by Ian Slater
“Jesus!” came one voice out of all the rest streaming into Berry’s bunker. “They’re inside the wire! Inside the fucking—”
The voice stopped short, and for a split second Berry didn’t understand the full import of the message. Of course he knew they were inside the perimeter wire, but—
Then another voice explained they were “coming up from inside!” They had tunneled under the wire and were now coming up well within the circle as well as breaching the wire.
Martinez fired the last of his clip, went to reload, saw the long, stilettolike bayonet of an AK-47 coming at him, then a shot so close to him it left his ears ringing, the Vietnamese soldier having shot the Chinese at point-blank range.
“Thanks,” Martinez said, the two of them advancing momentarily until driven back by the grenade concussion. But in that moment, when the Vietnamese had saved his life, for Martinez and for all the other Americans fighting side by side with Vietnamese, ‘Nam was now not forgotten, but was in some strange way resolved, and, as is often the case, the old ferocity between the two onetime enemies now underwent that strange metamorphosis in which old enemies join-in an equally close friendship as only men who have been under fire can understand and feel.
The Gurkhas in particular put a stop to what Leigh-Hastings described as “this tunnel nonsense!” by not only slitting throats at the tunnels’ exits, but going down and creating the only mass panic of the whole Chinese attack: one man in a tunnel a formidable force, effectively blocking the way of the long line of Chinese troops in the tunnel who, in the near pitch-dark, couldn’t shoot forward without killing their own. Not one of seven Gurkhas who went down came up, but what they cost the Chinese by comparison was huge, for the pile of mostly headless bodies jammed the tunnels’ exits, and now a fifteen-year-old with a .45 could have kept anyone from coming out.
The outer perimeter, however, had collapsed, and the three IFOR columns and the USVUN reserves were stretched in a tight perimeter around the DEF triangle, their concentrated fire hitting the Chinese with a veritable curtain of lead that for a full five minutes was a roar like some great waterfall cascading hundreds of feet over a precipice. The Chinese were driven back, only two or three actually reaching the trench leading to Berry’s command bunker, outside of which Kacey fired the Winchester shotgun twice, the sixty darts felling the three would-be intruders.
The Chinese began to withdraw. The defenders surged after them in a final enfilade of fire that filled the valley with sound.
“What d’you think?” Berry asked Leigh-Hastings and Roscoe over the telephone. “They’ll hit us again tonight?”
A voice from Leigh-Hastings’s bunker at Echo informed Colonel Berry that the major was dead — a stomach wound from a Black Rhino bullet had all but blown him apart, his entrails covering his men nearby and the bunker wall. It was the same kind of story coming in from DEF all over the perimeter — wounds that should not have been critical were of a kind never seen by the two Airborne surgeons at DEF’s hospital bunker. Men with shoulder and thigh wounds, normally candidates for recovery, were dead because of the enormous blood loss from the wounds.
“Colonel Berry, sir.” It was a sergeant who had just entered the bunker.
“Yes?”
“Sir, we took a few prisoners. The Vietnamese are seeing if they can get some info. Ah, their methods — I mean, they don’t seem to like the Chinese very much.”
“Can’t say I do either,” Berry replied, “but limit the rough stuff. Just keep pumping them separately. See if we can get a pattern.”
“Yes, sir. Ah, sir, we’ve got a surprise. I don’t think you’re gonna like it.” With that, the sergeant pulled in a prisoner, a black prisoner in tiger-pattern fatigues, different from the Chinese greens but wearing a PLA helmet. What infuriated Berry wasn’t so much that this was probably the MIA gone bad— what had Kacey called him, Pepper? — but the sneering attitude of the man.
“You fools are all dead! You know that?”
“What’s your name?” Berry asked.
“Fuck you, man!”
Berry fumed but held his temper, saying only, “Take him away. POW cage.”
“You all fucking dead, man!” Pepper yelled. “You all—”
It was only now that Kacey, posted outside, realized that the black man was Pepper. “Well, well, big shot! Whaddya know?”
“You dead too, you motherfucker Oreo!”
“Where’s the woman?” Kacey inquired.
