Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [177]
“During one class, I quietly parked my truck on a back road and walked through the woods to watch the students attack a target. I moved carefully and quietly so they wouldn’t see me. They made the hit and did a pretty good job. I was headed back to my truck, but when I got twenty meters from it, the engine roared to life, and it drove off with the whole squad in the back. Well, I knew I’d locked it, and I knew I had the keys. It seems their security element had spotted me and sent one of their street-smart kids after the truck. He shimmed the door and hot-wired the ignition, and they were gone. I chased after them, cussing a blue streak. About five minutes later they came driving back slowly, all of them with a big grin—asked if I needed a ride.”
“What’d you do?” I ask.
“What could I do? I told them that for future exercise play, cadre trucks were off-limits, but that they’d earned a ride back to the G base.”
On day seven, the G base is moved to a location on state game lands a few miles southwest of the town of Pine Bluff. The Gs move in the morning and the auxiliary trucks bring the Americans in that afternoon. The new location is more secure in that it’s protected on one side by a swampy marsh, and that means lots of mosquitoes. But this base camp can be guarded with two security positions. Later that afternoon, a dilemma surfaces when Colonel Merced brings in three new recruits. Colonel Chissom says he doesn’t trust the new men; he thinks they might be Pineland Army spies. The new men are quickly blindfolded and made to kneel with their hands tied behind their backs. There’s talk of executing them to be on the safe side. Chissom turns to Captain Santos.
“I’ll let them live, but you have to take charge of them and vouch for their conduct.”
Santos sidesteps this one. “Colonel, these are Pinelanders and they’re your people—your responsibility. Perhaps we should question them further to assess their loyalty.”
Chissom says he will take responsibility, but whatever happens, happens—indicating he may just shoot them. On further questioning, the new recruits are found to be loyal partisans and allowed to remain in the G base. The ODA gives them the Pineland oath, pays them, and gives them a quick class on the Rules of Land Warfare—what is and is not acceptable in their combat operations.
“What if the colonel decided to execute them?” I ask Miguel Santos later.
“We were ready for that, but there is only so much we can do in that situation. Intervention would threaten our mission, and the actions of the new recruits could only erode my position if I’d taken responsibility for them. We have some leverage with Chissom, and I was prepared to use it if he threatened to shoot them.”
“Captain Santos did the right thing,” Bill Chissom says of the dilemma. “Sometimes we take it further and prepare the new men for execution to see how the team handles it. But make no mistake, this kind of thing’s happening in Special Forces compounds today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who can you trust? Who do you let come into your base camp, and what do you let them see of your physical setup and your security measures? And how do you handle a situation where one of your indigenous leaders wants to mete out justice to someone on the spot? This is real world.”
The day after the G-base relocation, as it turns out, is a national holiday in Pineland. For the Americans, by chance, it’s Mother’s Day. The occasion is marked—for the Pinelanders, not for Mom—by a pig roast. Part of the duties of the men on security duty the previous night was to keep a roaring fire going to make a bed of coals. Sunday morning, a freshly killed whole pig is delivered to the camp. The Americans and the Gs gather for a class in pig preparation. As the team medic, Doc