Cline, though shocked, had pressing business at hand. But with his boss no longer in command, it was confusing all around.
“What is it?” Freeman asked.
“Sir, we’ve got Arty pouring fire down on Disney’s south side. You want our boys to wait for the Airborne?”
“Hell, no. Soon as Arty clears a sector, I want us and the other USVUN troops to occupy it. Soon as we have high ground cleared, we take it. That way the Airborne with my mortars will have LZs for the choppers. Besides, the more dirt we can stir up with Arty, the better. Tricky for the helo jockeys, I know, but it’s as good as smoke cover. Hell, our boys should be using smoke anyway.”
“Wind’s blowing north, General. It’s taking smoke away from us. Covering the enemy.”
“Well, hell, we can’t have everything. Anyway, maybe it’ll hide the upcoming choppers.” Freeman paused. “What time you make it, Major?”
“Fifteen twenty hours, General.”
“Then I suggest you record receiving my order at fifteen hundred.”
Cline looked at him, nonplussed.
“Yes, sir. But what about the press conference in Phu Lang Thuong? There must be near a hundred reporters waiting there.”
“What about them?”
“Well, sir, I mean are you going to tell them you’ve been relieved?”
Freeman shrugged, thinking it over. He sighed, shaking his head. “Hell, no. I want to try to help my boys in those IFOR columns. I sent them in there, and now, with that prick LaSalle telling the whole world where they are, least I can do is try to help ‘em — shift world opinion.”
“Beg pardon, General, but how in hell are you going to do that?”
“Watch me,” Freeman said.
“Yes, General, but what if Jorgensen finds out about this press conference you’re about to give?”
“We tried to contact him for permission, didn’t we?”
“Lines down?” Cline suggested.
“Whatever you like, Major.”
It was amazing, Cline thought. Freeman had just been fired, and the son of a bitch was back on the attack.
The general noticed Cline’s astonishment as the major opened the tent flap on the way to the Hummer that would take them to the press conference center in Phu Lang Thuong. As they got aboard the high-clearance Hummer, which had a bad time of it bouncing over the potholed road, the general glanced at Cline. “Bob, I want your computer boys to dig up State Department policy memos vis-a-vis ‘Hot Pursuit.’ “
“Across borders?” Cline asked.
“Specifically across borders,” Freeman said. “Those fairies in Washington think I’m a grunt general. Well, I am — damn proud of it too — but I do my homework, Major. By God, I do. Remember what Frederick the Great said.
Freeman knew that once he mounted the press center’s improvised podium — a wooden slat tent base — he would see a phalanx of hands shoot up. One of them would belong to Marte Price, and another to Pierre La Prick Salle. Both reporters, he knew by now, were politically left. And after blowing the Special Forces contingent in Laos, La Prick Salle probably wouldn’t think he’d take any questions from him.
Echo and Foxtrot column’s two pairs of security teams made several listening, halts along the site chosen by Major Leigh-Hastings for a possible ambush. The job of these four soldiers was to alert the rest of their columns as to the size of any enemy force coming either way. Everyone expected any enemy columns to come from deeper in Laos, to the west, but the possibility of an enemy force returning from the east, from action in Vietnam, also had to be considered.
The security teams for Foxtrot column were in position within another quarter hour, with the Echo security teams three miles south of Foxtrot. About twenty-five minutes later both Echo’s and Foxtrot’s leaders moved in their assault teams of twenty-five men each into their positions along each trail of the fan, setting it up for ambush. The remaining man in each of the two columns of thirty men was now free to command. It would be these two men who, staying still for the next twenty hours, like the rest of their column, would take up the best ambush position for overall command of their respective columns. It would be their order, and theirs alone, that would unleash fire should the Khmer Rouge-led columns come their way.
Crescent-shaped, two-and-a-half-pound claymore mines, each loaded with over six hundred explosive embedded steel balls, were set up in the undergrowth of the triple canopy jungle along one side of the trail. The camouflaged twenty-five-man assault team sat behind the protective sixty-degree arcs of the mines, the assault teams making “damn sure,” as Commander Berry ordered, that each convex side of each claymore embossed with front, toward enemy, was pointing away from the ambush column, each column’s leader in radio link with both security teams at the two ends of the 250-yard stretch of trail.
If a man defecated, he did so by squatting over a Glad bag — no paper was to be used — and the bag would not be buried, lest it be found and dug up by wild animals, creating the possibility of revealing the column’s presence. The excrement, like everything packed in, would have to be packed out, for if the hoped-for ambush did not happen for either Echo or Foxtrot, USVUN might want to return to the already scouted sites — if Freeman had his way. Because of the radio silence imposed outside their local radio link, neither Echo, Foxtrot, nor Delta columns had any information about the outside world in general, or Freeman in particular.
The men in Delta column under U.S. Captain Roscoe were waiting in the marsh area around Ban Cong Deng, six miles south-southwest of Dien Bien Phu. Without exception, every one of the thirty-man Special Forces column was covered in leeches sucking the blood out of them. With no smoking allowed, there was no way to burn them off, and the difficulty with using insect repellent was that it had an odor the Khmer Rouge guerrillas could detect amid all the other smells of the fetid swamps.
“Mr. LaSalle,” Freeman said, smiling, pointing at the French correspondent.
LaSalle was caught off guard, but after an initial “Ah” and a pause to collect himself, he asked, “General, is it true that USVUN Special Forces under your command are now in action against elements of the Khmer Rouge — across the border in Laos?”
“No, Mr. LaSalle, that’s not true,” Freeman replied. “We’ve been patrolling close to the border, that’s certainly true, but we’re under strict orders from the U.S. State Department and the President not to engage the enemy in Laos, Cambodia, or anywhere else unless such action comes under the explicit conditions of the State Department’s policy of ‘Hot Pursuit.’ “
“What’s that, General?” yelled another correspondent, an Australian.
“Policy of hot pursuit, sir, is the policy whereby if American troops are on border patrol — which they are, to protect the USVUN left flank — and are fired upon by Khmer Rouge-led guerrillas, for example, or by anyone else, we are free to pursue the attackers until we establish what we consider a ‘safety margin’ at the border.”
“How come we haven’t heard about this before, General?”
Freeman seemed astonished by what he was clearly indicating was the naivete of the question. “No one’s asked me!” he said.
There was a smattering of laughter. Pierre LaSalle was waving his hand frantically. Freeman let him wave and took another question from a television reporter. “General, are you denying there are USVUN Special Forces in Laos?”
“Yes. But if they are there, then they’ve clearly crossed the border because of the increasing concern we have about Khmer Rouge-led forces violating the neutrality and environment of Laos.”
The assembled correspondents knew well enough what Laotian neutrality was, but this was the first time they’d heard about U.S. military action to help the environment. Freeman answered with such audacity that it even sounded logical to Cline, who knew damn well the general was making it up as he went along.
“The environment, ladies and gentlemen, as Mr. LaSalle rightly stated in his report for
