CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Pulling back from where the blue on blue had occurred, D’Lupo’s seven-man point squad, the first rifle platoon HQ, and three other platoons behind them — including Martinez’s Special Forces group and the retreating troops of General Vinh — ran into some isolated sniping but managed to establish a half-moon-shaped defense perimeter. It was about three hundred yards in diameter, its edge just beyond a V-shaped gully formed by a creek bed which the PLA would have to cross before climbing fifteen feet at a forty-five-degree incline if they were to attack the allied force. Behind the half-moon-shaped perimeter there were the burial mounds of a deserted village. The villagers, terrified of the PLA, had left, heading south for Phu Lang Thuong well before the retreating advance patrol of the EMREF and Vinh’s troops had arrived.
On the lip of the gully, EMREF’s Special Forces had planted antipersonnel, puck-sized disk mines. Using K-bar knives, they’d gently lifted patches of grass, not cutting out the patches but lifting them up carefully from one side, as one would gently prise up a scab, then scratching out a two-inch hole beneath the grassy trapdoor, placing the disk mines, and covering them with the patch. Farther back from the gully’s lip, members of the two rifle platoons placed claymores, just as cautiously laying the trip wire. Johnny D’Lupo ordered some claymores on the flanks and in the rear.
“You think they’re gonna get behind us?” Dave Rhin asked.
“What d’you think, man?” Martinez, from the Special Forces platoon, replied. Rhin was on the field phone to HQ platoon, reporting that everything was set up and confirming that, in their capacity as the advance patrol for the EMREF, they were now in contact with Vinh’s forces, who had joined the defensive line above the southern side of the gully. After further consultation with Vinh’s English-speaking operator, the HQ squad ordered the flank mines to be dug up lest either of Vinh’s flanks gave way under a PLA attack and were forced into the American perimeter. Instead, the mines were to be placed on the Vietnamese flanks, several hundred yards away from both EMREF flanks.
“Shit!” one of D’Lupo’s seven-man squad complained. “Nothing I like better, man, than to dig up mines we just laid.”
“Right,” D’Lupo agreed. “Some fucker oughta thought of this ‘fore we started laying the fucking things!”
“Stop your whinin’, man,” Rhin advised. “Go take the fuckers to the Vietnamese flanks. They’ll love yer for —”
There was a high, whistling sound followed by the crash of an explosion, then another and another, men screaming, scrambling for cover as more explosions of red earth and undergrowth vomited skyward. The soil fell like rain for several seconds after the first mortar salvo, the smell of cordite and freshly uprooted vegetation pungent in the hostile air.
Some of the EMREFs who had been digging slit trenches lay unmoving, dead now, one beheaded, another sitting quite still, the victim of the tremendous force of the concussion and perhaps shrapnel as well. D’Lupo dived behind one of the loamy burial mounds, an 82mm Chinese mortar round landing close to the lip of the gully, sending shrubs and sticks into the air. Immediately, he moved to a mound in front of him that had been hit dead center, D’Lupo noting that there was an advancing pattern of small, mortar-made craters in front of him. He now dived into a burial mound, the peak of its cone blown off, the incoming round he’d just fled landing ten yards behind him. To his amazement, as he came up for air, he noticed his arm covered in blood.
He had no recollection of being hit. Despite the explosions of incoming and the steady
As suddenly as it started, the heavy mortar barrage ceased, only to be replaced by the tearing tarpaper sound of light and medium machine guns using not only the heavier 7.62mm ammunition of the old Type 68 assault weapon but also that of the newer 5.6mm CQ automatic rifle.
Following the blare of a Chinese bugle, someone on the west U.S.-Vietnamese side of the gully shouted, “They’re coming!” Rhin cussed like the trooper he was, disgustedly releasing his radio pack, which was now so much junk, the only thing intact being the handpiece, which he now tossed away. Through the undergrowth, they could see Chinese regulars, whose “piss-pot” helmets were covered in camouflage netting, branches of leaves draped from them, and whose black-green-brown combat uniforms were so difficult to see against the background of the gully’s bush-lipped opposite bank.
Even knowing that his platoon was cut off from HQ— they’d have to use runners, if necessary — Rhin was impressed by the Chinese assault. No sooner had half of them, fifty or so, been chopped down by the American and Vietnamese fire than the remaining fifty, having rushed across the shallow streambed, were out of sight, now at the base of the forty-five-degree-angle dirt cliff. The ocher-colored dirt cascaded down like a waterfall as the Chinese, without stopping, immediately began scaling the steep incline of loose soil by running up as far as they could go with supporting machine-gun fire from the bank behind them, from which they’d descended.
At the apogee of their climb, unable to make it alone up an almost vertical dirt face of ten to twelve feet, they took hold of long, arm-thick pieces of bamboo stilts shoved up to them as an assist from the men below.
Up and down the creek a hundred yards in either direction, more and more Chinese began scaling the cliff. Those first up to the edge were machine-gunned immediately and fell down amid their comrades at the base of the cliff. But without a pause, others took their place on the cliff and held ground, helped by a rain of stick grenades being flung up and over the cliff’s edge, lobbed amid the forward American and Vietnamese U.N. troops.
The explosions and concussions of earlier mortars had set off many of the antipersonnel mines. One Chinese at the middle of a ten-man-line charge tripped a claymore, and all ten were killed either outright or fatally felled by the ball bearings that had exploded toward them in a steel curtain at supersonic speed. But the Chinese kept coming and dying. D’Lupo and Martinez’s Special Forces knew that unless the Chinese resupply of troops could be cut, numbers alone would soon overwhelm them. Some of the USVUN machine guns were so hot, rounds were cooking off.
D’Lupo and Special Forces platoon were firing flares down into the gully, knowing that some of the units behind them must have gotten through to U.S.-Vietnam-U.N. troops headquarters at Kep or Phu Lang Thuong, and they hoped that despite the poor visibility in the low ceiling of stratus, TACAIR would be on the way. D’Lupo, by prior agreement with TACAIR’s forward air controller, had an understanding that should radio contact be lost, the enemy position would be indicated by a white/red/white flare combination.
Early in the Vietnam War, such arrangements were often made on the spot via radio contact between pilots and the men in trouble on the ground. But “Charlie,” as the enemy was then known, had often listened in on the U.S. radio messages with English-speaking radio interpreters, and would quickly fire the flare sequence onto American and ARVN positions, creating a blue on blue.
Now D’Lupo’s forward squad fired a white/red/white sequence into the gully’s eastern sector to the right of them. TACAIR, if it was on its way, should make visible contact in plus or minus two minutes, coming in beneath the blankets of the gray stratus.
Down in the gully, the Chinese immediately began a barrage of small-arms fire, shredding the flares’ chutes so they fell faster, giving the Chinese more time to pick up the unburned section of the smoke flares and, having cut their chute straps, lob them into the brush beyond the western side of the gully. Nothing like this had happened in Iraq, where, not surprisingly, there was no bush.
Some of the Chinese, already ensconced in dugouts along the lip, kept up a sustained fire into the American positions, making it impossible for the Americans to rush forward and secure the flares, now burning furiously, supposedly marking the enemy position to be bombed. As a result, two Intruders sent in from the
