Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [102]
Target seven, another radio tasking, is yet another cache. Private First Class Tim Baker is the patrol leader, and they reach the site well after dark. The role players are two civilians who have a large store of equipment, all from U.S. military stocks. They are black marketeers. Baker and his A-team leader, Sergeant Daniel Barstow, are able to get close—it’s a dark night with drizzle on and off, and the camp is well lit by a large fire. After his fire support and sniper overwatch are set, Baker and Barstow hail the camp and walk in, weapons slung. They pretend to be hunters, and Barstow plays the role of a drunk. They want to buy supplies, but the black marketeers want too much money. An argument breaks out, and Baker signals his team; the two pretend hunters drop to the ground, and 811 quickly assaults the camp. Sergeant Stan Hall leads the search team as they take inventory and prepare the cached materials for demolition. He finds a booby trap, a wire tied to a hidden smoke-grenade spoon. Hall is the only candidate to find and disarm it; all the other student ODAs find it the hard way. Meanwhile, Dolemont finds a cadre pickup truck stashed in a nearby ravine. He pulls into the camp to extract the team. The senior site cadre applauds Dolemont’s initiative, but makes him surrender the pickup. Eight-one-one gets a very positive after-action critique and moves on to target eight. Unbeknownst to them, it’s their last target.
Specialist David Altman is the leader for target eight. It is a long patrol to the final objective. This is their fourth day in the field. They’ve walked about twenty-two miles, not including all the reconnaissance movement in and around the targets. It’s rained most of the time, and the one night that it was clear, the temperature dropped close to freezing. While they’ve not been told as much, 811 senses this is its last target. Just before midnight, 811 is met by a good old boy with a shotgun and a bluetick hound. Playing the role of a Pinelander who is out hunting, he tells Altman about a group of bad guys who are camped at the site of a plane crash. He says they are holding an American captive. Altman radios this information into their commander and is told to recover the pilot and retrieve a black box aboard the aircraft. Eight-one-one finds the crash site and spends most of the night preparing for a dawn assault. This is a difficult target. The crash site is the fuselage of an old Navy S-2 Tracker—a carrier-based antisubmarine aircraft. It’s anyone’s guess how this aircraft got to this training site on Fort Bragg. Near the aircraft, there’s a campfire and a man in a flight suit tied to a chair. Men with AK-47s roam about the site on an irregular basis. The preassault reconnaissance also identifies a spider hole in which one of the security guards is hiding. Altman briefs 811, breaking his ODA into fire support, assault, search, and POW-handling teams. At dawn of their fifth day in the field, they make their move on the crash site. The POW handlers manage to creep close to the pilot before the shooting begins, which is a diversion away from the captive