I kept a steady pace and grew more and more worried that I had missed the line altogether, though I could hear the sounds of vicious hand-to-hand fighting getting closer and closer. There were gunshots, of course, but the dominant sound was human screams.
The PLA infantry may have been veterans, but even they had never fought a battle like this. The sides would be about evenly matched, I judged. The American soldiers would be slightly larger on average, but the PLA had presumably fixed bayonets before the attack began. Only a few American soldiers would have thought quickly enough to snap their bayonets into place before the attack began.
I almost had a heart attack when I encountered the line. Just five yards ahead of me, I saw two PLA infantry stabbing at an Airborne soldier in a foxhole. Reflexively, I opened fire with my M-4 rifle, quickly cutting down the two Chinese infantry and continuing forward without breaking stride.
To my left, I could see the outlines of more fighting, but I made myself continue forward. I was at the head of the column, and I would have to penetrate through far enough that the last soldier in my column would be at the original American defensive line. I hadn’t considered how difficult it would be to judge how far past the line I was with all the smoke and tumult of battle around me. I tried to count my steps, knowing that my column was about 25 soldiers deep.
When I got to 25 steps, I radioed, “Halt! Face left!” I couldn’t hear the column behind me turn, but I assumed they had since I could see the soldier directly behind me had.
“CHARGE!” I yelled.
My soldiers took up their own primal roar, and our column turned into a line advancing on the Chinese flank.
In my mind, I imagined my line as rotating around a hinge. The soldiers at the back of the column immediately ran into the side of the PLA soldiers fighting on the original American line, but the soldiers further forward had to go further before they encountered the enemy. It would naturally tend to be the case that there were fewer PLA soldiers the farther from the battlefront you went, so while my company had originally formed a straight line, we quickly ended up looking more like a backslash.
I could hear the effect our attack had on the PLA line. Rifle fire crackled from the back of my company as they encountered PLA soldiers in the midst of hand-to-hand fighting. On my end, I was finding individual PLA soldiers in the smoke who were facing intently forward, not watching their left flank.
After we had taken out perhaps as many as a hundred Chinese soldiers in this way, the Chinese commander must have realized roughly what was happening. I heard the cries of an officer in Chinese, and I didn’t need to speak the language to realize what the order was: pull back and turn to face the new threat.
Still, my company plunged on. In the flush of battle, I’m not sure if I heard the second-in-command of Teatime Hill radioing me to say he was pulling his men back, but the soldiers to the rear of my column reported that the Airborne soldiers were running away to the south, presumably coalescing into a new defensive line and fixing bayonets to continue the battle hand-to-hand if need be.
At this point, we had achieved my original strategic objective. The Chinese assault on Teatime Hill had been thrown into chaos. While the PLA had clearly taken the Hill, they would not be able to follow through on that success to surge into Citadel proper. I had no idea how our defensive lines would change to accommodate the fact that the Chinese controlled Teatime Hill, but the battle — and, consequently, the war — would not be lost in that hour because of Gutierrez’s obstinate refusal to reinforce Teatime Hill.
Now I just needed to figure out how the hell I’d disengage my own company.
Though we’d inflicted perhaps 150 casualties by that point, there were still at least twelve PLA soldiers for every one Airborne infantryman in my company. With each passing moment, the element of surprise was weakened. After two minutes, I was encountering Chinese soldiers looking in my direction, ready to fight.
Thinking back on that battle now, it was probably some of the sloppiest edged-weapon fighting in recorded history. No one in either army had trained extensively with bayonets. In the heat of the moment, soldiers slipped and fell, dropped their weapons, swung wildly and missed, or just froze and couldn’t bring their blade to bear.
For those who did wield their bayonets, it was utter savagery. After shooting several PLA soldiers I encountered and surprised in the smoke, I faced an opponent who saw me approach.
He was short, perhaps only five feet five inches tall. His bayonet was up against his chest, clutched with a death grip. On his face, I could see only youth and fear. I thrust with my bayonet, and he didn’t move to dodge the blow. My weapon lodged in his stomach, and I remembered my training enough to fire my weapon to help pull the blade free. The Chinese soldier crumpled and died on the field without a word or cry.
The next enemy was more of a challenge. He thrust first, and I batted away the point of his bayonet to the left with my own, then continued my motion in a circle and jabbed into his chest. The blade hit a rib, then skidded into a gap. The Chinese soldier pulled his bayonet back and gashed my left shoulder, but the adrenaline of battle meant that I didn’t even notice until much later. I fired another three shots from my weapon to remove the blade.
Now, I let the other soldiers of my company push forward for a moment while I caught my breath and tried to consider how I could get my men out of the fight. I looked around and realized the smoke was weakening somewhat. Perhaps the breeze that had cleared Devil Hill was now clearing Teatime Hill.
That was very bad news. We were able to limit the number of PLA infantry fighting us at any one moment because the Chinese still weren’t clear on exactly where we were in the smoke. Once that advantage dissipated, the PLA would wipe us out in short order.
I could just give an order to stop the attack and run for our lives. That would have been the prudent thing to do, but only a minute or two had elapsed since the attack began. Would that have been enough time to reestablish the defensive line further down the hill? Probably not.
I set a mental goaclass="underline" keep fighting for another two minutes, then run. After that, the Chinese would probably take another few minutes to recognize that their enemy had flown and reorganize for a push on into Citadel. That was surely enough time for the seven or eight hundred Airborne soldiers who had originally defended Teatime Hill to pull themselves together, turn around, and hold the new line.
It had to be enough. We would have our hands full just staying alive for those two minutes.
I thought to radio something to the company about how we only had to hang on for two minutes, but I stopped myself at the last moment. There would be many soldiers fighting with their bayonets even now, and for them, an ill-timed radio call could be a fatal distraction. I glanced to my digital wristwatch, set a timer for two minutes, and ran back into the battle.
In the smoke, I ran headlong into Lieutenant Williams, who was bent over a dead PLA soldier, his face white as a sheet. “He’s dead,” I shouted, “Come on!” Williams stood, but made no move to follow.
“Come on!” I repeated.
Williams shook his head sickly.
Understanding the situation, I ran on without him.
The cold logic of hand-to-hand fighting is that big people generally do better than little people. Yes, if someone knows karate or something like that they can defeat larger opponents, but if you pit two hundred people against each other in a tea field, the bigger fighters survive and the smaller ones die. At a shade over six feet tall, I had a marked advantage, and I used it to my full, bloody benefit.