by Ian Slater
“Anyone get out?”
“Don’t know.”
“Shit!”
In Aussie Lewis’s wry assessment, the usual fuckups had begun.
“Where are those friggin’ Blackbirds?” asked the Stallion’s copilot, who had narrowly missed being killed.
“On the way,” his pilot told him. Relax.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Relax, Evers,” repeated the pilot more sternly. “I know this is your first hot mission, but we’ve a ways to go. Freeman and Tibbet know what they’re doing.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I know it’s hard, Dave, but you’ve been trained by the best. You’ll be fine.”
But there was trouble aboard the Stallion. It was coming from a hoarse-voiced general, Douglas Freeman, who, by sheer accident during a chat with a mortar crewman, discovered that the marine, indeed the entire mortar crew and one of its M40A1-marine-trained snipers aboard the Stallion, had by some oversight been through marine Colonel Cobb Martens’ weapons training battalion — made famous by Colonel Michael Nance — without having been given an AK-47 or AK-74 familiarization course. Freeman told the pilot to radio Tibbet, who, red-faced, sent an encrypted fast-blast message to Yorktown to the effect that anyone waiting in the second wave who was not familiar with firing either the AK-47 or AK-74 must be so instructed. Immediately.
There was a problem. There were no AK-47s or AK-74s on the Yorktown. It was an American ship, for crying out loud.
“What?” was the general’s thunderous reply. He couldn’t believe that in the twelve vessels that constituted the Seventh Fleet there wasn’t a single AK-47 in any of the ship’s armories. It seemed particularly improbable, given the popularity of the virtually indestructible Russian weapon among British and American Special Ops teams like his.
“I know where there’re some,” Aussie Lewis assured him. “Unofficial, of course. They’ve got ’em stashed in McCain’s armory. There’s an ex-marine captain there with special arms training. He was wounded in Iraq. He’s now working in McCain’s Blue Tile. He’s, ah, what you might call a ‘collector.’”
“Is he?” said Freeman who, turning to Lieutenant Terry Chester, one of Jack Tibbet’s platoon commanders, ordered, “Message Yorktown that Colonel Tibbet and I expect every marine to know how to fire and strip an AK-47 before our Stallions return to pick them up. If we get into a logistics screwup and anyone runs short of ammo, an AK-47 snatched off a dead Russian might be the thing that turns the tide.”
On the Yorktown, the general’s “turn the tide” phrase was met with skepticism, but not, as one might have expected, by the veterans, who knew how an extra clip of ammo could save your hide. The skepticism came more from those young Leathernecks who hadn’t been in action before, whose number comprised about seven hundred of the MEU’s total sixteen hundred personnel. Some of them, such as young Peter Norton, who, though he had never met Freeman, knew something of him, understood that he was fanatical about logistical details, one of his ruling adages being “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.” And had they known Freeman, skeptics would also have known that Douglas Freeman’s attention to logistical detail had been justified by every hostile engagement he’d been part of.
“How far to target?” Aussie asked the Stallion’s burly crew chief.
“A hundred and forty-seven miles,” said the chief.
“That by road?” Aussie asked, leaning forward expectantly, elbows pressing down hard on his pack. Sal and Gomez were watching intently.
“As the crow flies,” answered the crew chief.
“Well,” said Aussie, “I’m not a fucking crow!” and sat back, visibly more relaxed. So were the other team members. It was a curious “good luck” ritual for Aussie, normally the least superstitious of men. At some point at the beginning of a mission he would always ask the crew chief, “How far to target?” and hold his breath. If the reply was so many miles or clicks, Aussie would ask, “That by road?” and the reply, common enough in the airborne services, was usually “As the crow flies.” As long as the crew chief’s answer had “crow” in it, it was a sign to Aussie that the mission would be successful.
“Ya hear that, boys?” he shouted at his team. “As the fucking crow flies.”
“What? — ” said Sal absently, checking his weapon. “Oh yeah, crow — right.”
“Gonna be a piece o’ cake!” said Aussie.
