Chapter 23: Fourth of the Fourth

September 2003 - December 2003

Dad drove me over to Hartsfield International in Atlanta Thursday morning, sometime around the crack of dawn. Mom stayed at home, which was a good thing, because she spent most of Wednesday night and Thursday morning crying. She was a total basket case, even though I was only going to New York. I didn’t want to be around her when I ended up going overseas. I had to be there early, because I was on a very cheap Delta flight, and you had to be there two hours early to go through security.

This was the first time I had ever actually been on an airplane, and I was excited by the idea. Kelly was the person with the passport and the trips back and forth to Europe. The Reaper family were not jetsetters. A big trip for us was in Mom’s Sienna to Myrtle Beach for summer vacation. Dad parked it and helped me unload. I only had my two duffle bags and my chimp box. I slung one of the bags on my back and put the second on top of the chimp box, and then shook Dad’s hand.

“Call when you get there,” he said.

“I’ll call when they let me call,” I replied, smiling.

“Smartass.” He shook his head, and then said, “Seriously, don’t do anything stupid, like get your ass shot off. Your mother would kill us both if that happened.”

“Grandpa said the same thing.”

Dad snorted at that. “At least he managed to stay out of trouble while he was in the Army. I don’t think you’re going to have the same luxury.” He noticed a cop motioning him away. “Take care. Got to go.” Dad climbed back in his truck and left.

I awkwardly bent and picked up my remaining gear. A guy with a cart came over, but I figured I would need to tip him, so I simply smiled and shook my head. Once inside the terminal I looked around and found a Delta ticket gate and headed there. As soon as I got in line, I dropped my bags to the floor. I could push them from here on out. I pulled my orders packet out and dug out the ticket and the typed orders, along with my driver’s license and military identification. That should suffice to get through security.

If people had to go through this kind of security all the time, I dreaded the thought of having to travel for a living. I needed to prove who I was to get a ticket, check my bags, and collect a boarding pass, but then I needed to go to a place near my gate and go through another screening to get inside a secure area to get to the gate. I had checked all my bags, but I noticed a lot of people with a single carry-on bag. That made me wonder what would happen if Delta lost my luggage. I was probably screwed then. The flight was supposed to take just over two hours.

Some people get scared on planes, but it was all so new to me it was pretty exciting. We were cramped, but I had spent so much time lately packed into places and vehicles with my fellow soldiers I didn’t much care. I did notice that a lot of my fellow passengers treated me very nicely, thanking me for my service, and the stewardess gave me an extra packet of peanuts with my Coke once we were airborne. We were flying in a Boeing 737, and it made an appalling amount of noise, but it stayed in the air and nobody else seemed concerned by it. Maybe that was how all airplanes were. We got into Syracuse a little before noon.

I saw another soldier when I got to baggage claim. The other soldier was already there, and he saw me and nodded. Shit, he was a staff sergeant! I snapped to parade rest, and he laughed. “At ease, soldier. This isn’t an inspection.”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

He shook his head in amusement. “Reporting in from training?”

“Yes, Sergeant!” His last name was Rossman, according to the name tag on his uniform.

“Calm down, soldier. I have better ways to waste my time than by writing you up for not being respectful, especially since you’re being respectful. Heading to Drum?”

“Yes, Sergeant.” I dug into my pocket and came out with the orders packet. “I’m supposed to report to the Reception Center once I get my luggage.”

He took the orders out of my hands and reviewed them, nodding to himself. “Okay, stick with me. My wife is waiting for me, and we’ll give you a lift to Drum. They’ll set you up for the night. You’ll be spending a few days in the Reception Company before they send you to wherever you’re going. Just coming from Benning?”

“Yes, Sergeant ... uh, don’t I have to go to the Reception Center? I don’t want to get in trouble.”

He chuckled. “All they’ll do is tell somebody they have to send a passenger van here to pick you up. That gets done every two or three hours, and all they do is take you to In-Processing. You can wait around here until they feel like rescuing you or you can catch a lift with me.”

“Okay, as long as I get where I have to go, I guess.”

“You’ll catch on. Don’t worry about it. My wife should be waiting for us, but I’ll call and make sure.” With that he pulled out a cell phone and made a call, and then we were able to get our luggage. He had a lot less than I did, so he grabbed my extra duffle, and we went to the front exit. Five minutes later an old minivan pulled up and beeped.

