As she raised the plastic threads to her lips for her first sip of the tepid water, half a dozen automatic weapons opened fire at close range. She dashed to the side of the road in a crouch hitting her quick release and diving unencumbered by pack into the sand. The eruption of noise was stunning. She was totally unprepared. Guns were louder when fired straight at you.
The Chinese guns sprayed the road. The first shouts were not commands, but, “Medic!” Stephie rose and ran inland as bullets slaughtered the people who’d dropped onto the pavement.
Grenades exploded with searing flashes and whizzing shrapnel. Screams of agony and of “Medic!” filled the air. All Stephie could think was three more steps. Then two. Then one. Then she collapsed onto her belly. Then up again and run until one, then dive into the sand. Over and over. Over and over.
They never fired at her, which gave her the idea, maybe, to move a little closer to the enemy.
“Medic!” screamed the tortured casualties in the distance. The Chinese fire was focused on maximizing kills.
At the end of one dash, she dropped behind a thin spray of weeds just underneath a deadly sheet of fire. The fire slammed into the mound of sand collected among the weeds, which now gave her life. She lay on her stomach. Her helmet, face, and body pressed flat in the sand. The fire lessened, then moved on. Somehow she had lived.
When she raised her head, a splash of sand from a sliding soldier sent grit into her eyes. The guy drew Chinese fire. She cursed and spat and scraped painfully at the grains that stuck to her sweaty, sunburned face. Before she could open her eyes she heard the crack-crack-crack of an M-16. It was Burns, kneeling beside her, firing two aimed rounds per second.
She was glad for the reinforcements.
Her weapon was covered in sand, and she frantically brushed it. She flicked the selector to “semi” while Burns was reloading and slowly peered over her low cover. They would see her helmet, she knew, before she would see them.
Burns dove onto her under a roar of fire whistling through the wet air just above him. He moved. He wasn’t dead. He rose and quickly resumed firing three-round bursts as fast as he could pull the trigger. She tried to rise again. He flattened her. “Cut that out!” she shouted, fending off his hand.
Animal’s machine gun opened up from nearer the road.
Stephie rolled away and sprinted for the next dune further inland. The Chinese were heads down under Animal’s fire. She slid to a stop.
The Chinese opened fire again on Burns. He was pinned where she had been behind a small exploding dune.
From Stephie’s slightly higher elevation, she could see the boots of a prone Chinese soldier. She tore off again, rising higher up the dune and diving into the sand. The Chinese fire arrived with a vengence. She couldn’t raise her head until they finally gave up firing at her, and then she waited an awful few seconds more.
She slowly lifted her right eye. Nothing but weeds, at first, then a thin topping of sand that wouldn’t come close to stopping a bullet. Finally, she could see the lower torsos of two prone enemy soldiers.
To her left came her platoon’s counterattack. A trail of five dead or writhing Americans led to four nearly equally luckless guys who were left to continue the direct frontal assault on the enemy. They dashed and dove and dug. One man rose and hurled a hand grenade thirty meters, but the enemy was fifty meters away. Fifty meters of open ground that the poor bastards had yet to traverse.
Stephie raised her rifle to her shoulder but wrapped her finger around the trigger to the grenade launcher slung underneath. Her right hand grasped the rifle’s magazine guide like a pistol grip. Her eye was lowered to the sights. She had registered the highest score in her training platoon on the grenade range. Her left hand cradled the round launcher. She raised the elevation slightly. Two hundred meters. She applied a light touch to the trigger.
The grenade thumped out of the tube and sent the rifle solidly back into her shoulder. Stephie carefully maintained the tube’s elevation and watched intently for her round to fall. She simultaneously loaded another thick grenade by feel. The explosion sent flame from a crater ten feet behind the Chinese. As she slapped the launcher’s breech closed, the enemy soldiers scrambled to train their weapons on her. Rounds cut through the air all around. She lowered the elevation a hair. She was firing directly, not indirectly like a mortar.
Thump!
She dove to her side into the sand as the first bullets arrived.
Her round went off. Its slap ended all enemy fire.
She lifted her head. Two Chinese soldiers lay in the open, rolled onto either side away from the burst, in which they had come apart. The Americans attacking their position rose on shouted command and dashed forward. Stephie, John Burns, and a dozen other riflemen riddled the wounded or dead with heavy fire.
The maneuver team hurled hand grenades through the air and dropped again to their bellies. This time, the pineapple-shaped devices lit the enemy redoubt with a half dozen explosions.
Everyone ceased fire on Ackerman’s radio command as the three men and one woman reached the smoking dune and fired bursts straight at the ground beneath them.
The air was suddenly alive with helicopters. Gunships, medevacs, and scouts swarmed over the fallen, who littered the site of the disastrous firefight. They began putting down all around.
A chorus of cries of “Medic!” were clearly audible despite the noise of the engines.
Stephie and John rushed down to the road. Men and women writhed on the pavement untended. Some had managed to press half-opened bandage packs to gaping wounds that looked to have randomly opened their bodies. Others lay dead, never having succeeded in getting the packs open.
“Medic!” “I’m hit!” “Oh-God-Oh-God!” “Help! I need help!” “Medic!” “Medic!”
Stephie’s head rocked back as she suddenly lost her equilibrium. She had to regain her balance before she fell. Burns and surviving medics rushed among the wounded as medevac helicopters belched flight-suited medical personnel. There was so much to do that Stephie was paralyzed staring at people who screamed for help or lay ominously quiet with wide glassy eyes in enormous pools of blood.
Stephie ran to and knelt beside the nearest wounded soldier. She was an African-American woman from Third Squad. About Stephie’s age. Trying unsuccessfully to raise her head to peer down at the shattered left forearm that she cradled. Each time, her helmetless head threatened to slam back down onto the pavement. She was disoriented from pain, blood loss, and shock.
Stephie raised the woman’s head and lay it in her lap, remaining careful to ensure that her arm blocked the woman’s sight of her wound. She got a bandage from the wounded woman’s first aid kit and gently pulled the woman’s right hand free of her left forearm.
Her wounded left arm moved unnaturally. Disconnected. A shouted moan suddenly erupted from the wounded woman. The pain or the psychological agony had awakened the poor woman. She now twisted and screamed and fought.
“Me-edi-i-ic!” Stephie screeched as she fought back. “It’s gonna be okay! It’s gonna be okay! It’s gonna be okay!” she fought with words, but the woman thrashed her head from side to side.
Thankfully, paramedics wearing jumpsuits and flight helmets arrived. Stephie held the woman’s head and mouthed soothing lies as the two medics gave the woman a shot of painkiller. Stephie wanted not to watch as they cut the sleeve away, but felt compelled to study how they took care of the woman. She felt wave after overwhelming wave of nausea, but she forced herself to do it.