Ian Slater - South China Sea

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.

“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.