Sergeant Carlos continued his leisurely shooting while the other three men watched through spotting scopes. Every time Carlos fired, a human being died. Then the trucks were empty, as the Viet Cong moved through the jungle toward them and called for NVA support. For good measure, Sergeant Carlos blew up three more trucks with explosive rounds. The flames and smoke drifted high into the morning air.
“You see, having your pals get picked off from more than a mile away hurts morale,” said Sergeant Carlos. He let the .50-caliber weapon cool while he assigned Dar’s team to the lower parapet and went off to prepare his own bolt-action M40 Sniper Rifle for “close-in” work of eight hundred yards or less.
Dar had always heard that war stories grow in memory and in retelling, but he had never told the story of those forty-eight hours at Dalat. His memory of them had always been as solid and unchanging as a stone in his soul.
The VC scouts had begun to return fire and send out probes from the tree line about twenty minutes after Sergeant Carlos had stopped their first convoy. Carlos and Dar used their 7.62-caliber M40s to kill the VC whenever they came out of the jungle shadows or showed themselves by muzzle flashes.
With the exception of the AK-47 rounds hitting outbuildings or gravel below, and a few reaching and barely chipping the reactor containment building itself, it was very quiet. Dar heard little except for the leisurely bark of the M40s and the softly spoken “Hit…hit…down but still moving…kill…hit” of Ned, his spotter.
Early that afternoon, about a hundred VC broke cover and assaulted the reactor complex. Dar and Carlos first killed the VC snipers who were giving the infantry what cover they could with their less accurate K-44 rifles—actually the old Soviet 7.62-millimeter M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant sniper rifles used by the Red Army in World War II. When they were finished with the snipers—always another sniper’s number one priority—they shot the sappers carrying their bangalore torpedoes to blow the fences. When the sappers had all fallen, Dar and Sergeant Carlos turned their attention to all of the NVA officers that they could identify. As soon as any man in a green uniform and pith helmet shouted an order or urged the other soldiers on or brandished a pistol rather than the usual AK-47, he was shot. When the thinned assault line came within eight hundred yards, still two hundred yards from the outer fence, Ned and Chuck opened up with rapid fire from their accurized M-14s.
The line broke. The VC ran for the jungle. A few made it.
The NVA regulars showed up a few minutes later. Watching through the spotter scope, Dar was amazed. He had never seen a Russian T-55 tank before, much less been taught how to kill it. The two lead tanks seemed to have the plan to drive straight up the road, smash down the gate, and drive straight into the reactor complex. They did not fire their seventy-two-millimeter cannons. All four of the Marines realized that there would be no mortar or artillery fire coming from the Communists. Evidently, some commander up the line had made the decision that the Dalat reactor must be captured without damage to the containment building. It was a stupid decision, Dar knew, because well-aimed mortar rounds would have killed the four Marines and only chipped and pockmarked the massive concrete walls. Wally and John, working deep in the control room, reported later that they had heard none of the shooting. Luckily for the Marines, the NVA command structure seemed to know even less about nuclear reactors than had the U.S. ambassador.
When the lead tank got within one thousand yards, Sergeant Carlos began firing explosive .50-caliber bullets at the vision slits.
“You have to be shitting me,” yelled Ned over the din. “You can’t kill a fucking tank with a sniper rifle.”
“Those vision slits are bulletproof,” said Sergeant Carlos between shots, “but not shatterproof. It’s hard to drive when you can’t see worth shit.”
It took eight rounds, but eventually the tank just stopped. A minute later, the crew bailed out and began running for the distant tree line. Dar and Sergeant Carlos killed them. The second tank took twelve explosive rounds around and into its vision ports before it veered suddenly to the right and stopped. The crew stayed inside until long after dark. When they ran for the tree line sometime after midnight, Dar killed three of them with his Starlight scope. The third tank turned around and clanked back into the jungle, but not before it let off a cannon round seemingly out of sheer frustration. The round blew a three-foot round hole in the outer perimeter fence and exploded on the grassy slope. The T-55 driver had made the mistake of turning around for maximum speed rather than backing away. One of Sergeant Carlos’s twelve-hundred-meter shots ignited the extra fuel canister on the right side and the tank drove into the jungle with flames leaping from its rear deck.
