“China is the king of Teatime Hill right now. Hell, China’s the king of the world. The United States owned the Hill and led the world not too long ago. No one gave us that. God didn’t put us at the top. We were there because our ancestors kept working when they were tired, kept struggling forward when they were comfortable, and kept fighting when they were scared. They made the world we live in today.”
“But somewhere over the last couple decades, we got lazy. We forgot that a country is only as great as the character of the people who live in it. We thought that what made our country strong were things like freedom of speech, tolerance, and equality. Those might be good things, but they only help us along the way to greatness, they don’t make us great. The only—the only—thing that made us great was the willingness of our people to work, to discover, to fight when the odds were against us.”
I took a breath, forming ideas I had never put into words, even in my own mind. “Look up at Teatime Hill. Someday, an American scientist will say, ’If those Airborne soldiers could fight their way to the top of Teatime Hill, I can keep working.’ A worker will say, ’If the PLA could be defeated, I can keep working another hour.’ A child will say, ’If fourteen-hundred Americans could beat eight thousand Chinese, I can do… anything.’”
“We can restore our country and everything it stands for if we find the courage to do what everyone else thinks is impossible. The fate of Citadel will turn on what we do right now. We are the fulcrum upon which Citadel will survive or fall. We have the right weapons, the right weather, the right enemy. The only question is whether we’re the right people. Let’s answer that question. Let’s take that fucking hill.”
No one wanted to shout because the attack had not yet started, but I heard thousands of clicks on the radio. Every soldier triggered his microphone and instantly let it go, and the overall effect was a cacophony in each of our ears, as our radios allowed multiple people to talk at once.
The time for talk was over. The men around me seemed less nervous, more eager to get moving. I checked my watch. The first time-sensitive component would start in ninety seconds.
“All, move out!”
The soldiers on the Coffee Line rose as one and quickly broke into two groups. About one in every ten soldiers had a thermal scope on their rifle, and they began to move forward at a jog, their weapons raised and aimed. It wouldn’t take long before they’d have targets. The other ninety percent of the attackers did not have thermal scopes, and they sprinted from cover to cover, waiting for the PLA to see them and open fire.
That didn’t take long. While the Chinese weren’t expecting an attack on Teatime Hill, they had dozens of sentries out watching the Coffee Line for the slightest sign of movement. They even had a few patrols trying to work their way closer to the Coffee Line, just in case an attack was in the offing. Those patrols and sentries quickly saw what was going on and opened fire, betraying their position to the Airborne soldiers with thermal scopes.
There were more Airborne soldiers with thermal scopes than there were PLA patrols and sentries out, and the Airborne soldiers were more psychologically prepared for the onset of battle. The PLA soldiers, shooting downhill and into the trees, often missed high. The Airborne soldiers had expected to be shot at, and quickly delivered accurate fire against the sentries. About twenty-five PLA soldiers were killed or wounded in these early moments of the battle, along with perhaps fifteen Airborne soldiers.
The shots fired by either side served to alert the Chinese on Teatime Hill — an attack was coming. They rushed to the trenches and foxholes, looking down the slope to see what was happening. Forty-five seconds after the first shots had been fired, Task Force Tennessee struck.
They had crawled out in all directions from our lines, then turned back in to converge around the PLA lines on Teatime Hill from all over the eastern and western side. Their task was simple — introduce chaos in the Chinese lines by attacking their flanks. All over the eastern and western sides of Teatime Hill, Airborne soldiers rose from the mud and fired on the PLA soldiers rushing for their foxholes.
The two-hundred soldiers of Task Force Tennessee had arguably the most dangerous job on the battlefield that day. They were spread out to such an extent that each soldier only had one or two companions within thirty yards of him, so whenever the PLA soldiers turned their attention to a single threat, they cut down the Airborne soldier in short order, and the Airborne soldier would die very nearly alone. If he was wounded, there was no one in the area to help him.
However, the PLA in the first defensive line had a lot more to worry about. For just at that moment, the next surprise arrived.
The Taiwanese had used precisely aimed land-based missiles to take out Chinese artillery threats. I had asked the Taiwanese a simple question: could they use satellite imagery to assign a target to the missiles ahead of time and then have the warhead of the missile detonate about seventy feet above that target? The Taiwanese leapt at the opportunity to apply some of their technical expertise to the task of defending Pinglin. They had quickly reprogrammed thirty-five of their missiles for the purpose.
Those missiles now streaked in from the east, far too fast for Chinese air defense to do anything but track them on radar. We had a split second to see the fiery trail of the rockets glowing in the foggy, rainy, early-evening sky before they detonated. The series of explosions lasted for about twenty seconds.
Each missile had been targeted on dense clusters of Chinese foxholes or trenches. No missile had been assigned to an area with less than fifteen soldiers present. Taiwanese satellite imagery experts had painstakingly searched for signs of officers, such as concentrations of radio emissions from particular locations, epaulets on uniforms, or even individuals in the satellite images who seemed to have many people coming over to talk to them.
By detonating in the air, the missile converted its metallic body and rocket engine into a lethal cloud of shrapnel. That shrapnel would be useless in destroying artillery or tanks, but would cut through the thickest body armor or helmet to kill a soldier. Each missile cleared a twenty-yard diameter circle of space on Teatime Hill of any PLA infantry.
The missiles punched thirty holes in the PLA line, killing or severely wounding over 400 defenders.
The Chinese on Teatime Hill had, in the space of one minute, come under assault from the entire southern arc of the hill and had many of their officers killed by the missile strikes. The main assault was still making its way up the Hill, and the fire from the PLA lines had dramatically slackened thanks to the missile strikes. The Airborne soldiers charged forward, many of them shouting. They had closed to within visual range, and they fired on the Chinese soldiers still dazed from the attacks on multiple fronts.
The first lines of Chinese soldiers crumpled under the assault, the men simply overwhelmed by events. Of perhaps three-thousand PLA in the first line facing us, only about two-hundred managed to collect themselves and fall back in good order to the next Chinese defensive lines about a hundred yards to the rear. Another three or four hundred threw down their rifles and ran, making themselves effectively useless to the defense.
I was in the center of the assault with the soldiers who had come nowhere near this far in their first assault on the hill. They roared with vengeance as they cut down the PLA defenders, ready to surge ahead to the next line.
I stayed a few yards back and didn’t fire my rifle. The first line was the easy part. We had only lost about forty-five men routing the first three-thousand defenders. Now came the much more difficult task.