Chapter 3

Fort Baker, Texas

July 15, 2015

Fort Baker was a sprawling piece of real estate forty miles outside the suburbs of Dallas. It was but one of fifteen basic training bases the United States army was operating these days to keep up with the constant demand for manpower, both at the front and behind it. Unlike most of the other such bases, which had simply taken over already existing military property, Fort Baker had been built from scratch out of the scrub brush that made up the desert region here. It was strictly a training base for those recruits destined for hazardous duty assignment and it concentrated only upon teaching those basic skills that made for a good infantryman. Those soldiers who would be manning the artillery guns or driving tanks were trained elsewhere.

Darren's train arrived at Fort Baker just ahead of the sunrise. He and the other 250 recruits who made up this particular training rotation—all of them males between the ages of 18 and 20—were immediately marched off by shouting assistant drill instructors and led to the uniform distribution area. Within an hour every last one of them had been issued two sets of summer camouflage BDUs. From there they were put through the second ritual of basic training: that of shaving their hair off. Twenty barbers were on duty for the occasion and more than two hundred pounds of hair was shaved, bagged, and thrown in the trash before another hour had gone by. From there the 250 young men were divided up into platoons of fifty and assigned a drill instructor.

Darren was assigned to Baker Platoon and he was easily the largest, most intimidating person in it. He hardly noticed, so excited was he to be starting his first day. Not even the fatigue that was pulling strongly at him—fatigue caused by two uncomfortable days spent in a cramped troop train seat—could quell this excitement. He was here at last! At the most distinguished basic training facility that the army had to offer. Fort Baker was where all of the bad asses started their career. Its image had been used in no less than ten war movies produced over the last few years, and was where the fabled Lieutenant Smith of Idaho Platoon had started his career as well. And now he was here, here to train with the best of the best, to learn his lessons from actual combat veterans. The only thing that took away from the experience was the absence of Mark, who was now in Nevada somewhere, embarking on his first days of flight school. Mark should have been there with him.

He was standing at attention in the second rank of his platoon, his hands tucked firmly into his chest, his head itching madly from the recent shaving, and rivulets of sweat dripping down his face from the thick summer heat of Texas. His brand new combat boots felt like two bricks tied to his feet, not having been broken in yet. He had a feeling that they would soon be as worn and sprung as a ten year old pair. Basic was notorious for the physical regiment that the recruits were put through.

Their assistant drill instructor had formed them up out here in the heat so that they could finally meet their true DI. So far they had been standing there twenty minutes and no such person had appeared. The sharply formed ranks were starting to waver a little, with recruits wobbling in place, or trying to surreptitiously stretch their legs a little to keep them from cramping.

At last a door opened on a nearby barracks building and a tall, average looking man of about twenty-five came strolling out, heading for them. He was dressed in a pair of BDUs identical to that which the recruits wore. There were no rank markings upon them but there were sergeant's stripes stenciled in white on the front of his kevlar helmet. He wore a pistol in a holster upon his hip and carried a rifle over his shoulder, though the rifle, Darren noted with some confusion, was not an M-16 but rather an AK-74 like what the Chinese carried.

He approached to about fifty feet in front of the first rank, his eyes tracking over them emotionlessly, giving no hint to whether he liked what he saw or not. Suddenly he stopped and hefted the rifle, socking it into his shoulder and pointing it almost directly at the formation of recruits. Without saying a word, without giving anyone a chance to process what he was doing, he fired. The muzzle winked red at them and the air was filled with the distinctive chattering of the weapon on full automatic. Darren clearly heard the whizzing of projectiles flashing by just above his head.

A collective gasp came from the ranks of recruits as he raked the weapon back and forth over them. Darren ducked slightly, purely out of terrified instinct, his body flooding with adrenaline. He was not the only one; almost everyone else performed a similar maneuver.

The sergeant's rifle locked open on an empty chamber, the last shot echoing off in the distance. He slowly lowered it, a look of contempt forming on his face. "Pathetic," he shouted. "Absolutely fucking pathetic!"