“No problem,” said Freeman, who was keen to maintain high morale, but he and Tibbet had pored over the logistics of “the devil’s domain” and knew the crucial element on this mission was not surprise — that had been lost because of CNN — but rapid resupply. Otherwise, as the general and colonel concurred, it could be a monumental balls-up, the general’s second Priest Lake.
What the general hadn’t told Aussie or the team — had never told them — was that he made it his business before every mission to give the crew chief aboard their helo or landing craft a heads-up about Aussie’s “crow.” In a team where there were few, if any, secrets, this was an exception that the general had made.
No matter how close he and his men had become over the years, he believed that for each member there had to be a moat across which neither friend nor foe should venture, an inviolable port that was the private preserve of secrets which only men and their Maker knew, the terrible memories of comrades lost, like Bone Brady, the fatally wounded SpecOp soldier whom, years before, Douglas Freeman had shot at point-blank range. It was the man’s face, head flung back, eyes rolling comically and all the more grotesquely for that, bloodied teeth, bottom jaw sliding from side to side, that haunted the general. No matter that Brady had begged to be put out of his misery, the face would rise up in the gut-tightening minutes before deployment.
For a moment, Douglas Freeman’s head slumped in shame, but he sat up quickly, ramrod straight, and made as if to clear his eye of grit, always a problem with so many men and things aboard, packed tightly together. “Know that fella Orwell?” he shouted at Johnny Lee. “Limey who wrote that Animal Farm?”
“Read it in school,” said Johnny, straining for his naturally high-pitched voice to rise above the roar of the helo’s three big turboshafts.
“Yeah,” said Freeman, pushing Bone Brady’s face out of range, turning his attention to maintaining morale. “Well, Orwell said that he sometimes thought life was a constant battle against dirt.” Freeman wiped his eye with his sleeve, hoping that their brownish green camouflage uniforms wouldn’t stand out too starkly against the ice. In frozen marshland the camouflage would be perfect, but not against the white sheet of a frozen lake. “Aussie!” he called out.
“Sir!” shouted Aussie obediently, like a good marine, that is, more formally than he would have had only the team members been present.
“Joke,” ordered the general.
They hit an air pocket.
“Choir barfing?” asked Aussie.
“Not yet,” said Salvini. “Is that the joke?”
There was laughter now in the dark, stuffy, dimly lit interior.
Choir smiled and doffed his Fritz to Aussie as if his horse had just won the Triple Crown. “Do,” said Choir, raising his voice, imitating an upper-class snob, “tell us your amusement.”
“My amusement?” said Aussie, head back in mock surprise. “Screwing.”
“Screwing what?” shouted a marine, name tag “Picard.”
“Anything that moves!” shouted Salvini.
“Birds,” said Aussie, feigning indignation, using the Australian slang for young women. “Nice-looking birds.”
“How ’bout one of those protected—” began a marine, name tag “Jackson, K.,” who was nursing a squad automatic weapon, “—What d’you call those birds?”
“Cranes,” said Marine Picard. “Yeah, would you screw a crane, Aussie?”
“He’d have to stand very still,” Aussie answered. “I wouldn�
��t chase the bugger!”
Catcalls and raucous laughter broke out so noisily that they momentarily drowned out the “whoomp whoomp” of the Stallion.
“Fussy,” said Choir, now adopting a cockney accent that made his pronunciation sound like “pussy.”
Aussie was suddenly alert. “Pussy? Where?”
The entire marine platoon was laughing and chortling at the silly banter, Marine Jackson, who’d initiated the exchange with Aussie, now being referred to as “Pussy,” a name that he knew as a marine would stick to him as long as he was in the corps — or dead.
“Joke!” another marine insisted. “That Aussie isn’t quitting on us, is he?”
“No way!” replied Aussie.
“Keep it clean,” said Freeman. “Women aboard.”
Aussie’s head shot up. “Where? Show me where!”
A lone hand was raised. She was an African American, Melissa Thomas, Tibbet’s MEU’s first woman combatant.
“No problem,” said Aussie. “It’s as clean as a whistle.”
“Stand up!” someone ordered Aussie.
“For the lady, sure,” said Aussie. “I don’t mind—”
“No,” shouted a SAW gunner. “So we can fuckin’ shoot you if it isn’t funny.” That got a big laugh, one of the loudest coming from the general who, as much as any of them, probably wouldn’t have laughed at this nonsense during stand-down time but whose unspoken anxiety about going into combat would lead him to grasp on to anything that would offer temporary relief.
