Once again, the ancient fortress became a witness to war. The fight began just after dawn, with gunfire from the sentries rousing those who had been able to sleep from what rest they could get. Cole and the others had expected a warning shot or two, but instead, there was suddenly a flurry of sharp rifle cracks. The battle had not started with a trickle, but with a flood.
“Here they come,” Cole shouted, mainly for the benefit of the Borinqueneers. Cisco translated the warning into Spanish, although the rifle shots had sent a message that was clear enough. Fortunately, the Puerto Rican soldiers had slept in their positions on top of the fortress wall and were ready for action.
Below, a swarm of Chinese troops appeared out of nowhere, sending the sentries running for cover. Moments before, the road through the mountains had been empty and shrouded in pre-dawn darkness. Now it was packed shoulder to shoulder with hordes of enemy troops clad in their grayish-white uniforms that made them seem ghostly and otherworldly, their rifles bristling.
From the rim of the fortress wall, the defenders had a clear field of fire down onto the road. Aimed at the oncoming enemy, rifles snapped all around Cole, raining a deadly fire upon the Chinese. Taken by surprise, the enemy troops scattered as best they could. However, there wasn't anywhere for them to go. On the one side were the steep cliffs that anchored one end of the fortress wall. And on the other side of the road was a steep drop with a branch of the Imjin river cutting through the valley floor below. The enemy troops were trapped like hogs in a pen, which was just what the defenders had hoped for.
“Pour it on ‘em, boys!” Cole shouted, taking aim with his own rifle and dropping a Chinese officer into the dirt. He ran the bolt and fired again. Every soldier they shot now was one that they wouldn’t have to fight later.
Cole knew from experience that the enemy would keep coming. The Chinese tossed lives away as carelessly as if they were autumn leaves. It was a tactic that won them battles, but it meant that the Chinese soldiers were only so much cannon fodder.
Cole fired again. And again. He could barely hear the Springfield above the din around him, but he felt the satisfying thump of the recoil against his shoulder.
The one-sided action energized the defenders and a spontaneous cheer went up across their ranks. For the Borinqueneers, this was just the encouragement that they needed. Cole thought that these boys needed to know that they weren't cowards. They needed to know that they could fight. They would need this boost of courage because Cole knew that the fight was just beginning.
It wasn’t just the Borinqueneers who were enjoying this shooting gallery. Beneath them, at the foot of the fortress wall, the two tanks opened up on the enemies in the road with devastating results.
The rounds from the tank acted like supersonic bowling balls with the enemy troops being so many bowling pins. Without any solid target, the rounds did not explode immediately, but careened down the road, leaving a path of carnage. Some men were cut in half, while others lost limbs. After a few rounds from the tanks, the surface of the road became slick with gore. When the tank rounds finally struck some rocky outcropping or a tree, they exploded with a final devastating blow. It was enough to make Cole almost feel sorry for the enemy soldiers being cut to pieces.
“It's like a turkey shoot,” Cole said to the kid beside him. The kid was also busy firing down at the enemy troops, but had paused to dig more ammunition from a pocket.
“I shot six and then I lost count,” the kid said, sounding excited.
“Best to stop counting before you run out of fingers and toes.”
Cole wondered how long the element of surprise could last. Clearly, the Chinese had not expected to encounter any resistance in these mountains when the U.N. forces were still many miles away. How long could they hope to turn back the flood of enemy soldiers?
He soon got his answer when the Chinese began to organize and direct fire toward the fortress walls. Bullets began to whine overhead or smack against the stone blocks. A few bullets found their targets, however, and a handful of Borinqueneers went down. Most were hit in the shoulders or shot in the head and killed instantly. All along the fortress walls, shouts for medics rang out.
Back at the Main Line of Resistance, there was at least some hope now that if you were badly wounded that you might be flown out by helicopter to one of the new MASH units. If nothing else, there was at least a field hospital. There were no helicopters all the way out here, however. Carrying the wounded all those miles back would be challenging, to say the least.
