“Excuse me, General,” Robert Cline interjected. “It’s hardly Second Army. I mean this recon force is only —”
“Numbers aren’t the point, Bob, goddamn it! I was led to understand that our approach to the snake — as our Vietnamese colleagues call the front line — would be—”
He heard a soldier moan but couldn’t see him. One of the Delta contingent had given the soldier, or what was left of him, a shot of morphine, but it couldn’t hold the pain. He was lying in the cool morning shade of a hardwood tree, his head hidden in a triangle of leaves. When Freeman neared the man and saw what was left of his face, he clamped his jaw muscles so tightly Marte Price could see them bulge. Freeman took another couple of paces toward the man and knelt beside him, gently pulling away one of the broad leaves that had acted as a curtain. The man’s face was gone, from the bright bloody pulp that had been his nose to the deep purplish red of where his eyes had been. The miracle to Freeman was that the body was still alive, its lips, lacerated, moving like some obscene puppetry. Freeman put his right ear near the man’s mouth, and he could smell the rusty metallic odor of blood and a vile stench of excrement. He nodded, looking to Marte like a priest listening to the confession of a bedridden believer. Freeman took the man’s limp right hand in his and squeezed it slightly, nodding his head. “Yes,” he said to the soldier, and with that unclipped his side holster and pulled out his .45.
“Medevacs,” Marte said. “In a few hours the wounded’ll be—”
“I know,” Freeman said without looking up. “Would you go away now — please,” and he let the .45 slide back into his holster. “Go away,” he told her, still watching the mash of bone and raw flesh. “Now!” He heard a click — a camera — and Bob Cline took her by the arm.
“My God,” she told Cline, reluctantly following him away from the tree. “For a moment there I thought the general was going to shoot him.”
“He was,” Cline said matter-of-factly, “but it would’ve panicked everyone and given our position away to any—”
They heard a scuffle behind them. “Don’t look,” the major said, but she already had and clicked her camera again. “Oh my God—”
Freeman had cut the grunt’s throat, the blood bubbling out, the man’s legs kicking about with such force they were splashing the mud up and about what was now the corpse. It wasn’t that uncommon in combat, and seasoned correspondents had seen more than one mercy killing, but it was something Marte Price hadn’t seen before, and it was always terrible to see.
Grim-faced, Freeman walked over to her. “You use that and you’ll end my career.”
Now reports were coming in from D’Lupo’s men on the front of what had been the cloverleaf formation, and from the second and third platoons, of the number of enemy killed— fourteen, and five wounded prisoners.
The terrible shock of that morning, however, didn’t fully occur until one of the four medics in the EMREF, having done all he could for his wounded buddies, moved on to help the enemy prisoners. The first was bleeding badly from shrapnel-caused lacerations to the arms and chest. The medic bandaged the wounds and gave the soldier a shot of morphine. It was only when he saw the second prisoner, the man’s upper right leg hit by an M-16 round, that the medic realized he wasn’t treating Chinese. Freeman was called, and arrived just as Cline was having a look at the wounded man.
“What’s up?” Freeman asked curtly, his face still creased by the strain of having put one of his own men out of his misery.
“General,” Cline replied, looking up from the wounded prisoner, “you’re not going to like this.”
“Like what, damn it?”
Marte Price’s camera clicked and whirred as it advanced the film. Freeman turned on her. “Goddamn it, lady, can’t you use a quieter gadget than that? You can hear it whirring from thirty feet away.” Marte Price said nothing — she was watching Cline exchanging a worried glance with the medic. Cline straightened up. “Sir, I think we ought to get one of our Vietnamese guides over here.”
Freeman looked down at the corpse, grimly adding, “So he doesn’t look Chinese. Probably from one of the hill tribes near the border. Chinese have Vietnamese sympathizers from the border regions. I—” He stopped, as if he’d just run out of breath. “A lot of PLA sympathizers were probably wearing those goddamned pajamas. Peasant garb. Could even be from the Laos-Vietnam border.”