“Fuck you, man. Fuckin’ Oreo!”
Kacey wished he could escort Pepper to the cage personally, but he had three dead PLA to drag out of his trench.
Roscoe told Berry that he didn’t think the Chinese would attack until predawn, “but when they do—” He didn’t get to finish his sentence for the PLA artillery started up, and to make matters worse, fog started to roll in. Roscoe called from his bunker and reported the capture of a white woman — no ID tags.
“Huh,” Berry said. “So the Chinese gave each one of them a rifle, and they gave up first chance they could. PLA won’t like that. We’ve got Pepper here. No ID tags on him. Yours?’
“Same here. What are we going to do with ‘em?” Roscoe asked.
“Same as we do with all the other prisoners. Take ‘em back with us, if we ever get out of here. But right now I don’t give a damn about those two. What I want is some in-depth defense. I’m going to get a few Skyraiders in here.”
“In this fog?”
“We’ll use purple smoke. At dawn.”
“If they wait”
Meanwhile everyone was ordered to dig deeper around the DEF triangle, the last line of defense, every man knowing the Chinese now had the circle.
* * *
At dawn three of the old warriors of ‘Nam — prop-driven Skyraiders — came in to answer Berry’s call for jelly. It was not something he wanted to do, because of the terrible danger to his own troops, but he could see no other way — not just of defense, but of survival.
* * *
Two miles from the border, in the early-morning moonlight, where flooded paddies gave way to higher ground, Mellin, Murphy, and Shirley Fortescue tried to move cautiously, but it was difficult, their excitement in anticipation of crossing the border, of outlandish dreams of fantastic things such as warmth, soap, clean clothes, good food, perhaps even coffee, dancing in their heads, at odds with their reason, which told them that being in the area where Chinese troops were most concentrated was inherently dangerous. They had no way of knowing the PLA had suffered a major defeat at Disney. They did not even know the hill called Disney was only four miles southwest of them. All they knew for certain was that earlier that day they had seen thousands of PLA troops to the west, trudging northward, following the rail line they had sabotaged. Perhaps the Chinese had won and front-line troops were being recalled? Whatever the situation, they had every intention of avoiding them after the grisly and unspeakable horrors they’d seen around noon, in particular me sight of a severed head having collected flotsam and grass about it in a slimy halo.
Murphy suddenly stopped. Shirley grabbed his arm.
“Danny,” Murphy said in a hushed tone. “You hear that?”
“Yeah.” It sounded like linoleum tearing, a machine gun in the distance. But whose?
“Let’s stay put for a while!” Danny said.
“Good idea,” Murphy said. They were near a grove of trees. “I’ll take the first watch.”
Shirley eased herself to the sodden muddy ground and felt dizzy from fatigue and hunger. After the explosion at the railway, Trang being killed, the horse, she’d had no appetite, but now she was ravenous and reached into the pockets of her PLA uniform and remembered that what few rice balls she’d managed to save were back at the railway in her jeans pockets. She had taken them off and put on the PLA uniform, forgetting in her hurry about the rice. Her sigh of disappointment was audible to Murphy.
“What’s up, Shirley?” She told him. He gave her his last ration, but she
refused. He insisted, saying if she didn’t take it, he’d start swearing again.
Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t help a smile, which he could barely make out in the moonlight. “In that case,” she told him, “I’ll eat it.” When he gave it to her, he folded her fingers over it and kissed them. She was astounded. As far as she knew, Australians only did that kind of thing when they were blind drunk. Maybe it was the concussion of the rail wreck.
* * *
The point man on one of Freeman’s unofficial border patrols had them in the green circle of his starlight scope, especially the one — a woman, he thought, from the blur that looked like shoulder-length hair — who was wearing a PLA helmet. One of the men had an AK-47, at least that’s what it looked like in the moonlight. What to do?
* * *
The Skyraiders, six of them now, among the last of their kind, were swallowed by ominous soon-to-be-storm clouds seventy miles west of Hanoi. They went to instrument flying and radio silence. They knew the drill: go in as low as you could, drop the jelly without fuses — so that it wouldn’t explode — then leave.
