Boom, boom, boom. BOOM!
The world around the paratroopers was disintegrating. Dirt, tree branches, pieces of sandbags, and everything else above the lip of their trench was being torn apart by the pieces of hot shrapnel whipsawing back and forth across the air above them.
The bombing itself lasted for only a few moments, but it had severely shaken their confidence. Then the new silence was broken by dozens of whistles and an enormously loud guttural yell that sounded like thousands of individuals screaming together.
“Up! Everyone up!” yelled Corporal Wright to the fourteen soldiers he was in charge of.
Lifting himself above the lip of the trench, he glanced down toward the burned-out city and saw a massive wave of humanity charging up toward them. They were roughly 300 meters away and closing the distance fast. Several of the machine-gun bunkers on either side of them opened fire, sending lines of red tracers into the crowds of advancing enemy soldiers.
“Get that gun going. Sweep it back and forth across them!” Wright bellowed. Meanwhile, Private Flowers used his grenade launcher to lob 40mm HE rounds into the enemy formations.
With two of the Australian soldiers manning the MAG 58, the other soldiers fired away at the attackers with their Steyr EF88 rifles. Wright brought his SA80 to his shoulder, looking down the sites at the wave of enemy soldiers rushing toward him.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
He kept pulling the trigger over and over again, watching one soldier after another drop to the ground only to be trampled on by the person behind them as they charged forward to take their place. The machine guns interlaced along the trench tore into the enemy ranks, hitting an enemy soldier with nearly every pull of the trigger. They burned through ammunition at a prodigious rate.
Thump, thump, thump.
The heavy weapons platoon a few hundred meters behind them started to fire their 60mm and 81mm mortars on the enemy. This was quickly being intermixed with 105mm artillery rounds from their artillery unit near the airport. As each mortar or artillery round landed among the charging horde, a small swath of them would simply be blown apart. Yet somehow, like waves of the ocean relentlessly pounds the beach, the enemy soldiers just kept charging.
Dozens and then hundreds of enemy bullets slapped into the sandbags in front of them and the tree branches that still dotted the side of the ridge. The terror building up inside of each of the soldiers became almost overwhelming. The ground in front of them was alive with men and women, angrily charging them with AK-74s.
Suddenly, one of the Australian soldiers screamed as he reached for his face. A bullet hit him in the jaw, destroying most of his mouth. He slumped to the ground, writhing in pain and pleading for help. One of the medics further down the trench heard his cries and came running over. When he saw the mess of the poor man’s jaw, he immediately applied a dressing on it to try and hold everything together. Once the bleeding was stemmed, he quickly pulled out a syringe of morphine and administered it.
With his immediate task at hand complete, the medic grabbed the soldier’s hand. “Hey, man, I wish I could do more right now, but I need you to head to the aid station further behind our lines. Do you know where it is?” he asked.
The soldier nodded.
“Good. I have to stay here with the rest of the soldiers in the trench. Lord knows you aren’t going to be my last patient today.”
The young soldier’s eyes welled with tears from the pain, but he nodded and headed off in search of the aid station.
Corporal Wright tried to return to the task at hand. Just beyond their own positions, he could see the national forest preserve the Gurkhas and a couple of their sister units were dug into. They appeared to be getting overrun. A lot of friendly artillery fire started landing really close to where he knew the edge of their lines were.
“I hope my mates in those units will be OK,” he thought.
Corporal Wright heard the sound of a jet and turned to look up just in time to see a German Eurofighter swoop in, releasing four objects from under its wings. They tumbled from the sky until they impacted near the middle of the swarm of enemy soldiers, maybe four hundred meters away. Within milliseconds, the jellied mixture of the bombs sprayed outward in a pattern that stretched nearly fifty meters wide before something inside the bomb ignited the sticky mixture. In the flash of an eye, everything that jellied mixture had touched — fabric, skin, metal and trees — erupted in red and orange flames.
Wright continued to fire away at the still-charging enemy soldiers, but the scene before him was overwhelming and gut-wrenching. Several hundred PLA soldiers were enveloped in flames, screaming wildly; some of them dropped to the ground, rolling around in a vain attempt to put the flames out, while others ran around flailing their arms in the air, screaming until they simply collapsed. It was the most horrifying thing Wright had ever seen.
He turned to look for Private Flowers and saw him doubled over in the trench, puking his guts out. The young Australian soldier manning the MAG 58 had tears running down his face as he screamed at the charging enemy, killing as many of them as he possible could.
“Flowers! Snap out of it and start shooting, or we’re all going to die!” Corporal Wright screamed.
Private Flowers looked up at him with anger in his eyes. Like Rocky Balboa getting up after a punch to the face, the young private wiped his mouth and turned back to shooting at the enemy.
Wright then moved over to the MAG 58 gunner, placing his hand on his shoulder. “I need you to take a break and start lobbing grenades at them,” he yelled. “Can you do that for me? I’ll take the gun.”
The young man, who still had tears streaming down his face, just nodded and handed the gun over.
While the others around him continued to shoot, Wright pulled the gun from the trench line and dropped it down to the floor of the trench, so it sat on its bipod. He hit the quick-release on the barrel, which was now glowing hot, and disconnected it. Then he moved over to the second barrel and mated the two pieces. Once it was locked in place, he returned to the trench line. One of the privates handed him a fresh belt of ammo and proceeded to connect another one to it so he could just focus on shooting while the assistant gunner made sure he had bullets to shoot.
Corporal Wright tucked the butt of the weapon into his shoulder and sighted down on a tranche of enemy soldiers that had just reached their concertina wire at the one-hundred-meter mark. He pulled the trigger, giving three-to-five-second bursts into each section of enemy soldiers before moving further down the line. He didn’t even have to aim; there were just so many enemy soldiers charging them, all he had to do was point in their vicinity and pull the trigger and he’d hit huge swaths of them.
Then the grenades came into play. The British and Australian soldiers lobbed them as fast as they could at the enemy, and likewise, many of the Chinese soldiers started throwing them at their trench as well.
Bang, boom, pop, BOOM!
Corporal Wright realized with agony that the PLA bullets were also starting to get a lot more accurate. One of the British soldiers in his squad took a bullet to the forehead and collapsed, dead in the trench. Another soldier clutched at his right shoulder when he took a hit, and then the Australian soldier helping to keep his machine gun fed with ammo took a bullet to the left arm. In a matter of seconds, most of the Australian and British soldiers around him had been hit in one form or another.
The enemy just kept coming. The Chinese soldiers eventually succeeded in cutting several breaks into the wire, and the horde of humanity pushed its way through the gaps. Wright turned his barrel on the mass of bodies that was now less than fifty meters from him and quickly gaining ground; he let loose a nearly ten-second string of bullets into their ranks. Twenty or thirty enemy soldiers fell, only to be quickly replaced by the next cluster following up behind them. With virtually nowhere to go, and nothing more he could do, Wright stopped shooting the machine gun just long enough to grab the detonators for the Claymore antipersonnel mines the Americans had given them.