More than courage Read online

  pump-action shotgun.

  To augment these personal weapons, RT Kilo's arsenal included a number of heavier weapons. Among the more impressive was the Beretta M-82A1 .50-caliber sniper rifle, capable of firing standard 12.7-mm cartridges. With a ten-power telescopic sight this rifle had a range in excess of 1,000 meters, or a tad over

  .6 of a mile, allowing a good marksman to reach out and touch his foe long before that unfortunate soul became aware that he was in danger. The sheer size of the slug, .5 inch in diameter, ensured that even a glancing blow was more than sufficient to ruin someone's entire day.

  The crew-served weapons mounted on the unit's vehicles were the real heavy weapons. The Hummer that gave them the mobility to range far and wide also provided them with platforms for weapons that their Vietnam forebears could never have imagined humping on their backs.

  Kilo Six, the Hummer used by the team commander, sported an M-2 .50-caliber heavy-barrel machine gun. Based upon a German World War I 12.7-mm antitank rifle and classified in 1921, it was fast reaching the century mark with no end to its useful military career in sight. Like the Beretta, it fired 12.7-mm balls or armoring-piercing rounds. Unlike the sniper rifle, the M-2, known affectionately by its operators as the Ma Two, had a rate of 18

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  fire that was 450 to 500 rounds per minute. Newer by a full half century was the M-19 40-mm grenade launcher that graced the ring mount on Kilo Three, which was Aveno's Hummer. Capable of chunking out sixty baseball-sized grenades per minute up to a range of 1,600 meters, its only major drawback was the limited number of rounds that could be held in its ready box.

  Range was not a factor for the crew-served weapon affixed to SFC Allen Kannen's Hummer Kilo Two, which was the only all enlisted humvec. Kannen, the team's senior NCO, fully appreciated what was probably the most unusual weapon for a Special Forces team--the tube-launched, optically tracked, wired-guided missile, or TOW. The decision as to whether or not to include this long-range antitank weapon had been an issue hotly debated at every level of command that had a say in the organization, deployment, and operational control of the recon teams. In the end the choice had been left to the individual team commanders.

  Captain Erik Burman, Kilo's commanding officer, explained his decision to use the TOW by telling his people that when one goes wandering about in bear country, it's not a bad idea to take along a bear rifle even if it's not bear you're looking for.

  The only RT Kilo Hummer that did not have an oversized weapon protruding from it was Kilo One, which belonged to the two-man air force team headed by First Lieutenant Joseph Ciszak. Instead of a ring mount and crew-served weapon, Kilo One's hard shell was adorned with an array of antennas and a small satellite dish. Ironically, it was this innocent-looking vehicle that was responsible for all the devastation that RT Kilo had managed to rain down upon their foes during the past six weeks. The members of RT Kilo were hunters in every sense of the word but they did not do any of the actual killing. None of them had fired a single round since they had crossed the Turkish-Syrian border.

  Rather, it had been Lieutenant Ciszak and his collection of high tech radios connecting him to his fellow aviators that did all of Kilo's killing. Using all the wonders of modern electronics and his trusty handheld laser designator, Joe Ciszak was able to employ MORE THAN COURAGE

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  the full spectrum of conventional munitions available to the United States Air Force. Were it not for the need to provide security and locate hard-to-find targets, the Special Forces A team would have been totally superfluous.

  In and of itself this impressive array of weaponry and comms equipment had no real value. The most accurate firearm in the world is worthless unless it is used by someone who possesses both the training and the motivation to use it. Military history is replete with accounts of lavishly equipped armies being humbled by ragtag forces that won through a triumph of will and courage.

  The United States Army itself has seen both sides of this coin, once at its birth when it faced the best-trained army in the world, and later in Vietnam when opposed by a foe who refused to yield to logic and the cruel mathematics of attrition. It is the willingness to soldier on and do one's duty in the face of daunting odds and seemingly insurmountable difficulties that often determined who is victorious and who is vanquished.

  So the question of a unit's morale, even when made up of elite warriors, is always of the greatest importance. Lacking a definitive means of measuring this critical element and suspecting that the other members of RT Kilo were suffering from their protracted deployment in much the same way as he was, Ken Aveno found himself worrying how his state of mind was impacting those around him. Perhaps one day, he told himself, he would find a surefire away of steeling himself against the slow, subtle corrosive effects of sagging morale. Perhaps" when the twin silver bars of captain were pinned to his collar they would shield him from that demon and give him the strength to be the sort of soldier that everyone expected him to be. Until then he would have to muddle along, executing those duties that were assigned to him as best he could and keep morale from robbing him or his unit of its ability to carry on.

  Climbing from the shallow hole that he had spent much of the day in, sleeping when the heat permitted, the executive officer of the small A team stretched his five-foot-ten frame for the first 20

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  time in hours as he continued to look around. There was not much to see. Each of the team's humvees was hidden under tanandbrown nets. It never failed to amaze Aveno how the squiggly strips of material laced through the squares of the knotted nylon nets managed to hide something as large as a Hummer and those who operated it. Yet he knew that from a surprisingly short distance, a net that was properly set up blended in nicely with the surrounding nothingness of the desert. From even farther out, the nets and Hummers tucked underneath them simply disappeared, just like Team Kilo.

