"Keep it moving, keep it moving!" Lieutenant Ballard was shouting, leading the way. If Cole had his rebel yell, all that Ballard needed was a sword to play the part of an old-time infantry officer.
Cole had to give the lieutenant at least some credit. He didn't much like Ballard. Hell, the feeling was mutual, because Ballard had made it clear that he didn't much like Cole.
On the battlefield, those issues melted away. They attacked the enemy as one. He had the lieutenant’s back, and the lieutenant had his.
The lieutenant was right out in front of his men. It took some brass to do that, Cole decided. Meanwhile, the Chinese weren't simply going to let them stroll up the hill. From the heights of Sniper Ridge, the enemy began to pour fire down on the advancing American troops. It was light enough now that there was no predawn twilight to screen them from the enemy guns. They were crossing a no-man's land filled with shell holes, rocks, and bodies. If it wasn't exactly hell itself, then it was at least hell's front porch.
Walls of tangled concertina wire impeded their progress. Some men had brought along wire cutters and were hacking away now at the coiled strands, but it was taking too damn long, holding up the attack. The advancing line was out in the open and made an easy target for the Chinese defenders.
"We're pinned down," Cole said. "Gonna be hell to pay."
When the attack began, Don Hardy ran with the others, stumbling over rocks and shattered tree stumps. There was no time to think, but only to act.
He didn't get far. His boot caught on something and he went flying, but struggled to keep the precious camera from smashing into the ground. Instead, he ended up sprawled face-down in the dirt. His breath went out of him with an oopf sound and sensation that he remembered from his schoolyard football days. It was like he had just been tackled by Korea.
He was tempted to lay there and claim that he had twisted his ankle, but in the end, his conscious wouldn't let him. He hadn't signed on to be part of an infantry attack. Instead, he had pictured himself interviewing soldiers in the foxholes, before heading back to the mess tent for a hot cup of coffee.
There was no time to whine about the situation in which he had found himself and there was nobody to listen, anyhow. He forced himself to his knees. As soon as he tried to get up and run, he saw that the attack was moving so quickly that he was already some distance behind the others. Some reporter you are, he thought. You're letting the story get away from you.
Back on his feet, he sprinted after the other soldiers to keep up, the carbine bouncing on his shoulder. He was more intent on observing the battle and shooting pictures than on shooting his weapon.
He cradled his precious camera in his hands, realizing that he was too worried about taking a few pictures to even be afraid. He wondered if something was wrong with him for thinking that. He was only dimly aware of the battle sounds around him: chattering machine guns, the pop, pop, pop of rifle fire. Dimly, he reminded himself that these were details that could go into one of his dispatches from the front.
He spotted a few men he recognized up ahead and decided to stick with the squad that he had found himself with earlier. That squad had included the hillbilly sniper. At least, that was how Hardy thought of him. He saw the man raise his rifle to fire, and Hardy snapped a photograph.
Something about the sniper was reassuring, simply because he seemed like one tough customer. If anybody was going to survive this attack, it was probably going to be somebody like that hillbilly. It came to Hardy in a flash that this was the same man with the Confederate flag on his helmet that he had seen when the Jeep carrying him into the camp had arrived.
Wait for me, he thought.
Hardy shadowed Cole and the two other squad members that he seemed to hang around with. A part of him registered that the most terrifying aspect of combat was the noise. Bullets whistled overhead and mortar rounds exploded, spewing rock and dirt into the air. He could hear men screaming battle cries as they ran up on the steep ridge where Chinese guns blazed down at the Americans. He could see the muzzle flashes in the distance like little firecrackers going off on the Fourth of July. But those flashes were far deadlier than a few firecrackers. All around him, men stumbled and fell, never to rise again. Although his mind dimly registered that these men were dead, Hardy had no choice but to keep running and keep up with the squad. When the soldiers ahead of him threw themselves down, he did the same and got his camera up long enough to shoot a few photographs of the assault.
He took another photo of the sniper at work and hoped that his hands weren't shaking so much that the photograph would be too blurry. Then the sniper and the others got up and ran on. Hardy launched himself after them, running pell-mell toward the ridge with the others.
The assault on the ridge seemed impossible. The ground was too steep. There were too many defenders and their bullets filled the air.
Hardy was fairly certain that he was going to die.
His heart hammered in his chest. His ears rang from the concussions. Color seemed to have leached out of the world, like a faded film.
There was nothing glorious here. It certainly wasn't like Lord Tennyson's poem about the Light Brigade riding to death and glory. There was only dirt and smoke and gore on the ground, and the screams of the wounded and the terrified attackers. Hardy gripped his camera for dear life, like a talisman, remembering to snap a few photos whenever the assault paused. He realized, though, that he kept forgetting to use his thumb to wind the roll, thus shooting one exposure on top of another.
Hardy took a deep breath and forced his shaking hands to advance the film.
Cole and the rest of the squad fired at the ridge, but they were stuck. If they didn't advance through the tangled obstacle created by the tangled wire, they were going to be caught out here in the open while the enemy cut them to pieces.
"This whole damn thing is getting bogged down," Pomeroy muttered, taking a knee next to Cole and watching for enemy targets.
"Go across my back!" somebody shouted nearby.
To Cole's amazement, he watched as a soldier threw himself down on the barbed wire, creating a human bridge through the mess.
Normally, his comrades might have been shocked, but in this case, out of fear and with adrenaline pumping, they simply ran across his back, crushing him deeper into the barbs.
Somebody else got the same idea, but this time they took the corpse of a dead Chinese soldier and threw him across the wire. Then they added a couple more bodies and the wire was pressed down effectively enough to create a bridge across the barrier.
American soldiers began to pour across that bridge of corpses and swarm up the steep ridge ahead.
"Stick with me, kid," Cole urged Tommy Wilson, throwing himself down beside the kid as a burst from a machine gun chewed up the rocks and dirt.
"Can you see him?" Cole wondered, putting his rifle to his shoulder. "You point me in the right direction and I'll shoot him."
The problem was that for Cole to see any larger area of the ridge, now that they were so close, he would have to take his eye away from this telescopic sight. Using the kid's eyes instead would help him to stay focused on individual targets.
"There he is. Ten o'clock," the kid said.
Cole swung the muzzle and spotted the heads of the machine gunners trying to mow them down. He was fairly certain it was one of the Degtyaryov light machine guns provided to the Chinese courtesy of the USSR. He popped off two quick shots and the machine gun was silenced, at least for now.