Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [99]
Twenty minutes later, five role players in black uniforms, khaki field coats, and AK-47 rifles come wandering along the road. When they enter the kill zone, they’re cut down by a withering volley of blank automatic-weapons fire. On Santos’s order, the A-team sweeps through the kill zone and quickly searches the dead enemy bodies. Amid all the shouting and shooting, David Altman calls out the elapsed time at thirty-second intervals. It’s a hit-and-run mission and speed on target is essential. The weapons and equipment taken from the dead enemy soldiers are dumped in a pile; Captain Santos calls in his security elements from either flank. The squad melts into the roadside foliage in a security perimeter. Sergeant Aaron Dunn places a dummy block of C-4 explosive on the collected guns and gear. Santos nods at him.
“Fire in the hole!” Dunn calls out and pulls the fuse igniter. “Fire in the hole!” the team echoes.
“Burning!” Dunn yells as he checks his firing assembly to ensure the time fuse is burning properly.
“OK, Sergeant O’Kane,” Santos orders, “take us out of here.” O’Kane sends Dan Barstow, the A-team point man, off on a prearranged direction from the ambush site. The rest of the team follow in squad order, with Costa counting everyone off the target to ensure that no one is left behind.
“OK, men,” Jan calls after them, “hold it up, and let’s bring it in again.” Sergeant Janss holds a critique session that includes input from the risen-from-the-dead role players. He asks Santos, O’Kane, and Costa what they think they could have done better—what their teams could have done better. From my perspective, it was a textbook setup and execution. “There was one point where the volume of fire died off,” Jan tells them. “You can’t slack off and give them time to recover—you stick it to them and you keep sticking it to them. But overall, it was a good ambush. Your time on target by my watch was four and a half minutes. That’s excellent.” He consults his notepad, tears off a sheet, and hands it to Matt Anderson. “Captain Anderson, you’re now the patrol leader. Kendall, you take the A-team and Altman, you have the C-team leader. These are your next coordinates. You need to be there no later than 2000. At that location, you will be met by a friendly agent who will give you further direction. How’s your commo with the cadre base station?”
“We have good commo, Sergeant,” Anderson replies.
“Good. Take a few minutes to sort yourself out and shift around your equipment, then head out to the linkup point with your contact.”
“Roger that, Sergeant.”
“And good luck. Make me proud.”
“Roger that, Sergeant.”
The role players walk back to a Humvee they had parked in the woods a few hundred meters away. They’ll return to the cadre base camp set up on the edge of Fort Bragg’s Nijmegen Drop Zone to await their next stroll through the kill zone of this ambush site. Sergeant Janss makes his way back across the piece of terrain that 811 just covered. A few hundred meters off one of the main roads, Gary Courtland has pitched a tent and set up a small camp. He and Jan will alternately work the ambush scenario. Later that evening, shortly after Jan links up with Courtland, another student ODA finds them. That team is given its mission and the ambush site coordinates, and the ODA sets off with Courtland following it. He and Sergeant Janss will make the trek to and from that same ambush-site scenario many times over the next three days, watching student ODAs kill the same role players and conducting after-action critiques.
Eight-one-one continues its operational odyssey. It takes the men about two hours to reach the grid coordinates Jan gave them. There, in the fading light, they find a tent and a man sipping coffee by a fire. It’s cold but clear, with the temperature scheduled to dip well into the mid-thirties.