Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [176]
“Yes, sir.”
“Fair enough; let’s drive on.”
This was an emotional experience for me personally. I came from the meeting shaken. I thought they ganged up on Miguel Santos—it was a verbal mugging. It was a degrading experience, and I felt for him. Why, I asked myself, should an officer in the United States Army have to submit himself to this kind of an ordeal? It took me a while to sort through this evolution—to understand the teaching points and the necessity of this kind of training. And the kind of war we’re training these men for.
In conventional warfare today, we have the upper hand. We have the money, the firepower, the logistics, the technology, and the battlefield capability. All of these mean little in an insurgency. Captain Santos is being trained for insurgency and counterinsurgency, where he has limited tools, where he has to negotiate for mission success, where he is often well out of his comfort zone and has to use his training, smarts, savvy, and cunning to get the job done. Bottom line, if they—the Colonel Chissoms of the world who represent our allies in the local population—are critical to the solution, and they certainly are in working the human terrain of an insurgency, then we have to work with them. Our American conventional, fire-superiority, might-is-right, why-don’t-the-locals-get-off-their-ass approach will not win the peace in the face of a dedicated insurgency. As much as my heart went out to Captain Santos during his ordeal, it’s but another step in preparing him to fight our war.
The following morning, Captain Santos and Colonel Chissom begin the morning under a strained cordiality. “He dimed me out,” Santos says later in the day of his G chief, “but I have to get past that. We have a war to fight.”
For the next several days, the Americans and the Pineland freedom fighters conduct a series of missions. There are always one or two teams in the field. There’s a mission to neutralize a water purification plant, to ambush a Pineland Army supply truck, to disable a microwave relay station, to cut a rail line, and to conduct a strike on a Pineland Army armory. There’s another aerial resupply drop. Most of these targets require a recon team to put eyes-on for a full twenty-four hours before the mission is carried out. Each of these targets requires a full-on mission-analysis, mission-planning work-up. And there are always the constants that keep 915 from getting more than just a few hours sleep here and there—security duty and camp chores. There are issues of personal hygiene that are essential when men are in the field this long. Twice a day they strip and search each other for ticks. About every third or fourth day they shave. Bathing involves a hand cloth and a canteen, followed by a wipedown with a Handi Wipe. By contrast, I have it easy. I’m able to slip back to my cabin for a few hours each day. There I strip and toss my clothes in the washer, and my wife inspects me for ticks before I hop in the shower. After a change of clothes and a hot meal, I’m back on the job. The soldiers in 915 are out there for the duration. (Think about it as you sit back and read this text. I can’t remember the last time I went two weeks without a shower, can you?) The men in 915 are getting weary, they’re short on sleep, and they still have a campaign to fight. They have a lot to learn, and the learning is not easy.
“Often the students do what they think the cadre wants them to do,” Sergeant Blackman tells me. “They are still playing cops and robbers, trying to get through the problem with the school solution. One of our challenges is to get a young soldier to see a problem and figure out how to best solve it,