General Douglas Freeman was in his tiny kitchen, emptying the last of his coffee around his aspidistra plant — an aspidistra was able to take anything and thrive — when the phone purred. It was the Pentagon telling him that the Emergency Response Force was to be activated for immediate deployment. Freeman knew it was for Vietnam, and a shiver of excitement rather than apprehension passed through him.
“Yes, sir,” he answered crisply. The irony of Americans returning to the country where they had suffered their first and most humiliating defeat in the twentieth century was on his mind, and he knew it would be at large among the EMREF’s troops; if not the British SAS contingent, then certainly among the rest of the force. But he welcomed the Pentagon’s decision, for whatever the American troops’ apprehension, Freeman saw it as an opportunity to exorcise once and for all the stigma that had been the legacy of America’s Vietnam vets.
The Pentagon’s view, however, was quite different. Its hope was that the very announcement of the American-led EMREF being activated, via Hawaii, would send a timely and clear message to Beijing — to stop the fighting and to withdraw its troops from Vietnam.
Within the closely guarded and vivid red-lacquered gates of Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, the government’s VIP compound, reaction was swift, with a message to Generals Wei and Wang to hold their positions at all costs, that “decisive” reinforcements were en route from Nanjing military district to the border. In fact, the Vietnamese supply line from Hanoi eighty miles to the south had been cut again, this time by PLA MiG-29 Fulcrums, so that Hanoi’s ability to resupply its troops south of Lang Son and Dong Dang was even further impaired, inviting a fresh Chinese attack, with Generals Wei and Wang eager to seize the moment and press farther south.