A one-second screech preceded a stupendous, unexpected mass Chinese rocket barrage. The ground was knocked from beneath the cameraman. On large-screen televisions all around the world, the fall and bounce of the camera sent people clutching for their seats or averting their gaze from the dizzying and soon-to-be-horrifying video. But the veteran journalist raised the camera with half a dozen grunts. The screens in cafes, living rooms, and offices steadied on grey geysers of earth rising from the ridge-top skyline. The eruptions of soil slowed and then fell back to the ground in long arcs. Large clumps of debris plummeted earthward trailing black tails of smoke like evil comets.
Without pausing to take in the scene, the combat photographer grunted again and abruptly sprinted forward. His expert, zigzagging dash transmitted dizzying slurs of pixilated video, but the digital audio that it captured was even more disconcerting. Noise was slung around rooms when surround sound processors faithfully decoded the ever-changing direction of the screams of pain and the cries for help recorded by the bouncing camera.
“Everybody up!” suddenly came the steady voice of Lieutenant Han Wushi, which grew louder with each long stride the racing cameraman took. “Keep moving! Advance! Knock out those bunkers! Get on top of them now! Everybody go! Go! Go! Go!” To Chinese viewers the shouts evoked tingling skin. Bravery in the face of the enemy. To nonChinese, however, the determined, foreign commands evoked the terror of being confronting by an unstoppable force. “Take the hill! Take the hill! Take the hill!” Wu shouted in raspy growls. “Charge for the guns!”
When the picture steadied on Wu — outstretched arm dramatically sweeping toward the hill — all saw that his men did indeed rise to attack. A crackling roar rose in intensity and volume from the surviving Americans straight ahead, who fired blindly out of the smoke that billowed from craters bracketing their bunkers. Wu’s men, however, were fully exposed to the random fire of the heavy machine guns, which raked from side to side in well-planned sheets of death. Strings of fist-sized divots rose from pavement and cut the slow and the unlucky in half or sheared heads from bodies in anything but clean fashion. The camera searched for Wu. A Chinese soldier lay behind a tree picking out of his arm the long splinters of wood blasted from the trunk of his slim cover. Soldiers made suicidal dashes through supersonic scythes. Some made it. Others died horribly. Slender trees were shaken and felled. Cedar fences exploded with huge holes. Rubber trash cans were blown across yards and shredded by repeated blows. Parked cars were rocked and flattened by angry machine cannon spewing exploding rounds.
The camera found Lieutenant Wu alive. Far ahead. Shouting commands heard only by frozen, cowering soldiers.
The cameraman rose but remained low to the earth as he sprinted after Wu. In the sky above, a black thunderhead of smoke from the Chinese rocket bombardment blotted out the sun. Through the thickening veil of haze at ground level from the multitude of fires and explosions, Wu disappeared and reappeared frequently, seldom little more than a dim profile that flashed past the camera. Twice, Wu rousted soldiers hunkering low against death. Twice, the cowering men had charged up the hill and disappeared into the smoke until they were illuminated by brief, fatal blasts. Heads in living rooms all across the world swivelled to the peripheries of their ultrawidescreens as men tumbled from all manner of blows. Viewers shouted in fright until family members pointed at the peripatetic young officer on another part of the screen and shouted, “There! There he is! He’s alive!” The cameraman rose again to follow Wu, passing one bloody remnant of a human being just as he was dying, but before he had figured out what had happened.
The camera caught glimpses of Wu only episodically, but the pattern was clear. When a soldier’s nerves flagged, Wu appeared at his side. The lens zoomed in for close-ups of Wu lying beside men under the eaves of houses, in shrubs, behind cars. He never kicked or berated them. He never brandished his rifle or threatened them in any way. Instead, he got into the faces of the petrified boys, looked them in the eye, and spoke to them calmly until he got a nod, then Wu got to his feet and led.
His men followed. All of them. Every time.
The closer the attacking platoon came to the American bunkers, the more frequently the camera lost them in the thickening smoke. It always found Wu again, but fewer and fewer of his men reappeared.
The camera swung around to point back down the hill toward their line of departure. Through the drifting smoke, it recorded a landscape of the dead and the writhing near-dead. Water poured from a main broken by a shell crater. The river turned pinkish as it washed down the street over the corpses. But the pools that collected beneath the bodies sprawled across sidewalk and lawn remained an undiluted crimson. Debris large and small — some with licks of flame still rising — was scattered everywhere. Clutter amid the carnage.
The camera ended on a close-up of Wu, who had reappeared at the cameraman’s side out of the haze. “Advance toward the guns!” he shouted. Again, he swept his arm forward, toward the enemy, in a pose suited to a heroic war monument. But Wu wasn’t made of marble.
The flesh-and-blood statue rose and advanced on the enemy. The camera’s lens and then the camera followed. The only thing you could see through the smoke ahead were continuous bursts of orange fire jetting from machine guns that protruded from bunker firing slits. At first, the only people advancing were Wu and the cameraman. Wu didn’t even bother to fire at the concrete facades of the bunkers, he just advanced. And somehow, impossibly, he lived. Slowly, one by one, men joined him. Not eagerly, or even willingly, but because they had to; for Wu disappeared into the smoke, attacking the enemy alone.
A dozen reluctant warriors were stooped low but advancing under the withering American fire. Suddenly, the bunker that dominated the street was lit by a devastating ripple of explosions. The images of the young soldiers twenty meters ahead of the camera were framed by fire. Half were blown to the ground, and half dove as a second salvo of a hundred heavy mortars struck the bunker and surrounding trenches simultaneously. Their blast toppled trees, broke every window on the street, and stunned all living things into total inaction except for the veteran combat cameraman. The camera shook as he sprinted up the hill after Wu.
The young lieutenant sat helmetless in the middle of the street facing up the hill. Like a monk on the verge of self-immolation, his back was straight and his legs were crossed at the ankle. The camera drew even with him. The lower half of his face — the half below the long fissure creasing his cheek — was pouring blood. His face had been rent by a near fatal bullet.
A medic, miraculously, arrived from the rear wearing a strikingly clean and fresh uniform. He dragged a now roused and struggling Wu off the street and collapsed underneath his patient behind a stone retaining wall. The camera followed and watched the rendering of expert medical aid. The medic’s boots were locked around Wu as if in a wrestling hold. From beneath Wu, the medic cleaned the wound and then closed it with a combination of staples and epoxy.
Only then did Wu’s men finally rally to their leader. They gathered around him behind the wall and sheltered against the storm of metal. With his face freshly bandaged, Wu struggled to his knees. Then, onto all fours. Finally, squatting, he got to his feet. Swirls of smoke — alternating black and white — drifted across the sunless, gray scene. The right hemisphere of Wu’s face was covered by white gauze and stripes of tape that crossed skin and scalp in utilitarian medical fashion.