wearing a PLA helmet. One of the men had an AK-47, at least that’s what it looked like in the moonlight. What to do?
The Skyraiders, six of them now, among the last of their kind, were swallowed by ominous soon-to-be-storm clouds seventy miles west of Hanoi. They went to instrument flying and radio silence. They knew the drill: go in as low as you could, drop the jelly without fuses — so that it wouldn’t explode — then leave.
Colonel Berry had thought about requesting a flare ship, a plane with a two-million-candlelight power beam, but to illuminate the area for the drop would also have lit it up for the PLA, enough to encourage them for another rush at the triangle. Berry called Roscoe about the tactical beacon.
“Tacbe on?” Berry inquired.
“Sending out its signal now, sir.”
“Soon as we hear them, I want you to have a squad with purple smoke, but don’t throw it until I give you the word. I don’t want any chink throwin’ it back at us. When you throw, make sure you’ve got it right”
“Affirmative.”
Berry passed the word to listen for the planes, but suddenly became alarmed by the fact that all he could hear was a persistent, high-toned ringing in his ears, drowning all other sounds. “Kacey?”
“Sir.”
“How’s your hearing?”
“Okay, sir.”
“Moment you hear those Skyraiders, let me know.”
“Yessir.”
“And Kacey, what was that between you and the brother?”
“He ain’t no brother, sir. He’s an asshole.”
Berry nodded and walked down through the foggy darkness past Kacey, along the trenches of the DEF triangle. “Anyone here from Foxtrot column?”
“Yo,” came the response, but the two men lying in the trench beside him were dead. The other men from Foxtrot, who were piling up bodies on the trench lip for extra cover, hadn’t yet reached them.
Berry spoke softly but without alarm. He patted the man who’d answered him and said, “Take their dog tags, son. Medics mightn’t get ‘round to it.”
“Yessir,” the soldier replied, but he knew that what Berry was really telling him was that if the Chinese made another attack en masse, there wouldn’t be time to take out the dead, no time even for body bags, maybe not even enough time to withdraw to the designated LZ south of Dien Bien Phu in what would be a terrible humiliation for the U.S. No matter that such a defeat would be assigned to USVUN, everyone knew the force majeure was the United States. The soldier, as others were doing all down the line, took off the dead men’s tags.
There was sporadic fire in the gloomy fog from both sides, but Berry advised Roscoe and the NCOs to conserve ammo and the men to fire only when they had a definite target. “Men here from Echo?”
“Yessir.” He went about bolstering morale in what was now the almost uncanny quiet of the battlefield, the PLA waiting for dawn, Berry waiting for the Skyraiders. He shook hands with Vietnamese NCOs and other troops, a smile here and there for the Airborne as well, and a bracing, “You’ll be all right, son,” where needed, Berry for a moment like Freeman’s double, as he was conscious of doing exactly what Freeman had done in the Battle of Skovorodino. It was a battle Freeman had lost.
The unfused jelly was also one of Freeman’s little-known tricks. Hopefully it would work.
At 0530 hours an SAS trooper heard the distant hum of prop-driven planes. The relative slowness of the old faithfuls, the Skyraiders, would allow greater accuracy for the jelly drop, but it would also expose them to much greater danger from any of the PLA’s radar-guided triple A flak.
The fog began to lift, but only enough to glimpse enemy positions through the starlight scopes. “Shit, they’re everywhere!” Kacey opined. “Like bats in the belfry.” He checked his Winchester 1200 for the sixth time in as many minutes, and he could feel the fog’s dampness seeping into the marrow of his bones.
It wasn’t yet dawn, but over Disney Hill and the surrounding countryside the air had been cleansed by the rain, and the predawn light allowed the point man of Freeman’s patrol to discern that it was a Caucasian woman in the PLA uniform, and that the other two were both males, dressed in nondescript clothes — light-colored shirts, one of them in what looked like jeans, the other in baggy shorts. The point man, by hand signal only, ordered the other ten members of the patrol to stay down, for it looked as if the three were headed up the knoll toward them. The point man didn’t want to spook the guy with the AK-47. But who in hell were they? They couldn’t possibly be some kind of Chinese resistance movement. Or were they?
