Although the prisoners had not yet been brought back, Captain Wang's feat had already been reported to the forward command in a short time, and then to the headquarters of the 14th Army. But that was as far as it went; it was not reported any further up, since they had not actually brought the men back yet.
Even so, it gave the commanders a deeper understanding of Wang Yan and the ferocity of the soldiers under his command.
With fewer than a hundred men in an understrength company, Wang Yan had pursued the enemy for over ten kilometers and attacked more than two hundred Vietnamese troops from a regiment headquarters that was in the process of relocating. He accurately provided artillery coordinates, predicted the shells' points of impact, and led his soldiers in a fierce assault. In a single battle, they killed more than a hundred enemy troops, wiped out over half the combat personnel at the regiment headquarters, and captured eighty-nine prisoners, including the headquarters' key officers and many clerical staff.
And all of that had taken only two hours, starting from their nighttime river crossing. Their own casualties numbered fewer than twenty. Even if their opponents were trash like those Vietnamese monkeys, bullets were still bullets. No matter how lousy the Vietnamese troops were, when they held guns and sprayed wildly, they still had fighting power. Calling Vietnam trash referred to its national strength, strategy, and tactics.
As for the frontline soldiers alone, in a one-on-one fight, it was hard to say who would kill whom.
But things were different with Wang Yan. The company of soldiers he led had fought outnumbered from the start of the war and had always been the main force in breaking through fortified positions.
During the river crossing, they suppressed the