by far of those downed pilots who— while waiting for rescue pickup from the relatively slow Skyraider — would hang around and shoot up anything that tried to get near them before they could be rescued by chopper.
It was a paradoxical military situation, since the more territory Freeman’s army gained — by pushing farther north — the less it could depend on TACAIR, because of the Washington-decreed inviolability of Chinese airspace beyond the Chinese-Vietnamese border. In Washington the “Yalu” complex was alive and well in the State Department from the days of the deep-seated American fear of an all-out nuclear battle between the United States and China.
But for D’Lupo, Doolittle, Martinez, and all the others in the seesaw battle of Disney Hill, politics was a bullshit land where men in three-piece suits talked diplomatese over cafe latte while the men on the line were dying for yards.
And it was now that General Freeman gave another controversial order: that Melbaine’s battalion was not to seek any ground farther than the ridgeline of Disney Hill, for at least that way if Wei’s forces crossed the 22nd parallel in force, they would be open to unrestricted TACAIR as well as artillery bombardment.
“Fine!” Doolittle growled. “Why don’t we just pull back into the rice paddies and let ‘em have the whole fucking lousy hill?”
“You don’ understand, man,” Martinez said, adopting a tone of mock condescension. “You just a dirt farmer. Don’t you know how important this hill is to the negotiations? Testing our will, man. Here and at Dien Bien Phu. Ain’t you ever hearda Pork Chop Hill?”
“Stick it up your ass,” Doolittle replied. “And rotate, mate.”
“Wish to Christ we had more ammo,” D’Lupo said. “Half of that last drop is in the fucking drink. All on account of that prayer of his. Meanwhile, the chinks are getting resupplied by the fucking Ningming express, which we can’t fucking bomb because it’s in fucking Chinese territory. And they’re using Black Rhinos.”
“How do you know that?” Martinez asked.
“You blind or somethin’, Martinez? Last guy we Medevacked outta here was hit in the thigh, man. You could put your fist through it. He’ll die ‘a just plain shock, man!”
“All right, knock it off, you guys,” a sergeant cautioned. “Chinks are gonna have another run at us.”
“Oh nice,” Doolittle said. “Ain’t that fucking lovely. Low on ammo and we’re on for another inning.”
“Can it, Doolittle.”
There was the high screech of incoming, and reply fire from the few air cavalry 105mms that had been dropped onto the narrow margin between the paddies and the south side of Disney, everyone save the U.S. Arty gunners crouching low as they could in the sloppy, mud-filled foxholes.
As the afternoon wore on, mist and low cloud now mingling in a diaphanous veil over the flooded fields along the Ningming-Xiash line, another dozen or so POWs had been caught. Trang led the trio of Murphy, Shirley, and Danny Mellin closer to the bogged truck, but told the soldiers he was under orders to take them to the culvert.
“What if there isn’t a maintenance shack inside the culvert?” Trang asked Mellin.
“There will be,” Danny assured him. “I’ve been watching the spacing between them — one every couple of miles. Besides, with a culvert, you always have the danger of slides— have to have something nearby to mend a track. All you have to do, Trang, is take us along the track. Tell the guards — if they bother to ask — that you’ve been ordered to take prisoners to the culvert and check the tracks, help fix ‘em with your prisoners if need be. Everyone knows how uptight General Wei and his boys have been about this supply line to the border, especially now that the rain’s washed away parts of the road. Only supply line they have is the railway.”
“Yeah,” Mike Murphy said, with more bravado than he felt. “They’ll expect the recaptured prisoners to be used as coolie labor.”
Shirley said nothing. The lack of sleep and food and the long, tense day in the flooded fields were taking their toll, but she didn’t want to let on, particularly in front of Murphy. Then, as if he’d been reading her thoughts as they sloshed their way through the waist-high water and mist toward the rail line, Murphy said, “Hey, Trang, let’s stop awhile. I’m feeling a bit whacked!” Murphy looked at her as he said it and winked. Weary as she was, she smiled at Murphy. “Thanks.”
Suddenly they heard shots and people screaming, somewhere a hundred yards or so east, behind them. This was followed by shouting.
“Sounds like Upshut,” Murphy said. They all stood still in the water, Shirley frozen in fear. Something had slithered across her foot in the muddy ooze that squelched beneath her toes. For a moment she was paralyzed with fear. She wanted to scream. Murphy sensed it and put his hand on hers. “We’re almost at the rail line,” he said by way of encouragement. “Tracks are elevated. We’ll be on dry ground — well, as dry as it gets ‘round here.”
He could feel her gripping his hand. She was shaking — cold and fearful.
“Got the Jim-whimmies myself,” he said softly.
Trang had turned in toward the rail line as the light began to fade, making it particularly dark in the culvert, whose appearance now took on the aspect of a long, dark tunnel.
There was a shout from a PLA guard a hundred yards off, and Trang, “without,” as Murphy would have said, “batting an eyelid,” answered loudly, his voice carrying across the water as if through an amplifier. His tone, even to Mellin, Shirley, and Murphy, who didn’t understand Chinese, was so pregnant with authority that it gave them a surge of confidence. As his horse took the incline up to the railway lines, Shirley slipped, Trang turning on her with a stream of invective, waving her impatiently up the embankment.
The guard they saw in the dying light looked as miserable, Danny thought, as he himself felt, it being no joke standing out all day in the rain with only one meal of hot, or rather, warm, rice and fish sauce delivered by the short food train that preceded the one big supply train a day, which Wei sent through to the Disney front every night.
They were on the standard four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch-wide track now, walking alongside the wooden sleepers that had been laid in a bed of stones, each segment of rail fixed to its tie by a screw bolt and a steel wedge between the rail and the bolt. Danny had told Trang to pretend to be inspecting the ties for any maintenance that might be needed.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
The President of the United States was holding an emergency conference in the White House, not in the War Room, but in the Oval Office, and the significance of that was not lost on Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Reese and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff. The President wanted a political assessment of the situation, and he was sure — not only from the CIA’s reports from agents in Beijing, but from his own gut feeling as a politician going into an election year — that Chairman Li Peng was calling a similar meeting in the Zhongnanhai Compound on Changan Avenue before he would give his request to the delegates in the Great Hall of the People.
The President and chairman both knew that the military conflict at Disney Hill on the Chinese-Vietnamese border, and at Dien Bien Phu near the Laotian border, were chess pieces in a game of political will, ostensibly between China and the U.N., but in reality between China and the United States of America.
The President told the assembled Chiefs of Staff and adviser Ellman that his position was very much like Truman’s situation in the Korean War. There, it had been Pork Chop Hill over which the U.S.-led U.N. force and China had to battle it out while both sides were negotiating at Panmunjon.
“As far as I’m concerned,” the President announced, “once the Chinese agree to withdraw all their forces to their side of the Vietnamese-Chinese border, it’s over. The whole reason this started is because they thought they could invade other people’s territory and claim it as their own. But-” He raised a hand to stifle any immediate objection. “—I realize that Dien Bien Phu is another matter. The Chinese are farther away from their border there.”
“Yes,” the Army Chief of Staff said. “And they’ve chosen Dien Bien Phu on purpose because it was there that France— the West — was defeated.”
“Humiliated,” Ellman said.
“Yes,” the Army Chief of Staff agreed. “That’s a better word for it.”
“Just as we were humiliated,” Admiral Reese said, “in Saigon in ‘seventy-five. Two things Americans
