Chapter 4

Somewhere over Wyoming

November 21, 2015

This was Darren's first experience with flying in an aircraft and he was not finding it to be much to his liking. It was a Boeing 767, a former commercial airliner that had once belonged to United or American or one of the other airlines but that was now the property of the WestHem armed forces. The seats were comfortable and spacious, the most comfortable in fact that he'd sat in in quite some time. So it wasn't the aircraft itself that made him nervous. What squeamed him was the fact that they were flying into territory that Chinese jets routinely operated in, some of them fighters armed with air-to-air missiles. If a Chinese fighter pilot escorting a raid on one of the many military targets in the vicinity happened to see a nice fat airliner, loaded with fresh troops bound for the battlefield, wouldn't he abandon his primary mission long enough to pot it out of the sky? Darren did not think that that scenario was very far-fetched, particularly since such things had happened several times in the past. Darren couldn't think of a more hideous way to die than spinning to the ground in a crippled jetliner from 30,000 feet.

Around him were 220 other young men and women, all of them freshly trained troops of one kind or another, all of them bound for assignments in and around the eastern edge of the front, which was the most active portion. Of course not all of them were combat troops. Most, actually, were not. Many would be going to serve their time in Boise, which was located some thirty miles from the front, fixing vehicles or running computers or loading trucks. They were future REMFs and they were easy to spot since they had carried no rifles onto the aircraft like the troops bound for the line had. Darren's M-16 rifle, the same one that he had been issued on his first day of basic training and that he had carried through eight weeks of armored cavalry training, was currently stowed in the overhead bin where carry-on luggage had once gone. His duffel bag, which contained all of his personal items, was stowed in the belly of the plane and would be unloaded when they reached the airport in Boise, or so the aircraft masters had promised.

Darren, like all of the combat troops on board, was sitting near the front of the plane, close to the doors. By virtue of being one of the largest of them, he had secured himself a window seat on the right side and he had spent a great deal of the flight from Indianapolis staring out of it to the ground below. Though he had seen no enemy planes bent on shooting them out of the sky, he had seen a great deal of the countryside from five miles up. Sitting next to him was Groovy, who, along with three others from his cavalry training class, were the only ones that he knew on the aircraft. Groovy was dozing lightly in his seat, the victim of a severe hangover from two nights ago when they'd gone to a combination bar and whorehouse in Oklahoma City. Darren himself was mostly recovered from that event but only because of his larger size and greater experience with the demon drink, not because of his lack of indulgence.

The aircraft bounced a few times as they encountered some rough air and then smoothed out. Darren lit a cigarette and then pulled out his PC, calling up his email software. He and Mark had maintained a sporadic exchange rate since leaving Sacramento for their respective training courses. It was hardly the once a week rate that they'd promised each other in the beginning, but at least they had kept in touch. Darren knew his friend was still in the pilot training and had more than two hundred hours of stick time under his belt now. He knew he had been pegged as a low-altitude specialist and would be going to Colorado soon to learn to fly Owls. Darren thought that was too damn bad. Mark would have to settle for bombing bridges and other inanimate objects instead of shooting chinks out of the sky. The Owls, Darren knew from his extensive study of all things war-related back in high school, didn't even carry air-to-air weapons. They went virtually undefended into the battle-area. What was up with that propaganda? Oh well, he couldn't let his sadness at his friend's situation take away from the excitement that he himself felt about finally getting to the front. He was almost there! In less than an hour they would land and then he and Groovy would be transported to the staging area of the 314^th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Caldwell. Within a week he would be killing chinks. A week!

"Compose email to Mark Whiting," Darren told his machine, activating its voice recognition software.

"Email recorder on stand-by," replied the female voice that he favored his computer to have. "Record when ready."

