The second missile, eight minutes after the first, hit her port rail, its high orange explosion erupting in front of the bridge, where Brentwood was issuing orders for damage control. The fireball enveloped the bridge, sections of the bulletproof glass bulging like some grotesque metallic monster, the sudden heat driving the exploding glass into the bridge, molten shards instantly killing the helmsman and decapitating the OOD. Brentwood saw a blinding white slab, his body crashing into the deck, hands pressing hard against his face, his fingers awash with the warm blood, the second officer, his clothes lacerated, his left arm shattered, eyebrows burned, stumbling, grabbing the battery-operated megaphone, yelling at Brentwood that they should “abandon ship.”
“Very—” began Brentwood. He nodded and blacked out, his face appearing to the second officer as if parts of it had melted, flaps of skin dangling loosely from what had been a face. Hearing the order to abandon ship, the tactical warfare officer one deck below in CIC inserted the key, opening the Clark Meyhew automatic destruct charge, setting the fuse on the Mark II decoder for fifteen minutes.
Only a yeoman, first-class, who had been on the chopper deck astern, assisting the helicopter to land on the fifteen-degree-kiltered deck, noticed, while racing forward along the relatively undamaged walkway, that although the port quarter was a shambles of twisted railing, the decking about it buckled from the missile’s impact, the multimillion-dollar ship, though limping badly, was still afloat. He shouted at one man who was tightening his life jacket on the starboard rail not to jump, that their sister ship in the carrier screen, the Des Moines, must be coming for them. For a second, the yeoman couldn’t see the figure he was yelling at, a gunner’s mate still wearing his asbestos hood, looking strangely like a polar explorer, lost momentarily in the churning white smoke that was boiling up from the well deck. The wind shifted for a second, smoke clearing, but the mate was gone. Looking over the side, the yeoman could see several oil-slicked men striking out in an Australian crawl, others breaststroking, the noises of their cries remarkably like wounded seals, heading as best they could through the black scum of the debris toward one of the half dozen Beaufort life rafts that were now bobbing unconcernedly on the oil-smooth chop like huge, contented orange-glow igloos.
In the Uijongbu corridor it was still raining late in the afternoon, the monsoon seeming to set in for the rest of the wet season. As forty M-1 tanks fanned out into overwatch positions, two wingmen or flank tanks overseeing the advance of a middle tank, which in turn would pair up with one of the remaining two and watch over the advance of the third tank, Clemens took delight in watching them spreading out to encircle the PT-76s. The latter were now withdrawing across the paddies, heading for the foothills of the mountain range as fast as they could. Clemens cursed, being unable to move in for the kill in his disabled tank, but did his best on his radio from his defilade position on the reverse side of the hill to guide some of the M-1s through the thick, choking smoke that the fleeing North Korean tanks and infantry were laying down across the darkening green of the countryside and around the enormous flooded ditch that the NKA had blown out of the ground to serve as an antitank defense. Through the noise of the battle and that of his own tank’s motors Clemens could hear the American commander brusquely alerting all tanks to go around the ditch that Clemens had warned was not just another paddy. The commander also ordered the tank crews to ready their fording equipment in the event that any of the other normally waist-deep paddies, flooded by the monsoon, proved too deep to negotiate on tracks alone.
Within minutes of General Kim ordering the PT-76s to withdraw as fast as possible, the M-1s were in trouble in the paddies, as Kim knew they would be. It was the culmination of a plan he had fought so long and hard for in Pyongyang, arguing against all the norms of military logic for a monsoon offensive rather than a winter or spring attack, when the ground would still be hard enough to allow for a rapid armored advance. He knew, as did everyone else, that the Abrams M-1 was quite simply the Cadillac of tanks, that next to them the PT-76s appeared as “Model Ts,” in his aide’s description, the old 76s tough and reliable in their own way but with nothing like the speed, armor, or shooting power of the American tanks. The Americans had long known this, and what Kim had banked on was the Americans’ very willingness to engage the PT-76s. He knew the M-1s, like the 76s, were also capable of fording waterways with the huge flotation skirting, but he also knew something else, something that came from a simple mathematical equation in the art of modern war.
The Abrams M-1 had been designed to go up against the equally heavy Russian T-90s and T-80s, a strategy that had not bothered itself with the old “tin can” PT-76 and so was not prepared for the difference between the ground pressure exerted by the fifty-four-ton M-1 and the ground pressure exerted by the fourteen-ton PT-76s. The difference, the M-1 exerting a ground pressure of 210 pounds per square inch as opposed to the mere 150 for the PT-76s, meant that each fifty-four-ton M-1 now had to spend vital time once it was stuck in the soft flooded ooze of the paddies while its flotation skirting was unfolded. In those few minutes the much lighter PT-76s were still free to maneuver. This single fact proved deadly for the Americans as Kim closed the trap.
In the mutual slaughter that Kim had predicted to his “dear and respected leader,” the M-1s’ laser range finders and 105-millimeter cannons put out an awesome rate of fire, crippling the PT-76s. The latter, having served Kim’s purpose of drawing the Americans into the paddies, were now sacrifical lambs as crack NKA infantry, able to set their aim on the temporarily stationary M-1s, delivered the knockout blows with everything from the old but reliable inventory of wire-guided Russian Saggers to sophisticated one-shot, one-time RPG 18s and 22s and the AT-5 Spandrels, whose hit probability at five hundred meters exceeded 74 percent. Contrary to what those outside the military believed, Kim was well aware of the fact that tanks, even the most modern ones, advancing without infantry support were much more vulnerable than was generally supposed and were one of the easiest targets to destroy, providing they stopped long enough for you to sight them in. The M-1s were able to spot some of the RPG 18 launchers because of their back-blast, which in the paddies created an aerosol spray of water behind the launchers. Even so, the M-1s, the giants in the contest of armor against armor, were for these few minutes at their most vulnerable, standing still in deep, muddy water, many of them knocked out of action by the inflatable skirting catching fire and in effect baking the four-man crews, especially the drivers, whose positions forward of the turret offered them less protection, and many of whom were machine-gunned as they tried to escape fume- and flame-engulfed tanks. Many of the gunners on the left flank, from Clemens’s company, most of whom hailed from the San Diego area, were among the first hit. Some of them drowned as they fell badly wounded, “flopping around in the water like winged ducks,” as Kim wrote in his glowing report to Pyongyang.