Chapter 2: Enlistment

Twenty Years Ago
Everest, Montana

“You really want to join the Army?” asked Marty.

Jake shrugged. “Do I really want to join the Army? Maybe not. Do I have a lot of options? You know the answer to that. What about you? Why are you joining the Army? Since when did you want to die for God and country?”

“Who said anything about dying? I want to be a cop. After basic I am going to MP school. A good tour as an MP and then I’m out. After that I can use my benefits and get into the academy in Helena,” replied Jake’s best friend.

“You’ve got it all planned out,” laughed Jake.

“Right down to the minute I come home and arrest your sorry ass on charges of being a dipshit and an asshole.”

“Christ, you’ll end up in the cell with me!” snorted Jake. Then he shook his head. “You know my situation. The day after I graduate, I’m history.”

Marty gave him a bleak look. “No change?”

Jake shrugged. “It is what it is. Barry and Lucille will let me stay, but they’ve already told me they are going to charge me room and board. They only agreed to put me up until I was eighteen and graduated high school.”

Barry and Lucille were Barry and Lucille Gallatin, Jake’s second cousins on his mother’s side. Jake Kilbourne’s family wasn’t white trash but weren’t far from it. They were what the liberal East and West Coast elites called ‘the working poor’, always just a paycheck away from eviction. They lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of Everest, Montana, and though they owned their double-wide and kept it in good repair, they drove used cars, shopped the specials at Walmart, and didn’t have much in the way of savings.

Jake’s mother had died six years ago of pancreatic cancer; his father died at the beginning of his senior year after getting T-boned by a speeding tractor-trailer. There wasn’t much family left in the area. Like so many rural families, the Kilbournes and Gallatins had been moving away for generations, mostly to California and Texas. Barry and Lucille had been the closest relatives still in Everest County. They had agreed to take in Jake until he finished high school, but after that he was on his own. That time was fast approaching. They weren’t bad people, but they didn’t have much more money than Jake’s family, and they had three daughters of their own.

“So, what is your specialty going to be?” asked Marty. “What are you going to do after basic?”

Jake shrugged. “Infantry. I took the ASVAB and they wanted me to do something else, but it sounded pretty boring.”

Marty nodded. “Who knows, maybe I’ll get a chance to give you a ticket in the Army.”

“That will certainly make both our days,” agreed Jake.

“You doing anything after the game?” Both boys played for the Everest High basketball team, the Red Hawks.

Jake smiled. “Kelsea wants to head up to the lake. She says she knows a very private scenic spot.”

Marty grinned. “Just how private?”

“Hopefully private enough. She told me she wants to test whether there is an echo up there, and I’m supposed to make sure she yells out loudly.”

“You’re full of shit, too.”

Jake gave a sincere smile. “It’s a burden, but I’ll just have to try.”

“So, I guess I won’t go up to the lake with Beth. It’s a good thing her parents are going away this weekend. I’ve promised to help her take care of the house,” replied Haskell.

“Do her parents know about this help?”

Marty shrugged. “I didn’t tell them. I wonder if Beth said anything. I’ll have to ask her later.”

Both teens laughed at that.

Thirteen Years Ago
United State Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

“We’ve met before. Who are you today?” asked Jake Kilbourne.

“I’m the guy who can get you out of here,” was the reply.

Jake didn’t respond to that, other than by commenting, “You want me to call you that? Or is there a shorter version I can put after the Mister? As I recall, the only name I heard the last time was Ed.”

“Jenkins.”

“Is that your real name?”

“No, but it will do. If you were to ask for Ed Jenkins, it will get back to me.”

Jenkins, or whoever he was, was a nondescript man in his mid-forties, white, balding, clean shaven, and with an average build with the beginnings of a small gut. He was wearing a light charcoal suit with a white shirt and a blue tie.