There were two more serious infantry flanking assaults before sunset. Now the Marine shooting teams were moving from level to level, revetment to revetment, firing in all directions. They had to be careful not to slide and fall on all the spent brass on the parapet concrete floors. The VC reached and blew the outer fence on the last rush before twilight. Thirty men got into the zone between the outer and secondary fences.
“Did the ARVN lay mines?” Chuck asked hopefully.
“Naw,” said Sergeant Carlos. “It’s the only fucking place in fucking South Vietnam with no mines.”
The thirty-man infantry shouted a victory cry, raised the North Vietnamese flag, and ran for the second fence. The four Marines killed them.
It was after midnight when the VC and the NVA began crawling out of the jungle toward the outer wire. In training, Dar had been taught that the new generation of passive image-intensifying devices—night scopes—were the Vietnam-era equivalent of World War II’s Norden bombsight: top-secret technology. In the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the saying had been “Charlie owns the night.” Now the Marines owned the night.
Twenty-five years after Dalat, Dar would see an ad in L.L. Bean or some other outdoor catalog for six-hundred-dollar night-vision goggles and he would have to smile. The priceless, die-before-letting-it-be-captured night-vision miracle had become catalogue item #NP14328, available for next-day delivery via FedEx. In recent years he had actually ordered such a pair of night-vision goggles and found them not only lighter and more effective than his old Starlight scope, but the price was much more reasonable.
Ned used the tripod-mounted Night Observation Device to sight the enemy at distances up to fourteen hundred yards and alert Dar and Chuck for their Starlight scope shots at eight hundred yards or less with the M-14s. Sergeant Carlos used the other NOD mounted on the .50-caliber M2 to cut down enemy soldiers at fifteen hundred yards the instant they moved in the midnight shadows.
Unusual for Vietnam at that time of year, the skies remained clear all that long night. There was no moon, but the stars were very beautiful.
Shortly after sunrise of the second day, six brand-new T-72 tanks and six T-55s began clanking purposefully toward the Dalat reactor. Infantry moved close behind them, and NVA snipers maintained covering fire from the tree line.
“I didn’t know the fucking North Vietnamese had that many tanks in their whole fucking army,” commented Sergeant Carlos, punctuating the soft words with a spit of his chewing tobacco.
Deep in the bowels of the building, Wally and John had slept an hour each. While one slept, the other had driven radioactive materials around on a forklift. None of the four Marines had slept at all.
Sergeant Carlos watched the tanks approaching the outer wire. He had been busy since predawn, talking on the PRC-45—their so-called Prick 45 command radio. Just before the circle of tanks reached the outer wire, a flight of five fast movers—F-4 Phantoms in this case—roared in at two hundred feet and dropped their ordnance, high-explosive shaped charges. Dar watched with fatigue-tinged disbelief as the turret of the lead T-72 blew three hundred feet straight into the air, higher than the F-4s had flown, the tank gunner’s charred legs clearly visible dangling and kicking from the tumbling turret.
Several of the tanks survived the air assault and churned around in
confusion, some running over their own infantry in the smoke and flame. Thirty seconds later, a follow-up strike mission of three Navy A-4D Skyhawks flying off the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk laid down napalm on three sides of the reactor complex. The resulting smoke and flame made it very difficult for Dar and the others to kill the fleeing survivors, but there were few survivors.
The second twenty-four hours were far less clear in Dar’s memory, though even more indelible.
Something happened to time; that was the only explanation for it. Time was distorted, stretched completely out of shape—almost to infinity or eternity was his impression—yet folded back on itself with moments and hours and events overlapping and coexisting. It was as if Dar had dropped below the event horizon of one of the black holes he would study in his doctorate work in the years to come.
