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The moment the massive tires of the Hercules touched and screeched on the runway at the Gia Lam airfield southeast of Hanoi’s center, the plane came under sniper fire, several rounds penetrating the fuselage, a ricochet striking and zinging off an EMREF trooper’s helmet. “How rude!” Doolittle said.
“Jesus Christ,” D’Lupo said, ducking. “Thought this friggin’ place was supposed to be secure.”
“Settle down,” Freeman intoned coolly over the PA system, not showing his own surprise. “Bound to be a few Chinese insurgents — take a potshot in hopes of shaking us up, then trot off home to bed. Right?”
“Fucking shakes me up,” D’Lupo told Martinez, the latter agreeing, gripping his rifle tightly. Doolittle meanwhile watched the photojournalism Marte Price, quickly jotting down notes, stopping for a moment to push away a wisp of hair beneath her helmet.
“General,” she asked Freeman, “how about a shot of the EMREF spearhead just before they deplane?”
Freeman nodded. “All right, boys, Ms. Price wants a photo of you heroes. Smile — and that’s an order.”
Marte Price was annoyed. What she didn’t want was a photograph of 126 troops grinning from ear to ear. The flash seemed to illuminate the whole plane. One soldier asleep — the tension having already drained him — suddenly sat up. “What the—”
It was good for a laugh, and Marte Price was satisfied. A startled soldier was a good pic for the next edition of the Des Moines Register. But already, even as the huge plane was coming to a standstill, she was feeling dishonest, somehow corrupted, knowing full well that the Register’s editor, unless told otherwise, would run the picture as one of a soldier in a moment of high combat stress. As such it would be taken off the wire by most major papers in America, particularly given the fact that apart from CNN, Freeman had excluded any major media network.
Two of the aircraft’s crew stood by as the massive rear door/ramp was lowered and two Humvee “scouts,” each armed with a TOW missile launcher and.50 caliber machine gun, rolled off onto the tarmac. They were followed by the two lines of troops, none of whom were below the level of E-7 Sergeant First Class when they volunteered for EMREF duty. The sniping had stopped.
“You figure this is worth fifty-five bucks a month?” D’Lupo said, referring to the Airborne’s hazardous duty pay.
“No way,” Martinez responded.
Freeman saw two Vietnamese, one a cadre — a political officer — coming toward him dressed in traditional black pajamas and lion-tamer hat, the other a senior military officer dressed in the camouflage green khaki of the new Vietnam uniform.
“General Freeman,” the cadre said, smiling. “We welcome you and your troops to Vietnam.”
“Cam on,” Freeman said, extending his hand first, though he didn’t like it, to the political officer and then to General Vinh.
“What’d he say?” D’Lupo whispered. “ ‘C’mon!’?”
“No, you fucking wop,” Martinez said. “It’s gook for ‘thank you.’ “
“You speak it too?” a surprised D’Lupo pressed.
“Yeah. Me and the general do our homework, see?”
“Oh yeah,” D’Lupo challenged. “All right then, what’s ‘fuck off’ in Vietnamese?”
“Easy,” Martinez said. “Chuc ngu ngon!”
“All right, smartass, so you know gook.”
In the penumbra of light about the ramp, D’Lupo saw a woman in Vietnamese uniform, then another carrying baskets toward the plane. D’Lupo couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. It seemed as if her whole leg was showing. She was walking toward Freeman, who was politely but firmly telling his Vietnamese host, through an interpreter now, that he was given ample assurances by Hanoi via the Pentagon that the Hanoi airfields were secure and that if there were sniping around Gia Lam Field, why the hell didn’t Hanoi tower divert the American Hercules thirteen miles north of the city proper to Noi Bai Airport?
Through his interpreter the cadre assured the general that the Gia Lam Airport was secure. There had been only one sniper, an ex-NVA regular who, the cadre explained, was mentally unstable, so that when he saw an American plane, and a huge one at that, as big as one of the B-52 bombers that had attacked Hanoi in the Vietnam War, he had had a false memory — the cadre meant “flashback”—and shot at the big plane.
“I believe,” the cadre added, “that you have similar problems with veterans in the United States?”
“Yes,” Freeman replied, tempted to say that as he understood it, Marxist-Leninism would make a balanced personality impossible, but realizing the cadre’s explanation was an olive branch being extended. Freeman accepted it. “Yes, we shot up one another quite a bit, didn’t we?” After the interpreter had finished, the cadre smiled, shaking Freeman’s hand again.
By now almost every one of Freeman’s 127-man spearhead had been given a lei of welcome by one of the female V.A. regulars, CNN already bouncing it off a satellite, beaming it back to the States, and Marte Price busily taking shots of the cadre and the two generals meeting, each handshake a polite but not overly warm gesture of willing cooperation. Once he realized the CNN camera was rolling, Freeman — the first note of anxiety present in his voice since he’d left Hawaii — called his aide over. “Bob, for God’s sake make sure CNN gets a shot of the British SAS boys. Emphasize that this is a U.S.-led U.N., I repeat U.N., action, and that other countries will be making their contributions to the U.N. force within a matter of days. And make sure those—” He stopped, unable to think of the right word for a second.
