On the hill, in the cacophony of battle, the order did not go down well. Martinez was yelling to Rhin over the sound of mixed small-arms fire, the scream of other wounded men, and the steady
“Don’t worry, man,” Martinez called out to Rhin. “Old man says he’s gonna come in himself and get you guys out later on.”
“Yeah, right,” Rhin said. ‘Tell the old man to go fuck himself.” Rhin’s face was a grimace, but it wasn’t from pain, the morphine shot coursing through his veins. It was sheer anxiety creasing his face, Rhin wondering what in hell would happen when the morphine wore off and Chinese were closing in. Martinez grabbed a bandoleer of 7.62mm ammo for the M-60 from D’Lupo, who wasn’t doing much of anything, and gave it to Rhin, who he knew would have to feed the belt himself in the absence of boxed magazine ammo.
“Aw, shit,” Martinez said. “I’m staying with Rhin.” Martinez dragged the M-60 toward him and set it up so that Rhin could feed in the belt.
“Hey, soldier!” a captain from Bravo Company yelled. “Move out down this hill. Now.”
“But sir—”
“Do as I fucking s—” He never uttered another word, an AK-47 round bursting his head open at the base of his skull, bone splinters and blood blown out like an aerosol spray.
“Move!” a sergeant yelled to Martinez while returning fire at the closing Chinese troops.
“Go!” Rhin said. “Get outta here — go, man!”
Martinez slapped Rhin on the shoulder. “See you, man.”
“Yeah.”
As the remaining American and. USVUN troops ran, crawled, and moved however they could down Disney Hill, Wei’s PLA swarmed onto the hill, more and more coming out of the tunnels. Their losses were staggering: over four hundred casualties in firefights and rushing tactics in less than twenty minutes, and still they kept coming, many of the retreating Americans unable to fire weapons because the M-60 barrels, despite new nonferrous lining, were overheating.
The Chinese, over two thousand of them now on the hill, kept pressing the attack, which, to the delight of General Wei in his HQ just south of Pingxiang, was fast becoming one of the most humiliating routs in U.S. military history. In the southern Chinese dialect, Wei’s and Wang’s staff were referring to the Americans as “chicken chow mein.”
The Americans, nearing the base of the hill and trying to put as much distance as possible behind them so artillery could be called in, fought desperately to consolidate their position before the entire rout became a massacre, the spearhead companies of Wei’s Chengdu army moving down the hill, killing every American left behind.
Some Americans and other USVUN soldiers now out of ammunition put up their hands in surrender. One of them was Private Rhin. As he sat there, his hands up, he saw one Chinese soldier approaching him cautiously as if melting in a mirage, the heat haze caused by the red-hot barrel of his M-60, which had just jammed. His hands up higher, Rhin sought to reassure the PLA soldier, “No booby traps, man, I’m clean.” Rhin knew that the Chinese soldiers, more of them nearing his position now, couldn’t understand the words, but he hoped they’d understand his tone. “I’m safe, man — no booby traps.”
The Chinese nearest Rhin looked down at the big American soldier as if he had never seen a black man before, then bayoneted him through the heart.
Under Wei’s express orders, no prisoners were taken. Prisoners in combat were a nuisance and could cost you valuable rice rations and water.
Marte Price tried to report the battle of Disney Hill as objectively as she could, telling of Freeman’s controversial order that had ended in tragedy for the men like Rhin left on the bloodied hill, but CNN was carrying the story under the news headline as FREEMAN’S FOLLY.
Pierre LaSalle didn’t even pretend to be objective. His hardhitting piece for
CHAPTER SIXTY
At the Ningming airfield’s POW camp, Mike Murphy, Danny Mellin, Shirley Fortescue, and the other assorted two hundred prisoners taken either from the Spratly Island claims or oil rigs were waking up from a wet, cold night spent under badly leaking, rat-holed tarpaulins.
“In line!” came a guard’s instruction.
The straggly line of worn, tired faces, bodies shuffling toward the feed trucks, looked more like a column of refugees, some who had caught cold in days and nights since they’d been captured, coughing and sneezing, unwittingly spreading their germs among their malnourished companions.
For Mellin, the problem in trying to oppose the Chinese order that they all become “construction workers”—by which the Chinese really meant construction slaves — to first build their own huts to house them, was in trying to organize his fellow prisoners. With his military background, Mellin had immediately seen that even with the simple problem of getting their rice and tea ration, what was needed was armylike organization instead of having them all moving about at random like lost sheep.
The ration this morning was the same as before: a wooden bowl of white, sticky, boiled rice and a mug of tepid water with only the faintest aroma of tea.
“Jesus,” Murphy said, pulling a threadbare blanket about him as he received his ration. “Looks like they just passed the racking tea bag over this tub of—” The cup flew from his hand, knocked away by the server’s ladle, an AK-47 butt striking him hard on the head and shoulder, sending him sprawling on the wet, muddy ground, his rice bowl upturned. The guards about the rice truck burst out laughing as they watched the Australian scrabbling in the mud to get the rice back into the bowl. He asked for another cup of “tea.” He was refused.
“Bad man!” one of the guards said. Murphy had to be content with picking out the mud from the rice and using his plastic POW cup to catch some of the runoff water from the tarpaulins to drink and to clean the rice as best he could.
“He’ll never learn,” Shirley Fortescue told Danny Mellin as they congregated with the other prisoners under their tarpaulin.
“No,” Danny agreed, his tone, unlike Fortescue’s, one of compassion, which she thought was misplaced.
“Well,” she said, “he asks for it, doesn’t he? I mean, I don’t like what these bloody Chinese are doing either but — well, what I’m trying to say—”
“Yeah!” said Murphy, who had been walking toward them in the crowd. “What
“What I’m saying, Mr. Murphy,” she answered stiffly, “is that one has to get on with people.”
“People,” Murphy said sneeringly. “These aren’t bloody people, sweetheart. They’re our enemy.”
“You know what I mean!”
“Yeah, I know,” the Australian responded, loudly enough, Danny thought, to bring the guards down on him again if he wasn’t careful. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Murphy continued, his voice growing louder. “You mean we should suck up to ‘em, don’t ya? Kiss their ass. Well, not me, sis.”
“Hold it down,” someone said. “Upshut’s coming our way.”
Either Upshut hadn’t heard Murphy or was too busy to want to do anything about it.
“In line,” he shouted. “Quick! Quick!” He laboriously informed them through the camp interpreter, Comrade Lu, that they must build the mud huts in one day. “No huts, no big covers.” He meant no more tarpaulins to sleep