Colonel Berry had thought about requesting a flare ship, a plane with a two-million-candlelight power beam, but to illuminate the area for the drop would also have lit it up for the PLA, enough to encourage them for another rush at the triangle. Berry called Roscoe about the tactical beacon.
“Tacbe on?” Berry inquired.
“Sending out its signal now, sir.”
“Soon as we hear them, I want you to have a squad with purple smoke, but don’t throw it until I give you the word. I don’t want any chink throwin’ it back at us. When you throw, make sure you’ve got it right”
“Affirmative.”
Berry passed the word to listen for the planes, but suddenly became alarmed by the fact that all he could hear was a persistent, high-toned ringing in his ears, drowning all other sounds. “Kacey?”
“Sir.”
“How’s your hearing?”
“Okay, sir.”
“Moment you hear those Skyraiders, let me know.”
“Yessir.”
“And Kacey, what was that between you and the brother?”
“He ain’t no brother, sir. He’s an asshole.”
Berry nodded and walked down through the foggy darkness past Kacey, along the trenches of the DEF triangle. “Anyone here from Foxtrot column?”
“Yo,” came the response, but the two men lying in the trench beside him were dead. The other men from Foxtrot, who were piling up bodies on the trench lip for extra cover, hadn’t yet reached them.
Berry spoke softly but without alarm. He patted the man who’d answered him and said, “Take their dog tags, son. Medics mightn’t get ‘round to it.”
“Yessir,” the soldier replied, but he knew that what Berry was really telling him was that if the Chinese made another attack en masse, there wouldn’t be time to take out the dead, no time even for body bags, maybe not even enough time to withdraw to the designated LZ south of Dien Bien Phu in what would be a terrible humiliation for the U.S. No matter that such a defeat would be assigned to USVUN, everyone knew the force majeure was the United States. The soldier, as others were doing all down the line, took off the dead men’s tags.
There was sporadic fire in the gloomy fog from both sides, but Berry advised Roscoe and the NCOs to conserve ammo and the men to fire only when they had a definite target. “Men here from Echo?”
“Yessir.” He went about bolstering morale in what was now the almost uncanny quiet of the battlefield, the PLA waiting for dawn, Berry waiting for the Skyraiders. He shook hands with Vietnamese NCOs and other troops, a smile here and there for the Airborne as well, and a bracing, “You’ll be all right, son,” where needed, Berry for a moment like Freeman’s double, as he was conscious of doing exactly what Freeman had done in the Battle of Skovorodino. It was a battle Freeman had lost.
The unfused jelly was also one of Freeman’s little-known tricks. Hopefully it would work.
At 0530 hours an SAS trooper heard the distant hum of prop-driven planes. The relative slowness of the old faithfuls, the Skyraiders, would allow greater accuracy for the jelly drop, but it would also expose them to much greater danger from any of the PLA’s radar-guided triple A flak.
The fog began to lift, but only enough to glimpse enemy positions through the starlight scopes. “Shit, they’re everywhere!” Kacey opined. “Like bats in the belfry.” He checked his Winchester 1200 for the sixth time in as many minutes, and he could feel the fog’s dampness seeping into the marrow of his bones.
* * *
It wasn’t yet dawn, but over Disney Hill and the surrounding countryside the air had been cleansed by the rain, and the predawn light allowed the point man of Freeman’s patrol to discern that it was a Caucasian woman in the PLA uniform, and that the other two were both males, dressed in nondescript clothes — light-colored shirts, one of them in what looked like jeans, the other in baggy shorts. The point man, by hand signal only, ordered the other ten members of the patrol to stay down, for it looked as if the three were headed up the knoll toward them. The point man didn’t want to spook the guy with the AK-47. But who in hell were they? They couldn’t possibly be some kind of Chinese resistance movement. Or were they?
* * *
The six Skyraiders came in V formation and were now peeling off and coming in on the beacon, but Kacey had already heard them and alerted Berry, who in turn told Roscoe and the CO. of the Airborne.