“Well,” said Aussie, “this young married couple, both marines—”
“Hey!” shouted someone. “No same-sex marriage in the corps bullshit. Right, Thomas?”
“Right!” Melissa shouted.
“Let him finish,” said a gunny, one of those sergeants who ran the corps.
“Right,” said Aussie, raising his voice to a near shout. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah, get on with it!”
“So,” began Aussie, “this couple are arguin’ about who should get up to make coffee every morning, and the guy says to his wife, ‘I think you should be the one to brew the coffee. You’re the woman of the house,’ and she says, ‘Don’t give me that crap. We’re both working, so I don’t see why you can’t get up and brew the coffee.’ So this argument goes on about who should brew the friggin’ coffee an’ she sees it’s going nowhere so she says, ‘Will you take scriptural authority on this?’ The guy says, ‘Scriptural? — You mean the Bible?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ He thinks for a mo, then says, ‘Okay. Bring it out.’ And there it was in the New Testament: ‘He-brews.’”
There was a concerted groan within the Super Stallion. “Shoot ’im!” someone shouted, but still they liked it. The joke had done just what Freeman had wanted it to do, channeling the precombat jitters, especially amongst those, such as Melissa Thomas, who Tibbet had told Freeman had been too young for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and for whom “Operation Bird Rescue” was their first real mission.
“That,” the general told Aussie, “is the corniest damn joke I’ve ever heard.”
“I like it!” shouted Choir.
“Yeah, you would,” said Aussie, “you Bible-thumping Welsh turd.”
“Thank you,” riposted Choir, “very much.”
Freeman was grinning, but Melissa Thomas, sitting at the rear of the starboard row of canvas-webbed seats by the Stallion’s door, wasn’t. She envied the ease with which each member of Freeman’s six-man SpecWar team enjoyed one another’s humor. She still couldn’t get that kind of response from her rifle squad, no matter that ever since she’d responded to the commercial on TV that showed marines fast-roping down from a haze-gray helicopter, freeze-framed as they raced into action from the helo, she’d done all that was required of her. “Can you do it?” the commercial’s narrator had challenged. “If you can, you’re one of the best.”
Her brother Danny “dissed” the ad as elitist, and that’s precisely what appealed to her — that and the stirring background rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” It was an old story: the military as the African American’s way out of the ghetto. If you couldn’t dribble and sink a basketball in her Detroit ghetto or get a scholarship to college, your horizons were very limited. The Marine Corps, after a dogged battle against Congress, had finally been forced to yield, and women were in. But that was only half the battle. Female marines had not been allowed in ground combat units. Being assigned to Operation Bird Rescue meant that Melissa Thomas was the first female marine in history to be purposely put in harm’s way rather than in a supportive capacity aboard ship. Melissa had learned much, particularly about self-reliance, the corps having the lowest officer-to-personnel ratio in any of the United States Armed Forces, and she said a prayer asking God to help her to be strong, conscious of the fact that she was a trailblazer, not only as an African American but as the first female marine to be in combat on the ground. She thought of the bus journey to Parris Island along the lonely, two-lane elevated road over the swamps and the ebb and flow of the salt marshes of South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, recalling the moment when she’d first come to stand in the painted yellow footprints in front of the receiving shed, knowing that there were drill instructors who wanted her to fail.
