At Dien Bien Phu things were not nearly as upbeat. The ninety men of the Special Forces weren’t so much depressed by the sense of siege as by the lack of action. Though they had been well-trained in defensive maneuvers, their natural disposition was to go on the offense. They also knew that if they went on the offensive now, they would be quickly pounded and eaten up by the vastly larger enemy force.
The big enemy guns the experts had told Navarre couldn’t be brought through such terrain were there and in fine shape. Though firing sporadically, they forced the men of Echo, Foxtrot, and Deltas — who had turned the first initial of their designations around to form “DEF’ and defiantly hoisted a makeshift flag above the triangle of deep, interlocking trenches and firing bays — to scurry for cover.
DEF was equipped with 82mm mortars, but overall there was no heavy ordnance.
Freeman knew that his first Enterprise raid was a failure, and that if he was to avoid a second Dien Bien Phu defeat of the kind meted out to the French in ‘54, he would have to order in the three companies of Airborne to help, enemy artillery or not. To avoid, or at least minimize, the massacre that could result because of enemy triple A on both sides of the valley. Freeman ordered that the Airborne go in that night. And here American technology in the form of the infrared goggles— which led to ferocious headaches after several hours of wear— allowed the slick pilots, with a fully night-equipped M53J Pave Low helo acting as pathfinder, to ferry in the nine hundred men.
The thousands of PLA troops could hear the choppers landing, and opened fire with their artillery, but however good their gunners were during the daylight, using open sight down-the-barrel direct fire, at night it was a different story. Even with the help of para flares turning night to flickering daylight, they were less effective because of the inferior computer guidance targeting necessary for the kind of deadly, vectored, indirect fire of the kind provided now by the American Airborne gunners. The 105mms and 155mms were ferried in by the huge, dragonfly-shaped CH-54 Tarhe helos to positions behind the ring of hills that surrounded the valley and were fired without their crews ever seeing the enemy, but with devastating results.
In short, the more sophisticated computer-fire-directed American guns could shoot from beyond the hills, out of sight of the enemy, with the Chinese guns unable to silence them.
It meant that while U.S. artillery could fire at any enemy gun position whose flash gave away its position, the PLA could not fire back with any accuracy worth talking about. Nevertheless the PLA, with their hidden dug-in guns and their mortars, did their best, pounding what they could see below on DEF’s triangle, the bombardment resulting in over a hundred American Airborne casualties during the hectic unloading phase. As soon as the Hueys unloaded their cargo of men and supplies for the DEF garrison, they began loading up with dead and wounded.
A PLA 105mm round hit a fully loaded Huey, and in the ghostly flickering of flare light and gas tank explosions, unidentifiable body parts could be seen dangling and dripping with blood from the nearby bushes and trees — one of the legless torsos belonging to a soldier who had apparently remembered his drill sergeant’s advice at Fort Bragg, for the media found his set of dog tags in his boots.
While this disembarkation was taking place at Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of miles eastward in the South China Sea Elizabeth Franks, her “grape” refueler jacket barely visible on the rain-slashed flight deck of the USS Enterprise, fought to keep her footing as the giant carrier came about, heading into the wind.
As soon as Gunner’s Mate Albright Stevens, stamping his feet to keep them warm, got off his watch, he and Elizabeth would find some warm, hidden place, and there all the stress and strain of the flight deck would be released. For a split second Elizabeth Franks was nearly blown overboard as the blast from a Phantom, its engine moving onto full afterburner, was not fully deflected by the water-cooled shield. Someone, a yellow shirt, grabbed her barely in time.
The Phantoms were punishing the PLA at several locations in the Spratly Islands where Wang’s troops had defiantly and bravely — or stupidly, depending on your point of view — raised the Chinese flag. In addition. Enterprise was also standing by to launch “Operation Landfill,” drawn up by the commander of the Second Army, General Freeman, as an alternative strike force now that so many Air Force bases east of Dien Bien Phu had been struck by PLA hit-and-run saboteur squads.
