Trial By Fire (58 page)

When neither the battalion commander nor Wittworth responded to her last transmission, she figured that they were done with her for now.

Turning to the southeast, Kozak watched, shouting to her squad leaders to spread the word that an air strike was coming in. Bell, who was also watching, saw them first. “There they are, LT.”

Following his finger, Kozak finally saw two black dots coming toward them fast. Within seconds, the black dots became black blobs. Then the black blobs appeared to sprout wings. Finally, just before they passed overhead, the two blobs with wings began to take on the distinctive form of F-16s. When they released their loads before they passed her platoon’s position, she thought, Christ, they’re going to hit us! Controlling her panic, she held her breath as-she watched the bombs fall away from the jets. Only when the cluster bombs, already split open and spewing hundreds of small bomblets, had cleared the platoon and began to impact on the far side of the arroyo, did Kozak begin to breathe again. Though she could not see the impact, a series of secondary explosions told her the F-16s had found the mark. A second pass, and the appearance of a company of Apache attack helicopters, was anticlimactic.

She had pulled it off. Second Platoon, Alpha Company, the “Dust Devils,” had pulled it off. Now, all that remained for her to do was to find out how much their small victory had cost them.

10 kilometers southeast of vallecillo, mexico 2245 hours, 12 September

From his position, Captain Nino Garza watched the trucks of the 16th Armored Division’s main command post move like a great snake crawling along the road leading southeast out of Vallecillo. The information he had been given, six hours before, that the division command post was preparing to move, had been right. Even more gratifying was the fact that his guess as to the road it would use had also been right. If that guess had

been wrong, he would have been guilty of unnecessarily exposing the one hundred and fifty members of the Rural Defense Force he now had deployed along that road, waiting to ambush the American command post. Taking one last look, Garza struggled to suppress the giddiness he felt at the prospect of impending battle.

Finally ready, Garza eased himself down off the rock he had been watching the road from and joined his subordinate commanders, who were gathered to receive his final instructions. “Remember, no one is to fire until the mortars fire. I will have them alternate the high-explosive rounds with illumination rounds so that we can keep the column illuminated.

And, remind your men, a green flare means they are to rush the column. I will do that only if conditions are ideal. Do not rush the column on your own, no matter how good conditions appear to be to your front.’’

Garza paused, looking at each of his subordinate commanders as they nodded

that they understood. Though he was far from being the patronizing type, Garza knew that the men entrusted to his command were simple farmers and shopkeepers. He not only had to keep everything simple, he also had to remember that each of these men had a family that depended upon him. Though the men were patriots, and each and every one was willing to die in the defense of his home and Mexico, as their grandfathers had been, Garza never forgot Colonel Guajardo’s admonishment to him and other guerrilla leaders like him: “While we need patriots to fight this war, never forget that only live Mexicans can build our future.” So Garza was careful to ensure that, if nothing else, everyone in his command understood the dispersal plan and the signal to initiate it. “Regardless of what happens or what you are doing,” he stressed to his subordinates, “when I or my deputy fires a red flare, the company will disperse. Do not wait for me, or anyone else. Take your people back to their rally points, have them clean their weapons before they bury them, and send them home. I will contact you when I can. Is that understood?”

With a final nod, each of Garza’s subordinate leaders moved off into the darkness, back to his unit where he would wait with his men for Garza to initiate the ambush.

Stuck in the rear seat of Major Nihart’s vehicle, amidst a tumble of personal gear and boxes, Captain Harold Cerro was asleep. To him, convoy and sleep were synonyms. Since his earliest days in the Army, he had found that the slow, serpentine pace of a convoy, coupled with the steady hum of an engine running at the same speed hour after hour after hour, was the best sleep aid ever invented. Cerro could last for ten, fifteen minutes tops, in a convoy before going to sleep. While sleep was always a commodity soldiers sought, it was not acceptable for the senior occupant of an Army vehicle to be seen sleeping while the vehicle was moving.

