Chapter 30: Fort Drum

April 2005 - May 2005

A few days later I had to leave. I was due back at Fort Drum on Thursday, so Tuesday Kelly and I loaded up the back of the Outback with all my stuff. This time we added all my personal stuff that I had shipped home when I first deployed to Iraq in 2003. Jack was none too amused when I took the television set with me, since he had set it up in the bedroom, but I wasn’t impressed. “You want to keep it? Fine with me. Just buy me a new one,” I told him.

“I don’t have the money for that!”

“Sucks to be you.” I took the television down the stairs and out to the car. I also took all my civvie clothes since I might be able to get into town on occasion.

Kelly and I left Matucket around noon on Tuesday. Depending on the roads and traffic, we would probably make Watertown on Wednesday, and get a room. We could sort out some stuff and have a nice night together before I reported in on Thursday. Once I got settled in, I would probably be able to spend a night or two with her before I drove her down to Syracuse and flew her back to Atlanta.

I knew some things would be different. For one thing, as a corporal, I wouldn’t be rooming with the enlisted guys, but with the NCOs. The Army frowned on fraternization. I also knew that I was going to probably be transferred to a different platoon, or maybe even a different company. Again, they figured it wasn’t a good idea to keep you with the guys you had been fucking around with as a Private or Specialist. You needed a certain degree of detachment. The same would happen if I was promoted to Sergeant. That was a real possibility, too. If we did another long deployment, the odds were that we would take some losses and people would shift around, and I might move up the ladder. That assumed, of course, that I didn’t totally blow at being a fire team leader, but I thought I could handle that.

It was a long drive back to upstate New York. We were at the halfway point somewhere around northern Virginia or western Maryland, and had just switched drivers, so I was driving again, and she was a passenger. Kelly asked, “Will you be able to get any leave between now and when I go back to school?”

“Probably, but I’d probably spend half the leave getting back and forth to Matucket,” I commented.

“You could fly, but that takes forever, too, these days. Security is a real pain,” she groused.

“It is what it is, babe. I promise that I’ll visit when I can. I get two-and-a-half days of leave a month. You’ll go back to school in about five months, so that works out to not quite two weeks.”

“What if I drive up to meet you halfway, or further?” she asked.

“Then that is more time we can be together. Don’t forget, my mother is going to be expecting me to come home for Christmas. I haven’t been home for Christmas for two years. I’ll need to save some leave for that, and I’ll probably be way down the list for taking leave.”

“Okay. Let’s figure something out for the late summer, at the minimum.” She leaned the car seat back and tried to sleep.

Thursday, I dressed in DCUs and headed over to Fort Drum. When I was back in Matucket I had gone over to the West Springs Army-Navy Surplus Store and picked up some of the Velcro chevrons I would need on my uniforms. It wasn’t hard to get onto the base, since I had my ID card and leave paperwork. From there I headed over to the headquarters building for Alpha Company and parked in the visitor’s area. I needed to get my official orders, register the car on the base, get a room in the NCO barracks, and do all the other piddling little crap that needed to be done to rejoin the Army.

I decided to head to First Platoon’s office first. I figured I would find either Lieutenant Briscoe or Sergeant Turner, and they would be able to sort me out. I wasn’t sure whether the paperwork had to be processed at the platoon level or at the company level. If neither was there and there weren’t any orders for me, I would head over to Company and see what they had to say. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary. Both Turner and Briscoe were present. Turner saw me first and said, “Look what the cat dragged in. I see you found a place to pick up some chevrons.”

“West Springs Army-Navy Surplus Store, everything for your military surplus needs!” I answered, parroting the company’s TV slogan.

He snorted at that. “More like everything for your weekend warrior wannabe needs.”

“Cradle of democracy, Sergeant. God bless America!” I replied, grinning.

He barked out a laugh and took me in to see Briscoe. I could tell that people were still trickling back from leave, and probably would be through the rest of the week. “Lieutenant, Georgia’s finest just arrived.”

“Welcome back, Corporal Reaper. Ready to go back to work?”

“Roger!”

“Excellent. You’re transferring over to Third Platoon. We have to rebuild the entire battalion, and we have to start with the platoons and companies. You’ll probably see a bunch of new faces as people come and go.”

