Another man had taken several ball bearings from a claymore mine to his stomach and groin. The resulting mess was horrific, and the man screamed.
Peng looked away and asked me, “Can you… end his pain?”
“Yes, but you make the decisions in each case,” I said. “I will follow your instructions.”
“He is gone,” Peng said simply, his voice under taut control.
I walked up to the PLA soldier and shot him once in the head. Peng had already moved to the next wounded man.
He spent a few seconds with each soldier. Two soldiers were merely immobilized, with broken bones in their feet or legs. Those injured could hobble along with one or two of their friends’ help. Most were far worse off than that.
For the first time, I saw that a few of the Chinese on the forest floor were women. The PLA had long ago approved the use of women in combat units, and now Peng examined them quickly without any special treatment.
One woman was hit in the chest and having great difficulty breathing. Peng spent a few seconds speaking to her and began to move away to the next wounded. She cried for him to come back and began coughing violently. Peng’s face remained impassive, though his eyes were tearing up.
When Peng had about five soldiers left to check, McCormick walked over and said, “Time to go.” To Peng, he said, “Load up whoever you think you can save. We have to get moving.”
This callousness rubbed me the wrong way. “Sergeant, he just needs another minute. Have some decency.”
McCormick gave me a withering look. “This is war, captain. Try to remember that.”
Peng called his soldiers over. He indicated the two soldiers with broken legs and the woman shot in the chest. Then he glanced at the remaining unexamined PLA infantry, several of whom were moaning. He picked two at random.
The eight relatively uninjured PLA helped the two with broken legs or feet hobble along and carried the two severely wounded soldiers.
McCormick assembled everyone and said, “Corporal Peng, you will be at the front of your men. Dietrich and Volodya, you two stay at the rear and watch the prisoners. Captain Concitor and I are going to be at the front of the column marching us into Pinglin so the 101st don’t shoot us when we arrive.”
After the Chinese organized themselves, we began the walk to Pinglin. The pace was slow, mainly due to the fact that the surviving PLA were in bad shape. As we walked, several were mumbling incoherently, still reeling from the emotional onslaught of the battle.
Citadel was only about two miles away, albeit over a small mountain. I wondered why I couldn’t already hear the sound of tanks and artillery firing on the town.
A few minutes into the walk, Corporal Peng asked, “Excuse me, Sergeant McCormick, may we take a break to bandage some of our soldiers’ wounds?”
“No,” McCormick said simply.
His tone bothered me. “Why not, sergeant?” I asked.
“He’s stalling,” McCormick replied, not caring if Peng heard him. “He wants us to slow down so the PLA can catch up to us.”
I replied, “Christ, sergeant, it’ll just take a minute. There are lives at stake here.”
McCormick looked at me without breaking stride. “That’s exactly right, captain. There are lives at stake. Our lives. The lives of the American soldiers in Pinglin. The lives of the Taiwanese in Yilan and the unoccupied part of the island. The lives of people around the world who see that this war is about free people and party bosses, right and wrong, good and evil. You know how many good people have died to save Taiwan so far?”
He let the question hang for a moment, the continued. “If the PLA catches us low on ammo and out in the open, we die. If we die, the 101st is going to be beaten, and Pinglin will fall. So, no, we won’t risk the war to bandage two PLA soldiers. Christ, I thought you weren’t another politically correct dipshit officer.”
The rejoinder stung. “I just told my commanding officer to go fuck himself and saved a couple hundred American soldiers on Farmers’ Ridge. Don’t lecture me, you goddamn punk. I know your story. You’ve been in special forces your whole adult life. You don’t care about people, you just care about winning, about killing the enemy. All you have is training and anger.”
McCormick looked like he was ready to throw a punch, but at that precise moment, Volodya called out from the rear of the column. “Raptors overhead!”
Sure enough, high up in the partly cloudy sky, two F-22’s were visible, streaking westward over the island. A moment later, two F-35’s appeared a few miles behind them. They dropped several bombs and then turned back to the east. I couldn’t track the bombs, but Volodya’s eyesight was somehow keen enough to track them over the horizon to the north. The bombs detonated with a crash somewhere over the mountains.
Dietrich said, “They’re hitting the Chinese artillery.”
Four surface-to-air missiles lanced out from the west, chasing the retreating F-35’s. Three of the missiles were confused by electronic countermeasures, but one missile locked onto an F-35 and wouldn’t let go. That F-35 was blotted from the sky in a massive explosion.
Our little column had stopped to watch the drama unfold, distracted for a moment from the arguments between me and McCormick. A minute after the F-35 was shot down, McCormick said, “Let’s get moving,” and the column got back on its way to Pinglin.
A few minutes passed in silence as we began to ascend the thousand-foot mountain, and I thought the argument would simply be abandoned. Then Peng raised his request again. “Might we pause for a water break so I can bandage the wounded?”
McCormick said over his shoulder, “No. What were you in college at Georgia Tech for, selling cars or something?”
Peng answered without humor, “Mechanical engineering.”
I asked, “Why did you move back to China?”
“It’s where the jobs were. Then the jobs started drying up about five years ago, so I joined the People’s Liberation Army.”
“What did you think about the invasion?” McCormick asked.
Peng shrugged. “When it started, I thought Taiwan is part of our culture, part of the Middle Kingdom.” His countenance grew darker. “But I don’t really care about that anymore. Culture, freedom, unity, independence — they’re just words, fake ideas. My friends were real, and now they’re dead. And now the war’s over for me, I hope. I just want to go home.”
No one replied. Peng was a broken man, one of the countless walking wounded produced by this war.
We crested the small mountain still in deep forest and looked down on the town of Pinglin. Citadel looked different in the daytime, almost idyllic in the late-spring light. The clouds had mostly cleared, and the small town perched on the river surrounded by hills and tea fields looked like a place you’d spend a day exploring on vacation.
McCormick said loudly, “We are not enemies. We are allied soldiers.”
“Password?” a voice to our left demanded, startling me.
It had only been a few hours since Farmers’ Ridge, and I assumed Brown and Gutierrez hadn’t thought to change the passwords yet, hadn’t considered the possibility that I had been captured by a hostile force.
“Coexistence,” I said, hating again the weakness in our Defense Sensitivity Office-approved call signs and passwords.
A relieved sigh came from brush ten yards away, and a heavily camouflaged soldier emerged. “Damn glad to see you, Captain Concitor. You’d better get to headquarters, sir.”
He finally noticed McCormick next to me. “Holy shit, are you that guy from the Knights?”
McCormick smiled, taking a moment of pleasure from his new celebrity. “Yeah, I’m Sergeant McCormick. Who are you?”
“Corporal Chavez.” He looked at the rest of our column, noting the prisoners in PLA uniform. “You guys better get to HQ with those pendejos, sir,” he said to me.