, began to withdraw. This time the Airborne raked the bodies with machine-gun fire to make sure that no live ones were left waiting for the next attack.
In the two attacks so far, over forty Airborne and two of Berry’s men had been killed, and over 220 PLA “hard hats.” The “hard hats,” or “piss pots,” as the Americans called them, were steel khaki helmets, a sign that Wang was using only strictly professional troops from Chengdu’s Fourteenth Army, that no militia units were being used, that Beijing was determined to win the battle for Dien Bien Phu.
Direct-fire artillery opened up again, and by now even the dimmest soldier on the battlefield could tell what Wang’s tactics consisted of — to shell the hell out of the allied force now under the thousand-man mark, and, once their position in the circle had been pulverized enough, turning dirt to sand, and their heads ringing and nerves stretched to the limit, send in another wave of sappers and storm troopers. The old Chinese water torture method, only instead of a drip at a time, you wore down the enemy by attack after attack. After all, as Wang had told the party chairman himself, the Americans weren’t going anywhere.
And though the Americans’ artillery of six-gun batteries was responding with careful forward-observer-directed fire, it wasn’t effective. Whereas the Americans had dug in within a half-mile-diameter circle whose now treeless moonscape offered an easily seen target for the PLA gunners, the PLA targets, their guns and suspected troop concentrations, were spread all over the hills about Dien Bien Phu. This amounted to a huge ambuscade around the Americans in an area so big that by the time one PLA gun was spotted, it would be retracted, often on wooden rails, deep into the cliffside and on a downgrade. Even if an American 155mm hit a target zone dead on either side of the valley, there would be little if any damage to the Chinese wagon. One or two PLA gunners might die if shrapnel sliced through the camouflaged nets down into the man-made cave or revetment, but there were plenty of PLA soldiers to replace them.
The mist had still not risen by noon, and the joke passed around between enemy salvos’ whistling then thundering in was that Freeman must have been praying again.
In fact, Freeman had now decided to place his faith in what he had briefly referred to as “essential deforestation,” or, as his HQ staff were soon calling it, “clear cutting.” The men in the trenches of Dien Bien Phu called it “fuck the forest.” There was nothing strikingly new about it, as Freeman had seen it used in ‘Nam before, but he did go about the preparations for it with a zest that later appalled Greenpeace and other conservation groups throughout the world. Freeman, avoiding passion, going for reason instead, would tell a hastily convened press conference that “when it comes to preserving the habitat or saving American lives, there is no contest.”
Bob Cline did whisper to him that he should have mentioned the British and other USVUN contingents, but before he could rectify the omission, LaSalle and others were pillorying him for it.
Freeman had told the combat information center aboard Enterprise precisely what he wanted, and when the mists finally rose and disappeared at 1420, the three-component strike force from the carrier was on its way. Entering “flak alley” between the hills of Dien Bien Phu, the first wave, guided in by forward air controllers, dropped fuel air explosive bombs. Unlike napalm, the FAE consisted of dropping a huge blanket of vaporized fuel over the target and detonating it all at one instant. This burnt much of the vegetation off in one enormous blanket of intense fire, consuming any troops directly beneath it.
The second wave of fighter-bombers then streaked in, dropping five-hundred-pound Snakeye bombs, which denuded the target area of any trees still standing. The third wave then swept in and, with the hillside devoid of vegetation, looking from the air like huge patches of mange, the fighter-bombers dropped laser-guided and high-angled two-thousand-pound bombs directly into the gaping holes that were, or rather had been, the revetments for the Chinese guns. This, as Leigh-Hastings put it, “upset” the Chinese gunners inside, and made a mess of their guns as well, which the USVUN forces in the circle and DEF triangle greatly a
ppreciated.
There was a problem, however, and to his credit, Freeman, playing devil’s advocate to his own strategy, realized it before anyone else at Dien Bien Phu. The problem was that this awesome attack upon the hillsides meant that if Wang was not to lose any more men in such clear-weather attacks, it had either better rain or Wang had to speed up his artillery and massed-attacks combination tactic to overwhelm the Dien Bien Phu garrison before the “gangster arsonist,” Freeman, burnt him out — driving him out of the hills.