“Understood, sir. Any idea on what I’ll be doing over there?” I asked.

Turner answered that. “Probably what you’ve been doing, being in a fire team. Big difference, though. You’re not the gunner anymore, Grim. You’re the leader now. You’re not the guy on the trigger. You need to think like a leader.”

I nodded in understanding. “Yeah, I follow you. For what it’s worth, I spent a lot of time talking to my grandfather while I was on leave. He was a sergeant in Vietnam, and he told me pretty much the same thing.”

Both men nodded at that, then Lieutenant Briscoe shook my hand and turned me over to Sergeant Turner. Turner walked me over to Headquarters Platoon and handed me off to a Specialist clerk. “Take care, Grim. I’ll be seeing you around.”

“I’m sure, Sergeant. Thanks.”

I did some paperwork at HQ, so that I was officially assigned to Third Platoon, and was then sent over there. I knew a fair number of the guys in Third Platoon. They had been stationed over at Fort Apache. I also knew some of the guys in Second Platoon and Headquarters Platoon. When you moved people around to cover the holes caused by combat losses, you did so at the lowest level possible. We all knew each other and trusted each other. New faces brought in from outside might not get that same level of trust and respect. It’s not something you wanted to chance in combat.

At Third Platoon I was processed in quickly, and was introduced to Platoon Sergeant Levi, a Sergeant First Class. “Welcome, Corporal Reaper. Turner says you do good work.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“I’d introduce you to our Platoon Leader, but we don’t have one at the moment,” he said, which made me raise my eyebrows. “Lieutenant Hmong caught some shrapnel right before we returned, and he’s at Walter Reed. I don’t think he’ll be coming back. We’re getting a new Lieutenant, but he hasn’t reported in yet. In the meantime, do what I tell you and we’ll get along fine.”

“How bad was Hmong hit?” I asked.

Levi shrugged. “Million-dollar wound, if you ask me. He took a couple of pieces through the right shoulder.”

“Yeah. On the television shows the hero always catches one there and is back in the office a week later.”

“It doesn’t really work like that.”

I smiled and agreed. A shoulder wound was one of the worst to come back from. The shoulder was just a mess of bones, ligaments, blood vessels, and nerve bundles, like every joint. The odds were that even if Hmong recovered, he would have a significant long-term disability. It might not matter in a civilian life, but in the Army, it would be a killer.

“First things first. Have you done the Warrior Leader Course?” he asked.

I gave my new platoon sergeant a curious look. I knew about the WLC. It was required of all new sergeants. It was ‘sergeant school’. “No. Isn’t that for new sergeants?”

“It’s for new NCOs, and that means you. Most Specialists go directly to Sergeant, but some stop at Corporal on the way. You are way too junior to go to Sergeant. Before I can assign you to a fire team you need to get through WLC.”

I blinked at that. I had never figured on the Warrior Leader Course. That was something that lifers did, and while I wasn’t sorry I had enlisted, I had no intention of becoming a career soldier. “Okay. When will that be?”

“We’ll be sending a bunch of you new guys there in a few weeks. We have quite a few Specialists who moved up over in the Sandbox and have to take the course or lose their new stripes.”

I shrugged. “Okay, if that’s what I need to do. What’s involved?”

“It will be held here at Fort Drum. You won’t need to TDY anywhere. It will take about a month, and then you’re back here. It’s going to be a few weeks before we start seeing the fresh meat, so this works out. I’m assigning you to Third Squad, under Staff Sergeant Bixley. You’re junior for the assignment, but Turner swears you know more about machine guns than the guys who invented them, and he says you’re very steady under fire. I expect you to live up to that.”

“Roger, Sergeant!”

“Good. Let’s get it in gear. You settled in yet?”

“No, Sergeant, not yet. I wanted to see where I would be before I did that. I still need to register my car and get a barracks room, all that sort of thing,” I replied.

“So, I’ll turn you over to Bixley and let him sort you out. Follow me.”

We found Sergeant Bixley at a table with another NCO, a buck Sergeant, and they were going over some paperwork together. Levi cleared his throat to get their attention, and the two men looked up. That was when I saw that the Sergeant was Gary Halston. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the Grim Reaper!” he said, sticking out his hand and smiling.

