fight our own press.”
Cline knew all about that, but his job wasn’t to agree with the general, it was to hit him “in the teeth,” as Freeman had once put it, “with the bad news as well as the good.” “We’re going to have to respond, General,” he repeated, his tone as demanding as his rank would allow.
“I know,” Freeman said thoughtfully, if hastily, looking at the huge map. His steel-blue eyes followed the winding course of the Laotian-Vietnamese border around the splotch of green that marked the eleven-mile-long valley running north and south of Dien Bien Phu and Ban Cong Deng.
“Call a press conference in an hour. We won’t restrict it — let in every son of a bitch in Hanoi who wants to come. I’ll straighten it out.”
Cline shook his head. “It’s going to be tough, General. We’ve got every longhaired weirdo yapping on this one. We’ve even got the environmentalists’ lobby charging that you’re going to use some chemical like Agent Orange to defoliate the border areas ‘round Dien Bien Phu and Ban Cong Deng. They’re afraid of hurting the trees.”
Freeman gave him a crooked grin. “Maybe I should let Marte Price take a photo of me hugging a goddamn bush!”
“She’d be the last one I’d give anything to.”
Freeman looked puzzled. “Why not?”
“Well, we can’t prove it, but our G-2 section suspects her of leaking our Laos Special Forces op. Not directly, but via that French shit, LaSalle. Scratching one another’s back. Rumor mill has it that he’s screwing her.”
Freeman’s facial muscles knotted. “Damn it, I gave her info about the Rhino rounds. She could roast us on an open spit with that one.”
“How?” Cline asked.
“I told her it affected morale. She could say—”
“Our boys are backing off,” Cline cut in.
“Exactly. Damn—”
“Sir?” It was a call from the operations table. Melbaine’s men, those that were off, were now all in the rice paddy, coming under mortar fire. The field was turning into a churning sea of muddy water as the PLA’s 82mm mortar rounds exploded, throwing up geysers of rust-colored water, green rice stalks, and shrapnel from the mortar shells. Meanwhile, various small-arms fire, mostly AK-47s, peppered the turbulent paddy. Several bodies, two Americans and a Vietnamese, were floating bumpily in the wash.
Freeman called for arty to straddle the narrow margin of ground between the rice paddy and Disney’s apron of high ground, now swarming with more PLA reinforcements coming from the tunnels. The general’s request was answered in less than forty seconds with a creeping barrage of H.E. that soon covered Disney’s southern slope in a dust storm of dirt and pebbles that, swept southward by the wind, fell like hail on the embattled USVUN forces on the edge of the paddy.
Anticipating the “blind pause” this would create for both sides, unless they wanted to waste ammunition by firing at nothing in particular, Freeman ordered in a brigade, three thousand men of the Third Airborne Cavalry Division, which had landed in Hanoi only a few hours before.
It was a sight that impressed even the old battle-hardened vets of both sides in ‘Nam, 157 slicks dotting the gray metallic sky in an aerial armada carrying the three battalions.
“Three thousand won’t be enough to stop them, General,” Melbaine shouted into his cellular field phone.
“I agree,” Freeman growled back, “it isn’t going to stop them, it’s going to push the sons of bitches back into China where they belong. You hang on, Colonel. I’m about to give you a lesson in logistics!”
“Arrogant son of a bitch,” Melbaine said, collapsing the phone, slipping it into his pocket. “How the hell’s he going to push ‘em back? We’re already running out of ammo, and the Airborne can only bring in enough for themselves, never mind us.”
“He’s got Hanoi fever!” a Vietnamese major nearby suggested.
“He’s nuts,” Melbaine’s second in command said. “Crazier’n a two-bit watch.”
All that Freeman had meant by a “lesson in logistics” was that the three battalions, under his express orders, were also equipped with Vietnamese 82mm mortars.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The Special Forces contingent that made up the interdiction force under Colonel Berry had now crossed the border into Laos, reaching the “fan stem” where two trails coming out of Laos converged. There, the IFOR contingent split up into three columns: Echo, commanded by SAS Major Leigh-Hastings; Foxtrot, U.S. Colonel Berry’s men; and Delta, led by U.S. Ranger Captain Walter Roscoe.
The plan was for two columns, Echo and Foxtrot, to go farther in along the two trails that eventually spread out to make a fan, or smaller trails, and lie in ambush waiting for any enemy main force en route to Vietnam’s western flank.
The remaining column of thirty men, Delta, under Roscoe, would wait back at the border in order to net any enemy survivors of an ambuscade or any smaller patrols that either Echo or Foxtrot would let pass rather than fire upon, and so betray its presence to an oncoming enemy force.
Normally, such ambushes would consist of no more than ten men, but intelligence, both from aerial pix and ground movement sensors dropped by air, indicated company-sized enemy activity, and the point of Freeman’s three Special Forces interdiction columns was not simply to verify such activity and then call in air strikes, but to engage the enemy on the spot and wipe them out. However, as Echo’s and Foxtrot’s security teams, a pair of soldiers from each column, went uptrail and downtrail about seventy yards from the selected ambush site, the fact of their general presence in the area was already known to Salt and Pepper Two — the incursion into the fan- shaped jungle area of about thirty square miles west of the Vietnamese-Laotian border was already on page one of
Immediately, General Wang ordered a six-hundred-man battalion of the elite Chengdu-based paratroop commandos south from Mengzi to Dien Bien Phu. Anticipating such a response, and despite the international uproar over his having ordered the Special Forces contingent into Laos, Freeman nevertheless asked Jorgensen in Hanoi to authorize interdiction by U.S. fighters aboard
Normally a placid man, Jorgensen, with visions of a court-martial foremost in his mind, was trying to control himself. “General,” he said, gripping the phone so hard his knuckles were white, “you don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation.”
“Sir,” Freeman cut in, “I understand it very well. The position of ninety of my best men has been compromised by a goddamn frog, and I want to give them air interdiction and TACAIR support.”
“I don’t mean the military situation,” Jorgensen shot back. “I’m talking about the political fallout. Everybody in Washington and at the U.N. in New York is up in arms about you widening the war. It’s the nightmare of ‘Nam again. Kennedy, Nixon, LBJ — all widening the war in the belief they were going to end it.”
“End it?” Freeman riposted. “By God, I’ll end it easy enough. You give me an A-bomb — which I know we have on the
The moment he said it, Freeman wished he hadn’t. But before he could retract it, his normally calm-spoken superior had blown a fuse. “You’re mad. You’re insane. I’m relieving you of command of Second Army as of now. You hear me?”
“General—”
“You hear me?”
“I hear you, sir.”
The phone line went dead.
Cline had heard enough of the conversation — Jorgensen yelling — to know it was very bad news. Freeman, who had put the phone down slowly, left his aide in no doubt. “I’ve been relieved. By God, I—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
