Arc Light (2 page)

“Arc Light, Arc Light,” U.S. Army Captain Bernard Weaver heard faintly over the radio speaker's din of electronic disturbance—the words leaving him stunned. South Korean Army Lieutenant Pak looked at Weaver quizzically. “What was that?” he asked in heavily accented English after it became clear that Weaver's careful tuning of the frequency knob would not be successful in pulling the distant signal in.

“It's . . . uh”—Weaver couldn't believe it—“it's the radio call for a B-52 strike.”

Pak's eyes grew wide and his jaw fell. Huddled together at the table of the earthen Command Post, all seemed quiet. Surely, Weaver thought, he must have misheard the call.
“Arc Light,”
the words came to him, sending a shiver down his spine.
What the hell's going on?

Weaver looked down at his report and picked up the hand mike. He couldn't make contact with the rear areas, but maybe they could hear him. “Alpha Lima Six Six, this is India Tango Four Seven. Stand by for
OPREP
-3.” It was an Operations Report that could have political ramifications, hence he'd given it a 3. As soon as he tried the radio he would pack up and head back on foot. The message was priority, headed directly to the Emergency Operations Center at the Pacific Command. “To
EOCPACOM
. From India Tango Four Seven. ‘Company-size element NKA infantry sighted by ROK Army in
DMZ fifteen miles east southeast of Panmunjom,' ” Weaver read, lifting his finger off the
PUSH-TO-TALK
button briefly, as taught, “ ‘at approximately 1630 Zulu. Observed activity included digging.' ”

Just then, the two men heard a single rifle crack, followed a half second later by a deluge of small-arms fire that continued to grow in volume for several seconds until it sounded as if the entire battalion had opened fire. Weaver's heart fluttered and pulse quickened with every decibel increase in the sound of fighting.

Pak grabbed his helmet and M-16 and without saying a word ran out the open entrance of the CP into the dark.

Weaver worked to calm himself and keep his wits about him as he pulled his Special Forces beret off his stubble-covered head and retrieved the Kevlar helmet from his rucksack. He had never seen action before, having still been in Special Forces training during the Gulf War and having run from skirmish to skirmish the last few days along the “Z” firing off nothing more than the after-action reports of junior Korean officers. Now, however, he thought as he hefted the rifle into his hands and listened to the fire being poured downhill, he was in the right place at the right time.

The first heavy blasts of artillery began to burst outside. The thump vibrated up through Weaver's feet despite his distance from the barrage, and the sound roared in through the entrance. Weaver froze at the sounds. This was different. This was unlike any of the games he had heard described during the forty plus years since the war here. The barrage grew to ferocious intensity—Russian-style preparation. The vibrations shook dirt through the beams and plywood of the CP's earthen roof, and the thought passed fleetingly through his brain that this might really be it. That possibility seemed more real with each thudding burst. But
PACOM
had been on alert for almost a week and Marines were holding Operation Eastern Gale just offshore to rattle the saber. Surely, he thought, the North Koreans wouldn't dare . . .

Weaver returned to his rucksack and hoisted the load onto his back, settling the heavy pack that smelled of canvas and sweat into its familiar place and buckling up. The artillery was falling steadily now, and the air of the CP was thick with dust. The rounds were not being poured on—only one every three or four seconds in the immediate vicinity.

With every step he took toward the first zig of the bunker's entrance, which was designed to prevent any direct fire or shrapnel penetrating from the outside, the noise of the violence grew. He paused to pull the charging handle of his AR-15 “Commando” back to chamber a round, extending the retractable butt of the stock and
flicking the selector switch to the rear—“Auto”—as his eyes began to adjust to the dark outside.

In a stoop, he rounded the sandbags of the bunker into the trench and was out under the open sky. The sound of the fighting was intense now, much louder than from inside the bunker. To the left and right down the trench line into which the bunker opened Weaver could see South Korean soldiers blazing away down the hillside with M-16s and M-60 machine guns, their wide eyes lit in brief yellow strobes by the faint muzzle flashes from their modern weapons. Overhead, mortar-fired flares were popping brightly and then floating down on their little parachutes, casting a peculiar dim white light into the trench. Weaver was transfixed by the scene, watching as the darkness slowly retook the floor of the trench and rose up the opposite wall as the nearest flare descended.

