Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [169]
They’re no more than a half hour into their trek back to the G base, retracing their steps, when Santos politely suggests that it might be dangerous to return the exact same way they came. Chissom explodes.
“How dare you again question my authority! This is my turf, my country, my fight, and this is my band of freedom fighters. You Americans are foreigners. You are arrogant! You are rude! And you know nothing of our struggle here! Maybe it would be better if you go back to where you came from and let us fight on alone.”
We are on a back road along the edge of a cotton field. I can see the dim lights of a farmhouse a few hundred yards away and hear a dog barking in the distance. A half moon peeks from behind a cloud to illuminate this confrontation that’s taking place, literally, in the middle of nowhere. You can cut the tension between Santos and Chissom with a knife. It’s my sense that Colonel Chissom is really upset and that Captain Santos is really struggling to hold his temper and work within the scenario. The others—the Gs, the other two 915 soldiers, and the writer—watch in apprehension as the two men square off. Only the two OCEs, standing well off to the side along with me, seem to take it in stride.
“You dress me down in front of my men,” Chissom continues, “you tell me how to do what we’ve done many times, and then you rush me away from the ambush site and we have no ears to show for it!”
“Ears?” Santos questions.
“The ears of the Pineland Army swine,” Chissom says with a show of great exasperation. “How do we celebrate the death of our enemies if we do not take their ears?” Then he stalks off in the direction of the G base. The guerrillas follow him, and the Americans follow them.
“Is it always like this?” I ask one of the OCEs as we drop back from earshot of the others.
“In one form or another,” he says. The OCE I spoke with retired after twenty years in the Army with close to sixteen years in 5th Group. While on active duty, he deployed to Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Saudi Arabia. He was an 18 Echo communications sergeant, and for two years he served as an 18 Fox intelligence sergeant. “Bill [Chissom] is a good one. He seems to know when to challenge the students and when to back away from them. But make no mistake about it; this is real. When you work with other cultures, being right or tactically sound doesn’t always make them like or trust you. This captain’s pretty sharp, but he’s letting his tactical competence become an obstacle to doing his job. It’s easy for us to see it, standing back and watching.” The former Special Forces sergeant chuckles. “Now, Captain Santos, there, he’s sweating bullets and wondering what the hell he did wrong.”
When we get back to the G base, Colonel Chissom goes straight to his tent. Santos huddles with Sergeant Olin to compare notes. Olin has something of a victory to report. He and Sergeant Major Johnson talked for a few hours around the fire, and Johnson will allow the 18 Bravo sergeants to begin holding classes on weapons maintenance and the use of the M240 machine gun tomorrow. Santos retrieves his toughbook computer from his ruck and types up a brief report on their first mission with his G force. These situation reports are sent by PSC-5 via satellite or PRC-137 high-frequency transmission and retrieved at the 18 Echo/Eureka Springs communications center at Fort Bragg. These transmissions are then forwarded to the Rowe Training Facility at Camp Mackall. The cadre serving as the forward operating base communicators receive these messages, reply as necessary within the exercise scenario, and file a copy of the message traffic in Captain Childers’s in-box,