by Bob Mayer
Boomer, still hiding himself from direct view of the people in the room, watched as Coulder started talking, wishing he could read lips.
“What are they talking about in there?”
Boomer asked.
The sergeant major shrugged.
“Don’t know. I’m the senior enlisted man in the tunnel and no one tells me shit.”
“Who are they?”
Skibicki looked and checked off people with a glance.
“As you know, the full bull at the podium is our exalted leader.
Colonel Coulder. The guy with the thinning blond hair works in J-3, Operations, up at USPACOM. I don’t recognize the major or the other colonel who”—Skibicki threw a questioning glance at Boomer—“you apparently know, but I don’t.”
“That colonel is from the JCS. He’s the Special Operations liaison.
His name is Decker,” Boomer said.
Coulder was slapping his pointer on the blue marking ocean, off to the west of the island. Suddenly Coulder stopped and looked straight through the glass at the sergeant major. He snapped something and the major stood up and drew the curtains on the far side of the glass, blocking off the view.
“Assholes,” Skibicki said angrily.
“That’s fucking insulting.
I’ve served in this man’s Army since Christ was a corporal, and they’re hiding things from me like they don’t trust me.” He rubbed his grizzled chin.
“Special Ops liaison from the JCS, eh? There’s some weird shit going on around here lately.”
Boomer relaxed slightly now that he couldn’t be spotted, but he was anxious to be out of the tunnel before the meeting broke up and Decker came out. He was absolutely the last person Boomer had expected to run into here.
Boomer turned his attention to more personal matters.
“Hey, sergeant major, is there someplace on post where we can go get a cup of coffee and a donut?” Boomer asked, wanting to get the story about his father out of the old man as much as he wanted to avoid Decker.
“Yeah.” Skibicki stood and grabbed his green beret, squashing it down on his iron-gray hair.
“Let’s go talk. It stinks in here.”
The snack bar Skibicki took Boomer to was an old World War II structure. One of thousands of “temporary” buildings, constructed during the war at dozens of Army posts and then used for the next fifty years by the military, another curious example of the spending practices of the defense establishment. Billions could be spent on a new airplane, but purchasing a new boot or better living quarters for the actual soldier was usually very low on the priority list. Boomer figured it was more a question of contractor and politician than soldier needs.
Inside the building. Boomer grabbed a couple of cups of coffee and a plateful of donuts and joined Skibicki who was joshing with the little old woman who worked the register.
“Boomer, meet Maggie Skibicki, my mom,” the sergeant major said.
“Mom, this young fellow is Boomer Watson.
I served with his dad.”
“Well, you are getting old, aren’t you. Ski? I don’t want to think what that says about me,” she joked.
“Pleased to meet you. Boomer,” Maggie said as she took his money.
Her face was wrinkled with the years, but her eyes were a piercing blue that had lost nothing over time. They gazed at Boomer, and he felt that look cut into him.
“Nice to meet you,” Boomer replied.
Skibicki led the way to a corner table where he sat down, his back square in the corner, facing the empty room.
“Mom’s been here at Shafter for over twenty years. She used to work up at Schofield Barracks.
“My dad was retired Navy. Mom’s what they call a Pearl Harbor survivor. She was living out by Pearl back in’fortyone.
Dad was on board the Enterprise, so it’s one of those strange twists of fate that she was here for the attack on Pearl Harbor and he wasn’t.
They used to joke about that all the time. He spent thirty years in the Navy. He died about four years back. Mom’s past mandatory retirement age, but she’s got a special exception from the post commander to work. She likes to get out and be around people.
You ever need to know anything about this island, you ask her.”
Boomer glanced across the room at the old woman with slightly different eyes. All he knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor were news clips and boring lectures at West Point.
“You need to go out there to Pearl,” Skibicki continued.
“It’s very interesting. Ask Maggie about it if you get the chance.”
“You said you served with my dad?” Boomer prompted.
Skibicki nodded. He reached into the breast pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a piece of cardboard and carefully unfolded it, revealing a faded picture inside.
“You ever heard of Projects B-50 or B-57?”
Boomer nodded.
“We used their after-action reports when I was in 10th Group to help write our team SOPS. B-50 and B-57 were the cross border operations 5th Group ran during the war to gather intelligence.”
Skibicki laid a photograph on the table top. A very young-looking Skibicki wearing tiger-stripe fatigues and sporting a CAR-15 stood next to another American, also wearing the distinctive fatigues and holding a short-barreled grenade launcher in one hand and an AK-47 in the other.
Four indigenous soldiers, dressed in fatigues and carrying AK-47s stood in front of the taller Americans. Boomer instantly recognized the second American as his father.
“There weren’t that many of us in S-F at any one time, although this was in’ sixty-nine when they were taking any Tom, Dick, and Harry and giving them a beret and shooting them across the borders because we were taking such high casualties,” the sergeant major explained.
“I was in the 173rd Airborne during my first tour, and when I went back for my second, they were hurting for bodies so they were taking even non-S-F people into the recon teams. Any idiot that was dumb enough to volunteer and had combat experience was accepted. So that’s how I became Special Forces-qualified in’ sixty-eight.”
