Somewhere to the right side of our line, I heard a scream. He was the first American casualty of the Battle of Pinglin. The artillery fire was a steady drumbeat now, one round every ten seconds or so. The noise was terrifying, but I told myself that I had better odds with a roof over my head even if the building was a more obvious target.
The soldiers in my company had had enough time to dig holes a few feet deep, which would keep them safe from most of the fragments, but would offer little protection for near misses.
The two other Airborne companies on Farmers’ Ridge had had less time to dig in, and suffered accordingly. Captain Greene, whose company was on my right, ought to be brought up on charges — he’d not ordered his men to dig in until about three minutes before the bombardment started. Sixteen soldiers in his company were dead or seriously wounded in the first minute.
After five minutes of shelling, the Chinese artillery let up. We had no idea whether it was to shift targets or because a friendly airstrike had forced them to change positions. Whatever the reason, quiet returned to Farmers’ Ridge.
I emerged from under the wooden table and looked down at the road at the base of the mountain. A number of armored personnel carriers were visible, trundling up the road perhaps four miles away.
Lieutenant Williams radioed the news to the company. “Chicom armored personnel carriers incoming, just outside Javelin range.” A mile or two closer and we could use Javelin antitank missiles against the Chinese APCs, though it was anyone’s guess as to whether the thirty-year-old missile design would be able to penetrate whatever defense measures the Chinese had built into their vehicles.
After about twenty seconds of silence in the still-dark Taiwanese night, Private Hook, a lanky kid from West Virginia, shouted into his radio mic, “There they are! Enemy spotted!” He fired a few shots into the woods, and suddenly Lieutenant Barker’s entire platoon opened up, spraying the trees with rounds. A few platoons from the other companies joined in, and the battlefield reverberated with the staccato of M-4 rifles and M-249 squad machine guns.
I scanned the woods with my nightvision scope and saw no return fire, nor any sign of enemy troops. “Cease fire,” I ordered loudly and clearly into my radio. It took about ten repetitions, but quiet returned to the battlefield after a few minutes.
This is where our twenty-year-olds pay the blood price for the decline of the American military, I thought. A decade earlier, it would be unthinkable for one of the historic airborne divisions to perform so poorly. The troops now were much better briefed on cultural norms in Islamic societies, the rules regarding prisoner treatment, and proper behavior toward transsexual soldiers, but funding and time for realistic training had been cut. It had been decades since a regular U.S. Army infantry unit without close air support had faced another nation’s conventional armed forces on a battlefield.
All the old lessons would be learned again.
The radio was alive with worried chatter, some even coming from officers.
“They’re out there, coming for us…”
“Is that a tank engine?”
“They’re probably surrounding our position right now…”
I cut in, my voice as calmly harsh as I could make it. “Empathy 4 to all units: keep the radio channel clear. Do not report in unless you can positively identify the enemy. The first Chicoms we see will likely be recon troops, not heavily armed. We will stop them cold.”
Looking back to the road, I could see Chinese tanks, state-of-the-art Type 99A2’s, in the distance using my nightvision scope, but there was no sign of the armored personnel carriers. Farmers’ Ridge was sufficiently steep and flat at the top that there were sections of road below we couldn’t see. I ordered three anti-tank teams to come up to the third floor of the apartment building so that they could fire on the APCs as soon as they emerged into view again.
Long minutes of quiet ensued. I radioed Lieutenant Barker. “Send your best squad out on patrol, see if they can locate the enemy advance.”
Barker replied coolly, “Captain, with the drones overhead, they’ll see our patrol.”
“I understand that, lieutenant. But we need to know what’s coming and when. Send them out.”
Hell broke loose about ten minutes later. The Chinese artillery started back up, pounding away at the area directly around the apartment building. An instant later a dozen Chinese APCs emerged into view about two miles from our position. “Light those fuckers up and let’s get the hell out of here.” I told the antitank teams, who were taking cover underneath the wooden table.
The two-soldier antitank teams only had seven missiles between them, so there was no way we’d get all of the APCs. I figured if we took out a few, the rest would at least slow down to take stock of the situation before pushing on.
Private Jim Hartobey, from Paint Creek, Texas was the gunner on the first Javelin team. As his loader, a girl from Alabama named Tracy Stevens, pushed the Javelin missile into place in the launcher, Hartobey locked onto the lead Chinese APC’s thermal signature.
Just as he fired the missile, an artillery shell exploded overhead, spraying the roof of the building with shrapnel. The roof mostly held, but large slivers of shrapnel laced through the thin tiles, killing Hartobey and Stevens instantly.
The missile Hartobey had fired streaked skyward and then turned downward to smash through the thinner topside armor of the Chinese vehicle. The APC erupted in a curtain of flame and debris.
Private Hartobey wasn’t the only Javelin operator in the apartment building to score a hit. Of the seven missiles fired at the oncoming armored vehicles, one other struck a Chinese APC, destroying it instantly. The other missiles were detonated prior to impact by some kind of short-range missile defense system on the Chinese APC’s, probably similar to the systems developed twenty years ago to protect our own vehicles in Iraq. One APC slowed after detonating a missile, possibly because its internal systems had been scrambled by the explosion.
Two APCs taken out, ten more coming.
Another artillery shell ripped a massive hole in the roof as the APC’s continued down the road, barely a mile away now. “Time to go,” I said, ordering everyone to evacuate the apartment building before the Chinese wiped it out entirely.
As we left the building, bursts of rifle fire sounded in the woods a few hundred yards in front of our position. Barker called in. “A couple dozen Chicoms are coming through the forest on either side of the road. I’m pulling back with my advance squad under fire.”
I wanted to ask her why the hell she had gone with the reconnaissance squad, but figured it could wait. Smoke obscured the road now, and I could only imagine how many more APC’s and tanks were even now making their way toward our position.
Just as I was leaving the rear entrance of the apartment building, a call sounded on the radio, “Chicom infantry in the woods, at least platoon strength!” After the false alarm earlier, I maintained some skepticism that my soldiers had identified thirty or more infantry.
I peeked around the corner of the apartment building and, sure enough, there were muzzle flashes in the woods. Bullets smacked into the building and I ducked behind the corner.
Ordinarily, this is the part of the battle where tricks and tactics come in. We’d had no time to set up a trap, however. There had barely been time for my company to dig in for the artillery attack. The Chinese strategy was obvious and straightforward: keep up the artillery fire to pin our anti-tank soldiers down in their foxholes, have their own infantry keep up constant pressure on our line, and use their armor to blast through the center of our line anchored on the northern road into Pinglin.