The mash unit had to be especially cautious when attending to Freeman’s wounds, not because he was a general, but because his Medic Alert disk showed he was allergic to certain antibiotics. When they got his wound cleansed and his hand bandaged up, they put his arm in a sling, which he immediately dispensed with. He walked back to the armored personnel carrier he was using as a mobile HQ, which, along with an armored cavalry unit, had made its way north along the Phu Lang Thuong road, then been airlifted into the west-east valley between Ban Re and Loc Binh.
Freeman was worried about the fading light. Soon it would be dark, and the Chinese still in the tunnels would be able to exit within the USVUN area and create havoc. Freeman and Vinh knew that if this occurred, there were bound to be many more blue on blue incidents. But to withdraw from the hillside would simply mean giving up the territory, the high ground, that the USVUN had fought so hard for all afternoon, and going back to the fields from which they’d started.
Freeman, like Patton, said he never liked “paying for the same real estate twice,” and elected to hold the high ground. Vinh, however, cautioned that it was possible the Chinese might simply elect to retreat through the tunnel system on this side of the southern slope of the ridge to the ridge’s northern side. Freeman readily acknowledged the possibility. At least if the Chinese did slip out of the battle, he wouldn’t have to worry so much about blue on blue, but he would be faced with the prospect of more than five thousand PLA troops slipping north across the border, troops which — like those who slipped across the Yalu River in Korea — could not be pursued by his Airborne cav units because of the political decision in Washington and Hanoi that USVUN forces could not cross the Vietnamese-Chinese border, which was only a mile and a half north of the ridge.
Vinh suggested through the interpreter that perhaps there might be a way of the USVUN “having cakes and consuming them.” He meant “having your cake and eating it.” Vinh said that if TACAIR attacks from the carrier USS Enterprise could keep up a steady bombing of the northern side of the ridge, bottling Chinese up in the vast underground tunnel system that traversed the ridge, then at least they couldn’t exit.
“So they can’t crawl out and head north?” Freeman asked.
“Yes,” Vinh said. “Then tomorrow we smoke out the tunnels through the camouflaged entrances and exits we found on the southern side today.”
Now Freeman saw the extent of the Vietnamese general’s strategy: bottle their northern escape route overnight by ceaselessly bombing the northern side of the ridge, and in daylight man all entrances and exits you could find and smoke them out — with “white phosphorus” if necessary.
Freeman ruled out white phosphorus, but not purely on humanitarian grounds. After all, the USVUN forces and the Chinese were already using white phosphorus grenades. But a regular grenade was one thing, a phosphorus grenade was something else. You couldn’t pump white phosphorus down into a tunnel system when you weren’t sure where the hell it was going to come up. If it got on your own men’s skin, you might kill more USVUN troops than those of the enemy.
“Very well,” Vinh concluded, “we will use purple smoke. Blow that down, and wherever it comes up we’ll seal unless they agree to surrender.”
“What if they decide to backtrack?” Freeman asked. “I mean what if Wang decides to come back through the tunnels to the fields behind us?”
“Why go back to old ground you have lost?”
“To try and escape south,” Freeman answered. “We don’t know how far south the tunnels go, do we? Besides, they have two battalions at least from their Fourteenth Chengdu Army down there in Disney World. Around a thousand men— infantry and some engineers.”
“Why engineers?” Cline put in.
“Because the bastards know how to dig, damn it! General Vinh here’ll tell you. Hell, his boys had over two hundred miles of tunnels in the Chu Chi system down south during ‘Nam. And despite all our technology, we couldn’t rout them.”
“What makes you think we can do it here, General?”
“Because—” Freeman hesitated. He was proud of his Second Army and he was loath to take anything away from them. “Because, Major, the Vietnamese have been at it a hell of a lot longer than we have, and in the tunnels, they’re better than we are.” He held up his bandaged hand. “Capiche?”
Cline nodded. “All right, but meanwhile where’s General Wei?”
Vinh pointed at the map. “Last intelligence reports say he is still proceeding down the Lang Son-Lang Ro road three miles to the west of us. But our — I mean, the USVUN heavy artillery is lined up along Lang Son-Ban Re railroad and are pounding shits out of them.”
Freeman roared with laughter at the interpreter’s phrasing, adding, “By God, General, I hope you’re right. We don’t want our left flank penetrated.”
“No.”
That night the ridge became known as Disney Hill, not only to the men of Freeman’s Second Army and the USVUN forces, but by the pilots of the fighters and bombers preparing to take off from the Enterprise, even now before the sun went down. The great carrier was at the center of the battle group, along with other ships — submarines and combat air patrols included — pledged to the protection of the carrier as she turned slowly into the wind of the Gulf of Tonkin, her catapults already bleeding steam. She was ready to thrust her warplanes aloft, the aircraft a careful mix of A-6E Intruders, F-14 Tomcats, and F-18 Hornet fighter-bombers, loaded with everything from two-thousand-pound bombs and Sparrow air-to-air missiles to fuel air explosive bombs.
There were no laser-guided bombs on this mission, for while the north side, and not the south side, of Disney Hill was to be hit, it would not be pinpoint bombing that was required to either kill or trap the Chinese in the southside tunnels, it would be power bombing — brute poundage. This was to be excavation by high explosive.
Already in Primary Flight Control, the “handler,” PRI-FLY’s second in command, whose job was so complicated and many-faceted that it often could not be computerized, watched his models of the aircraft on his grid-crossed table. Nowhere is war as complicated as on the flight deck of a carrier when men and machines move in a rough ballet of hand signals amid a forest of constantly moving, different-colored jerseys.
Two of these, gunner’s mates, Albright Stevens and Elizabeth Franks, a “grape” who in her purple jacket was helping to fuel one of the F-18 Hornets with JP-5 gasoline, had been lovers ever since he’d taken her to the movie at the beginning of the voyage. Both of them had since found time together in some of the hundreds of nooks and crannies aboard the huge ship, which, as well as launching planes in any weather, had to feed and minister to over five thousand crew members.
“Lucky we ain’t on a sub,” Albright had told her.
“You’d find a way,” she’d said.
“Believe I would.”
But that was then, and now they were in the Gulf of Tonkin, not a happy place in the annals of American history, and around them they knew the PLA navy was determined to somehow penetrate the carrier’s protective shield.