Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [31]
“Fall in, on the double! Move, people, move!” The soldiers struggle off the buses with their gear—all their worldly Army possessions in a kit bag and a duffel, perhaps a hundred pounds per man. “Fall in beside your gear. I want four ranks, dress and cover down.” The mass of troops scramble into a loose formation. “Too slow, people—everyone drop and start pushing them out.” The last of them tumble from the door of the buses, struggling under the weight of their gear. They find a piece of gravel, drop their bags, and begin doing push-ups. Finally, the buses are empty. They pull away in a cloud of blue haze, leaving an eerie quiet in their wake, broken only by the grunting of men doing push-ups. The soldiers melt into an undulating field of dark forms—rising and falling. There’s no moon, and the area’s sparsely lit by a picket of halogen streetlights along the edge of the athletic field. It’s August, and the overnight temperature has dropped to a moist seventy-five degrees.
“Recover!” shouts the man in the ball cap. “Fall in and do it smartly this time.” After several minutes, they manage a loose assembly of four ranks. There are about a hundred of them. “All right, men, listen up. When I call out your name, I want you to sound off and fall out into a group off to my right, understood?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” comes the weak chorus.
“Not loud enough, ladies. Drop!” After another short round of push-ups, he shouts, “Recover. Is that understood?”
“YES, SERGEANT!”
“Now you’re getting the idea. OK, Adams.”
“Here, Sergeant!”
“Adkins.”
“Here, Sergeant!”
The formation is cut to groups of twelve- to fourteen-man groups and sent off to their barracks. After dismissing the last group, the soldier in the black sweatshirt and ball cap, Sergeant First Class Ross Jennings, flips through his roster and again counts the new arrivals. These soldiers are the X-Rays, men who joined the Army specifically to become Green Berets. They’ll begin this journey with 18X Pre-SFAS Training—training to prepare them for Special Forces Assessment and Selection. This class is 18X Pre-SFAS Class 8-04. Jennings had 101 names and could only account for 99 soldiers—2 short. How the hell, he says to himself, could they muster 101 airborne-qualified 18 X-Rays at Benning, put them on the bus, and I get only 99 here to begin training?
Sergeant First Class Jennings is the senior TAC NCO for the Pre-SFAS course. TAC is yet another acronym and stands for teach, advise, and counsel. The X-Ray soldiers saw plenty of these TAC noncommissioned officers in their basic training, but Sergeant Jennings is the first TAC NCO they have met who is a Green Beret. He’s thirty-six years old and has been at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School for almost three years. Had the buses arrived as scheduled that afternoon, there would have been eighteen TAC NCOs waiting for them, and the class would have been welcomed to Fort Bragg at that time. Now that reception will have to wait until morning formation. Jennings sent his cadre of TAC sergeants home and remained in the area for the arrival of the new class. He’s five-nine with soft, regular features, light-brown wavy hair, and an easy smile that creases the corners of his eyes. Ross Jennings grew up in Tacoma and has a degree in history from the University of Washington. He’s one of the few TACs who is single. He came to the school from the 10th Special Forces Group. He speaks German and had two rotations in Bosnia