Accordingly, Freeman, his G2 section telling him of suddenly increased enemy radio traffic after the Enterprise attack, ordered his DEF commanders and Airborne to prepare for massive tujidui thrusts later that day, probably beginning at sundown and possibly going on all night. Air interdiction would be maintained by the Enterprise fliers, but the closer the PLA got to the Dien Bien Phu garrison before they attacked, the less help the garrison could expect, as once the Chinese began “bear-hugging,” closing with the Dien Bien Phu defenders, U.S. artillery and airpower would have to cease because of the danger of decimating their own troops. Then not even “Spooky,” the awesome AC-47 festooned with heavy-caliber machine guns, infrared scopes, TV cameras, and a 105mm howitzer, could be used, for fear of killing the Dien Bien Phu defenders as well as the attacking Chinese.
Despite this danger, and as a further countermeasure to what Freeman believed would be Wang’s biggest massed attack so far, Freeman, after conferring with Berry, Leigh-Hastings, Roscoe, and with the Airborne commander, decided that starlight scope patrols would be sent out before sunset and position themselves in the thick vegetation around the half-mile-diameter circle. Their job would be to “sniper” anything that moved, in hopes of first breaking up Chinese concentrations massing for attack, and second, locating and identifying, by radio and red flare, enemy concentrations, which Skyraiders— the old faithfuls, with a loiter time of up to eight and a half hours — could then bomb and strafe, in addition to the indirect fire from the American batteries behind the hills of Dien Bien Phu.
But if the present fine weather had given Freeman a break and allowed him to launch the deforestation attacks, the lack of mist also meant that the American 105mm and 155mm batteries’ positions could be seen by PLA patrols, and by 1630 hours, out of ten USVUN batteries south, behind Dien Bien Phu, seven had been overrun by PLA storm troopers. Both sides had paid a price, Wang having lost over four hundred men in Freeman’s FAE/Snakeye and laser-guided bomb attacks, and the garrison’s defenders losing over forty-two gunners, one small consolation being that all but one of the seven American guns overrun had been spiked before being taken and so were of no use to the PLA.
Each commander had now forced the other’s hand. Any further delay by one would mean the other would have time to plug the gaps so recently opened.
At 1630 six starlight patrols began edging out from the perimeter east and west of Nam Yum River. Immediately there was trouble, as over half were engaged by PLA snipers, some of whom had come right up to the tree line of the perimeter, forcing the USVUN snipers back into the circle around DEFs triangle.
“Maybe we can try later when it’s dark,” Leigh-Hastings opined.
“We’ve got no choice,” Berry answered. “Trouble is, they’ve still got a lot of vegetation on the valley floor, while their artillery has done a real job on ours. We’ve got nothing but a few dead trees and bare earthworks.”
“All the better to see ‘em when they rush us, Colonel,” Leigh-Hastings said.
“You think they’ll rush us?” he asked the Englishman, feigning surprise.
“Mad if they don’t, old boy.”
There was a screech of incoming, and they instinctively ducked even though they were in the HQ bunkers.
Roscoe came in through the burlap bag flap. “Colonel?”
“What is it?” Berry asked.
“Some of those reinforcements Freeman has sent in — some of Vinh’s boys among them — are worried about old tunnels. Some of them are saying their kinfolk fought here against the French, and they think—”
“Jesus!” Berry said. “They think the PLA are using them?”
“Some of ‘em, at least, Colonel. That’s why there’re so many all at once when they come at us from the trees. No movement in the trees during the day — zilch — but come nightfall—”
“Right,” Berry said. “Send out probe teams, bayonets, any damn thing you can find.”
Ten minutes passed, a long time with barely an hour of daylight left, before squads ventured out from the trenches to probe the earth about the perimeter.
Almost immediately there was the screech of incoming, only this time the bombardment increased, the vibration of the H.E. shells shaking the earth so violently that streams of dirt were falling from the roof of Berry’s bunker. “Some bastard’s watching us!” Doolittle said in one of the trenches.
“You don’t say,” an SAS trooper said.
“I do fucking say, and anybody who shows his scalp’ll fucking well lose it!”
