“Forest Checkpoint. We copy that.”
“Highway Vanguard, did you copy last message? A couple of possible ‘Charlies’ coming your way. Over,” continued the sergeant as they heard more shooting from the burning trucks.
“Highway Vanguard. We copied that and our guys with night sights are searching for them now.”
“All Forest Snipers—try and keep your shots high. I’m going in to secure the ambush zone and then work towards the main road. Medic section, we have wounded. I need stretchers immediately,” continued the sergeant over the radio.
The firing had stopped, and Preston climbed down from the fire tower and headed for the entrance gate to his farm. Several soldiers and the doctor ran past carrying stretchers and he ran with them to the gate, and then around the corner down the dirt road towards the barrier.
It was a mess. The fires from three vehicles glowed behind silhouettes of soldiers pulling bodies away from them. He got to the barrier, where he was halted by a soldier.
“Their tanks are going to go up at any second, sir. The sergeant said nobody past this point.”
The medics had already picked up two American soldiers and one of the Chinese men, who had an arm missing and several bullet wounds in his legs. Two more stretchers arrived as gun shots were heard deep in the forest. Carlos arrived a few seconds later, and they both watched as bodies and body parts were pulled out of the surrounding undergrowth. The troops moved forward as another flare lit up the sky and they saw half a dozen soldiers with Sergeant Perry halfway down the road. They were on each side of the road, bent over, running a couple of yards and then stopping in a crouch. They were slowly cleaning and checking the area for enemy.
Automatic fire suddenly erupted from the forest several yards in front of them, and the men dove into the ditches as a fire fight ensued. The first vehicle’s tank blew up as the men were still scrambling to pull bodies away from the rear vehicles and one man went down. There were soldiers searching through the trucks at the back as the front truck went up with a loud boom and they scurried away from the fourth row as the whole line of mutilated trucks began to catch fire.
“Preston, get us all your fire extinguishers and all the water containers you have! We need to stop the brush from catching fire. All soldiers not clearing and still in the ambush zone must go and help bring water,” shouted Sergeant Perry, running back to the barricade. There was a mass run towards the airport. Preston had 600 feet of garden hose he used to wash down the runway when it got dusty, and it was still connected to the nearest faucet to the road. The pipe would make it about halfway to the gate, if it went straight through the brush.
It took a couple of minutes to get the garden hose into position as close to the fire as possible with water gushing out of the end. Several men ran forward with fire extinguishers and plastic buckets collected from the medic tent and elsewhere.
A human chain was made from the end of the hose, and full buckets of water started moving from man to man and then were carried by more men down the farm road to the burning trucks.
For the next 20 minutes, they worked hard pouring water into the wooded areas that had several fires blazing. The fire extinguishers had dealt with the vehicles, smothering the flames pretty quickly as several men aimed their extinguishers onto the fires from several directions.
The heavy effort managed to stop five of the vehicles from going up in flames, and as dawn broke an hour later, troops were still walking in from the outer areas dragging a body here and there to add to the row of bodies by the barricade.
The sun broke over the trees to the east, dense smoke still filled the surrounding area and a slight breeze started pushing it southward. Preston and Carlos, as well as the rest of the water team, were tired and finally sitting around the barricade, eyeing the dead bodies of the enemy. The road was soaked with a mixture of foam from the extinguishers and the hundreds of gallons of water they had poured onto the immediate area. Both sides of the dirt road had puddles of water that was tinged a reddish color from all the blood. “Carlos, Preston,” a dirty-faced and hatless Sergeant Perry walked up to them. “We have everything that we’ve taken from the attackers piled up further back on the road. We have pieced together 39 bodies plus the one injured in the medical tent. We have two dead of our own and three wounded, and the medical staff is taking care of them. Would you like to come and inspect the equipment we found in the vehicles and see what is important?”
They walked past the bodies and body parts the soldiers were already placing in black trash bags for disposal.
“I don’t think their mothers would recognize any of them. Maybe Lee Wang might,” suggested Carlos. “Sergeant, could you send a radio message to the hangar and have Lee Wang escorted down here?”
Lee arrived five minutes later. By that time, they had concluded that all 39 bodies were Chinese. The rear of the last two trucks still facing the opposite way were full of food and water and one truck—an old Ford V8— had obviously served as an armory. It housed several rockets for the shoulder units, six cases of hand grenades, and several boxes of 7.62 cal, AK-47 ammunition protected in a steel, coffin-like box. They had been lucky that it hadn’t exploded, or there would have been far more causalities and fire damage.
“Lee,” Carlos asked the Chinese man when he arrived. “Do these men look like Chinese soldiers? Do you recognize any of them?” Slowly Lee looked at the bloody and bloodless remains of every man. He stopped at one of the first ones.
“This is Bo Lee Tang, I think. That one, the older man about 50 years old next to him, was Mi Jo. Bo Lee Tang was an American-dressed Chinese policeman on the island where I studied. It looks like him. Bo was only about 18 when I saw him last. He was part of the security detail on the island that kept the discipline and who told us to go home once we had had too much to drink in the American bars. I liked him because when he was off duty he was one of the worst drinkers, and tried to introduce me to American whiskey. He liked it so much that he had a small bottle of American whiskey tattooed on his right shoulder.”
Several soldiers stripped off the sweater and shirt from the body, and a small tattoo of Jack Daniels stared back at them. “The other man was head of the guard detachment for the block we lived in. He rang the bell at 4:00 am in the courtyard every morning for us to get up. He has certainly aged since I last saw him.”
“I believe he was the commander,” the sergeant added.
They continued on, and Lee did not recognize any more. Many were much younger and would have been babies when he left China, he explained to the men around him.
Then they got to the weapons and other items the men had carried with them. “We searched every pocket in their clothing and every corner of every vehicle we could, including the two on the main road,” continued the Sergeant. “Our men have secured the whole area. The forest snipers killed three and the last two enemies were taken out by the Highway snipers. Once the sun is up, we will do a sweep of the entire area as far out as the Forest Snipers, and two groups will walk out in both directions along the feeder road searching for any dead or injured. I don’t believe we have missed any.”
They all looked down at the mass of equipment. Many of the shoulder rocket launchers, and there were eight of them, were twisted broken metal. “There are three in good working order,” observed one of the soldiers looking over them. Many of the AK-47s were also bits of twisted metal. “We have five usable AK-47s, sir,” he added. “They are very modern, no more than two years old, and have the skeleton-steel shoulder butt versus the old solid-steel and wooden ones. Here are their personal electronic gadgets.”