He tapped the photo.”
“This was recon team Kansas.
Each team was named after a state. This picture was taken a week before we went on our last mission.”
Skibicki took a sip of coffee, then continued.
“Let me give you some background so you understand what happened.
“Sixty-eight and’sixty-nine were bad-ass years in the war. It was after Tet, and, despite what those pissant reporters said, we were kicking ass. The fucking NVA had run for the hills and was licking its wounds across the borders in Laos and Cambodia. The only time they showed up to fight was when they were sure they could hit us by surprise.
So in order not be surprised, in October of sixty eight the Blackboard Collection Plan was instigated by some Intelligence clink in Saigon.
The idea was to coordinate all surveillance and reconnaissance assets running operations near or over the borders.
“Project Gamma, of which project B-57 was a part, was the Special Forces’ contribution to the Blackboard effort.
And even though we only supplied six percent of the total flow of information to MACV, our stuff turned out to be over half the good intel. That was’cause we went in on the ground and put our beady little eyeballs right on the shit. We didn’t fly over at thirty thousand feet and guesstimate or drop in sensors that fucking deer could set off and the Air Force would waste a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of bombs “on making venison. When we said something was there, it was there right in front of us.
“Anyway, we would work off of humint — human intelligence — about possible enemy locations. We’d get some info, then go in and verify.
Well, in early’sixty-nine our sources started drying up. And the info we were getting was tainted. We lost several teams. They just went out, and it was like they disappeared into a black hole. We later found out what was hap
pening: there was a double-agent at Nha Trang turning the teams.” Skibicki waved his hand.
“I’ll get back to that.”
“In May of’sixty-nine we got information about an NVA regiment staging right across the border from an A Camp at Long Le Chon so we were ordered to go in and check it out. Your dad was the team commander, I was the man with the radio, and we had four’little people’—Montagnard natives — along for security.”
Skibicki’s eyes were unfocused as he remembered.
“It was supposed to be a quick in and out, just to check to see if the bad guys were preparing to attack. It wasn’t straightforward though.
They moved us out of the normal launch site to another place. It was somewhere I’d never seen before and it sure wasn’t S-F run. We got a briefing from some CIA dude assigned to CCN — Combat Control North — and they gave us a spook straphanger. Your dad didn’t like that one bit, but that’s the bitch of being in the green machine; our’s is but to do and die, right?”
Skibicki didn’t wait for an answer.
“So we went in on one slick. We had two Cobras flying cover — two Cobras painted black. Air America at work. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff the CIA had working over there. Just the little I saw at that camp hinted at an operation beyond anything that’s ever been written or talked about.
“Everything went to shit from the word go. We didn’t go in where we were supposed to. I had no idea where the fuck we were but it certainly wasn’t across the border from Long Le Chon. Your dad was arguing with the spook. Right there on the fucking landing zone they’re having a Goddamn argument. Talk about giving you the shits.
Your dad wanted us out. The spook overruled him. Your dad had me come up on the guard net and call for extraction. CCN denied it and told us to continue mission. Except now we didn’t know what the fuck the mission was, other than go with this spook and watch his ass. And that guy was none too happy about us coming up on the radio trying to get out of there.”
Skibicki shook his head.
“If I’d have known then what I know now, I would have greased the spook right then and there and called in a’prairie fire’—that was our code word for emergency extraction. We had our own air assets and we could have gotten out, although there would have been hell to pay later. But we still had that good Army training: follow orders, even if you don’t know where the fuck they’re coming from. I’ll tell you one thing I learned from that: if you ever get in the position where you got to kill someone to keep the shit from hitting the fan, kill’em, drive on, and don’t say a fucking word about it. That’s what we should have done.
“But I hadn’t learned that yet. So, there we were over the border, moving west and north along this ridgeline to some mysterious fucking rendezvous when we got hit. We had one of the little people at point and he got his shit blown away.” Skibicki looked Boomer in the eyes.
“You ever been on the receiving end in an ambush?”
Boomer shook his head, remembering the screams of the wounded near the bus.
“But you been shot at right?”
“Yeah, I’ve been shot at.”
“Well,” Skibicki continued, “you know it isn’t like in the movies. It was confusing as crap. Your dad was screaming for us to break contact and move down ridge Not the preferred direction, but we didn’t have much choice since they already had the high ground. Of course the spook didn’t know our immediate actions drills, but he knew enough to get out of the way and run. We broke contact, leaving behind two of our little people dead and the rest of us all hit somewhere. I had shrapnel wounds all along my left side from a grenade, but fear can be a mighty motivator.
We beat feet, leapfrogging. Two men laying down a base of fire, two running, then alternating. The spook helped some, he had a Swedish K and he emptied a magazine now and then over our heads.
“To make a long story short, we ran until we hit the first piece of open ground we could find. The spook got on the radio and called in for extraction from his people. Then we got hit on the edge of the PZ.
