Trial By Fire (49 page)

—George Armstrong Custer before the

Battle of the Little Big Horn, as quoted by

Giovanni Martini

Arlington, Virginia

0035 hours, 9 September

Reaching over with her right arm, Amanda Lewis spent several minutes of fruitless searching before she realized that the only thing her hand could find on Ed’s side of the bed was crumpled sheets and a vacant pillow. With her mind clouded with sleep, she was not quite up to the challenge of solving the mystery of the missing husband. Satisfied that she had done all she could, she rolled over and began slowly drifting back to sleep, until the muffled voice from downstairs began to bring her back.

Opening her eyes, as if that would help her hear better, Amanda listened for a moment. From the direction and the tone, she could tell that Ed was still on the phone., yelling at someone. Squinting in order to read the digital numbers on the clock, Amanda debated whether she should stay in bed and let Ed vent his spleen or go down and lend him some moral support. After listening for another minute and noticing no change in Ed’s pitch or tone, she opted to go down. At least, she thought, she could try to calm him, though she doubted it. Once Ed Lewis started chasing windmills, only a punch in the nose or a bout of high blood pressure could stop him. Though she couldn’t fend off the former, at least she could try to do something about the blood pressure.

Throwing on a robe, Amanda quietly went down the stairs to the kitchen to brew a pot of decaffeinated coffee. She didn’t even pause as she passed the door of Ed’s home office. Even through the closed door, Ed’s words could be heard clearly down the hall and in the kitchen.

Tuning out his outburst, punctuated with an occasional pause while the other party talked, Amanda busied herself preparing a tray for their coffee.

When all was ready, she took the tray and headed for Ed’s office, reaching the door just as Ed slammed the receiver down. Leaning over to listen at the door, Amanda didn’t hear a sound. Deciding that he was finished with whoever he had been talking to, she balanced the coffee tray in one hand while opening the door with the other.

Walking in as if nothing were out of the ordinary, Amanda began searching for any flat surface free of stacks of books, folders, papers, and magazines. She moved to a small table that appeared to offer a reasonably level spot on top of a small stack of books. Even on her way to the table she had to be wary, taking care to step over a briefcase, assorted books, and one of Ed’s shoes. As she crossed the room, she watched her husband from the corner of her eye.

Seated at his desk, his chair turned sideways to face the corner of the desk where the phone was, Lewis had yet to acknowledge her presence.

Instead, he merely sat there, reclining in his chair, hands folded on his stomach, staring at the phone. Even when Amanda finished preparing his mug of coffee, leaning over his desk to hand it to him, Lewis didn’t look at her. Mechanically, he reached out, took the mug in one hand, and slowly brought it to his lips, holding it there for a moment with both hands, all the while watching the phone.

It wasn’t that Ed was ungrateful or rude. When it came to a loving husband and an understanding father, there wasn’t any better and Amanda knew it. After twenty-two years of marriage, the only regret that she had was that she had given in to his desire to run for Congress. Even his tour of combat duty in the Persian Gulf as a battalion executive officer had not been as hard on her as his five years in Congress. In those years, she had watched the man she loved begin to turn solemn and cynical. Though he denied there were any differences in him, Amanda knew better. These changes, along with a growing threat of hypertension accentuated by a poor diet due to long hours of work, threatened to destroy the only man that Amanda had ever loved, the man to whom she had devoted her entire life. Quietly taking her mug of coffee, Amanda moved over to a chair across the room from him, bending down to remove several file folders from the seat cushion. Sitting down, Amanda Lewis began to sip her coffee as she watched Congressman Ed Lewis and waited patiently for him to finish his thoughts.

When the phone rang, Amanda jumped. Lewis leaped forward, grabbing for the phone with his right hand. Without looking, he swung his left arm, holding the coffee mug, toward the desk, and set the mug precariously on top of a jumbled stack of papers. Amanda was about to say something when Lewis responded to the party on the other end of the line.

“Yes, I’ll hold.”

Settling back in her seat, Amanda watched Lewis, while casting an occasional glance at the coffee mug that threatened to topple over from its awkward perch. Only when he began speaking did Amanda understand his lack of concern.

“Yes, Mr. President, this is Ed. I am sorry for waking you at this hour, but I wanted to ask you one more time to reconsider your decision.”

