Chengdu province’s Fourteenth Sichuan army, had placed a PLA soldier every fifty yards along the thirty-five-mile rail line from Ningming to the border. In all, it came to 3,696 men, each with nothing more to do on an eight-hour shift than watch his fifty yards of track, with orders to shoot anyone who even remotely looked like a trespasser.
The first sequence of digitized satfotos relayed to Jorgensen’s USVUN HQ in Hanoi had picked up about twelve hundred dots which, on magnification, showed up as soldiers on rail-line sentry duty. But it was the second and third sequence of a section of track south of Pingxiang that showed up twice as many men, alerting USVUN’s HQ that there were three shifts of eight hours each during every twenty-four-hour period, so that each fifty yards of track effectively had three men assigned to it. They were not any of Wei’s crack front-line troops, most of them being from militia units, but they could shoot, and each man was armed with an AK-47. Rice trains came out of Dong Dang, Pingxiang, Xiash, and Ningming once a shift to feed and water the troops.
“Damn it!” Freeman complained. “I wanted that track blown up in at least three places.”
“No chance of bombing it?” Major Cline asked.
“Hell, no. The fairies won’t permit it. That’d be an ‘in China’ attack and might have ‘international repercussions.’ Besides, any pilot from ‘Nam days or any other war’ll tell you that a damn rail track is one of the most difficult targets there is. Even if the weather’s good, which it isn’t, and you do manage a pinpoint hit with a smart bomb, the sons of bitches’ll have it fixed and taking trains the next morning.”
Freeman picked up one of the satfotos and held it beneath the magnifier. “See these squares every few miles?” he asked Cline, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Their maintenance shacks have T wrenches and assorted tools. Providing the train jacks aren’t actually destroyed — which they aren’t in most cases, only the ties are busted — then they can re-lay the track.” He dropped the satfoto on the table. “Hell, with over three thousand men stationed along there, they’ve got the manpower to fix up a broken length of track in a few hours.”
“So what can we do?” Cline asked, fully expectant that, as usual, Freeman would have an alternate plan.
“I don’t know,” Freeman replied. “Meanwhile, we’ve got the PLA coming out of their holes all over Disney, bear-hugging it to death.” By “bear-hugging” Freeman meant that the PLA were pressing right up against and among his troops so that no American or other USVUN artillery could be called in against the hill without killing as many Americans as PLA, or even more. Meanwhile, the trains from Ningming kept coming, laden with troops and ammunition.
On Disney Hill the fighting was ferocious, with no quarter given by either side. Much of it was hand-to-hand, after ammunition supplies had dwindled or when the American positions on the southern side were overrun.
It was here that American technology met its Waterloo, for unlike the Chinese, who used AK-47s, most of Freeman’s troops were armed with the M-16 with grenade-launcher tubes, which won’t take a bayonet. This small but salient fact was in the end responsible for what looked like an impending USVUN-American defeat on the hill, for it meant that with bayonet attached, the AK-47 became an all but unstoppable lance in the hands of the Chinese.
Martinez and Doolittle were down to their last clips. D’Lupo was firing sporadically, hesitating every few seconds to double-check his targets in the flare light, and Rhin was down to his M60-E’s last two link belts of fifty ball rounds each when they, along with everybody else in the dawn’s early light, heard the chopping sounds of helos in the south, coming from the direction of Bien Dong. It was some Second Armored Cavalry helos heading in from as far away as Phu Lang Thuong, most of the fighter planes from the
Only the slicks, the helos, could help. Even so, as the Hueys, like so many giant gnats, descended in battle line, they were exposing themselves to terrible danger. The helos’ leftside gunners tried to pour concentrated fire from their pintle-mounted M-60s at pockets of Chinese troops, the helos on occasion themselves taking fire from some PLA troops near point-blank range as each Huey slick touched to unload troops, ammunition, and water.