The DEF triangle now had an extra thousand men in and around it, where a circle a quarter mile in diameter ringed the dug-in garrison’s timber- and sandbag-reinforced command and hospital bunkers. The initial disorganization that besets most Airborne for the first few minutes after touchdown provided an opportunity for Wang to attack, but the mist-shrouded valley dissuaded both the PLA and DEF from moving too far from base positions. Though the Chinese still outnumbered the garrison’s defenders more than ten to one, Wang was waiting for when he could best use his dug-in artillery.
Flare light had allowed his gunners to get a few deadly salvos by direct fire down at the garrison, but the flashes of his guns would also show their positions to Freeman’s forces. Wang wanted to wait for daylight to make maximum use of his guns.
“Son of a bitch’ll attack at dawn,” Freeman opined to Colonel Berry over the secure scrambler phone. “So all you can do, Al, is dig. Dig like a bastard because the only way they can get that piece of real estate is to take it by hand-to-hand. Their artillery’ll be pounding you, and we’ll be pounding them, but in the end they have to take the friggin’ wire like they did with the frogs.”
Berry didn’t need a history lesson. He needed more time to inspect and to exhort his men to shore up their positions against what he was sure would be the coming massive bombardment from the PLA-owned hills.
Along with the reinforcements Freeman had sent in were dozens of the latest Heckler & Koch 40mm automatic grenade launchers, the lightest on the market, and constructed so their thirty-two-round belt could be fed from either the right or left. Instead of firing machine-gun bullets, with the HK40 they’d be firing machine-gun grenades.
“I don’t fuckin’ care!” Doolittle said, thoroughly pissed at being relieved on Disney only to find himself and his colleagues reassigned as support troops for the Airborne. Freeman had apparently predicted that there might be a lot of massed assaults on the wire and that men already blooded in this kind of combat should be airlifted into either DEF’s triangle or the outer defensive circle.
“I don’t fuckin’ care!” Doolittle repeated as they were digging in. “I mean, we’ve done our bit, haven’t we? Time for a bit of friggin’ S and S.”
“What’s that?” D’Lupo asked, not really caring.
“Sex and sex!” Doolittle said. “I wanted to say something to the captain ‘fore they carted us off from Disney — wanted you to back me up, eh? And what ‘appens? D’Lupo can’t find his tongue and Martinez — well, you’re a great fucking disappointment, you are, Martinez. ‘Yes, sir, no, sir, three fucking bags full, sir. We’d love to go to Dien Bien Fuck.’ “
“Well, you’re here now, Doolittle, so make the best of it. B’sides, it’s pretty important.”
“That’s right,” D’Lupo echoed.
“Yeah, ‘course,” Doolittle said. “They’re all bloody important, especially when you might buy it!”
“The French lost here,” Martinez said.
“Oh,” Doolittle said. “I get the picture. Wherever the frogs get beat we ‘ave to go in an’ put it right. That the story?”
“Nah,” Martinez answered. “You know, I mean — it’s important politically.”
“Oh,” Doolittle said, taking a rest from digging a shooting bay. “I see. Now we’ve got Henry fucking Kissinger here. Since when did you give a shit about politicians, Marty?”
“I dunno. I thought about runnin’ for Congress sometime.”
“Oh, Gawd protect us — Congressman Marty!”
“Doolittle,” D’Lupo said, “why don’t you shut up and dig?”
“All right, all right.” He started filling sandbags again. “ ‘Course, y’know — Christ, there’s a lot of noise going on ‘round here.”
“It’s called artillery, Doolittle. Our guys and their guys, remember?”
“Yeah, well, you know where they’re gonna hit us? Across the fuckin’ river — on our left flank. All this rain — everybody figures they won’t try to cross.”
D’Lupo tossed up another bag as flashes of artillery outlined his arm like a broken tree. “They’ll hit us from all directions at once.”
“Of course, everyone knows that. I know where I’d hit em.
“Where?” Martinez asked.
“Behind their latrines.”
“Bullshit—”
“Nope — that’s the truth, mate. PLA never post enough guards near their latrines.”
“No wonder,” D’Lupo said, “if they smell bad as you.”