Everyone simply stared at him in shock. What the hell was the matter with this idiot? Darren wondered. Where did he get off firing a rifle directly at a bunch of recruits? And with live ammunition as well! Was he insane? Was he suffering from post-traumatic stress?

The sergeant stepped forward angrily, stopping about ten feet away from the center of the front rank. There was now a large scar visible on his face. It ran from the corner of his right eye all the way down to the side of his ear. "You morons are all dead!" he yelled. "If I had been shooting this thing directly at you instead of two feet over your heads, every last motherfucking one of you would have been mowed down like grass!" He hefted to rifle up in the air again, not aiming it, but simply holding it up for them to see. "This, for those of you morons who have been in a fucking monastery these past four years, is an AK-74, fully automatic assault rifle. It is the primary weapon of the chink ground forces in the battle zone. The very first thing you need to learn in this training assignment is to get your stupid asses on the ground when you hear one of these fucking things firing! I'm not talking about ducking like most of you did. I'm not talking about crouching like you learned playing fucking Infantry Attack on your goddamn computers. I'm talking about getting down on the fucking ground, as low as you can possibly get, no matter what kind of terrain you happen to be moving across when you hear it. You need to learn this first and foremost because if you don't, you're gonna be some dead fucking grunts real quick once you get out in the shit! Does everyone understand that?"

"Yes sir!" everyone yelled automatically. By now that habit had been nicely instilled upon them by the assistant DI's.

The sergeant popped the magazine out and dropped it to the ground, where it landed with a clatter on the cement. He reached into his belt and pulled out another one, slamming it into the rifle. He pulled back the action and then, in one quick motion, put it to his shoulder and fired once again. This time the clattering was much louder, ear shattering almost. Darren, who was standing less than fifteen feet away, was able to smell the gun smoke. "Get down, you fucking puke sacks!" the sergeant screamed at them over the sound of the gunfire. "Get the fuck down!"

Darren, along with everyone else in the ranks, threw himself to the cement, landing hard enough to drive much of the air from his lungs. The cement was hot beneath him, hot enough to singe his skin.

"That was still fucking pathetic!" the sergeant told them once the second magazine had been fired empty. "Why don't I just save us all a little time and expense and shoot every last motherfucking one of you right now so we don't have to bother sending you to the front to get your asses shot off?"

Nobody said anything, they simply continued to lay on the smoldering pavement.

"Everyone, give me twenty push-ups for that display of military inefficiency. Count them out, now!"

They counted them out, the entire rank pounding out the first of what would be many push-ups throughout the course of their tenure there. When they were done the sergeant ordered them back to their feet and called them back to attention.

He handed the AK-74 to the assistant DI, who carried it off to the corner of the barracks building. He then resumed his position near the middle of the first rank. "Welcome to the army, morons," he addressed them. "I am Sergeant Black and I will be your drill instructor for your stay here. My job will be to teach you how to stay alive at the front. My qualifications to teach you this are two years spent in the 214^th infantry regiment. I served on the front line in the Battle of Viola and then in the trenches of western Idaho. I started out a puke-green piece of shit moron just like all of you and I lived long enough to command a squad through several major offenses by the Chinese. I've seen thousands of our people shot to pieces and blown to pieces on that battlefield and yet I managed to live through it. I'm here to try to teach you how to do the same thing."

He paced back and forth along the front rank for a moment. His voice softened a tad. "What I've just demonstrated to you morons is the very first and the most important lesson that you will learn. When you hear gunfire, when you hear explosions, when you hear anything out of the ordinary, you get your asses on the fucking ground. This is a lesson that I will go over and over again during your stay here. I will fire that fucking gun at you whenever it strikes my fancy. I'll shoot it at you during chow time, I'll shoot it at you while you're running PT, I'll shoot it at you in the middle of the fucking night while you're sleeping. And whenever you hear me do that, you will dive immediately to the ground no matter what the fuck else is going on. I don't give a shit if you're carrying your tray to your table in the mess. I don't give a shit if General Callahan himself is inspecting you at the moment. You get down and you get down before my magazine is empty or you're going to be doing fifty fucking pushups with my goddamn boot stuck up your ass! Is that understood?"