The Chinese troops were battle-hardened veterans and the ambush did not leave them dazed for long. The officers began to get the men spread out along the road so that they were no longer such easy targets. The tanks couldn’t depress their guns much lower, so that the rounds began to pass over the heads of the enemy. The Chinese took up positions wherever they could behind rocks or clumps of bushes and poured fire at the defenders.
Despite the handful of casualties along the top of the wall, the fire was not very telling at first, but then the Chinese began to bring up their nasty little Soviet-made light machine guns, along with mortars. Here the Chinese had an advantage because the mortars could arch high and rain down upon the walls of the fort. The mortars could even reach into the interior area where the supplies were being kept for the task force. Having traveled light and fast, needing to carry everything on their backs, the task force had only a couple of mortars and a small supply of mortar shells.
The more enemy mortars that were brought into play, the more precarious the defenders’ position would become. Down below, the Chinese moved closer to the tanks, which seemed counter-intuitive, but the fact was that it was impossible for the tanks to depress their barrels any lower. Instead, they had to rely on their machine guns for closer targets.
It was lucky for the defenders that the Chinese did not seem to have any artillery, unless it was toward the rear of the column and simply hadn’t been brought up yet. If any field artillery was brought into play, the high-explosive rounds would make short work of the fort.
“We need to take out those mortar crews,” Cole said, tapping the kid on the shoulder to get his attention. The kid redirected his rifle in that direction. “Make them keep their heads down.”
“You got it.”
Cole ran at a crouch along the fort wall, searching for Cisco. He hoped to hell that the young Borinqueneer hadn’t been hit. It would have meant that they had lost their only communication link with the Spanish-speaking troops. Not only that, but by golly, Cole had come to like that Puerto Rican kid. That boy had gumption.
To Cole’s relief, he found Cisco busy with his own rifle, firing down at the enemy. All around Cisco, the other Borinqueneers were doing the same, despite the increasing rate of enemy fire. Tough bastards, he thought, impressed. Still, a growing number of the Puerto Rican troops had been hit, leaving gaps along the wall. The wounded had been dragged behind whatever cover could be found, although there wasn’t any safe place on the wall, not with bullets whistling all around them. Everywhere, Cole smelled the familiar odor of gunpowder and more sickeningly, the smell of fresh-spilled blood.
The dead were left where they had fallen. Cole caught sight of a dead Borinqueneer, an older veteran whom he recognized from the march and training. A bullet hole marked the man’s cheekbone and his eyes stared sightlessly, never to see his island home again.
Cole jumped down next to Cisco.
“Hey amigo, tell your boys to shoot at the mortar crews,” Cole said. “If those goons start lobbing mortar shells up here, they will chew us up good.”
Cisco nodded and hurried away to spread the word. Cole knew that they must eliminate the mortar crews if the defenders hoped to hold out for any length of time.
Cole kept going down the length of the wall. The members of his own squad were peppered among the Borinqueneers and the Koreans to set the example. These veteran soldiers resembled the cement holding things together.
The Korean villagers and mountain people held their own, still atop the wall firing down at the Chinese, but several of them had been hit. He looked around for Jang-mi but didn’t see her right away. Not among the living, at least.
As fighters defending their country from the invading Chinese, the Koreans had plenty of spirit, but they weren't really soldiers and their weapons were not exactly modern. One youth struggled with a rusted single-shot rifle that had to be laboriously cocked between shots. Glancing at the pitted metal, Cole thought it was a wonder that the old weapon hadn’t blown up in his face yet. Cole thrust a discarded carbine into the youth’s hands instead.
“Use this!” he shouted. The young Korean nodded grimly.
Fear had gripped some of the Koreans so that they had stopped firing and cowered behind the low walls of the fort, hands over their ears. As a result, their return fire had slackened considerably. Cole stopped to put weapons back into their hands. “You need to fight!” he said. Some nodded and began shooting back at the Chinese, but others could not shake off the grip of fear and dropped the rifles as soon as Cole thrust the weapons at them.
He knew from experience that if the Chinese overran the fort, that they might show some mercy to any captured Americans. American prisoners had value for propaganda purposes. They could be paraded for newsreels and photographs like prize animals at the county fair. Also, captured Americans served as a bargaining chip in the negotiations to end the war. Captured Koreans would be killed outright as traitors, more than likely bayoneted to save bullets. Bleeding out through a bayonet wound in your guts was a slow, painful way to die, but you’d be dead all the same.
