Trial By Fire (34 page)

That, however, was not necessary. When the final vote was taken just before midnight on the 12th, seven members of the council voted to declare full mobilization and meet the challenge from the north as best they could. So, when President Molina announced from Mexico City that morning that it was with a heavy heart that he was ordering the full mobilization of the Army and militia in preparation to go north to the border, he meant it.

The rearming of the Rural Defense Corps, planned before the current crisis, fell into place with the defensive plan that Guajardo was now developing as a result of the council’s call for full mobilization. Even before the current crisis, Guajardo had felt that there was a need for the rearming, and so he had issued the appropriate orders. At that time, he himself could not have explained to his own satisfaction why he felt that doing so was necessary. Events had proved him right, though not for reasons he could have foreseen at the time.

The Rural Defense Corps, on horseback and foot, and supplemented by mechanized cavalry units of the Mexican Army, would patrol the border, providing both a visible presence and information. The last point, the gathering of information, was both critical and, for the Council of 13, a sore point. The Purification had, when it came to purging Mexico’s intelligence apparatus and both the national and state police forces, gone too far too fast. While few members of the intelligence community and the police had been arrested, the number of those under suspension had been quite large, accounting for over one-third of all members of those agencies. In addition, many of those who were not affected by these actions deserted, either fleeing north to the United States or back to their home villages. This accounted for another third of the force. Within the ranks of those that remained, morale was almost nonexistent and reliability even lower. After all, as Colonel Zavala pointed out, to the intelligence community and police forces of Mexico, the interests of Mexico and of the
PRI
had been one and the same. “How can we trust men,”

Zavala had stated before June 29, “who owe everything they have to men whom we are about to kill?”

Perhaps he had been right, Guajardo mused as he watched apeloton of Rural Defense Corps reassemble after receiving their new weapons. The men, smiles on their faces, were busy chatting amongst themselves while they worked the actions on the rifles and machine gun and inspected the sights by aiming at distant objects around the courtyard. These men, who had also been part of the PRI’s power structure, would now have to do the bulk of what trained and organized professionals had once done. And their task would be complicated by the need to look both ways, for it was Guajardo’s intent to use this force to not only keep track of activities north of the border, but also on their own side. Perhaps, he thought, they, people from the local communities along the border, could discover who it was that was working so hard to start a war between Mexico and the United States. Any information, any clue, any tiny break could make a difference, a difference that could end the current crisis and buy the council the time to work the miracle so desperately needed to save Mexico.

But

as far as Guajardo was concerned, time and hope were running out.

Each day brought the possibility of open conflict between the two nations closer. And as that gap closed, the possibility diminished that the United States would believe any evidence offered by the Council of 13 that it was not responsible for the border raids.

The country must have a large and efficient army, one capable of meeting the enemy abroad, or they must expect to meet him at home.

—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of

Wellington

On U.S. Highway 83, 10 kilometers north of San Ygnacio, Texas

1745 hours, 29 August

Moving far too fast to observe anything along the route, the lead Humvee of Sergeant Jimmy Sullivan’s scout section raced along the deserted highway to their assigned observation post. Two hundred meters behind, the second Humvee of the section, an armored Humvee armed with an M-60 machine gun, was pushing it to keep up with Sullivan. Were it not for an occasional reminder from Private Tod Alison, who normally drove Sullivan, Sullivan would have gone faster and lost the heavier and slower vehicle. Losing the second vehicle, however, was the least of his concerns.

With both hands gripping the steering wheel, Sullivan ignored the speedometer and leaned on the accelerator in an effort to make up the time they had lost getting ready back at the battalion’s base camp. In the backseat, Andy Morrezzo, a scout observer, held onto his map with one hand and the radio mike with his other, keeping track of their progress and calling off checkpoints as they went whizzing by. While he was doing so, Morrezzo hoped that no one back at the battalion was noticing that they were hitting the checkpoints rather fast.

There were any number of excuses Sullivan could use, if necessary, to explain why they had started late. After all, this was only their third day on the border, using equipment that was relatively new to them, and working as a section for the first time. Even under the best of circum stances, it took the men of the ist Battalion, 141st Infantry, most of the first week of annual summer camp to get into the groove of tactical operations. After all, you simply cannot jerk eight hundred men from their homes scattered all over central Texas one day and expect them to be up to speed, working as a battalion, the next.

To say that the conditions they were working under were far from the best would be an understatement. To start with, instead of going to Fort Hood, where their equipment was located, the battalion had assembled at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas. There, they were reorganized and issued a mix of Humvees and ancient M-151 jeeps instead of their armored vehicles. The wheeled vehicles, which were cheaper to operate and more suitable for patrolling the vast stretch of border which they were responsible for, were nonetheless new to the men and required some retraining as well as rethinking on how to employ them. In the case of Sullivan’s section, this meant reorganization as well as training. At Camp Mabry, Sullivan found that his scout section, authorized at five men and one M-3

Bradley fighting vehicle but consisting of four men and one M-113 armored personnel carrier since it was short personnel and modern equipment, now consisted of six men and two Humvees. One of the Humvees he was issued was a stripped model with nothing but a radio. It could carry four men and their equipment. The second Humvee, borrowed from an MP unit, was an armored version with a roof mount for the M-60

machine gun. The FM radios in both vehicles, VRC-64S, were built in the 1960s and had a planning range of twenty-five kilometers, or sixteen miles, which would be woefully inadequate for what they would have to do. Sullivan still wasn’t sure how best to use this combination of equipment when they were moved to their sector on the border.