His appearance was a considerable contrast to Jake Kilbourne’s. Jake was wearing the prescribed uniform for maximum security prisoners sentenced to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Specifically, he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, white socks, and orange lace-less sneakers. He was also sporting some extensive jewelry in the form of a restraint belt and wrist and ankle shackles. It was deemed appropriate by the prison guards, members of the 15^th Military Police Brigade, since the meeting was not being held in the normal meeting rooms for prisoners, where they could see family or lawyers. This meeting was in an empty room with nothing but a table and two chairs. The table and one of the chairs were bolted to the floor, and Jake’s shackles were run through a ring bolted to the table.

“So, Ed, how are you planning to get me out of here? You a lawyer?”

Jenkins smiled. “I haven’t sunk that low yet. No, I have a different method of securing your release. Would you care to hear about it?”

Kilbourne returned the smile. “It’s not like I have any other pressing engagements, do I?”

“You have a certain skill set and thought process that could prove useful to your government. In return, I can obtain release from your current ... domestic environment.”

“My skill set? The only skills I have that the Army has ever been interested in involved combat.”

“Precisely,” said Jenkins,

That set Jake back. After finishing basic and advanced infantry training, he had been assigned to an infantry battalion heading to Afghanistan. His first tour had been relatively unremarkable; Private Kilbourne had shown courage and above-average combat skills but was too junior to affect anything. He had returned from his first tour with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and a promotion to Corporal. From there he went to Airborne School and Ranger School, both at Fort Benning. After that he was promoted to Sergeant and given a squad in Afghanistan; eventually he was promoted to Staff Sergeant. The patrols he led gathered more intelligence, captured more prisoners, killed more Taliban and terrorists, and otherwise disrupted more enemy plans than would normally be expected of an Army unit commanded by a young man barely old enough to drink back home.

“I was very impressed with what you did in Taqab. That really set back the local assholes.”

Fourteen Years Ago
Kabul, Afghanistan

Staff Sergeant Jake Kilbourne was ushered into Major Palmer’s office. Normally the Major didn’t stand on a lot of ceremony, but when Jake saw the third person in the room, he decided to come to attention and salute. The major returned the salute and said, “At ease, Jake.”

“Yes, sir.” Jake glanced over at the third man.

The third man smiled and said, “Since this meeting never happened, I was never here.”

The sergeant looked back at the major, who was rolling his eyes. Jake said, “Right. How can SpecOps help the CIA today?”

Palmer laughed. “We’ve got an assignment for your team, Jake. You hear about the hospital in Kandahar?”

“The one the assholes blew up last week?” Jake shrugged. “I heard.”

The third man said, “Call me Ed. We have determined who the assholes are and want to send a message, a very loud and personal message.”

Jake raised an eyebrow and looked back at the major. “And I’m the messenger?”

Palmer nodded. He stood and led the way to a large map laid out on a side desk. “Ed?”

The third man stepped forward. “Abu bin Mahmud ordered the bombing in order to punish the locals for not killing all the Americans in the area.” He tossed down several photos of bearded Afghanis. “Bin Mahmud ordered Mohammed Number 1 and Mohammed Number 2 to go in, shoot up the hospital and everybody in it, and then blow the place. He works out of a mosque in Taqab.” He tapped a spot on the map and laid down an overhead photo of the mosque. “It’s probably got more fighters and weapons hidden there than we have here at the base.”

Jake looked over at his boss and then back at the CIA guy. “So, drop a few thousand-pounders on it and take care of him.”

He got a headshake in return. “No go. We need proof these guys are there before we can blow up a holy site. We’ll have to send in a team to verify presence and then phone it in.”

Jake looked at the spook and then back at Major Palmer. “That’s not how we work, Major.” He turned to Ed and continued, “I am not taking my boys deep into Indian country so that you can ask the local imam if I can kill his brother-in-law. It’s my call or you can whistle up somebody else.”

The CIA agent smiled at the major. “He’s like you said he would be.” He turned back to Jake and said, “Okay, it will be your call. I don’t trust the locals either.”

With that, the three men planned the operation, including the recon and overwatch package. Then the major turned Kilbourne over to his adjutant to finish lining up the assets. Then he turned back to the agent. “Satisfied, Ed?”