"Yes sir!" the platoon shouted out.

He nodded, halting his pacing and turning towards them. "I'm glad we understand each other then. Now that we've got that little bit of military knowledge covered, let us move on to the most important pieces of equipment that you morons will possess in the battle area. First squad," he stared at the front row, the row in which Darren was situated, "double time your asses over to the supply building over there." He pointed at a low concrete building about a quarter mile away. "You will pick up one helmet and one M-16 rifle there. Sign the paperwork and get your asses back here at fucking triple time! If you are not all back in this rank in exactly ten minutes you're going to be giving me fifty, is that clear?"

"Yes sir!" Darren and the rest of first rank shouted back.

"Then get moving," Black said mildly, just loud enough for all of them to hear. "The clock is running."

Darren and the others ran in a disorganized fashion across the parade ground, passing another group of recruits, obviously further along in their training, that were marching under the watchful eye of their DI. They scrambled into the building, finding themselves in a large room that connected to a gated, secured window. A large sign told them to line up for equipment hand out. A bored looking corporal was on the other side of the window. He was smoking a cigarette and watching something on a computer screen behind him.

"New morons?" he asked, seemingly put out that he was going to have to do his job.

"Yes sir!" Darren and the other nine recruits of the squad shouted out.

"Jesus fucking Christ," the corporal said, rubbing his temples. "Don't yell that shit at me. My name is Steve. Line up and I'll give you your shit."

"Yes sir!" everyone barked again despite his admonishments.

Darren, as the largest of the group, took his place at the front of the line out of instinct. It was something that he had done throughout his school years. When there was a line to be formed, the biggest person got to be in the front, right? That was the natural law accorded to the bad motherfuckers of the world. It was something that he would shortly regret doing in this setting.

Moving with agonizing slowness, Corporal Steve removed an M-16 and two empty magazines from a shelf behind him. The weapon was brand new, its black surfaces shining in the light, hardly a fingerprint marring its surface. He used a laser scanner to record the serial number on a computer terminal and then asked for Darren's social security number. Darren rattled it off impatiently and then was asked to put his thumbprint on the screen, acknowledging receipt of the weapon. He did this as well and the weapon was handed through the bars to him.

Despite more than six hundred hours to his credit at the game of Infantry Attack, he had never actually held an M-16 in his hands before, or in fact any kind of firearm. He found it was heavier than he'd imagined it would be, even without the ammunition in it. He hefted it a little, liking the way it felt. This was his chink killing machine, the embodiment of death for those commie yellow bastards. "Thank you, sir," he said sharply.

"It's Steve goddammit," he said resignedly. "I'm just a moron like you guys. Oh fuck it. What size hat you wear?"

"Extra large," Darren told him, taking a glance back at the other recruits that had come in with him. They were agitated, obviously worried about the amount of time this was taking. Well at least he would be able to get back before Black's ten minute deadline. And that was what was important, wasn't it? He figured the best thing to do was to make as little impression on the DI's as possible. And if you did have to make an impression, make sure it was a good one.

Steve reached behind him and pulled a Kevlar helmet from the shelf. It too was brand new. "Try this one on," he told Darren, handing it over. "You might have to adjust the band a little."

The helmet, in contrast to the rifle, was lighter than he'd envisioned. He placed it on his head and found that, although it was not a perfect fit, a little minor adjustment would undoubtedly make it so. "This'll work," he said hastily, picking up his two magazines and stepping aside to let the next recruit in. "Thank you, sir."

"Yeah, yeah," Steve said, dismissing him as he turned to get the next rifle.

Darren forced his way back through the other recruits and back out the door. Slinging his new rifle over his shoulder and holding tightly to the two magazines, he began running as fast as he could back across the parade ground towards where the rest of his training platoon were still standing at attention. He made it there reasonably quickly, well ahead of the ten-minute time clock he was sure. Sergeant Black was standing at the front of the remaining ranks as he came running up, yelling at two of them for something. They were on the ground pumping out push-ups. He stopped in mid-yell as Darren returned to his spot and assumed his attentive stance.

