Wu stole a glance. The sheets on his bed below his hips were pancake flat. “You know, Tsui, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the absolute end of your career. There are posts you could take. Wounded veterans are showing up in staff positions more and more. I could, maybe, if you want, get you a job on General Sheng’s…”
“I don’t want a career in the army!” Tsui snapped with surprising vigor. Doctors and nurses looked. Wounded soldiers raised their heads. “I’ve changed my mind! I don’t want to be a soldier! I want my legs back!”
Everyone was staring not at Tsui, but at the outsider: Wu. The healthy one. The staff officer in the clean battle dress.
Shen Shen tried to stop Wu from entering General Sheng’s office. “I’ll tell him you’re here!” she exclaimed. She wrapped her arms around him from behind, but Wu pried himself free and opened Sheng’s door.
The old general sat alone at his desk scribbling notes on a map. He laid the pen aside, as if he had been expecting Wu, and patiently waited. The lieutenant came to attention before the commanding general’s desk. A worried Shen Shen closed the door.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Sheng said in a disarming voice. Its timbre said instantly that he knew Wu’s pain. The small old man sat slumped in his chair. He spoke slowly. “My roommate from military school died in my arms. I held my hand over his mouth for two days after the North Vietnamese ran out of morphine. There was only one lantern in this operating room in a tunnel complex beneath a small village. The air was stale and thick with odors.”
Sheng’s fading memory flickered out, and he looked up at Wu. “You came here for a reason. To say something to me.”
“I am a soldier,” Wu said simply. “We are at war. I should be in the field. In combat. I should fight.”
Sheng stared back expressionless, then cocked his head and squinted.
“That’s all you have to say?” Sheng inquired.
“My father is a traitor,” Wu imagined that Sheng wanted to hear. “Yes, sir,” was Wu’s reply.
The old commander of Eleventh Army Group (North) nodded. “I remember when I was your age. I pulled strings to go to South Vietnam. I saw my first American there. He was even younger than me. He shot me right here,” Sheng said, pointing to the scar running across his forehead just above his left eye. “He came over to me thinking I was dead. From the look on his face, he couldn’t believe what he’d done. He started crying.” Sheng sighed. “It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life, killing that man.”
“Harder than killing American civilians?” Wu asked.
Sheng’s face hardened. “You do not know what it means to say that you are a soldier,” Sheng said to Wu. “You do not know what it takes.”
“Do I get a combat command, sir?” Wu asked.
Sheng seemed reluctant to let the subject move on, but he sighed and sat back in his chair. “I got a call from Beijing half an hour ago” Sheng said. Wu dropped his eyes to the floor. He had gone over Sheng’s head and called Beijing directly. “You can go to the front,” Sheng continued, “but you shouldn’t get yourself killed. Great things lie in store for you, Lieutenant Wu.”
The prophecy hung in the air. Wu looked down at Sheng, whose eyes had sunk to his desk. Wu saluted and did an about-face.
In the outer office, Shen Shen hugged him. Wu just stood there, absorbed by Sheng’s remark. “Great things lie in store for you.”
The defense minister had just used the exact same words.
There were pale shadows on the gray winter day, though no sunlight penetrated the haze. Master Sergeant Stephanie Roberts — hunched in a fighting hole, watching her breath form before cracked lips — was wrapped head to toe in cold-soaked gear. But she was on her first ever tactical command. The chill Stephie felt came not from the blustery day, but from the fear of getting all her people killed.
She waggled four fingers in the air and pointed. A fire team burst into a dark building. She waited for the eruption of fire and fountains of death that didn’t come. She waved, pointed at the unlucky squad leader whose attention she caught, and made a sideways chopping motion through woods that could be mined or manned by waiting Chinese. Ten crouched andterrified men and women walked straight into what could be the muzzle of a machine gun, but wasn’t.
She was the leader of a unit that plied the field, and she was totally responsible for her crew.
They advanced quietly. No radio. No microwave. No laser and no IR. Even their new camos absorbed their body heat. Stephie had made First Lieutenant John Burns — the new Charlie Company CO — give Stephie her old Third Platoon. The previous commander had been shot through ear to ear in intense fighting that had proven the onset of a major attack. Major Ackerman — battalion operations officer — had approved Stephie’s promotion. She now commanded a platoon.
Pounding thuds blasted the earth for miles in both directions, but the front line was fractured by every ridge into dozens of individual battlefields. Each valley was a different war. For the past few days, those wars had resulted in American victories, which had taken either perfection or piles of American bodies to attain. Lately, it seemed, it had taken both.
Stephie looked up from the bottom of a steep cut between two hill masses. Third Platoon would stop the Chinese there. The creek bed at the bottom of the cut was dry. The winter run-off had worn a deep furrow through the hills.
Noise and smoke drifted through the trees high above. They were the only intelligence she had. She hadn’t been in radio contact since they’d entered the valley, and she’d dispatched two runners who hadn’t yet returned.
Stephie felt confident leading the platoon into combat. She had placed the four squads and laid their fields of fire. She would say when to open fire and when to pull back.
“Where’s that arty?” came Animal’s bitch over the radio.
Stephie was pissed that he broke radio silence. She had placed herself in position to steady the left side of the platoon. Animal — Staff Sergeant Simpson — anchored the right. His flank was filled with jumpy, first-action cherries. Stephie had put them there because it had looked easier to hold. It ascended half way up a gentler right-hand slope strewn with large rocks, logs, and berms. In contrast, Stephie’s two squads on the left lay astride the dry creek bed. On their left was a steep, unscalable wall.
It was down that creek bed that any attack would come.
Stephie had led Third Platoon several hundred meters out in front of the twisting, turning, unconsolidated front lines. They had climbed out of trenches with packs on their backs and headed up toward the enemy like infantry. But they weren’t patrolling. They wouldn’t rush back to friendly lines on contact. Their plan was to ambush the unsuspecting Chinese attackers by being where they weren’t supposed to be: out in front of their lines. And after Stephie’s platoon plugged the creek bed and fixed the Chinese, the artillery would…
But with no radio there would be no artillery. That part of the plan had already gone to shit. John would never have sent her on that mission without artillery on her call, but he would, she felt sure, have sent others. And those others, Stephie concluded, would hold their ground, just as Stephie would now hold hers. Third Platoon would blunt any Chinese attack down that creek bed.
She scanned the row of helmets fifteen meters to her front. Her men and women lay in a line of shallow holes. That line conformed to the V-shaped contour of the deep cut. The V began on her left at a raw stone outcropping ten meters up the ridge. It descended to a point at the bottom of the streambed and climbed the gentler ridge to their right until it reached the last and luckiest cherry. That lone soldier, highest up the hill, was the most likely to survive. He or she was practically out of the fight. He or she could easily crest the lip of the finger ridge and slip back to friendly lines. He or she might at least report where, when, and how they had all died, but that wouldn’t answer the all-important, “Why?”