Though Cerro understood the reasoning behind that rule, he also understood that no one could regulate biology and human nature. Cerro had therefore developed a system for accommodating both. After being reprimanded on several occasions for sleeping, he now took the precaution of training his drivers to be on constant lookout for officers of the rank of major and above when he was asleep. When the driver saw the senior officer, it was the driver’s duty, Cerro would explain, to wake him.

That night, it would take more than a nudge by the driver to wake Cerro. It had been a difficult and trying day for him, far more demanding than he had ever thought possible. Though the threat of danger had been absent, along with the stress of being a leader in battle, the strain on the body and mind he had experienced that day was no less debilitating.

Division staffs are dominated by lieutenant colonels, who are the principal staff officers, and majors who are punching their tickets while they wait to become lieutenant colonels. Captains serving on division staffs don’t make any real decisions and don’t really get the chance to do much of anything. Their-days, split into twelve-hour shifts, consist of numerous little tasks, such as answering the phone; filling out, receiving, and submitting reports; asking questions of staff officers on subordinate unit staffs or answering questions asked by staff officers from higher headquarters staff; updating maps or redoing map graphics; searching to find the answer to a question posed by a senior officer; and dozens of other relatively simple and mundane things. Each of these actions, in and of itself, is simple, ludicrously simple. Doing all of them at once, however, in an area the size of a small hotel room crammed with tables, chairs, radios, telephones, map boards, computers, and a dozen other members of the staff is not only hard, it is physically and mentally demanding.

As in the experiment in which rats are made to live in overcrowded conditions, it is not long before the stress and strain of operating in an overcrowded van causes the members of a staff to turn on each other.

Though Cerro and the other members of Major Nihart’s current operations shop got along with each other under normal circumstances, the demands of the last twenty-four hours would have turned a saint into a chain-saw murderer. Even Colonel Dixon, normally a rock, had broken that day. During a heated conversation with the corps G3, Dixon had reached his breaking point. When he terminated the conversation by throwing the telephone across the current-operations van, barely missing Cerro, everyone in the van froze. Looking about at everyone in the van—all of whom were, in turn, looking at him—Dixon, a little embarrassed, mumbled, “Stupidity knows no bounds,” before he turned and left. Though no one had any idea what he meant, as soon as Dixon was gone, everyone went back to work without giving the incident a second thought. Such scenes were becoming more and more common.

Unable to vent the stress and frustrations of the day through physical means, as he had been able to do when he had commanded an airborne infantry company, Cerro sought escape through sleep. A sleep that nothing could disturb. Or so he thought.

Cerro hadn’t counted on Captain Garza and the members of the Rural Defense Force. No one, in fact, had. And that was about to become apparent.

When the convoy reached the point where Garza wanted to initiate the ambush, he fired a white flare, the signal for the mortars to commence firing. Five hundred meters to his rear, a man old enough to be Garza’s father, a cobbler by trade, watched the white star cluster climb into the sky and burst before he gave the three mortar crews under his command the order to fire. The mortar on the left, manned by a fanner and his two sons, had the honor of being the first to fire.

Cerro’s eyes popped open when the first 6omm mortar round, the one fired by the farmer and his sons, detonated less than one hundred meters in front of them. The odds against a mortar round, especially the first one, impacting on a moving truck were, even when the range was known, astronomical, under the best of circumstances. But it was also true, in the game of probability, that eventually someone had to be that “one” in a situation that measures the million-to-one odds.

As the G2 current-intelligence van, hit dead on, flopped over into the ditch on the side of the road, small-arms fire began to rake the column.

In the darkness, to his right, Cerro could see the flashes of rifles and machine guns. As he struggled to find his own rifle, hidden amongst the tumble of gear and equipment, Cerro heard a thump-thump-thump on the side of the vehicle, followed by a scream from Major Nihart. “Jesus. I’m hit. I’m fucking hit!”

Thrusting his head between Nihart and the driver, Cerro could see Nihart bent over, grasping his right thigh with both hands. Though he couldn’t see the blood, the grimace on Nihart’s face told him he had been hit bad. Cerro turned to the driver. “Left. Go left and get off this road.

Now.”