“Damn good to see you, too, Gary!” I shook his hand.

“Bix, this is your new fire team leader. I guess you already know Halston?” Sergeant Levi asked me.

“We were in First Platoon together for most of the last deployment,” I explained.

“We’re founding members of the Camp Custer Gun Club,” commented Gary, which earned a laugh from me.

Levi left me with Bixley and Halston, with instructions that I needed to get my personal life squared away as well. After that, the three of us sat down to discuss the future.

Put bluntly, Alpha Company was about to become a lab rat. We were going to be modifying the traditional platoon structure, making us into a heavier outfit, and would be studied by the Pentagon during training and our next deployment. A standard rifle platoon was made up of three rifle squads and a weapons squad and was commanded by a platoon leader and a platoon sergeant, and had an RTO, or radiotelephone operator, attached. A standard rifle squad was made up of two four-man fire teams, each with an NCO leader, a rifleman, a grenadier, and an automatic rifleman, and was commanded by a squad leader sergeant. A weapons squad contained a leader and two M-240 machine gunners and assistants, and two anti-tank missilemen and assistants. Add it all up and a standard rifle platoon contained thirty-nine men. You always had a few others around, like medics and forward observers, maybe a second RTO for the platoon sergeant, but that was the body count for shooters.

The new experimental structure was for a ‘heavy’ platoon. Each rifle squad would be increased by two men, each of which would be assigned to a fire team, so we would have five-man teams. The new man would be an automatic rifleman, so that each team would have two M-249s. That meant the team could be broken down into two half-teams as needed. In addition, the weapons squad would get another two automatic riflemen, adding a pair of M-249s to their mix. That would add eight additional M-249 light machine guns to the firepower of the platoon, along with eight more soldiers, to bring us from thirty-nine up to forty-seven. In theory that would make us both more powerful and more flexible.

We would be studied, first at Drum and then when we deployed, to see how we did. It was the equivalent of adding almost a fourth rifle squad to a platoon. Were we stronger by that much? More? Less? What about vehicles? Four guys could travel in a single Humvee, but five would require two. Would the equipment increases be worth it? We were lab rats for the Army.

On the other hand, you always had to remember what happened to lab rats. They usually didn’t survive the experiment.

Halston was going to have one of the teams, Alpha Three, and I would have the other, Bravo Three. “Do we have team members yet?” I asked.

“Getting them in, slowly. Most of the platoon is still out on leave, and we lost a bunch of guys. That’s happening throughout the battalion,” said Bixley.

Halston said, “There’s a lot of guys transferring out, going to schools, or being promoted out, that sort of thing. We’ve already lost Captain Holman. He went to Leavenworth on a Command and General Staff School program. When they laid the Stop-Loss on us before we deployed that screwed up a lot of personnel plans, and those chickens are all coming home to roost.”

“Figures. Welcome to the Army,” I commented.

“One thing, Reaper,” added Bixley. “You can’t be thinking like a trigger anymore. You now have to think like a leader of triggers. Can you do that?”

Halston opened his mouth to answer, but Bixley held his hand up to silence him and looked me in the eye. I nodded and said, “I understand, Sergeant. I can tell you what I told Sergeant Turner when he asked me. I spent a lot of my leave talking to my grandfather, who was a sergeant and squad leader in Vietnam. He pretty much told me the same thing and gave me a few pointers. I won’t let you down.”

Gary said, “Somebody else will have to sleep with Precious in the future.” That earned a laugh from me, and we had to explain it to Bixley.

Bixley said, “Well, at least you won’t have to lug around the M-249 yourself. An M-4 is a lot lighter.”

“You going to have any problems with me carrying an M-14, Sergeant? I know I’m not a trigger, but if I do have to take a shot, I know I’ll drop him if I’m firing NATO 7.62,” I asked.

“That’s fine, but I’ll be watching your performance. The whole fucking Army will, for that matter.”

“Fair enough.”

