Ian Slater - South China Sea

He had never felt so low — not even in ‘Nam. There, at least, he could fight back. But here in the rolling, pitching darkness of the tiny paint locker, he felt absolutely abandoned. Mellin thought of his sister, Angela, who had been posted all these years as MIA, wondering if her final moments had been like this — utterly alone — or had she had it worse than he? Was she perhaps still alive? A prisoner? Or was she dead? He clung to the idea she was still alive, as if somehow he had unfinished business, her unknown fate something to be settled, something to concentrate upon in his own abandonment, something to hold on to. Why? he asked himself as he lay sick on the cold, metal floor. Why were the Chinese so bent on finding out whether or not he’d been on the Chical? Had they been behind the attack? What made the Chinese authorities so interested in him?

The truth was, they weren’t interested in Danny Mellin. The ship’s officers’ Neanderthal interrogation of him was merely the result of them carrying out Beijing’s orders; orders which, in the seething bureaucratic maze of the Chinese capital, had now been forgotten in the sudden avalanche of paperwork occasioned by the war.

The activation of China’s twenty Main Force divisions—300,000 men, nine hundred planes, over a thousand T-69 tanks, and fourteen hundred pieces of artillery, much of it self-propelled — required a massive bureaucratic effort. An army of clerks in the Great Hall of the People and beyond, who, from the ministerial level of arranging finance through Beijing’s holdings on the Hong Kong stock exchange, to the more than twenty clerks required for each soldier at the front, complained that there were not enough computers to help reduce the task.

In fact, even Schwarzkopf’s HQ with all its computerization still required no less than thirty million phone calls for the bombing offensive against Iraq alone, and still needed three hundred Americans behind the lines for every American soldier at the front.

The moment the massive tires of the Hercules touched and screeched on the runway at the Gia Lam airfield southeast of Hanoi’s center, the plane came under sniper fire, several rounds penetrating the fuselage, a ricochet striking and zinging off an EMREF trooper’s helmet. “How rude!” Doolittle said.

“Jesus Christ,” D’Lupo said, ducking. “Thought this friggin’ place was supposed to be secure.”

“Settle down,” Freeman intoned coolly over the PA system, not showing his own surprise. “Bound to be a few Chinese insurgents — take a potshot in hopes of shaking us up, then trot off home to bed. Right?”

“Fucking shakes me up,” D’Lupo told Martinez, the latter agreeing, gripping his rifle tightly. Doolittle meanwhile watched the photojournalism Marte Price, quickly jotting down notes, stopping for a moment to push away a wisp of hair beneath her helmet.

“General,” she asked Freeman, “how about a shot of the EMREF spearhead just before they deplane?”

Freeman nodded. “All right, boys, Ms. Price wants a photo of you heroes. Smile — and that’s an order.”

Marte Price was annoyed. What she didn’t want was a photograph of 126 troops grinning from ear to ear. The flash seemed to illuminate the whole plane. One soldier asleep — the tension having already drained him — suddenly sat up. “What the—”

It was good for a laugh, and Marte Price was satisfied. A startled soldier was a good pic for the next edition of the Des Moines Register. But already, even as the huge plane was coming to a standstill, she was feeling dishonest, somehow corrupted, knowing full well that the Register’s editor, unless told otherwise, would run the picture as one of a soldier in a moment of high combat stress. As such it would be taken off the wire by most major papers in America, particularly given the fact that apart from CNN, Freeman had excluded any major media network.

Two of the aircraft’s crew stood by as the massive rear door/ramp was lowered and two Humvee “scouts,” each armed with a TOW missile launcher and.50 caliber machine gun, rolled off onto the tarmac. They were followed by the two lines of troops, none of whom were below the level of E-7 Sergeant First Class when they volunteered for EMREF duty. The sniping had stopped.

“You figure this is worth fifty-five bucks a month?” D’Lupo said, referring to the Airborne’s hazardous duty pay.

“No way,” Martinez responded.

Freeman saw two Vietnamese, one a cadre — a political officer — coming toward him dressed in traditional black pajamas and lion-tamer hat, the other a senior military officer dressed in the camouflage green khaki of the new Vietnam uniform.

“General Freeman,” the cadre said, smiling. “We welcome you and your troops to Vietnam.”

“Cam on,” Freeman said, extending his hand first, though he didn’t like it, to the political officer and then to General Vinh.

“What’d he say?” D’Lupo whispered. “ ‘C’mon!’?”

“No, you fucking wop,” Martinez said. “It’s gook for ‘thank you.’ “

“You speak it too?” a surprised D’Lupo pressed.

“Yeah. Me and the general do our homework, see?”

“Oh yeah,” D’Lupo challenged. “All right then, what’s ‘fuck off’ in Vietnamese?”

“Easy,” Martinez said. “Chuc ngu ngon!”

“All right, smartass, so you know gook.”

In the penumbra of light about the ramp, D’Lupo saw a woman in Vietnamese uniform, then another carrying baskets toward the plane. D’Lupo couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. It seemed as if her whole leg was showing. She was walking toward Freeman, who was politely but firmly telling his Vietnamese host, through an interpreter now, that he was given ample assurances by Hanoi via the Pentagon that the Hanoi airfields were secure and that if there were sniping around Gia Lam Field, why the hell didn’t Hanoi tower divert the American Hercules thirteen miles north of the city proper to Noi Bai Airport?

Through his interpreter the cadre assured the general that the Gia Lam Airport was secure. There had been only one sniper, an ex-NVA regular who, the cadre explained, was mentally unstable, so that when he saw an American plane, and a huge one at that, as big as one of the B-52 bombers that had attacked Hanoi in the Vietnam War, he had had a false memory — the cadre meant “flashback”—and shot at the big plane.

“I believe,” the cadre added, “that you have similar problems with veterans in the United States?”

“Yes,” Freeman replied, tempted to say that as he understood it, Marxist-Leninism would make a balanced personality impossible, but realizing the cadre’s explanation was an olive branch being extended. Freeman accepted it. “Yes, we shot up one another quite a bit, didn’t we?” After the interpreter had finished, the cadre smiled, shaking Freeman’s hand again.

By now almost every one of Freeman’s 127-man spearhead had been given a lei of welcome by one of the female V.A. regulars, CNN already bouncing it off a satellite, beaming it back to the States, and Marte Price busily taking shots of the cadre and the two generals meeting, each handshake a polite but not overly warm gesture of willing cooperation. Once he realized the CNN camera was rolling, Freeman — the first note of anxiety present in his voice since he’d left Hawaii — called his aide over. “Bob, for God’s sake make sure CNN gets a shot of the British SAS boys. Emphasize that this is a U.S.-led U.N., I repeat U.N., action, and that other countries will be making their contributions to the U.N. force within a matter of days. And make sure those—” He stopped, unable to think of the right word for a second.