One of Echo column’s two-man point security team was armed with a Winchester five-round 1200 riot shotgun, while his partner was sporting a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun, a weapon of choice in the Special Forces, the fully automatic gun set for three-round bursts of 9mm Parabellum.
Nothing had moved for hours as they, the twenty-five-man attack team behind them, and the rear-end security pair from Foxtrot, waited. If “Audacity, audacity, always audacity” was Freeman’s motto, “Patience, patience, and more patience” would serve the three thirty-man Special Forces columns.
It had been an especially difficult lesson for some of the American and British Special Forces, who were more used to urgent rescue and fast, deadly antiterrorist actions. Even so, every man knew that a mistake, a premature move, a bush mistaken for an enemy soldier and fired upon, a fart, a cough, could cost his life and the lives of the other twenty-nine men in his column.
Approximately three miles to the south beneath the jungle canopy, Foxtrot column also lay in wait, while in the marshy area south of Dien Bien Phu, under Captain Roscoe, Delta column had taken over what high ground there was. Men’s bodies, particularly the chest, were bloodied by leeches and assailed by mosquitoes.
Of the three columns, it was Delta that craved, prayed, for action, just to be able to move, to deal with the goddamn leeches, to smack a mosquito stone fucking dead.
The men of Delta were not to be disappointed, for the PLA Airborne Regiment 7885, which meant it had been formed on August 7, 1985, en route to the valley around Dien Bien Phu, were on the red light — all standing, making final checks and adjustments before the jump into the low but heavy gray overcast.
Delta column’s thirty men, unlike the sixty in Echo and Foxtrot, were not strung out on one side of a trail behind a line of trip-wire claymore mines, but instead were dispersed in an oval-shaped perimeter, ten men on either side and five each at the oval’s ends. In this way they could watch forces either way, in the event that the Khmer-led guerrillas or PLA decided to outflank Echo and Foxtrot, now that they’d been told by a bird-dog Cessna message drop that, courtesy of La Prick Pierre LaSalle, the whole world had been alerted to the presence of Freeman’s USVUN Special Forces column in Laos.
Captain Roscoe, in charge of Delta, not wanting to break radio silence, sent four of his men ahead as runners, two for each column, to alert Echo and Foxtrot that their general, if not specific, position was known to the enemy and that they should return posthaste to Delta.
In the two pairs of runners, one man would cover while the other advanced in a tactical leapfrog until they reached their respective columns, all four messengers torn between the need for speed, quiet, and the fear of being mistaken by Echo or Foxtrot as an enemy scout sneaking up behind them.