another — probably away from the truck, though he couldn’t quite be sure.
“Fire, Linn!” yelled Jing Yo, worried that they would soon lose their easy target. “Fire!”
Linn may or may not have heard him — they were separated by roughly forty meters — but if not, he read the situation as well as Jing Yo did. The grenade popped from its launcher, rocketing across the darkness in a fiery red flash like a meteorite plunging into the earth’s atmosphere. It hit the cab of the truck and exploded, sending shrapnel and debris into the small crowd of soldiers behind it. Panicked, the men began to retreat, only to be caught by Chin, who worked them over with his assault rifle.
The darkness, the confusion of battle, and most of all the inexperience of the Vietnamese soldiers had given the commandos a serious advantage against a numerically superior and more heavily armed foe. But Jing Yo realized that those were nebulous and fleeting qualities in war. His small force could easily be overmatched by the sheer number of Vietnamese soldiers trying to retreat down the road.
The first sign of this danger came a minute or so later, when he saw flashes in the field beyond the trees to his right. The Vietnamese had finally realized they didn’t have to use the road to advance.
“Chin! Drop back to the bridge, to the ravine!” Jing Yo ordered. He shouted, then had to resort to using his flashlight to send the message up the road.
Chin acknowledged, and began making his way back.
Had their instructions not been to hold the bridge, now would have been the time to retreat. The commandos had stalled the retreat, killed a large number of enemy soldiers, and not taken any casualties. An artillery strike zeroed in on the destroyed vehicles and then gradually expanding would safely eliminate a sizable portion of the enemy, and provide ample cover for Jing Yo and his men to get away.
But such a strike would almost surely damage the bridge as well, and besides, his instructions were to take and hold the span. It didn’t matter that the original plan had called for another three companies to be there to help, or that the bridge seemed, in Jing Yo’s opinion, considerably less important than the planners had believed. It mattered that those were his orders, and he knew better than to try and get them changed.
Having Chin retreat saved the private, who could easily have been overrun, but it also allowed the Vietnamese to advance without opposition. Jing Yo could partially compensate for this by having someone flank them from the east; it turned out that Sergeant Wu had already thought of this, and tracers began whipping through the brush and high grass.
A whistle sounded from the Vietnamese line. Jing Yo braced for an all-out attack, then realized that the Vietnamese commander was calling for a retreat.
“Hold your fire,” he ordered.
Undoubtedly it would be only a temporary respite. The enemy would regroup quickly.
Jing Yo called division again, to get a read on the location of the vanguard and to tell them that they were under heavy fire at the bridge. The major who was coordinating the attack communications told him that the vanguard was on Highway 12 and would soon be in his area.
“How close are they?” Jing Yo asked. “Can you give me a GPS point?”
“We don’t have specific data points,” said the major. “Things are in flux, Lieutenant.”
“We have a sizable number of enemy in front of us.”
“Then you have much opportunity. I must move on; there are many things happening.”
Judging only by the sound of explosions in the distance, the battle at the Lai Chau barracks had begun to wind down. But there was no way of knowing how close the tanks and infantry at the leading edge of the assault were. Nor could Jing Yo communicate directly with them.
Colonel Sun could. Jing Yo punched in the colonel’s command line. Sun surprised him by answering himself. His voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of explosions.
“Sun.”
“Colonel, we are holding the objective on Route 12,” said Jing Yo quickly. “We have a large force in front of us.”
“Good.”
“We have held off two assaults, one by armored cars. The force opposing us is mustering for a fresh attack. We’ve used about half of our ammunition,” said Jing Yo, laying out the problem in its starkest terms. “If they continue to press, we will run out of ammunition.”
“Hold your position,” snapped Sun.
“If I could get a read from the vanguard — ”
“Hold your position.”
The colonel snapped off the line.
“On the road!” yelled Sergeant Wu.
“Let them get a little closer,” said Jing Yo. “Wait until I fire. Sergeant, watch the right flank — this may just be to get our attention.”
Nearly two dozen Vietnamese came up the road, crouching along the sides in the thickest part of the shadows. Jing Yo waited until they were parallel with his position before starting to fire. The others quickly followed, cutting down about half of the attackers within a few seconds. The rest of the enemy fired back erratically, some at the copse, some at the bridge.
A second wave, another two dozen strong, came up behind them. There was no sense waiting this time; the commandos began firing as soon as the enemy was in range, and once again cut down about half the squad. But they took their first casualty as well: Private Bo got hit in the shoulder, and was temporarily out of action.
“Use the grenade launchers!” shouted Jing Yo, and almost immediately three of the small bombs exploded near the burned-out truck and the roadside. Unlike the rocket-propelled weapons, the 40 mm grenades were antipersonnel weapons, modeled on the grenades American infantrymen typically had mounted to their gun barrels. The Chinese version was roughly as dangerous, but they were in very short supply. The commandos had three launchers, with only four rounds apiece.
Gunfire erupted to the far right of the bridge, nearly a hundred meters away. One of the Vietnamese soldiers had been spooked in the dark, and he and his companions fired for thirty or forty seconds before their commander took nearly half a minute to get them under control. There were at least a dozen of them in the field, aiming to come up the flank against the commandos.
As the gunfire petered out, Wu decided to restoke it with a fresh round of grenades, hoping to get the Vietnamese to waste as much of their ammunition as possible. The night became an arc of red light, the gunfire so steady that for a few moments there seemed to be a solid wall of bullets.
Jing Yo ordered the sergeant to fall back, yelling his command and then signaling with the light. Wu acknowledged with a single blink.
Jing Yo and the two privates near him began firing, attracting the Vietnamese soldiers’ attention. When the answering fire began to peter out, Jing Yo got up and led the others down the hill, hustling through the trees and then staying low in the field until they reached the ravine. They slid in and moved up to the bridge quickly, reorienting themselves.
They’d have no hope against a concerted attack down the ravine; the enemy would have clear lines of fire to the bridge.
There was a whistle from the woods. This time it was a signal for an attack, and the Vietnamese began firing and rushing forward.
“Lai, Kim, back to the rocks,” he said, pointing to a set of low boulders on the bank. “I’ll cover from here.”
Jing Yo’s words were drowned out by two grenades, both of which exploded a short distance away. The Vietnamese were now advancing in front of them and to their side. There were at least several dozen men, maybe a hundred.
Jing Yo tossed a hand grenade, then emptied his gun’s magazine, pulled out the box, and slid in the mate he had taped to it. Within seconds he was through that one too, firing too fast, but there were so many bullets flying at him from so many directions that it was impossible to take his time. He hardly had to aim — there were flashes and bodies running toward him everywhere he looked.
He fumbled reloading, his fingers wet with sweat. He fired so quickly that he missed the incendiary round signaling he was near the end of the box, and was surprised when his gun clicked empty.
Jing Yo pushed a replacement into place and started firing again. Grenades exploded in a crescendo. Then