Sullivan’s personnel status was just as bad. Of the three men assigned to his scout section before the call-up, one announced on the day everyone reported to the armory that he was nondeployable due to his job with the state police. This cut Sullivan’s section down to three, including himself. To make good this deficiency, three new men were assigned to his section after they had arrived at Camp Mabry. One man, the best of the lot, had just left active duty. Although he had been an artilleryman while in the Army, he at least was trained. Of the other two, one had not yet had a chance to attend basic training while the other, Jack Lyttle, Sullivan suspected, was a dud transferred from one of the infantry companies.

Jack was a nice enough guy, anxious to please, but seemingly incapable of doing anything without close supervision. Sullivan thought that Jack’s nickname, Gomer Pyle, gave him too much credit, since, as Sullivan put it, at least Gomer knew how to wear his uniform properly.

With this mix of new equipment, men, and mission, with almost no time to organize and train properly, Sullivan didn’t have to fabricate a reason for not making their start time. In the words of his first sergeant, the scout platoon was an accident waiting to happen.

While Sullivan knew he could get away with such excuses, he didn’t want to if he didn’t need to. To do so at this early stage would be unwise.

The good ole boy system had no place in the 1st of the 141st. Instead, both the company commander and the battalion commander judged their people on their performance, not who they were or who they knew. Those who performed were rewarded, those who didn’t got extra training or the boot. The day would come, Sullivan knew, when he would need a favor, such as a couple of days off to go home and see his family. When that time came, the last thing he wanted to have was some officer pull out his notebook, flip to a page, and inform Sullivan that on 29 August he and his patrol had been thirty minutes late getting into place. And Captain Terry Wilkes, his company commander, was just the kind of guy to do that. So Sullivan told his normal driver to hop in the passenger seat, took the wheel, and made a beeline for the site where they would set up their first observation post that night. Along the way, he decided to reduce the number of stops to check crossing points from six to three and make a visual inspection of the other three as they went by. It was a gamble that Sullivan thought was worth taking.

The truth was, it didn’t make any difference. Even had Sullivan stopped at each of the six crossing points in his sector, neither he nor his section would have found any traces of Lefleur and his team. They, like all the other teams, were already north of the border, preparing to operate from new locations in the United States, not Mexico.

In a stroke of real genius, Delapos had ordered his teams to go north and-find base camps on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande before the Texas National Guard was able to close on the border and replace the U.S.

Border Patrol. The advantages of doing so were numerous. By operating in the United States, Delapos’s men could avoid the need to sneak through the increasing Mexican patrols, crossing a border that was coming under intense scrutiny by human and electronic surveillance on both sides, and then, when finished, come back after everyone was alerted. Their earlier operations, against the border patrol, had more than established the idea in everyone’s mind that the raids were coming across the border. There was, therefore, no need to reinforce this. What was necessary was to maintain a high success rate without compromise or loss. Actions by both the Mexican government and the state of Texas were making this harder.

Capitalizing on the fact that the Americans were becoming both frustrated and mesmerized by the ability of the raiders to move across the border without detection, both Delapos and Childress suspected that each success would cause the Americans to panic, redoubling their intelligence efforts at or south of the border, not north of it. If this in fact happened, Delapos figured that their operations would become easier as more troops and efforts were piled up on the border and drawn away from the interior.

Besides being able to avoid crossing the border, Delapos would be able to supply, pay, reinforce, and communicate with his people with greater ease. In the days after June 29, it had not been a problem to move men, weapons, and money about in Mexico while the Purification was decimating Mexico’s police and intelligence agencies and causing panic among those that remained. Deployment of the Rural Defense Corps, movement of regular Army units to the border, and acceptance of the Council of 13 by the people, however, had made operations south of the border hazardous.

Coupled with an increase in the odds of being discovered while operating on the border itself, was the fact that the Council of 13 was beginning to gain a firm grasp of Mexico’s institutions and systems. Banks, now under control, were limiting the amount of funds that could be transferred in and out of the country. The purge of customs officials, as well as of the police at seaports and airports, was over. Those who remained took the lessons of the Purification to heart and were, at least for the time being, incorruptible. To ensure that they remained so, the customs officials and police were being rotated to other assignments randomly and at irregular intervals, making it difficult to bribe them and allow arms and military supplies to be smuggled in. Against such moves, there was little Alaman or Delapos could do. Even communications and movement were becoming more difficult. The comings and goings of strangers were being tracked and reported. The telephone system was susceptible to being tapped. And roving roadblocks, set up without notice and at random intervals, were making movements of equipment difficult to plan.

The situation in the United States, however, was different. If anything, the shifting of operations north simplified matters. Despite the fact that the raids had created a panic in Texas and the National Guard had been called out, no one, not even the governor of Texas, was prepared to suspend civil liberties by declaring martial law or restricting movement of civilians. It was therefore possible for Delapos’s men, especially those who were North American or European, to travel near the border in pickup trucks and scout out their next ambush sites and watch the National Guard as it deployed and maneuvered. Some, like Childress, actually went up to the National Guard observation posts. Striking up a conversation with the guardsmen, Childress would share beer he just happened to have in a cooler in the back of his pickup, telling them how glad he was to see them on the job, and swap war stories. And while the guardsmen drank his beer, Childress carefully noted how they were equipped, asking seemingly innocent questions about their unit and mission, and listened to their reporting procedures. That they were being set up was the last thing on their minds. After all, he spoke the language, looked like them, and had been in the Army himself. The enemy, according to the commanders, were sneaky little Mexicans. As far as the soldiers were concerned, Childress was just another good ole boy who really knew how to support the troops.