“Shut up!” yelled Martinez, still in shock over D’Lupo’s death.
In Colonel Berry’s bunker the consensus was that the bombardment would not cease till nightfall.
“You think we can stop them?” someone asked Roscoe.
“I don’t know. I need to get through to Freeman for TACAIR.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
An army in retreat is never a pretty sight, but with the flooding of the plains north of Disney and the mangled rail line of the culvert in their way, Wang’s soldiers were in no mood to be merciful to any escaping POW they found, and eleven escapees from the camp near Ningming were summarily butchered with bayonets, their heads and the remainder of their bodies floating aimlessly in the waist-deep flood fields south of Xiash.
With only five miles in a direct line to go to the border, Shirley Fortescue in PLA uniform, Danny Mellin, and Murphy purposely lengthened their route by heading due east instead of south. It was harder going, but Mellin needed no argument to make his case that it was safer, after the three of them had seen bloodless torsos and heads float by, eyes picked clean.
* * *
“Why in hell don’t they send in Tomahawks?” Martinez asked, wondering why the Enterprise had not weighed in with the wizardry of the terrain-contour-matching guided cruise missiles, the wonder weapons of the Iraqi War. “The carrier too far out?”
Doolittle was about to answer when instead he ducked down in the trench as more incoming slammed into the circle outside DEF’s triangle. “No,” Doolittle said, “the carrier’s close enough in — few hundred miles is no trouble for a Tomahawk — but it’s got to have a particular target programmed into it. In Baghdad you had specific buildings, but here all there is is fucking jungle.”
“Well,” Martinez responded, brushing off mud and dirt from around his neck, “I wish to hell they’d drop a big blue.” He meant the 12,500-pound gelled slurry of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polyethylene soap.
“Gotta be careful with that one,” another SAS trooper said. “Drop it too close to us, it’ll suck the air right out of our lungs, matey, as well as the chinks’.”
The tempo of the shelling abruptly increased as the Chinese fired “time on target,” the worst form of artillery for the victims, as it is concentrated and coordinated so every round hits simultaneously, saturating the target, in this case the DEF triangle, with high explosive. It was bad news all around, for it meant that in order to mount such a time on target offensive, the Chinese must have restored communications between various gun positions in the hills, despite the earlier Enterprise strikes.
Berry ordered no flares be sent up, that starlight-scoped M-16s take the front foxholes on the perimeter. He’d no sooner given the order than he heard, “At the wire!” and the battle of small arms erupted, the USVUN defenders outnumbered four to one in the first wave. The enfilade of fire was deafening, the fighting at the outer perimeter already hand-to-hand, sacrificial Chinese sappers with ch
arges strapped to them hurling themselves at the razor wire, blowing up themselves and gaps through the rolls of wire. The starlights’ green, blurry images were shot down with impunity, but the numbers of attacks seemingly never ended, as for every dead man, another rose in his place.
The most effective “hole pluggers” on the USVUN side were the Heckler & Koch automatic grenade launchers throwing a curtain of hot steel at the invaders in three- and five-round bursts from their thirty-two-round ammo box, the only problem being that a number of AGLs were picked off because of the HK AGL’s lack of a flash hider. Some of the gunners fixed the problem with improvised fluted flash extinguishers made from meals ready to eat foil-taped to the end of the barrel.
“At the wire, at the wire! Two o’clock! Through the wire! They’re through the wire!”
Reports of Chinese breaching the wire were streaming into Berry’s bunker in surges of static, audible despite the cacophony of the firelights going on all around the perimeter.
Now the company of Gurkhas among the USVUN forces, having no grenade launchers on their rifles, showed their stuff with bayonet and Gurkha Kukri knife, heads literally rolling down in the mud, grotesque Dantelike figures — torsos that kept running, spurting blood like a gusher before they fell, their blood and mud a greasy mix for all but the surest-footed.
“Second line!” yelled NCOs and officers. “Second line,” as the PLA now owned the wire, forcing the allies back to the second line of trenches. Chinese para flares were now descending slowly, turning night to flickering day, illuminating the masses of men — over two thousand — fighting and dying, advancing, withdrawing, at point-blank range.