Wu took a seat, and the captain did the same. The senior officer leaned forward — hands on his knees and attentive — while the junior officer lounged in his chair and casually removed his gloves. “I need combat experience,” Wu answered honestly. “Preferably, command of an infantry platoon.”
“You must be insane!” the captain practically shouted. “Do you realize what you’re asking? How short the life expectancy of an infantry platoon leader is? In six weeks, my four platoons have been through seven platoon leaders!” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Your family would hang me if you die!”
“Almost all of my classmates became platoon leaders,” Wu insisted. “They’re my family.”
Thoroughly dissatisfied with the answer, the captain nevertheless had no choice but to relent. He had already received his orders. He stood, shook Wu’s hand and dismissed the lieutenant. When Wu left, a colonel entered from the next room. Headphones dangled from his neck as he retrieved and packed his hidden microphone and camera.
“Did you get what you needed?” the captain asked.
The senior officer only smiled as he finished up, and the captain didn’t press him for an anwer. It was best not to ask too many questions of a man who had come straight from the defense ministry in Beijing.
Wu joined his new troops in the middle of a patrol. It was an awkward, “Here’s-your-new-platoon-leader” introduction whispered by the captain to groups of two and three soldiers at a time as they huddled behind cover. As the company commander departed, Wu noted, he stopped and whispered to the platoon’s noncommissioned officers, informing them, Wu suspected, just who the hell Wu was. Each time the captain made such a stop, the sergeants’ eyes darted to Wu.
Wu didn’t lead his men, he followed them toward a metal-sided auto garage on the outskirts of a besieged American town. Their mission seemed simple and low-risk. “Sweep a three-hundred-meter front from the highway to the power lines,” the platoon sergeant had explained to him, watching Wu for any reaction. Wu had just nodded.
As far as Wu could tell from the map, the small community they entered had no name. It had formed, however, one of the links in the outer defenses of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. There were bodies — American and Chinese, mainly Chinese — lying in twisted heaps all across the landscape. The random litter of human remains on a battlefield, Wu thought, noting the sights and smells with interest. He tried to make out from the pattern of strewn corpses and bloodstains what exactly had happened in the fight. In the end, however, he concluded that it made no sense. Chinese. American. American. Chinese. The bodies were mixed. Draped, in some places, atop fighting holes whose original owner could have been soldiers from either army.
But Wu knew what had happened without direct, empirical study. The big picture told the story of the small. Repeated Chinese attacks had finally broken the enemy. They had overwhelmed them, Wu thought as he stared at the embankment of a small, nearly empty artificial pond. The berm of mud and grass had offered attacking Chinese temporary shelter, Wu guessed, until some unseen American gun had opened fire from a supporting position. Thirty men lay dead in a nearly perfect row. A picket fence of corpses inclined at forty-five degrees with their feet in six inches of water.
The company commander had his choice of platoons for Wu to command. All had lost their lone officer. The unit he had chosen was the one platoon not joining the main attack against the local militiamen — middle-aged retirees from military service who now worked at the port — who were tenaciously defending the city. The job of Wu’s platoon was to kick in the doors on outbuildings and kill ill-equipped partisans and desperate stragglers cut off from friendly lines.
Wu knelt behind the bumper of a car whose hulk sat atop concrete blocks. His soldiers, he noticed, had grown wary and lay prone in hollows and behind cover. Four of his men, led by Wu’s platoon sergeant, pried open metal doors just wide enough to toss grenades into the darkness. Wu thought that he heard the sliver of a shout from inside just before the explosions lit the windows, shattering them. The metal siding was riddled with shrapnel and smoke belched out.
Wu rose and headed for the entrance, but his platoon sergeant — who saw him approaching — quickly issued orders. Before Wu could cross the yard to the entrance, two soldiers stepped into the doorway.
Both died instantly in a rip of gunfire that sent Wu to his belly. Without receiving any orders to open fire, Wu’s platoon began the total destruction of the building. They were arrayed in a semicircle around the front of the garage. It was a free-fire zone right over Wu’s head. The platoon sergeant and the two survivors at the door tossed more grenades inside. By the time Wu had crawled back to his former cover, his platoon sergeant had ordered a cease-fire. After sixty seconds of automatic weapons fire and two dozen hand-thrown and tube-launched grenades, every square foot of the garage walls bore ragged, smoking holes.
Again the platoon sergeant sent men inside, and again there was firing, but this time the intermittent reports came only from Chinese guns. Wu strode up to the dark, smokey garage — rifle in hand and safety off — just behind several additional soldiers, who had obviously been tasked by the platoon sergeant to act as Wu’s human shield.
Once inside, it was obvious to Wu that the garage was a primitive American field hospital. The nearly dead lay moaning amid the dead. There were male and female soldiers, doctors and nurses, and civilian men, women, and children. All had been ripped to bloody shreds. A young girl, maybe ten, held her hand up and outstretched toward Wu. Blood covered her face and chest. She didn’t point at him. Her palm was down as if she sought out Wu’s hand to help her rise to her feet. But she might as well have pointed. Her high-pitched moan might as well have been an accusation. A curse that would stain his soul for all his days.
Wu’s men busily put the survivors out of their misery with single, jarring shots. The Americans were all so badly mangled it was clear that none would survive. It was the only humane thing to do. But still there were tears and whimpers from the Americans. Not pleas for their lives. All were far too grievously wounded. Their sounds were instead mostly nonsensical laments at their horrifying and sickening ends. Wu watched one American nurse hold her hand over the eyes of a legless soldier as a smoking muzzle touched the side of the man’s head.
Wu jumped when the shot was fired.
The nurse began coughing up and drowning on blood. A single red hole in her green hospital scrubs was the only sign of her fatal chest wound. Another shot blew her head open while she was busy coughing.
The young girl at Wu’s boots lay wide-eyed, but her arm had sunk to the ground. A sergeant held his muzzle over the girl, but looked at Wu.
Wu fled the gore, the cries, and the reek of the slaughter for the crisp sunny afternoon outside. The shot that rang out at his back might as well have struck Wu. He fell to his knees, wrapped his arms around his belly, and shook uncontrollably.
This wasn’t the way he’d thought it would be.
The weather was mild, and Stephie’s Third Platoon lounged in their fighting holes dug in a ring around the camouflaged, net-covered inflatable tents of brigade headquarters. Men lay with their heads on their packs and held bellies swollen with hot food. A cook in an apron walked from hole to hole and poured steaming hot coffee into aluminum mugs.
“Care for some coffee,” came a deep voice from behind Stephie. She turned and then scrambled to attention before the brigade commander. The one-star general made the fifty-meter walk from his tent to her hole to check on her almost every day. He held out a steaming ceramic mug that bore the West Point logo. She took it out of politeness and stood at ease.