  Shaking off his lethargy and anxious to get started before the faint light of early night was gone, Aveno chugged forward. As the XO he was charged with the maintenance and logistical affairs of Team Kilo. This required that he check each of the team's specially modified Hummers on a daily basis to ensure that they were being maintained in accordance with established standards and ready for that night's operations. Unlike unit morale, this task had established standards and procedures that could be measured and relied upon. In the process of overseeing maintenance, he was also expected to keep track of current levels of ammo, food, fuel, and water. After six weeks this drill had become second nature, as routine as the setting sun. In fact it had become so routine that the young first lieutenant found he had to guarci against complacency.

  Each member of Recon Team Kilo was a professional in every sense of the word, men who had been in the army long enough to appreciate the reasons behind Aveno's precombat inspections. Yet it still irked some of the enlisted men to have someone poking and prodding every nook and cranny of their vehicle and equipment day in and day out. They were after all the creme de la creme, the best of the best, professional soldiers who expected to be treated as professionals, not rank recruits. Only through quiet diplomacy and an occasional threat was Sergeant First Class Allen Kannen, Kilo's senior NCO, able to keep their tongues in check.

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  Still, not even he could stop their every effort to let Aveno know just how much his daily inspections irritated them.

  On approaching each Hummer, Aveno would call out to its driver, who was usually tearing down a camouflage net or checking out his humvee. The men assigned to the Hummer would greet him with whatever subtle sign of resentment they thought they could get away with. For his part, Aveno ignored this as he set about following a script that had been burned into his memory from repeated use. The routine never varied.

  First, he unscrewed the cap of all water cans hanging on the side of every vehicle in order to check their contents. Then he'd crawl inside each door, pulling out any
opened cases of MREs tossed in the rear and counting the riumber of meal packs remaining inside. After inspecting fuel gauges, and drawing dipsticks during his examination of the engine compartment of each Hummer, Aveno would drop to the ground and crawl under the vehicle checking the suspension. Everything had to be touched by him to confirm that every Hummer was functional and in order.

  Only the crew-served weapons, inspected by the commanding officer himself were ignored during this obsessive daily ritual that caused Kannen to secretly nickname Aveno Captain Queeg.

  If Aveno reminded the enlisted members of the naval officer who commanded the USS Caine, then their commanding officer was without question the team's Captain Ahab. It had been the only other officer assigned to RT Kilo, Lieutenant Ciszak of the U.S. Air Force, who had graduated from Notre Dame with a B.A.

  in English, who first made this comparison. One night, while he was waiting to direct an air strike, Ciszak turned to his driver, Airman Jay Jones, and commented that Captain Burman's single minded dedication to duty, aloofness, and drive to accomplish every mission regardless of difficulty or danger reminded him of Melville's fictional captain, a processed man who prowled the seven seas on an endless quest. Amused, Jones shared this observation with his fellows, who immediately started using nautical 22

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  terms whenever possible, including calling out "Thar she blows!"

  whenever they located a target they had been dispatched to find.

  Ignorant of its origin, Captain Burman joined in on what he took to be a harmless attempt to liven up their harsh and monotonous existence. It was three weeks before Aveno discovered, through a slip of his driver's tongue, the true story behind the adaptation of seafaring cliches. Unsure of how Burman would take this piece of information, Aveno decided to keep that knowledge to himself. With the irritating sand and stress already eating away at Burman's nerves, Aveno knew that it wouldn't help to tell his commander that he was the butt of a collective joke.

  Adding to the strain of their protracted deployment and the stress that living in the desert placed upon them was a gnawing doubt Aveno had concerning the value of their efforts. Like the cold war that his parent's generation had endured, the current war

  on terror seemed to have no end. To many of his fellow countrymen, people to whom 9/11 was just another news story that was little more than a bad memory, the war on terror had become a distraction, a drain on national resources that some felt would be better spent on social welfare programs, education, or new roads.

  To them the idea of chasing terrorists and eradicating the threat they posed was a quixotic notion, a foolish dream that could never be achieved. Even Ken Aveno found himself wondering from time to time if it made sense to dispatch a group of highly trained professional soldiers like those belonging to RT Kilo to chase small cells of terrorists and call in bombers to drop high-tech precision guided bombs on their tents when they were found.

  This point was driven home every time a nation that was supposed to be an ally took a step to undo those small successes that RT Kilo did manage to achieve. In truth, Aveno could find little fault in what the French and others were doing. He believed that if his own national leaders were not prisoners of their own rhetoric, they would be seeking some way of getting out of an open ended policy that was only costing American lives. Of course, MORE THAN COURAGE

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  such considerations were well above Aveno's pay grade. His personal mission was to follow orders and finish his current tour of duty with some degree of pride and sanity.

