For most of the men with “George C. Scott,” Douglas Freeman, the first sighting of Vietnam from the lead Hercules, a line of deep green broken here and there by palm-shaded beaches, was not particularly memorable. Only Freeman and a few others were old enough to really remember the Vietnam War, let alone to have fought in it. For most it was one of many wars America had fought, and America’s defeat had not marked them as it had Freeman and others who could still recall Walter Cronkite entering their living rooms every evening to tell them the state of the war and, always, like a football score, the body count.
In any case, the predominant emotion in the plane was fear — fear of the enemy and fear of showing it. These were not conscripts, but well-trained professionals, some who had seen action in the Iraqi War and some in the invasion of Haiti, and so knowledge of both desert and jungle warfare traveled with them. But most of the 127 in the EMREF spearhead had never been in battle, and they feared that unknown. Already in the vast interior of the plane, the smell of perspiration was heavy in the air.
There was a flash!
“What the hell—” Freeman began, seeing it was one of the two reporters he’d allowed to accompany the EMREF spearhead into action. He’d chosen a CNN reporter because he knew that way he’d get a story out if he needed it for strategic reasons. The other was a photojournalism a woman, Marte Price, from the little-known midwestern Des Moines Register. He disliked seeing all the big networks get all the scoops.
“I’m sorry,” she began, blushing, “I didn’t—”
But Freeman cut her short. “Ma’am, last thing we expect in an aircraft is a flash popping off — looks like a damn flash-bang grenade. Lucky someone didn’t shoot you.”
“I promise I won’t do it again, General.”
Freeman nodded and mumbled something about how there were going to be enough surprises to contend with once the EMREF had reached Hanoi then headed north to do business with the “red dragon,” as he collectively called the Chinese.
“Huh,” grunted Martinez, a Marine, formerly an auto mechanic, who hailed from Los Angeles. “That flash sure as hell frightened me. Damn near shit myself.”
“You and fifty others, mate,” a Brit said, nodding, his cockney accent reminding Martinez of Mr. Doolittle, Eliza’s father in My Fair Lady. The short, stocky Englishman’s accent was a bit hard for Martinez to understand, but the man’s eyes and gestures told most of the story. Martinez felt comforted by Doolittle’s frank admission of fear, especially since the Britisher wore the simple but coveted beret of the Special Air Service, among the toughest of the tough. To be SAS was to be as handy with a parachute as with the Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun, to run miles with a heavy pack, to be able to live off the land from grass shoots to rats — raw, uncooked, for fear of the smell alerting the enemy — and then you had to pass the hostage exam.
The SAS were so tough that the U.S. Delta Force based their training on the English elite, who had worldwide and enduring fame not from the wars they’d stopped and Communist infiltrators they’d killed, from Aden to Malaysia, but because of the stunning raid they had mounted in full view of the TV cameras on the Iranian Embassy in London in 1961. They had all worn black, including balaclavas, to protect their identity. And then they’d melted back incognito, some of them to the regular units they were assigned to, their absence usually covered by compassionate leave or some other such conventional excuse. The Delta Force and the Green Berets didn’t hop into a phone booth and do a “Clark Kent.”
Both the U.S. and British phrase “Special Forces” covered all three — Delta Force, Green Berets, and SAS — in this operation, as Freeman thought equally highly of all of them. He’d fought with all of them before at different times and had admired all three, but as the Hercules crossed the coast heading for Hanoi, the ETA less than ten minutes, he had something else to tell them — not because of the common bond they shared with one another, but because they would soon be fighting against a common enemy, China’s People’s Liberation Army, an army which Freeman’s and his men’s forebears had fought back in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
“What I want you boys and ladies—” He smiled at Marte Price. “—to remember is that it isn’t so strange to be asked to fight on the same side as the Vietnamese. A lot of your grandfathers fought with the South Vietnamese, and besides, two hundred years or so ago your ancestors and mine were fighting one another in the War of Independence, and we, the United States, lost more men in the fight between the Union and the Confederacy than we did in both world wars. So you see, as times change, old enemies become comrades in arms. It is the position of the United States of America and Great Britain that this Chinese attack on Vietnam threatens a hell of a lot more than Vietnam. It threatens, if it goes unchecked, the whole of Asia. And we’ve learned from history, if we’ve learned anything, that if you don’t stand up to bullies in the first instances, you only encourage the sons of bitches to take more and more.”