Weaver was momentarily stunned into inaction by the force of a shock wave and sound from an artillery shell that detonated in the air above the trench line seventy meters away. Crouching lower in the trench, he saw the eyes of the South Korean rifleman to his right as the soldier also hunkered down against the earthen wall. He looked to his left and saw that the machine gun crew was heads down also, staring at him with panicked looks on faces slowly being eclipsed by darkness as the latest flare continued its descent.

Weaver slipped his rucksack from his shoulders and climbed up onto a firing position on the trench wall to look down the hill toward the DMZ. As he peered over the sandbags, the scene was just as he had imagined it but at the same time infinitely more terrifying to behold. Everywhere in the light from the flares, clusters of men clad in black were hurrying toward the lines of concertina wire carrying long logs by their handles. Scores of North Koreans behind them poured small-arms fire up the hill toward the South Koreans. Officers shouted and whistles blew in patterns and signals as orders were given in their shrill code. As the first group reached the barrier, they hurled their log forward onto the wire to press it down and then dropped to fire as the next log was humped along the path of the previous one—each farther up the hill. Men fell constantly on either side of the logs, but there were always enough to carry them forward that last distance to their objective and hurl them onto the wire and onto the occasional mine, which burst quickly, felling the North Koreans in the vicinity. It was brutally efficient, it was well drilled, and it was fast.

Weaver raised the cool plastic stock of his carbine to his cheek, lined up one clump of soldiers at the wire and squeezed off a short staccato burst. Recentering the rifle after the vicious recoil, he saw
a pile of bodies on the wire where he had aimed. Before he could fire again, the pile grew as the South Korean soldiers on either side of him now poured lead down the hill. But other North Koreans had run up and were continuing the effort. Weaver fired again at the same spot, and more men fell.

When he had emptied his magazine, he backed down off the step at the firing position into the trench and hoisted his existence load onto his shoulders.
Time to get the hell outa Dodge and lie low,
he thought, his mind already settling upon a small hill with its jagged crags and outcroppings and thick vegetation that he had passed about half a mile behind the DMZ.
The better part of valor.
He looked down the trench line at the South Korean rifleman, who had ducked down into the trench and was watching him. He turned around to see that the M-60 crew was still firing, but keeping him in sight as well.
Where the hell is Pak anyway?
Weaver wondered angrily as he looked for the men's platoon leader, who must have been called to the Company Command Post.

He hesitated for a moment, halfway between the front and back walls of the trench. The rifleman continued to stare at him.
Why the hell didn't Pak buddy that son of a bitch up?
Weaver thought angrily, Pak having violated one of the principal rules of night infantry deployment: never leave men alone. “Shit!” he said finally, slapping another magazine into his rifle and climbing back up to his firing position, this time keeping his load on his back.

Weaver ran through the second thirty-round magazine of his carbine in short bursts, seated his third magazine and resumed firing down the hill directly in front of his position. His carbine was an M-16 rifle with its barrel shortened from twenty to eleven inches. The shorter barrel severely reduced the muzzle velocity of the rounds and therefore their range, accuracy, and stopping power in favor of the carbine's light weight and compact design. It kicked out full-size NATO 5.56-mm rifle rounds, however, and several North Koreans fell with each squeeze of the trigger. The weapon was more than adequate for this job. A pistol would have downed them at that distance.

Weaver shifted from target to target in the rich environment, firing methodically until it was time to reload again. A full magazine now seated in his carbine, he hesitated. North Koreans were everywhere, at distances far closer now than the targets on a rifle range. There were just so many, and they were fully exposed to his fire. He brought the weapon back up to his cheek and began dropping more, his mind calming as he got used to combat and as the training—the long-drilled routines of placing targets on the front sight's post and squeezing the trigger—replaced the anxiety from before.

