At the POW camp south of Ningming, Danny Mellin, Mike Murphy, and Shirley Fortescue were busily building the brick walls of their huts. Any reluctance the Australian had had earlier was now gone, drowned in the monsoon that had first struck the border area around Loc Binh, where Freeman’s besieged troops were fighting for their lives on the narrow margin between the base of the hill and the water-swollen paddies.
Unknown to Freeman, who was now en route to the Loc Binh front, the monsoon’s deluge had probably saved his troops on the margin, since the downpour coursing through the artillery-scored rust-red soil of Disney Hill was flooding many of the tunnels, whose drainage systems were clogged like leaves in a house’s gutters, with the artillery-mashed vegetation strewn all over Disney.
In fact, during the flash flood more PLA troops, en route from the north via the Disney tunnels, were killed by drowning than were killed by the U.S. and other USVUN troops. The rain cleared the smoke enough for the aerial fleet of choppers to return and to go in using the margin as their landing zone, violet smoke ground flares identifying the dust-offs, the Medevac helos’ LZs. Those helos whose red crosses were clearly visible on nose and sides were as usual used as aiming points by Wang’s soldiers, who knew that the Americans’ obsession with trying to get their wounded out would delay any counterattack. The air cavalry’s gunships, however, were quick to respond, the.50s on either side of the choppers sending down a deadly rain of one-in-five tracer, the frontmost helos also firing off salvoes of 2.75-inch rockets from their dual pods of nineteen apiece.
In this ear-pounding confusion of rain-curtained battle, Freeman’s air cavalry unloaded on the margin, which had more or less become a hundred-yard airfield-cum-starting point for Freeman’s counterattack, because now his consultation about weaponry with the Vietnamese general, Vinh, came into play. Standard 82mm Vietnamese mortars enabled Freeman’s troops once again to fire not only their own 81mm rounds, but PLA 82mm rounds as well.
In short, as the air cavalry rapidly stiffened the USVUN line on the margin — enough to push Wang’s Chinese army back fifty to seventy yards on Disney’s artillery-pockmarked southern face — the pyramids of mortar rounds that had to be left behind in the sudden and totally unexpected withdrawal fell into the hands of Freeman’s air cavalry mortar squads. Now, they quickly fed the Chinese ammo into the 82mm mortar tubes, the mortar rounds’ explosions not only an incentive for the already retreating PLA to retreat farther, but simultaneously further weakening the tunnels with a series of cave-ins from the rounds’ concussion. At one point, the cave-ins sealed the fate of an entire company of 115 Chinese troops.
Yes, there were U.S. casualties caused by tunnel cave-ins that produced sudden sinkholes, which in turn swallowed USVUN troops, but the losses were minuscule compared with the Chinese losses. And now, with ample ammunition supplies to feed the gaping mouths of the mortars, the high morale of the American advance continued, elements of the U.S. cavalry reinforcements having already gained Disney’s summit after unforgiving hand-to-hand combat along a deep, L-shaped trench. The same trench only a half hour before had been a tunnel filled with PLA, a tunnel that fed into the Disney complex as a conduit for those troops disembarking from the Ningming-Pingxiang-Lang Son railway’s troop trains.