“Oh, very droll,” Doolittle commented.
“You guys want some coffee?” It was a young Airborne corporal.
“I’d kill for coffee,” Doolittle said.
“Well, you might have to if those gooks have a crack at us in the morning.”
They took the coffee quietly and gratefully. The mist was still heavy in the valley, and they knew, as did everyone in the thousand-man defense force spread out from the DEF’s inner triangle to the outer gun ports of the half-mile-wide circle, that as dawn approached, when it was most difficult to distinguish the shape of a man from the shape of a tree, an attack must surely come. General Wang was no doubt just as determined that Dien Bien Phu should fall as was Freeman that it should not.
When the first salvo of Chinese 105mm and 155mm artillery hit the circle, the earth shook violently and a machine-gun emplacement was gone, two men dead and several more injured as everyone hit the deck, hugging the dirt in the trenches. The din was earsplitting. Within fifty seconds American 105s were answering the flashes, and soon the artillery bombardment fell off.
Within thirty seconds Wang’s first wave of sappers hit the wire with everything from explosive charges strapped to their waists to satchel charges ready to penetrate the perimeter’s defenses and wipe out command bunkers and strongpoints. There were explosions, fountains of red earth, screaming all around, and shadows to the west coming through the mist, rubber boats full of PLA on the river, the boats now in a hail of mortar fire, with one direct hit flinging bodies skyward before they fell back and were swept away, some clinging to the boats’ remains. Mortars still rained down, giant spumes of water erupting amid the multiple spouts caused by the Americans pouring in M-60 fire as well.
The initial shock of the sappers’ wave was now over, and though many more explosions were heard along the wire, the sappers were paying a terrible price for their initial attack. Their bodies and bits of them were strewn all along the wire, the holes they’d opened already being breached by the second assault, this one by PLA tujidui—storm troopers — heavily armed and moving fast to enter the bunkers and trench system that was the outer circle. These were met by a curtain of M-60 machine-gun fire and from the DEF triangle by mortar fire of such concentration that only a handful made it into the circle trench ring, followed by earth-shattering explosions and the screams of some of the dozen or so Airborne troops torn to pieces by the C4 exploding in such narrow confines. Over thirty PLA storm troopers were inside the circle for about a minute before the Airborne cut them down. A bugle blared, and as suddenly as it had begun, the Chinese attack ceased.
“Beat the bastards!” one of the Airborne proudly announced. “There must be forty, fifty dead chinks out there!”
“Terrific,” Martinez said. “That only leaves ‘bout five thousand!”
In fact, Wang’s forces, including porters and underground engineers, were twice that number, and what had depressed Martinez, Doolittle, and D’Lupo, as well as Berry’s Special Forces contingent, was the enemy’s morale. There had been absolutely no hesitation at the wire. Even from DEF’s triangle it had been at once impressive — at least from a strictly military point of view — and frightening to see how many of the sapper wave were suicidal.
Berry was anxious for the mist to lift so a striker force of fighter-bombers from Enterprise could hit the hillsides east and west of Dien Bien Phu and suppress Wang’s triple A. Then the air drops could be made within the half-mile-wide circle without too much interference.
“Wang has a measure of us now,” Leigh-Hastings commented from his bunker at the northern tip of the DEF triangle. He had punched in me numbers on his PRC-77 so the message couldn’t be intercepted.
“Of our outer ring,” Berry replied, “but they’re not ‘our boys.’ I don’t mean any disrespect toward the Airborne, they’re doing a great job, but—”
Leigh-Hastings cut in. “But our chaps are best at offensive operations.”
“You think I should be using them now?’ Berry asked.
“Not necessarily. I understand your strategy of the strong control defense, but each of our DEF chaps has a starlight scope, and the met report from Freeman’s HQ is that the mist and low fog will abate later today. Tonight it’ll be a VC moon — just enough light for Wang to attack by, but not enough for us to see them.” Leigh-Hastings also pointed out that starlight scopes, which Freeman’s G-2 had confirmed the PLA did not have, at least not in any substantial numbers, would allow the Special Forces troopers to play havoc with the PLA in the dark.