That was how the Chinese operated. The Communists were cruel bastards. Any wounded Americans would also be killed because the Chinese couldn’t be bothered to care for them. Cole had seen that happen at the Chosin Reservoir. He still had nightmares in which he heard the screams of the wounded GIs being burned alive once the Chinese captured the ambulances.
“Fight!” he shouted desperately at the Koreans, urging them to shoot back. “There ain’t no place to hide. It’s fight now or die later!”
They couldn’t understand Cole’s words, but they got the message, hearing the tone of urgency in his voice. Their return fire increased in intensity, scattering the Chinese on the road below.
Finally, he spotted Jang-mi.
She was bent over Chul, who was bleeding heavily from a chest wound. Cole could hear the air sucking in and out of it and knew that the tough old man didn’t have long for this world. As Cole approached, Chul pulled Jang-mi's hands away from the rag that she was pressing against the wound. He spoke to her in Korean, which Cole couldn't understand, but he thought that Chul had said something along the lines of, “Don’t worry about me. Go on and fight.”
Jang-mi nodded, picked up her rifle, and returned to the wall. Chul closed his eyes, sighed contentedly, and died as easily as if he had fallen asleep. It was a better fate than many others this day. Nearby, the boy named Seo-jun looked back at Chul’s body, then fired down at the Chinese with a vengeance, despite the tears streaming down his face.
Ballard and old Sergeant Weber were also moving along the wall, encouraging the defenders wherever they could and making sure that everyone had enough ammunition. They moved people to fill the gaps left by casualties. Like Cole, they had seen the danger posed by the mortars and the enemy machine gunners and tried to direct fire before the enemy could take a toll with those devastating weapons.
Jake Miller had chosen to fight alongside Jang-mi and he wielded his rifle awkwardly. One thing for sure, the flyboy was no infantry soldier. But Cole couldn’t deny that the pilot appeared full of fight.
He turned to Cole, “Look at that. We've almost got them on the run.”
“Almost,” Cole replied, although he was thinking that wasn’t about to happen.
“What I wouldn't give right now for a Corsair that I could fly in here and drop a bomb on their heads and give them little strafing for good measure,” Miller said.
“If you know who to call about that, now would be a good time,” Cole said.
“Do prayers count?” Miller just laughed, shook his head, and fired his rifle. No Corsairs appeared and no reinforcements. There was just this motley crew of defenders, their numbers diminishing by the minute as the Chinese fire took its toll.
The fight had only been going on for a few minutes, but already it felt like a lifetime. Cole had found that to be the case with most battles.
A fight never lasted as long as you thought, but every minute of a battled stretched on like some terrifying nightmare that you couldn’t wake from.
Jang-mi was doing her best to rally the Koreans, so Cole ran back in the direction of the Borinqueneers. He found that they had settled in for a bitter fight, crouching behind the low wall that served as the fort’s parapet or among the rocks where time and storms had scattered sections of the wall — helped by a few Chinese mortar rounds. The smell of sweating men and blood and cordite hung over the whole area. Some of the men were wounded, but they had patched themselves back up and gotten back into the fight. Cisco seemed to be everywhere at once, reassuring the others or running to get more ammunition.
Cole saw the grim determination on all of their faces and grunted to himself in satisfaction. The officers who had pegged these boys as cowards after the debacle at Outpost Kelly was just plain wrong. Hell, even he had been wrong about the Borinqueneers. He understood now that their orders during the fight on Outpost Kelly had just gotten confused by the language barrier. Here at the fortress, these Puerto Ricans were fighting like wildcats.
The kid was fighting alongside them. Running at a crouch, Cole jumped down beside him.
“Where have you been?” the kid asked.
“Oh, I strolled down to the corner store for the paper and a pack of smokes.”
The kid grinned. “I’d believe that if you could read and if you smoked.”
“You got a point there,” Cole said.
“Next time, pick me up a soda pop.”
“Hell, I’ll do better than that, kid. If we survive this, I’ll buy you a beer.”