Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [147]
Joining my Phase IV ODA is a single 18 Delta medic, Sergeant Andrew Kohl. Sergeant Brian Short, who, like Antonio Costa, is in the National Guard, is also an 18 Echo communicator. Nine-one-five will have a fourth communications sergeant in Staff Sergeant Tom Olin, who, as the senior enlisted soldier, will serve as the team sergeant. Nine-one-five will also have another officer, a foreign-exchange student from Botswana, First Lieutenant Patrick Kwele. Kwele will serve as the assistant student detachment leader. Let’s take a closer look at the new guys.
Andrew Kohl is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and has been in the Army for four years. He was an all-state high school cross-country runner from Wisconsin. After a year of college, he decided to enlist in the Army. “I’ve an uncle who served in Special Forces, and he’s been urging me to do this. After I saw what the SF were doing in Iraq, I knew this was what I wanted to do.” “Doc” Kohl has been in combat medic training longer than his teammates have been in the Q-Course and longer than the X-Ray candidates have been in the Army. But his combat medical training was as brief as he could make it. He was one of the minority from his 18 Delta class to go straight through training with no recycles.
Brian Short grew up in Minneapolis and has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in communications. Captain Santos immediately tapped him to serve as 915’s intelligence specialist. Sergeant Short was working as an assistant manager at Wal-Mart when he joined the National Guard to help pay off his college loans. He knows that by volunteering for Special Forces training, he’s guaranteed himself a combat deployment. He’s assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group, and is the only one in 915 that knows the exact day when he will deploy with an operational detachment to Iraq. And that deployment will be only days after he graduates from the Q-Course. I asked him what he’ll do when he returns. “I’ll have to wait and see. I may go back to my old job at Wal-Mart, or I may elect to go into the active Army. Right now I have to focus on Phase IV, the rest of the Q-Course, and my deployment.”
Staff Sergeant Tom Olin, twenty-five, has been in the Army for six years. He is from Montana, and began his military service with the 1st Cavalry Division as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle driver. This is his second try at the Q-Course. He was dropped from training in 2003 during Phase IV and is now back for the second try, having served a tour with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. He declined to talk about his previous attempt at Special Forces training, saying only that “I made some mistakes the last time I was here, and I won’t make those same mistakes again. I’m back here because this is what I want to do; I want to be a professional Special Forces soldier.”
First Lieutenant Kwele is part of the ongoing international military student program in U.S. Army and Army Special Forces. There are foreign officers as well as enlisted soldiers in Class 2-05. They participate in all aspects of the Q-Course except those classroom evolutions where classified material is discussed, which include some classroom training during Phase IV. Before they enter American military training, the international students are carefully screened and in some cases attend language training in America. They’re also counseled in our customs and cultural norms—issues that range from the treatment of women to automobile insurance. This includes our military standards of conduct, which may differ from their home nation’s service. One such standard is the position and esteem which our Army affords noncommissioned officers and which may or may not be the case in the guest soldier’s army.
Patrick Kwele is a lean, handsome, ebony-skinned African, with a shy, engaging smile. He is polite, almost formal, and speaks English with the precision of an Oxford don. Every foreign student in the Q-Course