Ian Slater: Warshot

But if Chen had predicted success in the raid on the jail, then his prediction that Freeman would immediately drive south couldn’t have been more wrong. Freeman, his Second Army now casting all its attention southward, was on the verge of just such a massive counterattack on A-7 and beyond when Beijing, seeing the writing on the wall, sued for a cease-fire in the U.N. on the grounds that, as they told the people, “the enemy imperialist aggressors on A-7 have been repelled at the border and we are satisfied. The freedom-loving peoples of China are not warmongers, and now that a lesson has been taught to the aggressors, the Chinese people wish to normalize relations.”

Without Chinese support on their eastern flank, and with the massive defeat of their armor out of Yakutsk, Novosibirsk quickly joined Communist China in asking for “peace talks.” Washington readily agreed to a cease-fire at midnight.

In the southernmost part of the lake around Kultuk, General Minsky’s troops, only hours before exultant over having helped rout the American III Corps, were defiant to the end. Their feeling of having been denied a victory because of Yesov’s failure to hold in the north was further inflamed by the news of the severing of the Nanking Bridge. Minsky was hard put, and indeed did little, to discipline his troops.

After having looted the American dead, they were now withdrawing back through the taiga like a plague. A company of them occupying their southernmost flank position sought to vent their anger and frustrations on anything and everything in their path. One such target was the small house in the woods near Kultuk that Minsky had used as a fire-control point. They burned it to the ground and then moved to the next target, Major Truet’s Charlie Company, where Private Thomis was dug in with the others, waiting for a helo evac that had been hampered by the midair collision of two Black Hawk choppers, one of which would have taken out Thomis, who now stood in the blood-soaked ice of his foxhole.

Though injected with morphine for the pain, and fully conscious, Thomis was unable to move his right leg because of his self-inflicted wound, which the medic and Truet and the others around him had quite reasonably believed had come from an enemy bullet during the earlier Siberian helo attack.

After the first attack wave of Minsky’s company against Charlie Company’s foxholes and trenches near the tunnels, the Siberians were beaten back. But Charlie Company was left with no more than fifty-two men out of what had originally been a hundred — several abdominal cases having priority over Thomis and others in the pre-cease-fire evacuation now under way. Now it was Thomis’s turn, but the taiga a hundred yards in front began trembling, snow sliding down the thickly laden branches from the reverberations of the Siberians’ machine guns. Amid all this, smoke flares were being fired for cover by the Siberians even as evac helos arrived in an effort to take out the last of Charlie Company. Thomis had to help himself out of the foxhole, Brooklyn and the man from Georgia both dead in foxholes nearby, Thomis using his M-16 as a staff to haul himself out with his left foot, but exhausted at the top, lying panting like a whipped dog in the snow, trying to catch his breath long enough to hobble his way to the nearest helo.

As the Siberian company broke cover under flare light and closed for the kill, a section of eight or nine of them, though white figures in the white smoke, nevertheless cast long, dark shadows spearing toward the nearest loading helo. Thomis knew that one good bullet in the right place and the helo would be out of operation, and from the darkness beyond the flare light he opened up at twenty yards, downing two of the Siberians, the others diving for cover behind the wreckage of one of the earlier disabled choppers. There was a sharp crack by his ear, but Thomis had already tossed two grenades at the downed helo’s carcass, the first going wide, blowing up snow and dirt, the second exploding in a purple crash by the helo whose wreckage suddenly spewed rivers of flame, two of the Siberians rising, afire. At fifteen yards Thomis couldn’t have missed them if he’d tried, the other four or five Siberians heading back to the taiga.

“Jesus!” someone yelled at the helo now loading its litters with the last of the wounded. “Look at Thom!”

Thomis was glimpsed in the smoke for a second changing magazines. Having tried to hobble toward the chopper, he’d found he couldn’t do it. The next moment he saw Emory, the black man moaning, his dark face shiny with blood draining down his left side. “Can you walk?” yelled Thomis, firing from the hip into a new rush of Siberians from the taiga trying to get close with their wildly spraying automatic Kalashnikovs. He heard the whack of several bullets hitting the chopper and was filled with panic that if the chopper bought it, he’d be left behind. “Get up, goddamn you!” he yelled at Emory. Emory was on his knees, blood still dripping from him, dazed, unsure of what was going on. “Go on, get up, goddamn it! Move your ass!” commanded Thomis.

The black man rose, and Thomis’s right arm wrapped itself about his shoulder. Emory would be his transport. Using the butt of the M-16 as a walking stick, they limped toward the chopper, fell, got up again, and now the chopper was rising into swirling smoke, its litters full, arms and legs sticking out of it from every angle, it was so crammed with bodies. Several Siberians were charging through the smoke. Thomis fired again from the hip, saw one man literally thrown back, another go down face forward into the snow, the third literally shot to pieces by Thomis’s last clip. Suddenly another man appeared on Thomis’s left, the smoke clearing because of the downdraft of the slowly rising chopper, the Siberian’s Kalashnikov aiming up at the chopper when Thomis, with one hop, brought his M-16 around like a baseball bat, knocking the man off his feet and falling on his face, butt first. At this point the helo, dangerously overloaded, barely managed to make its turn away toward the lake, and the last thing Truet and the other evacuees on the chopper saw was Thomis yelling something up at them, fist raised defiantly.

The Siberians had had enough, and moved on to Irkutsk. All that later historians would note about the “small action” at a place called the Kultuk Tunnels was that Americans had come under “repeated Siberian attacks during a last-minute evacuation.” Nothing was mentioned in the historical account — because no one knew — that Thomis had shot himself in the foot in the hopes of being one of the first “wounded” taken out, but had in fact been one of the last, along with Emory.

Major Truet had been told at West Point never to exaggerate a man’s exploits when writing him up for a commendation, that battle-experienced officers could smell a “puff” job a mile away. And so he simply wrote what he saw as the truth: namely that Private First Class John D. Thomis of Charlie Company Second Battalion U.S. III Corps had, despite sustaining a leg wound from the enemy and being under repeated attacks by the enemy on C Company positions, not only held his ground, but in the best traditions of the service, had thrown himself into the breach, fighting off repeated attempts of the Siberians who were trying to destroy the helicopter evacuating his comrades. Private Thomis had kept firing until he ran out of ammunition, at which point he used his rifle itself as a weapon in close-quarter combat, securing precious seconds during which the helo, with his comrades aboard, could take off.

For his “valor at the Kultuk Tunnels,” Private First Class Thomis was awarded the Silver Star. Only Emory, his head swathed in bandages now, and some said still suffering from concussion, opined, “Shit — that son of a bitch couldn’t walk to the chopper. That’s why he was shootin’ where he was, man. Otherwise he’d have been the first son of a bitch on the Huey.”