“I’ll take your suggestion under advisement,” Berry responded. “I’ll request more starlight scopes — for the Airborne.”
“Good show. I think—”
“Incoming!” Berry shouted, and the next moment Leigh-Hastings was thrown to the floor of his bunker, his radio flying out of his hands and hitting one of the wooden cross beams., He heard the high whistle of more artillery.
“They’re at the wire!” someone shouted, and the outer circle defenders opened up with everything they had. At least thirty to forty PLA were inside the outer wire, some of them having played dead outside the wire from the first attack. It was chaotic, a satchel charge detonating midair, killing more PLA than Americans; a screaming bayonet charge by PLA into one of the trenches, American and British fighting PLA hand-to-hand in the trenches.
An M-60 jammed, its quick-charge barrel glove lost and both machine gunner and assistant killed within seconds. But the HK automatic grenade launcher was proving its worth as Airborne gunners sprayed the breakthrough points with three-to five-round bursts, creating in effect a wall of small-arms artillery, the fragmentation grenades cutting the Chinese down as narrow breakthrough points forced them to cluster at the openings in the wire, running over their dead and dying comrades.
Another artillery duel erupted, the PLA issuing direct fire inside the circle, willing to kill their own as Freeman had done on Disney to gain ground by forcing the enemy back into the network of trenches. Had it not been for the Z turns built in the trenches, there would have been many more American and British casualties. The Z turns, like a traffic island, were plonked into the middle of a trench, where one man could hold off a whole squad. Martinez’s M-60, overheating, jammed, and had it not been for Doolittle cutting down two Chinese with his M-16, Martinez would have been dead. D’Lupo, out of ammunition, threw his rifle at a Chinese soldier, who ducked and bayoneted the American before being chopped to pieces by an M-60 burst at near point-blank range.
“Medic!” Doolittle yelled, firing his last grenade from his M-16 launcher at the wire. A medic was already at D’Lupo’s side, stanching the blood flow and yelling for a stretcher. The next moment the medic was dead from a burst from a Chinese T56-1 RPD, a gaping bloody hole where his chest had been. It seemed like minutes to D’Lupo, but in reality it was only a matter of seconds before a stretcher arrived and he was taken away to a hospital bunker inside the triangle.
As D’Lupo, hemorrhaging profusely, was being prepped for surgery, a Chinese who miraculously had made it all the way from the outer wire circle into the DEF triangle without a scratch, leapt into the trench, through the curtain — an artillery round shaking the overhead light violently — and began firing. He killed two nurses before the surgeon whipped his scalpel across the man’s throat, immediately returning to his patient while calling for orderlies to take out the dead nurses and telling a whey-faced medic to get a Special Forces type from DEF “down here right now. Tell him to stand outside the prep room.”
“Yes, sir.”
D’Lupo was dead.
Kacey, the Ranger who had run into Salt and Pepper, arrived a minute later with a Winchester 1200 shotgun whose hardened lead slug was guaranteed to stop a train and whose fléchette rounds, or darts — thirty of them — were lethal up to three hundred meters.
“Any fucker jumps down here,” Kacey proclaimed to no one in particular, “his fuckin’ head’ll end up in Laos!”
A man did jump down, but Kacey held his fire. The soldier, one of those who, like Doolittle, had been flown in from Disney, had his right hand missing, was covered in blood, and was staring disbelievingly at something he was carrying in his left hand. It was his other hand, having been sheared off at the wrist.
“Jesus!” Kacey yelled. “Medic — on the double!”
The bugle sounded again, and the Chinese, most of whom had failed to make it more than fifty yards into the circle, began to withdraw. This time the Airborne raked the bodies with machine-gun fire to make sure that no live ones were left waiting for the next attack.
In the two attacks so far, over forty Airborne and two of Berry’s men had been killed, and over 220 PLA “hard hats.” The “hard hats,” or “piss pots,” as the Americans called them, were steel khaki helmets, a sign that Wang was using only strictly professional troops from Chengdu’s Fourteenth Army, that no militia units were being used, that Beijing was determined to win the battle for Dien Bien Phu.