Halston was detailed with taking me over to the Provost Marshall’s office to register my car, and then to Housing to get a barracks room. Along the way we talked about our leaves. It had been his second tour, and he was married and living off base. He told me that he expected to be here only a short time longer. As a new sergeant he was required to take the Warrior Leader Course like me, the month-long course that was required for all new corporals and sergeants sometime in their first year. You could delay it if you were deployed, but as soon as you got back, you had to take it. I would have to take it now that we were back at Fort Drum. Luckily, I could take the classes at Fort Drum, and not have to travel somewhere else. After he got through WLC, he had already applied for the Advanced Leader Course. Gary was a lifer, and a good soldier. I could see him doing Drill Sergeant School as soon as he made Staff Sergeant.

“Know anything about the troops we’re getting for the fire teams?” I asked.

“Standard Army issue. You have two choices, newbies and shitbirds.”

“Crap! Welcome to the Army.”

“HOO-AAH!”

Newbies were self-explanatory. These were new guys, either PV1s or PV2s, straight from Benning, just like Riley Fox and I had been two years ago. They were clueless and don’t know jack shit about the Army. Shitbirds were worse, though. These were older and more experienced soldiers, probably PFCs and Specialists, transferred in to provide some experienced soldiers. That was the textbook definition, at least. The reality was that no platoon leader would ever get rid of his good soldiers, so when he needed to transfer out somebody, he transferred out the crappy ones. They would be the fuckups with bad attitudes, and they needed to be watched even more than the newbies did.

“Tremendous!” I repeated.

“Hey, you doing anything for dinner tonight?” he asked.

“Kelly’s here with me. Once I am clear, I’m taking her out. She goes home in a few days,” I explained.

“Look, want to go to dinner? I can call Megan; we can all go out.”

Megan was Gary’s wife, though I had never met her, but just seen her picture. “I’d like that. Kelly would, too. We can tell them lies about Camp Custer.”

That earned a laugh from Halston. He told me about a dressy place called the Tin Rooster. If we wore our Class As nobody would check my driver’s license for my age.

Kelly was up for a nice dinner. She had been hanging around the hotel the entire day watching television. The place had a pool, but it was outdoors, and it was still much too chilly to go swimming. That made me scratch my head in general. As far as I was concerned, it was still winter up here. Who puts in a swimming pool you can only use a couple months of the year? I knew there were a bunch of beaches on Lake Ontario, and that seemed even crazier. There were polar bears and icebergs out on that lake! I was going to have to check with Gary and a few of the others and see about getting a lot of long underwear.

“Where are we going?” asked Kelly.

“Someplace called the Tin Rooster, but that’s all I know. Gary said it was classy, so that we should wear something decent. If I wear my Class As, we won’t get carded.”

“So, I should probably wear something other than my cut-off shorts and my ‘Born To Party’ t-shirt?” she asked.

I smiled at that. “For that kind of dinner, we take Riley Fox and let him find you a wet t-shirt contest.”

“Been there, done that,” she replied, which made me look at her funny. Kelly blushed and said, “I told you I did some stupid stuff at Vanderbilt.”

“I’m just enjoying the mental image. Did you win?”

“No and leave it at that!” She started pulling a dress off the hanger.

“I think I will have to hear more about this when we get back here,” was my final comment, followed by a scolding from my beloved. I just knew I wanted to learn more.

I wore my Class As with the ribbons and Kelly wore a knee-length sundress with spaghetti straps holding up a low-cut top. Only I knew that she had nothing under it, which would make dessert back in the room later all the sweeter. I found directions to the place in the phone book, and we were to meet the Halstons at 1900.

We pulled into the parking lot in time to see Gary and his wife entering the restaurant, so I knew we weren’t late. Megan Halston was taller and slimmer than Kelly, and in her heels was almost as tall as Gary, who was only about five-eleven or so. She was wearing a knee-length halter dress, so maybe Gary was planning on some special dessert, too. We met up in the foyer of the Tin Rooster, and a hostess seated us at a table halfway back. I was glad Gary had told me the place was nice, since most of the men were wearing suits or jackets, and the ones that didn’t looked like they had hung them up somewhere and were wearing ties and dress shirts. It wasn’t all that casual.

“So, Kelly, you’re still in college?” asked Megan.

“I’m off this semester but in the fall, I start up as a senior at the University of Georgia,” she answered.

Gary asked, “So you’ll be graduating about the same time Grim finishes his service?”

I glanced over at Kelly, who nodded and said, “I guess so, but I’m not sure yet. I’m taking an overload and planning to do grad school afterwards. Depending on how things work out, I might not finish my Masters’ until after he gets out. Definitely not if I get my doctorate.”

