Can’t be done, Padre. Will you write it now—
The padre took out his pen and notebook and wrote,
Cline read it. “Jesus Christ, Padre — that won’t do it.”
“How do you know what God wants?”
“I’m talking about the general. He reads this — this ‘catastrophe’ and withdrawal bit, he’ll go ballistic!”
Wordlessly, the padre took the note, crossed out
“That’s a bit better,” Cline told him. “But it’s only — I mean it’s kind of short, isn’t it? Can’t you tart it up a bit?”
“You mean puff it up?”
“Yes,” Cline said angrily. “Puff it up.
The padre wrote again, looking up now and then, collecting his thoughts.
Cline read it. “Okay, fine. Thanks, Padre,” and he walked off.
“You’re welcome. And Major?”
Cline turned around. “Yes?”
“No offense to you or the general-it’s been a bad day for all of us.”
Cline nodded appreciatively. “I hope your prayer works, Padre.”
Freeman read the prayer aloud as he buckled on his holster. “ ‘Dear Lord, we most graciously beseech you to put a halt to this inclement weather so that our soldiers may more safely regroup against the attacks of the enemy and may proceed in this United Nations effort to bring peace once again to the region. Amen.’ “
Freeman shook his head in disappointment. “I don’t know, Bob. It’s all right, I suppose. Adequate, but there’s no majesty in it, no pizzazz! Almost think he was praying to the Secretary General of the U.N. We want a prayer for battle, for victory. This is a weasel prayer, not a prayer worthy of Second Army — not for warriors! Damn it!” He crushed the note. “I’ll write it myself, and you can deliver it to him, and I want him to use it in the next service. By God, our boys deserve better than this.” He rewrote it and read it to Cline.
“Dear God, we ask for a cessation of this inclement weather so that our men may advance against our foe, defeat them in battle, and so drive the godless hordes back to their Communist enclaves. And may our victory be so decisive that the warlords of communism will pause before committing further acts of war against those who fight in your name. Amen.”
Cline said it sounded great, and delivered it to the padre. It was said that night at 1900 at the hospital. A half hour later a typhoon, “Harold,” struck North Vietnam, the cloud cover descending even lower, the torrential downpour ruling out any possibility of TACAIR support for Freeman’s beleaguered troops.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
At the POW camp south of Ningming, Danny Mellin, Mike Murphy, and Shirley Fortescue were busily building the brick walls of their huts. Any reluctance the Australian had had earlier was now gone, drowned in the monsoon that had first struck the border area around Loc Binh, where Freeman’s besieged troops were fighting for their lives on the narrow margin between the base of the hill and the water-swollen paddies.
Unknown to Freeman, who was now en route to the Loc Binh front, the monsoon’s deluge had probably saved his troops on the margin, since the downpour coursing through the artillery-scored rust-red soil of Disney Hill was flooding many of the tunnels, whose drainage systems were clogged like leaves in a house’s gutters, with the artillery-mashed vegetation strewn all over Disney.
In fact, during the flash flood more PLA troops, en route from the north via the Disney tunnels, were killed by drowning than were killed by the U.S. and other USVUN troops. The rain cleared the smoke enough for the aerial fleet of choppers to return and to go in using the margin as their landing zone, violet smoke ground flares identifying the dust-offs, the Medevac helos’ LZs. Those helos whose red crosses were clearly visible on nose and sides were as usual used as aiming points by Wang’s soldiers, who knew that the Americans’ obsession with trying to get their wounded out would delay any counterattack. The air cavalry’s gunships, however, were quick to respond, the.50s on either side of the choppers sending down a deadly rain of one-in-five tracer, the frontmost helos also firing off salvoes of 2.75-inch rockets from their dual pods of nineteen apiece.
In this ear-pounding confusion of rain-curtained battle, Freeman’s air cavalry unloaded on the margin, which had more or less become a hundred-yard airfield-cum-starting point for Freeman’s counterattack, because now his consultation about weaponry with the Vietnamese general, Vinh, came into play. Standard 82mm Vietnamese mortars enabled Freeman’s troops once again to fire not only their own 81mm rounds, but PLA 82mm rounds as well.
In short, as the air cavalry rapidly stiffened the USVUN line on the margin — enough to push Wang’s Chinese army back fifty to seventy yards on Disney’s artillery-pockmarked southern face — the pyramids of mortar rounds that had to be left behind in the sudden and totally unexpected withdrawal fell into the hands of Freeman’s air cavalry mortar squads. Now, they quickly fed the Chinese ammo into the 82mm mortar tubes, the mortar rounds’ explosions not only an incentive for the already retreating PLA to retreat farther, but simultaneously further weakening the tunnels with a series of cave-ins from the rounds’ concussion. At one point, the cave-ins sealed the fate of an entire company of 115 Chinese troops.
Yes, there were U.S. casualties caused by tunnel cave-ins that produced sudden sinkholes, which in turn swallowed USVUN troops, but the losses were minuscule compared with the Chinese losses. And now, with ample ammunition supplies to feed the gaping mouths of the mortars, the high morale of the American advance continued, elements of the U.S. cavalry reinforcements having already gained Disney’s summit after unforgiving hand-to-hand combat along a deep, L-shaped trench. The same trench only a half hour before had been a tunnel filled with PLA, a tunnel that fed into the Disney complex as a conduit for those troops disembarking from the Ningming-Pingxiang- Lang Son railway’s troop trains.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
DANNY MELLIN’S POCKETS were bulging with boiled rice donated by other POWs in their belief that it was going to help one of the rig workers who had been captured first and was therefore the most malnourished POW. But the rice wasn’t for any POW. Instead, Mellin, with the help of Shirley Fortescue, mixed the grains of boiled rice in the mortar used to cement the bricks together for what would be the lower center part of the wall facing the long coils of razor wire that served as the outer main wall of the prison until a proper high-wire wall could be built to replace the wire perimeter.
“So,” Mellin said to Murphy and Shirley Fortescue, who were acting as his cover while he sprinkled another handful of rice in the cement, “I need you to get me a pair of wire cutters.”
“Oh, right,” Murphy said. “I’ll order one from Sears. Just give me the catalogue. I’ll fax ‘em right away.”
Danny ignored the Australian’s sarcastic tone. “Thought you Aussies—”
He stopped as Shirley whispered, “He’s coming.”
Upshut was shouting at one of the POWs, an older man in the brick-passing line who had crumpled with exhaustion. The old man struggled to his feet, a bayonet prodding him sharply in the back, drawing blood. When Upshut saw the waist-high wall of Mellin’s group, the highest wall so far of any of the five prisoners’ huts being constructed, he nodded, adding a grunt of approval.
Mellin smiled accommodatingly, as did Shirley Fortescue, Murphy whispering, “Prick!” when Upshut was out of hearing range. Murphy turned back to Mellin. “So what was that about Aussies?”
Mellin tapped the next brick down with the handle of the trowel. “I thought you Aussies were the can-do sort. Improvise.”
Mellin’s fingers, like everyone else’s, were raw from handling the bricks without gloves of any kind. “If you