“Gurkhas,” Cline said.
“Exactly,” Freeman said, slapping him on the shoulder. “And mention the Aussies, New Zealanders, South Koreans…” He steered Cline away from the Vietnamese general and cadre and toward his heavily loaded troops, his voice subdued. “But Bob, for Chrissake don’t say anything about the Japanese support — not even logistical support. These jokers in Hanoi, like much of Asia, hate the Japanese — figure the Japs still haven’t made amends for atrocities.”
“How about our My Lai?” Cline asked, reminding Freeman of the massacre of a whole Vietnamese village by U.S. troops.
“Bad as it was, Bob, it doesn’t start to compare with the widespread rape and pillage perpetrated by the sons of Nippon — sons of bitches traumatized the whole of Southeast Asia. And Bob…?”
“Sir?”
Freeman’s voice was friendly enough as he smiled back at the Vietnamese general and cadre before saying quietly to his aide, “Bob, coming down the ramp I heard some joker use the word ‘gook.’” Now Freeman was smiling broadly. “You tell ‘em if I hear any disparaging remarks about our U.N. allies, I will personally cut the offender’s prick off. You got that?”
“Yes, General.”
General Vinh asked in heavily accented English how long Freeman wanted to rest his troops before moving up to the snake — the name given by the Vietnamese Army to the winding front line that snaked its way up, down, and at times around the base of the hills north of Hanoi.
“Rest?” Freeman responded. “General, we didn’t come here to rest. Vietnamese people are being attacked by China, the U.N. sent us to help, and that means now. We can move out the moment my boys finish relieving themselves. Main body of Second Army in—” He almost said Japan. “—is already assembling for airlift. First planeload’ll be here in a matter of days.”
General Vinh understood most of it, except for the part about “relieving” themselves.
“Gia ve sinh,” the interpreter explained.
“Yes,” Freeman cut in. “Gia ve sinh,” adding, “Thunder box!”
When this was explained to General Vinh, he uttered an “Ah…” of recognition, smiling broadly. “Toi—Come,” he said, motioning to a line of ten three-ton trucks — all American made — looking the worse for wear, their engines spitting and coughing in two lines beyond four portable toilets that had been rolled into the apron of light about the Hercules.
As the trucks, their “blackout” headlights mere slits of light in the enormous darkness, rolled north from the Gia Lam airfield, Freeman’s spearhead troops, whose main function now was to carry out a recon in force for the benefit of Second Army, heard the sound of clapping in the darkness. Through their infrared goggles, against a soupy green background, they could see lines of Vietnamese civilians clapping here and there and waving tiny U.S. and U.N. flags.
“Ain’t that somethin’?” D’Lupo said, taking his infrareds off, as he, like others, was prone to severe headache from the goggles if he left them on too long. “Gooks welcoming U.S. soldiers. I’m gonna tell my grandchildren ‘bout this one.”
“You’ll tell nobody, D’Lupo,” a Delta first lieutenant said, “if you keep callin’ ‘em gooks. Remember what the general said — he’ll cut your prick off!”
“All right,” D’Lupo riposted. “I’ll call ‘em ‘Charlie.’ “
“Shit,” Martinez cut in. “You tryin’ to sound like a vet?”
“Listen, dick brain, I figure in a coupla hours we’ll start being vets.”
“If you last that long,” Martinez said.
“Thanks a lot, Marty,” D’Lupo charged. “You’re all laughs, you know that?”
Dave Rhin, a black man from Chicago, flicked up his IR goggles. “Man, there are thousands of ‘em lined up. See ‘em plain as day.”
“Yeah,” D’Lupo said in the rough camaraderie of soldiers. “Well, they’re gonna find it hard to see you, Rhin.”
“I told you,” Martinez chimed in, “to use that fuckin’ sunscreen, Rhin!”
“Hey, dick brain,” Rhin retorted, “they gonna see you honkies all right. They don’t need no IRs to see you, man.”
“Oh,” Doolittle said to his fellow SAS troopers in the truck, “isn’t this nice? We’re on our way to a punch-up wiv Charlie an’ these blokes start a fuckin’ race riot. Lovely, i’n’it?”
“Can’t understand a fuckin’ word you say, limey,” Rhin said.
“No matter,” Martinez joshed, flicking up his IRs. “Brits are full of shit anyway.”
“You’ll get yours, mite!”
“All right,” the first lieutenant said on the cellular. “Pipe down. We’ll be in enemy country before you know it. General wants you all quiet as of now.”