For a moment the driver looked at Cerro, then at Nihart. Thrusting his head forward so that it blocked the driver’s view of Nihart, Cerro repeated his order. “Get this piece of shit off the road to the left now, before we all die.”

When, out of the corner of his eye, the driver saw another truck further down the road blow up, he snapped out of his shock. He cut the wheel to the left with all his might, stepping on the accelerator as he did so. The vehicle almost jumped. The ditch to the left, though it wasn’t very wide or very deep, was wide enough and deep enough to bring the vehicle’s sudden burst of energy to a bone-crushing halt. Cerro was thrown head-first into the dashboard. Nihart, still clutching his leg, let out a piercing scream.

Panicked, the driver pushed the accelerator to the floor to no avail.

“We’re stuck! We’re stuck!”

Pulling himself back, Cerro shook his head. Now, he thought to himself, he finally understood why everyone insisted that soldiers wear their helmets when in a vehicle. Though he knew his neck would be stiff, his Kevlar helmet had saved him from a cracked skull. After shaking his head again, Cerro turned to the driver. In a rather calm tone of voice, he told the driver to let up on the accelerator and engage the four-wheel drive before trying again. Though the rear window of their vehicle was shattered by another volley of rifle fire, the driver complied. This time, they cleared the ditch, crawling up into the open field on the left side of the road and away from the ambush.

Sergeant Major Aiken, Dixon’s senior
NCO
and operations sergeant, was in the cab of the truck immediately behind Major Nihart’s vehicle.

He was in the process of swinging the ring-mounted .50-caliber machine gun that was attached to the cab of his truck toward the ambushers when he saw Major Nihart’s vehicle clear the ditch and move into the field to the left. Deciding that it might be smarter to follow the major, Aiken leaned over and yelled to the truck driver to follow Nihart into the open field. Though he knew that there might be mines or more enemy troops lying in wait on the left side of the road, Aiken also knew that the odds would be better moving around in an open field instead of sitting on the road.

Though he hadn’t intended it to, Cerro’s action created a chain reaction.

Behind Nihart’s vehicle and Aiken’s truck, every truck that could make the left-hand turn began to follow them. Though the drive across the open field was almost unbearable for Major Nihart, as each bump sent a spasm of pain through his body, it quickly became clear to Cerro that they were moving out of the kill zone of the ambush and mortar fire. It was only after he looked back to confirm this that he noticed that he was being followed. After traveling several hundred meters away from the road, a trip that seemed to take forever, Cerro told the driver to stop.

Climbing out over him, Cerro ordered the driver to tend to the major, then set out to set up a defensive perimeter.

Once on the ground, he headed for the first truck he came to. Aiken, seeing Cerro, who he thought was Major Nihart, on the ground, ordered his driver to stop. Dismounting even before the truck stopped rolling, he began to head for Cerro. “If you start forming the perimeter, Major, I’ll direct the other vehicles over to you.”

Cerro ignored the fact that Aiken thought he was the major. “Sounds good to me, Sergeant Major.”

Confused, Aiken walked up to Cerro, confirmed who he was, then apologized. “Sorry, thought you were Major Nihart, sir.”

“The major’s been hit. He’s out of it for now.”

“Anything we can do?”

Cerro looked around as he answered. “No, the major will be all right, I think. His driver’s with him now, taking care of him. Besides, you and I got a lot to do out here. If you will go on over there, Sergeant Major, and direct the incoming trucks to me, I’ll start circling the wagons.”

Aiken was about to respond when a red star cluster popped over the portion of the column that was still on the road. “What do you suppose that means, Captain?”

Cerro looked at the star cluster, noting that the ambushers were increasing their rate of fire. “I don’t know, Sergeant Major. But I have a sneaking suspicion we’re gonna find out. Until then, let’s get a move on and form this here perimeter.”

Aiken, looking at the road one last time before setting out, sighed,

“Big Al’s going to be pissed.”

“Pardon my apparent disrespect, Sergeant Major, but screw Big Al.

Right now, I’m more concerned about the yahoo that’s directing the ambush and what he’s thinking.”