Black walked directly over to him, his eyes murderous, making Darren instantly know he'd done something very wrong. He came over until he was standing chest to chest with him, close enough so that Darren could smell eggs and salsa on his breath. "I don't believe my fucking eyeballs," he told him. "I just don't fucking believe it! What's your name, moron?"

Darren swallowed nervously, wondering what he had done to deserve this. "Sir! Recruit Caswell, sir!" he responded, as he had been taught.

"Recruit Caswell," Black said contemplatively, as if mulling that name over. He looked him up and down, obviously not liking what he saw. "You're a big motherfucker, aren't you?"

"Yes sir!" Darren agreed.

"Probably about as dumb as a fuckin retarded chink too, ain't you?"

"No sir!" he said.

"Don't you fucking disagree with me, moron!" Black screamed at him, his spittle flying into his face. "If I say you're a dumb motherfucker then you fucking agree with me, do you get it?"

"Yes sir!" he said, his terror growing.

"Are you a dumb motherfucker?"

"Yes sir!"

Black nodded. "I'm glad we established that," he said in a lower, almost reasonable tone. "Now tell me something, you big dumb motherfucker, when you went over to the armory, did you go over there by yourself?"

"No sir!" Darren told him.

"No, you didn't, did you? You went over there with nine other morons like yourself. That was your squad Caswell. Your team." He started to shout again. "And you just left your fucking squad behind! You got what you needed and you just fucking left them there to fend for themselves, didn't you?"

"Uh..." Darren stammered, "I didn't mean ... I mean..."

"You answer me with a fucking yes sir or a fucking no sir, moron!" Black screamed. "You just left your goddamn team behind in the armory didn't you?"

"Yes sir!" he responded, surprised to find tears wanting to leak from his eyes. What the hell was the big deal? Why did this asshole seem to get off on yelling at people?

"You just figured, hell, I got my shit and I can get back before the ten minute deadline. Fuck those other people. Isn't that what you thought, Caswell?"

"No sir!" he responded weakly, although that was exactly what he had thought.

"You lowlife, scum sucking, chink fucking, piece of shit!" Black yelled in his face. "Don't give me that shit. That's exactly what the fuck you were thinking! Don't you fucking dare try to tell me that it wasn't! Do you know what happens in combat, Caswell, when people start thinking like you just did? When the rest of the team can't fucking rely on you to stick with them until the job is done?"

"No sir!"

"The whole fucking team dies!" he yelled. "And if all of the fucking teams that we send out there to fight the chinks dies, then we lose this fucking war and those of us that are left alive will have to learn to speak fucking Chinese while those commie asswipes are fucking our sisters! Now you get your ass back to that building at quadruple time!" He smacked him on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of him. "Move!"

Coughing and choking, trying to refill his lungs with air, he moved, putting his feet in front of him and sprinting back across the parade ground. He arrived back at the armory just in time to intercept the next person, a freckled, stupid-looking redhead that was almost as large as him, as he exited the doorway, new rifle in hand, new helmet on head. He briefly considered just letting him go. After all, why shouldn't someone else get to experience the same persecution that he had just endured? But another part of his mind warned that Black would probably be even more infuriated with him for doing that.

"Don't go back," he gasped, trying to talk and catch his breath at the same time.

"What?" the recruit asked. "What do you mean?"

"He just ... just ... reamed my ... ass for coming back without the rest of the squad," he said. "We have to go back together."

"Together?" he said, distressed. "But there's no way that we'll make it back in ten that way."

He took a few more deep breaths. "I'm just passing on the message," he said.

It took the better part of fifteen minutes for everyone in the squad to get outfitted with a rifle and a helmet. The next few to emerge wanted to run back on their own but Darren managed to convince them that that was a very bad idea. At last they assembled once more into their disorganized formation and began to run back. They arrived in an out of breath heap, quickly resuming their places in the line.

"Fifteen goddamn minutes," Black yelled at them once they were at attention. "I told you to be back here in ten, didn't I?"

"Yes sir!" they all yelled.