"Record," he said, watching as the green light came on and the small camera above the screen activated. He looked into it. "What's up, sarge?" he asked his friend. "How's it advancing out there in Nevada? You scored any more puss in Las Vegas? At a thousand bucks a pop I hope you tore it up. Goddamn I miss the lonely widows sometimes. Oh well, anyway, you'll never guess where I am right now. I'm on an airplane 30,000 feet above Wyoming somewhere. We graduated from cav school three days ago, had ourselves a bitchin party in Oklahoma City, and now we're on our way to Boise where we'll ship out to our assignments. I should be getting my first kill in the next couple of days and I can't fuckin wait.

"My friend Groovy that I told you about is still hangin' with me. We asked the captain that was in charge of assignments back in school if we could serve together and he made it happen. He said that they like friends to serve together, that it helps with unit cohesion or some bullshit like that. Sure, it's okay to do it now, but they couldn't do it back when it counted and we signed up for the fuckin buddy program." He shrugged, knowing that the camera wouldn't pick it up but doing it anyway. "Oh well, that's fuel through the engines I guess. I'm still pissed off about it but at least they let Groovy and I stay together." He turned the camera towards his sleeping friend. "There he is now. Isn't he a small motherfucker? He's even smaller than you are." He turned it back to his own face. "He's a little hungover from our party the other night. Ever since I introduced him to booze and pussy, he's been fucking unstoppable. Motherfucker spent almost all of his accumulated pay on hookers and then he had to make up some bullshit story for his mother about where it was going. She was expecting him to send some of that home for her and his six brothers and sisters." He laughed, shaking his head. "I wonder what old mom would think if she really knew what he'd done with it?"

He turned more serious now, his expression hardening some. "Anyway, this might be the last email I can send you for awhile. They tell us that once we get to the front we'll have to leave our PCs back at the staging area. It's some security bullshit or something like that. Besides, all the fuckin cell towers have been blown up by the chinks anyway. So I'll send you another one when I can, but until then, be careful in them airplanes and don't crash and stay away from the chicks with crabs, I'm here to tell you about that one. My fuckin pubic hair is just now starting to grow back after they shaved it off. Catch you later, sarge, and I'll keep track of how many chinks I kill. End recording."

"Recording complete," the computer told him. "Would you like to review it for editing?"

"No," he said. "Send recording."

The computer obediently locked its signal onto the nearest cellular antenna, which in this case was installed in the aircraft itself. Once the connection was made, Darren's recording was digitized and sent off across the internet where it quickly found Mark's server address and was stored in a file for retrieval the next time he checked his email. The entire process took less than two seconds, although Mark himself would not receive the recording for another six days. Currently his PC was resting in his locker and Mark himself was being shot out of the top of a specially modified C-130 aircraft moving at three hundred knots ten thousand feet above the most rugged part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This was a simulated combat ejection, the first part of his escape and evasion drill. After landing, he would have to work his way through the mountains and back to the desert subsisting on nothing but the supplies in his survival pack.

Darren, knowing nothing about this, simply looked at his computer for a moment and then, with a slight sigh, said, "Compose email to Bob and Darlene Caswell."

"Email recorder on stand-by. Record when ready."

He continued to look at the screen blankly, knowing that he owed his parents an update on his progress, but unable to think of a single thing to say. It had been more than two months since he had last contacted them in any way, though they had sent him multiple emails since then. He didn't know why he had so much trouble facing his parents these days, even over the relatively benign and faceless medium of email recordings, but trouble he was definitely having.

"Cancel email recording," he finally said, watching with a little guilt as the screen went blank. He would send them something later, once he was settled in a bit. He was sure that they would understand.

The plane bounced and bumped roughly as it flew through the unstable air above the Rocky Mountains. The ride smoothed out temporarily on the other side but quickly became rough once more when they descended to less than five thousand feet above the salt flats of northern Utah. The pilot announced over the intercom that they were now in what was considered hazardous airspace and that they would maintain that altitude, which would keep them well below the circling combat air patrol that protected them, until they entered the landing pattern at Boise. Conversation in the cabin, which had been rather boisterous and loud until that point, suddenly became subdued as everyone realized that they were really entering the war zone.