Gary looked at me in surprise. “A trigger and a doctor? That’s some combination!”

“Tell me about it. Most of my life I’ve been scared that one of these days she’d wake up and figure out that she could do a whole lot better.”

“Grim, we’ve been over that!” Kelly protested.

I squeezed her hand and smiled. “Past tense, babe.”

“What are you studying?” asked Megan.

“Mathematics. Not sure yet what I want to do in grad school. I’ll be thinking about that when I get to UGA.”

The Halstons looked at each other. “Ugga?” asked Gary.

“U-G-A,” I explained. “University of Georgia. We pronounce it UGGA. UGA also happens to be the name of the school mascot, an English Bulldog. He’s a real bulldog, too. He attends all the home games.”

“Cool.”

Our waiter came and took our drink orders, and never batted an eye when Kelly and I both ordered whiskey sours. Gary ordered a gin and tonic, but his wife simply asked for iced tea, sweetened ice tea. “I’ll be the designated driver,” she laughed.

Gary grinned. “It’s more than that.”

Megan admitted, “We’re trying to have another child. We’ve already got a two-year-old boy, and this would make for a good separation.”

“Congratulations!” I said.

“We’re not there yet, but with any luck, we can have the next one before Gary deploys again,” she said.

We chatted about families for a few minutes. The Halstons had met at Jefferson Community College in Watertown and been married shortly afterwards. Megan had managed to get a two-year degree and worked part-time as a cashier at a local supermarket.

When drinks were brought, Gary asked, “So, what do we drink to?”

I laughed and picked up my drink. “Here’s to the Camp Custer Gun Club!”

“Long may they reign,” he finished. We clinked glasses and sipped.

“What is the Camp Custer Gun Club?” asked Kelly.

I snorted out a laugh at that. It was Halston who answered. “The Camp Custer Gun Club was made up of the long guns and shooters at Camp Custer. Your boyfriend here and I were two of the founding members.”

“That was a day!” I agreed.

Gary explained. “We were tasked with doing some counter-sniper work. An Iraqi sniper had been working over some of the camps, and we were next on his list. Every squad had to put up their best marksman. There were three of us who had already done a tour and were designated marksmen, which meant we had actually been trained for this. The fourth guy who shows up is a newbie machine gunner, for God’s sake, and is so green he leaves grass stains when he sits down.”

I laughed at that. Kelly asked, “Grim? Why him?”

“Because he already had a reputation as the coldest guy in the platoon under fire, and of always hitting his target. I’ve seen your boyfriend taking shots out to 400 meters and dropping them center mass while the bullets and mortars are landing around him. It’s a very useful skill in the Army.”

“That was a pretty good day. Remember how you and I were working over that building, and then it suddenly blew up like a fireworks factory? I damn near died laughing!” I said.

Gary picked up his drink. “To Camp Custer!”

“And to all the poor bastards who were there,” I finished.

“Cheers.” We sipped our drinks again.

I turned to Kelly. “Tomorrow, I’ll get you to the airport. Things are still unsettled, but I can probably get some time to take you down to Syracuse. I need to move my stuff over to the NCO barracks.”

“I knew it was too good to last. You need to go back to the Army, don’t you?”

“Your tax dollars at work!”

In this I was assisted by Megan, who volunteered to drive Kelly and her luggage to the Syracuse airport, saving me a trip. She was free all day and could drive her down. They owned a minivan and could carry stuff. She also said that this would give her a chance to teach Kelly more about how the Army worked. Kelly probably needed to learn some of that stuff from an Army wife.

Even though we had a designated driver, Gary and I didn’t get hammered. We both had three drinks over a two-hour period, and with our size and weight, we weren’t drunk. Kelly got a little silly, but not too bad. She just got ... amorous. Put bluntly, she got horny as all hell. I held off her advances until we got back to the room, and then I surrendered to her and let her have her way with me.

We were up early the next morning, loading my gear into the Subaru. Kelly made a few phone calls and got a reservation on a noon Delta flight direct to Atlanta. Then I kissed her good-bye and drove over to Drum while she called Megan’s number. At Drum I moved my gear into the barracks in time to report for duty at the appointed hour.