“Show ‘em purple!” Berry ordered, and from all around the DEF triangle violet smoke canisters were fired into the outer perimeter’s breached wire, parts of the wire hidden from view, so dense was the outpouring of the smoke. Firing broke out, mainly from the Chinese side, Berry trying to limit the response. Within thirty seconds of the purple smoke canisters, a dozen or so, being thrown to form a rough circle a hundred yards or so from DEF’s triangle of trenches, at least three were picked up by PLA and flung back toward the triangle.
Without hesitation Berry rushed out. Four or five men, including a Vietnamese, immediately followed him into the open where, despite the fog, PLA gunners could see them. Berry was cut down in the first burst, as were an SAS and a Delta trooper. Now the triangle opened up in covering fire as the Vietnamese trooper and Doolittle grabbed the flares and flung them back into the mess of outer razor wire before making their way back to the trenches.
The first Skyraider, radio silence now broken, guiding the others, swooped down out of the cloud to no more than two hundred feet above the ground, like some enormous bird of prey in the dawn’s early light, and dropped the silvery tanks of napalm just beyond the purple flares. It banked hard left and dropped another tank, and like all the others, it burst in midair into a giant hoselike spray.
Chinese triple A was filling the air with hot metal and tracer, slicing the early-morning mist The question Roscoe was asking himself was, Would the Chinese go for the trap? Would they attack in me hope of “bear-hugging” the USVUN troops, getting so close in among the Americans mat the two remaining big guns beyond Dien Bien Phu would not fire for fear of hitting the DEF triangle, killing more Americans than Chinese?
Another Skyraider swooped by, dropping his “jelly beans” around the violet-smoking perimeter, the plane then suddenly going out of control, the pilot slumping in the seat, a dull bubble of light in the distant fog as it slammed into the eastern sides of the valley.
Suddenly, bugles sounded from beyond the perimeter and the attack en masse began.
“Grenades!” Roscoe shouted, his order repeated on the three sides of the DEF triangle, and the grenades falling mainly from the AGL gunners. The first Chinese had reached the wire when the first grenades exploded among the jelly, and suddenly, like scores of Christmas-tree lights coming alight — only there the similarity ended — the burning fuel air explosive ran like a wildfire through the masses of Chinese troops where the jelly tanks had burst, releasing an aerosoled fuel air explosive like a fine but de
nse spray all over the perimeter and the troops around it. They were afire. To make doubly sure that all the jelly spray was afire, the five remaining Skyraiders came in with rockets, a tongue of flame licking so close to Foxtrot’s position in the DEF triangle that three Americans and two Vietnamese caught fire and burned to death.
Anyone touching the victims suffered the same terrible fate because of the mixture’s sticky adhesive quality. Dozens of Chinese with either extraordinary bravery or madness kept running toward the DEF lines, only to be cut down by the concentrated cones of fire that issued forth from Freeman’s Special Forces, Gurkhas, and Airborne. So as not to waste ammunition, each sector of DEFs three lines had been assigned its own cone or field of fire for which each force alone would be responsible. Now the five Skyraiders came in, strafing the wire perimeter to sow further chaos among the PLA troops, another Skyraider downed in the process.
The sheer volume of fire from M-16s, M-60s, AK-47s, AK-74s, type 56s, AGLs, and the rest was of a kind Roscoe had never even imagined possible. The Chinese, most of them burning to some degree, were cut down as though some great arc of scythe had cut through a field of grain. The losses were now so high that neither Wei nor Wang, the latter already dispirited by the defeat at Disney, wanted to persist. And as if to underscore their decision, the forty-three remaining from Echo, Foxtrot, and Delta led a running counterattack charge. The Chinese lines broke and withdrew, their sudden panic not something the victors despised them for, but rather understood as fellow warriors. The combination of U.S. TACATR and the elite corps of commandos had simply held beyond the point the PLA had thought possible. Only now did Beijing decide to talk — not promise, but talk — about an armistice, a cease-fire to go into effect at noon.
* * *
Two hundred fifty miles eastward, where the early-morning light suffused the trees and tall grass in a golden hue, the point man now saw that all three were Caucasian. Not that this made them automatically risk-free, but everyone had heard about the PLA having taken a large number of oil rig workers and the like prisoner. “Freeze!” he shouted.