Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

The major was moving cautiously but was so far out front that one U.S. cavalryman dubbed the once shy major “Hound Dog.” Every one of them now knew the story of his daughter being raped before his eyes and sympathized with his obsession for vengeance on the NKA, but they weren’t keen to be part of it. Tae’s obsession was making him altogether too dangerous, in their eyes.

They slowed as they approached a second area, where they saw the remains of four NKA, one man’s limbs charcoal, two of the faces black jam already seething with insects. Tae was annoyed the napalm had burned off all unit patches or any other kind of identification that might have confirmed they were against one of the units led by Students for Reunification traitors like Jung-hyun.

The men on the flanks were resting on the slope up from the ditch when they heard the spitting of light machine-gun fire. Hitting the ground, no one knew where it was coming from until two cavalrymen dropped in the paddy fifty yards behind them, the high waterspouts dancing amid the stalks of rice. The Americans around Tae were unable to return the NKA fire for fear of hitting their own men in the paddy, and it wasn’t until two more Americans had been killed in the paddy and an NKA was seen floating that the firing ceased.

Seeing two of his men badly wounded, staggering from the rice field, the air cavalry lieutenant was on the PRC-25, calling in a Medevac chopper. Major Tae ordered the others into a tighter defensive perimeter. There was a scream off to his left, three men hit by a “Malay whip,” a long, six-inch-thick dead log rigged to a trip wire, slamming down like a swing trapeze. Two men were killed outright, the other, his back broken, screaming in agony — someone yelling at him to shut up, the lieutenant pulling a violet flare, its purple smoke designating the landing zone for the chopper and also alerting any NKA nearby to the Americans’ position.

It was then that Tae saw two badly burned NKA, fifty to sixty yards away, crawling into unburned brush, a whiff of burnt flesh and wood smoke in the air. One of them tried to turn and fire what looked like an AK-47, but either he was out of ammunition or the gun jammed. The other NKA, all but naked, save the singed rags of what had been a drab, olive-colored uniform, kept crawling toward the brush.

The cavalry sergeant caught up with him, and the man, though beaten, was staring up, eyes alive with hatred, his breathing labored and wheezy, eyebrows gone and a gellike pus where napalm had eaten into his left thigh. But there was no mistake, and Tae recognized him at once. Jung-hyun— his daughter’s onetime boyfriend and SFR activist who’d turned on his own country.

The cavalry lieutenant could tell at one glance that Tae had found his man. “About time, eh, Major?”

If Tae heard, he gave no indication, but while the lieutenant was preoccupied with organizing covering fire for the incoming Medevac, Tae handed his squad weapon to the sergeant, then, bending down, drew his knife from its leg sheath. The chopper was coining in, sporadic NKA fire erupting from the bush. “Where is Mi-ja?”

Jung-hyun refused to answer. Tae grabbed Jung’s tattered collar, bringing his head close to the blade. Once more he saw his daughter across the interrogation room — the smell of her perfume, and the rape as real to him as if it were happening now. And for her he could not kill Jung. As he stood up in the stinging dust of the Medevac chopper, whose rotors were beating the air into a maelstrom about him, Tae’s anger at his inability to do that for which he had stayed alive overwhelmed him and he kicked Jung in the side. Jung’s body rolled. There was an explosion — Tae’s body seemed to jump, sending him crashing into the sergeant, the grenade’s shrapnel killing the sergeant outright and mangling Tae’s feet, his boots, shredded with splintered bone, streaming blood.

In the American camp south at Uijongbu, the instructors used it as an example of how an officer, Tae, well trained and knowledgeable about booby traps, had, in a case of what the instructor called “emotional overload,” forgotten the very thing he’d just told a U.S. air cavalryman a few minutes before: “Never move close in to an NKA body, live or dead.” One of the oldest NKA tricks in the book was to pull a grenade’s pin and shove it under the weight of your body. As soon as you’re moved — down goes the striker. “Boom!”

Had it not been for the Medevac getting Tae to a field hospital within half an hour, said the instructor, the ROK major would have lost his life rather than having to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

“Would have been better off,” said one of the pupils.

“ SCHNELL!” - “QUICKLY!” shouted one of the Stasi guards. The POW column had slowed momentarily while a salvo of high-explosive shells whistled overhead, every one of the British and American soldiers hitting the forest floor. The guard was waving an AKM submachine gun, its black folding butt and tangent sight a stark contrast to the falling snow. The powder snow had stopped for a while over the northernmost part of the Teutoburger Wald, and now, with the temperature only slightly above freezing, the flakes were big and damp, disappearing on contact into the blankets that were being worn as capes by many in the column who had had their uniforms taken by the SPETS.

Now, with other prisoners being picked up along the way, the British and American column being force-marched to Gobfeld, eighteen miles north of Bielefeld and forty miles southwest of Hannover, had swelled to more than three hundred men. As much as the prisoners resented the bullying guards, most of them, like David, realized that ironically, in the Russian’s haste to move the POWs out of the way of their advancing echelons of armor-led troops and motorized regiments, the Stasi guards were in fact keeping some Allied prisoners alive who would have otherwise died from hypothermia had they been allowed to stop for any length of time.

Even so, the cockney’s earlier comment to David Brentwood and Waite that they were all “for the high jump “—execution-made the prisoners reluctant to keep up the punishing pace. “Hope the bastard that’s got my uniform is warm,” complained a U.S. engineer. “I’m sure as hell not.”

“Least you’ve got your boots, mate,” said Fred Waite, the British private who had teamed up with David Brentwood. “Least your twinkies won’t fell off.”

“Speak for yourself. Anyway—”

“Schweig dock!” yelled a guard.

“Shut up your fucking self,” said Waite, turning to Brentwood, his breath steaming the air. “That Kraut’s getting on my tit.”

Brentwood said nothing, glancing anxiously about as another stream of POWs, thirty or so Americans, up ahead were being melded into the main column heading for Gobfeld. For a moment David thought he recognized Thelman, but the main POW stream quickly swallowed up the new additions before Brentwood could know for sure. Dizzy, like so many of the other prisoners, from lack of food and sleep, and the effects of the cold, David found it necessary to muster all his strength merely to keep going in the column. Nevertheless, he tried to increase his pace.

“Easy, Davey, old son,” cautioned Waite, his breath no longer visible in the air, his body losing the battle. “Not the World Cup, you know.”

“Thought I saw a buddy of mine,” answered David.

“Yes, well relax. Husband your energy, old son. That’s the—” Waite wanted to say “ticket” but couldn’t go on, gasping for air like an exhausted swimmer. Brentwood took the Englishman’s left arm and draped it about his shoulder, taking his weight. “You okay, Fred?”