The silence was deafening. Freeman had permitted them to let off steam on the way in from the Gia Lam Field. But now that they were past the Ho Tay — West Lake — approaching the Song Hong, or Red River, and Thang Long Bridge, a prime target for U.S. bombers during the Vietnam War, every one of the 127 men, including Freeman, was alone with his fear.
Marte Price had wanted to stay in Hanoi to cover the war, but the CNN crew of three had decided to go to the front, and being the only woman reporter, she felt she would lose face not only for herself but for all the women in the armed services if she didn’t go with Freeman’s spearhead recon group. Someone had joked she’d decided to go “all the way,” but there were no laughs.
Sitting in the second armed Humvee behind the vehicle carrying Freeman, Cline, and the two Vietnamese, Marte Price was sick with fear. She found, to her astonishment, that one’s teeth really do chatter in the face of a danger so overwhelming that she felt a shortness of breath — a rapidly rising surge of panic that momentarily convinced her she was having a heart attack.
Southwest of Hanoi, in the Vietnamese People’s Army indoctrination center at Xuan Mai, Vietnamese militia and reservists were being told once again that it was not the American people in the sixties and early seventies who had declared war on the freedom-loving peoples of Vietnam but the “imperialist criminals” Kennedy, Johnson, and McNamara. The fact that the U.S. had never actually declared war, attested to by the Pentagon’s insistence on still writing about the war with a lowercase w, was not mentioned.
The American people, continued the cadre, had had their own civil war and a war of independence against the British imperialists. Very few of those listening were paying much attention to the cadre’s harangue. All they cared about was that in Vietnam’s never-ending struggle — the first Indochina War, the second Indochina War, and the wars against the Chinese— war had been the way of life. Peace was the abnormal condition.
This time it was again China, which had had its eyes on the lush Red River Delta since two hundred years before Christ. The Vietnamese soldiers didn’t need a cadre to tell them the obvious: their country was again under attack by the Chinese. No one bothered raising the theoretical contradiction of one Communist state waging war on another Communist state, for everyone understood that this was a war not of ideology but for territory, the rich deposits of oil beneath the hundreds of offshore islands from the Gulf of Tonkin to Borneo. In any case, the Americans had helped the Vietnamese once before, giving them arms and money to fight the Japanese in Vietnam. War was the way of life.
The militia and reservists were told that should it become necessary, they might have to fight side by side with the Americans to plug any gaps the Chinese attack might open. Most of the subdued talk among the young militia and reservists, many of them women, was of how anxious they were to fight with the Americans. Most of them were too young to have fought in America’s undeclared war against North Vietnam, and the same would be true for many, though not all, of the Americans. Besides, it was a well-known fact that Americans had everything, and there was a collective craving among the Vietnamese militia and reservists for American cigarettes. Not only were they the best cigarettes in the world, but in many transactions throughout Southeast Asia they had become the currency of exchange, a prime cargo for the South China Sea pirates.
The indoctrination session ended with several militiamen dozing off, the general belief being that there would be no further Chinese breakthrough, that their Vietnamese regular army would soon counterattack and with the help of American bombers force the Chinese back from the Lang Son line across the border.
The arrival of the EMREF recon spearhead was known to Beijing within half an hour of the Hercules landing, CNN having beaten the transmissions of Chinese Vietnamese agents who radioed the news to the Chinese capital. But CNN, as part of its “deal” with Freeman, hadn’t disclosed it was only one Hercules, and had it not been for the agents’ transmissions, Beijing would have been under the impression that the total EMREF force of several thousand had already arrived in Hanoi.
In any event, the news jolted Beijing, and within minutes the HQs of the Chengdu and Guangzhou military regions had been notified that the gains made so far by Generals Wei and Wang must be consolidated as soon as possible on both flanks of the Lang Son front—before the American genius for logistical buildup could be exercised.
“It is like,” General Wei’s cadres explained to his troops, “attacking a loaded bullock cart — kill the bullock driver first before he can unload his weapons and ammunition.” In this instance, Wei explained to his HQ personnel, the carts — the U.S. air supply line — might not be stopped by the Chinese air force, but the lead driver, Freeman, was already here and could be killed.
The Chinese general announced that any PLA unit wiping out Freeman’s advance spearhead would receive a “thousand commendations from the people.” This phrase was officialese for the fact that any unit that wiped out Freeman’s spearhead force would receive a monetary reward — one thousand dollars U.S. It was a small fortune, and on the black market it would buy many American cigarettes. Some senior cadres objected that this was unworthy of the people’s army ideology and was a “capitalist corruption” of the troops, to which Generals Wei and Wang responded that they were responsible for the military tactics and that the cadres, with all due respect, should keep out of it — it was a military not a political matter. A senior cadre continued to object, and Wei told him in very unpolitical terms to perform a sexual act on himself with a pointed stick.