  These dark troubling thoughts were in Ken Aveno's mind as he approached Kilo Six, Captain Burman's Hummer. Through the camo nets were still draped over the vehicle, he caught sight of Burman perched on the hood. This was a bad sign, for it had become something of a ritual for his commander to assume this particular posture when translating orders he had received during the day into detailed instructions. It was his way of announcing that the team had been tasked to go out into the gathering darkness once more and find something that a cabal of staff officers, ten thousand miles away, had suddenly taken an interest in. While most of these forays resulted in the discovery of targets that were subsequently bombed into oblivion, more times than Aveno cared to count, the forays had turned into a snipe hunt, but one in which the snipe had sharp teeth and long, deadly claws.

  Stopping a few meters away, he watched as Captain Burman pored over maps and scribbled notes on a pad lying next to him.

  It didn't seem right to the young officer that in this age of computers and high-tech wizardry success and failure in combat still depended upon illegible scribbling on a page made by a human being. It was as if they were insulators placed within an increasingly high-speed system to keep it from overheating or spinning out of control. That there were fellow officers sitting in the Pentagon and at Fort Leavenworth trying to figure out how to eliminate those insulators was no great secret. Rubbing his irritated eyes, Aveno thought that the sooner those guys finished their work and made him obsolete, the sooner he would be free to pull pitch and turn his back on Syria, its people, and its fucking desert.

  It was several minutes before Burman noticed that his executive officer was standing off to one side watching him. Determined to finish what he was doing before he lost the last bit of useful daylight, Burman ignored Aveno.

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  The task his team had been given that night was another routine mission. A Syrian ADA missile battery had become active some sixty kilometers southwest of where they were. As far as anyone knew there was very little in the region where the battery was located, and nothing of military value. The small villages scattered throughout the area relied on camels and goats. Half of the population was still nomadic, real Lawrence of Arabia stuff, as SFC

  Kanncn put it. Hence the reason for curiosity and concern by various intelligence agencies.

  Though the operations order he had received made no mention of it, Burman knew that someone back in Washington, D.C., was hoping that the barrenness of the area was an indication there was something worth defending hidden among the sun-dried brick huts and seemingly innocent expanses of nothingness. So Team Kilo was being dispatched to find out if it was just another cluster of terrorist training camps, or something more significant, especially installations involved in the development, testing, and manufacture of special weapons, the modern catchall phrase used to describe nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Everyone knew that facilities dedicated to this purpose existed somewhere in Syria and that the Syrians were doing their best to hide and protect them. But not everyone agreed on where they would most likely be found and how best to go about finding them. So even the relatively simple mission of locating and designating the Syrian ADA battery for aerial attack carried with it the implied task of uncovering any evidence of unusual or suspect activity that other intelligence resources had, to date, failed to detect.

  Even so, the evening's mission was pretty much routine. As such Burman saw no reason to make a big fuss over the way it would be executed. When all precombat checks and briefings had been completed they would move out in a dispersed column. He would lead out with Kilo Six, followed by the team's senior NCO

  in Kilo Two and the air force liaison officer, or LNO, in Kilo One.

  Aveno, who was still patiently waiting, would bring up the rear in Kilo Three. Once they were within striking distance of their MORE THAN COURAGE

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  objective the team would find a concealed spot from which Bur man and Aveno would sally forth, either mounted or on foot, to sniff out the exact location of their target while Kannen stayed back with Ciszak. How they would proceed depended on what they discovered during this preliminary recon. So other than mapping out their route of march, Burman saw little need for any additional detailed planning.

  Having finished jotting a few notes just as the last modicum of light waned, Burman laid his map and pad aside and looked around. When his eyes fi
nally turned toward the dark shadow of his executive officer, he acted surprised. "I didn't see you standing there, Lieutenant Aveno."

  Burman slowly eased his way off the Hummer's hood. "I imagine you're waiting for me to vacate this spot," he quipped,

  "so you can finish your appointed rounds."

  "No rush, sir. I knew you were in the midst of putting together an order." When Burman turned to walk away without saying a word Aveno called out, "Anything exciting, sir?"

  "Nothing to be concerned about, Lieutenant."

  Aveno remained where he was, struggling to suppress the anger he felt welling up in him. The bastard was fucking with him. He was always fucking with him. It was as if they were still back at the Point, and Burman was still a first classman and Aveno was still a plebe. Since they were in different units and first classmen seldom took the time to bother with plebes who were not in their own company neither man had-known the other then. Still, after all these years the psychological gulf remained.

  There wasn't a man in the team who hadn't taken note of the "Me Tarzan, you Jane," attitude that Burman showed in all of his dealings with his number two. Aveno knew it wasn't personal.

  As best he could tell, he had never said or done anything that could even remotely be considered improper or offensive to his commanding officer. Yet from day one the two had never really clicked. In Aveno's opinion Burman's policy of keeping him at a distance and his insistence on using proper military titles instead 26