Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [189]
When we arrived at the ODA’s outpost, the team was gearing up for a mission. The mission was a multiunit operation into a nearby village that was a hub of insurgent activity, for both local insurgents and transients coming in from the Syrian border. IED activity in the area was on the rise, and this operation was designed to do a bit of housecleaning. There were two other forces involved in addition to the elements with my ODA. There would be two platoons of mechanized infantry from the 1st Armored Division in Bradley Fighting Vehicles and two platoons of Marine Force Recon from a regional combat team with the 7th Marines. The Special Forces and mech infantry would drive to their objectives, while the Marines would be landed by helo some four miles from the town and patrol in on foot. An AC-130 gunship would be on call and orbiting overhead, and a section of Marine F/A-18 fighters would be circling as well. Each force had specific targeting in their assigned section of the village. It was to be a predawn coordinated attack.
My ODA was a “heavy” detachment with fifteen Green Berets. There were also two Marine Corps intelligence analysts, a four-man Civil Affairs team, and a single Navy corpsman assigned to the team. The detachment members looked very similar to my SEAL platoon decades ago: Their hair was longish, but not too long, and about a third of them had beards. They went about the team compound in shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. The detachment commander was a short, lean Korean-American with a degree in literature from UCLA. He had the look of an undergraduate student. His quiet, capable leadership was well complemented by the veteran sergeant who ran the team. The team sergeant was a slim, outgoing master sergeant from San Antonio with full, neatly combed hair and a push-broom mustache. He was on his fourth rotation to Iraq. I asked him how many deployments he had made in his SF career. “I keep track of countries, not rotations, and I’ve been to sixty-three countries in my twenty-four years with Special Forces—so far.” This team was a relatively young detachment with several team members on only their second and third rotation. Only one was on his first, and he was a former 18 X-Ray. And, of course, there was a story there. He was from Petaluma, California, and has a degree in engineering from Princeton. He worked as an analyst for a venture capital firm in San Francisco for five years before leaving it for the X-Ray Program. My favorite X-Ray question had become “How do you like this duty?”
“It’s good work—something of what I expected and much of it is what you could never expect, or could even imagine. And it’s challenging, always a challenge.”
“And your MOS?”
“I’m an engineer—an 18 Charlie. As a trained civil engineer, it was a chance to do some hands-on construction work and, I admit, a chance to work with military demolitions. I do like to blow things up. Of course, as the junior detachment Charlie, I get more than my share of the paperwork, but that goes with the territory.”
“Any chance of reenlisting when your contract service is up?” This had become my second-favorite X-Ray question.
“I’m not sure, and I’ll have two years to think about it. Right now I’m leaning toward getting out and getting a graduate business degree. We’ll see. Right now, I’m having fun; I like what I’m doing.”
At 1300 on the day of our arrival, the team sergeant briefed his ODA and the AOB support team on the following morning’s mission. This was more of a patrol order than a full-on mission briefback for a senior commander, but the key elements were the same. It had the feel and format of a briefing by Sergeant Stan Hall with student ODA 811 during Phase II, or Captain Miguel Santos with 915 in Phase IV. The briefing was for the ODA and addressed its role in the operation, one that would focus on security, movement, and intelligence collection. The assaulters for this mission, the actual door kickers, would be Iraqis.
The assault phase of the operation