The long-range battle moved to another valley and blended into the constant sound of distant fighting. Intense fighting. Desperate fighting. Fighting everywhere around him.
I’m too valuable for them to use, Hart mocked in anger. Or I’m too useless, came another voice with a different point of view. The war had reached a critical phase and would now be won or lost by draftees. Infantry fillers. Clerks and programmers were handed rifles and sent into concrete trenches and bunkers to fight to the bloody fucking death.
It infuriated him. Flu-like chills rippled down his body. He was of half a mind to grab his rifle, march to the nearest Chinese sentry, and blow him away. The little voice in his head took the half-baked plan and began to reel off improbable projections of the enemy body count. Ten to one casualties. Fifteen to one. Twenty to one.
Always something or other to one, Hart thought. Always I would die. The tempting voice fell strangely silent. There was no voice counseling him to choose life, which one day might yet hold beauty. Amid the thunder of war both near and far, it was that silence that saved Hart’s life.
He lowered his head to the rock hard towel and listened to the war. He heard Chinese volley fire degenerate into individual shots. He could feel the impacts of exploding American shells through the ground.
After a few minutes, he drifted off to sleep.
A handheld television camera recorded every move made by Junior Lieutenant Wu. The graying, bushy-haired civilian cameraman transmitted unprecedented live images of war to a prime time audience of one billion Chinese. Two dozen channels of popular programming had been interrupted for the prime minister’s brief, jarring introduction. “My grandson, Han Wushi,” the old man intoned, “is an eighteen-year-old officer in the war our military is fighting. He, like all the other flowers of our youth, has reached this moment of truth on the outskirts of the American capital. Please watch this live, unedited broadcast from the Battle of Washington, and pray for Lieutenant Han Wushi with me.”
All were then transfixed by the first ever uncensored glimpses of hell.
Wu’s face filled the screen as he flinched and hunched his shoulders under a murderous artillery barrage. Dirt pelted his cheeks and rolled off his helmet after each near miss. The audio and video drama was relayed via a tall microwave mast several hundred meters away to a van several miles to the rear. From there, it passed through a high bandwith network backbone to subsea cables crossing the Gulf of Mexico. The fiber optic bundle popped above ground in Nicaragua for an instant, then plunged deep into the cold waters of the Pacific.
It rose again — a fraction of a second later — in China. Nothing distinguished the single, hair-width tube carrying Wu’s picture and voice from the multitude of others in the thick package of cabling. Until, that is, network control room monitors lit with flashes and loudspeakers sounded thundering booms.
And when the signal arrived, at long last, a half second later in the living rooms of China, the sights and sounds of China’s war in America assumed the face of Han Wushi.
Rocking bursts unsteadied even the electronically stabilized camera and maxed out the six LED columns of multichannel audio just as European television networks switched to the feed. Weekend soccer and basketball games were interrupted. The audience swelled by another five hundred million people, who like their Asian counterparts were as shocked and appalled as they were enthralled.
For it wasn’t heroism that all saw in Wu’s grimaces. It was a desperation at the bleeding edge of life. He lay in the bottom of the ditch beside a suburban street whose pavement was being blown skyward in huge, jarring sheets. The scene was compelling. Universal. Wu was The Everyman. He was Chinese. He was American. He was German, British, and French. Each powerful blast sent Wu’s face careening off-screen momentarily, and all waited and watched with one question on their minds. Is he alive, or is he dead? Each time, the camera returned to Wu. Each time, against mounting odds, Wu lived.
During the trauma shared with billions, Wu became an icon for the horrors of war visited upon young, fresh-faced innocents. He also became an instant worldwide celebrity. The brief connection established between the boy and the aged prime minister — explained to European viewers by anchormen’s voiceovers — afforded Wu the identity that he never had before possessed. From nonperson he had become the young heir to a reigning dynastic power.
But the sketchy introductions of the star of the real-time docudrama left gaps in Wu’s personal story to be filled by the imaginations of billions. His, all presumed, had been a life of high Chinese post — Communist nobility, all of which was now at risk just like the lives of the commoners. “Why would he do it?” rang out across millions of living rooms in a dozen different languages. What would motivate a young prince to jeopardize everything when he surely could so easily have avoided the danger? Or was it that he could not escape his obligations? Was his family making him fight? But why would civilian, vaguely antiwar politicians ask so much of such a young boy?
There were a myriad of questions and answers with endless permutations, but the billion viewers each had one thing in common. It now mattered urgently, to each and every one of them, whether this boy survived the lethal festival of real-time, televised violence.
The American barrage suddenly lifted. The camera stilled, focused, and framed Wu expertly in high-quality, high definition. The latest and the best equipment in the hands of the best combat photographer to have survived ten years of war. No expense had been spared for this unparalleled extravaganza. In the background, all could hear the thunder of intense bombardment, but around the hero there was a momentary respite from the violence.
Wu rose. Clumps of earth rolled off his battle dress like the premature fill of his grave. In the background, some soldiers rose. Others would never move again. There were repeated shouts of, “Are you okay?” In Europe, blazing computers translated the Chinese and simultaneously displayed subtitles. In the foreground came Wu’s commands.
“Everybody up!” he shouted. “Advance toward the bunkers!”
The grim survivors — three dozen strong — trotted up an ordinary suburban American street toward the wooded crest of a hill ahead, from which rose towering sprays of fire. It was now the Americans’ turn to seek shelter from the ballistic storm. The cameraman followed.
Wu skirted smoldering craters in pavement and lawn alike. The houses lining the street were alternately in pristine, prewar condition, and blazing hulks victimized by errant rounds. After a long, camera-jolting sprint, the cameraman caught up with and walked alongside Wu, filming him in heroic profile, and then pulled ahead to get a shot of Wu leading his men up the hill.
But the photographer wasn’t foolhardy. He knelt, and a ten-foot-tall Wu jogged past, stooped at the waist, rifle in hand. The camera panned to follow, but fell progressively further behind and took longer and longer shots at higher and higher magnification. Despite the covering bombardment, half a dozen of Wu’s men were blasted off their feet by the deep rattle of heavy machine guns. Each could just as well have been Wu, which brought home the reality of the drama.