Chapter 92

The flight only took two hours and thirty nine minutes. I was clock watching - call it impatience, anxiety or enthusiasm - I wasn’t sure.

The 747-200 had already made the trip, leaving forty minutes earlier with the men from Morton.

When we landed the place was full of men and women, this time in JBG uniforms as it should be. Uniforms were part of discipline, moral, order and ended the preverbal question of who are you? Do you belong here?

This was what Fort Dean had been built for - to be used aggressively, not like the day we made the un-announced stop.

The road into Fort Dean had been paved as I had told Andy to have done. It was twenty feet wide with a double yellow stripe down the middle.

The archway was exactly what I had in mind, Fort Dean in big letters at the top of the arch that spanned the new roadway. The JBG security logo was on the left side, on the right was Cameron Parish, Louisiana - Southern and Central American command and training center.

Past the arch the road split with an armed guard shack in the middle and the one arm barrier controlled by the guards. Past the barrier were a double row of vicious tire spikes that were close enough that even a motorcycle could not pass; they dropped out of sight when the barrier was raised. On the departing lane was the same set of spikes controlled by the guardhouse.

The trash was gone and not one cigarette butt could be seen, the command center had been painted with new signage. The barracks had been painted inside and out with new windows, doors, a new roof and new AC units.

The fuel truck had been replaced with a new and bigger one. The fuel farm was expanded. Where there was only one fuel tank there were now six.

The command center was new inside - gone were all those worn out surplus military metal desks. There was a nice office for the Fort commander with a big flat screen and camera for MTAC and VCATS with any of our offices. There was a smaller office for his second in command.

Smart new cubicles were occupied by others. On them were new flat screens and laptop docking stations with all the bells and whistles Robert’s group thought they needed.

On one wall was a really big flat screen that everyone could see by turning around.

Andy had torqued someone when he left to see my orders - his orders completed.

The barracks was full; all six hundred men were there for final briefing and assignment to the six battalions. Andy, Paul Drake and eight of Andy’s top men he trusted were put in command.

As soon as these six hundred were in Mexico, four hundred more from the call up group were assembling at Fort Dean for backup or to begin Part D of the contract. By the end of the week we would have ten battalions in Mexico - the one thousand man limit in the original contract.

Battalion red one and red two were - for the lack of a better term - mobile infantry units. Each unit had fifteen MRAPS, fifteen Humvees and a total of one hundred men each.

Battalion blue one and blue two were the aviation support for red one and red two. Of the four 802s two were equipped with a mini gun and rockets, the other two with mini gun and Hellfire missiles. Four Blackhawks were with each group to quickly get advance men to the two airfields. With the aviation support group there were fifty men in each of those battalions.

I was surprised to see Robbie with the aviation support group.

‘‘How did they get you away from the shop?’’ I asked.

‘‘So much going on I just wanted to be here, be a part of it and to see what you do,’’ Robbie replied.

Green battalions one and two were logistics - the freezer tractor trailers with frozen foods, ten eight thousand gallon potable fresh water trucks with a slight taste of chlorine. There were cooks, portable messes, tents, sleep buses and portable showers and toilets; latrines were out of the questions.

The last thing I needed was an environmental waste scandal to hit the media in several months. There were two sewage trucks to remove the sewage from the sleep buses, showers and toilets. It was to be trucked back to the Brownsville treatment plant.

There was a front end loader, a grader and a small bulldozer loaded on trailers to help set up the two camps. The two battalions were one hundred and fifty men. If things moved quickly I doubted that would be enough.

Orange battalions one and two were camp security with fifty men each. They were also responsible for any prisoners - and I wanted prisoners. There were two doctors and two nurses courtesy of Doc Burns.

I let Hanna and Melinda take a camera sweep in the field house with the men assembled and still shots of the entrance to use on reports after we were in Mexico. They would need filler to keep what we were doing in the news cycle.

All day long the men were drilled on what groups they were with and vehicles they were to be assigned to.

The aviation unit was under command of a former unit commander just back from Iraq. He worked over and over with the pilots on flight patterns and ground support that had a mix of helicopters and fixed wing working the field together.