"So can anyone tell me why it took fifteen for you to get back?" He looked up and down the line. No one answered him. He walked back up to Darren. "How about you, you dumbshit, chink fucking, squad abandoning motherfucker?" he demanded of him. "Can you tell me why it took so fucking long for you and these other morons to get back?"

Darren wasn't sure how he was expected to answer. He decided on the spur of the moment to take a chance and try the truth. "Sir!" he said. "It took that long for the corporal to give us all our equipment, sir!"

Black took a step backward, his eyes continuing to bore into Darren's. "So you're saying," he asked, "that Corporal Jenkins was not able to pass out your supplies in the time that I allotted to you?"

"Yes sir!" he agreed.

He seemed to consider this for a moment. "So," he said, "by that logic, I gave you an impossible task then, didn't I?"

"Yes sir," he said, a little less conviction this time.

Black nodded slowly, his face animating thoughtfully, as if a startling realization was just coming home to him. And then he seemed to shake it off. He shrugged disinterestedly. "Oh well," he said dismissively. "What can you do? It won't be the last time that some fucking idiot orders you to do something impossible and then punishes you for not getting it done. All ten of you, get down and give me fifty. Right now!"

They dropped and began to count off.

"Second squad," Black shouted. "To the armory for weapons and helmets. You have ten minutes! Ten fucking minutes!"

Nearly forty-five minutes later, the entire platoon was freshly outfitted with their weapons and helmets. None of the squads had even come close to the ten-minute deadline for their return.

"All right, morons," Black told them after the last group finished up their fifty push-ups, "you now have in your possession the two most important pieces of equipment that you will ever carry into the battle zone. You have a standard M-16, 5.56 millimeter, fully automatic assault weapon and you have your helmet. Your rifle is your lover, your best friend, the only fucking thing you can depend on in this shitty war. You are absolutely fucking worthless without it. Your helmet is your protector. It will keep shell fragments or badly aimed bullets from scrambling what little brains you have. From this point out, you will carry these pieces of equipment with you everywhere. And I mean fucking everywhere! When you march from one place to another, you will have your helmet upon your head and your weapon upon your person. When we exercise at PT, you will have them with you. When we sit in the classroom to teach you how to die like men, you will have them with you. When you go to the latrine to take a shit, you will have your weapon and your helmet within arm's reach of you. When you go to the shower to clean the filth off of your disgusting body, you will have them within arm's reach of you. When you are asleep in your bunk at night, you will sleep with your helmet on your head and your weapon strap around your arm. If you are caught at any point without either of these objects in your possession, I will have you running laps on the track until you drop from heat exhaustion. If I catch you twice, you will fail this course and recycle during the next rotation. Is that clear, morons?"

"Yes sir!" they shouted as one.

"Very good," he said almost conversationally. "Now we are going to start our lessons today with the rifle. Since it is the most important piece of equipment that you own, you will need to become as familiar with it as you are your own cocks. Before we start to teach you how to march, how to run, how to put on your packs, how to take a shit in the presence of nine other morons, you're going to learn how to assemble, disassemble, load, and fire that weapon. In fact, you will learn these things today, before you even eat breakfast. This platoon will have no food or water until every last motherfucker in here can flawlessly do those four tasks I just outlined. Have I made myself understood?"

"Yes sir!"

"Then let's head to the firing range, shall we? Follow behind me and keep up. Anyone falling behind will be doing pushups until their goddamn arms fall off. Let's move out!"

And with that, he and the assistant DI turned and began running to the west. The platoon hesitated for the briefest of seconds and then started off behind them.

None of the men of Baker Platoon would eat a scrap of food or drink a drop of water until nearly 3:30 that afternoon. Five of them would come close enough to heat exhaustion and dehydration to require medical attention. But when they finally did sit down to a meal of stale bologna sandwiches and warm distilled water, every last one of them knew how to assemble, disassemble, load, and fire their M-16 with impressive precision.