Direct-fire artillery opened up again, and by now even the dimmest soldier on the battlefield could tell what Wang’s tactics consisted of — to shell the hell out of the allied force now under the thousand-man mark, and, once their position in the circle had been pulverized enough, turning dirt to sand, and their heads ringing and nerves stretched to the limit, send in another wave of sappers and storm troopers. The old Chinese water torture method, only instead of a drip at a time, you wore down the enemy by attack after attack. After all, as Wang had told the party chairman himself, the Americans weren’t going anywhere.
And though the Americans’ artillery of six-gun batteries was responding with careful forward-observer-directed fire, it wasn’t effective. Whereas the Americans had dug in within a half-mile-diameter circle whose now treeless moonscape offered an easily seen target for the PLA gunners, the PLA targets, their guns and suspected troop concentrations, were spread all over the hills about Dien Bien Phu. This amounted to a huge ambuscade around the Americans in an area so big that by the time one PLA gun was spotted, it would be retracted, often on wooden rails, deep into the cliffside and on a downgrade. Even if an American 155mm hit a target zone dead on either side of the valley, there would be little if any damage to the Chinese wagon. One or two PLA gunners might die if shrapnel sliced through the camouflaged nets down into the man-made cave or revetment, but there were plenty of PLA soldiers to replace them.
The mist had still not risen by noon, and the joke passed around between enemy salvos’ whistling then thundering in was that Freeman must have been praying again.
In fact, Freeman had now decided to place his faith in what he had briefly referred to as “essential deforestation,” or, as his HQ staff were soon calling it, “clear cutting.” The men in the trenches of Dien Bien Phu called it “fuck the forest.” There was nothing strikingly new about it, as Freeman had seen it used in ‘Nam before, but he did go about the preparations for it with a zest that later appalled Greenpeace and other conservation groups throughout the world. Freeman, avoiding passion, going for reason instead, would tell a hastily convened press conference that “when it comes to preserving the habitat or saving American lives, there is no contest.”
Bob Cline did whisper to him that he should have mentioned the British and other USVUN contingents, but before he could rectify the omission, LaSalle and others were pillorying him for it.
Freeman had told the combat information center aboard Enterprise precisely what he wanted, and when the mists finally rose and disappeared at 1420, the three-component strike force from the carrier was on its way. Entering “flak alley” between the hills of Dien Bien Phu, the first wave, guided in by forward air controllers, dropped fuel air explosive bombs. Unlike napalm, the FAE consisted of dropping a huge blanket of vaporized fuel over the target and detonating it all at one instant. This burnt much of the vegetation off in one enormous blanket of intense fire, consuming any troops directly beneath it.
The second wave of fighter-bombers then streaked in, dropping five-hundred-pound Snakeye bombs, which denuded the target area of any trees still standing. The third wave then swept in and, with the hillside devoid of vegetation, looking from the air like huge patches of mange, the fighter-bombers dropped laser-guided and high-angled two-thousand-pound bombs directly into the gaping holes that were, or rather had been, the revetments for the Chinese guns. This, as Leigh-Hastings put it, “upset” the Chinese gunners inside, and made a mess of their guns as well, which the USVUN forces in the circle and DEF triangle greatly appreciated.
There was a problem, however, and to his credit, Freeman, playing devil’s advocate to his own strategy, realized it before anyone else at Dien Bien Phu. The problem was that this awesome attack upon the hillsides meant that if Wang was not to lose any more men in such clear-weather attacks, it had either better rain or Wang had to speed up his artillery and massed-attacks combination tactic to overwhelm the Dien Bien Phu garrison before the “gangster arsonist,” Freeman, burnt him out — driving him out of the hills.
