Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [134]
“There’s another reason you want your immediate commander and everyone else up the chain of command to have confidence in you,” James tells his captains. “A lot of commanders want to micromanage you in the field. The last thing you want is some guy back in a rear area calling you every few hours to ask you how it’s going. It’s in your interest to give the higher-ups every reason to trust you and to let you do your job. This is especially true for routine tactical missions or missions that are administrative in nature. A detachment commander recently back from Afghanistan told me he had an emergency request to send his medic to a forward position to tend to some friendlies who had been wounded by an IED. He sent his junior medical sergeant and his senior weapons sergeant to take care of it. The area commander, a conventional-force guy, ordered him to go—he wanted the detachment commander on the end of the radio so he could call every fifteen minutes and see what was going on. It was nothing his two sergeants couldn’t handle. The detachment commander had his team sergeant in the field with a platoon of local militia and wanted to be near his ODA base camp. He finally had to tell his commander to let him do his job or to relieve him. You have to know your team and your stuff, and you have to be respectful, but you also have to stand your ground.”
Nine-one-two conducts its rehearsals, sanitizes its briefing spaces, and boards its insertion helo—in this case an old six-by-six Army truck. The men are dropped off late afternoon for a four-mile night patrol to the target area. The temperature is in the mid-thirties, it’s raining, and their rucks top out at about ninety-five pounds. They’ll be in the field for five days with no resupply. Just before dawn the following day, the three elements of 912 go to ground in their hide sites. In most reconnaissance and surveillance missions, the recon teams move at night and hide out during the day. Choosing and preparing a good hide site is an art form. They’ll usually look for a small depression or a narrow ravine to start with. Then they move about the area to find fallen branches to bridge the depression. A woodland-pattern tarp is placed over the branches and covered with sticks, vegetation, and leaves. Most teams carry a can of spray adhesive so the leaves will cling to the tarp and look natural. You can walk within a few feet of a good hide site in the daytime and not see it. Before the elements go to ground for the day, they rig jungle antennas, using a slingshot to carry a weighted line over a tree branch to hoist the wire antenna into the air. When the sun is full up, 912’s two hidden recon teams are in communications with Shaw in the base camp on their handheld MBITR radios. In the base camp, Captain Shaw raises the forward operating base on his PRC-137. By midday, the cadre are out looking for the student teams to see how well they’re hidden.
The drill is to put eyes on the targets for two days, noting the security arrangements, guard-force activity, and operational activity. All this is relayed back to the forward operating base—in this exercise, a cadre sergeant manning a base-station radio. These are long days and uncomfortable days, but this is the essence of strategic reconnaissance—observe without being seen. On the third day, Captain Shaw receives a radio message that calls for the targets be taken out at exactly 2345 the following day—fifteen minutes before midnight. The tasking calls for the radar site and the communications facility to be inoperative for four hours. Per the Pineland scenario, Navy fighter jets flying from carriers offshore are scheduled to conduct strikes at strategic targets inland, and a gap in the radar coverage must be opened to give them access to their targets. That evening, Captain Shaw calls each of his recon teams in and tasks them with their