Force of Arms

Начало книги

It happened in the last forty minutes before the latest cease-fire.

The Medevac choppers came in and found themselves almost immediately “bracketed” by heavy ChiCom 82mm and light 60mm mortar fire, a dozen U.S. Blackhawk helos either afire or unable to take off with the wounded — some of whom were ChiComs who had been gathered up and put in the wire litters that were carried both in and astride the helos.

One such wounded was Wan Zhang, a private from Shenyang’s Sixteenth Army who had been hit by an unexploded American 60mm mortar round that passed into the man’s body via his shoulder girdle, penetrating the pectoralis major and entering the axilla, the unexploded mortar bomb, seen clearly in the X ray, finally lodging subcutaneously down outside the rib cage in the patient’s right side just above the crest of his right hip.

The only other case on record of an unexploded round in a soldier had occurred in Vietnam. Even without the X rays, the surgeon at the inflatable MUST — Medical Unit Self-contained Transportable — hospital behind the lines at Orgon Tal could see the bomb’s outline bulging in the patient’s right side. They injected Zhang with morphine and left him on the stretcher well outside the MUST, lest the round go off and kill other patients as well as the ChiCom.

Читать дальше →