There were several more all-out infantry assaults on the morning of that second day. During one of them, the Navy air strikes were delayed by half an hour and several hundred NVA regulars—no VC in black pajamas here, but well-fed, uniformed, superbly well armed crack troops, the pride of General Giap of the North—reached the inner fence. In a normal situation, Dar and the others would have called in artillery fire missions from fire bases nearby, but all of the American artillery had packed up and left the country, and all of the ARVN artillery in the province had been overrun. The only thing that saved their little Alamo was the fact that Giap obviously wanted to take the reactor intact.
Dar remembered that it was during one of those attacks on the morning of the second day that the barrel of his original M40 melted and he had to switch to the backup sniper rifle. Ned was killed by NVA countersniper fire just before that last morning attack—or perhaps just after. Dar could not remember with certainty. But he did remember the sequence of deaths. Ned was shot in the eye while using the twenty-power scope around midday. Sergeant Carlos was hit in the chest and throat sometime during the evening’s fusillade, and died just as the sun set red and full behind Lang Biang mountain. Chuck was killed by a volley of bullets just seconds before they were to board the Sea Stallion.
During the last night—Wally and John still working and loading and using waldoes, remote handlers, deep in the building—Chuck and Dar talked about Plan B. Plan B was walking the fifty miles to the coast. Both Marines knew it was now impossible. It was not just that there were now at least two battalions of NVA mechanized infantry and perhaps three companies of VC in the jungle on all sides of them. Marines could deal with that. But with Ned and Sergeant Carlos dead, Dar and Chuck could never make it to the coast carrying the two bodies, while helping the scientists with their hundreds of pounds of radioactive isotopes and plutonium and what all. And Marines did not leave their dead behind.
Dar had always thought this policy the height of obscenity—trading more human lives for dead bodies—but he also knew that he was not going to be the one to break the tradition and leave Carlos and Ned for the enemy.
When the last attack of the day came and the last air strike was called in, it was napalm again, dropped from four F-4 fast movers. Some of the ordnance burned the outbuildings, the Jeeps, and the base of the containment building itself. Dar would never forget the smell of frying human flesh, nor his shame at the fact that in his hunger, the smell made him salivate. He had not eaten in twenty hours. The screams seemed to come from just a few feet away instead of fifty yards away. Dar clearly remembered cowering on the parapet floor, covering his scoped sniper’s rifle with his body as if protecting a child from harm, as flames rose two hundred feet high all around the reactor building and the air became too hot to inhale.
Chuck and Dar spent the second night moving from position to position, using the Starlight scopes on the M-14s and the NOD on the .50-caliber to spot and shoot the scores of sappers and troops crawling from all directions.
“Did you ever see Beau Geste?” Dar had called to Chuck during a lull in the shooting.
“What?” said the Marine from the higher parapet.
“Never mind,” shouted Dar.
The NVA was laying down smoke by this time—which was smart because even image-intensifying night scopes could not see through smoke—but there was already so much smoke in the air that it worked against the NVA cover-fire snipers as well. Usually, when a trooper got within one hundred yards, either Chuck or Dar would catch a glimpse of greenish movement through the hellish curtains of smoke and white-blob glare of the open flames, and then one of them would kill him with a single shot. When they were shooting from the same side of the building, the two Marines worked efficiently, yelling, “Mine! I’ve got it!” like Little League outfielders calling for a catch.
At 2:00 A.M. of that second night, Wally and John staggered to the parapets to announce that everything was loaded on pallet trucks and they could leave in the Jeeps now. While Dar explained that the plans had changed, the enemy kept up constant harassing fire. Thousands of bullets were striking the parapets. The sandbags were shot to pieces and the sound of bullets striking them was as steady as a heavy rain on a canvas tent roof. The ricochets were the dangerous element. Both Marines were bleeding freely from impacts from flying masonry and spent bullets.
Dar remembered Wally cleaning his glasses—the scientist’s eyes red with fatigue but also wide in shock at Dar’s bloody and battered appearance—and saying, “Has there been shooting while we were working?”
