under. “You understand?”
“Yes,” Mellin said, speaking as leader for his squad of ten.
After Upshut had gone, Murphy said, albeit quietly this time, “A hut in a day. No fucking way, mate.”
“Why not?” Danny said. “Twenty of us. We’ve got the concrete bricks. They’ve been kept dry under their tarpaulins. We can start now.”
“Oh, can we?” Murphy answered, looking from Mellin to Shirley Fortescue. “Listen, bud, you’ve been listening to this sheila too much. I thought the whole idea wasn’t to help the chinks, but to break out if we could. Fourteen miles to the border, mate.”
“I never said anything about escaping,” Danny said. “Besides, it’d be a lot longer than fourteen miles. That’s in a direct line.”
Murphy, his blanket still wrapped around him, glared at the American. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Yank, eh? Day I helped you up, I thought I was picking up someone with guts.”
“Be quiet,” someone else said.
“Yes,” another hissed. “You’ll get us all in a jam.”
“In a jam!” Murphy said loudly, his eyes bright with anger. “You fucking dodos, don’t you understand? Didn’t you listen to Uncle Lu? You’re already
“What would you do?” Shirley Fortescue asked him. “Refuse and get shot?”
“No, but—” He stopped as if he’d forgotten the question, his head again in a nervous tic, less violent than it was a minute before, but still there. “I–I wouldn’t help ‘em,” he said. “You know, go-slow tactics.”
“For Chrissake,” someone said. “Lower your voice.” Murphy tried, but was only partially successful, his voice rising and dropping without any warning or apparent control. “Accidents,” he blurted out. “Y’know — make me mortar too wet— y’know.”
People edged away from him. They all knew what they’d get for any kind of sabotage. The Australian wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Listen up.” It was Danny. “Before we start, I want to make a request. A guy in one of the other groups is pretty ill. Kept him on one of their ships. Hardly fed him at all. I’m asking everybody to save a spoon or two of rice per meal over the next few days. Give it to me. Okay with everybody?”
There was a murmur of assent, however reluctant they were to share their already meager rations.
“How bad is he?” Shirley asked Danny.
“What? Sorry, what was that?”
“How ill is he?” she asked.
“Well, without the extra rice, he probably won’t make it.”
Shirley moved off toward their brick pile, asking no more questions. Danny Mellin was glad. He’d just told them all a blatant lie, but he figured that by the time anyone found out, he’d have gotten the rice he wanted.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
With Hanoi 150 miles away to the east, and the refueling depot at Ban Lot behind them, the command helo and the three big “bananas,” or Chinook troop carriers, carrying Freeman’s interdiction force, two Huey gunships on the flanks, approached the Laotian-Vietnamese border in a mist that wreathed the hills and filled the valley around Dien Bien Phu.
The joint U.S.-British Ranger/SAS/Gurkha Special Forces group was under the overall command of U.S. Army Colonel Berry, with British SAS Major Anthony Leigh-Hastings and U.S. Ranger Captain Walter Roscoe, Jr., assisting. The three-platoon-sized force had been ordered by Freeman to go in four miles south-southwest of Dien Bien Phu along the valley floor to a point one mile west of the Ban Cong Deng road junction near the southern end of the valley.
Their secret mission was to interdict the road that wound eastward out of Deo Tay Chang, a small Vietnamese settlement only a mile east of the Laotian border. It was hoped the Special Force would engage and stop the infiltration of any Khmer Rouge-led enemy column before the latter could reach the Ban Cong Deng junction and have the luxury of either heading north to Dien Bien Phu, just inside Vietnam, or east, farther into Vietnam.
As the big Chinooks descended into the mist, their
The two M-60s on each of the two gunships opened up, pouring down what the gunners hoped would be suppressive fire in the event that, contrary to Green Beret recon team info, the Khmer-led insurgents had already reached the Ban Cong Deng junction east of the landing zone.
The moment the first helo landed, Rangers and SAS fanned out forward and aft of the Chinook to establish a fire perimeter, the rotor wash sending shivering waves of water in a nearby paddy, rice stalks bending in the fearsome wind and howl of the man-made storm. There was no return fire, and soon all three LZs were declared secure. The helos disappeared into the mist, the chopping of their rotors growing fainter. Suddenly, as the jungle swallowed up the last of the ninety commandos of the Ranger/SAS/Gurkha force, it was as if nothing had ever disturbed the stillness of this remote valley where, over four decades before, the French had met their modern Waterloo.
“Now the tricky part’s over,” Major Leigh-Hastings said. “The hard part begins.” He meant setting up ambush in terrain where the difference between being the hunted or the hunter could be a matter of seconds, the movement of a leaf, the crack of a twig.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
It wasn’t until some of the incoming wounded — not those on Disney Hill, but from the accompanying or western left flank attacked by Wei’s troops — were brought in by the Medevac helos to the MUST that the extent of the wounds among USVUN troops became known.
In the heat of the battle, few but the medics had noticed that enemy bullets, not shrapnel, had been splitting open the Kevlar bulletproof vests. By the time the wounded were on the operating table, the vests had been taken off, revealing horrific chest and head wounds caused by just one bullet. It was almost impossible to stop the bleeding, and there were hundreds of minute, razor-sharp pieces.
The doctors at first assumed the wounds had been caused by mortar shrapnel. But it wasn’t a surgeon or medic who would eventually solve the problem, it was Freeman, who had flown in via chopper from his HQ at Phu Lang Thuong after hearing about the new kinds of wounds. He’d also heard that the PLA had been firing on the Medevac choppers, using the Red Cross insignia on the nose and side as aiming points.
“That’s nothing new,” he said, thinking aloud. “We’ll have to have a fighter escort for the most serious cases, after they’ve been patched up and sent on to our hospital ship in the gulf.” He turned to Cline just as they were landing. “Bob, while I look at the sitreps, you get me X rays of some of our boys with those wounds everyone’s talking about.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Bob, bring me actual fragments.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Freeman exited the chopper in its dust storm, he instinctively ducked and returned a salute to a colonel of artillery whose expression told him something else had gone wrong.
“What is it, Colonel?”
“Sir, we’re losing more men on the hill.”