The driver was a pretty, blonde woman, a little pudgy but not too much. “Rescuing lost puppies again?” she asked.

“Hey, honey, we just need to drop Private Reaper off at the Reception Company. After that he’s on his own,” explained Staff Sergeant Rossman.

We loaded our stuff in the back of the minivan, and an hour-and-a-half later we were going through what appeared to be the main gate at Fort Drum. At first I was confused when we turned away from what looked like the main post and was surprised when the Rossmans pulled up to a World-War-Two-style building with a sign that read “Tenth Replacement Company”. I unloaded my gear and thanked the Rossmans, and then headed inside. There was a short line of soldiers and I got in the line.

There was a Specialist at the counter when I got there, and he simply asked me for my orders. He couldn’t care less about the fact that I didn’t call and ask for transportation. In fact, he looked supremely bored when I tried to explain, so I just stopped. “Okay, it’s too late in the day to process you in, so you are staying the night here. I’ll issue you bed linens and a room and get you a meal card. That gets you dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. Report back to this desk at 0900 tomorrow for In-Processing. Got that?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

He sighed and repeated himself, and then had me follow him. I grabbed all my gear, and we went down a short hall. He stopped at a linen closet and pulled out a stack of bedsheets and towels. The Specialist was on the verge of handing them to me, but he realized I had no way to carry them. He held onto them and led the way down another hall to a small barracks. Stopping at an empty room, he ushered me inside and set the linens down on a naked bed. He handed me a key and the meal card. “If you hustle, you can catch the shuttle over to the D-FAC and catch dinner. Breakfast starts at 0600. The shuttle bus will be right outside in ten minutes.”

I dropped my gear. I could make my bed when I got back. “Thank you.”

“Welcome to the Tenth Mountain.”

I signed a receipt for the key and room and followed him back to the lobby and went out and waited for the bus.

At 0900 the next morning I was back at the front desk. Nobody had told me I had to pack my gear up, but outside of a fresh uniform, I hadn’t really made myself at home. It would be a minute’s work to pack everything. I had my orders in hand.

I spent the next three workdays going through all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense, all done in classic Army hurry-up-and-wait fashion. I got a break after the first day, Friday, since nothing much happened over the weekend. I was allowed to travel around the post, including the Post Exchange and movie theater, so I walked around and took the shuttle bus and explored. On Monday it was back to In-Processing.

There were quite a few of us, all new and reporting in, but I didn’t recognize anybody except by their hair styles. I knew Riley Fox was coming to Fort Drum, also, but he must have been a day before or after me. We got lectures on the history of the Tenth Mountain Division, listened to all sorts of rules about what we could and couldn’t do (don’t get drunk was number one, don’t drink and drive was number two, and so forth.) I had to attend lectures and training on sexual harassment, being kind to civilians, weapons handling, post regulations, and all sorts of things. A lot of it was stuff I had already learned at Basic a few weeks ago. After every lecture we had to sign a form stating we had been to the lecture.

I was on the verge of asking why we were getting told this stuff again, when another soldier out of AIT asked. The sergeant giving the lecture simply answered. “So that when you fuck up, and we know you will, you can’t say you were never told, and we can hammer you to our hearts’ content. Good enough?”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

I also got another physical, even though I had gotten one right before leaving Fort Benning. After that we were split into smaller groups and sent to where we were assigned. Not everybody who was there was going to be in the infantry. It was just that everybody had to go through the Reception Company to get anywhere else.

I was taken, along with a few other soldiers, some privates like me, but a couple of Specialists and a Staff Sergeant also, over to the Second Brigade Combat Team. We went through some more sorting out at Brigade, and then got divvied up further. I was walked over to my battalion, Fourth of the Fourth - Fourth Battalion, Fourth Infantry Regiment - which was one of the three infantry battalions in the Brigade. (That was one of the crazier aspects to all this. Brigades are made up of a bunch of smaller battalions, but the numbering is nutty. The Second Brigade (“Commandos”) consisted of the Second of the Fourteenth (“Golden Dragons”), Fourth of the Thirty-First (“Polar Bears”), and Fourth of the Fourth (“Raging Vipers”), all infantry battalions; the First of the Eighty-Ninth, a cavalry squadron; and the Second of the Fifteenth, an artillery battalion. None of the regiments existed except on paper, so why have them? Very strange!) From Battalion I was taken over to Alpha Company, which would be my new home. The three rifle companies in the Vipers were Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, also known as the “Anacondas”, “Boas”, and “Cobras.” At each step along the way I went through more processing and paperwork.

