Ian Slater: Force of Arms

“Right!” the coxs’n called. “Let’s hear a joke.”

There was only a groan from the bellies of the beasts— one man throwing up, another trying to get away from the stench. “You dirty bastard!”

“C’mon,” joined in the lieutenant of the platoon that the coxswain was ferrying to shore. “Joke!” Suddenly there was a scream just above them. The Chinese HE was a “long” shot, causing nothing more than a high column of seawater to erupt ahead of them, some of the water sweeping over the men. The Chinese had found the range, and from his semaphore leader the coxswain, Lynch, was being told, as were all the boats in his line, to slow down, anticipating the next salvo would be “shorts.”

“Jesus Christ!” Hamish said. “That was close.”

“C’mon,” Lynch bullied. “I want to hear a fucking joke, right, Lieutenant? I’m not goin’ back to the big boat without an entry from—” He waited.

“Third platoon, ‘Charlie’ company,” the lieutenant answered.

“All right then,” Lynch boomed through his bullhorn. “Let’s hear a fucking joke!”

A hand came up from the middle of the platoon.

“Go!” Lynch yelled.

“Woman has an orgasm every time she sneezes. Goes to the doc and tells him. He’ says, ‘Well, what are you taking for it?’

“ ‘Pepper,’ she says.”

There was a collective grunt.

“I like it,” the coxswain bellowed. “Any more?”

“What’s the difference—” Another LCU took a direct hit and Third platoon Charlie company could hear a man’s scream.

“Go on,” Lynch said. Intruders were swooping over low, bombing the Chinese emplacements. The LCU would be there in about seven minutes. “Go on!”

“What’s the difference between—” No one could hear it, the noise deafening.

“Get ready, boys. Ramp goes down in four minutes.”

“Remember,” the lieutenant yelled, “weapons high and each man give your two mortar rounds to the mortar team — carefully. Just don’t plunk ‘em down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hamish said. “The boys know that. Right, Walton?”

“Christ,” said Walton, “I don’t think I can stand. My fuckin’ legs—”

“Ramp down — ready!”

There was the run of chains, the splash, and the first men out — up to their waist, the zinging and pinging of bullets and the inefficient but loud slaps of expended rounds. The whole grayness of the world seemed to crowd in with a depressing enormity upon the crescent of Middle Beach, and from the ruins of the broadcasting house on Middle Beach to its hotel, the Zhonghaitau, came the heaviest concentration of automatic fire that Sergeant Hamish or Walton had ever seen. “Mortar bombs!” the lieutenant shouted. “Mortar bombs! C’mon, get movin’! Get those fuckin’ bombs over here — here, Ashe — good man, Ashe. Walton, you too.”

As the lieutenant hurried to get the mortar bomb pile set up, the mortar crew already had bipod, base plate, and thirty-five-pound barrel set, one man bent over, aligning the site, and within three minutes HE rounds were whistling up and over with a sustained rate of fourteen rounds a minute.

The heavy guns of the fleet kept crashing in, and without them the thousands of ChiCom infantry crowding on and around the much larger East Beach just to the north would have swept down in a green khaki tide. The pocket the marines had secured on Middle Beach was just that, a semicircle three hundred yards in diameter, but each minute the superiority of American logistics became painfully apparent to Cheng’s warlords, for the American organization was such that the sheer weight, the density of men and matériel, kept pushing out the pocket as if it were some awful inevitability, a giant amoeba spreading over the beach where once cadres basked in the sun.

Cheng, who had taken personal command of the reinforcements rushed in by train from Shenyang, could see only one way out, and when the bugles sounded, the ghosts of the Korean War rose up in Cheng’s troops. And under the phalanx of red flags and a terrible din they charged en masse, and it was decidedly not true, as the La Roche tabloids reported, that only half of them were armed so that all would charge and if one man fell another would quickly snatch up the downed man’s weapon. The fact was, every ChiCom soldier was well armed with either AK-74s or 47s, and there seemed to be no shortage of stick grenades.

But against the bravery of the Chinese and their weapons was pitted the bravery and equally strong discipline of the American marines in their thirteen-man rifle squad configuration with a squad leader, like Sergeant Hamish, and three four-man fire teams equipped with the best weapons in the world. The marines stood firm, unfazed by the mass attack and helped by the timely arrival of a flame-throwing tank whose two-hundred-foot-long tongue was, in Freeman’s words, the “biggest goddamn dragon those jokers had ever seen. Hell, barbecued three platoons ‘fore Cheng knew what had hit him.”

In the same way it was rumored that the Chinese didn’t like fighting in the rain, the Chinese believed that the Americans, so enamored, as Chairman Nie put it, with their high-tech toys, had no stomach for hand-to-hand combat. Trouble for Nie was that the high-tech “toys” killed faster and more accurately than those of the Chinese, and that someone had forgotten to tell him about Fort Lejeune, and when cold steel met cold steel on Middle Beach, the Chinese did a bit better because of their light packs, compared to the much more heavily weighted marines, but no discernible dent was made in the MEF’s pocket.

PFC Walton was so exhilarated being on land again he knew no one was going to push him back into the sea. On one level, like so many, he was drained of energy from the seasickness, but once ashore, the adrenaline of escape and a quickly consumed Baby Ruth bar were more than enough to carry him.

By now the massed landings of the LC craft were supplemented by over a hundred Sea Stallion helos ferrying commando units behind the Chinese, the ChiCom troops so tightly packed on and around the rear approaches to Middle Beach that the commandos were using one-shot disposable antitank LAW rocket launchers against congested areas of infantry with devastating results. Twelve helos were lost on such operations, but the success of their behind-the-lines forays was undeniable and sowed more confusion and knocked out almost as many bugles as anything else.

And it was only Cheng — certainly none of Freeman’s commanders — who divined the time of attack, 1400 hours, as most propitious for the Americans. Freeman, Cheng realized, had chosen 1400 hours for the beginning of the attack because he knew one thing the Chinese Army was fervent about was xiuxi, the two-hour spell-off period between 1:00 and 3:00 guaranteed them by Article Forty-nine of the Constitution. Two p.m. was halfway through the siesta, where most units’ efficiency was at its lowest. Pulling them out of it was like pulling a westerner out of his jet lag and telling him to fight.

The battle to breach the Great Wall at Badaling was not difficult with helo-ferried troops taken over to the southern side of the wall and getting the ChiCom defenders in a deadly cross fire. The Great Wall, as Freeman had predicted, was a great folly in modern warfare, another example of what Patton had once said — namely that “fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man,” that “anything man can build he can just as easily tear down.”

The Chinese didn’t believe in the wall any more than Freeman. Cheng hoped instead that the American graveyard would be Juyong Pass, six miles to the southeast, where there were particularly steep walled gorges that must be passed through — an ideal trap for armor. But it was there in the narrow confines of the pass, when friend and foe were clearly visible as the monsoon’s rain abated, that the A-10 Thunderbolts, or Warthogs, as they were affectionately known by those who flew and serviced them, attacked the ChiComs’ T-62s that Cheng, in his first real blunder — or so it appeared — had ordered in to spearhead the Chinese counterattack. The American pilots were left shaking their heads as they took down the planes and punctured tank after tank with the enormous A-10 Thunderbolts’ rotary-barreled GAU-8 Avengers, firing their 30mm depleted uranium-tipped bullets. Hadn’t the Chinese seen what the Warthogs had done in Iraq — on the road to Basra? As it turned out, Cheng had ordered all armored personnel, including maintenance crews, as part of their training, to go see the CNN footage, which the PLA had copied.