ETA Hanoi was another five minutes. Douglas Freeman saw Marte Price tucking strands of her short-cropped red hair into her helmet, but not even her camouflage fatigues could totally hide her figure. Freeman told her that once the plane landed in Hanoi the only pictures allowed would be “sans flash.”
“I’m not that stupid, General,” Marte said.
“Didn’t say you were, ma’am. It’s just that along with the truth, I don’t want you to be our first casualty.”
“In that case, thanks.” She paused. “This is my big chance. To…”
She left the sentence hanging in the air. Freeman finished it for her. ‘To break free from the pack — be your own—” He paused, “—person.”
“Yes.”
“General, ETA seven minutes,” Bob Cline told him.
“It was ETA five minutes — three minutes ago!”
“Yes, sir, but we’ve had to swing south before turning north. Captain’s afraid the Hanoi triple A might let fly, mistaking us on radar for Chinese swinging west after hitting Haiphong harbor.”
“Very well,” Freeman said, then, turning to Marte, said, “Ms. Price?’
“Call me Marte, General.”
“I prefer Price.”
She looked surprised. He hadn’t struck her as the formal type.
“Ms. Price,” he began again, “don’t take any photos till you establish where you are vis-à-vis headquarters.”
“Where will that be?” she asked, nonplussed.
“Me,” he said. “Stick with me, and whatever story you write, don’t put anything about anybody saying ‘over and out,’ ‘cause that’s a contradiction in terms. Only those movie jokers in L.A. who rarely get out of bed write that guff.”
“ETA four minutes,” came the pilot’s voice in the cavernous interior, the sound of the Hercules more thunderous than before, shaking more, but everything seemed to be going all right. As soon as they landed they would be met by the French charge d’affaires, whose staff would direct them to camouflaged trucks already painted with the outline of a black triangle signifying a U.N. truck. Likewise, all the men’s uniforms — both British and American — also sported the U.N. symbol on helmets and both shoulder patches.
“Man,” Martinez’s friend Johnny D’Lupo confided, “I hope those fuckers see it!”
“Balls,” Martinez said. “You don’t want ‘em to see it. If they can see it they can shoot it.”
“Bloody right,” enjoined Doolittle, whom the others had dubbed “Doctor.” “I hope they don’t see me but I see them.”
“Sir,” Martinez called out to the general, his élan with a superior officer easy not only because he was American, but because he was one of the elite whose forebears’ battle honors went back to the Halls of Montezuma. “Sir, how long you think we’ll be goin’ in the trucks?”
“Twenty-five miles from Hanoi to Thuong,” Freeman said. He meant Phu Lang Thuong. “Roads are pretty bad and we’re coming in on the leading edge of the rainy season. I guess about forty-five minutes to an hour. No time to dip your—” He fell silent, and this was greeted with an assortment of catcalls, whistles, and cheers.
“What were you going to say, General?” Marte inquired.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, mumbling something about conferring with the captain.
Marte asked Martinez what the general was about to say.
“It’s kinda crude, miss.”
“C’mon,” she pressed, her notebook out, camera slung over her shoulder and her moving awkwardly in the seat belt H harness.
“No time to dip your wick,” D’Lupo put in. “No leave.”
“Oh,” she said, and smiled. Farther down the row, D’Lupo turned to Dr. Doolittle, his voice hardly audible above the roar of the engines. “I’m in love with her, Doc!”