Soon they were circling over Boise itself, waiting their turn to land at what was now the busiest (and most often attacked) air terminal in the United States. Darren looked out his window and beheld a small city that looked like it had been through quite a bit in the last few years. Entire sections of housing had been smashed flat and burned out. The downtown skyscrapers were all darkened and, except for the anti-aircraft emplacements atop a few of them, utterly deserted. Most had large sections of window glass that had been shattered and never replaced. Several had gaping holes in them where off-target bombs or crashing planes had struck. To the north of downtown, a huge industrial area that had once contained warehouses and factories had been bombed flat, some of the debris still smoking in places. Nearly every highway and freeway bridge throughout the city's transportation network was fractured in one way or another. Some of them, those that were vital to the movement of supplies, had been rebuilt into makeshift structures but most were nothing more than piles of rubble rotting away. In the residential areas that were still standing, many of the houses were damaged, some with the scattered debris of crashed aircraft still strewn about, the vast majority unoccupied since the residents of Boise had long since moved elsewhere. Closer in, near the airport itself, a huge staging area of military trucks, APCs, tanks, halftracks, artillery pieces, and other vehicles could be seen, hundreds, if not thousands of soldiers plainly visible moving about and working in the vicinity. A seemingly endless convoy of trucks stretched out towards the north and west, snaking its way through the buildings and the network of roads and bridges. And everywhere the snouts of anti-aircraft weapons of all shapes, sizes, and caliber, could be seen poking upward into the sky, some fixed within sandbagged emplacements, some mobile and mounted on trucks.

"Damn," Darren whispered, awestruck as he took in the sights of a city destroyed by years of warfare.

They touched down at the airport a few minutes later, the aircraft bumping and bouncing almost violently over a runway that had been cratered by anti-runway bombs and then repaired many times over. Pushed off to the sides in several places were the remains of crashed aircraft—a burned out F-22 here, a broken and battered C-11 there, all of them appearing to be rather recently strewn there, all of them appearing to have been simply bulldozed off of the runway to allow operations to continue. More anti-aircraft emplacements were installed near the taxiways, all of them manned by teams of Air Force personnel. Darren noted that several of these teams were quite openly drinking bottles of beer and smoking marijuana.

The aircraft came to a halt a few minutes later. "Okay, morons," the pilot said over the intercom system, "the longer that I'm on the ground here, the more likely it is that some chink will come along and blow my ass up, so let's get you all unloaded as quickly as possible. Get your gear from the overheads and move to the front exit in an orderly fashion."

Everyone stood up and started grabbing for their gear, no one liking the idea of being trapped inside of an aircraft full of fuel while Chinese bombers came in for a low level attack. Darren, along with the other combat troops, grabbed his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He eased his way down the aisle and was one of the first out the door.

The air was quite brisk and a light snow was falling as he emerged from the aircraft. They were parked on a taxiway about one hundred yards from what had once been a terminal building. It was now partially collapsed on one side, partially burned on another. Concrete barricades with KEEP OUT signs circled its perimeter. Set up to one side of it were several large tents that were surrounded by double layers of sandbags, stacked ten high with doorway openings on each wall. Beneath the plane a group of airmen were opening up the cargo compartment and tossing bags out onto the ground. A flimsy looking set of steps had been set up against the doorway. It rocked alarmingly as Darren stepped onto its platform and started down.

Another airman, this one with a PC in his hand, was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. "Assemble over there," he said mechanically, pointing towards the far edge of the taxiway. "Once the gear is unloaded and the plane moves away, you can get your stuff."

Darren went where he was told, shifting his weapon on his shoulder a little. He waited.

Within five minutes all of the passengers were off of the aircraft. Within ten minutes all of the bags had been tossed out and the cargo doors sealed back up. Less than a minute after that the jet engines wound up once more and the plane began rolling towards the head of the runway once again. During this time period three more planes had parked further down and were beginning the same process.

