He had forgotten how hard it was to kill a man. How much it took out of you emotionally. The men firing weapons all around him weren’t exhausted from lack of sleep. They had been deprived for too long of something else. Mercy, kindness, forgiveness — all those things man calls ‘humanity.’ Clark fired again, and missed. He fired again. This time a hit. The man he’d shot writhed on the ground. He thrashed about in pain from a high-velocity round that had just shattered bones, jellied tissue.
Clark pulled his eye back from his sights. The Chinese were dying in numbers Clark had never before witnessed first-hand. Some of the grizzled old vets in ’Nam had told stories of the human waves in Korea. But words could never do the scene justice. When men fell and died by the thousands, individual targets quickly lost their significance. There were so many they just became a part of a whole. Clark was killing a platoon, a company, a regiment. Whether one at a time by the pull of a trigger, or en masse by issuing orders from his CP. The targets weren’t individual human beings. They had no face. No family. No past. That would’ve been too much. The scale of the slaughter forced him to wall his mind up. To shut out reality.
His two riflemen and even his radiomen were on the wall now. They all fired across the two-hundred-meter shooting gallery. The smell of the gunsmoke made Clark vaguely nauseous. Still the Chinese came. A fresh wave appeared in the broken trees even before the last of the ranks before them had fallen. What were the Chinese commanders doing? Clark wondered in sudden confusion. Entire regiments hurled against well-prepared positions? How could they possibly be expending men’s lives in such a coldly calculated fashion? Then Clark remembered Brigadier General Merrill. You did what you had to do.
The depleted front ranks of the onrushing infantrymen were at one hundred meters. Clark began to fire three-round bursts. He quickly ran through two magazines. He then grabbed three more from a man who carried a rucksack up and down the trench line. A new wave of attackers leaped over the flattened razor wire in the killing zone.
He turned to his radioman and shouted, ‘Find out what’s keeping that air!’ He then returned to his rapidly fired bursts. The sandbag on which he steadied his aim jerked and split open. It leaked its contents just like a human body would.
Another shot whizzed by his head. Clark caught himself feeling momentarily amazed. He then raised his rifle almost in reflex. He had been a green second lieutenant three decades ago. Somehow the greenness had grown back.
The air was now filled with the enemy’s return fire. Out of the corner of his eye Clark saw the first man fall. The ragged but still charging line was now seventy-five meters away. He glanced back at the fallen, writhing man. Most wounds in the trench would be like his, he realized. Head wounds. A medic was trying to pry the man’s hands away from his face without success. He was screaming. It was just like before. It was every bit as awful as he remembered.
‘Tango Lima One Niner, this is X-ray Yankee Five Eight, do you read me, over!’ the radioman shouted. He got no response. He was sitting at the bottom of the trench — repeating, ‘Tango Lima One Niner…’
Every shot counted now. The men nearest the trench were hurling hand grenades in volleys. Just before Clark and all the others dropped, he saw a fresh line of Chinese emerge from the smoky forest.
The spinning grenades rained down all around. The earth shook with several dozen explosions. Fire and smoke shot down the trench from around the bend. A grenade had dropped home on the unlucky squad. Grenades fell end over smoking end from the sky. But an NCO shouted, ‘Everybody u-u-up!’
‘Tango Lima One Niner…/’
When Clark stepped back onto his fighting post he felt fear shoot up his spine. He didn’t have time to wonder what had gone wrong. He didn’t have time to rage at the forward air controller. He had time only to fire his rifle. The first Chinese were only fifty meters away. This time he jerked at the trigger. Still his targets fell at nearly every pull. They were right at the end of his front sight, impossible to miss. The searing heat of grenades licked at his skin. Their thunderous booms frayed his nerves to a jangled mess. Violence raged around him. Grenades burst in and all around the trench. Bullets ripped through the air at supersonic speed. Clark killed without thinking.
‘Tango Lima One Niner, do-you-read-me-ove-e-e-r?
Clark dropped down and ejected an empty magazine. He could hear the full-throated shouts of the massed Chinese. Suddenly, the world erupted in fire. The air at the bottom of the trench shook. Choking dust rose. Snow cascaded from walls onto his helmet and shoulders. Everybody had fallen from their posts and lay now on the icy floor. Men leapt down into the trench or onto the far wall just as another earth-shattering roar shook the darkening sky. Flame shot out of rifles, lighting the trench with flashes as men killed other men. All was noise and confusion and death. Soldiers of both armies clawed at the walls to escape. Another thunderous vibration filled the air with felling and burning debris.
The fighting inside the trench was over. The survivors hugged the walls for their lives. The staggering, earth-shattering, end-of-the-world violence was near constant now. Clark rolled himself into a fetal ball. He didn’t know if they had won or lost. The bombers had arrived out of nowhere to begin the apocalypse. They were the enemy now. Their bombs were the greater risk.
His heart was still pounding when he realized the worst had passed. The intense bombing was farther away. ‘Come on!’ someone shouted before choking on the smoke and coughing. ‘Sweep the trench!’ Clark rose back up to the wall. The misty morning sky was now obscured by a pall of black smoke. A shroud over the countless dead. Crackling fires burned near and fer. No one moved. Nothing lived. The battle was won.
‘I know where the hell you are!’ General Dekker shouted over the satellite phone. ‘Goddammit, Nate. We’ve soldiered together for years. But you disobeyed an express order. I don’t need to tell you where I’m headed with this. You put the commander in chief of all forces in theater into a surrounded airbase under imminent threat of overrun! You’re risking getting yourself killed in a sideshow, Nate! A fuckin’ sideshow! Jesus Christ!’ Dekker’s sigh sounded like a gale wind blowing into the mouthpiece. ‘Why’d you do it? Why’d you disobey my order and go in there?’
‘I’m sending men off to die, Ed.’ Clark’s voice quivered. ‘A lot of men. You should see them. You’d be proud of ’em. All these years and I still don’t know what makes ’em lace up their boots and head out into that shit. I swear to God it amazes me more today than it did back when we were their age. They don’t have a clue why the hell they’re here. They just…’ He choked. ‘They just…’ Clark shook his head. Goose bumps rose on his arms as he spoke, ‘By God, they’re fine soldiers, Ed. Every last one of ’em. I don’t care what they did before or what they’ll do if they make it home. Nothing can take away the fact that right here, right now, they’re the best Goddamn army that’s ever taken to the field.’
Dekker was silent. When he finally spoke, he sounded drained of his earlier anger. ‘You know I should yank your Goddamned command. I should bust you down two grades and retire your ass on half pension. But if that base holds, they’ll pro’bly pin a fuckin’ DSM on your chest.’