A call came in from the commander of Gettysburg 2, a 29 year-old captain from Compton named Frank Chamberlain. “Any available air support, this is Gettysburg 2, drop on my position, I repeat, drop on Phaseline Charlie. Wipe them out!”
It was a brave call from a man who knew he was about to die. A Taiwanese F-35 heard the call and responded, “Gettysburg 2, this is Jade 4 inbound. ETA 15 seconds.”
“Colonel Concitor, we have done our duty.” Chamberlain said calmly, wrenching my heart with sadness.
The F-35 was too high to see, but its load of four five-hundred pound bombs struck within feet of the old concrete blacksmith building, killing two hundred Americans within, along with perhaps two thousand of the enemy.
Now was the moment, the point on which the attack balanced. The Chinese had lost about two-thirds of the attacking force, and now their morale was finally cracking. They had fought through hell, and they were still taking fire from Teatime Hill. Phaseline Charlie was still partially intact and pouring more lead into the PLA flank.
That was when the eight hundred Airborne soldiers and nine hundred Taiwanese civilians of the Militia loosed a cataclysmic volley. I joined in, having nothing more to offer the defense of Citadel.
The first eleven hundred men in the Chinese attack went down. The attack ground to a halt as the attackers found themselves in a Stygian hell of blood. Their friends had been cut down by the thousands, and they had finally been pushed beyond the last of their endurance. They wanted Taiwan still, wanted the dream of a unified Chinese empire, but more than that, they knew that advancing further was death.
And so they ran. The attackers running for Phaseline Delta came sprinting back into the soldiers working to wipe out the remnants of Gettysburg 2 and 3 at Phaseline Charlie. Seeing their comrades run, the PLA fighting at Phaseline Charlie joined the retreat.
Some started celebrating then, but I called over the radio, “Keep firing on them, damn it, we have to break them here!” Another fifteen hundred PLA infantry were cut down while running.
And then there was quiet in Citadel. At Devil Hill and Teatime Hill, the Chinese infantry apparently had gotten the word that the all-out attack on the western side had failed. They began a much more controlled retreat, but no less final for that.
The adrenaline still coursing through my veins, I shouted, “Victory!” and a cry of joy went up from Phaselines Charlie and Delta. My heart exalted, and I wanted to trumpet the news to the world.
Then I heard the moans and screams coming from the west, and elation fled from me. The western road into Pinglin was a bloody, writhing carpet of dead and mortally wounded PLA infantry, thousands upon thousands of them.
The battle was over. We had lost too many, well over a thousand men, but the Chinese had paid a far higher toll. Those poor Chinese who had fought so hard and had come up just a little bit short were now suffering as the sun slowly climbed into the sky. It was too soon to send my soldiers out to administer any help to those men, not with so many Chinese still so close to our lines. I didn’t want to order my men to fire on the wounded for mercy killings for the simple reason that I didn’t know how many of the Chinese could be saved.
An urgent call on the radio. Some officer in the Pentagon. “Concitor, are you seeing what we’re seeing? You held them off! You did it!” His voice was full of joy, of excitement, of victory.
“I didn’t do it,” I replied. “Frank Chamberlain did it. Mike Williams did it. All the Airborne soldiers who will never see home again did it.” With that, I took a deep breath and sat down, the adrenaline draining from my body, and my hand began to shake.
Epilogue: McCormick
A few hours after the Chinese pulled back from their failed assault on Citadel, the President of the People’s Republic of China contacted President Gates, seeking an armistice during which the PLA could withdraw its forces from Taiwan. I would have expected most U.S. presidents to have accepted on the spot, valuing peace over whatever the point of the fighting had been.
Gates, to his credit, surpassed my expectations. He held all of the cards, with his armored divisions even then landing in Yilan and his Air Force pounding every Chinese position it could find on the island. He refused to allow the Chinese to retreat unless they promised to return all prisoners from the war, reopen trade, and permanently renounce all claim to ownership of Taiwan.
The Chinese President balked, and Gates ordered airstrikes against the PLA troop concentrations retreating from Pinglin. F-22’s and F-35’s strafed camps of exhausted, broken men, and hundreds more died needlessly.
After that, there was no word from the Chinese leader. News reports talked about chaos in Beijing, an attempted coup. A general claiming leadership over the PLA forces in the area around Pinglin drove into the Airborne’s town in a car flying a white flag. He surrendered his forces to Colonel Concitor, who turned Pinglin into an ad hoc prison camp for nearly thirty-thousand PLA infantry, in addition to the ten-thousand wounded his soldiers had recovered in the hours after the last battle. There might have been problems feeding and attending to so many prisoners if events had continued to move forward so quickly on the political front.
The PLA senior leadership refused to consider the war lost. They thought they could inflict enough casualties on American ground forces to win a more favorable negotiated peace. The Chinese President consequently sent agents from the Ministry of State Security to arrest the senior leaders of the PLA. Open fighting ensued on the streets of Beijing between MSS and PLA forces. They fought back and forth for the next day while the PLA forces in Taiwan disintegrated before a united American-Taiwanese advance that quickly overtook Pinglin and then drove to the outskirts of Taipei.
At that point, cooler heads prevailed in China. The Chinese President resigned and was replaced by his deputy. PLA senior leadership remained in place, but agreed to President Gates’s terms of surrender. There was no surrender ceremony, but the closest thing to it was a memorial service President Duan of Taiwan held as the last shipload of PLA soldiers left Changhua City, a port on the western side of the island.
He invited me to attend and stand on the podium, and once I made sure Amy was well enough to make the drive, I accepted the invitation. I saw Concitor there in his full-dress uniform, which made me realize that I was wearing simple civilian clothes. I shook his hand rather than salute, since my Army days were now over.
“What now?” I asked him. Concitor was the hero of the Battle of Pinglin, and his iconic eyepatch had become the symbol of American defiance and resurgence.
“Just going home seeing my wife and kids,” he said with a satisfied look. “Haven’t thought a minute beyond walking in the front door. Maybe I’ll become a teacher at West Point or something. Seems hard to believe anything could ever live up to all this.”
“Just make sure they get someone good to play you in the movie,” I said.
He laughed, and then Duan’s presentation was beginning. He looked ten years younger than he had the last time I’d seen him, the night of the atomic bombings before the siege of Pinglin began. The speech went by in a blur, but I remember one part.
“Taiwan and the United States are two nations connected by values and, now, by blood. Rebuilding our nation will be a large task, but I can think of no two countries who have proven more decisively that no job is too big, no problem insurmountable, and no achievement impossible for a free people united in a common goal.”