Darren and the others sorted through the unruly pile of bags for a few minutes until everyone had found the one belonging to him or her.

"Combat troops," said the airman who seemed to be in charge of the operation, "assemble together and march to tent 9-A, that's nine-alpha, over there on the edge of the old terminal building. The rest of you, follow me for processing."

The men with the guns all formed up into a loose formation out of instinct born in basic training. There were about fifty of them in all and they almost strutted as they made their way to tent 9-A, which turned out to be a small processing center staffed by four army sergeants and one lieutenant.

"Name?" demanded one of the sergeants when Darren made his way up to the desk.

"Private Caswell," Darren told him proudly.

The sergeant checked his name on a computer screen and pushed a few buttons. "You're bound for the 314^th ACR, correct?"

"Yes sir," Darren said.

"I'm a sergeant, don't call me sir," he said tonelessly. "Take your shit and go out that door behind me there. Hang a left. There will be a deuce and a half parked in space number eighteen. That's your ride."

"Thank you, sir ... uh sergeant," he said, hefting his bag and his rifle up once again.

The two and a half ton truck, or deuce and a half as it was known, was the standard transport truck of the armed forces. Painted the white and brown winter camouflage scheme, the back covered in canvas of the same design, it sat silently in an outlined parking spot along the tent. A .50 caliber machine gun was mounted just behind the cab and stuck upwards through a flap in the canvas. A gangly looking corporal smoking a cigarette greeted Darren at the back. "314^th?" he asked.

"Yes," Darren confirmed.

"Hop in the back and settle in. The trip will take about an hour or so."

In all, twelve of the group climbed in the back with him. Including Groovy, eight of them had just come from the armored cav class in Oklahoma. They exchanged a few pleasantries with each other beneath the canvas cover and settled in. Soon, the corporal that had been outside climbed in and manned the machine gun, leaning against it silently and lighting another cigarette. Several of the new members tried to engage him in conversation—he had the look of someone who had spent time in the trenches—but he ignored them completely, not even acknowledging their presence. Finally, the diesel engine fired up and they began lurching along towards their destination.

The 314^th Armored Cavalry Regiment was based in Caldwell, a small town located on Interstate 84, less than thirty miles from Boise. The lanes of the interstate were heavily congested with military equipment of all shapes, forms, and purpose. The deuce and a half trucks were the staple of the vehicular traffic, all of them loaded up with food supplies, ammunition, soldiers, and every other light supply needed to fight the war, all of them with manned .50 caliber machine guns sticking up towards the sky. Interspersed among them were tank transporters with M2A4 tanks upon them, flatbeds hauling Bradley infantry carriers and artillery weapons, and larger, trailer trucks hauling God knew what. All of this traffic moved along at forty miles per hour at best and often was forced to a complete standstill for minutes at a time. All along both sides of the freeway were the charred remains of vehicles that had been blown to pieces from the air while making this same trip. Darren looked at these forgotten vehicles nervously through a gap in the canvas of the truck.

Finally they bounced into Caldwell itself. It had once been a fairly fashionable suburb of Boise, the place where the doctors and lawyers and real estate developers had lived. Now it was a collection of bombed out houses, shattered streets, and flattened strip malls. Nearly all of the real estate in the town was now abandoned and unlivable but as they got closer towards the northern stretches, Darren began to see signs of life. Here the buildings had been shored up and sandbagged. Soldiers, most of them packing their rifles, were walking to and fro, some engaged in work details, some just passing the time with each other. A few vehicles could also be seen driving from one place to another, most of them Humvees, a few of them deuce and a halfs. Nowhere however, did he see any tanks or APCs, which were the fighting vehicles of an armored cavalry regiment. Where were they? Were they hidden somewhere?

They came to a stop in front of a large lot that had probably once contained a shopping mall or a commercial building complex. Now the buildings were all gone and had been replaced by a collection of sandbagged tents of varying size. A mobile SAM launcher and several anti-aircraft emplacements were set up around the outside of this area, all of the positions manned. There was a lot of pedestrian activity here as well, with groups of soldiers working on sandbags, repairing tents, or fixing vehicles.