Amanda’s eyes narrowed. Bullshit, she thought. Ed wasn’t sorry for waking the president. Nor was she sorry that he had.

“Yes, sir. I understand your position. And I understand the need to do something about the raids across the border. Hell, Mr. President, I’d rather be down there, on the front line, than stay here in Washington any day of the week.”

,

With her eyes narrowing even more, Amanda felt like shouting “Good, let’s go, tonight, and get the hell out of this rat race,” but restrained herself.

Lewis continued. “No sir, I have not changed my view. It is, and will remain, a mistake to take direct military action against the Mexican government. I am convinced that they are as anxious to stop those raids as we are.”

As she lowered her mug to her lap, Amanda shook her head. You’ll never give up, she thought. You’ll never give up chasing those windmills, you old fool.

“No sir, I do not believe what the
CIA
, the
DIA
, the
NSA
, or the
FBI
are saying. They’re full of shit and you know it.”

Looking over to the clock behind Lewis’s desk, Amanda knew the conversation would be ending soon. Presidents, after all, don’t have to listen to congressmen curse like that at one o’clock in the morning. She was sure the president got enough of that during the day.

“In the first place, they have a piss-poor record, starting from when Fidel took Havana all the way up until now and every point in between.

Second, and most importantly, the Mexicans will fight. Both you and I know we will never be able to bring the Council of 13 down. Hell, even with the whole world behind us and his armed forces shattered, we couldn’t get rid of Saddam. What makes you think this is going to go any better?”

Odds, Amanda thought. After all, any Vegas gambler knew that if you threw the dice enough, you would eventually come up with a winning number. After Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Iraq, some president had to get lucky. Suddenly, she realized that she was beginning to sound as cynical as Ed. With a shake of her head, she stood up and moved over to the tray to pour herself another cup of coffee.

“You, Mr. President, may be committed. But I am not obliged to follow. This is a dumb move, a move that neither you nor I, in the end, will pay for. I just pray that next week, when the body bags start coming back, you can find a way to explain to Johnny Jones’s mother that her son died for political necessity.” After listening for another minute, Lewis heaved a sigh. “Yes, Mr. President. It will be a long day. But not near as long for us as it will be for our people moving into Mexico.”

Without any further response, Lewis hung the phone up. Turning away from the tray, Amanda saw him sitting there, still holding the receiver with his right hand while bending over, staring at the floor in silence.

He had lost, again. Heaving a great sigh, Amanda felt the urge to go over and take him in her arms. But she knew that this wasn’t the time for that. Instead, she lifted the pot of coffee and quietly went over to his desk.

As he heard more coffee being poured into his mug, which still sat teetering on the papers he had put it on, Lewis sat up and turned to his wife. For the first time, he took note of her smiling face framed by her long, ruffled hair. When she was finished and began to return to her seat, leaving the pot on the tray as she did so, he reached over for his mug, taking a sip before saying anything. When he did speak, it was in a low, almost plaintive tone. “This, my dear, isn’t a good night to be an American.”

Resuming

her seat and picking up her own cup, Amanda gave him a sympathetic smile. “I heard, dear. How about telling me all about it.”

East of Las Josefines, on the Texas side of the Rio Grande 0405 hours, 9 September

For the briefest of moments, the sky above Laredo lit up. Though she couldn’t hear the muffled explosion over the whine of her Bradley, Kozak knew someone had blown something up somewhere. She had no way of realizing that she had just witnessed the explosion that claimed the first American dead of the day. The war of attrition, a war the Mexicans felt that they couldn’t possibly lose, had begun.

Turning her attention back in the direction in which they were moving, Kozak squinted slightly, searching through the dust thrown up by the lead vehicles for the chem lights marking the Bradley to her immediate front.

It took her a few seconds to identify the faint glow of the three red chem lights hanging vertically from the back of the turret of the 1st Squad’s Bradley, the lead track in her platoon. Each company in 2nd of the 13th Infantry used different colors to identify their vehicles. Her company, A Company, used red stripes painted on the base of the 25mm cannon for visual recognition during the day and red chem lights or red-filtered flashlights at night. B Company used white, C Company blue, D Company yellow, and all headquarters vehicles green. Within the company, platoons were identified by the number of stripes or lights used. First Platoon had one stripe or light, 2nd Platoon two, 3rd Platoon, her platoon, three, and the company commander’s Bradley used four. By using such a system, commanders, at a glance, could tell who they were looking at in the heat of battle when a friendly vehicle appeared on their left or right.