Alpha Company was pretty much the final stop. I met the Company Sergeant, First Sergeant Wasserman, who informed me I was now assigned to the First Platoon, First Lieutenant Bernicki’s platoon, and sent to them. The Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant First Class Turner, in turn assigned me to Second Squad under Staff Sergeant Blockman, who put me in Alpha Team under Sergeant Satterly. This was as low as I was going to go. Alpha Team was my home for the foreseeable future, and consisted of Sergeant Satterly, a Specialist named Williger, and a pair of Privates, me, and a certain Riley Fox, who had shown up the day before. That made me the FNG, the Fucking New Guy, and the guy who was going to shovel the most shit in the fire team.

For instance, Riley greeted me like a long-lost brother, and then announced that I was the best shot in our training company with any kind of weapon, including any machine guns. That was all very true, but not overly helpful, in the sense that as soon as he heard that, Sergeant Satterly asked, “Is that true, Reaper?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Great! You’re our new automatic rifleman. Fox, you’re our grenadier.”

I looked over at Riley, who was smiling innocently. “Thanks, Riley. I’ll show you my appreciation later.”

“It’s for the good of the unit, Grim!”

I wasn’t so thrilled. A machine gun, any machine gun, weighed a hell of a lot more than an M-4 carbine, and the guy operating it had to carry around a lot more ammo than a regular soldier. One of the things we were taught in Basic and AIT was that the real strength of an infantry unit was not in the rifles of individual soldiers, but in the heavier crew-served weapons. As a result, everybody served in fire teams, where one soldier ran a heavy weapon while the others supported him. In this case I was operating an M-249 Light Machine Gun, while Sergeant Satterly directed us and selected targets, and Riley Fox and Joe Williger acted as security, spotters, and ammo carriers; they were all armed with M-4 Carbines, but Riley’s had an M-203 Grenade Launcher under the barrel. Over in the heavy weapons platoon they had M-240 medium machine guns and AT4 and Javelin missiles.

I promised Riley that payback was a bitch. Whereas a standard M-4 weighed in at just under eight pounds, an M-249 with all the whistles and bells weighed almost three times as much, at about twenty-two pounds! At least it wasn’t anything heavier. An M-240 weighed five pounds more and a Ma Deuce, which was an M-2.50 caliber heavy machine gun, weighed almost 130 pounds, and was always mounted on a tripod or on a vehicle.

It wasn’t completely bad, though. The M-249 fired standard NATO 5.56mm. ammunition, just like everybody else’s M-4s, and if I ever ran out of linked ammo, I could use their standard magazines. 5.56 also weighed a lot less than the 7.62 NATO the M-240 used and it was smaller, so I could carry a lot more ammo.

Payback looked to prove relatively easy to arrange. Right after I was assigned the M-249 slot, a Specialist came around and collected me and my gear and took me over to the barracks. I was assigned to share a barracks room with Riley and two other new guys from Third Squad. In effect we each had small single-occupancy rooms with a common kitchen and living area and a common bathroom. I met the other two guys, a Private First Class and a Specialist, later in the day. A laundry area was down the hallway.

I might have been the Newest Fucking Guy, but Riley wasn’t all that much more experienced, so we both got all the shit details. If something needed cleaning or inventorying or being moved around, we got the detail. I commented on it to Williger, and he just shrugged and said, “Welcome to the Army,” and then gave me something else to do. It wasn’t like I was going to formally bitch. I might be new to the Army, but it wasn’t anything different than what we made the newbies do back on the Pioneers.

I didn’t really have anybody to complain to, anyway. I still hadn’t met Lieutenant Bernicki, who had been on leave himself, and returned the day after I showed up. He hadn’t even had a chance to welcome me to the platoon before he was summoned to battalion, along with all the other officers. Satterly commented that this wasn’t a good omen.

It wasn’t. It was expected, but that didn’t make it good. Friday morning everybody was summoned to a company meeting, all three rifle platoons and the headquarters platoon. The meeting was held in an empty building that normally stored something, but now had folding chairs set up in it. Captain Holman, our company commander, spoke. He came in and we all stood and came to attention, and then he ordered us to sit.

