The column rolled on, and Harold had been pleased with the victory. He’d been worried about getting caught in that truck during a firefight. And he quickly saw that those worries were justified. They steered around the burning carcass of a Deuce-and-a-Quarter. The outlines of the truck were clearly visible in the flames. Tires, canopy frame, chassis. The heat was so intense as to be painful. Harold and his squadmates shielded themselves from the searing fire of the fully consumed vehicle.
The wind didn’t seem so bad afterwards. Cold was slow death, but fire did the job right away. And the breeze helped rid Stempel’s clothes of the lingering stench of the burned truck.
‘That’s it!’ Woody shouted over the noise. ‘That’s as far as we can go!’
Kate looked in disbelief at the line of smoke rising above the woods just ahead. Woody pulled her to the ground behind a large log. With the thick trunk behind her back and a large boulder on her right she sat listening to the sounds of fighting all around. The rattling machine guns and bursting grenades and earth-shattering bombs were so loud that they drowned out ordinary conversation. Added to that was the noise of six howitzers. The air-transportable guns were rapidly expending their remaining shells. Kate and Woody had passed 105-mms in their flight from the onrushing Chinese. The gunners were already preparing to destroy their pieces.
All night and all day they’d retreated from the Chinese. But now they’d come to the end of the road. Up ahead lay the northernmost lines — half a mile from where she and Woody sat. And from behind came an entire Chinese army — less than a mile away and charging hard. Watching the haze rise from the now continuous fighting, Kate felt like she was trapped inside a forest fire. The blazing ring around their unburned patch of woods was tightening. The small oasis of unconsumed earth was shrinking as fiery death drew near.
Bullets cut randomly through the air overhead. The heavy machine-gun bullets would travel for miles. They expended their force only upon striking something solid. They sounded like firecrackers when they smacked into trees. You could see the cloud of dust as they skimmed off granite rocks. In the meat grinder where they sat, bullets sliced through the air in both directions.
‘You think they’re going to drop any more paratroopers?’
Kate asked Woody. She’d been watching the skies for transports.
‘They don’t have room. Half of ’em would land behind Chinese lines.’
Kate’s throat was tightly constricted. ‘Still, they wouldn’t have, you know, put that whole regiment in here if things were…’ She heaved a deep sigh. When she’d first seen the parachutes in the blue sky, she’d thought they were more supplies. But the soaring spirits of the soldiers around her had lifted her mood before she’d even realized what was happening. Once she saw that under the chutes hung reinforcements, she and Woody had hurried to meet them. They were a whole regiment of German paratroopers. They were saviors sent to stop the Chinese. They meant more than just a thousand additional defenders. They stood for UNRUSFOR commitment not to lose that valley. They were a sign straight from Clark’s Mt Olympus that the defenders in the valley would hold.
The thousand men had quickly joined the ranks. To all appearances, however, they’d done little to stop the Chinese. There were more parachutes in the sky later that morning, but they’d held boxes and crates, not men. After what would’ve been lunchtime had Kate and Woody stopped running long enough to eat, the skies had been filled again. But this time not with transports. When the Chinese sent masses of infantry, the allies responded with fleets of bombers.
Woody was clearly right. The narrow cage into which they’d been pressed was now almost too small even for resupply. No long strings of parachutes could descend from the sky without falling into the sea of Chinese. ‘Okay,’ Kate said. ‘What do we do?’ Her eyes were transfixed by the smoky boundaries. The ring of killing grounds where weapons blazed. The frontiers of their ever-shrinking hold on this part of China.
‘We either lie low down here in the valley, or we hightail it up to the hills.’
Kate longed to choose the former. To curl up in a ball right where she sat, close her eyes, and not wake till it was over. She was scared. Every time she thought about getting captured by the Chinese she felt a chill so complete her thoughts froze. She could think about it no further. She couldn’t imagine the horrors that might await.
Woody was waiting for her to reply. His usually smiling eyes were sunk deep into their sockets. And he hadn’t even gotten high once since they’d arrived in that valley. ‘Woody… you wanta smoke a joint or something?’ Kate asked. He didn’t even raise his head. ‘I’ll… I’ll get high with you.’ He turned to her, staring straight into her eyes. She couldn’t take his gaze for long and looked away. ‘I guess that wouldn’t be smart,’ she said, making an attempt at a chuckle. ‘Here we’d be stumbling around stoned…’ she began, but didn’t finish. She brought her legs up into a fetal curl and lowered her chin to her knees.
‘I’m not worried about getting stoned and losing my shit, Kate,’ Woody said slowly. ‘After all these years, I’m as competent stoned as I am straight. I quit smoking, Kate, because I didn’t want to spend my last hours on earth high. It just didn’t seem right. Like I might miss out on something, you know? Fresh air. Blue sky. Maybe even some last-second revelation or insight’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate whispered in a trembling voice. ‘Oh, Woody, I’m so, so sorry! I got us into this stupid…!’ Tears choked the words off. She dissolved into sobs — incapacitated by spasms of guilt and fear. Woody put his arm around her. The fervor with which she cried and the extreme fatigue from which she suffered brought a quick end to the episode. Her store of emotions was rapidly exhausted. She apologized again in a wooden voice, then sat there in a daze. Spent. Empty. Waiting.
Time passed. The bedlam of war was all around.
Woody finally broke the silence, speaking slowly. ‘Have you ever seen what it’s like when soldiers crack?’ His tone was calm and matter-of-fact. ‘At the end, when they break and just run for their lives?’
Kate’s throat was so dry she had to swallow twice. ‘No.’ She buried her hands — suddenly cold — between her knees.
‘In Burundi, there was a company of French peacekeepers guarding a Tutsi refugee camp. The Hutus came at them by the thousands with machetes. The French ran out of ammunition, and then they broke.’ He was staring off into the distance. Remembering.
‘Did the Hutus…?’ Kate began, but faltered. ‘Did they kill the French?’
Woody shook his head as if in a trance. ‘They killed the Tutsis. All of them.’
Kate tried to imagine the medieval scene. The hacking slaughter of a thousand innocent people. But it too was beyond her ability to conceive. ‘What do you think the Chinese will do?’ She meant what did he think they would do to the defeated UNRUSFOR soldiers? But she was also thinking about herself. Apart from the nurses, she was the only woman among the Americans.
‘The most dangerous time, Kate, is right at first. Right when they’re taking you, and before you’re “in the system.” You’ve just got to stay alive. You understand? That’s all. Don’t try for anything more than that. Just put everything out of your mind but survival. Don’t judge anything that happens to you by any other standard than whether you live through it. Time heals most wounds, and life is long. You do whatever it takes. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Kate?’