She said that she was as concerned as anybody about the habitat, but surely the most important considerations behind General Freeman’s sending in Special Forces were to protect Americans and other USVUN members from attack from Laos and “to help free any MIAs.”
Bruce Ellman saw his chance and took it. “I think the caller is absolutely correct, Larry. The MIA issue has always been important to this administration, and the President doesn’t want anyone to forget it.”
“But,” Mrs. Mellin continued, “why is the MIA issue still not resolved? I’m the sister-in-law of an MIA — an Army nurse — and my husband has been missing since the beginning of all this.”
“Ma’am,” King interrupted gently, “I understand about your sister-in-law being an MIA — you’ve called before, right?”
“Yes.”
“Point I’m making, ma’am, is your husband’s not strictly speaking an MIA. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t he— isn’t he — one of those taken from one of the oil rigs?”
“Yes, but he’s still missing and I—”
“We know that, ma’am. Sorry, we’re running out of time. Bruce, administration’s on to this, right? Tracking down American nationals who were snatched?”
“Yes we are, Larry.”
“I mean,” Mrs. Mellin said, “they say some MIAs had been — you know — turned around by the Communists over there, but we still owe them our compassion until—”
“You’re right, ma’am,” King cut in. “Point is, we owe every Vietnamese vet and MIA a hearing. We weren’t there. They were.”
“Exactly,” a heartened Mrs. Mellin said.
“Gotta run. Thanks, Bruce.”
“Pleasure, Larry.”
“Tomorrow night — another guest. She’s often nude, always naughty, and she’s a member of the Italian parliament. See you then.”
The President zapped the TV, its light dying as he beamed. He looked around at the Chiefs of Staff. “Well, what’s the consensus?”
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Reese was the first to respond. “I thought Ellman handled himself very well.”
“I thought he did brilliantly,” the President said.
There was no disagreement in the Oval Office. “Yes,” the President continued, “Freeman is riding high in the public’s opinion and we were right to support him. I think General Jorgensen acted a little hastily on this one.”
“You want me to speak to Jorgensen?” the Army chief asked. “Straighten out any misunderstanding between him and Douglas?”
“I’d appreciate that, General,” the President answered.
“In any case,” Admiral Reese added, “Douglas is going to have his hands full with this breakthrough at Disney.”
“Yes,” the President agreed. “I think that for Jorgensen to relieve him at the moment would be very unwise.”
What they meant was that if someone had to take the heat for what all indications showed would be a disastrous defeat at Disney, it might as well be a popular public figure, at least a temporarily popular figure, like Freeman.
And if anyone on Jorgensen’s HQ in Hanoi thought General Jorgensen would be offended by being overruled, albeit quietly, by the White House, they couldn’t have been more mistaken. Jorgensen, who’d had time to mull over his own earlier flash of temper in response to Freeman’s outburst, was in fact enormously relieved by the call from the White House. He was no fool, and also he’d seen the “Larry King Show.” If Freeman was that popular all of a sudden, then let him hold on to the field command of USVUN’s Second Army; let him get out of the terrible mess he was in on Disney Hill.
And it was a mess, the armada of over 350 choppers carrying the American air cavalry Freeman had called in unable, except in a few cases, to disgorge their cargoes of men and ammunition because of heavy smoke being laid down by a PLA mortar barrage, the 82mm falling all along the base of the hill blinding the helo pilots and the Huey’s gunners.
The four troopers, two running to warn Echo, two for Foxtrot, were within fifteen minutes of reaching Leigh- Hastings’s column and Berry’s when the two most forward troopers, one running to Echo, one to Foxtrot, ran into spiked deadfalls, at different times. These were booby traps made of long, sharpened stakes protruding from a four-by-six-foot wooden box ‘suspended high in a tree by a cord or vine whose quick-release knot end is hidden by the undergrowth near a trail. When an enemy soldier passes underneath the tree, the knot is released and the whole spiked contraption falls on him. If he’s lucky, the spikes kill him outright, but in most cases the long spikes inflict terrible wounds all over the body.
The two men hit this day were badly wounded, one with a punji stick penetrating his abdomen and exiting through his genitals. Their buddies had only two choices: to finish them off or leave them. Neither could carry a wounded man out, for their mission was to warn both Echo and Foxtrot columns that their position had been blown.
One of the wounded man’s buddies took out his K-bar and, hand shaking, drove it into the man’s heart. He heard a noise behind him but was too late, AK-47 rounds blowing his head off, scattering its contents across the trail. Echo would not be warned unless the weather cleared and someone from high up in a tree managed to see the dots of descending Chinese paratroops over Dien Bien Phu in the far distance.
The buddy of the man hit with a deadfall on the Foxtrot trail thought quicker and fired a wide, arcing burst as he went to ground behind the man who’d been spiked. He used the dead body and the bloodied booby trap as cover while he threw two “Willie Petes,” or white phosphorus grenades, into the green jungle on either side of the trail. He followed with long bursts from his Heckler & Koch, spraying twenty-five rounds of 9mm Parabellum in less than two seconds as he leapt up and kept running down the trail, his eyes trying to take in the overhead canopy as well as the trail. He rounded a bend, saw a trip wire, jumped over it, and kept running, all his senses alert for danger. He heard something moving to his right and dove to earth. A bush quivered, and he gave it a three-round burst. There was a squealing noise, the wounded boar making it halfway across the trail before he slumped dead.
Heart thumping, sweat coursing down his back, the Special Forces trooper, a U.S. Ranger, William Kacey, looked up the trail, saw a patch of ground with less dead leaves on it, and figured it was a punji stick hole. He guessed he was about ten minutes away from Colonel Berry’s Foxtrot Company. Whether or not the pair of troopers heading for Echo had gotten through, Kacey had no idea.
After five minutes of staying stock-still, letting his pulse fall, his eyes constantly looking about, Kacey decided to stay a bit longer. Something else was moving. You could sense it from the bird noises, louder than usual, as if telegraphing one another a warning.
Now Kacey heard movement coming toward him on the trail, but it was a careless sound, not the noise of someone trying to tread lightly.
The girl was probably around seven years old, and when she saw the pig, gasped with fright and stood still, holding a bamboo stick by her side, as if wondering what to do. Kacey, as yet unseen by her, was also thinking what to do. If she spotted him, could he afford to let her run back to the hamlet or wherever she’d come from? It couldn’t be far away. She was standing upright, only her head bent forward as she looked down at the pig. Kacey’s brain was racing. Something wasn’t right. What did they say in the movies? “It’s too quiet out there!” It wasn’t quiet; the birds were making a racket. Was it the smell of the place? No, it was the usual damp, musty leaf odor of the forest.
It was the way she was standing, as if she had a stick up her ass, a walking booby trap, an old Viet Cong trick: turn a kid into a walking bomb. It was only now that Kacey realized her left hand was bunched up. A grenade? Right then he knew he wouldn’t kill her even if she let go of a grenade or whatever — a homemade job with lots of nails and the gunpowder taken from an unexploded ‘Nam bomb? But he wouldn’t harm her — Jesus Christ, wasn’t that what he was over here for? As part of the USVUN attempt to show China that you wouldn’t put up with