Kensington Air Force Base, Nevada

July 21, 2015

Kensington Air Force Base was located thirty miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was a barren, hot, miserable place to be in any month of the year but it was particularly miserable in July. Heat waves shimmered endlessly off of the concrete runways and the desert sands surrounding them, making it difficult to see anything clearly beyond a range of half a mile or so. Rows of jet aircraft—the vast majority of them obsolete F-16s that had been relegated to training status—sat in sandbagged storage stalls on the tarmac. Surrounding the parked aircraft were a few anti-aircraft emplacements and a solitary fixed SAM launcher, token defenses to be sure because, though the base was well within range of Chinese air power, they had never bothered to send their bombers after the training facility.

Rolling along the taxiway towards the head of runway 27 was one of the base's F-16T aircraft, a specially modified trainer version that featured two seats instead of the usual one. In the rear seat, the command seat, sat Lieutenant Tyler Pratt, one of the flight instructors for the facility. In the front seat, the student's seat, sat recruit Mark Whiting, who was about to embark upon his first flight since the time his mother and father had taken him to Hawaii when he was eleven years old. And this was no gentle civilian airliner that he was strapped into.

His class of student pilots consisted of 50 recruits, 42 men and 8 women (the Air Force and Navy were the two services where the fairer sex was allowed to participate in combat operations), every last one of them, just like in Darren's class, between the ages of 18 and 20 years old. They were a mixed variety of various ethnic backgrounds that was fairly representative of the United States as a whole. The majority were Caucasians, followed a close second by African-Americans, Hispanics, Arabians, and one Native American of Cherokee descent. The armed services didn't give a shit what color you were or where your parents had come from (with the obvious exception of those of Asian heritage, they were the one category that was absent of representation), anyone had the equal opportunity to die in an air battle for their country.

Mark, along with the rest of his class, had discovered that their recruiters had been entirely honest when they'd proclaimed the training to be intense and specific towards the goal of getting people flight qualified in the shortest amount of time possible. They had been on the base for three weeks now, twenty-one straight days without a weekend pass or even a day off. There had been no basic military training of any kind. There was no marching, no drill instructors and the mind games that went along with them, no fastidiousness over uniform conditions or bed making, no inspections. Their hair had not been shaved off of their scalps, nor was there much of a physical training program save the two mile, loosely monitored runs every morning before breakfast, and that was only so they would meet the minimum physical fitness standards for maintaining flight status.

Their very first day at Kensington had been marked by uniform and flight gear fittings and then they had gone directly to the classrooms where they had begun to learn the basic principals of flight. They had started with gravity vs. lift and thrust vs. drag, covering all of the concepts of that in a grueling eleven hours. For the next two weeks, things had been pretty much the same. They went for the morning run, they had breakfast in the cafeteria, and then they headed to the classrooms where they spent the hours from 0800 to 2000 listening to lectures on flight principals and aircraft systems given by a variety of early to mid-twenties Air Force instructors, all of them combat veterans that had managed to live through at least two years on the line in a conflict where the enemy had overwhelming air parity. They would break for lunch at 1300 and be back in the classrooms by 1330 and they would then go straight through until the end of the day. Dinner, which usually was not all that bad here, would be served in the cafeteria at 2030.

It was only in the last week that the routine had changed somewhat. It was then that they had been introduced to the flight simulators where they could start to put some of their newly gained knowledge to semi-practical use. The sims, as they were called, were located in a huge warehouse building adjacent to the classroom complex. Each one consisted of an exact replica of the F-16 cockpit contained within a barrel shaped, windowless steel cylinder that sat upon hydraulically operated gimbals. Advanced supercomputers controlled every aspect of what went on there, projecting impressively realistic three dimensional images on a 360 degree screen that surrounded the student in his or her simulated ejection seat. Movement of the simulated controls would create movement of the entire simulator atop the gimbal, thus imparting simulated centrifugal motion for the student. The lecture period of each day now ended at 1530. Simulator time was scheduled for the hours between 1600 and 2000 now. So far Mark, like all of his classmates, had spent fifteen complete flight hours in the sims learning the basics of the control and display layouts and how to turn, bank, ascend, descend, and, most important of all, how to maintain straight and level flight.