“Christ, he seems so young.”

“They’re all young, Ed.” He pointed at the chair across from him.

Ed sat down. “Tell me about him.”

“He’s got a hell of a record, Ed. Two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, ASVAB scores off the charts, he picked up a little college on the side - this kid, he’s going places.”

“What’s his story? Why the hell is this kid a fucking Sergeant and not a Lieutenant or Captain by now?”

“It’s the same story a lot of these kids have. He was orphaned as a teenager and had to live with some relatives who didn’t have any use for him. They told him the day after he graduated high school that he could either leave or start paying room and board. No family and no money. He enlisted the next day.”

“How come you guys haven’t sent him to college yet? He’d be more useful to you with bars on his shoulders than with stripes on his sleeves.”

Palmer shrugged. “We probably will at some point. Right now, he’s scheduled for an instructor slot at Ranger school, but we might just send him to school. We’ve got programs for that. My bet is that at the end of this tour somebody is going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. Get him a quickie degree and run him through OCS. He’s got the chops for it. I’d sign off on him, that’s for sure.”

“All right. Let me get out of here. I’ll be back for the op.”

“Take care, Ed.”

“Take care, Ted.”

Fourteen Years Ago
Taqab, Afghanistan

“Romeo Foxtrot, SITREP, over,” came over the radio.

Staff Sergeant Kilbourne rolled his eyes at Sergeant Bonaroo, his JFO, a Joint Fires Observer who controlled the radio and handled close air support. The SITREP was the Situation Report, which wasn’t any different than fifteen minutes prior. Kilbourne was commanding a Ranger Reconnaissance squad, a recon team assigned to the JSOTF, the Joint SpecOps Task Force in Kabul. Despite his relative youth he was considered a rising star in the unit. Kilbourne was considered a bit unorthodox and tended to stray from the pure doctrine, but nobody really cared. The whole fucking war was unorthodox.

“Overlooking target from southwest. Say status on air support,” said Bonaroo.

“Predator is on station with two AGM weapons. Joker Flight, two Vipers with GBU munitions, is one-five mikes out.”

“Roger, Home Base.”

Jake put his binoculars to his eyes again and focused them on the target. That was the reason they were there, after all. They had been helicoptered in two nights before and had hiked overnight into position, then had hunkered down for a day and a night. Now it was time for the effort to pay off. The target was a mosque on the southwest side of the small town. Most of the mosques were hotbeds of sedition and intrigue, filled with arms and munitions, and hosted Taliban and Al Qaeda units. Because mosques were considered religious and political hot potatoes, it took a really horrendous attack to make the Americans want to respond against one. A bombing of a children’s hospital qualified.

That didn’t mean the Air Force was just allowed to drop a bomb or two on the mosque and wipe it off the map. The politicians in Kabul and Washington needed ‘proof’ that the mosque was the source of the attack. There were pictures of the attackers, so an Army unit was maneuvered into position to see if any of the attackers were at the mosque. The insanity was not lost on the Army unit assigned; rather than just bomb the hell out of the place, a place everybody agreed was the source of the attack, they had to move eight soldiers over difficult terrain and hide them near a few hundred men who would happily eviscerate them without benefit of anesthesia. Then, after coordinating an attack by the Air Force, they needed to sneak away through an area that would be crawling with angry locals who knew the area like the back of their hands. It was the equivalent of sneaking up on a hill full of fire ants, kicking it, and then trying to sneak away when the fire ants boiled out.

Most of the squad was focused on anything not related to the mosque, making sure nobody was sneaking up on them. Only two were looking down at the mosque, Sergeant Kilbourne and a young Specialist with good eyesight and good judgment. The JFO was staying down, trying to be inconspicuous and making sure the radio worked.

Specialist Hensley was looking down at the mosque through the eyepiece of a high-powered digital movie camera. That way they could prove that when they bombed the mosque, bad guys were actually onsite. “Sarge, we got somebody arriving.”