The six Skyraiders came in V formation and were now peeling off and coming in on the beacon, but Kacey had already heard them and alerted Berry, who in turn told Roscoe and the CO. of the Airborne.
“Show ‘em purple!” Berry ordered, and from all around the DEF triangle violet smoke canisters were fired into the outer perimeter’s breached wire, parts of the wire hidden from view, so dense was the outpouring of the smoke. Firing broke out, mainly from the Chinese side, Berry trying to limit the response. Within thirty seconds of the purple smoke canisters, a dozen or so, being thrown to form a rough circle a hundred yards or so from DEF’s triangle of trenches, at least three were picked up by PLA and flung back toward the triangle.
Without hesitation Berry rushed out. Four or five men, including a Vietnamese, immediately followed him into the open where, despite the fog, PLA gunners could see them. Berry was cut down in the first burst, as were an SAS and a Delta trooper. Now the triangle opened up in covering fire as the Vietnamese trooper and Doolittle grabbed the flares and flung them back into the mess of outer razor wire before making their way back to the trenches.
The first Skyraider, radio silence now broken, guiding the others, swooped down out of the cloud to no more than two hundred feet above the ground, like some enormous bird of prey in the dawn’s early light, and dropped the silvery tanks of napalm just beyond the purple flares. It banked hard left and dropped another tank, and like all the others, it burst in midair into a giant hoselike spray.
Chinese triple A was filling the air with hot metal and tracer, slicing the early-morning mist The question Roscoe was asking himself was, Would the Chinese go for the trap? Would they attack in me hope of “bear- hugging” the USVUN troops, getting so close in among the Americans mat the two remaining big guns beyond Dien Bien Phu would not fire for fear of hitting the DEF triangle, killing more Americans than Chinese?
Another Skyraider swooped by, dropping his “jelly beans” around the violet-smoking perimeter, the plane then suddenly going out of control, the pilot slumping in the seat, a dull bubble of light in the distant fog as it slammed into the eastern sides of the valley.
Suddenly, bugles sounded from beyond the perimeter and the attack en masse began.
“Grenades!” Roscoe shouted, his order repeated on the three sides of the DEF triangle, and the grenades falling mainly from the AGL gunners. The first Chinese had reached the wire when the first grenades exploded among the jelly, and suddenly, like scores of Christmas-tree lights coming alight — only there the similarity ended — the burning fuel air explosive ran like a wildfire through the masses of Chinese troops where the jelly tanks had burst, releasing an aerosoled fuel air explosive like a fine but dense spray all over the perimeter and the troops around it. They were afire. To make doubly sure that all the jelly spray was afire, the five remaining Skyraiders came in with rockets, a tongue of flame licking so close to Foxtrot’s position in the DEF triangle that three Americans and two Vietnamese caught fire and burned to death.
Anyone touching the victims suffered the same terrible fate because of the mixture’s sticky adhesive quality. Dozens of Chinese with either extraordinary bravery or madness kept running toward the DEF lines, only to be cut down by the concentrated cones of fire that issued forth from Freeman’s Special Forces, Gurkhas, and Airborne. So as not to waste ammunition, each sector of DEFs three lines had been assigned its own cone or field of fire for which each force alone would be responsible. Now the five Skyraiders came in, strafing the wire perimeter to sow further chaos among the PLA troops, another Skyraider downed in the process.
The sheer volume of fire from M-16s, M-60s, AK-47s, AK-74s, type 56s, AGLs, and the rest was of a kind Roscoe had never even imagined possible. The Chinese, most of them burning to some degree, were cut down as though some great arc of scythe had cut through a field of grain. The losses were now so high that neither Wei nor Wang, the latter already dispirited by the defeat at Disney, wanted to persist. And as if to underscore their decision,