Colonel Melbaine, commanding USVUN forces on the hill, seeing the situation quickly degenerating into crisis, was in brief radio contact with Freeman. The general, against every tenet of his “keep moving and never retreat” philosophy, concurred with Melbaine’s decision to pull the USVUN troops back down the southern side of the hill with the intention of regrouping at the fringe of the rice paddies and extricating them from the Chinese, so that U.S. artillery could pound the southern side of the hill. But Freeman, and especially Melbaine, on the spot, knew it would be one thing to give the order for his troops to withdraw and quite another to execute the maneuver.
In a microcosm of what was happening all across Freeman’s front, the withdrawal was a debacle, and in the dismal gray light of a rain-streaked dawn, confusion reigned, with General Wei’s PLA troops adapting more adroitly than anyone expected to the new situation. Showing no fear, their confidence surging with their successful and unexpected counterattack via the tunnels on Disney’s southern side, the Chinese stuck like glue to the retreating Americans and assorted USVUN troops.
The moment a squad of U.S. Second Army’s troops withdrew down the hill, the Chinese, rather than occupying and securing the vacated positions, kept pursuing the Americans and other USVUN troops. They were not only intent on driving Melbaine’s troops away from the hill but equally determined to stay among them so as to keep frustrating the attempts of Freeman’s artillery to scour Chinese positions on the hill. American casualties were mounting by the minute, over eighty men already killed, many more wounded.
However, through the bedlam of radio traffic at his HQ, Freeman kept his cool and, in an order that seemed eccentrically insignificant to Major Cline and others at the time, ordered more of his Vietnamese contingent’s mortars flown into the paddy area south of the hill where Melbaine was trying to consolidate his troops.
“Tell those helo pilots to land well back. I don’t want those mortars unloaded too close to this free-for-all on the hill. Tell them to loiter till they see a clear area from which they can pour suppressive fire.”
“Trouble is, sir,” Freeman’s TACAIR liaison officer said, “the chinks are staying with us all the way.”
“Then have the helos loiter farther back!” Freeman said in an overriding tone of exasperation.
“Yes, sir.”
“And alert I Corps Airborne. I want them ready when we need them.”
Things were getting worse on the hill, and D’Lupo’s squad was an example of what was going wrong. Rhin, who’d been manning the M-60 machine gun, which was now so hot it was cooking off rounds without the trigger being pulled, was hit in the left leg. It was possible for him to walk, or rather limp, but he was a man down, and Martinez was already calling in a Medevac helo. The pilot, with the exemplary courage of their breed, was coming in low while the remainder of D’Lupo’s platoon stopped their retreat to quickly form a defensive perimeter around a landing zone between sheared-off trees. The firepower of the pursuing Chinese seemed to suddenly center on the Huey. The helo, the wash of its rotors kicking up dirt, leaves, and other debris, was taking hits all over, the pilot forced to take off.
In a wind shear, the helo dropped ten feet and swung sharply to the right, its rotors colliding with a broken stand of timber. The helo rose sharply, as if by some giant hand, and then fell like a grenade to the ground, its broken rotors from the main shaft and tail cartwheeling. What was left of the main rotors decapitated an American from D’Lupo’s squad, chopped up a mortar squad of Chinese, and also killed a Vietnamese machine gunner. Amazingly, the pilot suffered no more than a broken arm and severe bruising, but it slowed everyone in D’Lupo’s squad.
Freeman then made a tactical decision that would not endear him to the men of Second Army, or the American public if it got out. He made it because, as he would later cryptically tell Marte Price, “That’s what they pay me for.” He ordered squads to keep moving down the hill. He didn’t want any more calls for Medevacs because every time a slick tried to come in, every American in that sector stopped moving in order to secure the LZ, and every time the retreat slowed, it meant more men were cut down and more helos destroyed. Accordingly, Freeman ordered Melbaine to tell any wounded who couldn’t be moved to stay put and do the best they could for the time being.
“We’ll get to them later,” Freeman promised. “By Christ, I’ll go in later and get those boys out myself. But damn it, right now we have to get our forces out of there or they’ll
