Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [180]
“OK, guys, you’re shot. Start calling for help.”
“Medic! Medic, I’m hit—help me! Help!” Doc Kohl and four others respond on the run, two Americans and two Gs. They patrol on skirmish line to the two wounded men. Then Sergeant Blackman shoots Kohl. “OK, your medic just got shot,” Blackman tells the others. “Now what are you going to do?”
Several others arrive from the G base to provide security and to help with the casualties. Sergeant Blackman dictates wounds: head wound bleeding badly, leg wound bleeding badly, abdominal wound, pulse weak and rapid, blood pressure dropping. It’s a full-on medical drill for 915 and its Gs. They get a pressure bandage on the abdominal wound, a tourniquet on the leg, and some IVs started. An auxiliary truck arrives to take the two Gs to a regional medical station for treatment; Doc Kohl is pronounced fit for duty.
“We needed to take a few of the Gs out of the G bases, so we have a more robust opposition force during the final problem,” Sergeant Blackman tells me off to the side, “so we created this training scenario. This way we get some medical training and collect some men to serve with the opposing forces.”
“I’d just come off security duty and was sound asleep,” Sergeant Kohl says of the drill. “I came out of a total fog—didn’t know where I was, what day it was. I was running up the trail with my aid bag and my rifle before I really came awake. Guess that’s the way it’ll be downrange.”
Captain Santos and his planners work straight through the day. This is to be a two-ODA, two-G-force operation, with some twenty-four Americans and forty-five Pineland freedom fighters making the attack. It’ll be a complex and challenging undertaking. Nine-one-five will be teamed with 912 for the operation. That evening, after an exhaustive day of planning, Captain Santos, Sergeant Olin, and two of their Gs are taken to a safe house well out in the countryside. There they meet the team leader, the team sergeant, and two Gs from student ODA 912. Inside the safe house, the resistance sector commander, a contract role player in the character of a Pineland resistance-force general, is conducting the proceedings. Attending the general are Colonel Chissom, 912’s G chief, and Major Mike Kennedy, the American forward base commander, who has just “parachuted in” that afternoon for the meeting. All of them are drinking beer—nonalcoholic O’Doul’s. The Pineland liberation battle plan is reaching a critical phase. The invasion forces are ready, but this senior resistance political leader has to be made free to lead the new order. The two student ODA delegations, each in turn, present their plan to free this key Pineland leader. For both 915 and 912, their guerrilla counterparts do most of the talking. The game now, as I’m taken aside and told, is not how well the ODAs can do the job, but how well they’ve schooled their Gs to do the job. The empaneled cadre, G chiefs, and sector commander will select one ODA to lead the mission and one to support the mission. Their criteria? Which ODA has done the best job in training their guerrilla force. Up front, whose Gs are the best mission briefers.
While the cadre and guerrilla leaders talk and evaluate the two presentations, the two team leaders and their contingents mill about in front of the safe house. It’s a soft North Carolina spring night. While I wait it out with them, I spend a few minutes with Sergeant Major Rick Martin, the Echo Company sergeant major and Major Kennedy’s senior enlisted adviser.
“At this point in the training,” Martin tells me, “the ‘by, with, and through’ concept of conducting a campaign should be taking hold. Sometimes the light goes on and sometimes it doesn’t. Our job is to turn that light on. It can happen early on and, hopefully, sometime before Robin Sage is over. For a few, it doesn’t go on until they are standing in front of the review board