The satpix relayed to Freeman wasn’t of the best quality, but it told him exactly what had happened — a massive train wreck on the PLA’s main line of communication. He didn’t hesitate, and like a juggler in midact, shifted all his attention from one problem, Dien Bien Phu, to the other, ordering all elements of Second Army in the Disney area to press home a dawn attack preceded by a creeping barrage from the 105mms and 155mms on the margin between the southern base of the hill and the flooded paddies.
Even as his artillery began to pulverize the PLA positions on the north side of Disney, Freeman, like a good political cadre, was making “damn sure,” as he put it to his senior commanders, that every man in the USVUN force on Disney would know that the PLA’s logistics line had been severed and that this was the best chance they had.
As a gray dawn stole upon the hill, the USVUN troops— over ten thousand of them — moved from Disney’s ridgeline to the northern slope. It was touch and go for six and a half hours of close combat, but like one grain at a time in an hourglass, the ratio of mortars between the USVUN and the PLA moved from 1:1 to 2:1 to 3:1 in the allies’ favor.
Wei’s commanders had to give ground, not much at first — a hundred yards or so — but by 0115 the USVUN had pushed off Wei’s best troops. Running low on everything because of the train wreck, particularly ammunition, the PLA had to give more ground until it was a rout and Freeman’s forces owned the hill. This also allowed the U.S. air cavalry to put down its helos without being fired upon from Disney’s crest.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
At Dien Bien Phu things were not nearly as upbeat. The ninety men of the Special Forces weren’t so much depressed by the sense of siege as by the lack of action. Though they had been well-trained in defensive maneuvers, their natural disposition was to go on the offense. They also knew that if they went on the offensive now, they would be quickly pounded and eaten up by the vastly larger enemy force.
The big enemy guns the experts had told Navarre couldn’t be brought through such terrain were there and in fine shape. Though firing sporadically, they forced the men of Echo, Foxtrot, and Deltas — who had turned the first initial of their designations around to form “DEF’ and defiantly hoisted a makeshift flag above the triangle of deep, interlocking trenches and firing bays — to scurry for cover.
DEF was equipped with 82mm mortars, but overall there was no heavy ordnance.
Freeman knew that his first
The thousands of PLA troops could hear the choppers landing, and opened fire with their artillery, but however good their gunners were during the daylight, using open sight down-the-barrel direct fire, at night it was a different story. Even with the help of para flares turning night to flickering daylight, they were less effective because of the inferior computer guidance targeting necessary for the kind of deadly, vectored, indirect fire of the kind provided now by the American Airborne gunners. The 105mms and 155mms were ferried in by the huge, dragonfly- shaped CH-54 Tarhe helos to positions behind the ring of hills that surrounded the valley and were fired without their crews ever seeing the enemy, but with devastating results.
In short, the more sophisticated computer-fire-directed American guns could shoot from beyond the hills, out of sight of the enemy, with the Chinese guns unable to silence them.
It meant that while U.S. artillery could fire at any enemy gun position whose flash gave away its position, the PLA could not fire back with any accuracy worth talking about. Nevertheless the PLA, with their hidden dug-in guns and their mortars, did their best, pounding what they
A PLA 105mm round hit a fully loaded Huey, and in the ghostly flickering of flare light and gas tank explosions, unidentifiable body parts could be seen dangling and dripping with blood from the nearby bushes and trees — one of the legless torsos belonging to a soldier who had apparently remembered his drill sergeant’s advice at Fort Bragg, for the media found his set of dog tags in his boots.
While this disembarkation was taking place at Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of miles eastward in the South China Sea Elizabeth Franks, her “grape” refueler jacket barely visible on the rain-slashed flight deck of the USS
As soon as Gunner’s Mate Albright Stevens, stamping his feet to keep them warm, got off his watch, he and Elizabeth would find some warm, hidden place, and there all the stress and strain of the flight deck would be released. For a split second Elizabeth Franks was nearly blown overboard as the blast from a Phantom, its engine moving onto full afterburner, was not fully deflected by the water-cooled shield. Someone, a yellow shirt, grabbed her barely in time.
The Phantoms were punishing the PLA at several locations in the Spratly Islands where Wang’s troops had defiantly and bravely — or stupidly, depending on your point of view — raised the Chinese flag. In addition.
The DEF triangle now had an extra thousand men in and around it, where a circle a quarter mile in diameter ringed the dug-in garrison’s timber- and sandbag-reinforced command and hospital bunkers. The initial disorganization that besets most Airborne for the first few minutes after touchdown provided an opportunity for Wang to attack, but the mist-shrouded valley dissuaded both the PLA and DEF from moving too far from base positions. Though the Chinese still outnumbered the garrison’s defenders more than ten to one, Wang was waiting for when he could best use his dug-in artillery.
Flare light had allowed his gunners to get a few deadly salvos by direct fire down at the garrison, but the flashes of his guns would also show their positions to Freeman’s forces. Wang wanted to wait for daylight to make maximum use of his guns.
“Son of a bitch’ll attack at dawn,” Freeman opined to Colonel Berry over the secure scrambler phone. “So all you can do, Al, is dig. Dig like a bastard because the only way they can get that piece of real estate is to take it by hand-to-hand. Their artillery’ll be pounding you, and we’ll be pounding them, but in the end they have to take the friggin’ wire like they did with the frogs.”
Berry didn’t need a history lesson. He needed more time to inspect and to exhort his men to shore up their positions against what he was sure would be the coming massive bombardment from the PLA-owned hills.
Along with the reinforcements Freeman had sent in were dozens of the latest Heckler & Koch 40mm automatic grenade launchers, the lightest on the market, and constructed so their thirty-two-round belt could be fed from either the right or left. Instead of firing machine-gun bullets, with the HK40 they’d be firing machine-gun grenades.
“I don’t fuckin’ care!” Doolittle said, thoroughly pissed at being relieved on Disney only to find himself and his colleagues reassigned as support troops for the Airborne. Freeman had apparently predicted that there might be a lot of massed assaults on the wire and that men already blooded in this kind of combat should be airlifted into either DEF’s triangle or the outer defensive circle.