“Soldiers, we have been alerted for deployment to the CENTCOM AOR, specifically Iraq. The Second Brigade is deploying to Iraq, and the Fourth of the Fourth is going to be the tip of the spear. Brigade and Battalion will be issuing a deployment schedule in the next few days, but this means that our little vacation here in upstate New York is about to end. Uncle Sam is looking for some return on his investment, and Alpha Company will deliver. Is that understood?” CENTCOM AOR meant Central Command Area of Responsibility. Oh, shit!

There was a lot of cheering in the audience, but some awfully sober faces among the guys who had deployed once before. Some of these guys had already been to Afghanistan, and they didn’t think it was a great vacation spot. Me, I was cheering like all the other new guys. Fort Drum was the farthest I’d ever been from home. Iraq sounded kind of interesting and exotic.

Captain Holman then went on to explain a few other things, which none of us were pleased with, and more than a few groans were heard. First, effective immediately, Fourth of the Fourth was implementing Stop-Loss. This meant they stopped all movement out of the unit and stopped all losses. We were now a roach motel - soldiers check in but they don’t check out. If you were already scheduled to transfer out, maybe to another unit or school, tough luck. Worse, if you were leaving because you were scheduled to leave the Army, you were stuck with the unit until they returned from deployment! Your retirement was cancelled! In addition, we were all told that all leaves were hereby cancelled. We would be heading out before Christmas, and there was no time left for leaves. We had less than three months to prepare, finish training, and pack our gear. I think the no-leave provision and the scheduling was the most disturbing thing to a lot of us. That meant no Thanksgiving leave, and we would be gone before Christmas.

Welcome to the Army.

Riley and I were formally welcomed to the First Platoon after the company meeting, when Lieutenant Bernicki met with us and all the other guys who had transferred in while he was on leave. He gave us a standard welcome speech and told us to obey our sergeants and we’d do fine. By then I knew that Collie Farmer was also in the company, but he was in Third Platoon. There were a few other faces in First that I had seen at AIT, but I couldn’t say I knew them all that well. Collie and Riley had been my best friends in training.

Training intensified dramatically after that. My contract with the Army was for Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training, but not for Airborne or Air Assault training. Those were separate schools, for paratroopers and air assault troops, the guys who ended up in the 82^nd or 101 ^st. Still, since it might be necessary to fly around in helicopters, the Second Brigade had a more informal air assault training program called Familiarization. Suddenly schedules got ripped up and rewritten. Fourth of the Fourth now had priority, and anybody who hadn’t ever been on a helo now got priority training. Riley and I spent two weeks learning about helicopters, how to get in one, how to get out of one, and how to ride around in one. They started out with some junked old Blackhawks that couldn’t fly anymore, and then graduated to actual working Blackhawks. If I had thought that the airplane, I had flown in was noisy and shook a lot, it had nothing on a helicopter! I figured they were about to shred apart, most likely in mid-air, and spread my ass all over the terrain below me. Then we had to practice leaving the helicopter while it was off the ground, by rappelling out an open door. All in all, I found helo operations the most terrifying thing I had ever done in my life!

About the only good thing that happened in this time is that I was promoted to PV2. They still called me a Private, but now I got a chevron and a pay raise in time for Christmas. It wasn’t that big a deal, though. It wasn’t as if the Army had decided that PV1 Reaper was that wonderful a fellow and needed to be rewarded for his exemplary service and heroism. It was automatic after six months in the Army and could be granted with a waiver after four months. Lieutenant Colonel Gilhooly, our battalion commander, signed a waiver for everybody who had been through Basic and AIT and had been in for four months. Still, it allowed me to lord it over any lowly E-1s I chanced across, which were damn few.

I called home every weekend, borrowing Riley’s cell phone and paying him for the minutes. A lot of that sort of thing happened. If a guy had a cell phone, he might rent out some time on it to cover his costs. At least that way I wasn’t out of touch with them. For instance, I learned that the Pioneers had been undefeated again, but had then lost to Kennesaw Mountain in the first playoff game. Kelly also kept me informed about Matucket High and what she was up to. I figured that it made no sense to buy a cell phone when I was going to leave it behind in just a few months.