Accordingly, Freeman, his G2 section telling him of suddenly increased enemy radio traffic after the Enterprise attack, ordered his DEF commanders and Airborne to prepare for massive tujidui thrusts later that day, probably beginning at sundown and possibly going on all night. Air interdiction would be maintained by the Enterprise fliers, but the closer the PLA got to the Dien Bien Phu garrison before they attacked, the less help the garrison could expect, as once the Chinese began “bear-hugging,” closing with the Dien Bien Phu defenders, U.S. artillery and airpower would have to cease because of the danger of decimating their own troops. Then not even “Spooky,” the awesome AC-47 festooned with heavy-caliber machine guns, infrared scopes, TV cameras, and a 105mm howitzer, could be used, for fear of killing the Dien Bien Phu defenders as well as the attacking Chinese.
Despite this danger, and as a further countermeasure to what Freeman believed would be Wang’s biggest massed attack so far, Freeman, after conferring with Berry, Leigh-Hastings, Roscoe, and with the Airborne commander, decided that starlight scope patrols would be sent out before sunset and position themselves in the thick vegetation around the half-mile-diameter circle. Their job would be to “sniper” anything that moved, in hopes of first breaking up Chinese concentrations massing for attack, and second, locating and identifying, by radio and red flare, enemy concentrations, which Skyraiders— the old faithfuls, with a loiter time of up to eight and a half hours — could then bomb and strafe, in addition to the indirect fire from the American batteries behind the hills of Dien Bien Phu.
But if the present fine weather had given Freeman a break and allowed him to launch the deforestation attacks, the lack of mist also meant that the American 105mm and 155mm batteries’ positions could be seen by PLA patrols, and by 1630 hours, out of ten USVUN batteries south, behind Dien Bien Phu, seven had been overrun by PLA storm troopers. Both sides had paid a price, Wang having lost over four hundred men in Freeman’s FAE/Snakeye and laser-guided bomb attacks, and the garrison’s defenders losing over forty-two gunners, one small consolation being that all but one of the seven American guns overrun had been spiked before being taken and so were of no use to the PLA.
Each commander had now forced the other’s hand. Any further delay by one would mean the other would have time to plug the gaps so recently opened.
At 1630 six starlight patrols began edging out from the perimeter east and west of Nam Yum River. Immediately there was trouble, as over half were engaged by PLA snipers, some of whom had come right up to the tree line of the perimeter, forcing the USVUN snipers back into the circle around DEFs triangle.
“Maybe we can try later when it’s dark,” Leigh-Hastings opined.
“We’ve got no choice,” Berry answered. “Trouble is, they’ve still got a lot of vegetation on the valley floor, while their artillery has done a real job on ours. We’ve got nothing but a few dead trees and bare earthworks.”
“All the better to see ‘em when they rush us, Colonel,” Leigh-Hastings said.
“You think they’ll rush us?” he asked the Englishman, feigning surprise.
“Mad if they don’t, old boy.”
There was a screech of incoming, and they instinctively ducked even though they were in the HQ bunkers.
Roscoe came in through the burlap bag flap. “Colonel?”
“What is it?” Berry asked.
“Some of those reinforcements Freeman has sent in — some of Vinh’s boys among them — are worried about old tunnels. Some of them are saying their kinfolk fought here against the French, and they think—”
“Jesus!” Berry said. “They think the PLA are using them?”
“Some of ‘em, at least, Colonel. That’s why there’re so many all at once when they come at us from the trees. No movement in the trees during the day — zilch — but come nightfall—”
“Right,” Berry said. “Send out probe teams, bayonets, any damn thing you can find.”
Ten minutes passed, a long time with barely an hour of daylight left, before squads ventured out from the trenches to probe the earth about the perimeter.
Almost immediately there was the screech of incoming, only this time the bombardment increased, the vibration of the H.E. shells shaking the earth so violently that streams of dirt were falling from the roof of Berry’s bunker. “Some bastard’s watching us!” Doolittle said in one of the trenches.
“You don’t say,” an SAS trooper said.
“I do fucking say, and anybody who shows his scalp’ll fucking well lose it!”
“Shut up!” yelled Martinez, still in shock over D’Lupo’s death.
In Colonel Berry’s bunker the consensus was that the bombardment would not cease till nightfall.
“You think we can stop them?” someone asked Roscoe.
“I don’t know. I need to get through to Freeman for TACAIR.”