Those son-of-a-bitches. whoever the fuck they were, wanted us bad. The spook got hit right at the start — caught a round through the chest. We lost the last two Montagnards and your dad took a round through his thigh. I was bandaging up the spook, trying to seal off his sucking chest wound, when I opened up the small ruck he was carrying, looking for anything I could use to block off the air coming out of the hole in his lung.
“There was gold in there. Four fucking bars of gold.”
Skibicki laughed bitterly.
“Of course that shit wasn’t very useful at the moment. That’s when I got hit again.” He tapped the side of his head.
“Lucky I got a thick skull.”
Skibicki fell silent and Boomer waited for a few seconds.
“Then what happened?” he finally asked.
“The black Cobra gunships came in. Your dad directed their fire using the spook’s radio. Jesus, he was great, Boomer.” Skibicki shook his head wonderingly at that day so long ago. “A true fucking professional. I was half out of it. I couldn’t see a damn thing; my eyes were full of blood, and I had a hell of a headache,” he said.
“I just kept firing in the general direction of the bad guys which wasn’t hard to do since we were surrounded.
“Your dad carried me out to the slick that came in. He threw me on board and he went back to get the spook. That was a big mistake. He was carrying the spook back when they got cut down. The bad guys must have brought up a heavy machine gun by that time and they opened up from the treeline. We got the bodies on board and the pilots got us the hell out of there in a hurry. The bird took a lot of hits on the way out but it got back in one piece.” Skibicki looked at Boomer.
“Your dad and the spook were KIA.”
“But that’s not what his citation read,” Boomer said. He knew a bit about classified operations and he was confused.
“How did my dad get a Medal of Honor for a cross-border mission? I thought all that stuff got buried deep. Hell, there’s guys who got wounded on some of those cross border missions who still can’t get VA treatment since their wounds aren’t recorded anywhere because they weren’t legally supposed to be where they were when they got hit.
The citation said he was killed defending an A Camp in South Vietnam, not across the border.”.
Skibicki gave a wicked grin.
“I did that. Me and the Special Operations Commander in-country. Colonel Rison. I was in the hospital recovering when Rison came to ask me what had happened. When I told him, he wrote up the award just as you saw it. The CIA backed the story. It was a trade-off. I kept silent about what really happened and your dad got the CMH. It was the least we could do for him.”
“What did happen?” Boomer asked. “What was that guy carrying gold for?”
“You know what CIA stands for, don’t you?” Skibicki didn’t bother to wait for an answer.
“Cocaine in America. Those guys were running a whole’nother show over there. Still probably are.”
“It was a drug operation?” Boomer asked, not as shocked as he probably should have been; his years in Delta had shown him a thing or two about the real world.
Skibicki shrugged.
“I don’t know that for sure, but what the hell else would that guy be carrying gold bars into the jungle for? He might have been paying some mercenary groups that were in the Cia’s employ. At least that was what the spooks briefed me afterwards, but I think that’s a bullshit cover story. If we were going in to pay off mercenaries, why didn’t we just land at the mercenaries’ camp.
If we were paying them, they should have been friendly, right?”
Skibicki shook his head.
“No, I heard enough and seen enough over there to know. It was a drug op. Gold for drugs, which they could turn a big profit on back here in the states. How the hell do you think they can fund all their bullshit? And those people who were after us wanted us a hell of a lot more
than the VC and NVA usually did. They wanted us real bad to absorb the casualties they took.”
“But what about the Army?” Boomer asked.
“Didn’t the Special Ops commander — this Colonel Rison — do anything about his people getting caught up in that?”
“Listen, Boomer. I don’t know what the hell you’ve been doing, but let me tell you a few things I’ve learned in my time. One is that you don’t fuck with the CIA. And the other is that the CIA and the top ranks of the Army are wired in tight. It’s us guys wearing the green beanies who are on the outside. Everyone always thinks the CIA is some world unto its own, but you just need to look at its history to see that it was formed right out of the Army at the end of the Second World War. And its aims and the Army’s have never been very far apart. Hell, Boomer, whenever you give someone a whole lot of power, then cloak it in secrecy in the name of national security, you got the ingredients for some bad shit to happen.
“Hell, that whole fucking war was just like a big game for some of them people. Think about it. What the fuck were we doing? We didn’t fight it to win, and we didn’t fight it to lose. We just sort of dicked around until the damn civilians had enough of it and made us come home.”
Boomer had heard it all before from other veterans. He was surprised, though, when Skibicki leaned forward and grabbed his arm.
“You went to West Point, didn’t you? I heard you took the Presidential from your dad’s medal.”
“Yeah,” Boomer said, extracting his arm from the other man’s fierce grip.
“That’s pretty ironic,” Skibicki growled, “considering how it was West Pointers that got your dad killed.”
“What do you mean? You said it was the CIA.”
“Colonel Rison was a West Pointer. He told me about some of the shit that was going on. Hell, they tried to courtmartial him about six months after your dad got killed.”
“What happened to him?” Boomer asked.