Ever since she was a young girl in Detroit she had always wanted to be part of a shipboard marine contingent, her uncle explaining how a marine’s original role in the English navy was to go aloft, high into the rigging, so as to snipe the enemy and to enforce the captain’s discipline on their own ship. With images of raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima dancing in her head during the hard, unforgiving physical and mental conditioning of Parris now behind her, she had become the first ever female marine combatant to be assigned to an amphibious unit aboard the floating military airbase called Yorktown. But with few exceptions, Melissa had been only grudgingly accepted by her fellow marines, an outsider informally assigned to little more than “swab deck” status aboard Yorktown, no matter that she had qualified in everything they threw at her. She’d run the marine gauntlet from the recruits’ “fright night” in her “Forming Phase” to Phase I’s backbreaking, sinew-sapping PT to Phase II’s mastery of the M16A2 5.56 mm combat rifle to North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune as the first female recruit ever to attend the School of Infantry, hitherto the sole preserve of male recruits. And finally, there was graduation day when her DI presented her with the coveted eagle-topped globe and anchor emblem of the United State Marine Corps, and for Melissa the special moment when she introduced her dad, now frail with age and eyes brimming with tears of pride, to DI Morgana Schmidt. Schmidt, a black belt — level martial arts drill instructor of the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion, had overseen recruit Thomas and the other 69 recruits in the platoon all the way from Pick-Up briefing to graduation, carefully, at times roughly, guiding Melissa through the morphing of yet another civilian into a United States Marine.
As the Super Stallion hit a series of sharp wind shears, she felt a wave of nausea pass through her, something she had not felt since experiencing what her DI had introduced as a “visit to the pool,” a gross understatement, if Melissa had ever heard one, of the terrifying requirement of each marine to float in full battle dress and boots in the dreaded water-training facility.
Even now, the memory of impending drowning and the palpable dread one experienced on approaching the hated drop boards over the water which she, like any other recruit, had to master, still haunted her dreams, and now, as the Stallion continued to buck, she prayed to God, as she had prayed with the Yorktown’s padre, that she would not find herself in deep water in combat.
As they approached the gray, socked-in coastline of Russia’s wild and lonely far eastern coast, turbulence struck the Super Stallions.
“Need a bag?” Sal asked Choir.
“How ’bout a bucket?” proffered Aussie.
Choir’s expression segued from mild anxiety into a broad smile. “I’m feeling great.”
>
The Stallion dropped again, the G-force lifting many of the marines off the web-seats to clearly voiced expressions of disapproval from the men and Melissa who, on this helo alone, formed a third of the MEU’s Bravo rifle company which, in turn, constituted one of the three rifle companies of what would be the MEU’s battalion landing team.
Freeman saw the alarm on Melissa’s face, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared, marine discipline arresting any potential show of alarm. For her to have complained or even sworn would have immediately been seen as a typical “skirt” reaction. The parent in Freeman wanted to reassure her that the turbulence would probably subside as soon as they passed over the coastal mountains between Glazkovka and Cape Titova on the air route that he and Tibbet had selected through the valleys between the Kiyevka and Ussuri rivers. But the officer in him told him not to single her out; it would only reinforce her marginalization, which he’d sensed, albeit subtly, during liftoff from Yorktown. Still—
“Well,” announced the Stallion’s crew chief, “we’re well past Cape Titova!” Hoots and laughter followed.
“Bring it on!” yelled someone.
Freeman saw Melissa Thomas smile, trying to be one of the boys, and he empathized with her sense of being an outsider — everyone had such moments — and thought about how he might help her to feel included in the team. He asked a marine in the mortar squad, a loader, about Thomas’s classification.
“She’s an E-2, S/S, sir.”
“Ah,” said Freeman, the designation telling him she was a private first class with sniping credentials. Impressive.
“Yes, sir,” continued the loader. “She’s a good shot.”
A “good shot” was an understatement. S/S told the general that this marine with the shy, dark eyes had been tough enough to have graduated from Parris with not only a high score in marksmanship but also the designation “Scout/Sniper.” It was an outstanding achievement, but for a woman in a man’s world, it was yet another way of moving herself, albeit unwittingly, further from her fellow marines. The rifle with the big scope told Freeman that Melissa must have been able to repeatedly hit a man-sized target in the head at ranges greater than half a mile. You didn’t have to be a giant to do that occasionally, but to do it consistently meant you had to be strong and have iron nerves. “Nerves of iron,” Freeman used to tell his recruits, “not nerves of steel, because steel springs back at you. No, you need iron will to lie there for hours in your hide, not moving so much as a hair. Waiting, controlling your bladder sphincter through sheer will. You might have the luxury of a scope spotter to share the mission with you, or you might be alone.” It was Douglas Freeman’s intention, as had always been his inclination, to make the outsider feel at home.