“You and everybody else, mate,” Doolittle responded. “I’ve had a hard-on ever since we left the States.”
“Yes,” D’Lupo said.
“Well, don’t worry, old son. Sooner we clean this lot up at Thuong, sooner we’ll ‘ave time to spend wiv young Marte.”
They both knew it was bull, Martinez, like everybody else aboard except maybe Freeman, scared about going in. Only a few had seen sustained combat in Iraq — and hell, that was in the desert. In any kind of jungle, they knew, you couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of you.
“Well hell,” D’Lupo said, “we won’t be going in till the rest of the EMREF arrive.”
Doolittle didn’t know whether this was supposed to mean they’d have more time to ogle Marte Price or have more time to collectively steel their nerves. But then Doolittle and every other man aboard the Hercules was discovering once again that the company of your fellows could only go so far in comforting you — ultimately you were alone.
In the U.S. battle group, with the carrier USS Enterprise at center, steaming into the South China Sea, an echo was picked up by one of the Sea Kings’ dipping sonar and relayed to the sub Santa Fe by advanced warning aircraft. The commander of the Santa Fe prepared to dive the boat.
“Officer of the deck — last man down — hatch secured,” came the seaman’s report.
The executive officer moved to his position as officer of the deck and in turn reported to the captain, “Last man down. Hatch secured, aye. Captain, the ship is rigged for dive, current depth one two fathoms. Checks with the chart. Request permission to submerge the ship.”
“Very well, officer of the deck,” the captain responded. “Submerge the ship.”
“Submerge the ship, aye, sir. Dive — two blasts on the dive alarm. Dive, dive.”
The alarm wheezed twice sufficiently loud that every crewman aboard could hear, but not so loud as to resonate through the hull. A seaman saw to the vents and reported, “All vents shut.”
“Vents shut, aye.”
For any visitor to a sub, the obsessive litany of the dive seemed to be unnecessarily repetitive — almost comical — but there would be nothing comical about it if a single order was botched and the ship were to dive too deep too fast. Within seconds it could be below its crush depth around three thousand feet, and the next minute would be hurtling down unable to reverse its course, the quickly mounting pressure of thousands of tons per square inch driving it in excess of a hundred miles per hour to hit the bottom like a bomb imploding, its giant frame no more than flat-pressed metal scrap.
A seaman was reading off the depth. “Sixty-two… sixty-four…” and a chief of the boat reported, “Officer of the deck, conditions normal on the dive.”
“Very well, diving officer,” acknowledged the OOD, who in turn reported, “Captain, at one forty feet trim satisfactory.”
“Very well,” the captain said. “Steer five hundred feet ahead standard.”
The OOD instructed the helmsman. “Helm all ahead standard. Diving officer, make the depth for five hundred feet.”
The captain glanced over at the ethereal blue of the sonar room and its half-dozen green video screens of yellow lines, each line in the “waterfall” a sound source from the ocean, a world not of silence but a cacophony of noise, from the frying sound of schools of shrimp to the steady deep beat of a submarine’s cooling pump.
“Anything interesting, Sonar?”
“Negative.”
“Maybe it’s a diesel they heard. No pump.”
“Could be, sir.”
The captain knew he could go active, but then his own position would be betrayed. “We’ll wait.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The Chinese frigate was now in rough water, and Mellin, alone in the fume-laden darkness, was violently ill. He had experienced seasickness twice before — once in a friend’s sailboat off the California coast near Big Sur, the other time during a ride up from the Mekong Delta aboard one of the U.S. riverine patrol boats. It was the most terrible sickness he could imagine, and he’d seen hardened combat troops humbled by the ordeal. And whereas normally the eyes became adjusted to darkness, the darkness of the paint locker was so absolute that he could not make out anything but the hard bulkhead as once more the ship’s bow rose hard astarboard, shook as if it were coming apart, then fell through a gut-emptying space, colliding with the sea.
He heard a noise and prayed it was someone coming to let him out.