"Everyone out," the corporal manning the gun announced. "Assemble out front with your shit and someone will be out to put you where you belong momentarily."

One by one they filed out onto the wet asphalt, lining up and standing at parade rest. The corporal and the two privates that had been in the cab of the truck all disappeared towards the largest collection of tents, leaving them alone.

They stood there for the better part of five minutes before a man of about twenty-five came strolling up to them. He was wearing a camouflage parka over his BDUs and his helmet. He had no rank markings of any kind upon him. His face had not been shaved for perhaps three days and his eyes looked the collection of privates up and down emotionlessly, as if he were taking in a collection of fence posts or tires to be installed. He stopped before them.

"I'm Captain Mead," he said, stifling a yawn. "I'm in charge of Alpha Company of the 2^nd infantry Battalion of the 314^th. All of you newbies have been assigned to my company to replace all of the other newbies that got killed in the last offensive. Welcome to Caldwell."

"Thank you, sir," they said in unison, all of them answering as they would have back in training.

"You don't have to do that yes-sir, no-sir shit to me," Mead said. "This is the front, gentlemen and we do things different here than we do in training. Don't address me or any officer or NCO under my command unless we have addressed you personally. Don't salute us at any time, especially not in the forward areas. I know they taught you all kinds of neat little things about leading squads and fire teams in training. You can just forget all of that shit. You won't be doing it here. Your job is to do what you're told, when you're told to do it, no matter what it is you've been told to do. That's all you need to know. If you live long enough, you'll figure out the rest as we go along."

Everyone in the line itched to say "yes sir" to him. Everyone managed to restrain themselves however.

"Okay," Mead said. "That's my inspiring speech for you." He walked over to the center of the line, to the two soldiers that were standing there. He inserted his hand between them and pushed one to the left and one to the right, forcing a break in the line. "This half," he said, pointing to his left, "will be assigned to Lieutenant Fender of 2^nd Platoon." He then pointed to his right. "This half, you'll go to Lieutenant Washington of 4^th Platoon. Everyone remember that? Good. Now let's have those of you assigned to 2^nd Platoon head over there to tent seven and those of you assigned to 4^th head over to tent eleven. Line up outside and your lieutenants will be out shortly." With that, Mead turned and walked away, strolling back to his tent.

Darren and Groovy had both been in the group assigned to 2^nd Platoon. They turned and marched along the wet ground in the direction that Mead had pointed, passing three of the sandbagged tents before coming to one that had a large 7 stenciled on it. The rest of the group followed behind them. No sooner had they lined up before it than the flap opened and a prematurely balding man of about twenty-three walked out. He was dressed the same as Mead had been, the same in fact as everyone seemed to be around here. His speech was even shorter than Mead's had been. He simply divided them up into three different groups and sent them further down the chain to meet their squad sergeants. Groovy and Darren were kept together for this further division and were sent to assemble before tent 24, which was were they were told they would find Sergeant Maxwell.

Maxwell was sitting in a chair outside of the tent, smoking a cigarette and browsing through something on his PC. He too was dressed in his winter parka and was without rank markings. His hair was dirty blonde and his complexion pockmarked with a few outbreaks of acne. He was only about twenty years old in appearance but his eyes seemed much older, ancient even, as they flitted over the two new recruits.

"You two my newbies?" he asked listlessly, taking a drag and spitting a wad of phlegm on the ground.

"Yes sir," Darren said.

"Don't call me sir," he said. "This isn't training. This is reality. My name is sergeant or sarge, got it?"

"Yes, sergeant," Darren corrected.

"Yes, sergeant," Groovy piped up as well.

He spent another moment or two looking them over before shaking his head sadly. "Let me guess," he said at last. "You two are volunteers aren't you?"