The HQ phone crackled and a hushed voice from the third platoon told Freeman and his force that there was movement in the heavy underbrush at eleven o’clock, four hundred yards off on the left flank behind them and coming from the direction of the Hanoi-Lang Son road, a creaking, metallic noise.
“Tanks?” Cline asked.
“Freeman! General Free-man!” It was a high-pitched woman’s voice piercing the heavy jungle growth, but there was no reply, the EMREF’s reconnaissance force having gone to ground the instant they’d known of an approaching force. It was an old Vietnamese ruse — to learn someone’s name on the opposing force, particularly that of the commanding officer, and to call out the name, giving the impression they knew a lot about you. Even among battle-hardened veterans it was a nerve-racking experience, for no matter how many times you might be reassured by your own commander, the fact was that somehow they had discovered your name — somehow they were getting inside information and had found out exactly where you were.
“General Freeman!” The voice was coming from about a hundred yards back. “General Vinh is here.”
“Yeah, right!” D’Lupo whispered. “And I’m fucking queen of the May.”
“General Freeman. Do you hear me?”
In the HQ platoon Freeman, via radio, ordered his first platoon to swing around hard left in a cloverleaf patrol, while the remaining three of the four platoons settled in defensive posture. “Okay,” said first platoon’s sergeant quietly, turning to D’Lupo, “you take the point, queenie,” and the patrol moved out.
“General Freeman!” The woman’s voice on the left flank of the HQ platoon seemed closer now, and seven and a half tense minutes later the HQ radio crackled to life, a report coming not from the left flank but from D’Lupo’s platoon up ahead. “Alpha One to Mother Hen. We’ve got a white flag fifty feet in front of us.”
“Alpha One,” Freeman ordered, “do the same. Fly a white flag.”
D’Lupo was watching the woman. She looked Chinese. At first sight she appeared to be alone, but now that his eyes had been fixed on her for several minutes, D’Lupo and others in the squad left and right of him also saw the two men materializing on either side of her, one of the AK47s looking for all the world like a stubby branch of a tree.
Slowly D’Lupo, wondering why Freeman had been so ready to answer a white flag with a white flag, reached up to the elastic khaki band about his helmet and felt for the field dressing package, the only ready white material in his kit. “Cover me,” he whispered, hoping that the two of his men nearest him on the flanks about thirty feet away from each other and either side of him had heard him. They didn’t, but they saw D’Lupo rise slowly, the white bandage wrapped loosely around the end of his M-16.
The woman, her hands held high in surrender, advanced slowly toward D’Lupo, and now the two Vietnamese guides moved forward, stopping by the four dead Vietnamese men in the black pajamas. There was a short, rapid exchange between the guides, its tone more revealing than any translation, telling Freeman that his worst fear — any commanding officer’s worst fear — had been realized. It had been a “blue on blue,” the innocuous-sounding phrase the Army used whenever there had been a clash between “friendlies” or “allies.”
The wounded men in the black pajamas were now talking rapidly at the guides, confirming that they were part of Vinh’s men, not part of the Chinese army. The Americans had fired upon their allies — or had it been the other way around? Whatever, the failure of one side or both to properly identify the other had led to the disaster of twenty-nine Americans and Vietnamese killed and fourteen wounded. To make matters even worse, Vinh’s force on the Americans’ left flank, which the Americans had thought was the creaking noise of PLA tanks, was in fact a Vietnamese relief column moving along the Hanoi-Lang Son road, riding their bicycles — some with tires punctured, riding on the rim.
“Malaya,” Freeman said, his tone terse.
“Malaya?” Cline asked, nonplussed.
“After the Japs hit Pearl Harbor,” Freeman answered, “they drove south on the jungle roads through Malaya. Get a flat tire — they’d just keep going on the rims. Sounded like armor on the move to the Aussies and the Brits. Scared the hell out of ‘em.” It was a throwaway comment, but it reminded Captain Boyd, Freeman’s press officer, just how encompassing and particular Freeman’s knowledge of military history was.