The PRC-45 radio was destroyed shortly after Wally and John finished their work, but Dar had already requested two air strikes at 0400 hours. The original plan called for a slick to slip in to pick up the two Marines, the two bodies, the two scientists, and their half ton of radioactive material. They’d be covered by massive use of napalm and cluster bombs, to be followed by Huey gunships rocketing the tree line all around the perimeter. But the Navy was dubious that an Army Huey could lift that load, and two slicks trying to land close together in all that smoke and fire was courting disaster. Finally the Navy said that they would see if they could free up a much larger search-and-rescue chopper—a Sea Stallion—from its duties ferrying important Vietnamese politicians and their families and luggage and possessions from Saigon to the carrier task force.
The hour of 0400 came and went and there was no air strike, no gunships, no Sea Stallion rescue chopper… Dar felt that there would be no hope for air evacuation after first light, as the NVA had serious antiaircraft guns and shoulder-launched SAMs all around Dalat by now. By 0540 hours, Dar had groggily swapped his remaining M-14 and Starlight scope for his M40 Sniper Rifle with its daylight Redfield scope. He remembered wiping blood off the lens, although whose blood it was, he could not tell. For the first time, as that second Dalat dawn set forth its rosy fingertips—the Homeric phrase kept echoing through his head—Dar felt the approach of katalepsis. He felt himself begin to surrender to both fear and bloodlust; he felt the loss of control he had spent his short life trying to master.
The fast movers roared in at 0645, six Phantom F-4s laying down so much napalm that Dar lost his eyebrows and most of his hair. The gunships came in before the deafening sound of the jets had faded, the Hueys rocketing and mini-gunning the tree lines in all directions. NVA shoulder-launched missiles flew out of the jungle by the score, leaving crisscrossing smoke trails like some elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display. But the gunships came in low and skimmed just a meter or so above the grass and flattened fences, actually passing through the walls of flames before opening fire with their miniguns, risking the massive amount of small-arms fire, rather than keep altitude and be brought down by a missile.
And then the Sea Stallion came in, blowing the smoke into complicated spirals that mesmerized the exhausted-beyond-numbness Darwin Minor. He almost forgot to move, so fascinated was he by the intricate spirals and vortexes of smoke created by the huge rotor blades. Years later, Dar used chaos mathematics to study the fractal variations of that phenomenon.
But of the events at 0645 hours on that second day, he only dimly remembered Chuck pulling him away from
the parapet, of carrying Sergeant Carlos’s body to the waiting chopper while Chuck carried Ned’s limp form, and then going back to help the scientists hump the isotopes and other trophies out into the light.
The lead-lined container of 80 grams of priceless weapons’ grade plutonium had absolute priority—just like the contingency moon-rocks the Apollo astronauts had grabbed as soon as they came out of their lunar module a few years before—and Chuck lifted it and jogged toward the Sea Stallion while Dar was pulling the last crate of reactor crap out the doorway.
Dar still retained a perfectly clear image of Chuck being struck by a dozen bullets as the smoke cleared enough for advancing snipers to fire from the inner fence. Dar had frozen in place. Wally and John were in the Sea Stallion, but Dar was outside, less than a hundred yards from the twenty-five or so NVA marksmen who had just cut Chuck to bloody ribbons. As warped as time seemed at that moment, Dar knew that he had no time to grab his rifle or to run for cover. He watched the AK-47 muzzles swing in his direction as if everything had been choreographed in slow motion. Then a Huey gunship seemed to drift over them, also in slow motion, its Gatling gun revolving and firing in a silence only Dar could hear, empty cartridges flying and dropping by the hundreds, by the thousands, dropping away and catching the light from the rising sun. It was a beautiful sight simply from an aesthetic point of view—the sunlight glinting on all that expended brass. Suddenly the entire mass of NVA snipers was enveloped by dust and then tumbled down and back, as if simply slapped away by the invisible backhand of God.
Dar threw Chuck’s body over his shoulder, grabbed the priceless plutonium cylinder, and ran for the Sea Stallion.
To this day, Dar remembered nothing of the flight out to the waiting carrier except for his last glimpse of the Dalat reactor through the swirling smoke. The entire six-story building was cratered by bullets. Dar could not have spread his hand on any part of the wall without encountering more than one pockmark. The sandbags were completely gone—shot to pieces, and the pieces then shot away.