They both agreed that they had in fact volunteered. "I'm not no pussy, sarge," Darren added.

He shook his head again, chuckling in sad amusement. "So you bought into all that crap on TV and internet about serving your country and driving back those fascist chinks, right? They told you how great it was to serve your fucking country, what a goddamn honor it was, and you bought into it."

Neither Darren nor Mark was quite sure how to respond to this seemingly seditious statement by their new sergeant, but Maxwell didn't seem to require an answer.

"Yep," he said, slowly getting up from his chair, "that's why you signed up all right. Did either of you morons waive a non-hazardous to get here?"

"I did, sergeant," Darren admitted, for some reason not feeling as proud of this as he usually was.

Maxwell walked up to him, taking another drag from his cigarette and letting the smoke drift into his face. "Well you truly are a moron then," he informed him lightly. "Soon you'll discover that that was the dumbest thing you've ever done. Mark my words, newbie, you fucked up and you fucked up big time. This place is hell on earth, my man, have no doubt about it."

"Are you a draftee, sergeant?" Darren asked him, figuring that he was bitter about being forced into the role that he was now playing.

He shook his head, shooting that theory right into the dust. "Nope," he said. "I was just as stupid as you back in '13. I signed up right after high school, all gung-ho to go out and kill me some chinks." He spat again. "Well I've killed me plenty of chinks now, and let me tell you, I wish I would've sucked some captain's dick back then and got myself assigned as a REMF somewhere."

Darren and Groovy cast a look at each other, both of them silently cursing their bad luck at having been assigned to such a cowardly sergeant. He wished he were a REMF? Would he try to keep them out of the action? Darren wondered with alarm. He sure seemed like the type that would rather run from a fight than respond to it.

"So anyway," Maxwell told them, casting his cigarette away and immediately lighting another one, "you are now part of second squad, second platoon, Alpha Company of the 2^nd battalion of the 314^th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Remember all of that, okay? That way you'll be able to spout it off and impress people if you manage to live through the war."

"Yes, sergeant," they both said in unison, earning them a foul look.

"What are your names?" he asked them next.

"Private Caswell," Darren said.

"Private Griffith," Groovy piped up. "Most people just call me Groovy."

"Wrong," Maxwell said, shaking his head sternly. "Your names, both of your names, are newbie. That's all people are going to call you around here until you live long enough for them to want to know your name. And I'm here to tell you that we don't want to know you, don't want to know anything about you right now because the odds are that both of you are going to be killed during your first month here. Don't take it personally, we just don't like to get attached to our newbies since we lose so many of them."

The two privates shared another brief look with each other, a look that Maxwell interpreted for what it was.

"You two are standing there thinking that I'm wrong about you, aren't you?" he asked them. "You've never been near the front before, the only thing you know about it is what you've seen on TV shows and movies like The Snoqualmie Defenders, but all the same, you're telling yourselves that I couldn't possibly be right about that. You two are too smart to die at the front, aren't you? Only the stupid ones get killed. Isn't that what they always say?"

"That's what they say, sergeant," Darren offered doubtfully.

"What they say is bullshit," he told them mildly. "Everyone dies out here, a lot of the time in ways that don't have nothing to do with smart, dumb, experienced, or inexperienced. When a fuckin chink arty shell lands right on your trench and shreds you like a wood chipper, there ain't too much that your smarts could've done to prevent it. But the ones who die the most are not the stupid ones like everyone says, at least not in a manner of speaking, but the new ones, the ones who haven't learned how to live out here yet. And its not stupidity that keeps them from learning what they need to know most of the time, its death. They get their asses blown up before they have a chance to learn. That's why we lose more than half of all of our replacements out here and that's why I can almost guarantee that one of you is going to die in the next thirty days and that more than likely both of you will."

While they digested that disturbing information, Maxwell took an especially deep drag off his smoke. "So," he said, almost cheerfully, "with that in mind, let's have you two follow me to the briefing room and I'll show you just what we're up against out here. How's that?"