Satisfied that her driver was keeping the proper interval, Kozak twisted about, looking behind for the 2nd Squad’s Bradley, which was supposed to be following hers. The 3rd Squad, with Sergeant Rivera, was taking up the rear of the platoon and the company. As she looked, it occurred to Kozak that she had fallen into the habit of assigning missions and establishing the order of march for her platoon in such a manner that it was always 1st Squad in the lead, 2nd Squad next, and 3rd Squad in the rear.

Although Staff Sergeant Maupin was the most experienced and competent of her squad leaders, it wasn’t fair that he should always lead. Kozak had been taught that such a practice had a tendency to make the other squad leaders lazy, dependent on the map-reading skills of Maupin and secure in the knowledge that Maupin’s Bradley, and not theirs, would catch the first land mine or antitank round in a firefight. The same considerations put continuous pressure and stress on the men of the 1st Squad. That such feelings were real struck home when Kozak noticed that two riflemen from Maupin’s squad had scribbled “First to Fall” on the camouflage bands of their helmets. The use of such graffiti, thinly disguised as humor, was a subtle method used by soldiers to communicate dissatisfaction with leadership or unit policies or practices. That Maupin, who had to have seen the slogan, allowed the two riflemen to continue to display it, told Kozak that he agreed with its sentiment.

Not that she could blame her own people for feeling that way. With Captain Wittworth’s habit of placing her platoon at the rear of the company column during every road march, or in reserve during most operations, she was beginning to sympathize with the feeling of the men in 1st Squad. At first Kozak had accepted Wittworth’s practice of putting her platoon in the rear without much thought. When she began to notice that he continued to do so, she had passed it off as common sense. Wittworth, she told herself, was simply giving her a chance to learn her trade without the added pressure of being in the lead. That rationale, however, began to wear thin when Wittworth rotated ist and 2nd Platoons, while keeping Kozak’s in the rear or sending her on every mission that required a platoon to be detached from the company. Though she tried hard not to become paranoid, Kozak began to wonder if Wittworth was trying to discourage her or keep her at arm’s length. Regardless of the reason, it was becoming apparent to her, and to her platoon, that Wittworth was, in his own way, telling the 3rd Platoon that it wasn’t good enough yet to be part of the company.

Besides the psychological cold shoulder, there were practical concerns.

Being the trail platoon meant that the 3rd Platoon had the honor of eating the entire company’s dust on long road marches. When traveling on dirt trails, especially on the tank trails at Fort Hood, where the dust had been ground into fine powder by the passage of thousands of tracked vehicles since 1940, the dust clouds could reach great heights and linger forever.

It was not unusual to end a road march covered with a thick layer of dust that clogged every pore, violated every crack, crevice, and opening on your body, and turned dark green camouflage uniforms almost white. For Kozak, whose nose was still stuffed with cotton wadding and who was still breathing through her mouth, this was particularly annoying. In fact, she had even considered scribbling a motto of her own on her helmet, such as “The Dust Devils” or “The Last of the Least.” But Nancy Kozak was an officer, a new and junior officer, who was being watched and evaluated by everyone who outranked her, which, to a second lieutenant, seemed like everyone in the Army. So she bit her tongue and did as she was told. Her day, she knew, would come. Until then, all she could do was follow and, for the time being, eat more dust, a commodity that 2nd Platoon was currently supplying lots of as they headed south into Mexico.

Sheraton Hotel, South Padre Island, Texas

0815 hours, 9 September

Each page of the thick document sitting on the breakfast table served only to discourage Childress, though he didn’t show it. There was a reason, he knew, for his being shown this particular report. When he asked Delapos, who sat across from him, sipping coffee and eyeing the waitresses, how he had managed to obtain it, Delapos smiled. “The Council of 13, my friend, no longer thinks as one.” If, in fact, the document he was reading was authentic, then Delapos’s words were true, and Alaman, the manager, had succeeded in penetrating the belts of security that had surrounded the council.