Just like King of the fucking Hill,
Weaver thought.
I'm on the hill—I'm King, you bastards!

But the North Koreans kept coming, and for the first time dirt began to kick up around his head and shoulders, forcing him to duck. After loading the fifth and next to last magazine into his carbine, he looked back up to see two groups of North Koreans almost simultaneously finish breaching the last strand of wire. Weaver aimed and let loose a burst at one of the two breaches just as a platoon-size unit rushed forward through the gap. Although their breach was narrow and several men stumbled to the ground in the burst, the majority made it through the choke point and quickly fanned out, continuing their rush up the hill.

Someone set off two Claymores, spraying hundreds of deadly pellets down the hill in an arc, killing dozens of black-clad North Koreans. Off in the distance to the southwest Weaver saw a line of helicopters—visible only in blackened outline because of the fires on the hill behind them—stream across the DMZ, heading south. He looked back down the hill. It was a simple formula now, he realized, rate of fire from the defenders versus speed of advance, and without the wire to slow them down, the North Koreans were closing the gap rapidly. It was a formula that would produce only one result, Weaver concluded with a start. This was not a feint or a probe. There were no intelligence officers in the darkness to the north registering the South Koreans' positions weapon-by-weapon from their muzzle flashes. They would not be bypassed. The breach would occur here. They were being overrun.

The chill sank into Weaver's bones as all the ramifications of his calculation became evident. He stared down the hill without focusing as his peripheral vision fed signs of movement up the hill from both sides of his position—the orange flashes and loud “cracks” from each of their rifles now faintly distinct from the bursts of light and general roar of weapons all through the hills around him. Mechanically he flicked the selector switch to “Semi” and began firing single rounds at individual targets as they rose to rush up the hill three or four steps at a time. Every second or third shot dropped another North Korean. Unlike before, however, taking action did not ease the involuntary clench that randomly seized his muscles or the churning of his bowels.

Weaver glanced nervously toward the M-60 to his left. To his horror he saw that North Koreans were pouring over the trench a hundred meters away and that the M-60 had fallen silent, its crew nowhere to be seen. Weaver turned to his right as bullets cut audibly through the night air by his head to see the soldier with the M-16 lying contorted in a twisted position at the bottom of the trench.
Raising his carbine back to his cheek, he could see directly in front and out of the corners of his eyes numerous black clumps of men rushing up the slope toward the trench, only fifty meters in front of him now. Multiple breaches.

Weaver fired one more burst on full auto and dropped back down into the trench as a hail of bullets rained clumps of dirt down onto him and split the sandbags on the roof of the bunker behind him with a continuing drumbeat of heavy thumps.

Just as the outpouring of fire toward Weaver's small section of trench grew, the fighting elsewhere along the trench was dying down. The battle should have been reaching its peak as North Koreans stormed over the lip of the trenches, but the sounds of fighting were waning. He could suddenly hear the ringing in his ears from the firing of his carbine, like a whining tone through ears deadened as if by cotton plugs. “Shit!” Weaver said as the realization of what was happening washed over him like the surf, its undertow pulling him and his heavy pack to the ground in the bottom of the trench with a faint jangle from his taped and well-placed equipment.
It's too late,
he thought in shock, looking up at the high front wall of the trench before him over which the North Koreans would pour any second now.
Goddammit—it's too fucking late!

The artillery and automatic weapons fire was now being replaced by the much more ominous sound of single rifle cracks up and down the trench line.
Oh God, oh God, oh God
ran through Weaver's mind like a mantra, blotting out all other thoughts as his eyes flitted about the trench for some place to hide. A bright flash and jolt through his pants seat drew his attention to his left as he watched fire shoot out of the heavily sandbagged Command Post next in line down the trench. Black smoke billowed from its opening as he saw another flash of light over the hill behind it signal the same end for the next bunker. They were blowing the CPs—
big charges,
he thought,
satchels.